Salman Rushdie was my senior in school in Mumbai, and our parents were acquaintances, if not actually friends. He was known to be something of a prodigy and a hero to us little kids. I remember bumping into him at many of the places he later immortalised in Midnight’s Children: Bombelli’s pastry shop, Reader’s Paradise bookshop, Chimalker’s toy shop and Rhythm House music store and, as a seven-year old, it would give me a small glow of pride when he occasionally turned and said hi to me. But most of all, I seem to remember bumping into him at the Metro Cinema.
We were members of something called the Metro Cub Club, which ran Saturday morning shows at special kiddy rates for members. And it was there that we saw films like The Fastest Gun Alive, Tarzan the Ape Man, Ben Hur and The Wizard of Oz. It was The Wizard of Oz that Rushdie says was responsible for turning him into a writer.
As he recalls it, after watching the movie, he went straight home, sat down and wrote his first story – about a little boy who is walking down a Mumbai street one day when he suddenly steps on the beginning of a rainbow, whose brightly coloured steps take him up into a fantasyland in the skies. His father apparently saved that story proudly, but it got lost somewhere in the passage of the years. Some would argue, though, that The Wizard of Oz shows up in much of what he has written since then – including The Golden House.
Another important turning point in Rushdie’s childhood was, perhaps, a spectacular school production of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, in which he played the precocious role of the prosecutor. With its gorgeous medieval costumes and pageantry, I remember how that play fired our seven-year old imaginations. But for Rushdie himself it was an introduction to the dynamics of theatre – and, ultimately, of cinema – one reason probably why his fiction has always had such a vivid, cinematic quality about it. The Golden House, again, is an interesting example.
What is what
When Midnight’s Children was first published, there was a game that was played by people who had known Rushdie as a child. It was to decode the childhood influences that were artfully twisted and planted in the book – who was actually who, and what was actually what. With Midnight’s Children it was fairly easy, but with The Golden House, it takes a little more knowledge, effort and imagination.
When Midnight’s Children was first published, there was a game that was played by people who had known Rushdie as a child. It was to decode the childhood influences that were artfully twisted and planted in the book – who was actually who, and what was actually what. With Midnight’s Children it was fairly easy, but with The Golden House, it takes a little more knowledge, effort and imagination.
Take the Gardens, where Renee spies on the Golden family. Are they really located in Lower Manhattan, between Sullivan Street and MacDougal Street, as the book says? Or is that actually a metaphor for Westfield Estate, that little enclave hidden away off Mumbai’s Warden Road, where Rushdie grew up?
Because that was where he and his friends learned to spy – on a young American couple who had recently moved into an apartment across the driveway, and had somehow neglected to put up curtains on their bedroom windows, thus presenting neighbours with fascinating views. It was also there, at Westfield Terrace, that Rushdie would spy on the attractive Czech girl, immortalised in Midnight’s Children as “Masha Miovic, the Champion Breast-stroker”, who lived down the lane in a building eccentrically named “Christmas Eve”.
The plot of The Golden House clearly owes something to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window which, significantly, had been a great hit at Mumbai’s Eros cinema during Rushdie’s childhood. None of us kids, to the best of my knowledge, had actually seen the film, since it was for adults only – and Eros was known to be particularly strict about such things. But, somehow, all of us seemed to know the story, thanks to our older cousins, from whom we had heard it in graphic detail (film story-telling having been a highly developed art form back then, when movies were considered to be an indulgence).
Renee, the film-maker of The Golden House seems to pick up where Jeff, the photographer of Rear Window, left off. And while Rear Window was shot on a Paramount set designed to mimic New York, anyone who knew Rushdie’s old Westfield Terrace home would tell you it could easily have been the Mumbai neighbourhood of his childhood instead.
The boy in the submarine
The other thing that shows up clearly in The Golden House is, of course, the fantastical imagination Rushdie displayed right from his school days. At age 11, for example, he invented a game called “submarines” in which he would form a human submarine with four friends during the lunch break every day. With Rushdie in the lead, noisily pumping his arms like pistons, and the others kicking out their legs sideways, this bizarre invention would slowly navigate its way around the school – through the corridors, and up and down the staircases – drawing jeers from the other boys.
Rushdie was also famed for his writing skills and his way with words, and was a darling of his English master, Mr Glynne-Howell. When the class was once asked to compose limericks, for example, the other 12-year olds struggled to write one, or maybe two – while Rushdie, in the space of half an hour, dashed off about fifteen, one of which was selected for publication in the school magazine:
“To a very wise man it was once said,
— S Rushdie
‘I bet you can’t stand on your head’
When he said, ‘Yes, I can!’
They said, ‘Prove it!’
So he did it and promptly fell dead!”
This limerick is a historic little piece of literature: the very first work of Rushdie’s to be published. But it obviously embarrasses him today. In fact, when I discovered it, a couple of years ago, and mailed it to him, he couldn’t resist the urge to clean up its childish rhyming and mail a revised version back to me.
Hunting for clues
Reading The Golden House, you might spot some of the many clues about Rushdie’s Mumbai, and his childhood, that seem to be planted in it. Some are obvious, like the dark back story of the Golden family that is intertwined with the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008. Others are more subliminal: “Batwoman”, the presidential candidate of the novel, for example, obviously goes all the way back to the comic books that he swapped with friends at Cathedral School – though her rival, “The Joker”, with his “luminous green hair”, seems to owe at least as much to The Wizard of Oz, a kind of analog of the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West, who seeks the magical Ruby Slippers in order to conquer Oz.
The love of Roman and Greek mythology displayed in the book evidently springs from Rushdie’s eclectic education at Cathedral School, where we were taught these mythologies from age seven, alongside Indian history – just as we were taught Latin, alongside Marathi and Gujarati. And then, of course, there are other references scattered through the pages like private jokes: like the alternative fact of the 2008 terrorists attacking the Metro cinema, and thus fictitiously interacting with Rushdie’s own Technicolor childhood memories. Or like the “Godfather” character, based on Haji Mastan who, in real life, lived just a hundred yards up the road from Rushdie’s own home.
Reading The Golden House one can’t help recalling Rushdie’s line, “Exile is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back.” Or, to put it another way, you can take the boy out of Mumbai, but you can never quite take Mumbai out of the boy.