Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie Read Free Book Online

stripping them naked, shooting them dead, taking their jewelry, and throwing their bodies down in the dirt at one of the gates of Delhi, which was thereafter known as the
Khooni Darvaza
, the gate of blood. That Hodson was a former Bradley Houseresident made the young Indian rebel even prouder of having refused to join the army in which the executioner of the Mughal princes had served. Dr. Dazeley added, vaguely, and perhaps incorrectly, that he believed Hodson had been one of the models for the character of Flashman, the school bully in Thomas Hughes’s novel of Rugby,
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
. There was a statue of Hughes on the lawn outside the school library, but here at Bradley House the presiding old-timer was the alleged real-life original version of the most famous bully in English literature. That seemed just about right.
    The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.
    For the next four years he spent Wednesday afternoons reading yellow-jacketed science fiction novels borrowed from the town library, while eating egg salad sandwiches and potato chips, drinking Coca-Cola and listening to
Two-Way Family Favourites
on the transistor radio. He became an expert on the so-called golden age of science fiction, devouring such masterworks as Isaac Asimov’s
I, Robot
, wherein the Three Laws of Robotics were enshrined, Philip K. Dick’s
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
, Zenna Henderson’s
Pilgrimage
novels, the wild fantasies of L. Sprague de Camp, and, above all, Arthur C. Clarke’s haunting short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” about the world quietly coming to an end once its secret purpose, the listing of all God’s names, had been fulfilled by a bunch of Buddhist monks with a supercomputer. (Like his father, he was fascinated by God, even if religion held little appeal.) It might not have been the greatest revolution in history, this four-and-a-half-year fall toward the fantastic fueled by tuckshop snack foods, but every time he saw his schoolfellows come lurching in from their war games, exhausted, muddy and bruised, he was reminded that standing up for oneself could sometimes be well worth it.
    In the matter of God: The last traces of belief were erased from his mind by his powerful dislike of the architecture of Rugby Chapel. Many years later, when by chance he passed through the town, he was shocked to find that Herbert Butterfield’s neo-Gothic building was in fact extremely beautiful. As a schoolboy he thought it hideous, deciding, in that science-fiction-heavy time of his life, that it resemblednothing so much as a brick rocket ship ready for takeoff; and one day when he was staring at it through the window of a classroom in the New Big School during a Latin lesson, a question occurred. “What kind of God,” he wondered, “would live in a house as ugly as that?” An instant later the answer presented itself: Obviously no self-respecting God would live there—in fact, obviously, there
was
no God, not even a God with bad taste in architecture. By the end of the Latin lesson he was a hard-line atheist, and to prove it, he marched determinedly into the school tuckshop during break and bought himself a ham sandwich. The flesh of the swine passed his lips for the first time that day, and the failure of the Almighty to strike him dead with a thunderbolt proved to him what he had long suspected: that there was nobody up there with thunderbolts to hurl.
    Inside Rugby Chapel he joined the rest of the school, one term, in rehearsing and singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” as part of a performance of the full
Messiah
with professional soloists. He took part in compulsory matins and evensong—having attended the Cathedral School in Bombay, he had no leg to stand on if he wanted to make an argument that would excuse him from mumbling his way through Christian prayers—and he couldn’t deny that he liked the hymns, whose music lifted his heart. Not all