MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
Salmon Rusdie is the author of seven novels:
Grimus, Midnight's
Children
(which was awarded the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black
Prize),
Shame
(winner of the French Prix du Meillear Livre Etranger),
The
Satanic Verses
(winner of the Whitbread Prize for the Best Novel),
Haroun
and the Sea of Stories
(winner of the Writers' Guild Award),
The Moor's Last
Sigh
(winner of the European Aristeion Prize for Literature) and
The Ground
Beneath Her Feet
. He has also published a collection of short stories,
East,
West
; a book of reportage,
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan journey;
a volume
of essays,
Imaginary Homelands
, and a work of film criticism,
'The Wizard of
Oz
'.
Salman Rusdie was awarded Germany's Author of the Year Award for his
novel
The Satanic Verses
in 1989. In 1993,
Midnight's Children
was adjudged
the 'Booker of Bookers' the best novel to have won the 'Booker Prize in its
first 25 years. In the same year he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for
European Literature. He is also an Honorary Professor in Humanities at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature. His books have been published in more than two dozen
languages.
BY SALMAN RUSDIE:
Fiction
Grimus Midnight's Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun And The Sea Of Stories
East, West
The Moor's Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Non-fiction
The Jaguar Smile:
A Nicaraguan Journey
Imaginary Homelands
'The Wizard Of Oz'
Salman Rushdie
First published in Vintage 1995
14 16 18 20 19 17 15 13
Copyright (c) Salman Rushdie
The right of Salman Rushdie to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out,
or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Excerpts from the Koran come from
the Penguin Classics edition, translated by
N. J. Dawood, copyright (c) 1956, 1959,1966,1968,1974.
Reprinted by kind permission of Penguin Books Ltd
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1981
Arrow Books Limited
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ISBN 0 09 957851 4
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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for Zafar Rushdie
who, contrary to all expectations,
was born in the afternoon
Contents
Book One
The perforated sheet
9
Mercurochrome
24
Hit-the-spittoon
37
Under the carpet
51
A public announcement
64
Many-headed monsters
78
Methwold
92
Tick, tock
106
Book Two
The fisherman's pointing finger
121
Snakes and ladders
136
Accident in a washing-chest
149
All-India radio
165
Love in Bombay
180
My tenth birthday
192
At the Pioneer Cafe
207
Alpha and Omega
223
The Kolynos Kid
237
Commander Sabarmati's baton
252
Revelations
267
Movements performed by pepperpots
282
Drainage and the desert
294
Jamila Singer
306
How Saleem achieved purity
326
Book Three
The buddha
345
In the Sundarbans
360
Sam and the Tiger
374
The shadow of the Mosque
384
A wedding
404
Midnight
421
Abracadabra
443
Book One
The perforated sheet
I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't
do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's
Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well
then: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight,
as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I
came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's
arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps.
And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my
father broke his big toe; but Ms accident was a mere trifle when set beside
what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult
tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously
handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my
country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers
had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my
authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem
Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha
and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at the
best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my
own nose at the time.
Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I
will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body
permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having
even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than
Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning - yes, meaning -something. I admit
it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
And there are so many stories to tell,-too many, such an excess of
intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of
the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to
know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.
Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by
the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven
inches in diameter cut into the centre, clutching at the dream of that
holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I
must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it
really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as
present
,
as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.
(The sheet, incidentally, is stained too, with three drops of old,
faded redness. As the Quran tells us:
Recite, in the name of the Lord thy
Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.)
One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam
Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting
to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened
instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat,
transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once
more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had
solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously
from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man.
This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner
chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. Unaware of this at
first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled
the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm
surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes.
The world was new again. After a winter's gestation in its eggshell of
ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow. The
new grass bided its time underground; the mountains were retreating to their
hill-stations for the warm season. (In the winter, when the valley shrank
under the ice, the mountains closed in and snarled like angry jaws around
the city on the lake.)
In those days the radio mast had not been built and the temple of
Sankara Acharya, a little black blister on a khaki hill, still dominated the
streeets and lake of Srinagar. In those days there was no army camp at the
lakeside, no endless snakes of camouflaged trucks and jeeps clogged the
narrow mountain roads, no soldiers hid behind the crests of the mountains
past Baramulla and Gulmarg. In those days travellers were not shot as spies
if they took photographs of bridges, and apart from the Englishmen's
houseboats on the lake, the valley had hardly changed since the Mughal
Empire, for all its springtime renewals; but my grandfather's eyes
-
which
were, like the rest of him, twenty-five years old - saw things differently
... and his nose had started to itch.
To reveal the secret of my grandfather's altered vision: he had spent
five years, five springs, away from home. (The tussock of earth, crucial
though its presence was as it crouched under a chance wrinkle of the
prayer-mat, was at bottom no more than a catalyst.) Now, returning, he saw
through travelled eyes. Instead of the beauty of the tiny valley circled by
giant teeth, he noticed the narrowness, the proximity of the horizon; and
felt sad, to be at home and feel so utterly enclosed. He also felt
-
inexplicably - as though the old place resented his educated, stethoscoped
return. Beneath the winter ice, it had been coldly neutral, but now there
was no doubt; the years in Germany had returned him to a hostile
environment. Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up
with hate, and he came to sacrifice himself at the shrine of the black stone
god in the temple on the hill, he would try and recall his childhood springs
in Paradise, the way it was before travel and tussocks and army tanks messed
everything up.
On the morning when the valley, gloved in a prayer-mat, punched him on
the nose, he had been trying, absurdly, to pretend that nothing had changed.
So he had risen in the bitter cold of four-fifteen, washed himself in the
prescribed fashion, dressed and put on his father's astrakhan cap; after
which he had carried the rolled cheroot of the prayer-mat into the small
lakeside garden in front of their old dark house and unrolled it over the
waiting tussock. The ground felt deceptively soft under his feet and made
him simultaneously uncertain and unwary. 'In the Name of God, the
Compassionate, the Merciful ...' - the exordium, spoken with hands joined
before him like a book, comforted a part of him, made another, larger part
feel uneasy - "... Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Creation ..." - but now
Heidelberg invaded his head; here was Ingrid, briefly his Ingrid, her face
scorning him for this Mecca-turned parroting; here, their friends Oskar and
Ilse Lubin the anarchists, mocking his prayer with their anti-ideologies
-'... The Compassionate, the Merciful, King of the Last Judgment!...' -
Heidelberg, in which, along with medicine and politics, he learned that
India - like radium - had been 'discovered' by the Europeans; even Oskar was
filled with admiration for Vasco da Gama, and this was what finally
separated Aadam Aziz from his friends, this belief of theirs that he was
somehow the invention of their ancestors - "... You alone we worship, and to
You alone we pray for help ..." - so here he was, despite their presence in
his head, attempting to re-unite himself with an earlier self which ignored
their influence but knew everything it ought to have known, about submission
for example, about what he was doing now, as his hands, guided by old
memories, fluttered upwards, thumbs pressed to ears, fingers spread, as he
sank to his knees - '... Guide us to the straight path, The path of those
whom You have favoured ...' But it was no good, he was caught in a strange
middle ground, trapped between belief and disbelief, and this was only a
charade after all - '... Not of those who have incurred Your wrath, Nor of
those who have gone astray.' My grandfather bent his forehead towards the
earth. Forward he bent, and the earth, prayer-mat-covered, curved up towards
him. And now it was the tussock's time. At one and the same time a rebuke
from Ilse-Oskar-Ingrid-Heidelberg as well as valley-and-God, it smote him
upon the point of the nose. Three drops fell. There were rubies and
diamonds. And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood.
Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that
middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly
disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.
The young, newly-qualified Doctor Aadam Aziz stood facing the
springtime lake, sniffing the whiffs of change; while his back (which was
extremely straight) was turned upon yet more changes. His father had had a
stroke in his absence abroad, and his mother had kept it a secret. His
mother's voice, whispering stoically: '...
Because your studies were too
important, son.'
This mother, who had spent her life housebound, in purdah,
had suddenly found enormous strength and gone out to run the small gemstone
business (turquoises, rubies, diamonds) which had put Aadam through medical
college, with the help of a scholarship; so he returned to find the
seemingly immutable order of his family turned upside down, his mother going
out to work while his father sat hidden behind the veil which the stroke had
dropped over his brain ... in a wooden chair, in a darkened room, he sat and
made bird-noises. Thirty different species of birds visited him and sat on
the sill outside his shuttered window conversing about this and that. He
seemed happy enough.
(... And already I can see the repetitions beginning; because didn't my
grandmother also find enormous ... and the stroke, too, was not the only ...
and the Brass Monkey had her birds ... the curse begins already, and we
haven't even got to the noses yet!)
The lake was no longer frozen over. The thaw had come rapidly, as
usual; many of the small boats, the shikaras, had been caught napping, which
was also normal. But while these sluggards slept on, on dry land, snoring
peacefully beside their owners, the oldest boat was up at the crack as old
folk often are, and was therefore the first craft to move across the
unfrozen lake. Tai's shikara ... this, too, was customary.
Watch how the old boatman, Tai, makes good time through the misty
water, standing stooped over at the back of his craft! How his oar, a wooden
heart on a yellow stick, drives jerkily through the weeds!
In these parts he's considered very odd because he rows standing up...
among other reasons. Tai, bringing an urgent summons to Doctor Aziz, is
about to set history in motion... while Aadam, looking down into the water,
recalls what Tai taught him years ago: "The ice is always waiting, Aadam
baba, just under the water's skin.' Aadam's eyes are a clear blue, the
astonishing blue of mountain sky, which has a habit of dripping into the
pupils of Kashmir! men; they have not forgotten how to look. They see -
there! like the skeleton of a ghost, just beneath the surface of Lake Dali -
the delicate tracery, the intricate crisscross of colourless lines, the cold
waiting veins of the future. His German years, which have blurred so much
else, haven't deprived him of the gift of seeing. Tai's gift. He looks up,
sees the approaching V of Tai's boat, waves a greeting. Tai's arm rises -
but this is a command. 'Wait!' My grandfather waits; and during this hiatus,
as he experiences the last peace of his life, a muddy, ominous sort of
peace, I had better get round to describing him.
Keeping out of my voice the natural envy of the ugly man for the
strikingly impressive, I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. Pressed
flat against a wall of his family home, he measured twenty-five bricks (a
brick for each year of his life), or just over six foot two. A strong man
also. His beard was thick and red - and annoyed his mother, who said only
Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His
hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had
said, They went mad with the colours when they made your face.' But the
central feature of my grandfather's anatomy was neither colour nor height,
neither strength of arm nor straightness of back. There it was, reflected in
the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face... Aadam
Aziz, waiting for Tai, watches his rippling nose. It would have dominated
less dramatic faces than his easily; even on him, it is what one sees first
and remembers longest. 'A cyranose,' Ilse Lubin said, and Oskar added, 'A
proboscissimus.' Ingrid announced, 'You could cross a river on that nose.'
(Its bridge was wide.)
My grandfather's nose: nostrils flaring, curvaceous as dancers. Between
them swells the nose's triumphal arch, first up and out, then down and
under, sweeping in to his upper lip with a superb and at present red-tipped
flick. An easy nose to hit a tussock with. I wish to place on record my
gratitude to this mighty organ - if not for it, who would ever have believed
me to be truly my mother's son, my grandfather's grandson? - this colossal
apparatus which was to be my birthright, too. Doctor Aziz's nose -
comparable only to the trunk of the elephant-headed god Ganesh - established
incontrovertibly his right to be a patriarch. It was Tai who taught him
that, too. When young Aadam was barely past puberty the dilapidated boatman
said, That's a nose to start a family on, my princeling. There'd be no
mistaking whose brood they were. Mughal Emperors would have given their
right hands for noses like that one. There are dynasties waiting inside it,'
- and here Tai lapsed into coarseness - 'like snot.'
On Aadam Aziz, the nose assumed a patriarchal aspect. On my mother, it
looked noble and a little long-suffering; on my aunt Emerald, snobbish; on
my aunt Alia, intellectual; on my uncle Hanif it was the organ of an
unsuccessful genius; my uncle Mustapha made it a second-rater's sniffer; the
Brass Monkey escaped it completely; but on me - on me, it was something else
again. But I mustn't reveal all my secrets at once.
(Tai is getting nearer. He, who revealed the power of the nose, and who
is now bringing my grandfather the message which will catapult him into his
future, is stroking his shikara through the early morning lake ...)
Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been plying this
same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen
Lakes ... forever. As far as anyone knew. He lived somewhere in the
insanitary bowels of the old wooden-house quarter and his wife grew lotus
roots and other curious vegetables on one of the many 'floating gardens'
lilting on the surface of the spring and summer water. Tai himself cheerily
admitted he had no idea of his age. Neither did his wife - he was, she said,
already leathery when they married. His face was a sculpture of wind on
water: ripples made of hide. He had two golden teeth and no others. In the
town, he had few friends. Few boatmen or traders invited him to share a
hookah when he floated past the shikara moorings or one of the lakes' many
ramshackle, waterside provision-stores and tea-shops.
The general opinion of Tai had been voiced long ago by Aadam Aziz's
father the gemstone merchant: 'His brain fell out with his teeth.' (But now
old Aziz sahib sat lost in bird tweets while Tai simply, grandly,
continued.) It was an impression the boatman fostered by his chatter, which
was fantastic, grandiloquent and ceaseless, and as often as not addressed
only to himself. Sound carries over water, and the lake people giggled at
his monologues; but with undertones of awe, and even fear. Awe, because the
old halfwit knew the lakes and hills better than any of his detractors;
fear, because of his claim to an antiquity so immense it defied numbering,
and moreover hung so lightly round his chicken's neck that it hadn't
prevented him from winning a highly desirable wife and fathering four sons
upon her... and a few more, the story went, on other lakeside wives. The
young bucks at the shikara moorings were convinced he had a pile of money
hidden away somewhere - a hoard, perhaps, of priceless golden teeth,
rattling in a sack like walnuts. Years later, when Uncle Puffs tried to sell
me his daughter by offering to have her teeth drawn and replaced in gold, I
thought of Tai's forgotten treasure... and, as a child, Aadam Aziz had loved
him.
He made his living as a simple ferryman, despite all the rumours of
wealth, taking hay and goats and vegetables and wood across the lakes for
cash; people, too. When he was running his taxi-service he erected a
pavilion in the centre of the shikara, a gay affair of flowered-patterned
curtains and canopy, with cushions to match; and deodorised his boat with
incense. The sight of Tai's shikara approaching, curtains flying, had always
been for Doctor Aziz one of the defining images of the coming of spring.
Soon the English sahibs would arrive and Tai would ferry them to the
Shalimar Gardens and the King's Spring, chattering and pointy and stooped.
He was the living antithesis of Oskar-Ilse-Ingrid's belief in the
inevitability of change... a quirky, enduring familiar spirit of the valley.
A watery Caliban, rather too fond of cheap Kashmiri brandy.
Memory of my blue bedroom wall: on which, next to the P.M.'s letter,
the Boy Raleigh hung for many years, gazing rapturously at an old fisherman
in what looked like a red dhoti, who sat on - what? -driftwood? - and
pointed out to sea as he told his fishy tales... and the Boy Aadam, my
grandfather-to-be, fell in love with the boatman Tai precisely because of
the endless verbiage which made others think him cracked. It was magical
talk, words pouring from him like fools' money, past Ms two gold teeth,
laced with hiccups and brandy, soaring up to the most remote Himalayas of
the past, then swooping shrewdly on some present detail, Aadam's nose for
instance, to vivisect its meaning like a mouse. TMs friendship had plunged
Aadam into hot water with great regularity. (Boiling water. Literally. While
his mother said, 'We'll kill that boatman's bugs if it kills you.') But
still the old soliloquist would dawdle in Ms boat at the garden's lakeside
toes and Aziz would sit at Ms feet until voices summoned Mm indoors to be
lectured on Tai's filthiness and warned about the pillaging armies of germs
Ms mother envisaged leaping from that hospitably ancient body on to her
son's starched white loose-pajamas. But always Aadam returned to the water's
edge to scan the mists for the ragged reprobate's hunched-up frame steering
its magical boat through the enchanted waters of the morning.
'But how old are you really, Taiji?' (Doctor Aziz, adult, redbearded,
slanting towards the future, remembers the day he asked the unaskable
question.) For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall. The monologue,
interrupted. Slap of oar in water. He was riding in the shikara with Tai,
squatting amongst goats, on a pile of straw, in full knowledge of the stick
and bathtub waiting for him at home. He had come for stories - and with one
question had silenced the storyteller.
'No, tell, Taiji, how old,
truly?
And now a brandy bottle,
materialising from nowhere: cheap liquor from the folds of the great warm
chugha-coat. Then a shudder, a belch, a glare. Glint of gold. And - at last!
- speech. 'How old? You ask how old, you little wet-head, you nosey ...'
Tai, forecasting the fisherman on my wall, pointed at the mountains. 'So
old, nakkoo!' Aadam, the nakkoo, the nosey one, followed his pointing
finger. 'I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die.
Listen. Listen, nakkoo ...' - the brandy bottle again, followed by
brandy-voice, and words more intoxicating than booze -'... I saw that Isa,
that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I am
keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. Once I knew
where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which
bled once a year. Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can't
read.' Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath
the rage of his sweeping hand. Which sweeps again to chugha-pocket, to
brandy bottle, to lips chapped with cold. Tai always had woman's lips.
'Nakkoo, listen, listen. I have seen plenty. Yara, you should've seen that
Isa when he came, beard down to his balls, bald as an egg on his head. He
was old and fagged-out but he knew his manners. "You first, Taiji," he'd
say, and "Please to sit"; always a respectful tongue, he never called me
crackpot, never called me
tu
either. Always
aap.
Polite, see? And what an
appetite! Such a hunger, I would catch my ears in fright. Saint or devil, I
swear he could eat a whole kid in one go. And so what? I told him, eat, fill
your hole, a man comes to Kashmir to enjoy life, or to end it, or both. His
work was finished. He just came up here to live it up a little.' Mesmerized
by this brandied portrait of a bald, gluttonous Christ, Aziz listened, later
repeating every word to the consternation of his parents, who dealt in
stones and had no time for 'gas'.
'Oh, you don't believe?' - licking his sore lips with a grin, knowing
it to be the reverse of the truth; 'Your attention is wandering?' - again,
he knew how furiously Aziz was hanging on his words. 'Maybe the straw is
pricking your behind, hey? Oh, I'm so sorry, babaji, not to provide for you
silk cushions with gold brocade-work - cushions such as the Emperor Jehangir
sat upon! You think of the Emperor Jehangir as a gardener only, no doubt,'
Tai accused my grandfather, 'because he built Shalimar. Stupid! What do you
know? His name meant Encompasser of the Earth. Is that a gardener's name?
God knows what they teach you boys these days. Whereas I' ... puffing up a
little here ..'I knew his precise weight, to the tola! Ask me how many
maunds, how many seers! When he was happy he got heavier and in Kashmir he
was heaviest of all. I used to carry his litter... no, no, look, you don't
believe again, that big cucumber in your face is waggling like the little
one in your pajamas! So, come on, come on, ask me questions! Give
examination! Ask how many times the leather thongs wound round the handles
of the litter - the answer is thirty-one. Ask me what was the Emperor's
dying word - I tell you it was "Kashmir". He had bad breath and a good
heart. Who do you think I am? Some common ignorant lying pie-dog? Go, get
out of the boat now, your nose makes it too heavy to row; also your father
is waiting to beat my gas out of you, and your mother to boil off your
skin.'
In the brandy bottle of the boatman Tai I see, foretold, my own
father's possession by djinns ... and there will be another bald foreigner
... and Tai's gas prophesies another kind, which was the consolation of my
grandmother's old age, and taught her stories, too ... and pie-dogs aren't
far away ... Enough. I'm frightening myself. Despite beating and boiling,
Aadam Aziz floated with Tai in his shikara, again and again, amid goats hay
flowers furniture lotus-roots, though never with the English sahibs, and
heard again and again the miraculous answers to that single terrifying
question: 'But Taiji, how old are you,
honestly?
From Tai, Aadam learned the secrets of the lake - where you could swim
without being pulled down by weeds; the eleven varieties of water-snake;
where the frogs spawned; how to cook a lotus-root; and where the three
English women had drowned a few years back. There is a tribe of feringhee
women who come to this water to drown,' Tai said. 'Sometimes they know it,
sometimes they don't, but I know the minute I smell them. They hide under
the water from God knows what or who - but they can't hide from me, baba!'
Tai's laugh, emerging to infect Aadam - a huge, booming laugh that seemed
macabre when it crashed out of that old, withered body, but which was so
natural in my giant grandfather that nobody knew, in later times, that it
wasn't really his (my uncle Hanif inherited this laugh; so until he died, a
piece of Tai lived in Bombay). And, also from Tai, my grandfather heard
about noses.
Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is nakkoo? It's the
place where the outside world meets the world inside you. If they don't get
on, you feel it here. Then you rub your nose with embarrassment to make the
itch go away. A nose like that, little idiot, is a great gift. I say: trust
it. When it warns you, look out or you'll be finished. Follow your nose and
you'll go far.' He cleared his throat; his eyes rolled away into the
mountains of the past. Aziz settled back on the straw. 'I knew one officer
once - in the army of that Iskandar the Great. Never mind his name. He had a
vegetable just like yours hanging between his eyes. When the army halted
near Gandhara, he fell in love with some local floozy. At once his nose
itched like crazy. He scratched it, but that was useless. He inhaled vapours
from crushed boiled eucalyptus leaves. Still no good, baba! The itching sent
him wild; but the damn fool dug in his heels and stayed with his little
witch when the army went home. He became - what? - a stupid thing, neither
this nor that, a half-and-halfer with a nagging wife and an itch in the
nose, and in the end he pushed his sword into his stomach. What do you think
of that?'
...Doctor Aziz in 1915, whom rubies and diamonds have turned into a
half-and-halfer, remembers this story as Tai enters hailing distance. His
nose is itching still. He scratches, shrugs, tosses his head; and then Tai
shouts.
'Ohe! Doctor Sahib! Ghani the landowner's daughter is sick.'
The message, delivered curtly, shouted unceremoniously across the
surface of the lake although boatman and pupil have not met for half a
decade, mouthed by woman's lips that are not smiling in long-time-no-see
greeting, sends time into a speeding, whirligig, blurry fluster of
excitement...
...'Just think, son,' Aadam's mother is saying as she sips fresh lime
water, reclining on a takht in an attitude of resigned exhaustion, 'how life
does turn out. For so many years even my ankles were a secret, and now I
must be stared at by strange persons who are not even family members.'
...While Ghani the landowner stands beneath a large oil painting of
Diana the Huntress, framed in squiggly gold. He wears thick dark glasses and
his famous poisonous smile, and discussed art. 'I purchased it from an
Englishman down on his luck, Doctor Sahib. Five hundred rupees only - and I
did not trouble to beat him down. What are five hundred chips? You see, I am
a lover of culture.'
... 'See, my son,' Aadam's mother is saying as he begins to examine
her, 'what a mother will not do for her child. Look how I suffer. You are a
doctor... feel these rashes, these blotchy bits, understand that my head
aches morning noon and night. Refill my glass, child.'
... But the young Doctor has entered the throes of a most
un-hippocratic excitement at the boatman's cry, and shouts, 'I'm coming just
now! Just let me bring my things!' The shikara's prow touches the garden's
hem. Aadam is rushing indoors, prayer-mat rolled like cheroot under one arm,
blue eyes blinking in the sudden interior gloom; he has placed the cheroot
on a high shelf on top of stacked copies of
Vorwarts
and Lenin's
What Is To
Be Done?
and other pamphlets, dusty echoes of his half-faded German life; he
is pulling out, from under his bed, a second-hand leather case which his
mother called his 'doctori-attache', and as he swings it and himself upwards
and runs from the room, the word HEIDELBERG is briefly visible, burned into
the leather on the bottom of the bag. A landowner's daughter is good news
indeed to a doctor with a career to make, even if she is ill. No:
because
she is ill.
... While I sit like an empty pickle jar in a pool of Anglepoised
light, visited by this vision of my grandfather sixty-three years ago, which
demands to be recorded, filling my nostrils with the acrid stench of his
mother's embarrassment which has brought her out in boils, with the .
vinegary force of Aadam Aziz's determination to establish a practice so
successful that she'll never have to return to the gemstone-shop, with the
blind mustiness of a big shadowy house in which the young Doctor stands,
ill-at-ease, before a painting of a plain girl with lively eyes and a stag
transfixed behind her on the horizon, speared by a dart from her bow. Most
of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have
found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so
that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the
mist seemed to slant across the early morning air ... everything, and not
just the few clues one stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin
trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed.
... Aadam refills his mother's glass and continues, worriedly, to
examine her. Tut some cream on these rashes and blotches, Amma. .. For the
headache, there are pills. The boils must be lanced. But maybe if you wore
purdah when you sat in the store... so that no disrespectful eyes could ...
such complaints often begin in the mind ...'
... Slap of oar in water. Plop of spittle in lake. Tai clears his
throat and mutters angrily, 'A fine business. A wet-head nakkoo child goes
away before he's learned one damn thing and he comes back a big doctor sahib
with a big bag full of foreign machines, and he's still as silly as an owl.
I swear: a too bad business.'
... Doctor Aziz is shifting uneasily, from foot to foot, under the
influence of the landowner's smile, in whose presence it is not possible to
feel relaxed; and is waiting for some tic of reaction to his own
extraordinary appearance. He has grown accustomed to these involuntary
twitches of surprise at his size, his face of many colours, his nose ... but
Ghani makes no sign, and the young Doctor resolves, in return, not to let
his uneasiness show. He stops shifting his weight. They face each other,
each suppressing (or so it seems) his view of the other, establishing the
basis of their future relationship. And now Ghani alters, changing from an
art-lover to tough-guy. 'This is a big chance for you, young man,' he says.
Aziz's eyes have strayed to Diana. Wide expanses of her blemished pink skin
are visible.
... His mother is moaning, shaking her head. 'No, what do you know,
child, you have become a big-shot doctor but the gemstone business is
different. Who would buy a turquoise from a woman hidden inside a black
hood? It is a question of establishing trust. So they must look at me; and I
must get pains and boils. Go, go, don't worry your head about your poor
mother.'
... 'Big shot,' Tai is spitting into the lake, 'big bag, big shot. Pah!
We haven't got enough bags at home that you must bring back that thing made
of a pig's skin that makes one unclean just by looking at it? And inside,
God knows what all.' Doctor Aziz, seated amongst flowery curtains and the
smell of incense, has his thoughts wrenched away from the patient waiting
across the lake. Tai's bitter monologue breaks into his consciousness,
creating a sense of dull shock, a smell like a casualty ward overpowering
the incense... the old man is clearly furious about something, possessed by
an incomprehensible rage that appears to be directed at his erstwhile
acolyte, or, more precisely and oddly, at his bag. Doctor Aziz attempts to
make small talk... 'Your wife is well? Do they still talk about your bag of
golden teeth?'... tries to remake an old friendship; but Tai is in full
flight now, a stream of invective pouring out of him. The Heidelberg bag
quakes under the torrent of abuse. 'Sistersleeping pigskin bag from Abroad
full of foreigners' tricks. Big-shot bag. Now if a man breaks an arm that
bag will not let the bone-setter bind it in leaves. Now a man must let his
wife lie beside that bag and watch knives come and cut her open. A fine
business, what these foreigners put in our young men's heads. I swear: it is
a too-bad thing. That bag should fry in Hell with the testicles of the
ungodly.'
... Ghani the landowner snaps his braces with his thumbs. 'A big
chance, yes indeed. They are saying good things about you in town. Good
medical training. Good... good enough... family. And now our own lady doctor
is
sick so you get your opportunity. That woman, always sick these days, too
old, I am thinking, and not up in the latest developments also, what-what? I
say: physician heal thyself. And I tell you this: I am wholly objective in
my business relations. Feelings, love, I keep for my family only. If a
person is not doing a first-class job for me, out she goes! You understand
me? So: my daughter Naseem is not well. You will treat her excellently.
Remember I have friends; and ill-health strikes high and low alike.'
... 'Do you still pickle water-snakes in brandy to give you virility,
Taiji? Do you still like to eat lotus-root without any spices?' Hesitant
questions, brushed aside by the torrent of Tai's fury. Doctor Aziz begins to
diagnose. To the ferryman, the bag represents Abroad; it is the alien thing,
the invader, progress. And yes, it has indeed taken possession of the young
Doctor's mind; and yes, it contains knives, and cures for cholera and
malaria and smallpox; and yes, it sits between doctor and boatman, and has
made them antagonists. Doctor Aziz begins to fight, against sadness, and
against Tai's anger, which is beginning to infect him, to become his own,
which erupts only rarely, but comes, when it does come, unheralded in a roar
from
bis
deepest places, laying waste everything in sight; and then
vanishes, leaving him wondering why everyone is so upset ... They are
approaching Ghani's house. A bearer awaits the shikara, standing with
clasped hands on a little wooden jetty. Aziz fixes his mind on the job in
hand.
... 'Has your usual doctor agreed to my visit, Ghani Sahib?' ... Again,
a hesitant question is brushed lightly aside. The landowner says, 'Oh, she
will agree. Now follow me, please.'
... The bearer is waiting on the jetty. Holding the shikara steady as
Aadam Aziz climbs out, bag in hand. And now, at last, Tai speaks directly to
my grandfather. Scorn in his face, Tai asks, 'Tell me this, Doctor Sahib:
have you got in that bag made of dead pigs one of those machines that
foreign doctors use to smell with?' Aadam shakes his head, not
understanding. Tai's voice gathers new layers of disgust. 'You know, sir, a
thing like an elephant's trunk.' Aziz, seeing what he means, replies: 'A
stethoscope? Naturaly.' Tai pushes the shikara off from the jetty. Spits.
Begins to row away. 'I knew it,' he says. 'You will use such a machine now,
instead of your own big nose.'
My grandfather does not trouble to explain that a stethoscope is more
like a pair of ears than
&
nose. He is stifling his own irritation, the
resentful anger of a cast-off child; and besides, there is a patient
waiting. Time settles down and concentrates on the importance of the moment.
The house was opulent but badly lit. Ghani was a widower and the
servants clearly took advantage. There were cobwebs in corners and layers of
dust on ledges. They walked down a long corridor; one of the doors was ajar
and through it Aziz saw a room in a state of violent disorder. This glimpse,
connected with a glint of light in Ghani's dark glasses, suddenly informed
Aziz that the landowner was blind. This aggravated his sense of unease: a
blind man who claimed to appreciate European paintings? He was, also,
impressed, because Ghani hadn't bumped into anything... they halted outside
a thick teak door. Ghani said, 'Wait here two moments,' and went into the
room behind the door.
In later years, Doctor Aadam Aziz swore that during those two moments
of solitude in the gloomy spidery corridors of the landowner's mansion he
was gripped by an almost uncontrollable desire to turn and run away as fast
as his legs would carry him. Unnerved by the enigma of the blind art-lover,
his insides filled with tiny scrabbling insects as a result of the insidious
venom of Tai's mutterings, his nostrils itching to the point of convincing
him that he had somehow contracted venereal disease, he felt his feet begin
slowly, as though encased in boots of lead, to turn; felt blood pounding in
his temples; and was seized by so powerful a sensation of standing upon a
point of no return that he very nearly wet his German woollen trousers. He
began, without knowing it, to blush furiously; and at this point his mother
appeared before him, seated on the floor before a low desk, a rash spreading
like a blush across her face as she held a turquoise up to the light. His
mother's face had acquired all the scorn of the boatman Tai. 'Go, go, run,'
she told him in Tai's voice, 'Don't worry about your poor old mother.'
Doctor Aziz found himself stammering, 'What a useless son you've got, Amma;
can't you see there's a hole in the middle of me the size of a melon?' His
mother smiled a pained smile. 'You always were a heartless boy,' she sighed,
and then turned into a lizard on the wall of the corridor and stuck her
tongue out at him. Doctor Aziz stopped feeling dizzy, became unsure that
he'd actually spoken aloud, wondered what he'd meant by that business about
the hole, found that his feet were no longer trying to escape, and realized
that he was being watched. A woman with the biceps of a wrestler was staring
at him, beckoning him to follow her into the room. The state of her sari
told him that she was a servant; but she was not servile. 'You look green as
a fish,' she said. 'You young doctors. You come into a strange house and
your liver turns tojelly. Come, Doctor Sahib, they are waiting for you.'
Clutching his bag a fraction too tightly, he followed her through the dark
teak door.
... Into a spacious bedchamber that was as ill-lit as the rest of the
house; although here there were shafts of dusty sunlight seeping in through
a fanlight high on one wall. These fusty rays illuminated a scene as
remarkable as anything the Doctor had ever witnessed: a tableau of such
surpassing strangeness that his feet began to twitch towards the door once
again. Two more women, also built like professional wrestlers, stood stiffly
in the light, each holding one corner of an enormous white bedsheet, their
arms raised high above their heads so that the sheet hung between them like
a curtain. Mr Ghani welled up out of the murk surrounding the sunlit sheet
and permitted the nonplussed Aadam to stare stupidly at the peculiar tableau
for perhaps half a minute, at the end of which, and before a word had been
spoken, the Doctor made a discovery:
In the very centre of the sheet, a hole had been cut, a crude circle
about seven inches in diameter.
'Close the door, ayah,' Ghani instructed the first of the lady
wrestlers, and then, turning to Aziz, became confidential. This town
contains many good-for-nothings who have on occasion tried to climb into my
daughter's room. She needs,' he nodded at the three musclebound women,
'protectors.'
Aziz was still looking at the perforated sheet. Ghani said, 'All right,
come on, you will examine my Naseem right now.
Pronto.'
My grandfather peered around the room. 'But where is she, Ghani Sahib?'
he blurted out finally. The lady wrestlers adopted supercilious expressions
and, it seemed to him, tightened their musculatures, just in case he
intended to try something fancy.
'Ah, I see your confusion,' Ghani said, his poisonous smile broadening,
'You Europe-returned chappies forget certain things. Doctor Sahib, my
daughter is a decent girl, it goes without saying. She does not flaunt her
body under the noses of strange men. You will understand that you cannot be
permitted to see her, no, not in any circumstances; accordingly I have
required her to be positioned behind that sheet. She stands there, like a
good girl.'
A frantic note had crept into Doctor Aziz's voice. 'Ghani Sahib, tell
me how I am to examine her without looking at her?' Ghani smiled on.
'You will kindly specify which portion of my daughter it is necessary
to inspect. I will then issue her with my instructions to place the required
segment against that hole which you see there. And so, in this fashion the
thing may be achieved.'
'But what, in any event, does the lady complain of?' - my grandfather,
despairingly. To which Mr Ghani, his eyes rising upwards in their sockets,
his smile twisting into a grimace of grief, replied: 'The poor child! She
has a terrible, a too dreadful stomachache.'
'In that case,' Doctor Aziz said with some restraint, 'will she show me
her stomach, please.'
Mercurochrome
Padma - our plump Padma - is sulking magnificently. (She can't read
and, like all fish-lovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she
doesn't. Padma: strong, jolly, a consolation for my last days. But
definitely a bitch-in-the-manger.) She attempts to cajole me from my desk:
'Eat, na, food is spoiling.' I remain stubbornly hunched over paper. 'But
what is so precious,' Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air updownup
in exasperation, 'to need all this writing-shiting?' I reply: now that I've
let out the details of my birth, now that the perforated sheet stands
between doctor and patient, there's no going back. Padma snorts. Wrist
smacks against forehead. 'Okay, starve starve, who cares two pice?' Another
louder, conclusive snort... but I take no exception to her attitude. She
stirs a bubbling vat all day for a living; something hot and vinegary has
steamed her up tonight. Thick of waist, somewhat hairy of forearm, she
flounces, gesticulates, exits. Poor Padma. Things are always getting her
goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told
her, when she was only small, that she had been named after the lotus
goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is 'The One Who
Possesses Dung'.
In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a
little of turmeric, ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative
which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air - just as Scheherazade, depending
for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten up by curiosity, used
to do night after night! I'll begin at once: by revealing that my
grandfather's premonitions in the corridor were not without foundation. In
the succeeding months and years, he fell under what I can only describe as
the sorcerer's spell of that enormous - and as yet unstained - perforated
cloth.
'Again?' Aadam's mother said, rolling her eyes. 'I tell you, my child,
that girl is so sickly from too much soft living only. Too much sweetmeats
and spoiling, because of the absence of a mother's firm hand. But go, take
care of your invisible patient, your mother is all right with her little
nothing of a headache.'
In those years, you see, the landowner's daughter Naseem Ghani
contracted a quite extraordinary number of minor illnesses, and each time a
shikara wallah was despatched to summon the tall young Doctor sahib with the
big nose who was making such a reputation for himself in the valley. Aadam
Aziz's visits to the bedroom with the shaft of sunlight and the three lady
wrestlers became weekly events; and on each occasion he was vouchsafed a
glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of
the young woman's body. Her initial stomach-ache was succeeded by a very
slightly twisted right ankle, an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of the
left foot, a tiny cut on the lower left calf. Tetanus is'a killer, Doctor
Sahib,' the landowner said, 'My Naseem must not die for a scratch.') There
was the matter of her stiff right knee, which the Doctor was obliged to
manipulate through the hole in the sheet ... and after a time the illnesses
leapt upwards, avoiding certain unmentionable zones, and began to
proliferate around her upper half. She suffered from something mysterious
which her father called Finger Rot, which made the skin flake off her hands;
from weakness of the wrist-bones, for which Aadam prescribed calcium
tablets; and from attacks of constipation, for which he gave her a course of
laxatives, since there was no question of being permitted to administer an
enema. She had fevers and she also had subnormal temperatures. At these
times his thermometer would be placed under her armpit and he would hum and
haw about the relative inefficiency of the method. In the opposite armpit
she once developed a slight case of tineachloris and he dusted her with
yellow powder; after this treatment - which required him to rub the powder
in, gently but firmly, although the soft secret body began to shake and
quiver and he heard helpless laughter coming through the sheet, because
Naseem Ghani was very ticklish - the itching went away, but Naseem soon I
found a new set of complaints. She waxed anaemic in the summer and bronchial
in the winter. ('Her tubes are most delicate,' Ghani explained, 'like little
flutes.') Far away the Great War moved from crisis to crisis, while in the
cobwebbed house Doctor Aziz was also engaged in a total war against his
sectioned patient's inexhaustible complaints. And, in all those war years,
Naseem never repeated an illness. 'Which only shows,' Ghani told Mm, 'that
you are a good doctor. When you cure, she is cured for good. But alas!' - he
struck his forehead - 'She pines for her late mother, poor baby, and her
body suffers. She is a too loving child.'
So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind,
a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a
partitioned woman began to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued
together by his imagination, she accompanied him on all his rounds, she
moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could
feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny
wrists or the beauty of the ankles; he could smell her scent of lavender and
chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little
girl; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face.
His mother by on her bed, spreadeagled on her stomach. 'Come, come and
press me,' she said, 'my doctor son whose fingers can soothe his old
mother's muscles. Press, press, my child with his expression of a
constipated goose.' He kneaded her shoulders. She grunted, twitched,
relaxed. 'Lower now,' she said, 'now higher. To the right. Good. My
brilliant son who cannot see what that Ghani landowner is doing. So clever,
my child, but he doesn't guess why that girl is forever ill with her
piffling disorders. Listen, my boy: see the nose on your face for once: that
Ghani thinks you are a good catch for her. Foreign-educated and all. I have
worked in shops and been undressed by the eyes of strangers so that you
should marry that Naseem! Of course I am right; otherwise why would he look
twice at our family?' Aziz pressed his mother. 'O God, stop now, no need to
kill me because I tell you the truth!'
By 1918, Aadam Aziz had come to live for his regular trips across the
lake. And now his eagerness became even more intense, because it became
clear that, after three years, the landowner and his daughter had become
willing to lower certain barriers. Now, for the first time, Ghani said, 'A
lump in the right chest. Is it worrying, Doctor? Look. Look well.' And
there, framed in the hole, was a perfectly-formed and lyrically lovely ...
'I must touch it,' Aziz said, fighting with his voice. Ghani slapped him on
the back. 'Touch, touch!' he cried, 'The hands of the healer! The curing
touch, eh, Doctor?' And Aziz reached out a hand ... 'Forgive me for asking;
but is it the lady's time of the month?' ... Little secret smiles appearing
on the faces of the lady wrestlers. Ghani, nodding affably: 'Yes. Don't be
so embarrassed, old chap. We are family and doctor now.' And Aziz, 'Then
don't worry. The lumps will go when the time ends.'... And the next time, 'A
pulled muscle in the back of her thigh, Doctor Sahib. Such pain!' And there,
in the sheet, weakening the eyes of Aadam Aziz, hung a superbly rounded and
impossible buttock ... And now Aziz: 'Is it permitted that ...' 'Whereupon a
word from Ghani; an obedient reply from behind the sheet; a drawstring
pulled; and pajamas fall from the celestial rump, which swells wondrously
through the hole. Aadam Aziz forces himself into a medical frame of mind ...
reaches out... feels. And swears to himself, in amazement, that he sees the
bottom reddening in a shy, but compliant blush.
That evening, Aadam contemplated the blush. Did the magic of the sheet
work on both sides of the hole? Excitedly, he envisaged his headless Naseem
tingling beneath the scrutiny of his eyes, his thermometer, his stethoscope,
his fingers, and trying to build a picture in her mind
of him.
She was at a
disadvantage, of course, having seen nothing but his hands ... Aadam began
to hope with an illicit desperation for Naseem Ghani to develop a migraine
or graze her unseen chin, so they could look each other in the face. He knew
how unprofessional his feelings were; but did nothing to stifle them. There
was not much he could do. They had acquired a life of their own. In short:
my grandfather had fallen in love, and had come to think of the perforated
sheet as something sacred and magical, because through it he had seen the
things which had filled up the hole inside him which had been created when
he had been hit on the nose by a tussock and insulted by the boatman Tai.
On the day the World War ended, Naseem developed the longed-for
headache. Such historical coincidences have littered, and pejrhaps befouled,
my family's existence in the world.
He hardly dared to look at what was framed in the hole in the sheet.
Maybe she was hideous; perhaps that explained all this performance ... he
looked. And saw a soft face that was not at all ugly, a cushioned setting
for her glittering, gemstone eyes, which were brown with flecks of gold:
tiger's-eyes. Doctor Aziz's fall was complete. And Naseem burst out, 'But
Doctor, my God, what a
nose?
Ghani, angrily, 'Daughter, mind your ...' But
patient and doctor were laughing together, and Aziz was saying, 'Yes, yes,
it is a remarkable specimen. They tell me there are dynasties waiting in
it...' And he bit his tongue because he had been about to add, '... like
snot.'
And Ghani, who had stood blindly beside the sheet for three long years,
smiling and smiling and smiling, began once again to smile his secret smile,
which was mirrored in the lips of the wrestlers.
Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give
up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very
poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai
chose to stink. For three years now, he had neither bathed nor washed
himself after answering calls of nature. He wore the same clothes, unwashed,
year in, year out; his one concession to winter was to put his chugha-coat
over his putrescent pajamas. The little basket of hot coals which he carried
inside the chugha, in the Kashmiri fashion, to keep him warm in the bitter
cold, only animated and accentuated his evil odours. He took to drifting
slowly past the Aziz household, releasing the dreadful fumes of his body
across the small garden and into the house. Flowers died; birds fled from
the ledge outside old Father Aziz's window. Naturally, Tai lost work; the
English in particular were reluctant to be ferried by a human cesspit. The
story went around the lake that Tai's wife, driven to distraction by the old
man's sudden filthiness, pleaded for a reason. He had answered: 'Ask our
foreign-returned doctor, ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz,' Was it, then,
an attempt to offend the Doctor's hypersensitive nostrils (in which the itch
of danger had subsided somewhat under the anaesthetizing ministrations of
love)? Or a gesture of unchangingness in defiance of the invasion of the
doctori-attache from Heidelberg? Once Aziz asked the ancient, straight out,
what it was all for; but Tai only breathed on him and rowed away. The breath
nearly felled Aziz; it was sharp as an axe.
In 1918, Doctor Aziz's father, deprived of his birds, died in his
sleep; and at once his mother, who had been able to sell the gemstone
business thanks to the success of Aziz's practice, and who now saw her
husband's death as a merciful release for her from a life filled with
responsibilities, took to her own deathbed and followed her man before the
end of his own forty-day mourning period. By the time the Indian regiments
returned at the end of the war, Doctor Aziz was an orphan, and a free man -
except that his heart had fallen through a hole some seven inches across.
Desolating effect of Tai's behaviour: it ruined Doctor Aziz's good
relations with the lake's floating population. He, who as a child had
chatted freely with fishwives and flower-sellers, found himself looked at
askance. 'Ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz.' Tai had branded him as an
alien, and therefore a person not completely to be trusted. They didn't like
the boatman, but they found the transformation which the Doctor had
evidently worked upon him even more disturbing. Aziz found himself
suspected, even ostracized, by the poor; and it hurt him badly. Now he
understood what Tai was up to: the man was trying to chase him out of the
valley.
The story of the perforated sheet got out, too. The lady wrestlers were
evidently less discreet than they looked. Aziz began to notice people
pointing at him. Women giggled behind their palms ...
'I've decided to give Tai his victory,' he said. The three lady
wrestlers, two holding up the sheet, the third hovering near the door,
strained to hear him through the cotton wool in their ears. ('I made my
father do it,' Naseem told him, 'These chatterjees won't do any more of
their tittling and tattling from now on.') Naseem's eyes, hole-framed,
became wider than ever.
.. .Just like his own when, a few days earlier, he had been walking the
city streets, had seen the last bus of the winter arrive, painted with its
colourful inscriptions - on the front, GOD WILLING in green shadowed in red;
on the back, blue-shadowed yellow crying THANK GOD!, and in cheeky maroon,
SORRY-BYE-BYE! - and had recognized, through a web of new rings and lines on
her face, Ike Lubin as she descended ...
Nowadays, Ghani the landowner left him alone with earplugged guardians,
To talk a little; the doctor-patient relationship can only deepen in
strictest confidentiality. I see that now, Aziz Sahib - forgive my earlier
intrusions.' Nowadays, Naseem's tongue was getting freer all the time. 'What
kind of talk is this? What are you - a man or a mouse? To leave home because
of a stinky shikara-man!' ...
'Oskar died,' Ilse told him, sipping fresh lime water on his mother's
takht. 'Like a comedian. He went to talk to the army and tell them not to be
pawns. The fool really thought the troops would fling down their guns and
walk away. We watched from a window and I prayed they wouldn't just trample
all over him. The regiment had learned to march in step by then, you
wouldn't recognize them. As he reached the streetcorner across from the
parade ground he tripped over his own shoelace and fell into the street. A
staff car hit him and he died. He could never keep his laces tied, that
ninny' ... here there were diamonds freezing in her lashes ... 'He was the
type that gives anarchists a bad name.'
'All right,' Naseem conceded, 'so you've got a good chance of landing a
good job. Agra University, it's a famous place, don't think I don't know.
University doctor!... sounds good. Say you're going for that, and it's a
different business.' Eyelashes drooped in the hole. 'I will miss you,
naturally ...'
'I'm in love,' Aadam Aziz said to Ilse Lubin. And later,'... So I've
only seen her through a hole in a sheet, one part at a time; and I swear her
bottom blushes.'
'They must be putting something in the air up here,' Use said.
'Naseem, I've got the job,' Aadam said excitedly. 'The letter came
today. With effect from April 1919. Your father says he can find a buyer for
my house and the gemstone shop also.'
'Wonderful,' Naseem pouted. 'So now I must find a new doctor. Or maybe
I'll get that old hag again who didn't know two things about anything.'
'Because I am an orphan,' Doctor Aziz said, 'I must come myself in
place of my family members. But I have come nevertheless, Ghani Sahib, for
the first time without being sent for. This is not a professional visit.'
'Dear boy!' Ghani, clapping Aadam on the back. 'Of course you must
marry her. With an A-1 fine dowry! No expense spared! It will be the wedding
of the year, oh most certainly, yes!'
'I cannot leave you behind when I go,' Aziz said to Naseem. Ghani said,
'Enough of this tamasha! No more need for this sheet tomfoolery! Drop it
down, you women, these are young lovers now!'
'At last,' said Aadam Aziz, 'I see you whole at last. But I must go
now. My rounds ... and an old friend is staying with me, I must tell her,
she will be very happy for us both. A dear friend from Germany.'
'No, Aadam baba,' his bearer said, 'since the morning I have not seen
Ilse Begum. She hired that old Tai to go for a shikara ride.'
'What can be said, sir?' Tai mumbled meekly. 'I am honoured indeed to
be summoned into the home of a so-great personage as yourself. Sir, the lady
hired me for a trip to the Mughal Gardens, to do it before the lake freezes.
A quiet lady, Doctor Sahib, not one word out of her all the time. So I was
thinking my own unworthy private thoughts as old fools will and suddenly
when I look she is not in her seat. Sahib, on my wife's head I swear it, it
is not possible to see over the back of the seat, how was I to tell? Believe
a poor old boatman who was your friend when you were young ...'
'Aadam baba,' the old bearer interrupted, 'excuse me but just now I
have found this paper on her table.'
'I know where she is,' Doctor Aziz stared at Tai. 'I don't know how you
keep getting mixed up in my life; but you showed me the place once. You
said: certain foreign women come here to drown.'
'I, Sahib?' Tai shocked, malodorous, innocent. 'But grief is making
your head play trick! How can I know these things?'
And after the body, bloated, wrapped in weeds, had been dredged up by a
group of blank-faced boatmen, Tai visited the shikara halt and told the men
there, as they recoiled from his breath of a bullock with dysentery, 'He
blames me, only imagine! Brings his loose Europeans here and tells me it is
my fault when they jump into the lake!... I ask, how did he know just where
to look? Yes, ask him that, ask that nakkoo Aziz!'
She had left a note. It read: 'I didn't mean it.'
I make no comment; these events, which have tumbled from my lips any
old how, garbled by haste and emotion, are for others to judge. Let me be
direct now, and say that during the long, hard winter of 1918-19, Tai fell
ill, contracting a violent skin disease, akin to that European curse called
the King's Evil; but he refused to see Doctor Aziz, and was treated by a
local homeopath. And in March, when the lake thawed, a marriage took place
in a large marquee in the grounds of Ghani the landowner's house. The
wedding contract assured Aadam Aziz of a respectable sum of money, which
would help buy a house in Agra, and the dowry included, at Doctor Aziz's
especial request, a certain mutilated bedsheet. The young couple sat on a
dais, garlanded and cold, while the guests filed past dropping rupees into
their laps. That night my grandfather placed the perforated sheet beneath
his bride and himself and in the morning it was adorned by three drops of
blood, which formed a small triangle. In the morning, the sheet was
displayed, and after the consummation ceremony a limousine hired by the
landowner arrived to drive my grandparents to Amritsar, where they would
catch the Frontier Mail. Mountains crowded round and stared as my
grandfather left his home for the last time. (He would return, once, but not
to leave.) Aziz thought he saw an ancient boatman standing on land to watch
them pass - but it was probably a mistake, since Tai was ill. The blister of
a temple atop Sankara Acharya, which Muslims had taken to calling the
Takht-e-Sulaiman, or Seat of Solomon, paid them no attention. Winter-bare
poplars and snow-covered fields of saffron undulated around them as the car
drove south, with an old leather bag containing, amongst other things, a
stethoscope and a bedsheet, packed in the boot. Doctor Aziz felt, in the pit
of his stomach, a sensation akin to weightlessness.
Or falling.
(... And now I am cast as a ghost. I am nine years old and the whole
family, my father, my mother, the Brass Monkey and myself, are staying at my
grandparents' house in Agra, and the grandchildren -myself among them - are
staging the customary New Year's play; and I have been cast as a ghost.
Accordingly - and surreptitiously so as to preserve the secrets of the
forthcoming theatricals - I am ransacking the house for a spectral disguise.
My grandfather is out and about his rounds. I am in his room. And here on
top of this cupboard is an old trunk, covered in dust and spiders, but
unlocked. And here, inside it, is the answer to my prayers. Not just a
sheet, but one with a hole already cut in it! Here it is, inside this
leather bag inside this trunk, right beneath an old stethoscope and a tube
of mildewed Vick's Inhaler ... the sheet's appearance in our show was
nothing less than a sensation. My grandfather took one look at it and rose
roaring to his feet. He strode up on stage and unghosted me right in front
of everyone. My grandmother's lips were so tightly pursed they seemed to
disappear. Between them, the one booming at me in the voice of a forgotten
boatman, the other conveying her fury through vanished lips, they reduced
the awesome ghost to a weeping wreck. I fled, took to my heels and ran into
the little cornfield, not knowing what had happened. I sat there - perhaps
on the very spot on which Nadir Khan had sat! - for several hours, swearing
over and over that I would never again open a forbidden trunk, and feeling
vaguely resentful that it had not been locked in the first place. But I
knew, from their rage, that the sheet was somehow very important indeed.)
I have been interrupted by Padma, who brought me my dinner and then
withheld it, blackmailing me: 'So if you're going to spend all your time
wrecking your eyes with that scribbling, at least you must read it to me.' I
have been singing for my supper - but perhaps our Padma will be useful,
because it's impossible to stop her being a critic. She is particularly
angry with my remarks about her name. 'What do you know, city boy?' she
cried - hand slicing the air. 'In my village there is no shame in being
named for the Dung Goddess. Write at once that you are wrong, completely.'
In accordance with my lotus's wishes, I insert, forthwith, a brief paean to
Dung.
Dung, that fertilizes and causes the crops to grow! Dung, which is
patted into thin chapati-like cakes when still fresh and moist, and is sold
to the village builders, who use it to secure and strengthen the walls of
kachcha buildings made of mud! Dung, whose arrival from the nether end of
cattle goes a long way towards explaining their divine and sacred status!
Oh, yes, I was wrong, I admit I was prejudiced, no doubt because its
unfortunate odours do have a way of offending my sensitive nose - how
wonderful, how ineffably lovely it must be to be named for the Purveyor of
Dung!
... On April 6th, 1919, the holy city of Amritsar smelled (gloriously,
Padma, celestially!) of excrement. And perhaps the (beauteous!) reek did not
offend the Nose on my grandfather's face - after all, Kashmir! peasants used
it, as described above, for a kind of plaster. Even in Srinagar, hawkers
with barrows of round dung-cakes were not an uncommon sight. But then the
stuff was drying, muted, useful. Amritsar dung was fresh and (worse)
redundant. Nor was it all bovine. It issued from the rumps of the horses
between the shafts of the city's many tongas, ikkas and gharries; and mules
and men and dogs attended nature's calls, mingling in a brotherhood of shit.
But there were cows, too: sacred kine roaming the dusty streets, each
patrolling its own territory, staking its claims in excrement. And flies!
Public Enemy Number One, buzzing gaily from turd to steaming turd,
celebrated and cross-pollinated these freely-given offerings. The city
swarmed about, too, mirroring the motion of the flies. Doctor Aziz looked
down from his hotel window on to this scene as a Jain in a face-mask walked
past, brushing the pavement before him with a twig-broom, to avoid stepping
on an ant, or even a fly. Spicy sweet fumes rose from a street-snack barrow.
'Hot pakoras, pakoras hot!' A white woman was buying silks from a shop
across the street and men in turbans were ogling her. Naseem - now Naseem
Aziz - had a sharp headache; it was the first time she'd ever repeated an
illness, but life outside her quiet valley had come as something of a shock
to her. There was a jug of fresh lime water by her bed, emptying rapidly.
Aziz stood at the window, inhaling the city. The spire of the Golden Temple
gleamed in the sun. But his nose itched: something was not right here.
Close-up of my grandfather's right hand: nails knuckles fingers all
somehow bigger than you'd expect. Clumps of red hair on the outside edges.
Thumb and forefinger pressed together, separated only by a thickness of
paper. In short: my grandfather was holding a pamphlet. It had been inserted
into his hand (we cut to a long-shot - nobody from Bombay should be without
a basic film vocabulary) as he entered the hotel foyer. Scurrying of urchin
through revolving door, leaflets falling in his wake, as the chaprassi gives
chase. Mad revolutions in the doorway, roundandround; until chaprassi-hand
demands a close-up, too, because it is pressing thumb to forefinger, the two
separated only by the thickness of urchin-ear. Ejection of juvenile
disseminator of gutter-tracts; but still my grandfather retained the
message. Now, looking out of his window, he sees it echoed on a wall
opposite; and there, on the minaret of a mosque; and in the large black type
of newsprint under a hawker's arm. Leaflet newspaper mosque and wall are
crying:
Hartal!
Which is to say, literally speaking, a day of mourning, of
stillness, of silence. But this is India in the heyday of the Mahatma, when
even language obeys the instructions of Gandhiji, and the word has acquired,
under his influence, new resonances.
Hartal -April
7, agree mosque newspaper
wall and pamphlet, because Gandhi has decreed that the whole of India shall,
on that day, come to a halt. To mourn, in peace, the continuing presence of
the British.
'I do not understand this hartal when nobody is dead,' Naseem is crying
softly. 'Why will the train not run? How long are we stuck for?'
Doctor Aziz notices a soldierly young man in the street, and thinks-
the Indians have fought for the British; so many of them have seen the world
by now, and been tainted by Abroad. They will not easily go back to the old
world. The British are wrong to try and turn back the clock. 'It was a
mistake to pass the Rowlatt Act,' he murmurs.
'What rowlatt?' wails Naseem. 'This is nonsense where I'm concerned!'
'Against political agitation,' Aziz explains, and returns to his
thoughts. Tai once said: 'Kashmiris are different. Cowards, for instance.
Put a gun in a Kashmiri's hand and it will have to go off by itself - he'll
never dare to pull the trigger. We are not like Indians, always making
battles.' Aziz, with Tai in his head, does not feel Indian. Kashmir, after
all, is not strictly speaking a part of the Empire, but an independent
princely state. He is not sure if the hartal of pamphlet mosque wall
newspaper is his fight, even though he is in occupied territory now. He
turns from the window ...
... To see Naseem weeping into a pillow. She has been weeping ever
since he asked her, on their second night, to move a little. 'Move where?'
she asked. 'Move how?' He became awkward and said, 'Only move, I mean, like
a woman ...' She shrieked in horror. 'My God,what have I married? I know you
Europe-returned men. You find terrible women and then you try to make us
girls be like them! Listen, Doctor Sahib, husband or no husband, I am not
any ... bad word woman,' This was a battle my grandfather never won; and it
set the tone for their marriage, which rapidly developed into a place of
frequent and devastating warfare, under whose depredations the young girl
behind the sheet and the gauche young Doctor turned rapidly into different,
stranger beings... 'What now, wife?' Aziz asks. Naseem buries her face in
the pillow. 'What else?' she says in muffled tones. 'You, or what? You want
me to walk naked in front of strange men.' (He has told her to come out of
purdah.)
He says, 'Your shirt covers you from neck to wrist to knee. Your loose
pajamas hide you down to and including your ankles. What we have left are
your feet and face. Wife, are your face and feet obscene?' But she wails,
'They will see more than that! They will see my deep-deep shame!'
And now an accident, which launches us into the world of Mercurochrome
... Aziz, finding his temper slipping from him, drags all his wife's
purdah-veils from her suitcase, flings them into a wastepaper basket made of
tin with a painting of Guru Nanak on the side, and sets fire to them. Flames
leap up, taking him by surprise, licking at curtains. Aadam rushes to the
door and yells for help as the cheap curtains begin to blaze ... and bearers
guests washerwomen stream into the room and flap at die burning fabric with
dusters towels and other people's laundry. Buckets are brought; the fire
goes out; and Naseem cowers on the bed as about thirty-five Sikhs, Hindus
and untouchables throng in the smoke-filled room. Finally they leave, and
Naseem unleashes two sentences before clamping her lips obstinately shut.
'You are a mad man. I want more lime water.'
My grandfather opens the windows, turns to his bride. 'The smoke will
take time to go; I will take a walk. Are you coming?'
Lips clamped; eyes squeezed; a single violent No from the head; and my
grandfather goes into the streets alone. His parting shot: 'Forget about
being a good Kashmiri girl. Start thinking about being a modern Indian
woman.'
... While in the Cantonment area, at British Army H.Q., one Brigadier
R. E. Dyer is waxing his moustache.
It is April 7th, 1919, and in Amritsar the Mahatma's grand design is
being distorted. The shops have shut; the railway station is closed; but now
rioting mobs are breaking them up. Doctor Aziz, leather bag in hand, is out
in the streets, giving help wherever possible. Trampled bodies have been
left where they fell. He is bandaging wounds, daubing them liberally with
Mercurochrome, which makes them look bloodier than ever, but at least
disinfects them. Finally he returns to his hotel room, his clothes soaked in
red stains, and Naseem commences a panic. 'Let me help, let me help, Allah
what a man I've married, who goes into gullies to fight with goondas!' She
is all over him with water on wads of cotton wool. 'I don't know why can't
you be a respectable doctor like ordinary people are just cure important
illnesses and all? О God you've got blood everywhere! Sit, sit now, let me
wash you at least!'
'It isn't blood, wife.'
'You think I can't see for myself with my own eyes? Why must you make a
fool of me even when you're hurt? Must your wife not look after you, even?'
'It's Mercurochrome, Naseem. Red medicine.'
Naseem - who had become a whirlwind of activity, seizing clothes,
running taps - freezes. 'You do it on purpose,' she says, 'to make me look
stupid. I am not stupid. I have read several books.'
It is April 13th, and they are still in Amritsar. 'This affair isn't
finished,' Aadam Aziz told Naseem. 'We can't go, you see: they may need
doctors again.'
'So we must sit here and wait until the end of the world?'
He rubbed his nose. 'No, not so long, I am afraid.'
That afternoon, the streets are suddenly full of people, all moving in
the same direction, defying Dyer's new Martial Law regulations. Aadam tells
Naseem, 'There must be a meeting planned - there will be trouble from the
military. They have banned meetings.'
'Why do you have to go? Why not wait to be called?'
... A compound can be anything from a wasteland to a park. The largest
compound in Amritsar is called Jallianwala Bagh. It is not grassy. Stones
cans glass and other things are everywhere. To get into it, you must walk
down a very narrow alleyway between two buildings. On April 13th, many
thousands of Indians are crowding through this alleyway. 'It is peaceful
protest,' someone tells Doctor Aziz. Swept along by the crowds, he arrives
at the mouth of the alley. A bag from Heidelberg is in his right hand. (No
close-up is necessary.) He is, I know, feeling very scared, because his nose
is itching worse than it ever has; but he is a trained doctor, he puts it
out of his mind, he enters the compound. Somebody is making a passionate
speech. Hawkers move through the crowd selling channa and sweetmeats. The
air is filled with dust. There do not seem to be any goondas, any trouble-
makers, as far as my grandfather can see. A group of Sikhs has spread a
cloth on the ground and is eating, seated around it. There
is
still a smell
of ordure in the air. Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier
R. Е. Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack
troops. He is the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar - an important man,
after all; the waxed tips of his moustache are rigid with importance. As the
fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my
grandfather's nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up
positions, twenty-five to Dyer's right and twenty-five to his left; and
Aadam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle
mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the
sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. 'Yaaaakh-thоооо!' he sneezes
and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving
his life. His 'doctori-attache' flies open; bottles, liniment and syringes
scatter in the dust. He is scrabbling furiously at people's feet, trying to
save his equipment before it is crushed. There is a noise like teeth
chattering in winter and someone falls on him. Red stuffstains his shirt.
There are screams now and sobs and the strange chattering continues. More
and more people seem to have stumbled and fallen on top of my grandfather.
He becomes afraid for his back. The clasp of his bag is digging into his
chest, inflicting upon it a bruise so severe and mysterious that it will not
fade until after his death, years later, on the hill of Sankara Acharya or
Takht-e-Sulaiman. His nose is jammed against a bottle of red pills. The
chattering stops and is replaced by the noises of people and birds. There
seems to be no traffic noise whatsoever. Brigadier Dyer's fifty men put down
their machine-guns and go away. They have fired a total of one thousand six
hundred and fifty rounds into the unarmed crowd. Of these, one thousand five
hundred and sixteen have found their mark, killing or wounding some person.
'Good shooting,' Dyer tells his men, 'We have done a jolly good thing.'
When my grandfather got home that night, my grandmother was trying hard
to be a modern woman, to please him, and so she did not turn a hair at his
appearance. 'I see you've been spilling the Mercurochrome again, clumsy,'
she said, appeasingly.
'It's blood,' he replied, and she fainted. When he brought her round
with the help of a little sal volatile, she said, 'Are you hurt?'
'No,' he said.
'But
where
have you
been,
my
God?'
'Nowhere on earth,' he said, and began to shake in her arms.
My own hand, I confess, has begun to wobble; not entirely because of
its theme, but because I have noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing
in my wrist, beneath the skin ... No matter. We all owe death a life. So let
me conclude with the uncorroborated rumour that the boatman Tai, who
recovered from his scrofulous infection soon after my grandfather left
Kashmir, did not die until 1947, when (the story goes) he was infuriated by
India and Pakistan's struggle over his valley, and walked to Chhamb with the
express purpose of standing between the opposing forces and giving them a
piece of his mind. Kashmiri for the Kashmiris: that was his line. Naturally,
they shot him. Oskar Lubin would probably have approved of his rhetorical
gesture; R. E. Dyer might have commended his murderers' rifle skills. I must
go to bed. Padma is waiting; and I need a little warmth.
Hit-the-spittoon
Please believe that I am falling apart.
I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of
some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply
that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug - that my poor body,
singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage
above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has
started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating,
slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you
only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into
(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and
necessarily oblivious dust. This is why I have resolved to confide in paper,
before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)
There are moments of terror, but they go away. Panic like a bubbling
sea-beast conies up for air, boils on the surface, but eventually returns to
the deep. It is important for me to remain calm. I chew betel-nut and
expectorate in the direction of a cheap brassy bowl, playing the ancient
game of hit-the-spittoon: Nadir Khan's game, which he learned from the old
men in Agra... and these days you can buy 'rocket paans' in which, as well
as the gum-reddening paste of the betel, the comfort of cocaine lies folded
in a leaf. But that would be cheating.
... Rising from my pages comes the unmistakable whiff of chutney. So
let me obfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most
delicately-gifted olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days
to the large-scale preparation of condiments. But now, 'A cook?' you gasp in
horror, 'A khansama merely? How is it possible?' And, I grant, such mastery
of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess
it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your
200-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the
saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and
kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings - by day
amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at
the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from
the corruption of the clocks.
But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of
linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next: 'At this rate,' Padma
complains, 'you'll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about
your birth.' She is affecting nonchalance, jutting a careless hip in my
general direction, but doesn't fool me. I know now that she is, despite all
her protestations, hooked. No doubt about it: my story has her by the
throat, so that all at once she's stopped nagging me to go home, to take
more baths, to change my vinegar-stained clothes, to abandon even for a
moment this darkling pickle-factory where the smells of spices are forever
frothing in the air... now my dung goddess simply makes up a cot in the
corner of this office and prepares my food on two blackened gas-rings, only
interrupting my Anglepoise-lit writing to expostulate, 'You better get a
move on or you'll die before you get yourself born.' Fighting down the
proper pride of the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her.
'Things - even people - have a way of leaking into each other,' I explain,
'like flavours when you cook. Ilse Lubin's suicide, for example, leaked into
old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise,' I intone
earnestly, 'the past has dripped into me .'.. so we can't ignore it...' Her
shrug, which does pleasantly wavy things to her chest, cuts me off. 'To me
it's a crazy way of telling your life story,' she cries, 'if you can't even
get to where your father met your mother.'
... And certainly Padma is leaking into me. As history pours out of my
fissured body, my lotus is quietly dripping in, with her down-to-earthery,
and her paradoxical superstition, her contradictory love of the fabulous -
so it's appropriate that I'm about to tell the story of the death of Mian
Abdullah. The doomed Hummingbird: a legend of our times.
... And Padma is a generous woman, because she stays by me in these
last days, although I can't do much for her. That's right - and once again,
it's a fitting thing to mention before I launch into the tale of Nadir Khan
- I am unmanned. Despite Padma's many and varied gifts and ministrations, I
can't leak into her, not even when she puts her left foot on my right, winds
her right leg around my waist, inclines her head up toward mine and makes
cooing noises; not even when she whispers in my ear, 'So now that the
writery is done, let's see if we can make your other pencil work!'; despite
everything she tries, I cannot hit her spittoon.
Enough confessions. Bowing to the ineluctable Padma-pressures of
what-happened-nextism, and remembering the finite quantity of time at my
disposal, I leap forwards from Mercurochrome and land in 1942. (I'm keen to
get my parents together, too.)
It seems that in the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor
Aadam Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism. Bicycling around
Agra, he whistled piercingly, badly, but very happily. He was by no means
alone, because, despite strenuous efforts by the authorities to stamp it
out, this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year,
and drastic steps were to be taken before it was brought under control. The
old men at the paan-shop at the top of Cornwallis Road chewed betel and
suspected a trick. 'I have lived twice as long as I should have,' the oldest
one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing
up against each other around his vocal chords, 'and I've never seen so many
people so cheerful in such a bad time. It is the devil's work.' It was,
indeed, a resilient virus - the weather alone should have discouraged such
germs from breeding, since it had become clear that the rains had failed.
The earth was cracking. Dust ate the edges of roads, and on some days huge
gaping fissures appeared in the midst of macadamed intersections. The
betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming
themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the
numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might now issue from the Assuring
earth. Apparently a Sikh from the bicycle-repair shop had had his turban
pushed off his head in the heat of one afternoon, when his hair, without any
reason, had suddenly stood on end. And, more prosaically, the water shortage
had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with
which to adulterate the milk :.. Far away, there was a World War in progress
once again. In Agra, the heat mounted. But still my grandfather whistled.
The old men at the paan-shop found Ms whistling in rather poor taste, given
the circumstances.
(And I, like them, expectorate and rise above fissures.)
Astride his bicycle, leather attache attached to carrier, my
grandfather wMstled. Despite irritations of the nose, his lips pursed.
Despite a bruise on his chest which had refused to fade for twenty-three
years, his good humour was unimpaired. Air passed his lips and was
transmuted into sound. He whistled an old German tune:
Tannenbaum.
The optimism epidemic had been caused by one single human being, whose
name, Mian Abdullah, was only used by newspapermen. To everyone else, he was
the Hummingbird, a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist.
'Magician turned conjurer,' the newspapermen wrote, 'Mian Abdullah rose from
the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi to become the hope of India's hundred
million Muslims.' The Hummingbird was the founder, chairman, unifier and
moving spirit of the Free Islam Convocation; and in 1942, marquees and
rostrums were being erected on the Agra maidan, where the Convocation's
second annual assembly was about to take place. My grandfather, fifty-two
years old,
his
hair turned white by the years and other afflictions, had
begun whistling as he passed the maidan. Now he leaned round corners on his
bicycle, taking them at a jaunty angle, threading his way between cowpats
and children ... and, in another time and place, told Ms friend the Rani of
Cooch Naheen: 'I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I
got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian. I'm still not much
of a Muslim, but I'm all for Abdullah. He's fighting my fight.' His eyes
were still the blue of Kashmiri sky... he arrived home, and although Ms eyes
retained a glimmer of contentment, the whistling stopped; because waiting
for him in the courtyard filled with malevolent geese were the disapproving
features of my grandmama, Naseem Aziz, whom he had made the mistake of
loving in fragments, and who was now unified and transmuted into the
formidable figure she would always remain, and who was always known by the
curious title of Reverend Mother.
She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles
like witch's nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress
of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties.
Earlier that year Aadam Aziz had commissioned life-size blow-up photographs
of his family to hang on the living-room wall; the three girls and two boys
had posed dutifully enough, but Reverend Mother had rebelled when her turn
came. Eventually, the photographer had tried to catch her unawares, but she
seized Ms camera and broke it over his skull. Fortunately, he lived; but
there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was
not one to be trapped in anyone's little black box. It was enough for her
that she must live in unveiled, barefaced shamelessness - there was no
question of allowing the fact to be recorded.
It was perhaps the obligation of facial nudity, coupled with Aziz's
constant requests for her to move beneath Mm, that had driven her to the
barricades; and the domestic rules she established were a system of
self-defence so impregnable that Aziz, after many fruitless attempts, had
more or less given up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions,
leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain. (Perhaps,
too, it wasn't a system of self-defence at all, but a means of defence
against her self.)
Among the things to which she denied entry were all political matters.
When Doctor Aziz wished to talk about such things, he visited his friend the
Rani, and Reverend Mother sulked; but not very hard, because she knew Ms
visits represented a victory for her.
The twin hearts of her kingdom were her kitchen and her pantry. I never
entered the former, but remembered staring through the pantry's locked
screen-doors at the enigmatic world within, a world of hanging wire baskets
covered with linen cloths to keep out the flies, of tins wMch I knew to be
full of gur and other sweets, of locked chests with neat square labels, of
nuts and turnips and sacks of grain, of goose-eggs and wooden brooms. Pantry
and kitchen were her inalienable territory; and she defended them
ferociously. When she was carrying her last child, my aunt Emerald, her
husband offered to relieve her of the chore of supervising the cook. She did
not reply; but the next day, when Aziz approached the kitchen, she emerged
from it with a metal pot in her hands and barred the doorway. She was fat
and also pregnant, so there was not much room left in the doorway. Aadam
Aziz frowned. 'What is this, wife?' To which my grandmother answered, 'This,
whatsitsname, is a very heavy pot; and if just once I catch you in here,
whatsitsname, I'll push your head into it, add some dahi, and make,
whatsitsname, a korma.' I don't know how my grandmother came to adopt the
term
whatsitsname
as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her
sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry
for help ... as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a
hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe.
She didn't know, you see, what it was called.
... And at the dinner-table, imperiously, she continued to rule. No
food was set upon the table, no plates were laid. Curry and crockery were
marshalled upon a low side-table by her right hand, and Aziz and the cMldren
ate what she dished out. It is a sign of the power of this custom that, even
when her husband was afflicted by constipation, she never once permitted Mm
to choose Ms food, and listened to no requests or words of advice. A
fortress may not move. Not even when its dependants' movements become
irregular.
During the long concealment of Nadir Khan, during the visits to the
house on Cornwallis Road of young Zulfikar who fell in love with Emerald and
of the prosperous reccine-and-leathercloth merchant named Ahmed Sinai who
hurt my aunt Alia so badly that she bore a grudge for twenty-five years
before discharging it cruelly upon my mother, Reverend Mother's iron grip
upon her household never faltered; and even before Nadir's arrival
precipitated the great silence, Aadam Aziz had tried to break this grip, and
been obliged to go to war with his wife. (All this helps to show how
remarkable his affliction by optimism actually was.)
... In 1932, ten years earlier, he had taken control of his children's
education. Reverend Mother was dismayed; but it was a father's traditional
role, so she could not object. Alia was eleven; the second daughter, Mumtaz,
was almost nine. The two boys, Hanif and Mustapha, were eight and six, and
young Emerald was not yet five. Reverend Mother took to confiding her fears
to the family cook, Daoud. 'He fills their heads with I don't know what
foreign languages, whatsitsname, and other rubbish also, no doubt.' Daoud
stirred pots and Reverend Mother cried, 'Do you wonder, whatsitsname, that
the little one calls herself Emerald? In English, whatsitsname? That man
will ruin my children for me. Put less cumin in that, whatsitsname, you
should pay more attention to your cooking and less to minding other people's
business.'
She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction.
Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. 'You have
your Hummingbird,' she told him, 'but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God.
A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man's hum.' It was one of her rare
political comments ... and then the day arrived when Aziz Arew out the
religious tutor. Thumb and forefinger closed around the maulvi's ear. Naseem
Aziz saw her husband leading the stragglebearded wretch to the door in the
garden wall; gasped; then cried out as her husband's foot was applied to the
divine's fleshy parts. Unleashing thunderbolts, Reverend Mother sailed into
battle.
'Man without dignity!' she cursed her husband, and, 'Man without,
whatsitsname,
shame!'
Children watched from the safety of the back verandah.
And Aziz, 'Do you know what that man was teaching your children?' And
Reverend Mother hurling question against question, 'What will you not do to
bring disaster, whatsitsname, on our heads?' -But now Aziz, 'You think it
was Nastaliq script? Eh?' - to which his wife, warming up: 'Would you eat
pig? Whatsitsname? Would you spit on the Quran?' And, voice rising, the
doctor ripostes, 'Or was it some verses of "The Cow"? You think that?' ...
Paying no attention, Reverend Mother arrives at her climax: 'Would you marry
your daughters to Germans!?' And pauses, fighting for breath, letting my
grandfather reveal, 'He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to
hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs and who knows what other
vegetarians. Will you have hateful children, woman?'
'Will you have godless ones?' Reverend Mother envisages the legions of
the Archangel Gabriel descending at night to carry her heathen brood to
hell. She has vivid pictures of hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and
everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages... 'I take this oath,
whatsitsname,' my grandmother said, 'I swear no food will come from my
kitchen to your lips! No, not one chapati, until you bring the maulvi sahib
back and kiss his, whatsitsname, feet!'
The war of starvation which began that day very nearly became a duel to
the death. True to her word, Reverend Mother did not hand her husband, at
mealtimes, so much as an empty plate. Doctor Aziz took immediate reprisals,
by refusing to feed himself when he was out. Day by day the five children
watched their father disappearing, while their mother grimly guarded the
dishes of food. 'Will you be able to vanish completely?' Emerald asked with
interest, adding solicitously, 'Don't do it unless you know how to come back
again.' Aziz's face acquired craters; even his nose appeared to be getting
thinner. His body had become a battlefield and each day a piece of it was
blasted away. He told Alia, his eldest, the wise child: 'In any war, the
field of battle suffers worse devastation than either army. This is
natural.' He began to take rickshaws when he did his rounds. Hamdard the
rickshaw-wallah began to worry about him.
The Rani of Cooch Naheen sent emissaries to plead with Reverend Mother.
'India isn't full enough of starving people?' the emissaries asked Naseem,
and she unleashed a basilisk glare which was already becoming a legend.
Hands clasped in her lap, a muslin dupatta wound miser-tight around her
head, she pierced her visitors with lidless eyes and stared them down. Their
voices turned to stone; their hearts froze; and alone in a room with strange
men, my grandmother sat in triumph, surrounded by downcast eyes. 'Full
enough, whatsitsname?' she crowed. 'Well, perhaps. But also, perhaps not.'
But the truth was that Naseem Aziz was very anxious; because while
Aziz's death by starvation would be a clear demonstration of the superiority
of her idea of the world over his, she was unwilling to be widowed for a
mere principle; yet she could see no way out of the situation which did not
involve her in backing down and losing face, and having learned to bare her
face, my grandmother was most reluctant to lose any of it.
'Fall ill, why don't you?' - Alia, the wise child, found the solution.
Reverend Mother beat a tactical retreat, announced a pain, a killing pain
absolutely, whatsitsname, and took to her bed. In her absence Alia extended
the olive branch to her father, in the shape of a bowl of chicken soup. Two
days later, Reverend Mother rose (having refused to be examined by her
husband for the first time in her life), reassumed her powers, and with a
shrug of acquiescence in her daughter's decision, passed Aziz his food as
though it were a mere trifle of a business.
That was ten years earlier; but still, in 1942, the old men at the
paan-shop are stirred by the sight of the whistling doctor into giggling
memories of the time when his wife had nearly made him do a disappearing
trick, even though he didn't know how to come back. Late into the evening
they nudge each other with, 'Do you remember when -' and 'Dried up like a
skeleton on a washing line! He couldn't even ride his -' and '- I tell you,
baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream her
daughters' dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!' But as
evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest.
Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a
pursing of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but
instead a long red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in
unerring accuracy towards an old brass spittoon. There is much slapping of
thighs and self-admiring utterance of 'Wah, wah, sir!' and, 'Absolute master
shot!' ... Around the oldsters, the town fades into desultory evening
pastimes. Children play hoop and kabaddi and draw beards on posters of Mian
Abdullah. And now the old men place the spittoon in the street, further and
further from their squatting-place, and aim longer and longer jets at it.
Still the fluid flies true. 'Oh too good, yara!' The street urchins make a
game of dodging in and out between the red streams, superimposing this game
of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon ... But here is an army
staff car, scattering urchins as it comes ... here, Brigadier Dodson, the
town's military commander, stifling with heat... and here, his A.D.C., Major
Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the
car knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood
congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at
the retreating power of the Raj.
Memory of a mildewing photograph (perhaps the work of the same poor
brained photographer whose life-size blow-ups so nearly cost him his life):
Aadam Aziz, aglow with optimism-fever, shakes hands with a man of sixty or
so, an impatient, sprightly type with a lock of white hair falling across
his brow like a kindly scar. It is Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird. ('You
see, Doctor Sahib, I keep myself fit. You wish to hit me in the stomach?
Try, try. I'm in tiptop shape.'... In the photograph, folds of a loose white
shirt conceal the stomach, and my grandfather's fist is not clenched, but
swallowed up by the hand of the ex-conjurer.) And behind them, looking
benignly on, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, who was going white in blotches, a
disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous scale shortly
after Independence ... 'I am the victim,' the Rani whispers, through
photographed lips that never move, 'the hapless victim of my cross-cultural
concerns. My skin is the outward expression of the internationalism of my
spirit.' Yes, there is a conversation going on in this photograph, as like
expert ventriloquists the optimists meet their leader. Beside the Rani -
listen carefully now; history and ancestry are about to meet! - stands a
peculiar fellow, soft and paunchy, his eyes like stagnant ponds, his hair
long like a poet's. Nadir Khan, the Hummingbird's personal secretary. His
feet, if they were not frozen by the snapshot, would be shuffling in
embarrassment. He mouths through his foolish, rigid smile, 'It's true; I
have written verses ...' Whereupon Mian Abdullah interrupts, booming through
his open mouth with glints of pointy teeth: 'But what verses! Not one rhyme
in page after page!...' And the Rani, gently: 'A modernist, then?' And
Nadir, shyly: 'Yes.' What tensions there are now in the still, immobile
scene! What edgy banter, as the Hummingbird speaks: 'Never mind about that;
art should uplift; it should remind us of our glorious literary heritage!'
... And is that a shadow, or a frown on his secretary's brow? ... Nadir's
voice, issuing lowaslow from the fading picture: 'I do not believe in high
art, Mian Sahib. Now art must be beyond categories; my poetry and - oh - the
game of hit-the-spittoon are equals.'... So now the Rani, kind woman that
she is, jokes, 'Well, I shall set aside a room, perhaps; for paan-eating and
spittoon-hittery. I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli,
and you must all come and practise. Let the walls be splashed with our
inaccurate expectorating! They will be honest stains, at least.' And now the
photograph has run out of words; now I notice, with my mind's eye, that all
the while the Hummingbird has been staring towards the door, which is past
my grandfather's shoulder at the very edge of the picture. Beyond the door,
history calls. The Hummingbird is impatient to get away... but he has been
with us, and his presence has brought us two threads which will pursue me
through all my days: the thread that leads to the ghetto of the magicians;
and the thread that tells the story of Nadir the rhymeless, verbless poet
and a priceless silver spittoon.
'What nonsense,' our Padma says. 'How can a picture talk? Stop now; you
must be too tired to think.' But when I say to her that Mian Abdullah had
the strange trait of humming without pause, humming in a strange way,
neither musical nor unmusical, but somehow mechanical, the hum of an engine
or dynamo, she swallows it easily enough, saying judiciously, 'Well, if he
was such an energetic man, it's no surprise to me.' She's all ears again; so
I warm to my theme and report that Mian Abdullah's hum rose and fell in
direct relationship to his work rate. It was a hum that could fall low
enough to give you toothache, and when it rose to its highest, most feverish
pitch, it had the ability of inducing erections in anyone within its
vicinity. ('Arre baap,' Padma laughs, 'no wonder he was so popular with the
men!') Nadir Khan, as his secretary, was attacked constantly by his master's
vibratory quirk, and his ears jaw penis were forever behaving according to
the dictates of the Hummingbird. Why, then, did Nadir stay, despite
erections which embarrassed him in the company of strangers, despite aching
molars and a work schedule which often occupied twenty-two hours in every
twenty-four? Not - I believe - because he saw it as his poetic duty to get
close to the centre of events and transmute them into literature. Nor
because he wanted fame for himself. No: but Nadir had one thing in common
with my grandfather, and it was enough. He, too, suffered from the optimism
disease.
Like Aadam Aziz, like the Rani of Cooch Naheen, Nadir Khan loathed the
Muslim League ('That bunch of toadies!' the Rani cried in her silvery voice,
swooping around the octaves like a skier. 'Landowners with vested interests
to protect! What do they have to do with Muslims? They go like toads to the
British and form governments for them, now mat the Congress refuses to do
it!' It was the year of the 'Quit India' resolution. 'And what's more,' the
Rani said with finality, 'they are mad. Otherwise why would they want to
partition India?')
Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird, had created the Free Islam Convocation
almost single-handedly. He invited the leaders of the dozens of Muslim
splinter groups to form a loosely federated alternative to the dogmatism and
vested interests of the Leaguers. It had been a great conjuring trick,
because they had all come. That was the first Convocation, in Lahore; Agra
would see the second. The marquees would be filled with members of agrarian
movements, urban labourers' syndicates, religious divines and regional
groupings. It would see confirmed what the first assembly had intimated:
that the League, with its demand for a partitioned India, spoke on nobody's
behalf but its own. They have turned their backs on us,' said the
Convocation's posters, 'and now they claim we're standing behind them!' Mian
Abdullah opposed the partition.
In the throes of the optimism epidemic, the Hummingbird's patron, the
Rani of Cooch Naheen, never mentioned the clouds on the horizon. She never
pointed out that Agra was a Muslim League stronghold, saying only, 'Aadam my
boy, if the Hummingbird wants to hold Convocation here, I'm not about to
suggest he goes to Allahabad.' She was bearing the entire expense of the
event without complaint or interference; not, let it be said, without making
enemies in the town. The Rani did not live like other Indian princes.
Instead of teetar-hunts, she endowed scholarships. Instead of hotel
scandals, she had politics. And so the rumours began. 'These scholars of
hers, man, everyone knows they have to perform extra-curricular duties. They
go to her bedroom in the dark, and she never lets them see her blotchy face,
but bewitches them into bed with her voice of a singing witch!' Aadam Aziz
had never believed in witches. He enjoyed her brilliant circle of friends
who were as much at home in Persian as they were in German. But Naseem Aziz,
who half-believed the stories about the Rani, never accompanied him to the
princess's house. 'If God meant people to speak many tongues,' she argued,
'why did he put only one in our heads?'
And so it was that none of the Hummingbird's optimists were prepared
for what happened. They played hit-the-spittoon, and ignored the cracks in
the earth.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
According to legend, then - according to the polished gossip of the ancients
at the paan-shop - Mian Abdullah owed his downfall to his purchase, at Agra
railway station, of a peacock-feather fan, despite Nadir Khan's warning
about bad luck. What is more, on that night of crescent moons, Abdullah had
been working with Nadir, so that when the new moon rose they both saw it
through glass. 'These things matter,' the betel-chewers say. 'We have been
alive too long, and we know.' (Padma is nodding her head in agreement.)
The Convocation offices were on the ground floor of the historical
faculty building at the University campus. Abdullah and Nadir were coming to
the end of their night's work; the Hummingbird's hum was low-pitched and
Nadir's teeth were on edge. There was a poster on the office wall,
expressing Abdullah's favourite anti-Partition sentiment, a quote from the
poet Iqbal: 'Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?' And now the
assassins reached the campus.
Facts: Abdullah had plenty of enemies. The British attitude to him was
always ambiguous. Brigadier Dodson hadn't wanted him in town. There was a
knock on the door and Nadir answered it. Six new moons came into the room,
six crescent knives held by men dressed all in black, with covered faces.
Two men held Nadir while the others moved towards the Hummingbird.
'At this point,' the betel-chewers say, 'the Hummingbird's hum became
higher. Higher and higher, yara, and the assassins' eyes became wide as
their members made tents under their robes. Then -Allah, then! - the knives
began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he'd never
hummed before. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble
killing him; one broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with
red. But now - listen! - Abdullah's humming rose out of the range of our
human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe
eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is
certain that some were eating, others dying; there were some who fornicated
and others who did not hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that
left six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these
turned and ran for the University, many of them rushing across the railway
tracks from the wrong side of town. It is well known that this is true.
Everyone in town saw it, except those who were asleep. They went noisily,
like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung
and bits of hair ... and all the time Abdullahji was humming,
humming-humming, and the knives were singing. And know this: suddenly one of
the killers' eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces
of glass were found, ground into the carpet!'
They say, 'When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives
were blunt... they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which
had no glass because Abdullah's hum had shattered it ... they thudded
against the door until the wood broke ... and then they were everywhere,
baba!... some without legs, others lacking hair, but most of them had some
teeth at least, and some of these were sharp ... And now see this: the
assassins cannot have feared interruption, because they had posted no
guards; so the dogs got them by surprise... the two men holding Nadir Khan,
that spineless one, fell beneath the weight of the beasts, with maybe
sixty-eight dogs on their necks ... afterwards the killers were so badly
damaged that nobody could say who they were.'
'At some point,' they say, 'Nadir dived out of the window and ran. The
dogs and assassins were too busy to follow him.'
Dogs? Assassins? ... If you don't believe me, check. Find out about
Mian Abdullah and his Convocations. Discover how we've swept his story under
the carpet ... then let me tell how Nadir Khan, his lieutenant, spent three
years under my family's rugs.
As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had
grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art.
'Look at me,' he said before he killed himself, 'I wanted to be a
miniaturist and I've got elephantiasis instead!' The swollen events of the
night of the crescent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room-mate, because
life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned
melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.
How did Nadir Khan run across the night town without being noticed? I
put it down to his being a bad poet, and as such, a born survivor. As he
ran, there was a self-consciousness about him, his body appearing to
apologize for behaving as if it were in a cheap thriller, of the sort
hawkers sell on railway stations, or give away free with bottles of green
medicine that can cure colds, typhoid, impotence, homesickness and
poverty... On Cornwallis Road, it was a warm night. A coal-brazier stood
empty by the deserted rickshaw rank. The paan-shop was closed and the old
men were asleep on the roof, dreaming of tomorrow's game. An insomniac cow,
idly chewing a Red and White cigarette packet, strolled by a bundled
street-sleeper, which meant he would wake in the morning, because a cow will
ignore a sleeping man unless he's about to die. Then it nuzzles at him
thoughtfully. Sacred cows eat anything.
My grandfather's large old stone house, bought from the proceeds of the
gemstone shops and blind Ghani's dowry settlement, stood in the darkness,
set back a dignified distance from the road. There was a walled-in garden at
the rear and by the garden door was the low outhouse rented cheaply to the
family of old Hamdard and his son Rashid the rickshaw boy. In front of the
outhouse was the well with its cow-driven waterwheel, from which irrigation
channels ran down to the small cornfield which lined the house all way to
the gate in the perimeter wall along Cornwallis Road. Between house and
field ran a small gully for pedestrians and rickshaws. In Agra the
cycle-rickshaw had recently replaced the kind where a man stood between
wooden shafts. There was still trade for the horse-drawn tongas, but it was
dwindling ... Nadir Khan ducked in through the gate, squatted for a moment
with his back to the perimeter wall, reddening as he passed his water. Then,
seemingly upset by the vulgarity of his decision, he fled to the cornfield
and plunged in. Partially concealed by the sun-withered stalks, he lay down
in the foetal position.
Rashid the rickshaw boy was seventeen and on his way home from the
cinema. That morning he'd seen two men pushing a low trolley on which were
mounted two enormous hand-painted posters, back-to-back, advertising the new
film
Gat-Wallah,
starring Rashid's favourite actor Dev. FRESH FROM FIFTY
FIERCE WEEKS IN DELHI! STRAIGHT FROM SIXTY-THREE SHARPSHOOTER WEEKS IN
BOMBAY! the posters cried. SECOND RIP-ROARIOUS YEAR! The film was an eastern
Western. Its hero, Dev, who was not slim, rode the range alone. It looked
very like the Indo-Gangetic plain. Gai-Wallah means cow-fellow and Dev
played a sort of one-man vigilante force for the protection of cows.
SINGLE-HANDED! and DOUBLE-BARRELLED!, he stalked the many herds of cattle
which were being driven across the range to the slaughterhouse, vanquished
the cattlemen and liberated the sacred beasts. (The film was made for Hindu
audiences; in Delhi it had caused riots. Muslim Leaguers had driven cows
past cinemas to the slaughter, and had been mobbed.) The songs and dances
were good and there was a beautiful nautch girl who would have looked more
graceful if they hadn't made her dance in a ten-gallon cowboy hat. Rashid
sat on a bench in the front stalls and joined in the whistles and cheers. He
ate two samosas, spending too much money; his mother would be hurt but he'd
had a fine time. As he pedalled his rickshaw home he practised some of the
fancy riding he'd seen in the film, hanging down low on one side,
freewheeling down a slight slope, using the rickshaw the way Gai-Wallah used
his horse to conceal him from his enemies. Eventually he reached up, turned
the handlebars and to his delight the rickshaw moved sweetly through the
gate and down the gully by the cornfield. Gai-Wallah had used this trick to
steal up on a gang of cattlemen as they sat in the brush, drinking and
gambling. Rashid applied the brakes and flung himself into the cornfield,
running -FULL-TILT!-at the unsuspecting cattlemen,
his
guns cocked and
ready. As he neared their camp-fire he released his 'yell of hate' to
frighten them. YAAAAAAAA! Obviously he did not really shout so close to the
Doctor Sahib's house, but he distended
his
mouth as he ran, screaming
silently. BLAMM! BLAMM! Nadir Khan had been finding sleep hard to come by
and now he opened his eyes. He saw - EEEYAAAH! - a wild stringy figure
coming at him like a mail-train, yelling at the top of his voice - but maybe
he had gone deaf, because there wasn't any
noise! -
and he was rising to his
feet, the shriek was just passing his over-plump lips, when Rashid saw him
and found voice as well. Hooting in terrified unison, they both turned tail
and ran. Then they stopped, each having noted the other's flight, and peered
at one another through the shrivelling corn. Rashid recognized Nadir Khan,
saw hi
s
torn clothes and was deeply troubled.
'I am a friend,' Nadir said foolishly. 'I must see Doctor Aziz.'
'But the Doctor is asleep, and is not in the cornfield.' Pull yourself
together, Rashid told himself, stop talking nonsense! This is Mian
Abdullah's friend!... But Nadir didn't seem to have noticed; his face was
working furiously, trying to get out some words which had stuck like shreds
of chicken between his teeth... 'My life,' he managed it at last, 'is in
danger.'
And now Rashid, still full of the spirit of Gai-Wallah, came to the
rescue. He led Nadir to a door in the side of the house. It was bolted and
locked; but Rashid pulled, and the lock came away in
his
hand. 'Indian-made'
he whispered, as if that explained everything. And, as Nadir stepped inside,
Rashid hissed, 'Count on me completely, sahib. Mum's the word! I swear on my
mother's grey hairs.'
He replaced the lock on the outside. To have actually saved the
Hummingbird's right-hand man!... But from what? Whom?... Well, real life was
better than the pictures, sometimes.
'Is that him?' Padma asks, in some confusion. 'That fat soft cowardly
plumpie? Is he going to be your father?'
Under the carpet
That was the end of the optimism epidemic. In the morning a
sweeper-woman entered the offices of the Free Islam Convocation and found
the Hummingbird, silenced, on the floor, surrounded by paw-prints and the
shreds of his murderers. She screamed; but later, when the authorities had
been and gone, she was told to clean up the room. After clearing away
innumerable dog-hairs, swatting countless fleas and extracting from the
carpet the remnants of a shattered glass eye, she protested to the
University's comptroller of works that, if this sort of thing was going to
keep happening, she deserved a small pay rise. She was possibly the last
victim of the optimism bug, and in her case the illness didn't last long,
because the comptroller was a hard man, and gave her the boot.
The assassins were never identified, nor were their paymasters named.
My grandfather was called to the campus by Major Zulfikar, Brigadier
Dodson's A.D.C., to write his friend's death certificate. Major Zulfikar
promised to call on Doctor Aziz to tie up a few loose ends; my grandfather
blew his nose and left. At the maidan, tents were coming down like punctured
hopes; the Convocation would never be held again. The Rani of Cooch Naheen
took to her bed. After a lifetime of making light of her illnesses she
allowed them to claim her, and lay still for years, watching herself turn
the colour of her bedsheets. Meanwhile, in the old house on Cornwallis Road,
the days were full of potential mothers and possible fathers. You see,
Padma: you're going to find out now.
Using my nose (because, although it has lost the powers which enabled
it, so recently, to make history, it has acquired other, compensatory gifts)
- turning it inwards, I've been sniffing out the atmosphere in my
grandfather's house in those days after the death of India's humming hope;
and wafting down to me through the years comes a curious melange of odours,
filled with unease, the whiff of things concealed mingling with the odours
of burgeoning romance and the sharp stink of my grandmother's curiosity and
strength ... while the Muslim League rejoiced, secretly of course, at the
fall of its opponent, my grandfather could be found (my nose finds him)
seated every morning on what he called his 'thunderbox', tears standing in
his eyes. But these are not tears of grief; Aadam Aziz has simply paid the
price of being Indianized, and suffers terribly from constipation.
Balefully, he eyes the enema contraption hanging on the toilet wall.
Why have I invaded my grandfather's privacy? Why, when I might have
described how, after Mian Abdullah's death, Aadam buried himself in his
work, taking upon himself the care of the sick in the shanty-towns by the
railway tracks - rescuing them from quacks who injected them with
pepperwater and thought that fried spiders could cure blindness - while
continuing to fulfil his dudes as university physician; when I might have
elaborated on the great love that had begun to grow between my grandfather
and his second daughter, Mumtaz, whose dark skin stood between her and the
affections of her mother, but whose gifts of gentleness, care and fragility
endeared her to her father with his inner torments which cried out for her
form of unquestioning tenderness; why, when I might have chosen to describe
the by-now-constant itch in his nose, do I choose to wallow in excrement?
Because this is where Aadam Aziz was, on the afternoon after his signing of
a death certificate, when all of a sudden a voice -soft, cowardly,
embarrassed, the voice of a rhymeless poet - spoke to him from the depths of
the large old laundry-chest standing in the corner of the room, giving him a
shock so profound that it proved laxative, and the enema contraption did not
have to be unhooked from its perch. Rashid the rickshaw boy had let Nadir
Khan into the thunderbox-room by way of the sweeper's entrance, and he had
taken refuge in the washing-chest. While my grandfather's astonished
sphincter relaxed, his ears heard a request for sanctuary, a request muffled
by linen, dirty underwear, old shirts and the embarrassment of the speaker.
And so it was that Aadam Aziz resolved to hide Nadir Khan.
Now comes the scent of a quarrel, because Reverend Mother Naseem is
thinking about her daughters, twenty-one-year-old Alia, black Mumtaz, who is
nineteen, and pretty, nighty Emerald, who isn't fifteen yet but has a look
in her eyes that's older than anything her sisters possess. In the town,
among spittoon-hitters and rickshaw-wallahs, among film-poster-trolley
pushers and college students alike, the three sisters are known as the Teen
Batti', the three bright lights ...and how can Reverend Mother permit a
strange man to dwell in the same house as Alia's gravity, Mumtaz's black,
luminous skin and Emerald's eyes?... 'You are out of your mind, husband;
that death has hurt your brain.' But Aziz, determinedly: 'He is staying.' In
the cellars ... because concealment has always been a crucial architectural
consideration in India, so that Aziz's house has extensive underground
chambers, which can be reached only through trap-doors in the floors, which
are covered by carpets and mats... Nadir Khan hears the dull rumble of the
quarrel and fears for his fate. My God (I sniff the thoughts of the
clammy-palmed poet), the world is gone insane... are we men in this country?
Are we beasts? And if I must go, when will the knives come for me?... And
through his mind pass images of peacock-feather fans and the new moon seen
through glass and transformed into a stabbing, red-stained blade...
Upstairs, Reverend Mother says, 'The house is full of young unmarried girls,
whatsitsname; is this how you show your daughters respect?' And now the
aroma of a temper lost; the great destroying rage of Aadam Aziz is
unleashed, and instead of pointing out that Nadir Khan will be under ground,
swept under the carpet where he will scarcely be able to defile daughters;
instead of paying due testimony to the verbless bard's sense of propriety,
which is so advanced that he could not even dream of making improper
advances without blushing in his sleep; instead of these avenues of reason,
my grandfather bellows, 'Be silent, woman! The man needs our shelter; he
will stay.' Whereupon an implacable perfume, a hard cloud of determination
settles upon my grandmother, who says, 'Very well. You ask me, whatsitsname,
for silence. So not one word, whatsitsname, will pass my lips from now on.'
And Aziz, groaning, 'Oh, damnation, woman, spare us your crazy oaths!'
But Reverend Mother's lips were sealed, and silence descended. The
smell of silence, like a rotting goose-egg, fills my nostrils; overpowering
everything else, it possesses the earth ... While Nadir Khan hid in his
half-lit underworld, his hostess hid, too, behind a deafening wall of
soundlessness. At first my grandfather probed the wall, looking for chinks;
he found none. At last he gave up, and waited for her sentences to offer up
their glimpses of her self, just as once he had lusted after the brief
fragments of her body he had seen through a perforated sheet; and the
silence filled the house, from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, so that
the flies seemed to give up buzzing, and mosquitoes refrained from humming
before they bit; silence stilling the hissing of geese in the courtyard. The
children spoke in whispers at first, and then fell quiet: while in the
cornfield, Rashid the rickshaw boy yelled his silent 'yell of hate', and
kept his own vow of silence, which he had sworn upon his mother's hairs.
Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose
head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in
the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice, as
a result, was thin and sharp - it had to be, to squeeze through the narrow
gap between his breathing apparatus and his jaw ... a man whose short sight
obliged him to take life one step at a time, which gained him a reputation
for thoroughness and dullness, and endeared him to his superiors by enabling
them to feel well-served without feeling threatened; a man whose starched,
pressed uniform reeked of Blanco and rectitude, and about whom, despite his
appearance of a character out of a puppet-show, there hung the unmistakable
scent of success: Major Zulfikar, a man with a future, came to call, as he
had promised, to tie up a few loose ends. Abdullah's murder, and Nadir
Khan's suspicious disappearance, were much on his mind, and since he knew
about Aadam Aziz's infection by the optimism bug, he mistook the silence in
the house for a hush of mourning, and did not stay for long. (In the cellar,
Nadir huddled with cockroaches.) Sitting quietly in the drawing-room with
the five children, his hat and stick beside him on the Telefunken radiogram,
the life-size images of the young Azizes staring at him from the walls,
Major Zulfikar fell in love. He was short-sighted, but he wasn't blind, and
in the impossibly adult gaze of young Emerald, the brightest of the 'three
bright lights', he saw that she had understood his future, and forgiven him,
because of it, for his appearance; and before he left, he had decided to
marry her after a decent interval. ('Her?' Padma guesses. 'That hussy is
your mother?' But there are other mothers-to-be, other future fathers,
wafting in and out through the silence.)
In that marshy time without words the emotional life of grave Alia, the
eldest, was also developing; and Reverend Mother, locked up in the pantry
and kitchen, sealed behind her lips, was incapable -because of her vow - of
expressing her distrust of the young merchant in reccine and leathercloth
who came to visit her daughter. (Aadam Aziz had always insisted that his
daughters be permitted to have male friends.) Ahmed Sinai - 'Ahaa!' yells
Padma in triumphant recognition - had met Alia at the University, and seemed
intelligent enough for the bookish, brainy girl on whose face my
grandfather's nose had acquired an air of overweight wisdom; but Naseem Aziz
felt uneasy about him, because he had been divorced at twenty. ('Anyone can
make one mistake,' Aadam had told her, and that nearly began a fight,
because she thought for a moment that there had been something overly
personal in his tone of voice. But then Aadam had added, 'Just let this
divorce of his fade away for a year or two; then we'll give this house its
first wedding, with a big marquee in the garden, and singers and sweetmeats
and all.' Which, despite everything, was an idea that appealed to Naseem.)
Now, wandering through the walled-jn gardens of silence, Ahmed Sinai and
Alia communed without speech; but although everyone expected him to propose,
the silence seemed to have got through to him, too, and the question
remained unasked. Alia's face acquired a weigh tiness at this time, a jowly
pessimistic quality which she was never entirely to lose. ('Now then,' Padma
reproves me, 'that's no way to describe your respected motherji.')
One more thing: Alia had inherited her mother's tendency to put on fat.
She would balloon outwards with the passing years.
And Mumtaz, who had come out of her mother's womb black as midnight?
Mumtaz was never brilliant; not as beautiful as Emerald; but she was good,
and dutiful, and alone. She spent more time with her father than any of her
sisters, fortifying him against the bad temper which was being exaggerated
nowadays by the constant itch in his nose; and she took upon herself the
duties of caring for the needs of Nadir Khan, descending daily into his
underworld bearing trays of food, and brooms, and even emptying his personal
thunderbox, so that not even a latrine cleaner could guess at his presence.
When she descended, he lowered his eyes; and no words, in that dumb house,
were exchanged between them.
What was it the spittoon hitters said about Naseem Aziz? 'She
eavesdropped on her daughters' dreams, just to know what they were up to.'
Yes, there's no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen
in this country of ours, just pick up any newspaper and see the daily
titbits recounting miracles in this village or that -Reverend Mother began
to dream her daughters' dreams. (Padma accepts this without blinking; but
what others will swallow as effortlessly as a laddoo, Padma may just as
easily reject. No audience is without its idiosyncrasies of belief.) So,
then: asleep in her bed at night, Reverend Mother visited Emerald's dreams,
and found another dream within them - Major Zulfikar's private fantasy, of
owning a large modern house with a bath beside his bed. This was the zenith
of the Major's ambitions; and in this way Reverend Mother discovered, not
only that her daughter had been meeting her Zulfy in secret, in places where
speech was possible, but also that Emerald's ambitions were greater than her
man's. And (why not?) in Aadam Aziz's dreams she saw her husband walking
mournfully up a mountain in Kashmir with a hole in his stomach the size of a
fist, and guessed that he was falling out of love with her, and also foresaw
his death; so that years later, when she heard, she said only. 'Oh, I knew
it, after all.'
... It could not be long now, Reverend Mother thought, before our
Emerald tells her Major about the guest in the cellar; and then I shall be
able to speak again. But then, one night, she entered the dreams of her
daughter Mumtaz, the blackie whom she had never been able to love because of
her skin of a South Indian fisherwoman, and realized the trouble would not
stop there; because Mumtaz Aziz - like her admirer under the carpets - was
also falling in love.
There was no proof. The invasion of dreams - or a mother's knowledge,
or a woman's intuition, call it what you like - is not something that will
stand up in court, and Reverend Mother knew that it was a serious business
to accuse a daughter of getting up to hanky-panky under her father's roof.
In addition to which, something steely had entered Reverend Mother; and she
resolved to do nothing, to keep her silence intact, and let Aadam Aziz
discover just how badly his modern ideas were ruining his children - let Mm
find out for himself, after Ms lifetime of telling her to be quiet with her
decent old-fashioned notions. 'A bitter woman,' Padma says; and I agree.
'Well?' Padma demands. 'Was it true?'
Yes: after a fashion: true.
'There was hankying and pankying? In the cellars? Without even
chaperones?'
Consider the circumstances - extenuating, if ever circumstances were.
Things seem permissible underground that would seem absurd or even wrong in
the clear light of day. 'That fat poet did it to the poor blackie? He did?'
He was down there a long time, too - long enough to start talking to flying
cockroaches and fearing that one day someone would ask Mm to leave and
dreaming of crescent knives and howling dogs and wishing and wishing that
the Hummingbird were alive to tell Mm what to do and to discover that you
could not write poetry underground; and then this girl comes with food and
she doesn't mind cleaning away your pots and you lower your eyes but you see
an ankle that seems to glow with graciousness, a black ankle like the black
of the underground nights ...
'I'd never have thought he was up to it.' Padma sounds admiring. 'The
fat old good-for-notMng!'
And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive Mding in
the cellar from Ms faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the
roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the
cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length
of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors
(HaniFs dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the
cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been
transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually
in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes
straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose
kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and
then
'And then? Come on, baba, what then?'
shyly, she smiles at him.
'What?'
And after that, there are smiles in the underworld, and something has
begun.
'Oh, so what? You're telling me that's
all?'
That's all: until the day Nadir Khan asked to see my grandfather -his
sentences barely audible in the fog of silence - and asked for Ms daughter's
hand in marriage.
'Poor girl,' Padma concludes, 'Kashmiri girls are normally fair like
mountain snow, but she turned out black. Well, well, her skin would have
stopped her making a good match, probably; and that Nadir's no fool. Now
they'll have to let Mm stay, and get fed, and get a roof over Ms head, and
all he has to do is hide like a fat earthworm under the ground. Yes, maybe
he's not such a fool.'
My grandfather tried hard to persuade Nadir Khan that he was no longer
in danger; the assassins were dead, and Mian Abdullah had been their real
target; but Nadir Khan still dreamed about the singing knives, and begged,
'Not yet, Doctor Sahib; please, some more time.' So that one night in -the
late summer of 1943 - the rains had failed again - my grandfather, Ms voice
sounding distant and eerie in that house in which so few words were spoken,
assembled Ms children in the drawing-room where their portraits hung. When
they entered they discovered that their mother was absent, having chosen to
remain immured in her room with her web of silence; but present were a
lawyer and (despite Aziz's reluctance, he had complied with Mumtaz's wishes)
a mullah, both provided by the ailing Rani of Cooch Naheen, both 'utterly
discreet'. And their sister Mumtaz was there in bridal finery, and beside
her in a chair set in front of the radiogram was the lank-haired,
overweight, embarrassed figure of Nadir Khan. So it was that the first
wedding in the house was one at which there were no tents, no singers, no
sweetmeats and only a minimum of guests; and after the rites were over and
Nadir Khan lifted his bride's veil - giving Aziz a sudden shock, making Mm
young for a moment, and in Kashmir again, sitting on a dais while people put
rupees in his lap - my grandfather made them all swear an oath not to reveal
the presence in their cellar of their new brother-in-law. Emerald,
reluctantly, gave her promise last of all.
After that Aadam Aziz made his sons help him carry all manner of
furnishings down through the trap-door in the drawing-room floor: draperies
and cushions and lamps and a big comfortable bed. And at last Nadir and
Mumtaz stepped down into the vaults; the trap-door was shut and the carpet
rolled into place and Nadir Khan, who loved
his
wife as delicately as a man
ever had, had taken her into his underworld.
Mumtaz Aziz began to lead a double life. By day she was a single girl,
living chastely with her parents, studying mediocrely at the university,
cultivating those gifts of assiduity, nobility and forbearance which were to
be her hallmarks throughout her life, up to and including the time when she
was assailed by the talking washing-chests of her past and then squashed
flat as a rice pancake; but at night, descending through a trap-door, she
entered a lamplit, secluded marriage chamber which her secret husband had
taken to calling the Taj Mahal, because Taj Bibi was the name by which
people had called an earlier Mumtaz - Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Emperor Shah
Jehan, whose name meant 'king of the world'. When she died he built her that
mausoleum which has been immortalized on postcards and chocolate boxes and
whose outdoor corridors stink of urine and whose walls are covered in
graffiti and whose echoes are tested for visitors by guides although there
are signs in three languages pleading for silence. Like Shah Jehan and his
Mumtaz, Nadir and his dark lady lay side by side, and lapis lazuli inlay
work was their companion because the bedridden, dying Rani of Cooch Naheen
had sent them, as a wedding gift, a wondrously-carved, lapis-inlaid,
gemstone-crusted silver spittoon. In their comfortable lamplit seclusion,
husband and wife played the old men's game.
Mumtaz made the paans for Nadir but did not like the taste herself. She
spat streams of nibu-pani. His jets were red and hers were lime. It was the
happiest time of her life. And she said afterwards, at the ending of the
long silence, 'We would have had children in the end; only then it wasn't
right, that's all.' Mumtaz Aziz loved children all her life.
Meanwhile, Reverend Mother moved sluggishly through the months in the
grip of a silence which had become so absolute that even the servants
received their instructions in sign language, and once the cook Daoud had
been staring at her, trying to understand her somnolently frantic
signalling, and as a result had not been looking in the direction of the
boiling pot of gravy which fell upon his foot and fried it like a five-toed
egg; he opened-his mouth to scream but no sound emerged, and after that he
became convinced that the old hag had the power of witchery, and became too
scared to leave her service. He stayed until his death, hobbling around the
courtyard and being attacked by the geese.
They were not easy years. The drought led to rationing, and what with
the proliferation of meatless days and riceless days it was hard to feed an
extra, hidden mouth. Reverend Mother was forced to dig deep into her pantry,
which thickened her rage like heat under a sauce. Hairs began to grow out of
the moles on her face. Mumtaz noticed with concern that her mother was
swelling, month by month. The unspoken words inside her were blowing her up
... Mumtaz had the impression that her mother's skin was becoming
dangerously stretched.
And Doctor Aziz spent his days out of the house, away from the
deadening silence, so Mumtaz, who spent her nights underground, saw very
little in those days of the father whom she loved; and Emerald kept her
promise, telling the Major nothing about the family secret; but conversely,
she told her family nothing about her relationship with him, which was fair,
she thought; and in the cornfield Mustapha and Hanif and Rashid the rickshaw
boy became infected with the listlessness of the times; and finally the
house on Cornwallis Road drifted as far as August 9th, 1945, and things
changed.
Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed
to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of
the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes
the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of
my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body
of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.
What happened in August 1945? The Rani of Cooch Naheen died, but that's
not what I'm after, although when she went she had become so sheetly-white
that it was difficult to see her against the bed-clothes; having fulfilled
her function by bequeathing my story a silver spittoon, she had the grace to
exit quickly... also in 1945, the monsoons did not fail. In the Burmese
jungle, Orde Wingate and his Chindits, as well as the army of Subhas Chandra
Bose, which was fighting on the Japanese side, were drenched by the
returning rains. Satyagraha demonstrators in Jullundur, lying non-violently
across railway lines, were soaked to the skin. The cracks in the
long-parched earth began to close; there were towels wedged against the
doors and windows of the house on Cornwallis Road, and they had to be wrung
out and replaced constandy. Mosquitoes sprouted in the pools of water
standing by every roadside. And the cellar - Mumtaz's Taj Mahal grew damp,
until at last she fell ill. For some days she told nobody, but when her eyes
became red-rimmed and she began to shake with fever, Nadir, fearing
pneumonia, begged her to go to her father for treatment. She spent the next
many weeks back in her maiden's bed, and Aadam Aziz sat by his daughter's
bedside, putting cooling flannels on her forehead while she shook. On August
6th the illness broke. On the morning of the 9th Mumtaz was well enough to
take a little solid food.
And now my grandfather fetched an old leather bag with the word
HEIDELBERG burned into the leather at the base, because he had decided that,
as she was very run-down, he had better give her a thorough physical
check-up. As he unclasped the bag, his daughter began to cry.
(And now we're here. Padma: this is it.)
Ten minutes later the long time of silence was ended for ever as my
grandfather emerged roaring from the sick-room. He bellowed for his wife,
his daughters, his sons. His lungs were strong and the noise reached Nadir
Khan in the cellar. It would not have been difficult for him to guess what
the fuss was about.
The family assembled in the drawing-room around the radiogram, beneath
the ageless photographs. Aziz carried Mumtaz into the room and set her down
on a couch. His face looked terrible. Can you imagine how the insides of his
nose must have felt? Because he had this bombshell to drop: that, after two
years of marriage, his daughter was still a virgin.
It had been three years since Reverend Mother had spoken. 'Daughter, is
this thing true?' The silence, which had been hanging in the corners of the
house like a torn cobweb, was finally blown away; but Mumtaz just nodded:
Yes. True.
Then she spoke. She said she loved her husband and the other thing
would come right in the end. He was a good man and when it was possible to
have children he would surely find it possible to do the thing. She said a
marriage should not depend on the thing, she had thought, so she had not
liked to mention it, and her father was not right to tell everyone out loud
like he had. She would have said more; but now Reverend Mother burst.
Three years of words poured out of her (but her body, stretched by the
exigencies of storing them, did not diminish). My grandfather stood very
still by the Telefunken as the storm broke over him. Whose idea had it been?
Whose crazy fool scheme, whatsitsname, to let this coward who wasn't even a
man into the house? To stay here, whatsitsname, free as a bird, food and
shelter for three years, what did you care about meatless days,
whatsitsname, what did you know about the cost of rice? Who was the
weakling, whatsitsname, yes, the white-haired weakling who had permitted
this iniquitous marriage? Who had put his daughter into that scoundrel's,
whatsitsname,
bed?
Whose head was full of every damn fool incomprehensible
thing, whatsitsname, whose brain was so softened by fancy foreign ideas that
he could send his child into such an unnatural marriage? Who had spent his
life offending God, whatsitsname, and on whose head was this a judgment? Who
had brought disaster down upon his house ... she spoke against my
grandfather for an hour and nineteen minutes and by the time she had
finished the clouds had run out of water and the house was full of puddles.
And, before she ended, her youngest daughter Emerald did a very curious
thing.
Emerald's hands rose up beside her face, bunched into fists, but with
index fingers extended. Index fingers entered ear-holes and seemed to life
Emerald out of her chair until she was running, fingers plugging ears,
running - FULL-TILT! - without her dupatta on, out into the street, through
the puddles of water, past the rickshaw-stand, past the paan-shop where the
old men were just emerging cautiously into the clean fresh air of
after-the-rain, and her speed amazed the urchins who were on their marks,
waiting to begin their game of dodging in and out between the betel-jets,
because nobody was used to seeing a young lady, much less one of the Teen
Batti, running alone and distraught through the rain-soaked streets with her
fingers in her ears and no dupatta around her shoulders. Nowadays, the
cities are full of modern, fashionable, dupatta-less misses; but back then
the old men clicked their tongues in sorrow, because a woman without a
dupatta was a woman without honour, and why had Emerald Bibi chosen to leave
her honour at home? The old ones were baffled, but Emerald knew. She saw,
clearly, freshly in the after-rain air, that the fountain-head of her
family's troubles was that cowardly plumpie (yes, Padma) who lived
underground. If she could get rid of him everyone would be happy again ...
Emerald ran without pausing to the Cantonment district. The Cantt, where the
army was based; where Major Zulfikar would be! Breaking her oath, my aunt
arrived at his office.
Zulfikar is a famous name amongst Muslims. It was the name of the
two-pronged sword carried by Ali, the nephew of the prophet Muhammad. It was
a weapon such as the world had never seen.
Oh, yes: something else was happening in the world that day. A weapon
such as the world had never seen was being dropped on yellow people in
Japan. But in Agra, Emerald was using a secret weapon of her own. It was
bandylegged, short, flat-headed; its nose almost touched its chin; it
dreamed of a big modern house with a plumbed-in bath right beside the bed.
Major Zulfikar had never been absolutely sure whether or not he
believed Nadir Khan to have been behind the Hummingbird's murder; but he
itched for the chance to find out. When Emerald told him about Agra's
subterranean Taj, he became so excited that he forgot to be angry, and
rushed to Cornwallis Road with a force of fifteen men. They arrived in the
drawing-room with Emerald at their head. My aunt: treason with a beautiful
face, no dupatta and pink loose-pajamas. Aziz watched dumbly as the soldiers
rolled back the drawing-room carpet and opened the big trap-door as my
grandmother attempted to console Mumtaz. 'Women must marry men,' she said.
'Not mice, whatsitsname! There is no shame in leaving that, whatsitsname,
worm.' But her daughter continued to cry.
Absence of Nadir in his underworld! Warned by Aziz's first roar,
overcome by the embarrassment which flooded over him more easily than
monsoon rain, he vanished. A trap-door flung open in one of the toilets -
yes, the very one, why not, in which he had spoken to Doctor Aziz from the
sanctuary of a washing-chest. A wooden 'thunderbox' -a 'throne' - lay on one
side, empty enamel pot rolling on coir matting. The toilet had an outside
door giving out on to the gully by the cornfield; the door was open. It had
been locked from the outside, but only with an Indian-made lock, so it had
been easy to force ... and in the soft lamplit seclusion of the Taj Mahal, a
shining spittoon, and a note, addressed to Mumtaz, signed by her husband,
three words long, six syllables, three exclamation marks:
Talaaq! Talaaq!
Talaaq!
The English lacks the thunderclap sound of the Urdu, and anyway you
know what it means. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. Nadir
Khan had done the decent thing.
О awesome rage of Major Zulfy when he found the bird had flown! This
was the colour he saw: red. О anger fully comparable to my grandfather's
fury, though expressed in petty gestures! Major Zulfy, at first, hopped up
and down in helpless fits of temper; controlled himself at last; and- rushed
out through bathroom, past throne, alongside cornfield, through perimeter
gate. No sign of a running, plump, longhair, rhymeless poet. Looking left:
nothing. And right: zero. Enraged Zulfy made his choice, pelted past the
cycle-rickshaw rank. Old men were playing hit-the-spittoon and the spittoon
was out in the street. Urchins, dodging in and out of the streams of
betel-juice. Major Zulfy ran, ononon. Between the old men and their target,
but he lacked the urchins' skill. What an unfortunate moment: a low hard jet
of red fluid caught him squarely in the crotch. A stain like a hand clutched
at the groin of his battledress; squeezed; arrested his progress. Major
Zulfy stopped in almighty wrath. О even more unfortunate; because a second
player, assuming the mad soldier would keep on running' had unleashed a
second jet. A second red hand clasped the first and completed Major Zulfy's
day... slowly, with deliberation, he went to the spittoon and kicked it
over, into the dust. He jumped on it -once! twice! again! - flattening it,
and refusing to show that it had hurt his foot. Then, with some dignity, he
limped away, back to the car parked outside my grandfather's house. The old
ones retrieved their brutalized receptacle and began to knock it back into
shape.
'Now that I'm getting married,' Emerald told Mumtaz, 'it'll be very
rude of you if you don't even try to have a good time. And you should be
giving me advice and everything.' At the time, although Mumtaz smiled at her
younger sister, she had thought it a great cheek on Emerald's part to say
this; and, unintentionally perhaps, had increased the pressure of the pencil
with which she was applying henna tracery to the soles of her sister's feet.
'Hey!' Emerald squealed, 'No need to get mad! I just thought we should try
to be friends.'
Relations between the sisters had been somewhat strained since Nadir
Khan's disappearance; and Mumtaz hadn't liked it when Major Zulfikar (who
had chosen not to charge my grandfather with harbouring a wanted man, and
squared it with Brigadier Dodson) asked for, and received, permission to
marry Emerald. 'It's like blackmail,' she thought. 'And anyway, what about
Alia? The eldest shouldn't be married last, and look how patient she's been
with her merchant fellow.' But she said nothing, and smiled her forebearing
smile, and devoted her gift of assiduity to the wedding preparations, and
agreed to try and have a good time; while Alia went on waiting for Ahmed
Sinai. ('She'll wait forever,' Padma guesses: correctly.)
January 1946. Marquees, sweetmeats, guests, songs, fainting bride,
stiff-at-attention groom: a beautiful wedding... at which the leather-cloth
merchant, Ahmed Sinai, found himself deep in conversation with the
newly-divorced Mumtaz. 'You love-children? - what a coincidence, so do I..."
'And you didn't have any, poor girl? Well, matter of fact, my wife couldn't
...' 'Oh, no; how sad for you; and she must have been bad-tempered like
anything!''... Oh, like hell... excuse me. Strength of emotions carried me
away.''- Quite all right; don't think about it. Did she throw dishes and
all?' 'Did she throw? In one month we had to eat out of newspaper!' 'No, my
goodness, what whoppers you tell!' 'Oh, it's no good, you're too clever for
me. But she did throw dishes all the same.' 'You poor, poor man.' 'No - you.
Poor, poor you.' And thinking: 'Such a charming chap, with Alia he always
looked so bored ...' And,'... This girl, I never looked at her, but my
goodness me...' And,'... You can tell he loves children; and for that I
could...' And,'... Well, never mind about the skin...' It was noticeable
that, when it was time to sing, Mumtaz found the spirit to join in all the
songs; but Alia remained silent. She had been bruised even more badly than
her father in Jallianwala Bagh; and you couldn't see a mark on her.
'So, gloomy sis, you managed to enjoy yourself after all.'
In June that year, Mumtaz re-married. Her sister - taking her cue from
their mother- would not speak to her until, just before they both died, she
saw her chance of revenge. Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother tried,
unsuccessfully, to persuade Alia that these things happen, it was better to
find out now than later, and Mumtaz had been badly hurt and needed a man to
help her recover... besides, Alia had brains, she would be all right. 'But,
but,' Alia said, 'nobody ever married a book.' 'Change your name,' Ahmed
Sinai said. 'Time for a fresh start. Throw Mumtaz and her Nadir Khan out of
the window, I'll choose you a new name. Amina. Amina Sinai: you'd like
that?' 'Whatever you say, husband,' my mother said. 'Anyway,' Alia, the wise
child, wrote in her diary, 'who wants to get landed with this marrying
business? Not me; never; no.'
Mian Abdullah was a false start for a lot of optimistic people; his
assistant (whose name could not be spoken in my father's house) was my
mother's wrong turning. But those were the years of the drought; many crops
planted at that time ended up by coming to nothing.
'What happened to the plumpie?' Padma asks, crossly, 'You don't mean
you aren't going to
tell?'
A public announcement
There followed an illusionist January, a time so still on its surface
that 1947 seemed not to have begun at all. (While, of course, in fact...) In
which the Cabinet Mission - old Pethick-Lawrence, clever Cripps, military A.
V. Alexander - saw their scheme for the transfer of power fail. (But of
course, in fact it would only be six months until...) In which the viceroy,
Wavell, understood that he was finished, washed-up, or in our own expressive
word, funtoosh, (Which, of course, in fact only speeded things up, because
it let in the last of the viceroys, who ...) In which Mr Attlee seemed too
busy deciding the future of Burma with Mr Aung Sam. (While, of course, in
fact he was briefing the last viceroy, before announcing his appointment;
the last-viceroy-to-be was visiting the King and being granted
plenipotentiary powers; so that soon, soon ...) In which the Constituent
Assembly stood self-adjourned, without having settled on a Constitution.
(But, of course, in fact Earl Mountbatten, the last viceroy, would be with
us any day, with his inexorable ticktock, his soldier's knife that could cut
subcontinents in three, and his wife who ate chicken breasts secretly behind
a locked lavatory door.) And in the midst of the mirror-like stillness
through which it was impossible to see the great machineries grinding, my
mother, the brand-new Amina Sinai, who also looked still and unchanging
although great things were happening beneath her skin, woke up one morning
with a head buzzing with insomnia and a tongue thickly coated with unslept
sleep and found herself saying aloud, without meaning to at all, 'What's the
sun doing here, Allah? It's come up in the wrong place.'
... I must interrupt myself. I wasn't going to today, because Padma has
started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious,
whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the
strings; but I simply must register a protest. So, breaking into a chapter
which, by a happy chance, I have named 'A Public Announcement', I issue (in
the strongest possible terms) the following general medical alert: 'A
certain Doctor N. Q. Baligga,' I wish to proclaim - from the rooftops!
Through the loudhailers of minarets! - 'is a quack. Ought to be locked up,
struck off, defenestrated. Or worse: subjected to his own quackery, brought
out in leprous boils by a mis-prescribed pill. Damn fool,' I underline my
point, 'can't see what's under his nose!'
Having let off steam, I must leave my mother to worry for a further
moment about the curious behaviour of the sun, to explain that our Padma,
alarmed by my references to cracking up, has confided covertly in
this
Baligga - this ju-ju man! this green-medicine wallah! -and as a result, the
charlatan, whom I will not deign to glorify with a description, came to
call. I, in all innocence and for Padma's sake, permitted him to examine me.
I should have feared the worst; the worst is what he did. Believe this if
you can: the fraud has pronounced me whole! 'I see no cracks,' he intoned
mournfully, differing from Nelson at Copenhagen in that he possessed no good
eye,
his
blindness not the choice of stubborn genius but the inevitable
curse of his folly! Blindly, he impugned my state of mind, cast doubts on my
reliability as a witness, and Godknowswhatelse: 'I see no cracks.'
In the end it was Padma who shooed him away. 'Never mind, Doctor
Sahib,' Padma said, 'we will look after him ourselves.' On her face I saw a
kind of recognition of her own dull guilt... exit Baligga, never to return
to these pages. But good God! Has the medical profession - the calling of
Aadam Aziz - sunk so low? To this cess-pool of Baliggas? In the end, if this
be true, everyone will do without doctors ... which brings me back to the
reason why Amina Sinai awoke one morning with the sun on her lips.
'It's come up in the wrong place!' she yelped, by accident; and then,
through the fading buzzing of her bad night's sleep, understood how in this
month of illusion she had fallen victim to a trick, because all that had
happened was that she had woken up in Delhi, in the home of her new husband,
which faced east towards the sun; so the truth of the matter was that the
sun was in the right place, and it was her position which had changed ...
but even after she grasped this elementary thought, and stored it away with
the many similar mistakes she had made since coming here (because her
confusion about the sun had been a regular occurrence, as if her mind were
refusing to accept the alteration in her circumstances, the new,
above-ground position of her bed), something of its jumbling influence
remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease.
'In the end, everyone can do without fathers,' Doctor Aziz told his
daughter when he said goodbye; and Reverend Mother added, 'Another orphan in
the family, whatsitsname, but never mind, Muhammad was an orphan too; and
you can say this for your Ahmed Sinai, whatsitsname, at least he is half
Kashmiri.' Then, with his own hands, Doctor Aziz had passed a green tin
trunk into the railway compartment where Ahmed Sinai awaited his bride. 'The
dowry is neither small nor vast as these things go,' my grandfather said.
'We are not crorepatis, you understand. But we have given you enough; Amina
will give you more.' Inside the green tin trunk: silver samovars, brocade
saris, gold coins given to Doctor Aziz by grateful patients, a museum in
which the exhibits represented illnesses cured and lives saved. And now
Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up after the
dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so re-invented her, thus
becoming in a sense her father as well as her new husband ... he walked
(with his own feet) along the platform as the train began to move. A relay
runner at the end of his lap, he stood wreathed in smoke and comic-book
vendors and the confusion of peacock-feather fans and hot snacks and the
whole lethargic hullabaloo of squatting porters and plaster animals on
trolleys as the train picked up speed and headed for the capital city,
accelerating into the next lap of the race. In the compartment the new Amina
Sinai sat (in mint condition) with her feet on the green tin trunk which had
been an inch too high to fit under the seat. With her sandals bearing down
on the locked museum of her father's achievements she sped away into her new
life, leaving Aadam Aziz behind to dedicate himself to an attempt to fuse
the skills of Western and hakimi medicine, attempt which would gradually
wear him down, convincing him that the hegemony of superstition, mumbo-jumbo
and all things magical would never be broken in India, because the hakims
refused to co-operate; and as he aged and the world became less real he
began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom
he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to
do so.
As the train pulled out of the station Ahmed Sinai jumped up and bolted
the compartment door and pulled down the shutters, much to Amina's
amazement; but then suddenly there were thumps outside and hands moving the
doorknobs and voices saying 'Let us in, maharaj! Maharajin, are you there,
ask your husband to open.' And always, in all the trains in this story,
there were these voices and these fists banging and pleading; in the
Frontier Mail to Bombay and in all the expresses of the years; and it was
always frightening, until at last I was the one on the outside, hanging on
for dear life, and begging, 'Hey, maharaj! Let me in, great sir.'
'Fare dodgers,' Ahmed Sinai said, but they were more than that. They
were a prophecy. There were to be others soon.
... And now the sun was in the wrong place. She, my mother, lay in bed
and felt ill-at-ease; but also excited by the thing that had happened inside
her and which, for the moment, was her secret. At her side, Ahmed Sinai
snored richly. No insomnia for him; none, despite the troubles which had
made him bring a grey bag full of money and hide it under his bed when he
thought Amina wasn't looking. My father slept soundly, wrapped in the
soothing envelope of my mother's greatest gift, which turned out to be worth
a good deal more than the contents of the green tin trunk: Amir, a Sinai
gave Ahmed the gift of her inexhaustible assiduity.
Nobody ever took pains the way Amina did. Dark of skin, glowing of eye,
my mother was by nature the most meticulous person on earth. Assiduously,
she arranged flowers in the corridors and rooms of the Old Delhi house;
carpets were selected with infinite care. She could spend twenty-five
minutes worrying at the positioning of a chair. By the time she'd finished
with her home-making, adding tiny touches bere, making fractional
alterations there, Ahmed Sinai found his orphan's dwelling transformed into
something gentle and loving. Amina would rise before he did, her assiduity
driving her to dust everything, even the cane chick-blinds (until he agreed
to employ a hamal for the purpose); but what Ahmed never knew was that his
wife's talents were most dedicatedly, most determinedly applied not to the
externals of their lives, but to the matter of Ahmed Sinai himself.
Why had she married him? - For solace, for children. But at first the
insomnia coating her brain got in the way of her first aim; and children
don't always come at once. So Amina had found herself dreaming about an
undreamable poet's face and waking with an unspeakable name on her lips. You
ask: what did she do about it? I answer: she gritted her teeth and set about
putting herself straight. This is what she told herself: 'You big ungrateful
goof, can't you see who is your husband now? Don't you know what a husband
deserves?' To avoid fruitless controversy about the correct answers to these
questions, let me say that, in my mother's opinion, a husband deserved
unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. But there was a
difficulty: Amina, her mind clogged up with Nadir Khan and insomnia, found
she couldn't naturally provide Ahmed Sinai with these things. And so,
bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love
him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his
component parts, physical as well as behavioural, compartmentalizing him
into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes ... in short, she fell
under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she
resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit.
Each day she selected one fragment of Ahmed Sinai, and concentrated her
entire being upon it until it became wholly familiar; until she felt
fondness rising up within her and becoming affection and, finally, love. In
this way she came to adore his over-loud voice and the way it assaulted her
eardrums and made her tremble; and his peculiarity of always being in a good
mood until after he had shaved -after which, each morning, his manner became
stern, gruff, businesslike and distant; and his vulture-hooded eyes which
concealed what she was sure was his inner goodness behind a bleakly
ambiguous gaze; and the way his lower lip jutted out beyond his upper one;
and his shortness which led him to forbid her ever to wear high heels ...
'My God,' she told herself, 'it seems that there are a million different
things to love about every man!' But she was undismayed. 'Who, after all,'
she reasoned privately, 'ever truly knows another human being completely?'
and continued to learn to love and admire his appetite for fried foods, his
ability to quote Persian poetry, the furrow of anger between his eyebrows...
'At this rate,' she thought, 'there will always be something fresh about him
to love; so our marriage just can't go stale.' In this way, assiduously, my
mother settled down to life in the old city. The tin trunk sat unopened in
an old almirah.
And Ahmed, without knowing or suspecting, found himself and his life
worked upon by his wife until, little by little, he came to resemble -and to
live in a place that resembled - a man he had never known and an underground
chamber he had never seen. Under the influence of a painstaking magic so
obscure that Amina was probably unaware of working it, Ahmed Sinai found Ms
hair thinning, and what was left becoming lank and greasy; he discovered
that he was willing to let it grow until it began to worm over the tops of
his ears. Also, his stomach began to spread, until it became the yielding,
squashy belly in which I would so often be smothered and which none of us,
consciously at any rate, compared to the pudginess of Nadir Khan. His
distant cousin Zobra told him, coquettishly, 'You must diet, cousinji, or we
won't be able to reach you to kiss!' But it did no good ... and little by
little Amina constructed in Old Delhi a world of soft cushions and draperies
over the windows which let in as little light as possible... she lined the
chick-blinds with black cloths; and all these minute transformations helped
her in her Herculean task, the task of accepting, bit by bit, that she must
love a new man. (But she remained susceptible to the forbidden dream-images
of... and was always drawn to men with soft stomachs and longish, lankish
hair.)
You could not see the new city from the old one. In the new city, a
race of pink conquerors had built palaces in pink stone; but the houses in
the narrow lanes of the old city leaned over, jostled, shuffled, blocked
each other's view of the roseate edifices of power. Not that anyone ever
looked in that direction, anyway. In the Muslim muhallas or neighbourhoods
which clustered around Chandni Chowk, people were content to look inwards
into the screened-off courtyards of their lives; to roll chick-blinds down
over their windows and verandahs. In the narrow lanes, young loafers held
hands and linked arms and kissed when they met and stood in hip-jutting
circles, facing inwards. There was no greenery and the cows kept away,
knowing they weren't sacred here. Bicycle bells rang constantly. And above
their cacophony sounded the cries of itinerant fruit-sellers:
Come all you
greats-O, eat a few dates-O!
To all of which was added, on that January morning when my mother and
father were each concealing secrets from the other, the nervous clatter of
the footsteps of Mr Mustapha Kemal and Mr S. P. Butt; and also the insistent
rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum.
When the clattering footsteps were first heard in the gullies of the
muhalla, Lifafa Das and his peepshow and drum were still some distance away.
Clatter-feet descended from a taxi and rushed into the narrow lanes;
meanwhile, in their corner house, my mother stood in her kitchen stirring
khichri for breakfast overhearing my father conversing with his distant
cousin Zohra. Feet clacked past fruit salesmen and hand-holding loafers; my
mother overheard:'... You newlyweds, I can't stop coming to see,
cho chweet
I can't tell you!' While feet approached, my father actually coloured. In
those days he was in the high summer of his charm; his lower lip really
didn't jut so much, the line between his eyebrows was still only faint...
and Amina, stirring khichri, heard Zohra squeal, 'Oh look, pink! But then
you are so fair, cousinji! ...' And he was letting her listen to All-India
Radio at the table, which Amina was not allowed to do; Lata Mangeshkar was
singing a waily love-song as 'Just like me, don'tyouthink,' Zohra went on.
'Lovely pink babies we'll have, a perfect match, no, cousinji, pretty white
couples?' And the feet clattering and the pan being stirred while 'How awful
to be black, cousinji, to wake every morning and see it staring at you, in
the mirror to be shown proof of your inferiority! Of course they know; even
blackies know white is nicer, don'tyouthinkso?' The feet very close now and
Amina stamping into the dining-room pot in hand, concentrating hard at
restraining herself, thinking Why must she come today when I have news to
tell and also I'll have to ask for money in front of her. Ahmed Sinai liked
to be asked nicely for money, to have it wheedled out of him with caresses
and sweet words until his table napkin began to rise in his lap as something
moved in his pajamas; and she didn't mind, with her assiduity she learned to
love this also, and when she needed money there were strokes and 'Janum, my
life, please...' and'.. .Just a little so that I can make nice food and pay
the bills ...' and 'Such a generous man, give me what you like, I know it
will be enough'... the techniques of street beggars and she'd have to do it
in front of that one with her saucer eyes and giggly voice and loud chat
about blackies. Feet at the door almost and Amina in the dining-room with
hot khichri at the ready, so very near to Zohra's silly head, whereupon
Zohra cries, 'Oh, present company excluded,
of course!'
just in case, not
being sure whether she's been overheard or not, and 'Oh, Ahmed, cousinji,
you are really too dreadful to think I meant our lovely Amina who really
isn't so black but only like a white lady standing in the shade!' While
Amina with her pot in hand looks at the pretty head and thinks Should I?
And, Do I dare? And calms herself down with: 'It's a big day for me; and at
least she raised the subject of children; so now it'll be easy for me to...'
But it's too late, the wailing of Lata on the radio has drowned the sound of
the doorbell so they haven't heard old Musa the bearer going to answer the
door; Lata has obscured the sound of anxious feet clattering upstairs; but
all of a sudden here they are, the feet of Mr Mustapha Kemal and Mr S. P.
Butt, coming to a shuffling halt.
'The rapscallions have perpetrated an outrage!' Mr Kemal, who is the
thinnest man Amina Sinai has ever seen, sets off with his curiously archaic
phraseology (derived from his fondness for litigation, as a result of which
he has become infected with the cadences of the lawcourts) a kind of chain
reaction of farcical panic, to which little, eaky, spineless S. P. Butt, who
has something wild dancing like a monkey in the eyes, adds considerably, by
getting out these three words: 'Yes, the firebugs!' And now Zohra in an odd
reflex action clutches the radio to her: bosom, muffing Lata between her
breasts, screaming, 'O God, О God, what firebugs, where? This house? О God I
can feel the heat!' Amina stands frozen khichri-in-hand staring at the two
men in their business suits as her husband, secrecy thrown to the winds now,
rises shaven but as-yet-unsuited to his feet and asks, 'The godown?'
Godown, gudam, warehouse, call it what you like; but no sooner had
Ahmed Sinai asked his question than a hush fell upon the room, except of
course that Lata Mangeshkar's voice still issued from Zohra's cleavage;
because these three men shared one such large edifice, located on the
industrial estate at the outskirts of the city. 'Not the godown, God
forfend," Amina prayed silently, because the reccine and leathercloth
business was doing well - through Major Zulfikar, who was now an aide at
Military G.H.Q, in Delhi, Ahmed Sinai had landed a contract to supply
leathercloth jackets and waterproof table coverings to the Army itself- and
large stocks of the material on which their lives depended were stored in
that warehouse. 'But who would do such a thing?' Zohra wailed in harmony
with her singing breasts, 'What mad people are loose in the world these
days?'... and that was how Amina heard, for the first time, the name which
her husband had hidden from her, and which was, in those times, striking
terror into many hearts. 'It is Havana,' said S. P. Butt... but Ravana is
the name of a many-headed demon; are demons, then, abroad in the land? 'What
rubbish is this?' Amina, speaking with her father's hatred of superstition,
demanded an answer; and Mr Kemal provided it. 'It is the name of a dastardly
crew, Madam; a band of incendiary rogues. These are troubled days; troubled
days.'
In the godown;roll upon roll of leathercloth; and the commodities dealt
in by Mr Kemal, rice tea lentfls - he hoards them all over the
1
country in vast quantities, as a form of protection against the
many-headed many-mouthed rapacious monster that is the public, which, if
given its heads, would force prices so low in a time of abundance that
godfearing entrepreneurs would starve while the monster grew fat...
'Economics is scarcity,' Mr Kemal argues, 'therefore my hoards not only keep
prices at a decent level but underpin the very structure of the economy.' -
And then there is, in the godown, Mr Butt's stockpile, boxed in cartons
bearing the words AAG BRAND. I do not need to tell you that aag means fire.
S. P. Butt was a manufacturer of matches.
'Our informations,' Mr Kemal says, 'reveal only the fact of a fire at
the estate. The precise godown is not specified.'
'But why should it be ours?' Ahmed Sinai asks. 'Why, since we still
have time to pay?'
'Pay?' Amina interrupts. 'Pay whom? Pay what? Husband, janum, life of
mine, what is happening here?'... But 'We must go,' S. P. Butt says, and
Ahmed Sinai is leaving, crumpled night-pajamas and all, rushing
clatterfooted out of the house with the thin one and the spineless one,
leaving behind him uneaten khichri, wide-eyed women, muffled Lata, and
hanging in the air the name of Ravana... 'a gang of ne'er-do-wells, Madam;
unscrupulous cut-throats and bounders to a man!'
And S. P. Butt's last quavering words: 'Damnfool Hindu firebugs, Begum
Sahiba. But what can we Muslims do?'
What is known about the Ravana gang? That it posed as a fanatical
anti-Muslim movement, which, in those days before the Partition riots, in
those days when pigs' heads could be left with impunity in the courtyards of
Friday mosques, was nothing unusual. That it sent men out, at dead of night,
to paint slogans on the walls of both old and new cities: NO PARTITION OR
ELSE PERDITION! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA! and so forth. And that it
burned down Muslim-owned factories, shops, godowns. But there's more, and
this is not commonly known: behind this facade of racial hatred, the Ravana
gang was a brilliantly-conceived commercial enterprise. Anonymous phone
calls, letters written with words cut out of newspapers were issued to
Muslim businessmen, who were offered the choice between paying a single,
once-only cash sum and having their world burned down. Interestingly, the
gang proved itself to be ethical. There were no second demands. And they
meant business: in the absence of grey bags full of pay-off money, fire
would lick at shopfronts factories warehouses. Most people paid, preferring
that to the risky alternative of trusting to the police. The police, in
1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. And it is said (though I can't
be sure of this) that , when the blackmail letters arrived, they contained a
list of 'satisfied customers' who had paid up and stayed in business. The
Ravana gang - like all professionals - gave references.
Two men in business suits, one in pajamas, ran through the narrow
gullies of the Muslim muhalla to the taxi waiting on Chandni Chowk. They
attracted curious glances: not only because of their varied attire, but
because they were trying not to run. 'Don't show panic,' Mr Kemal said,
'Look calm.' But their feet kept getting out of control and rushing on.
Jerkily, in little rushes of speed followed by a few badly-disciplined steps
at walking pace, they left the muhalla; and passed, on their way, a young
man with a black metal peepshow box on wheels, a man holding a dugdugee
drum: Lifafa Das, on his way to the scene of the important annunciation
which gives this episode its name. Lifafa Pas was rattling his drum and
calling: 'Come see everything, come see everything, come see! Come see
Delhi, come see India, come see! Come see, come see!'
But Ahmed Sinai had other things to look at.
The children of the muhalla had their own names for most of the local
inhabitants. One group of three neighbours was known as the 'fighting-cock
people', because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose
homes were separated by one of the muhalla's few Hindu residences. The
Sindhi and the Bengali had very little in common - they didn't speak the
same language or cook the same food; but they were both Muslims, and they
both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from
their rooftops. They hurled multilingual abuse at him from their windows.
They flung scraps of meat at his door... while he, in turn, paid urchins to
throw stones at their windows, stones with messages wrapped round them:
'Wait,' the messages said, 'Your turn will come'... the children of the
muhalla did not call my father by his right name. They knew him as 'the man
who can't follow his nose'.
Ahmed Sinai was the possessor of a sense of direction so inept that,
left to his own devices, he could even get lost in the winding gullies of
his own neighbourhood. Many times the street-arabs in the lanes had come
across him, wandering forlornly, and been offered a four-anna chavanni piece
to escort him home. I mention this because I believe that my father's gift
for taking wrong turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it
was also a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir
Khan, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what's
more, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent
clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me,
for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road... But that's
enough for now, because I've given the three businessmen enough time to get
to the industrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct
consequence of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over
whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future
failure, the odour of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an
aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths. Mr Kemal, who
smelled it, would say privately to S. P. Butt, "These Kashmiri types, old
boy: well-known fact they never wash.' This slander connects my father to
the boatman Tai... to Tai in the grip of the self-destructive rage which
made him give up being clean.
At the industrial estate, night-watchmen were sleeping peacefully
through the noise of the fire-engines. Why? How? Because they had made a
deal with the Ravana mob, and, when tipped off about the gang's impending
arrival, would take sleeping draughts and pull their charpoy beds away from
the buildings of the estate. In this way the gang avoided violence, and the
nightwatchmen augmented their meagre wages. It was an amicable and not
unintelligent arrangement.
Amid sleeping night-watchmen, Mr Kemal, my father and S. P. Butt
watched cremated bicycles rise up into the sky in thick black clouds. Butt
father Kemal stood alongside fire engines, as relief flooded through them,
because it was the Arjuna Indiabike godown that was burning - the Arjuna
brand-name, taken from a hero of Hindu mythology, had failed to disguise the
fact that the company was Muslim-owned. Washed by relief, father Kemal Butt
breathed air filled with incendiarized bicycles, coughing and spluttering as
the fumes of incinerated wheels, the vaporized ghosts of chains bells
saddlebags handlebars, the transubstantiated frames of Arjuna Indiabikes
moved in and out of their lungs. A crude cardboard mask had been nailed to a
telegraph pole in front of the flaming godown - a mask of many faces - a
devil's mask of snarling faces with broad curling lips and bright red
nostrils. The faces of the many-headed monster, Ravana the demon king,
looking angrily down at the bodies of the night-watchmen who were sleeping
so soundly that no one, neither the firemen, nor Kemal, nor Butt, nor my
father, had the heart to disturb them; while the ashes of pedals and inner
tubes fell upon them from the skies.
'Damn bad business,' Mr Kemal said. He was not being sympathetic. He
was criticizing the owners of the Arjuna Indiabike Company.
Look: the cloud of the disaster (which is also a relief) rises and
gathers like a ball in the discoloured morning sky. See how it thrusts
itself westward into the heart of the old city; how it is pointing, good
lord, like a finger, pointing down at the Muslim muhalla near Chandni Chowk!
... Where, right now, Lifafa Das is crying his wares in the Sinais' very own
gully.
'Come see everything, see the whole world, come see!'
It's almost time for the public announcement. I won't deny I'm excited:
I've been hanging around in the background of my own story for too long, and
although it's still a little while before I can take over, it's nice to get
a look in. So, with a sense of high expectation, I follow the pointing
finger in the sky and look down on my parents' neighbourhood, upon bicycles,
upon street-vendors touting roasted gram in twists of paper, upon the
hip-jutting, hand-holding street loafers, upon flying scraps of paper and
little clustered whirlwinds of flies around the sweetmeat stalls... all of
it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view. And there are
children, swarms of them, too, attracted into the street by the magical
rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum and his voice, 'Dunya dekho', see the
whole world! Boys without shorts on, girls without vests, and other, smarter
infants in school whites, their shorts held up by elasticated belts with
S-shaped snake-buckles, fat little boys with podgy fingers; all flocking to
the black box on wheels, including this one particular girl, a girl with one
long hairy continuous eyebrow shading both eyes, the eight-year-old daughter
of that same discourteous Sindhi who is even now raising the flag of the
still-fictional country, of Pakistan on his roof, who is even now hurling
abuse at his neighbour, while his daughter rushes into the street with her
chavanni in her hand, her expression of a midget queen, and murder lurking
just behind her lips. What's her name? I don't know; but I know those
eyebrows.
Lifafa Das: who has by an unfortunate chance set up Ms black peepshow
against a wall on which someone has daubed a swastika (in those days you saw
them everywhere; the extremist R.S.S.S. party got them on every wall; not
the Nazi swastika which was the wrong way round, but the ancient Hindu
symbol of power. Svasti is Sanskrit for good) ... this Lifafa Das whose
arrival Pve been trumpeting was a young fellow who was invisible until he
smiled, when he became beautiful, or rattled his drum, whereupon he became
irresistible to children. Dugdugee-men: all over India, they shout, 'Dilli
dekho', 'come see Delhi!' But this was Delhi, and Lifafa Das had altered his
cry accordingly. 'See the whole world, come see everything!' The hyperbolic
formula began, after a time, to, prey upon his mind; more and more picture
postcards went into his peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what
he promised, to put everything into his box. (I am suddenly reminded of
Nadir Khan's friend the painter: is this an Indian disease, this urge to
encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?)
Inside the peepshow of Lifafa Das were pictures of the Taj Mahal, and
MeenaksM Temple, and the holy Ganges; but as well as these famous sights the
peepshow-man had felt the urge to include more contemporary images -
Stafford Cripps leaving Nehru's residence; untouchables being touched;
educated persons sleeping in large numbers on railway lines; a publicity
still of a European actress with a mountain of fruit on her head - Lifafa
called her Carmen Verandah; even a newspaper photograph, mounted on card, of
a fire at the industrial estate. Lifafa Das did not believe in shielding his
audiences from the not-always-pleasant features of the age... and often,
when he came into these gullies, grown-ups as well as children came to see
what was new inside
his
box on wheels, and among his most frequent customers
was Begum Amina Sinai.
But today there is something hysterical in the air; something brittle
and menacing has settled on the muhalla as the cloud of cremated Indiabikes
hangs overhead... and now it slips its leash, as this girl with her one
continuous eyebrow squeals, her voice lisping with an innocence it does not
possess, 'Me firth t! Out of my way... let me thee! I can't
thee!'
Because
there are already eyes at the holes in the box, there are already children
absorbed in the progression of postcards, and Ldfafa Das says (without
pausing in his work - he goes right on turning the knob which keeps the
postcards moving inside the box), 'A few minutes, bibi; everyone will have
his turn; wait only.' To which the one-eyebrowed midget queen replies, 'No!
No! I want to be firtht!' Lifafa stops smiling - becomes invisible - shrugs.
Unbridled fury appears on the face of the midget queen. And now an insult
rises; a deadly barb trembles on her lips. 'You've got a
nerve,
coming into
thith muhalla! I know you: my father knows you: everyone knows you're a
Hindu!!'
Lifafa Das stands silently, turning the handles of his box; but now the
ponytailed one-eyebrowed valkyrie is chanting, pointing with pudgy fingers,
and the boys in their school whites and snake-buckles are joining in,
'Hindu! Hindu! Hindu!' And chick-blinds are flying up; and from his window
the girl's father leans out and joins in, hurling abuse at a new target, and
the Bengali joins in in Bengali... 'Mother raper! Violator of our
daughters!' ... and remember the papers have been talking of assaults on
Muslim children, so suddenly a voice screams out - a woman's voice, maybe
even silly Zohra's, 'Rapist! Arre my God they found the badmaash! There he
u!' And now the insanity of the cloud like a pointing finger and the whole
disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are
echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant, 'Ra-pist!
Ra-pist! Ray-ray-ray
-pist!'
without really knowing what they're saying; the
children have edged away from Lifafa Das and he's moved, too, dragging his
box on wheels, trying to get away, but now he is surrounded by voices filled
with blood, and the street loafers are moving towards him, men are getting
off bicycles, a pot flies through the air and shatters on a wall beside him;
he has his back against a doorway as a fellow with a quiff of oily hair
grins sweetly at him and says, 'So, mister: it is you? Mister Hindu, who
denies our daughters? Mister idolater, who sleeps with his sister?' And
Lifafa Das, 'No, for the love of...', smiling like a fool ... and then the
door behind him opens and he falls backwards, landing in a dark cool
corridor beside my mother Amina Sinai.
She had spent the morning alone with giggling Zohra and the echoes of
the name Ravana, not knowing what was happening out there at the industrial
estate, letting her mind linger upon the way the whole world seemed to be
going mad; and when the screaming started and Zohra - before she could be
stopped - joined in, something hardened inside her some realization that she
was her father's daughter, some ghost-memory of Nadir Khan hiding from
crescent knives in a cornfield, some irritation of her nasal passages, and
she went downstairs to the rescue, although Zohra screeched, 'What you
doing, sisterji, that mad beast, for God, don't let him in here, have your
brains gone raw?'... My mother opened the door and Lifafa Das fell in.
Picture her that morning, a dark shadow between the mob and its prey,
her womb bursting with its invisible untold secret: 'Wah, wah,' she
applauded the crowd. 'What heroes! Heroes, I swear, absolutely! Only fifty
of you against this terrible monster of a fellow! Allah, you make my eyes
shine with pride.'
... And Zohra, 'Come back, sisterji!' And the oily quiff, 'Why speak
for this goonda, Begum Sahiba? This is not right acting.' And Amina, 'I know
this man. He is a decent type. Go, get out, none of you have anything to do?
In a Muslim muhalla you would tear a man to pieces? Go, remove yourselves.'
But the mob has stopped being surprised, and is moving forward again ... and
now. Now it comes.
'Listen,'
my mother shouted,
'Listen well. I am with child. I am a
mother who will have a child, and I am giving this man my shelter. Come on
now, if you want to kill, kill a mother also and show the world what men you
are!'
That was how it came about that my arrival - the coming of Saleem Sinai
- was announced to the assembled masses of the people before my father had
heard about it. From the moment of my conception, it seems, I have been
public property.
But although my mother was right when she made her public announcement,
she was also wrong. This is why: the baby she was carrying did not turn out
to be her son.
My mother came to Delhi; worked assiduously at loving her husband; was
prevented by Zohra and khichri and clattering feet from telling her husband
her news; heard screams; made a public announcement. And it worked. My
annunciation saved a life.
After the crowd dispersed, old Musa the bearer went into the street and
rescued Lifafa Das's pecpshow, while Amina gave the young man with the
beautiful smile glass after glass of fresh lime water. It seemed that his
experience had drained him not only of liquid but also sweetness, because he
put four spoonfuls of raw sugar into every glass, while Zohra cowered in
pretty terror on a sofa. And, at length, Lifafa Das (rehydrated by lime
water, sweetened by sugar) said: 'Begum Sahiba, you are a great lady. If you
allow, I bless your house; also your unborn child. But also - please permit
- I will do one thing more for you.'
'Thank you,' my mother said, 'but you must do nothing at all.'
But he continued (the sweetness of sugar coating
las
tongue). 'My
cousin, Shri Ramram Seth, is a great seer, Begum Sahiba. Palmist,
astrologer, fortune-teller. You will please come to him, and he will reveal
to you the future of your son.'
Soothsayers prophesied me ... in January 1947, my mother Amina Sinai
was offered the gift of a prophecy in return for her gift of a life. And
despite Zohra's 'It is madness to go with this one, Amina sister, do not
even think of it for one sec, these are times to be careful'; despite her
memories of her father's scepticism and of his thumbandforefinger closing
around a maulvi's ear, the offer touched my mother in a place which answered
Yes. Caught up in the illogical wonderment of her brand-new motherhood of
which she had only just become certain, 'Yes,' she said, 'Lifafa Das, you
will please meet me after some days at the gate to the Red Fort. Then you
will take me to your cousin.'
'I shall be waiting every day,' he joined his palms; and left.
Zohra was so stunned that, when Ahmed Sinai came home, she could only
shake her head and say, 'You newlyweds; crazy as owls; I must leave you to
each other!'
Musa, the old bearer, kept his mouth shut, too. He kept himself in the
background of our lives, always, except twice ... once when he left us; once
when he returned to destroy the world by accident.
Many-headed monsters
Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance; in which case Musa
-for all his age and servility - was nothing less than a time-bomb, ticking
softly away until his appointed time; in which case, we should either
-optimistically - get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in
advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared the terror of knowing
ourselves to be random, without a
why;
or ebe, of course, we might - as
pessimists - give up right here and now, understanding the futility of
thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway;
things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?
Was my father being opti- or pessimistic when my mother told him her news
(after everyone in the neighbourhood had heard it), and he replied with, 'I
told you so; it was only a matter of time? My mother's pregnancy, it seems,
was fated; my birth, however, owed a good deal to accident.
'It was only a matter of time,' my father said, with every appearance
of pleasure; but time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a
thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in
Pakistan would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts... Mr
Kemal, who wanted nothing to do with Partition, was fond of saying, 'Here's
proof of the folly of the scheme! Those Leaguers plan to abscond with a
whole thirty minutes! Time Without Partitions,' Mr Kemal cried, That's the
ticket!' And S. P. Butt said, 'If they can change the time just like that,
what's real any more? I ask you? What's true?'
It seems like a day for big questions. I reply across the unreliable
years to S. P. Butt, who got his throat slit in the Partition riots and lost
interest in time: 'What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.'
True,
for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories
Mary Pereira told me: Mary my ayah who was both more and less than a mother;
Mary who knew everything about all of us.
True
was a thing concealed just
over the horizon towards which the fisherman's finger pointed in the picture
on my wall, while the young Raleigh listened to his tales. Now, writing this
in my Anglepoised pool of light, I measure truth against those early things:
Is this how Mary would have told it? I ask. Is this what that fisherman
would have said? ... And by those standards it is undeniably true that, one
day in January 1947, my mother heard all about me six months before I turned
up, while my father came up against a demon king.
Amina Sinai had been waiting for a suitable moment to accept Lifafa
Das's offer; but for two days after the burning of the Indiabike factory
Ahmed Sinai stayed at home, never visiting his office at Connaught Place, as
if he were steeling himself for some unpleasant encounter. For two days the
grey moneybag lay supposedly secret in its place under his side of their
bed. My father showed no desire to talk about the reasons for the grey bag's
presence; so Amina said to herself, 'Let him be like that; who cares?'
because she had her secret, too, waiting patiently for her by the gates of
the Red Fort at the top of
Chandni Chowk. Pouting in secret petulance, my mother kept Lifafa Das
to herself. 'Unless-and-until he tells me what he's up to, why should I tell
him?' she argued.
And then a cold January evening, on which 'I've got to go out tonight'
said Ahmed Sinai; and despite her pleas of 'It's cold - you'll get sick...'
he put on his business suit and coat under which the mysterious grey bag
made a ridiculously obvious lump; so finally she said, 'Wrap up warm,' and
sent him off wherever he was going, asking, 'Will you be late?' To which he
replied, 'Yes, certainly.' Five minutes after he left, Amina Sinai set off
for the Red Fort, into the heart of her adventure.
One journey began at a fort; one should have ended at a fort, and did
not. One foretold the future; the other settled its geographical location.
During one journey, monkeys danced entertainingly; while, in the other
place, a monkey was also dancing, but with disastrous results. In both
adventures, a part was played by vultures. And many-headed monsters lurked
at the end of both roads.
One at a time, then ... and here is Amina Sinai beneath the high" walls
of the Red Fort, where Mughals ruled, from whose heights the new nation will
be proclaimed ... neither monarch nor herald, my mother is nevertheless
greeted with warmth (despite the weather). In the last light of the day,
Lifafa Das exclaims, 'Begum Sahiba! Oh, that is excellent that you came!'
Dark-skinned in a white sari, she beckons him towards the taxi; he reaches
for the back door; but the driver snaps, 'What do you think? Who do you
think you are? Come on now, get in the front seat damn smart, leave the lady
to sit in the back!' So Amina shares her seat with a black peepshow on
wheels, while Lifafa Das apologizes: 'Sorry, hey, Begum Sahiba? Good intents
are no offence.'
But here, refusing to wait its turn, is another taxi, pausing outside
another fort unloading its cargo of three men in business suits, each
carrying a bulky grey bag under his coat... one man long as a life and thin
as a lie, a second who seems to lack a spine, and a third whose lower lip
juts, whose belly tends to squashiness, whose hair is thinning and greasy
and worming over the tops of his ears, and between whose eyebrows is the
telltale furrow that will, as he ages, deepen into the scar of a bitter,
angry man. The taxi-driver is ebullient despite the cold. 'Purana Qila!' he
calls out, 'Everybody out, please! Old Fort, here we are!'... There have
been many, many cities of Delhi, and the Old Fort, that blackened ruin, is a
Delhi so ancient that beside it our own Old City is merely a babe in arms.
It is to this ruin of an impossibly antique time that Kemal, Butt and Ahmed
Sinai have been brought by an anonymous telephone call which ordered,
'Tonight. Old Fort. Just after sunset. But no police ... or godown
funtoosh!' Clutching their grey bags, they move into the ancient, crumbling
world.
... Clutching at her handbag, my mother sits beside a peepshow, while
Lifafa Das rides in front with the puzzled, irascible driver, and directs
the cab into the streets on the wrong side of the General Post Office; and
as she enters these causeways where poverty eats away at the tarmac like a
drought, where people lead their invisible lives (because they share Lifafa
Das's curse of invisibility, and not all of them have beautiful smiles),
something new begins to assail her. Under the pressure of these streets
which are growing narrower by the minute, more crowded by the inch, she has
lost her 'city eyes'. When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible
people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars
don't impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don't
look like dormitories. My mother lost her city eyes and the newness of what
she was seeing made her flush, newness like a hailstorm pricking her cheeks.
Look, my God, those beautiful children have black teeth! Would you believe
... girl children baring their nipples! How terrible, truly! And,
Allah-tobah, heaven forfend, sweeper women with - no! - how
dreadful!. -
collapsed spines, and bunches of twigs, and no caste marks; untouchables,
sweet Allah!... and cripples everywhere, mutilated by loving parents to
ensure them of a lifelong income from begging... yes, beggars in boxcars,
grown men with babies' legs, in crates on wheels, made out of discarded
roller-skates and old mango boxes; my mother cries out, 'Lifafa Das, turn
back!' ... but he is smiling his beautiful smile, and says, 'We must walk
from here.' Seeing that there is no going back, she tells the taxi to wait,
and the bad-tempered driver says, 'Yes, of course, for a great lady what is
there to do but wait, and when you come I must drive my car in reverse all
the way back to main-road, because here is no room to turn!'... Children
tugging at the pallu of her sari, heads everywhere staring at my mother, who
thinks, It's like being surrounded by some terrible monster, a creature with
heads and heads and heads; but she corrects herself, no, of course not a
monster, these poor poor people - what then? A power of some sort, a force
which does not know its strength, which has perhaps decayed into impotence
through never having been used ... No, these are not decayed people, despite
everything. 'I'm frightened,' my mother finds herself thinking, just as a
hand touches her arm. Turning, she finds herself looking into the face of -
impossible! - a white man, who stretches out a raggedy hand and says in a
voice like a high foreign song, 'Give something, Begum Sahiba...' and
repeats and repeats like a stuck record while she looks with embarrassment
into a white face with long eyelashes and a curved patrician nose -
embarrassment, because he was white, and begging was not for white
people.'... All the way from Calcutta, on foot,' he was saying, 'and covered
in ashes, as you see, Begum Sahiba, because of my shame at having been there
for the Killing - last August you remember, Begum Sahiba, thousands knifed
in four days of screaming ...' Lifafa Das is standing helplessly by, not
knowing how to behave with a white man, even a beggar, and '... Did you hear
about the European?' the beggar asks, '... Yes, among the killers, Begum
Sahiba, walking through the town at night with blood on his shirt, a white
man deranged by the coming futility of his kind; did you hear?'... And now a
pause in that perplexing song of a voice, and then: 'He was my husband.'
Only now did my mother see the stifled breasts beneath the rags ... 'Give
something for my shame.' Tugging at her arm. Lifafa Das tugging at the
other, whispering Hijra, transvestite, come away, Begum Sahiba; and Amina
standing still as she is tugged in opposite directions wants to say Wait,
white woman, just let me finish my business, I will take you home, feed you
clothe you, send you back into your own world; but just then the woman
shrugs and walks off empty-handed down the narrowing street, shrinking to a
point until she vanishes - now! - into the distant meanness of the lane. And
now Lifafa Das, with a curious expression on his face, says, 'They're
funtoosh! All finished! Soon they will all go; and then we'll be free to
kill each other.' Touching her belly with one light hand, she follows him
into a darkened doorway while her face bursts into flames.
... While at the Old Fort, Ahmed Sinai waits for Ravana. My father in
the sunset: standing in the darkened doorway of what was once a room in the
ruined walls of the fort, lower lip protruding fleshily, hands clasped
behind his back, head full of money worries. He was never a happy man. He
smelled faintly of future failure; he mistreated servants; perhaps he wished
that, instead of following his late father into the leathercloth business,
he had had the strength to pursue his original ambition, the re-arrangement
of the Quran in accurately chronological order. (He once told me: 'When
Muhammed prophesied, people wrote down what he said on palm leaves, which
were kept any old how in a box. After he died, Abubakr and the others tried
to remember the correct sequence; but they didn't have very good memories.'
Another wrong turning: instead of rewriting a sacred book, my father lurked
in a ruin, awaiting demons. It's no wonder he wasn't happy; and I would be
no help. When I was born, I broke his big toe.) ... My unhappy father, I
repeat, thinks bad-temperedly about cash. About his wife, who wheedles
rupees out of him and picks his pockets at night. And his ex-wife (who
eventually died in an accident, when she argued with a camel-cart driver and
was bitten in the neck by the camel), who writes him endless begging
letters, despite the divorce settlement. And his distant cousin Zohra, who
needs dowry money from him, so that she can raise children to marry his and
so get her hooks into even more of his cash. And then there are Major
Zulfikar's promises of money (at this stage, Major Zulfy and my father got
on very well). The Major had been writing letters saying, 'You must decide
for Pakistan when it comes, as it surely will. It's certain to be a goldmine
for men like us. Please let me introduce you to M. A. J. himself.. •' but
Ahmed Sinai distrusted Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and never accepted Zulfy's
offer; so when Jinnah became President of Pakistan, there would be another
wrong turning to think about. And, finally, there were letters from my
father's old friend, the gynaecologist Doctor Narlikar, in Bombay. 'The
British are leaving in droves, Sinai bhai.. Property is dirt cheap! Sell up;
come here; buy; live the rest of your life in luxury!' Verses of the Quran
had no place in a head so full of cash... and, in the meantime, here he is,
alongside S. P. Butt who will die in a train to Pakistan, and Mustapha Kemal
who will be murdered by goondas in his grand Flagstaff Road house and have
the words 'mother-sleeping hoarder' written on his chest in his own blood
... alongside these two doomed men, waiting in the secret shadow of a ruin
to spy on a blackmailer coming for his money. 'South-west corner,' the phone
call said, 'Turret. Stone staircase inside. Climb. Topmost landing. Leave
money there. Go. Understood?' Defying orders, they hide in the ruined room;
somewhere above them, on the topmost landing of the turret tower, three grey
bags wait in the gathering dark.
... In the gathering dark of an airless stairwell, Amina Sinai is
climbing towards a prophecy. Lifafa Das is comforting her; because now that
she has come by taxi into the narrow bottle of his mercy, he has sensed an
alteration in her, a regret at her decision; he reassures her as they climb.
The darkened stairwell is full of eyes, eyes glinting through shuttered
doors at the spectacle of the climbing dark lady, eyes lapping her up like
bright rough cats' tongues; and as Lifafa talks, soothingly, my mother feels
her will ebbing away, What will be, will be, her strength of mind and her
hold on the world seeping out of her into the dark sponge of the staircase
air. Sluggishly her feet follow his, up into the upper reaches of the huge
gloomy chawl, the broken-down tenement building in which Lifafa Das and his
cousins have a small corner, at the very top... here, near the top, she sees
dark light filtering down on to the heads of queueing cripples. 'My number
two cousin,' Lifafa Das says, 'is bone-setter.' She climbs past men with
broken arms, women with feet twisted backwards at impossible angles, past
fallen window-cleaners and splintered bricklayers, a doctor's daughter
entering a world older then syringes and hospitals; until, at last, Lifafa
Das says, 'Here we are, Begum,' and leads her through a room in which the
bone-setter is fastening twigs and leaves to shattered limbs, wrapping
cracked heads in palm-fronds, until his patients begin to resemble
artificial trees, sprouting vegetation from their injuries ... then out on
to a flat expanse of cemented roof. Amina, blinking in the dark at the
brightness of lanterns, makes out insane shapes on the roof: monkeys
dancing; mongeese leaping; snakes swaying in baskets; and on the parapet,
the silhouettes of large birds, whose bodies are as hooked and cruel as
their beaks: vultures.
'Arre baap,' she cries, 'where are you bringing me?'
'Nothing to worry, Begum, please,' Lifafa Das says. 'These are my
cousins here. My number-three-and-four cousins. That one is monkey-dancer
...'
'Just practising, Begum!' a voice calls. 'See: monkey goes to war and
dies for his country!'
'... and there, snake-and-mongoose man.'
'See mongoose jump, Sahiba! See cobra dance!'
'... But the birds? ...'
'Nothing, Madam: only there is Parsee Tower of Silence just near here;
and when there are no dead ones there, the vultures come. Now they are
asleep; in the days, I think, they like to watch my cousins practising.'
A small room, on the far side of the roof. Light streams through the
door as Amina enters ... to find, inside, a man the same age as her husband,
a heavy man with several chins, wearing white stained trousers and a red
check shirt and no shoes, munching aniseed and drinking from a bottle of
Vimto, sitting cross-legged in a room on whose walls are pictures of Vishnu
in each of his avatars, and notices reading, WRITING TAUGHT, and SPITTING
DURING VISIT IS QUITE A BAD HABIT. There is no furniture ... and Shri Ramram
Seth is sitting cross-legged, six inches above the ground.
I must admit it: to her shame, my mother screamed ...
... While, at the Old Fort, monkeys scream among ramparts. The ruined
city, having been deserted by people, is now the abode of langoors.
Long-tailed and black-faced, the monkeys are possessed of an overriding
sense of mission. Upupup they clamber, leaping to the topmost heights of the
ruin, staking out territories, and thereafter dedicating themselves to the
dismemberment, stone by stone, of the entire fortress. Padma, it's true:
you've never been there, never stood in the twilight watching straining,
resolute, furry creatures working at the stones, pulling and rocking,
rocking and pulling, working the stones loose one at a time... every day the
monkeys send stones rolling down the walls, bouncing off angles and
outcrops, crashing down into the ditches below. One day there will be no Old
Fort; in the end, nothing but a pile of rubble surmounted by monkeys
screaming in triumph ... and here is one monkey, scurrying along the
ramparts - I shall call him Hanuman, after the monkey god who helped Prince
Rama defeat the original Ravana, Hanuman of the flying chariots... Watch him
now as he arrives at this turret - his territory; as he hops chatters runs
from corner to corner of his kingdom, rubbing his rear on the stones; and
then pauses, sniffs something that should not be here... Hanuman races to
the alcove here, on the topmost landing, in which the three men have left
three soft grey alien things. And, while monkeys dance on a roof behind the
post office, Hanuman the monkey dances with rage. Pounces on the grey
things. Yes, they are loose enough, won't take much rocking and pulling,
pulling and rocking... watch Hanuman now, dragging the soft grey stones to
the edge of the long drop of the outside wall of the Fort. See him tear at
them: rip! rap! гор! ... Look how deftly he scoops paper from the insides of
the grey things, sending it down like floating rain to bathe the fallen
stones in the ditch! ... Paper falling with lazy, reluctant grace, sinking
like a beautiful memory into the maw of the darkness; and now, kick! thump!
and again kick! the three soft grey stones go over the edge, downdown into
the dark, and at last there comes a soft disconsolate plop. Hanuman, his
work done, loses interest, scurries away to some distant pinnacle of his
kingdom, begins to rock on a stone.
... While, down below, my father has seen a grotesque figure emerging
from the gloom. Not knowing a thing about the disaster which has taken place
above, he observes the monster from the shadow of his ruined room: a
ragged-pajama'd creature in the head-dress of a demon, a papier-mache
devil-top which has faces grinning on every side of it ... the appointed
representative of the Ravana gang. The collector. Hearts thumping, the three
businessmen watch this spectre out of a peasant's nightmare vanish into the
stairwell leading to the landing; and after a moment, in the stillness of
the empty night, hear the devil's perfectly human oaths. 'Mother-sleepers!
Eunuchs from somewhere!' ... Uncomprehending, they see their bizarre
tormentor emerge, rush away into the darkness, vanish. His imprecations ...
'Sodomizers of asses! Sons of pigs! Eaters of their own excrement!'...
linger on the breeze. And up they go now, confusion addling their spirits;
Butt finds a torn fragment of grey cloth; Mustapha Kemal stoops over a
crumpled rupee; and maybe, yes, why not, my father sees a dark flurry of
monkey out of the corner of an eye... and they guess.
And now their groans and Mr Butt's shrill curses, which are echoes of
the devil's oaths; and there's a battle raging, unspoken, in all their
heads: money or godown or godown or money? Businessmen ponder, in mute
panic, this central riddle - but then, even if they abandon the cash to the
depredations of scavenging dogs and humans, how to stop the fire-raisers? -
and at last, without a word having been spoken, the inexorable law of
cash-in-hand wins them over; they rush down stone stairs, along grassed
lawns, through ruined gates, and arrive - PELL-MELL! - at the ditch, to
begin scooping rupees into their pockets, shovelling grabbing scrabbling,
ignoring pools of urine and rotting fruit, trusting against all likelihood
that tonight - by the grace of-just tonight for once, the gang will fail to
wreak its promised revenge. But, of course ...
... But, of course, Ramram the seer was not really floating in midair,
six inches above the ground. My mother's scream faded; her eyes focused; and
she noticed the little shelf, protruding from the wall. 'Cheap trick,' she
told herself, and, 'What am I doing here in this godforsaken place of
sleeping vultures and monkey-dancers, waiting to be told who knows what
foolishness by a guru who levitates by sitting on a shelf?'
What Amina Sinai did not know was that, for the second time in history,
I was about to make my presence felt. (No: not that fraudulent tadpole in
her stomach: I mean myself, in my historical role, of which prime ministers
have written '... it is, in a sense, the mirror of us all.' Great forces
were working that night; and all present were about to feel their power, and
be afraid.)
Cousins - one to four - gathering in the doorway through which the dark
lady has passed, drawn like moths to the candle of her screech... watching
her quietly as she advanced, guided by Lifafa Das, towards the unlikely
sooth-sayer, were bone-setter cobra-wallah and monkey-man. Whispers of
encouragement now (and were there also giggles behind rough hands?): 'O such
a too fine fortune he will tell, Sahiba!' and, 'Come, cousinji, lady is
waiting!'... But what was this Ramram? A huckster, a two-chip palmist, a
giver of cute forecasts to silly women - or the genuine article, the holder
of the keys? And Lifafa Das: did he see, in my mother, a woman who could be
satisfied by a two-rupee fake, or did he see deeper, into the underground
heart of her weakness? - And when the prophecy came, were cousins astonished
too? - And the frothing at the mouth? What of that? And was it true that my
mother, under the dislocating influence of that hysterical evening,
relinquished her hold on her habitual self- which she had felt slipping away
from her into the absorbing sponge of the lightless air in the stairwell -
and entered a state of mind in which anything might happen and be believed?
And there is another, more horrible possibility, too; but before I voice my
suspicion, I must describe, as nearly as possible in spite of this filmy
curtain of ambiguities, what actually happened: I must describe my mother,
her palm slanted outwards towards the advancing palmist, her eyes wide and
unblinking as a pomfret's - and the cousins (giggling?), 'What a reading you
are coming to get, Sahiba!' and, 'Tell, cousinji, tell!' - but the curtain
descends again, so I cannot be sure - did he begin like a cheap circus-tent
man and go through the banal conjugations of life-line heart-line and
children who would be multi-millionaires, while cousins cheered, 'Wah wah!'
and, 'Absolute master reading, yara!' - and then, did he change? - did
Ramram become stiff- eyes rolling upwards until they were white as eggs -
did he, in a voice as strange as a mirror, ask, 'You permit, Madam, that I
touch the place?' - while cousins fell as silent as sleeping vultures - and
did my mother, just as strangely, reply, 'Yes, I permit,' so that the seer
became only the third man to touch her in her life, apart from her family
members? - and was it then, at that instant, that a brief sharp jolt of
electricity passed between pudgy fingers and maternal skin? And my mother's
face, rabbit-startled, watching the prophet in the check shirt as he began
to circle, his eyes still egg-like in the softness of his face; and suddenly
a shudder passing through him and again that strange high voice as the words
issued through his lips (I must describe those lips, too - but later,
because now ...) 'A son.'
Silent cousins - monkeys on leashes, ceasing their chatter - cobras
coiled in baskets - and the circling fortune-teller, finding history
speaking through his lips. (Was that how?) Beginning, 'A son... such a son!'
And then it comes, 'A son, Sahiba, who will never be older than his
motherland - neither older nor younger.' And now, real fear amongst
snake-charmer mongoose-dancer bone-setter and peepshow-wallah, because they
have never heard Ramram like this, as he continues, singsong, high-pitched:
'There will be two heads - but you shall see only one - there will be knees
and a nose, a nose and knees.' Nose and knees and knees and nose ... listen
carefully, Padma; the fellow got nothing wrong! 'Newspaper praises him, two
mothers raise him! Bicyclists love him - but, crowds will shove him! Sisters
will weep; cobra will creep ...' Ramram, circling fasterfaster, while four
cousins murmur, 'What is this, baba?' and, 'Deo, Shiva, guard us!' While
Ramram, 'Washing will hide him - voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him
- blood will betray him!' And Amina Sinai, 'What does he mean? I don't
understand - Lifafa Das - what has got into him?' But, inexorably, whirling
egg-eyed around her statue-still presence, goes Ramram Seth: 'Spittoons will
brain him - doctors will drain him - jungle will claim him - wizards reclaim
him! Soldiers will try him -tyrants will fry him ...' While Amina begs for
explanations and the cousins fall into a hand-flapping frenzy of helpless
alarm because something has taken over and nobody dares touch Ramram Seth as
he whirls to his climax: 'He will have sons without having sons! He will be
old before he is old!
And he will die ... before he is dead.'
Is that how it was? Is that when Ramram Seth, annihilated by the sage
through him of a power greater than his own, fell suddenly to the floor and
frothed at the mouth? Was mongoose-man's stick inserted between his
twitching teeth? Did Lafafa Das say, 'Begum Sahiba you must leave, please:
our cousinji has become sick'?
And finally the cobra-wallah - or monkey-man, or bone-setter, or even
Lifafa Das of the peepshow on wheels - saying, 'Too much prophecy, man. Our
Ramram made too much damn prophecy tonight.'
Many years later, at the time of her premature dotage, when all k'nds
of ghosts welled out of her past to dance before her eyes, my mother saw
once again the peepshow man whom she saved by announcing my coming and who
repaid her by leading her to too much prophecy, and spoke to him evenly,
without rancour. 'So you're back ' she said, 'Well, let me tell you this: I
wish I'd understood what your cousinji meant - about blood, about knees and
nose. Because who knows? I might have had a different son.'
Like my grandfather at the beginning, in a webbed corridor in a blind
man's house, and again at the end; like Mary Pereira after she lost her
Joseph, and like me, my mother was good at seeing ghosts.
But now, because there are yet more questions and ambiguities, I am
obliged to voice certain suspicions. Suspicion, too, is a monster with too
many heads; why, then, can't I stop myself unleashing it at my own mother?
... What, I ask, would be a fair description of the seer's mach? And memory
- my new, all-knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother
father grandfather grandmother and everyone else - answers: soft; squashy as
cornflour pudding. Again, reluctantly, I ask: What was the condition of his
lips? And the inevitable response: full; overfleshed; poetic. A third time I
interrogate this memory of mine: what of Ms hair? The reply: thinning; dark;
lank; worming over his ears. And now my unreasonable suspicions ask the
ultimate question ... did Amina, pure-as-pure, actually ... because of her
weakness for men who resembled Nadir Khan, could she have... in her odd
frame of mind, and moved by the seer's illness, might she not ... 'No!'
Padma shouts, furiously. 'How dare you suggest? About that good woman - your
own mother? That she would? You do not know one thing and still you say it?'
And, of course, she is right, as always. If she knew, she would say I was
only getting my revenge, for what I certainly did see Amina doing, years
through the grimy windows of the Pioneer Cafe; and maybe that's where my
irrational notion was born, to grow illogically backwards in time, and
arrive fully mature at this earlier - and yes, almost certainly innocent -
adventure. Yes, that must be it. But the monster won't lie down... 'Ah,' it
says, 'but what about the matter of her tantrum - the one she threw the day
Ahmed announced they were moving to Bombay?' Now it mimics her: 'You -
always you decide. What about me? Suppose I don't want... I've only now got
this house straight and already...!' So, Padma: was that housewifely zeal -
or a masquerade?
Yes - a doubt lingers. The monster asks, 'Why did she fail, somehow or
other, to tell her husband about her visit?' Reply of the accused (voiced by
our Padma in my mother's absence): 'But think how angry he'd've got, my God!
Even if there hadn't been all that firebug business to worry him! Strange
men; a woman on her own; he'd've gone wild! Wild, completely!'
Unworthy suspicions ... I must dismiss them; must save my strictures
for later, when, in the absence of ambiguity, without the clouding curtain,
she gave me hard, clear, irrefutable proofs.
... But, of course, when my father came home late that night, with a
ditchy smell on him which overpowered his customary reek of future failure,
his eyes and cheeks were streaked with ashy tears; there was sulphur in his
nostrils and the grey dust of smoked leathercloth on Ms head ... because of
course they had burned the godown.
'But the night-watchmen?' - asleep, Padma, asleep. Warned in advance to
take their sleeping draughts just in case ... Those brave lalas, warrior
Pathans who, city-born, had never seen the Khyber, unwrapped little paper
packets, poured rust-coloured powders into their bubbling cauldron of tea.
They pulled their charpoys well away from my father's godown to avoid
falling beams and showering sparks; and lying on their rope-beds they sipped
their tea and entered the bittersweet declensions of the drug. At first they
became raucous, shouting the praises of their favourite whores in Pushtu;
then they fell into wild giggling as the soft fluttering fingers of the drug
tickled their ribs... until the giggling gave way to dreams and they roamed
in the frontier passes of the drug, riding the horses of the drug, and
finally reached a dreamless oblivion from which nothing on earth could
awaken them until the drug had run its course.
Ahmed, Butt and Kemal arrived by taxi - the taxi-driver, unnerved by
the three men who clutched wads of crumpled banknotes which smelled worse
than hell on account of the unpleasant substances they had encountered in
the ditch, would not have waited, except that they refused to pay him. 'Let
me go, big sirs,' he pleaded, 'I am a little man; do not keep me here ...'
but by then their backs were moving away from him, towards the fire. He
watched them as they ran, clutching their rupees that were stained by
tomatoes and dogshit; open-mouthed he stared at the burning godown, at the
clouds in the night sky, and like everyone else on the scene he was obliged
to breathe air filled with leathercloth and matchsticks and burning rice.
With his hands over his eyes, watching through his fingers, the little
taxi-driver with his incompetent moustache saw Mr Kemal, thin as a demented
pencil, lashing and lucking at the sleeping bodies of night-watchmen; and he
almost gave up his fare and drove off in terror at the instant when my
father shouted, 'Look out!' ... but, staying despite it all, he saw the
godown as it burst apart under the force of the licking red tongues, he saw
pouring out of the godown an improbable lava flow of molten rice lentils
chick-peas waterproof jackets matchboxes and pickle, he saw the hot red
flowers of the fire bursting skywards as the contents of the warehouse
spilled on to the hard yellow ground like a black charred hand of despair.
Yes, of course the godown was burned, it fell on their heads from the sky in
cinders, it plunged into the open mouths of the bruised, but still snoring,
watchmen ... 'God save us,' said Mr Butt, but Mustapha Kemal, more
pragmatically, answered: 'Thank God we are well insured.'
'It was right then,' Ahmed Sinai told his wife later, 'right at that
moment that I decided to get out of the leathercloth business. Sell the
office, the goodwill, and forget everything I know about the reccine trade.
Then - not before, not afterwards - I made up my mind, also, to think no
more about this Pakistan claptrap of your Emerald's Zulfy. In the heat of
that fire,' my father revealed - unleashing a wifely tantrum - 'I decided to
go to Bombay, and enter the property business. Property is dirt cheap there
now,' he told her before her protests could begin, 'Narlikar knows.'
(But in time, he would call Narlikar a traitor.)
In my family, we always go when we're pushed - the freeze of '48 being
the only exception to this rule. The boatman Tai drove my grandfather from
Kashmir; Mercurochrome chased him out of Amritsar; the collapse of her life
under the carpets led directly to my mother's departure from Agra; and
many-headed monsters sent my father to Bombay, so that I could be born
there. At the end of that January, history had finally, by a series of
shoves, brought itself to the point at which it was almost ready for me to
make my entrance. There were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I
stepped on to the scene ... the mystery, for example, of Shri Ramram's most
enigmatic remark: 'There will be a nose and knees: knees, and a nose.'
Тhe insurance money came; January ended; and in the time it took to
close down their affairs in Delhi and move to the city in which - as Dr
Narlikar the gynaecologist knew - property was temporarily as cheap as dirt,
my mother concentrated on her segmented scheme for learning to love her
husband. She came to feel a deep affection for the question marks of his
ears; for the remarkable depth of his navel, into which her finger could go
right up to the first joint, without even pushing; she grew to love the
knobbliness of his knees; but, try as she might (and as I'm giving her the
benefit of my doubts I shall offer no possible reasons here), there was one
part of him which she never managed to love, although it was the one thing
he possessed, in full working order, which Nadir Khan had certainly lacked;
on those nights when he heaved himself up on top of her - when the baby in
her womb was no bigger than a frog - it was just no good at all.
... 'No, not so quick, janum, my life, a little longer, please,' she is
saying; and Ahmed, to spin things out, tries to think back to the fire, to
the last thing that happened on that blazing night, when just as he was
turning to go he heard a dirty screech in the sky, and, looking up, had time
to register that a vulture- at night! - a vulture from the Towers of Silence
was flying overhead, and that it had dropped a barely-chewed Parsee hand, a
right hand, the same hand which - now! - slapped him full in the face as it
fell; while Amina, beneath him in bed, ticks herself off: Why can't you
enjoy, you stupid woman, from now on you must really
try.
On June 4th, my ill-matched parents left for Bombay by Frontier Mail.
(There were hangings, voices hanging on for dear life, fists crying out,
'Maharaj! Open, for one tick only! Ohe, from the milk of your kindness,
great sir, do us favour!' And there was also - hidden beneath dowry in a
green tin trunk - a forbidden, lapis-lazuli-encrusted, delicately-wrought
silver spittoon.) On the same day, Earl Mountbatten of Burma held a press
conference at which he announced the Partition of India, and hung his
countdown calendar on the wall: seventy days to go to the transfer of
power... sixty-nine ... sixty-eight ... tick, tock.
Methwold
The fishermen were here first. Before Mountbatten's ticktock, before
monsters and public announcements; when underworld marriages were still
unimagined and spittoons were unknown; earlier than Mercurochrome; longer
ago than lady wrestlers who held up perfor-ated sheets; and back and back,
beyond Dalhousie and Elphinstone, before the East India Company built its
Fort, before the first William Methwold; at the dawn of time, when Bombay
was a dumbbell-shaped island tapering, at the centre, to a narrow shining
strand beyond which could be seen the finest and largest natural harbour in
Asia, when Mazagaon and Worli, Matunga and Mahim, Salsette and Colaba were
islands, too - in short, before reclamation, before tetrapods and sunken
piles turned the Seven Isles into a long peninsula like an outstretched,
grasping hand, reaching westward into the Arabian Sea; in this primeval
world before clocktowers, the fishermen - who were called Kolis - sailed in
Arab dhows, spreading red sails against the setting sun. They caught pomfret
and crabs, and made fish-lovers of us all. (Or most of us. Padma has
succumbed to their piscine sorceries; but in our house, we were infected
with the alienness of Kashmiri blood, with the icy reserve of Kashmiri sky,
and remained meateaters to a man.)
There were also coconuts and rice. And, above it all, the benign
presiding influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, whose name -Mumbadevi,
Mumbabai, Mumbai - may well have become the city's. But then, the Portuguese
named the place Bom Bahia for its harbour, and not for the goddess of the
pomfret folk ... the Portuguese were the first invaders, using the harbour
to shelter their merchant ships and their men-of-war; but then, one day in
1633, and East Indian Company Officer named Methwold saw a vision. This
vision - a dream of a British Bombay, fortified, defending India's West
against all comers -was a notion of such force that it set time in motion.
History churned ahead; Methwold died; and in 1660, Charles II of England was
betrothed to Catharine of the Portuguese House of Braganza - that same
Catharine who would, all her life, play second fiddle to orange-selling
Nell. But she has this consolation - that it was her marriage dowry which
brought Bombay into British hands, perhaps in a green tin trunk, and brought
Methwold's vision a step closer to reality. After that, it wasn't long until
September 21st, 1668, when the Company at last got its hands on the island
... and then off they went, with their Fort and land-reclamation, and before
you could blink there was a city here, Bombay, of which the old tune sang:
Prima in Indis,
Gateway to India,
Star of the East
With her face to the West.
Our Bombay, Padma! It was very different then, there were no
night-clubs or pickle factories or Oberoi-Sheraton Hotels or movie studios;
but the city grew at breakneck speed, acquiring a cathedral and an
equestrian statue of the Mahratta warrior-king Sivaji which (we used to
think) came to life at night and galloped awesomely through the city streets
- right along Marine Drive! On Chowpatty sands! Past the great houses on
Malabar Hill, round Kemp's Corner, giddily along the sea to Scandal Point!
And yes, why not, on and on, down my very own Warden Road, right alongside
the segregated swimming pools of Breach Candy, right up to huge Mahalaxmi
Temple and the old Willingd on Club ... Throughout my childhood, whenever
bad times came to Bombay, some insomniac nightwalker would report that he
had seen the statue moving; disasters, in the city of my youth, danced to
the occult music of a horse's grey, stone hooves.
And where are they now, the first inhabitants? Coconuts have done best
of all. Coconuts are still' beheaded daily on Chowpatty beach; while on Juhu
beach, under the languid gaze of film stars at the Sun'n'Sand hotel, small
boys still shin up coconut palms and bring down the bearded fruit. Coconuts
even have their own festival, Coconut Day, which was celebrated a few days
before my synchronistic birth. You may feel reassured about coconuts. Rice
has not been so lucky; rice-paddies lie under concrete now; tenements tower
where once rice wallowed within sight of the sea. But still, in the city, we
are great rice-eaters. Patna rice, Basmati, Kashmiri rice travels to the
metropolis daily; so the original, ur-rice has left its mark upon us all,
and cannot be said to have died in vain. AS for Mumbadevi - she's not so
popular these days, having been replaced by elephant-headed Ganesh in the
people's affections. The calendar of festivals reveals her decline: Ganesh -
'Ganpati Baba' - has his day of Ganesh Chaturthi, when huge processions are
'taken out' and march to Chowpatty bearing plaster effigies of the god,
which they hurl into the sea. Ganesh's day is a rain-making ceremony, it
makes the monsoon possible, and it, too, was celebrated in the days before
my arrival at the end of the ticktock countdown - but where is Mumbadevi's
day? It is not on the calendar. Where the prayers of pomfret folk, the
devotions of crab-catchers? ... Of all the first inhabitants, the Koli
fishermen have come off worst of all. Squashed now into a tiny village in
the thumb of the handlike peninsula, they have admittedly given their name
to a district - Colaba. But follow Colaba Causeway to its tip - past cheap
clothes shops and Irani restaurants and the second-rate flats of teachers
journalists and clerks - and you'll find them, trapped between the naval
base and the sea. And sometimes Koli women, their hands stinking of pomfret
guts and crabmeat, jostle arrogantly to the head of a Colaba bus-queue, with
their crimson (or purple) saris hitched brazenly up between their legs, and
a smarting glint of old defeats and dispossessions in their bulging and
somewhat fishy eyes. A fort, and afterwards a city, took their land;
pile-drivers stole (tetrapods would steal) pieces of their sea. But there
are still Arab dhows, every evening, spreading their sails against the
sunset... in August 1947, the British, having ended the dominion of
fishing-nets, coconuts, rice and Mumbadevi, were about to depart themselves;
no dominion is everlasting.
And on June 19th, two weeks after their arrival by Frontier Mail, my
parents entered into a curious bargain with one such departing Englishman.
His name was William Methwold.
The road to Methwold's Estate (we are entering my kingdom now, coming
into the heart of my childhood; a little lump has appeared in my throat)
turns off Warden Road between a bus-stop and a little row of shops.
Chimalker's Toyshop; Reader's Paradise; the Chimanbhoy Fatbhoy jewellery
store; and, above all, Bombelli's the Confectioners, with their Marquis
cake, their One Yard of Chocolates! Names to conjure with; but there's no
time now. Past the saluting cardboard bellboy of the Band Box Laundry, the
road leads us home. In those days the pink skyscraper of the Narlikar women
(hideous echo of Srinagar's radio mast!) had not even been thought of; the
road mounted a low hillock, no higher than a two-storey building; it curved
round to face the sea, to look down on Breach Candy Swimming Club, where
pink people could swim in a pool the shape of British India without fear of
rubbing up against a black skin; and there, arranged nobly around a little
roundabout, were the palaces of William Methwold, on which hung signs that
would - thanks to me - reappear many years later, signs bearing two words;
just two, but they lured my unwitting parents into Methwold's peculiar game:
FOR SALE.
Methwold's Estate: four identical houses built in a style befitting
their original residents (conquerors' houses! Roman mansions; three-storey
homes of gods standing on a two-storey Olympus, a stunted Kailash!) -large,
durable mansions with red gabled roofs and turret towers in each corner,
ivory-white corner towers wearing pointy red-tiled hats (towers, fit to lock
princesses in!) - houses with verandahs, with servants' quarters reached by
spiral iron staircases hidden at the back - houses which their owner,
William Methwold, had named majestically after the palaces of Europe:
Versailles Villa, Buckingham Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci.
Bougainvillaea crept across them; goldfish swam in pale blue pools; cacti
grew in rock-gardens; tiny touch-me-not plants huddled beneath tamarind
trees; there were butterflies and roses and cane chairs on the lawns. And on
that day in the middle of June, Mr Methwold sold his empty palaces for
ridiculously little - but there were conditions. So now, without more ado, I
present him to you, complete with the centre-parting in Ms hair ... a
six-foot Titan, this Methwold,
his
face the pink of roses and eternal youth.
He had a head of thick black brilliantined hair, parted in the centre. We
shall speak again of this centre-parting, whose ramrod precision made
Methwold irresistible to women, who felt unable to prevent themselves
wanting to rumple it up ... Methwold's hair, parted in the middle, has a lot
to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history
and sexuality moved. Like tightrope-walkers. (But despite everything, not
even I, who never saw him, never laid eyes on languid gleaming teeth or
devastatingly combed hair, am incapable of bearing him any grudge.)
And his nose? What did that look like? Prominent? Yes, it must have
been, the legacy of a patrician French grandmother - from Bergerac! - whose
blood ran aquamarinely in his veins and darkened his courtly charm with
something crueller, some sweet murderous shade of absinthe.
Methwold's Estate was sold on two conditions: that the houses be bought
complete with every last thing in them, that the entire contents be retained
by the new owners; and that the actual transfer should not take place until
midnight on August I5th.
'Everything?' Amina Sinai asked. 'I can't even throw away a spoon?
Allah, that lampshade ... I can't get rid of one
comb?'
'Lock, stock and barrel,' Methwold said, 'Those are my terms. A whim,
Mr Sinai ... you'll permit a departing colonial his little game? We don't
have much left to do, we British, except to play our games.'
'Listen now, listen, Amina,' Ahmed is saying later on, 'You want to
stay in this hotel room for ever? It's a fantastic price; fantastic,
absolutely. And what can he do after he's transferred the deeds? Then you
can throw out any lampshade you like. It's less than two months ...'
'You'll take a cocktail in the garden?' Methwold is saying, 'Six
o'clock every evening. Cocktail hour. Never varied in twenty years.'
'But my God, the paint... and the cupboards are full of old clothes,
janum... we'll have to live out of suitcases, there's nowhere to put one
suit!'
'Bad business, Mr Sinai,' Methwold sips his Scotch amid cacti and
roses, 'Never seen the like. Hundreds of years of decent government, then
suddenly, up and off. You'll admit we weren't all bad: built your roads.
Schools, railway trains, parliamentary system, all worthwhile things. Taj
Mahal was falling down until an Englishman bothered to see to it. And now,
suddenly, independence. Seventy days to get out. I'm dead against it myself,
but what's to be done?'
'... And look at the stains on the carpets, janum; for two months we
must live like those Britishers? You've looked in the bathrooms? No water
near the pot. I never believed, but it's true, my God, they wipe their
bottoms with paper only! ...'
'Tell me, Mr Methwold,' Ahmed Sinai's voice has changed, in the
presence of an Englishman it has become a hideous mockery of an Oxford
drawl, 'why insist on the delay? Quick sale is best business, after all. Get
the thing buttoned up.'
'... And pictures of old Englishwomen everywhere, baba! No place to
hang my own father's photo on the wall! ...'
'It seems, Mr Sinai,' Mr Methwold is refilling the glasses as the sun
dives towards the Arabian Sea behind the Breach Candy pool, 'that beneath
this stiff English exterior lurks a mind with a very Indian lust for
allegory.'
'And drinking so much, janum ... that's not good.'
'I'm not sure - Mr Methwold, ah - what exactly you mean by ...'
'... Oh, you know: after a fashion, I'm transferring power, too. Got a
sort of itch to do it at the same time the Raj does. As I said: a game.
Humour me, won't you, Sinai? After all: the price, you've admitted, isn't
bad.'
'Has his brain gone raw, janum? What do you think: is it safe to do
bargains if he's loony?'
'Now listen, wife,' Ahmed Sinai is saying, 'this has gone on long
enough. Mr Methwold is a fine man; a person of breeding; a man of honour; I
will not have his name... And besides, the other purchasers aren't making so
much noise, I'm sure... Anyway, I have told him yes, so there's an end to
it.'
'Have a cracker,' Mr Methwold is saying, proffering a plate, 'Go on, Mr
S., do. Yes, a curious affair. Never seen anything like it. My old tenants -
old India hands, the lot - suddenly, up and off. Bad show. Lost their
stomachs for India. Overnight. Puzzling to a simple fellow like me. Seemed
like they washed their hands - didn't want to take a scrap with them. "Let
it go," they said. Fresh start back home. Not short of a shilling, none of
them, you understand, but still, Rum. Leaving me holding the baby. Then I
had my notion.'
'... Yes, decide, decide,' Amina is saying spiritedly, 'I am sitting
here like a lump with a baby, what have I to do with it? I must live in a
stranger's house with this child growing, so what? ... Oh, what things you
make me do ...'
'Don't cry,' Ahmed is saying now, flapping about the hotel room, 'It's
a good house. You know you like the house. And two months... less than
two... what, is it kicking? Let me feel... Where? Here?'
'There,' Amina says, wiping her nose, 'Such a good big kick.'
'My notion,' Mr Methwold explains, staring at the setting sun, 'is to
stage my own transfer of assets. Leave behind everything you see? Select
suitable persons - such as yourself, Mr Sinai! - hand everything over
absolutely intact: in tiptop working order. Look around you: everything's in
fine fettle, don't you agree? Tickety-boo, we used to say. Or, as you say in
Hindustani: Sabkuch ticktock hai. Everything's just fine.'
'Nice people are buying the houses,' Ahmed offers Amina his
handkerchief, 'nice new neighbours ... that Mr Homi Catrack in Versailles
Villa, Parsee chap, but a racehorse-owner. Produces films and all. And the
Ibrahims in Sans Souci, Nussie Ibrahim is having a baby, too, you can be
friends... and the old man Ibrahim, with so-big sisal farms in Africa. Good
family.'
'... And afterwards I can do what I like with the house ... ?'
'Yes, afterwards, naturally, he'll be gone ...'
'... It's all worked out excellently,' William Methwold says. 'Did you
know my ancestor was the chap who had the idea of building this whole city?
Sort of Raffles of Bombay. As his descendant, at this important juncture, I
feel the, I don't know, need to play my part. Yes, excellently... when d'you
move in? Say the word and I'll move off to the Taj Hotel. Tomorrow?
Excellent. Sabkuch ticktock hai.'
These were the people amongst whom I spent my childhood: Mr Homi
Catrack, film magnate and racehorse-owner, with his idiot daughter Toxy who
had to be locked up with her nurse, Bi-Appah, the most fearsome woman I ever
knew; also the Ibrahims in Sans Souci, old man Ibrahim Ibrahim with his
goatee and sisal, his sons Ismail and Ishaq, and IsmaiPs tiny flustery
hapless wife Nussie, whom we always called Nussie-the-duck on account of her
waddling gait, and in whose womb my friend Sonny was growing, even now,
getting closer and closer to his misadventure with a pair of gynaecological
forceps ... Escorial Villa was divided into flats. On the ground floor lived
the Dubashes, he a physicist who would become a leading light at the Trombay
nuclear research base, she a cipher beneath whose blankness a true religious
fanaticism lay concealed - but I'll let it lie, mentioning only that they
were the parents of Cyrus (who would not be conceived for a few months yet),
my first mentor, who played girls' parts in school plays and was known as
Cyrus-the-great. Above them was my father's friend Dr Narlikar, who had
bought a flat here too ... he was as black as my mother; had the ability of
glowing brightly whenever he became excited or aroused; hated children, even
though he brought us into the world; and would unleash upon the city, when
he died, that tribe of women who could do anything and in whose path no
obstacle could stand. And, finally, on the top floor, were Commander
Sabarmati and Lila - Sabarmati who was one of the highest flyers in the
Navy, and his wife with her expensive tastes; he hadn't been able to believe
his luck in getting her a home so cheaply. They had two sons, aged eighteen
months and four months, who would grow up to be slow and boisterous and to
be nicknamed Eyeslice and Hairoil; and they didn't know (how could they?)
that I would destroy their lives ... Selected by William Methwold, these
people who would form the centre of my world moved into the Estate and
tolerated the curious whims of the Englishman - because the price, after
all, was right.
... There are thirty days to go to the transfer of power and Lila
Sabarmati is on the telephone, 'How can you stand it, Nussie? In every room
here there are talking budgies, and in the almirahs I find moth-eaten
dresses and used brassieres!' ... And Nussie is telling Amina, 'Goldfish,
Allah, I can't stand the creatures, but Methwold sahib comes himself to
feed... and there are half-empty pots of Bovril he says I can't throw...
it's mad, Amina sister, what are we doing like this?'... And old man Ibrahim
is refusing to switch on the ceiling fan in his bedroom, muttering, 'That
machine will fall - it will slice my head off in the night - how long can
something so heavy stick on a ceiling?'... and Homi Catrack who is something
of an ascetic is obliged to lie on a large soft mattress, he is suffering
from backache and sleeplessness and the dark rings of inbreeding around his
eyes are being circled by the whorls of insomnia, and his bearer tells him,
'No wonder the foreign sahibs have all gone away, sahib, they must by dying
to get some sleep.' But they are all sticking it out; and there are
advantages as well as problems. Listen to Lila Sabarmati ('That one - too
beautiful to be good,' my mother said)... 'A pianola, Amina sister! And it
works! All day I'm sitting sitting, playing God knows what-all! "Pale Hands
I Loved Beside The Shalimar"... such fun, too much, you just push the
pedals!'... And Ahmed Sinai finds a cocktail cabinet in Buckingham Villa
(which was Methwold's own house before it was ours); he is discovering the
delights of fine Scotch whisky and cries, 'So what? Mr Methwold is a little
eccentric, that's all - can we not humour him? With our ancient
civilization, can we not be as civilized as he?'... and he drains
his
glass
at one go. Advantages and disadvantages: 'All these dogs to look after,
Nussie sister,' Lila Sabarmati complains. 'I hate dogs, completely. And my
little choochie cat,
cho chweet
she is I swear, terrified absolutely!' ...
And Dr Narlikar, glowing with pique, 'Above my bed! Pictures of children,
Sinai brother! I am telling you: fat! Pink! Three! Is that fair?'... But now
there are twenty days to go, things are settling down, the sharp edges of
things are getting blurred, so they have all failed to notice what is
happening: the Estate, Methwold's Estate, is changing them. Every evening at
six they are out in their gardens, celebrating the cocktail hour, and when
William Methwold comes to call they slip effortlessly into their imitation
Oxford drawls; and they are learning, about ceiling fans and gas cookers and
the correct diet for budgerigars, and Methwold, supervising their
transformation, is mumbling under his breath. Listen carefully: what's he
saying? Yes, that's it. 'Sabkuch ticktock hai,' mumbles William Methwold.
All is well.
When the Bombay edition of the
Times of India,
searching for a catchy
human-interest angle to the forthcoming Independence celebrations, announced
that it would award a prize to any Bombay mother who could arrange to give
birth to a child at the precise instant of the birth of the new nation,
Amina Sinai, who had just awoken from a mysterious dream of flypaper, became
glued to newsprint. Newsprint was thrust beneath Ahmed Sinai's nose; and
Amina's finger, jabbing triumphantly at the page, punctuated the utter
certainty of her voice.
'See, janum?' Amina announced. 'That's going to be me.'
There rose, before their eyes, a vision of bold headlines declaring 'A
Charming Pose of Baby Sinai - the
Child
of this Glorious Hour!' - a vision
of A-1 top-quality front-page jumbo-sized baby-snaps; but Ahmed began to
argue, 'Think of the odds against it, Begum,' until she set her mouth into a
clamp of obstinacy and reiterated, 'But me no buts; it's me all right; I
just know it for sure. Don't ask me how.'
And although Ahmed repeated his wife's prophecy to William Methwold, as
a cocktail-hour joke, Amina remained unshaken, even when Methwold laughed,
'Woman's intuition - splendid thing, Mrs S.! But really, you can scarcely
expect us to...' Even under the pressure of the peeved gaze of her neighbour
Nussie-the-duck, who was also pregnant, and had also read the
Times of
India,
Amina stuck to her guns, because Ramram's prediction had sunk deep
into her heart.
To tell the truth, as Amina's pregnancy progressed, she had found the
words of the fortune-teller pressing more and more heavily down upon her.
shoulders, her head, her swelling balloon, so that as she
became trapped in a web of worries about giving birth to a child with
two heads she somehow escaped the subtle magic of Methwold's Estate,
remaining uninfected by cocktail-hours, budgerigars, pianolas and English
accents ... At first, then, there was something equivocal about her
certainty that she would win the
Time's
prize, because she had convinced
herself that if this part of the fortune-teller's prognostications were
fulfilled, it proved that the rest would be just as accurate, whatever their
meaning might be. So it was not in tones of unadulterated pride and
anticipation that my mother said, 'Never mind intuition, Mr Methwold. This
is guaranteed fact.'
To herself she added: 'And this, too: I'm going to have a son. But
he'll need plenty of looking after, or else.'
It seems to me that, running deep in the veins of my mother, perhaps
deeper than she knew, the supernatural conceits of Naseem Aziz had begun to
influence her thoughts and behaviour - those conceits which persuaded
Reverend Mother that aeroplanes were inventions of the devil, and that
cameras could steal your soul, and that ghosts were as obvious a part of
reality as Paradise, and that it was nothing less than a sin to place
certain sanctified ears between one's thumb and forefinger, were now
whispering in her daughter's darkling head. 'Even if we're sitting in the
middle of all this English garbage,' my mother was beginning to think, 'this
is still India, and people like Ramram Seth know what they know.' In this
way the scepticism of her beloved father was replaced by the credulity of my
grandmother; and, at the same time, the adventurous spark which Amina had
inherited from Doctor Aziz was being snuffed out by another, and equally
heavy, weight.
By the time the rains came at the end of June, the foetus was fully
formed inside her womb. Knees and nose were present; and as many heads as
would grow were already in position. What had been (at the beginning) no
bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a
paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments,
becoming, one might say, a book -perhaps an encyclopaedia - even a whole
language ... which is to say that the lump in the middle of my mother grew
so large, and became so heavy, that while Warden Road at the foot of our
two-storey hillock became flooded with dirty yellow rainwater and stranded
buses began to rust and children swam in the liquid road and newspapers sank
soggily beneath the surface, Amina found herself in a circular first-floor
tower room, scarcely able to move beneath the weight of her leaden balloon.
Endless rain. Water seeping in under windows in which stained-glass
tulips danced along leaded panes. Towels, jammed against window-frames,
soaked up water until they became heavy, saturated, useless. The sea: grey
and ponderous and stretching out to meet the rainclouds at a narrowed
horizon. Rain drumming against my mother's ears, adding to the confusion of
fortune-teller and maternal credulity and the dislocating presence of
strangers' possessions, making her imagine all manner of strange things.
Trapped beneath her growing child, Amina pictured herself as a convicted
murderer in Mughal times, when death by crushing beneath a boulder had been
a common punishment ... and in the years to come, whenever she looked back
at that time which was the end of the time before she became a mother, that
time in which the ticktock of countdown calendars was rushing everyone
towards August 15th, she would say: 'I don't know about any of that. To me,
it was like time had come to a complete stop. The baby in my stomach stopped
the clocks. I'm sure of that. Don't laugh: you remember the clocktower at
the end of the hill? I'm telling you, after that monsoon it never worked
again.'
... And Musa, my father's old servant, who had accompanied the couple
to Bombay, went off to tell the other servants, in the kitchens of the
red-tiled palaces, in the servants' quarters at the backs of Versailles and
Escorial and Sans Souci: 'It's going to be a real ten-rupee baby; yes, sir!
A whopper of a ten-chip pomfret, wait and see!' The servants were pleased;
because a birth is a fine thing and a good big baby is best of all ...
... And Amina whose belly had stopped the clocks sat immobilized in a
room in a tower and told her husband, 'Put your hand there and feel him ...
there, did you feel? ... such a big strong boy; our little
piece-of-the-moon.'
Not until the rains ended, and Amina became so heavy that two
manservants had to make a chair with their hands to lift her, did Wee Willie
Winkie return to sing in the circus-ring between the four houses; and only
then did Amina realize that she had not one, but two serious rivals (two
that she knew of) for the
Times of India's
prize, and that, prophecy or no
prophecy, it was going to be a vey close-run finish.
'Wee Willie Winkie is my name; to sing for my supper is my fame!'
Ex-conjurers and peepshow-men and singers ... even before I was born, the
mould was set. Entertainers would orchestrate my life.
'I hope you are com-for-table! ... Or are you come-for-tea? Oh,
joke-joke, ladies and ladahs, let me see you laugh now!'
Talldarkhandsome, a clown with an accordion, he stood in the
circus-ring. In the gardens of Buckingham Villa, my father's big toe
strolled (with its nine colleagues) beside and beneath the centre-parting of
William Methwold... sandalled, bulbous, a toe unaware of its coming doom.
And Wee Willie Winkie (whose real name we never knew) cracked jokes and
sang. From a first-floor verandah, Amina watched and listened; and from the
neighbouring verandah, felt the prick of the envious competitive gaze of
Nussie-the-duck.
... While I, at my desk, feel the sting of Padma's impatience. (I wish,
at times, for a more discerning audience, someone who would understand the
need for rhythm, pacing, the subtle introduction of minor chords which will
later rise, swell, seize the melody; who would know, for instance, that
although baby-weight and monsoons have silenced the clock on the Estate
clocktower, the steady beat of Mountbatten's ticktock is still there, soft
but inexorable, and that it's only a matter of time before it fills our ears
with its metronomic, drumming music.) Padma says: 'I don't want to know
about this Winkie now; days and nights I've waited and still you won't get
to being born!' But I counsel patience; everything in its proper place, I
admonish my dung-lotus, because Winkie, too, has his purpose and his place,
here he is now teasing the pregnant ladies on their verandahs, pausing from
singing to say, 'You've heard about the prize, ladies? Me, too. My Vanita
will have her time soon, soon-soon; maybe she and not you will have her
picture in the paper!'... and Amina is frowning, and Methwold is smiling (is
that a forced smile? Why?) beneath his centre-parting, and my father's lip
is jutting judiciously as his big toe strolls and he says, 'That's a cheeky
fellow; he goes too far.' But now Methwold in what looks very like
embarrassment - even guilt! -reproves Ahmed Sinai, 'Nonsense, old chap. The
tradition of the fool, you know. Licensed to provoke and tease. Important
social safety-valve.' And my father, shrugging, 'Hm.' But he's a clever
type, this Winkie, because he's pouring oil on the waters now, saying, 'A
birth is a fine thing; two births are two fine! Too fine, madams, joke, you
see?' And a switch of mood as he introduces a dramatic notion, an
overpowering, crucial thought: 'Ladies, gentlemen, how can you feel
comfortable here, in the middle of Mr Methwold sahib's long past? I tell
you: it must be strange; not real; but now it is a new place here, ladies,
ladahs, and no new place is real until it has seen a birth. The first birth
will make you feel at home.' After which, a song: 'Daisy, Daisy ...' And Mr
Methwold, joining in, but still there's something dark staining his brow ...
... And here's the point: yes, it is guilt, because our Winkie may be
clever and funny but he's not clever enough, and now it's time to reveal the
first secret of the centre-parting of William Methwold, because it has
dripped down to stain his face: one day, long before ticktock and
lockstockandbarrel sales, Mr Methwold invited Winkie and his Vanita to sing
for him, privately, in what is now my parents' main reception room; and
after a while he said, 'Look here, Wee Willie, do me a favour, man: I need
this prescription filling, terrible headaches, take it to Kemp's Corner and
get the chemist to give you the pills, the servants are all down with
colds.' Winkie, being a poor man, said Yes sahib at once sahib and left; and
then Vanita was alone with the centre-parting, feeling it exert a pull on
her fingers that was impossible to resist, and as Methwold sat immobile in a
cane chair, wearing a lightweight cream suit with a single rose in the
lapel, she found herself approaching him, fingers outstretched, felt fingers
touching hair; found centre-parting; and began to rumple it up.
So that now, nine months later, Wee Willie Winkie joked about his
wife's imminent baby and a stain appeared on an Englishman's forehead.
'So?' Padma says. 'So what do I care about this Winkie and his.wife
whom you haven't even told me about?'
Some people are never satisfied; but Padma will be, soon.
And now she's about to get even more frustrated; because, pulling away
in a long rising spiral from the events at Methwold's Estate -away from
goldfish and dogs and baby contests and centre-partings, away from big toes
and tiled roofs - I am flying across the city which is fresh and clean in
the aftermath of the rains; leaving Ahmed and Amina to the songs of Wee
Willie Winkie, I'm winging towards the Old Fort district, past Flora
Fountain, and arriving at a large building filled with dim fustian light and
the perfume of swinging censers because here, in St Thomas's Cathedral, Miss
Mary Pereira is learning about the colour of God.
'Blue,' the young priest said earnestly. 'All available evidence, my
daughter, suggests that Our Lord Christ Jesus was the most beauteous crystal
shade of pale sky blue.'
The little woman behind the wooden latticed window of the confessional
fell silent for a moment. An anxious, cogitating silence. Then: 'But how,
Father? People are not
blue.
No people are blue in the whole big world!'
Bewilderment of little woman, matched by perplexity of the priest ...
because this is not how she's supposed to react. The Bishop had said,
'Problems with recent converts ... when they ask about colour they're almost
always that ... important to build bridges, my son. Remember,' thus spake
the Bishop, 'God is love; and the Hindu love-god, Krishna, is always
depicted with blue skin. Tell them blue; it will be a sort of bridge between
the faiths; gently does it, you follow; and besides blue is a neutral sort
of colour, avoids the usual Colour problems, gets you away from black and
white: yes, on the whole I'm sure it's the one to choose.' Even bishops can
be wrong, the young father is thinking, but meanwhile he's in quite a spot,
because the little woman is clearly getting into a state, has begun issuing
a severe reprimand through the wooden grille: 'What type of answer is blue,
Father, how to believe such a thing? You should write to Holy Father Pope in
Rome, he will surely put you straight; but one does not have to be Pope to
know that the mens are not ever blue!' The young father closes his eyes;
breathes deeply; counter-attacks. 'Skins have been dyed blue,' he stumbles.
'The Picts; the blue Arab nomads; with the benefits of education, my
daughter, you would see...' But now a violent snort echoes in the
confessional. 'What, Father? You are comparing Our Lord to
junglee
wild men?
О Lord, I must catch my ears for shame!'... And there is more, much more,
while the young father whose stomach is giving him hell suddenly has the
inspiration that there is something more important lurking behind this blue
business, and asks the question; whereupon tirade gives way to tears, and
the young father says panickily, 'Come, come, surely the Divine Radiance of
Our Lord is not a matter of mere pigment?' ... And a voice through the
flooding salt water: 'Yes, Father, you're not so bad after all; I told him
just that, exactly that very thing only, but he said many rude words and
would not listen ...' So there it is,
him
has entered the story, and now it
all tumbles out, and Miss Mary Pereira, tiny virginal distraught, makes a
confession which gives us a crucial clue about her motives when, on the
night of my birth, she made the last and most important contribution to the
entire history of twentieth-century India from the time of my grandfather's
nose-bump until the time of my adulthood.
Mary Pereira's confession: like every Mary she had her Joseph. Joseph
D'Costa, an orderly at a Pedder Road clinic called Dr Narlikar's Nursing
Home ('Oho!' Padma sees a connection at last), where she worked as a
midwife. Things had been very good at first; he had taken her for cups of
tea or lassi or falooda and told her sweet things. He had eyes like
road-drills, hard and full of ratatat, but he spoke softly and well. Mary,
tiny, plump, virginal, had revelled in his attentions; but now everything
had changed.
'Suddenly suddenly he's sniffing the air all the time. In a funny way,
nose high up. I ask, "You got a cold or what, Joe?" But he says no; no, he
says, he's sniffing the wind from the north. But I tell him, Joe, in Bombay
the wind comes off the sea, from the west, Joe...' In a fragile voice Mary
Pereira describes the ensuing rage of Joseph D'Costa, who told her, 'You
don't know nothing, Mary, the air comes from the north now, and it's full of
dying. This independence is for the rich only; the poor are being made to
kill each other like flies. In Punjab, in Bengal. Riots riots, poor against
poor. It's in the wind.'
And Mary: 'You talking crazy, Joe, why you worrying with those so-bad
things? We can live quietly still, no?'
'Never mind, you don't know one thing.'
'But Joseph, even if it's true about the killing, they're Hindu and
Muslim people only; why get good Christian folk mixed up in their fight?
Those ones have killed each other for ever and ever.'
'You and your Christ. You can't get it into your head that that's the
white people's religion? Leave white gods for white men. Just now our own
people are dying. We got to fight back; show the people who to fight instead
of each other, you see?'
And Mary, 'That's why I asked about colour, Father ... and I told
Joseph, I told and told, fighting is bad, leave off these wild ideas; but
then he stops talking with me, and starts hanging about with dangerous
types, and there are rumours starting up about him, Father, how he's
throwing bricks at big cars apparently, and burning bottles also, he's going
crazy, Father, they say he helps to burn buses and blow up trams, and I
don't know what. What to do, Father, I tell my sister about it all. My
sister Alice, a good girl really, Father. I said: "That Joe, he lives near a
slaughterhouse, maybe that's the smell that got into his nose and muddled
him all up." So Alice went to find him, "I will talk for you," she says; but
then, О God what is happening to the world ... I tell you truly, Father... О
baba...' And the floods are drowning her words, her secrets are leaking
saltily out of her eyes, because Alice came back to say that in her opinion
Mary was the one to blame, for haranguing Joseph until he wanted no more of
her, instead of giving him support in his patriotic cause of awakening the
people. Alice was younger than Mary; and prettier; and after that there were
more rumours, Alice-and-Joseph stories, and Mary came to her wits' end.
That one,' Mary said, 'What does she know about this politics-politics?
Only to get her nails into my Joseph she will repeat any rubbish he talks,
like one stupid mynah bird. I swear, Father ...'
'Careful, daughter. You are close to blasphemy ..."
'No, Father, I swear to God, I don't know what I won't do to get me
back that man. Yes: in spite of... never mind what he... ai-o-ai-ooo!'
Salt water washes the confessional floor.,. and now, is there a new
dilemma for the young father? Is he, despite the agonies of an unsettled
stomach, weighing in invisible scales the sanctity of the confessional
against the danger to civilized society of a man like Joseph D'Costa? Will
he, in fact, ask Mary for her Joseph's address, and then reveal ... In
short, would this bishop-ridden, stomach-churned young father have behaved
like, or unlike, Montgomery Clift in
I Confess?
(Watching it some years ago
at the New Empire cinema, I couldn't decide.) - But no; once again, I must
stifle my baseless suspicions.
What happened to Joseph would probably have happened anyway And in all
likelihood the young father's only relevance to my history is that he was
the first outsider to hear about Joseph D'Costa's virulent hatred of the
rich, and of Mary Pereira's desperate grief.
Tomorrow I'll have a bath and shave; I am going to put on a brand new
kurta, shining and starched, and pajamas to match. I'll wear mirrorworked
slippers curling up at the toes, my hair will be neatly brushed (though not
parted in the centre), my teeth gleaming... in a phrase, I'll look my best.
('Thank God' from pouting Padma.)
Tomorrow, at last, there will be an end to stories which I (not having
been present at their birth) have to drag out of the whirling recesses of my
mind; because the metronome musk of Mountbatten's countdown calendar can be
ignored no longer. At Methwold's Estate, old Musa is still ticking like a
time-bomb; but he can't be heard, because another sound is swelling now,
deafening, insistent; the sound of seconds passing, of an approaching,
inevitable midnight.
Tick, tock
Padma can hear it: there's nothing like a countdown for building
suspense. I watched my dung-flower at work today, stirring vats like a
whirlwind, as if that would make the time go faster. (And perhaps it did;
time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay's
electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don't
believe me - tied to electricity, it's usually a few hours wrong. Unless
we're the ones who are wrong ... no people whose word for 'yesterday' is the
same as their word for' tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the
time.)
But today, Padma heard Mountbatten's ticktock... English-made, it beats
with relentless accuracy. And now the factory is empty; fumes linger, but
the vats are still; and I've kept my word. Dressed up to the nines, I greet
Padma as she rushes to my desk, flounces down on the floor beside me,
commands: 'Begin.' I give a little satisfied smile; feel the children of
midnight queueing up in my head, pushing and jostling like Koli fishwives; I
tell them to wait, it won't be long now; I clear my throat, give my pen a
little shake; and start.
Thirty-two years before the transfer of power, my grandfather bumped
his nose against Kashmir! earth. There were rubies and diamonds. There was
the ice of the future, waiting beneath the water's skin There was an oath:
not to bow down before god or man. The oath created a hole, which would
temporarily be filled by a woman behind a perforated sheet. A boatman who
had once prophesied dynasties lurking in my grandfather's nose ferried him
angrily across a lake. There were blind landowners and lady wrestlers. And
there was a sheet in a gloomy room. On that day, my inheritance began to
form - the blue of Kashmiri sky which dripped into my grandfather's eyes;
the long sufferings of my great-grandmother which would become the
forebearance of my own mother and the late steeliness of Naseem Aziz; my
great-grandfather's gift of conversing with birds whkh would descend through
meandering bloodlines into the veins of my sister the Brass Monkey; the
conflict between grandpaternal scepticism and grandmaternal credulity; and
above all the ghostly essence of that perforated sheet, which doomed my
mother to learn to love a man in segments, and which condemned me to see my
own life - its meanings, its structures - in fragments also; so that by the
time I understood it, it was far too late.
Years ticking away - and my inheritance grows, because now I have the
mythical golden teeth of the boatman Tai, and his brandy bottle which
foretold my father's alcoholic djinns; I have Ilse Lubin for suicide and
pickled snakes for virility; I have Tai-for-changelessness opposed to
Aadam-for-progress; and I have, too, the odours of the unwashed boatman
which drove my grandparents south, and made Bombay a possibility.
... And now, driven by Padma and ticktock, I move on, acquiring Mahatma
Gandhi and his hartal, ingesting thumb-and-forefinger, swallowing the moment
at which Aadam Aziz did not know whether he was Kashmir! or Indian; now I'm
drinking Mercurochrome and stains the shape of hands which will recur in
spilt betel-juice, and I'm gulping down Dyer, moustache and all; my
grandfather is saved by his nose and a bruise appears on his chest, never to
fade, so that he and I find in its ceaseless throbbing the answer to the
question, Indian or Kashmiri? Stained by the bruise of a Heidelberg bag's
clasp, we throw our lot in with India; but the alienness of blue eyes
remains. Tai dies, but his magic hangs over us still, and makes us men
apart.
... Hurtling on, I pause to pick up the game of hit-the-spittoon. Five
years before the birth of a nation, my inheritance grows, to include an
optimism disease which would flare up again in my own time, and cracks in
the earth which will-be-have-been reborn in my skin, and ex-conjurer
Hummingbirds who began the long line of street-entertainers which has run in
parallel with my life, and my grandmother's moles like witchnipples and
hatred of photographs, and whatsitsname, and wars of starvation and silence,
and the wisdom of my aunt Alia which turned into spinsterhood and bitterness
and finally burst out in deadly revenge, and the love of Emerald and
Zulfikar which would enable me to start a revolution, and crescent knives,
fatal moons echoed by my mother's love-name for me, her innocent
chand-ka-tukra, her affectionate piece-of-the- ... growing larger now,
floating in the amniotic fluid of the past, I feed on a hum that rose
higherhigher until dogs came to the rescue, on an escape into a cornfield
and a rescue by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah with his Gai-Wallah antics as he
ran -FULL-TILT!- screaming silently, as he revealed the secrets of locks
made in India and brought Nadir Khan into a toilet containing a
washing-chest; yes, I'm getting heavier by the second, fattening up on
washing-chests and the under-the-carpet love of Mumtaz and the rhymeless
bard, plumping out as I swallow Zulnkar's dream of a bath by his bedside and
an underground Taj Mahal and a silver spittoon encrusted with lapis lazuli;
a marriage disintegrates, and feeds me; an aunt runs traitorously through
Agra streets, without her honour, and that feeds me too; and now false
starts are over, and Amina has stopped being Mumtaz, and Ahmed Sinai has
become, in a sense, her father as well as her husband ... my inheritance
includes this gift, the gift of inventing new parents for myself whenever
necessary. The power of giving birth to fathers and mothers: which Ahmed
wanted and never had.
Through my umbilical cord, I'm taking in fare dodgers and the dangers
of purchasing peacock-feather fans; Amina's assiduity seeps into me, and
more ominous things - clattering footsteps, my mother's need to plead for
money until the napkin in my father's lap began to quiver and make a little
tent - and the cremated ashes of Arjuna Indiabikes, and a peepshow into
which Lifafa Das tried to put everything in the world, and rapscallions
perpetrating outrages; many-headed monsters swell inside me - masked
Ravanas, eight-year-old girls with lisps and one continuous eyebrow, mobs
crying Rapist. Public announcements nurture me as I grow towards my time,
and there are only seven months left to go.
How many things people notions we bring with us into the world, how
many possibilities and also restrictions of possibility! - Because all of
these were the parents of the child born that midnight, and for every one of
the midnight children there were as many more. Among the parents of
midnight: the failure of the Cabinet Mission scheme; the determination of M.
A. Jinnah, who was dying and wanted to see Pakistan formed in his lifetime,
and would have done anything to ensure it - that same Jinnah whom my father,
missing a turn as usual, refused to meet; and Mountbatten with his
extraordinary haste and his chicken-breast-eater of a wife; and more and
more - Red Fort and Old fort, monkeys and vultures dropping hands, and white
transvestites, and bone-setters and mongoose-trainers and Shri Ramram Seth
who made too much prophecy. And my father's dream of rearranging the Quran
has its place; and the burning of a godown which turned him into a man of
property and not leathercloth; and the piece of Ahmed which Amina could not
love. To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you
that.
And fishermen, and Catharine of Braganza, and Mumbadevi coconuts rice;
Sivaji's statue and Methwold's Estate; a swimming pool in the shape of
British India and a two-storey hillock; a centre-parting and a nose from
Bergerac; an inoperative clocktower and a little circus-ring; an
Englishman's lust for an Indian allegory and the seduction of an
accordionist's wife. Budgerigars, ceiling fans, the
Times of India
are all
part of the luggage I brought into the world ... do you wonder, then, that I
was a heavy child? Blue Jesus leaked into me; and Mary's desperation, and
Joseph's revolutionary wildness, and the flightiness of Alice Pereira ...
all these made me, too.
If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my
inheritance ... perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst
of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
'At last,' Padma says with satisfaction, 'you've learned how to tell
things really fast.'
August I3th, 1947: discontent in the heavens. Jupiter, Saturn and Venus
are in quarrelsome vein; moreover, the three crossed stars are moving into
the most ill-favoured house of all. Benarsi astrologers name it fearfully:
'Karamstan! They enter Karamstan!'
While astrologers make frantic representations to Congress Party
bosses, my mother lies down for her afternoon nap. While Earl Mountbatten
deplores the lack of trained occultists on his General Staff, the slowly
turning shadows of a ceiling fan caress Amina into sleep. While M. A.
Jinnah, secure in the knowledge that his Pakistan will be born in just
eleven hours, a full day before independent India, for which there are still
thirty-five hours to go, is scoffing at the protestations of
horoscope-mongers, shaking his head in amusement, Amina's head, too, is
moving from side to side.
But she is asleep. And in these days of her boulder-like pregnancy, an
enigmatic dream of flypaper has been plaguing her sleeping hours ... in
which she wanders now, as before, in a crystal sphere filled with dangling
strips of the sticky brown material, which adhere to her clothing and rip it
off as she stumbles through the impenetrable papery forest; and now she
struggles, tears at paper, but it grabs at her, until she is naked, with the
baby kicking inside her, and long tendrils of flypaper stream out to seize
her by her undulating womb, paper glues itself to her hair nose teeth
breasts thighs, and as she opens her mouth to shout a brown adhesive gag
falls across her parting lips ...
'Amina Begum!' Musa is saying. 'Wake up! Bad dream, Begum Sahiba!'
Incidents of those last few hours - the last dregs of my inheritance:
when there were thirty-five hours to go, my mother dreamed of being glued to
brown paper like a fly. And at the cocktail hour (thirty hours to go)
William Methwold visited my father in the garden of Buckingham Villa.
Centre-parting strolling beside and above big toe, Mr Methwold reminisced.
Tales of the first Methwold, who had dreamed the city into existence, filled
the evening air in that penultimate sunset. And my father - apeing Oxford
drawl, anxious to impress the departing Englishman - responded with,
'Actually, old chap, ours is a pretty distinguished family, too.' Methwold
listening: head cocked, red rose in cream lapel, wide-brimmed hat concealing
parted hair, a veiled hint of amusement in his eyes ... Ahmed Sinai,
lubricated by whisky, driven on by self-importance, warms to his theme.
'Mughal blood, as a matter of fact.' To which Methwold, 'No! Really? You're
pulling my leg.' And Ahmed, beyond the point of no return, is obliged to
press on. 'Wrong side of the blanket, of course; but Mughal, certainly.'
That was how, thirty hours before my birth, my father de-monstrated
that he, too, longed for fictional ancestors... how he came to invent a
family pedigree that, in later years, when whisky had blurred the edges of
his memory and djinn-bottles came to confuse him, would obliterate all
traces of reality ... and how, to hammer his point home, he introduced into
our lives the idea of the family curse.
'Oh yes.' my father said as Methwold cocked a grave unsmiling head,
'many old families possessed such curses. In our line, it is handed down
from eldest son to eldest son - in writing only, because merely to speak it
is to unleash its power, you know.' Now Methwold: 'Amazing! And you know the
words?' My father nods, lip jutting, toe still as he taps his forehead for
emphasis. 'All in here; all memorized. Hasn't been used since an ancestor
quarrelled with the Emperor Babar and put the curse on his son Humayun ...
terrible story, that - every schoolboy knows.'
And the time would come when my father, in the throes of his utter
retreat from reality, would lock himself in a blue room and try to remember
a curse which he had dreamed up one evening in the gardens of his house
while he stood tapping
his
temple beside the descendant of William Methwold.
Saddled now with flypaper-dreams and imaginary ancestors, I am still
over a day away from being born ... but now the remorseless ticktock
reasserts itself: twenty-nine hours to go, twenty-eight, twenty-seven ...
What other dreams were dreamed on that last night? Was it then -yes,
why not - that Dr Narlikar, ignorant of the drama that was about to unfold
at his Nursing Home, first dreamed of tetrapods? Was it on that last night -
while Pakistan was being born to the north and west of Bombay - that my
uncle Hanif, who had come (like
his
sister) to Bombay, and who had fallen in
love with an actress, the divine Pia ('Her face is her fortune!' the
Illustrated Weekly
once said), first imagined the cinematic device which
would soon give him the first of his three hit pictures? ... It seems
likely; myths, nightmares, fantasies were in the air. This much is certain:
on that last night, my grandfather Aadam Aziz, alone now in the big old
house in Cornwallis Road -except for a wife whose strength of will seemed to
increase as Aziz was ground down by age, and for a daughter, Alia, whose
embittered virginity would last until a bomb split her in two over eighteen
years later - was suddenly imprisoned by great metal hoops of nostalgia, and
lay awake as they pressed down upon his chest; until finally, at five
o'clock in the morning of August I4th - nineteen hours to go - he was pushed
out of bed by an invisible force and drawn towards an old tin trunk. Opening
it, he found: old copies of German magazines; Lenin's
What Is To Be Done?;
a
folded prayer-mat; and at last the thing which he had felt an irresistible
urge to see once more - white and folded and glowing faintly in the dawn -
my grandfather drew out, from the tin trunk of his past, a stained and
perforated sheet, and discovered that the hole had grown; that there were
other, smaller holes in the surrounding fabric; and in the grip of a wild
nostalgic rage he shook his wife awake and astounded her by yelling, as he
waved her history under her nose:
'Moth-eaten! Look, Begum: moth-eaten! You forgot to put in any
naphthalene balk!'
But now the countdown will not be denied ... eighteen hours; seventeen;
sixteen... and already, at Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, it is possible to
hear the shrieks of a woman in labour. Wee Willie Winkie is here; and his
wife Vanita; she has been in a protracted, unproductive labour for eight
hours now. The first pangs hit her just as, hundreds of miles away, M. A.
Jinnah announced the midnight birth of a Muslim nation... but still she
writhes on a bed in the Narlikar Home's 'charity ward' (reserved for the
babies of the poor) ... her eyes are standing halfway out of her head; her
body glistens with sweat, but the baby shows no signs of coming, nor is its
father present; it is eight o'clock in the morning, but there is still the
possibility that, given the circumstances, the baby could be waiting for
midnight.
Rumours in the city: The statue galloped last night!'... 'And the stars
are unfavourable!'... But despite these signs of ill-omen, the city was
poised, with a new myth glinting in the corners of its eyes. August in
Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna's birthday and Coconut
Day; and this year - fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve -there was an
extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation
which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting
us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history,
although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom
Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country
which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective
will - except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy
shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would
periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided
by rituals of blood. India, the new myth - a collective fiction in which
anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty
fantasies: money and God.
I have been, in my time, the living proof of the fabulous nature of
this collective dream; but for the moment, I shall turn away from these
generalized, macrocosmic notions to concentrate upon a more private ritual;
I shall not describe the mass blood-letting in progress on the frontiers of
the divided Punjab (where the partitioned nations are washing themselves in
one another's blood, and a certain punchinello-faced Major Zulfikar is
buying refugee property at absurdly low prices, laying the foundations of a
fortune that will rival the Nizam of Hyderabad's); I shall avert my eyes
from the violence in Bengal and the long pacifying walk of Mahatma Gandhi.
Selfish? Narrow-minded? Well, perhaps; but excusably so, in my opinion.
After all, one is not born every day.
Twelve hours to go. Amina Sinai, having awakened from her flypaper
nightmare, will not sleep again until after... Ramram Seth is filling her
head, she is adrift in a turbulent sea jn which waves of excitement
alternate with deep, giddying, dark, watery hollows of fear. But something
else is in operation, too, Watch her hands - as, without any conscious
instructions, they press down, hard, upon her womb; watch her lips,
muttering without her knowledge: 'Come on, slowpoke, you don't want to be
late for the newspapers!'
Eight hours to go ... at four o'clock that afternoon, William Methwold
drives up the two-storey hillock in his black 1946 Rover. He parks in the
circus-ring between the four noble villas; but today he visits neither
goldfish-pond nor cactus-garden; he does not greet Lila Sabarmati with his
customary, 'How goes the pianola? Everything tickety-boo?' - nor does he
salute old man Ibrahim who sits in the shade of a ground-floor verandah,
rocking in a rocking-chair and musing about sisal; looking neither towards
Catrack nor Sinai, he takes up his position in the exact centre of the
circus-ring. Rose in lapel, cream hat held stiffly against his chest,
centre-parting glinting in afternoon light, William Methwold stares straight
ahead, past clock-tower and Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy's map-shaped
pool, across the golden four o'clock waves, and salutes; while out there,
above the horizon, the sun begins its long dive towards the sea.
Six hours to go. The cocktail hour. The successors of William Methwold
are in their gardens - except that Amina sits in her tower-room, avoiding
the mildly competitive glances being flung in her direction by
Nussie-next-door, who is also, perhaps, urging her Sonny down and out
between her legs; curiously they watch the Englishman, who stands as still
and stiff as the ramrod to which we have previously compared his
centre-parting; until they are distracted by a new arrival. A long, stringy
man, wearing three rows of beads around
his
neck, and a belt of
chicken-bones around
his
waist; his dark skin stained with ashes, his hair
loose and long - naked except for beads and ashes, the sadhu strides up
amongst the red-tiled mansions. Musa, the old bearer, descends upon him to
shoo him away; but hangs back, not knowing how to command a holy man.
Cleaving through the veils of Musa's indecision, the sadhu enters the garden
of Buckingham Villa; walks straight past my astonished father; seats
himself, cross-legged, beneath the dripping garden tap.
'What do you want here, sadhuji?' - Musa, unable to avoid deference; to
which the sadhu, calm as a lake: 'I have come to await the coming of the
One. The Mubarak - He who is Blessed. It will happen very soon.'
Believe it or not: I was prophesied twice! And on that day on which
everything was so remarkably well-timed, my mother's sense of timing did not
fail her; no sooner had the sadhu's last word left his lips than there
issued, from a first-floor tower-room with glass tulips dancing in the
windows, a piercing yell, a cocktail containing equal proportions of panic,
excitement and triumph... 'Arre Ahmed!' Amina Sinai yelled, 'Janum, the
baby! It's coming - bang on time!'
Ripples of electricity through Methwold's Estate... and here comes Homi
Catrack, at a brisk emaciated sunken-eyed trot, offering: 'My Studebaker is
at your disposal, Sinai Sahib; take it now - go at once!'... and when there
are still five hours and thirty minutes left, the Sinais, husband and wife,
drive away down the two-storey hillock in the borrowed car; there is my
father's big toe pressing down on the accelerator; there are my mother's
hands pressing down on her moon-belly; and they are out of sight now, around
the bend, past Band Box Laundry and Reader's Paradise, past Fatbhoy jewels
and Chimalker toys, past One Yard of Chocolates and Breach Candy gates,
driving towards Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home where, in a charity ward, Wee
Willie's Vanita still heaves and strains, spine curving, eyes popping, and a
midwife called Mary Pereira is waiting for her time, too ... so that neither
Ahmed of the jutting lip and squashy belly and fictional ancestors, nor
dark-skinned prophecy-ridden Amina were present when the sun finally set
over Methwold's Estate, and at the precise instant of its last disappearance
- five hours and two minutes to go -William Methwold raised a long white arm
above his head. White hand dangled above brilliantined black hair; long
tapering white fingers twitched towards centre-parting, and the second and
final secret was revealed, because fingers curled, and seized hair; drawing
away from his head, they failed to release their prey; and in the moment
after the disappearance of the sun Mr Methwold stood in the afterglow of his
Estate with his hairpiece in his hand.
'A baldie!' Padma exclaims. 'That slicked-up hair of his ... I knew it;
too good to be true!'
Bald, bald; shiny-pated! Revealed: the deception which had tricked an
accordionist's wife. Samson-like, William Methwold's power had resided in
his hair; but now, bald patch glowing in the dusk,
he
flings his thatch
through the window of his motor-car; distributes, with what looks like
carelessness, the signed title-deeds to his palaces; and drives away. Nobody
at Methwold's Estate ever saw him again; but I, who never saw him once, find
him impossible to forget.
Suddenly everything is saffron and green. Amina Sinai in a room with
saffron walls and green woodwork. In a neighbouring room, Wee Willie
Winkie's Vanita, green-skinned, the whites of her eyes shot with saffron,
the baby finally beginning its descent through inner passages that are also,
no doubt, similarly colourful. Saffron minutes and green seconds tick away
on the clocks on the walls. Outside Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, there are
fireworks and crowds, also conforming to the colours of the night - saffron
rockets, green sparkling rain; the men in shirts of zafaran hue, the women
in saris of lime. On a saffron-and-green carpet, Dr Narlikar talks to Ahmed
Sinai. 'I shall see to your Begum personally,' he says, in gentle tones the
colour of the evening, 'Nothing to worry about. You wait here; plenty of
room to pace.' Dr Narlikar, who dislikes babies, is nevertheless an expert
gynaecologist. In his spare time he lectures writes pamphlets berates the
nation on the subject of contraception. 'Birth Control,' he says, 'is Public
Priority Number One. The day will come when I get that through people's
thick heads, and then I'll be out of a job.' Ahmed Sinai smiles, awkward,
nervous. 'Just for tonight,' my father says, 'forget lectures -deliver my
child.'
It is twenty-nine minutes to midnight. Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home is
running on a skeleton staff; there are many absentees, many employees who
have preferred to celebrate the imminent birth of the nation, and will not
assist tonight at the births of children. Saffron-shirted, green-skirted,
they throng in the illuminated streets, beneath the infinite balconies of
the city on which little dia-lamps of earthenware have been filled with
mysterious oik; wicks float in the lamps which line every balcony and
rooftop, and these wicks, too, conform to our two-tone colour scheme: half
the lamps burn saffron, the others flame with green.
Threading its way through the many-headed monster of the crowd is a
police car, the yellow and blue of its occupants' uniforms transformed by
the unearthly lamplight into saffron and green. (We are on Colaba Causeway
now, just for a moment, to reveal that at twenty-seven minutes to midnight,
the police are hunting for a dangerous criminal. His name: Joseph D'Costa.
The orderly is absent, has been absent for several days, from his work at
the Nursing Home, from his room near the slaughterhouse, and from the life
of a distraught virginal Mary.)
Twenty minutes pass, with aaahs from Amina Sinai, coming harder and
faster by the minute, and weak tiring aaahs from Vanita in the next room.
The monster in the streets has already begun to celebrate; the new myth
courses through its veins, replacing its blood with corpuscles of saffron
and green. And in Delhi, a wiry serious man sits in the Assembly Hall and
prepares to make a speech. At Methwold's Estate goldfish hang stilly in
ponds while the residents go from house to house bearing pistachio
sweetmeats, embracing and kissing one another - green pistachio is eaten,
and saffron laddoo-balls. Two children move down secret passages while in
Agra an ageing doctor sits with his wife, who has two moles on her face like
witchnipples, and in the midst of sleeping geese and moth-eaten memories
they are somehow struck silent, and can find nothing to say. And in all the
cities all the towns all the villages the little dia-lamps burn on
window-sills porches verandahs, while trains burn in the Punjab, with the
green flames of blistering paint and the glaring saffron of fired fuel, like
the biggest dias in the world.
And the city of Lahore, too, is burning.
The wiry serious man is getting to his feet. Anointed with holy water
from the Tanjore River, he rises; his forehead smeared with sanctified ash,
he clears his throat. Without written speech in hand, without having
memorized any prepared words, Jawaharlal Nehru begins:'... Long years ago we
made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our
pledge - not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially ...'
It is two minutes to twelve. At Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, the dark
glowing doctor, accompanied by a midwife called Flory, a thin kind lady of
no importance, encourages Amina Sinai: 'Push! Harder! ... I can see the
head!...' while in the neighbouring room one Dr Bose - with Miss Mary
Pereira by his side - presides over the terminal stages of Vanita's
twenty-four-hour labour ... 'Yes; now; just one last try, come on; at last,
and then it will be over!...' Women wail and shriek while in another room
men are silent. Wee Willie Winkie - incapable of song - squats in a corner,
rocking back and forth, back and forth... and Ahmed Sinai is looking for a
chair. But there are no chairs in this room; it is a room designated for
pacing; so Ahmed Sinai opens a door, finds a chair at a deserted
receptionist's desk, lifts it, carries it back into the pacing room, where
Wee Willie Winkie rocks, rocks, his eyes as empty as a blind man's... will
she live? won't she? ... and.now, at last, it is midnight.
The monster in the streets has begun to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man
is saying,'... At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps,
India awakens to life and freedom ...' And beneath the roar of the monster
there are two more yells, cries, bellows, the howls of children arriving in
the world, their unavailing protests mingling with the din of independence
which hangs saffron-and-green in the night sky - 'A moment comes, which
comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when
an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance
...' while in a room with saffron-and-green carpet Ahmed Sinai is still
clutching a chair when Dr Narlikar enters to inform him: 'On the stroke of
midnight, Sinai brother, your Begum Sahiba gave birth to a large, healthy
child: a son!' Now my father began to think about me (not knowing...); with
the image of my face filling his thoughts he forgot about the chair;
possessed by the love of me (even though...), filled with it from top of
head to fingertips, he let the chair fall.
Yes, it was my fault (despite everything) ... it was the power of my
face, mine and nobody else's, which caused Ahmed Sinai's hands to release
the chair; which caused the chair to drop, accelerating at thirty-two feet
per second, and as Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly Hall, 'We end today a
period of ill-fortune,' as conch-sheik blared out the news of freedom, it
was on my account that my father cried out too, because the falling chair
shattered his toe.
And now we come to it: the noise brought everyone running; my father
and his injury grabbed a brief moment of limelight from the two aching
mothers, the two, synchronous midnight births - because Vanita had finally
been delivered of a baby of remarkable size: 'You wouldn't have believed
it,' Dr Bose said, 'It just kept on coming, more and more of the boy forcing
its way out, it's a real ten-chip whopper all right!' And Narlikar, washing
himself: 'Mine, too.' But that was a little later - just now Narlikar and
Bose were tending to Ahmed Sinai's toe; midwives had been instructed to wash
and swaddle the new-born pair; and now Miss Mary Pereira made her
contribution.
'Go, go,' she said to poor Flory, 'see if you can help. I can do all
right here.'
And when she was alone - two babies in her hands - two lives in her
power - she did it for Joseph, her own private revolutionary act, thinking
He will certainly love me for this, as she changed name-tags on the two huge
infants, giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the
rich-born child to accordions and poverty ... 'Love me, Joseph!' was in Mary
Pereira's mind, and then it was done. On the ankle of a ten-chip whopper
with eyes as blue as Kashmiri sky - which were also eyes as blue as
Methwold's - and a nose as dramatic as a Kashmiri grandfather's - which was
also the nose of a grandmother from France - she placed this name:
Sinai.
Saffron swaddled me as, thanks to the crime of Mary Pereira, I became
the chosen child of midnight, whose parents were not his parents, whose son
would not be his own... Mary took the child of my mother's womb, who was not
to be her son, another ten-chip pomfret, but with eyes which were already
turning brown, and knees as knobbly as Ahmed Sinai's, wrapped it in green,
and brought it to Wee Willie Winkie - who was staring at her blind-eyed, who
hardly saw his new son, who never knew about centre-partings ... Wee Willie
Winkie, who had just learned that Vanita had not managed to survive her
childbearing. At three minutes past midnight, while doctors fussed over
broken toe, Vanita had haemorrhaged and died.
So I was brought to my mother; and she never doubted my authenticity
for an instant. Ahmed Sinai, toe in splint, sat on her bed as she said:
'Look, janum, the poor fellow, he's got his grandfather's nose.' He watched
mystified as she made sure there was only one head; and then she relaxed
completely, understanding that even fortune-tellers have only limited gifts.
'Janum,' my mother said excitedly, 'you must call the papers. Call
them at the
Times of India.
What did I tell you? I won.'
'... This is no time for petty or destructive criticism,' Jawaharlal
Nehru told the Assembly. 'No time for ill-will. We have to build the noble
mansion of free India, where all her children may dwell.' A flag unfurls: it
is saffron, white and green.
'An Anglo?' Padma exclaims in horror. 'What are you telling me? You are
an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?'
'I am Saleem Sinai,' I told her, 'Snotnose, Stainface, Sniffer, Baldy,
Piece-of-the-Moon. Whatever do you mean - not my own?'
'All the time,' Padma wails angrily, 'you tricked me. Your mother, you
called her; your father, your grandfather, your aunts. What thing are you
that you don't even care to tell the truth about who your parents were? You
don't care that your mother died giving you life? That your father is maybe
still alive somewhere, penniless, poor? You are a monster or what?'
No: I'm no monster. Nor have I been guilty of trickery. I provided
clues ... but there's something more important than that. It's this: when we
eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it
made
no difference!.
I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind
of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not
think our way out of our pasts... if you had asked my father (even him,
despite all that happened!) who his son was, nothing on earth would have
induced him to point in the direction of the accordionist's knock-kneed,
unwashed boy. Even though he would grow up, this Shiva, to be something of a
hero.
So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over
the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were
only partially the offspring of their parents - the children of midnight
were also the children
of the time:
fathered, you understand, by history. It
can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.
'Enough,' Padma sulks. 'I don't want to listen.' Expecting one type of
two-headed child, she is peeved at being offered another. Nevertheless,
whether she is listening or not, I have tilings to record.
Three days after my birth, Mary Pereira was consumed by remorse. Joseph
D'Costa, on the run from the searching police cars, had clearly abandoned
her sister Alice as well as Mary; and the little plump woman - unable, in
her fright, to confess her crime - realized that she had been a fool.
'Donkey from somewhere!' she cursed herself; but she kept her secret. She
decided, however, to make amends of a kind. She gave up her job at the
Nursing Home and approached Amina Sinai with, 'Madam, I saw your baby just
one time and fell in love. Are you needing an ayah?' And Amina, her eyes
shining with motherhood, 'Yes.' Mary Pereira ('You might as well call
her
your mother,' Padma interjects, proving she is still interested, 'She made
you, you know'), from that moment on, devoted her life to bringing me up,
thus binding the rest of her days to the memory of her crime.
On August 20th, Nussie Ibrahim followed my mother into the Pedder Road
clinic, and little Sonny followed me into the world - but he was reluctant
to emerge; forceps were obliged to reach in and extract him; Dr Bose, in the
heat of the moment, pressed a little too hard, and Sonny arrived with little
dents beside each of his temples, shallow forcep-hollows which would make
him as irresistibly attractive as the hairpiece of William Methwold had made
the Englishman. Girls (Evie, the Brass Monkey, others) reached out to stroke
his little valleys ... it would lead to difficulties between us.
But I've saved the most interesting snippet for the last. So let me
reveal now that, on the day after I was born, my mother and I were visited
in a saffron and green bedroom by two persons from the
Times of India
(Bombay edition). I lay in a green crib, swaddled in saffron, and looked up
at them. There was a reporter, who spent his time interviewing my mother;
and a tall, aquiline photographer who devoted his attentions to me. The next
day, words as well as pictures appeared in newsprint ...
Quite recently, I visited a cactus-garden where once, many years back,
I buried a toy tin globe, which was badly dented and stuck together with
Scotch Tape; and extracted from its insides the things I had placed there
all those years ago. Holding them in my left hand now, as I write, I can
still see - despite yellowing and mildew - that one is a letter, a personal
letter to myself, signed by the Prime Minister of India; but the other is a
newspaper cutting.
It has a headline: MIDNIGHT'S CHILD.
And a text: 'A charming pose of Baby Saleem Sinai, who was born last
night at the exact moment of our Nation's independence - the happy Child of
that glorious Hour!'
And a large photograph: an A-1 top-quality front-page jumbo-sized
baby-snap, in which it is still possible to make out a child with birthmarks
staining his cheeks and a runny and glistening nose. (The picture is
captioned:
Photo by Kalidas Gupta.)
Despite headline, text and photograph, I must accuse our visitors of
the crime of trivialization; mere journalists, looking no further than the
next day's paper, they had no idea of the importance of the event they were
covering. To them, it was no more than a human-interest drama.
How do I know this? Because, at the end of the interview, the
photographer presented my mother with a cheque - for one hundred rupees.
One hundred rupees! Is it possible to imagine a more piffling, derisory
sum? It is a sum by which one could, were one of a mind to do so, feel
insulted. I shall, however, merely thank them for celebrating my arrival,
and forgive them for their lack of a genuine historical sense.
'Don't be vain,' Padma says grumpily. 'One hundred rupees is not so
little; after all, everybody gets born, it's not such a big big thing.'
Book Two
The fisherman's pointing finger
Is it possible to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal
scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival?
I can think of no other reason for Padma's bizarre behaviour; and this
explanation at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into
which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading
aloud) a word which should not have been spoken ... ever since the episode
of the quack doctor's visit, I have sniffed out a strange discontent in
Padma, exuding its enigmatic spoor from her eccrine (or apocrine) glands.
Distressed, perhaps, by the futility of her midnight attempts at
resuscitating my 'other pencil', the useless cucumber hidden in my pants,
she has been waxing grouchy. (And then there was her ill-tempered reaction,
last night, to my revelation of the secrets of my birth, and her irritation
at my low opinion of the sum of one hundred rupees.) I blame myself:
immersed in my autobiographical enterprise, I failed to consider her
feelings, and began tonight on the most unfortunate of false notes.
'Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,' I wrote and
read aloud, 'I have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because
while Aadam Aziz remained the sheet's victim, I have become its master - and
Padma is the one who is now under its spell. Sitting in my enchanted
shadows, I vouchsafe daily glimpses of myself- while she, my squatting
glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose frozen into immobility by
the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralysed - yes! - by love.'
That was the word: love. Written-and-spoken, it raised her voice to an
unusually shrill pitch; it unleashed from her lips a violence which would
have wounded me, were I still vulnerable to words. 'Love
you
?
'
our Padma
piped scornfully, 'What for, my God? What use are you, little princeling,' -
and now came her attempted
coup de grace -
'as a
lover
?
'
Arm extended, its
hairs glowing in the lamplight, she jabbed a contemptuous index finger in
the direction of my admittedly nonfunctional loins; a long, thick digit,
rigid with jealousy, which unfortunately served only to remind me of
another, long-lost finger...
so that she, seeing her arrow miss its mark, shrieked, 'Madman from
somewhere! That doctor was right!' and rushed distractedly from the room. I
heard footsteps clattering down the metal stairs to the factory floor; feet
rushing between the dark-shrouded pickle vats; and a door, first unbolted
and then slammed.
Thus abandoned, I have returned, having no option, to my work.
The fisherman's pointing finger: unforgettable focal point of the
picture which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above
the sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight's child, I spent my
earliest days. The young Raleigh - and who else? - sat, framed in teak, at
the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor - did he have a walrus
moustache? - whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery
horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of
Raleigh - and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the
picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic ... and
now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party in which a proud mother
and an equally proud ayah dressed a child with a gargantuan nose in just
such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor sat in a sky-blue room, beneath
the pointing finger, and copied the attire of the English milords ... 'Look,
how
chweet!
Lila Sabarmati exclaimed to my eternal mortification, 'It's like
he's just stepped out of the
picture?
In a picture hanging on a bedroom wall, I sat beside Walter Raleigh and
followed a fisherman's pointing finger with my eyes; eyes straining at the
horizon, beyond which lay - what? - my future, perhaps; my special doom, of
which I was aware from the beginning, as a shimmering grey presence in that
sky-blue room, indistinct at first, but impossible to ignore ... because the
finger pointed even further than that shimmering horizon, it pointed beyond
teak frame, across a brief expanse of sky-blue wall, driving my eyes towards
another frame, in which my inescapable destiny hung, forever fixed under
glass: here was a jumbo-sized baby-snap with its prophetic captions, and
here, beside it, a letter on high-quality vellum, embossed with the seal of
state - the lions of Sarnath stood above the dharma-chakra on the Prime
Minister's missive, which arrived, via Vishwanath the post-boy, one week
after my photograph appeared on the front page of the
Times of India.
Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal
Nehru wrote: 'Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy
accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient
face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your
life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our
own.'
And Mary Pereira, awestruck, 'The Government, Madam? It will be keeping
one eye on the boy? But why, Madam? What's wrong with him?' -And Amina, not
understanding the note of panic in her ayah's voice: 'It's just a way of
putting things, Mary; it doesn't really mean what it says.' But Mary does
not relax; and always, whenever she enters the baby's room, her eyes flick
wildly towards the letter in its frame; her eyes look around her, trying to
see whether the Government is watching; wondering eyes: what do they know?
Did somebody see? ... As for me, as I grew up, I didn't quite accept my
mother's explanation, either; but it lulled me into a sense of false
security; so that, even though something of Mary's suspicions had leaked
into me, I was still taken by surprise when ...
Perhaps the fisherman's finger was not pointing at the letter in the
frame; because if one followed it even further, it led one out through the
window, down the two-storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy
Pools, and out to another sea which was not the sea in the picture; a sea on
which the sails of Koli dhows glowed scarlet in the setting sun... an
accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at the city's dispossessed.
Or maybe - and this idea makes me feel a little shivery despite the
heat - it was a finger of warning, its purpose to draw attention to
itself;
yes, it could have been, why not, a prophecy of another finger, a finger not
dissimilar from itself, whose entry into my story would release the dreadful
logic of Alpha and Omega ... my God, what a notion! How much of my future
hung above my crib, just waiting for me to understand it? How many warnings
was I given - how many did I ignore? ... But no. I will not be a 'madman
from somewhere', to use Padma's eloquent phrase. I will not succumb to
cracked digressions; not while I have the strength to resist the cracks.
When Amina Sinai and Baby Saleem arrived home in a borrowed Studebaker,
Ahmed Sinai brought a manila envelope along for the ride. Inside the
envelope: a pickle-jar, emptied of lime kasaundy, washed, boiled, purified -
and now, refilled. A well-sealed jar, with a rubber diaphragm stretched over
its tin lid and held in place by a twisted rubber band. What was sealed
beneath rubber, preserved in glass, concealed in manila? This: travelling
home with father, mother and baby was a quantity of briny water in which,
floating gently, hung an umbilical cord. (But was it mine or the Other's?
That's something I can't tell you.) While the newly-hired ayah, Mary
Pereira, made her way to Methwold's Estate by bus, an umbilical cord
travelled in state in the glove compartment of a film magnate's Studey.
While Baby Saleem grew towards manhood, umbilical tissue hung unchanging in
bottled brine, at the back of a teak almirah. And when, years later, our
family entered its exile in the Land of the Pure, when I was struggling
towards purity, umbilical cords would briefly have their day.
Nothing was thrown away; baby and afterbirth were both retained; both
arrived at Methwold's Estate; both awaited their time.
I was not a beautiful baby. Baby-snaps reveal that my large moon-face
was too large; too perfectly round. Something lacking in the region of the
chin. Fair skin curved across my features - but birthmarks disfigured it;
dark stains spread down my western hairline, a dark patch coloured my
eastern ear. And my temples: too prominent: bulbous Byzantine domes. (Sonny
Ibrahim and I were born to be friends - when we bumped our foreheads,
Sonny's forcep-hollows permitted my bulby temples to nestle within them, as
snugly as carpenter's joints.) Amina Sinai, immeasurably relieved by my
single head, gazed upon it with redoubled maternal fondness, seeing it
through a beautifying mist, ignoring the ice-like eccentricity of my
sky-blue eyes, the temples like stunted horns, even the rampant cucumber of
the nose.
Baby Saleem's nose: it was monstrous; and it ran.
Intriguing features of my early life: large and unbeautiful as I was,
it appears I was not content. From my very first days I embarked upon an
heroic programme of self-enlargement. (As though I knew that, to carry the
burdens of my future life, I'd need to be pretty big.) By mid-September I
had drained my mother's not inconsiderable breasts of milk. A wet-nurse was
briefly employed but she retreated, dried-out as a desert after only a
fortnight, accusing Baby Saleem of trying to bite off her nipples with his
toothless gums. I moved on to the bottle and downed vast quantities of
compound: the bottle's nipples suffered, too, vindicating the complaining
wet-nurse. Baby-book records were meticulously kept; they reveal that I
expanded almost visibly, enlarging day by day; but unfortunately no nasal
measurements were taken so I cannot say whether my breathing apparatus grew
in strict proportion, or faster than the rest. I must say that I had a
healthy metabolism. Waste matter was evacuated copiously from the
appropriate orifices; from my nose there flowed a shining cascade of goo.
Armies of handkerchiefs, regiments of nappies found their way into the large
washing-chest in my mother's bathroom ... shedding rubbish from various
apertures, I kept my eyes quite dry. 'Such a good baby, Madam,' Mary Pereira
said, 'Never takes out one tear.'
Good baby Saleem was a quiet child; I laughed often, but soundlessly.
(Like my own son, I began by taking stock, listening before I rushed into
gurgles and, later, into speech.) For a time Amina and Mary became afraid
that the boy was dumb; but, just when they were on the verge of telling his
father (from whom they had kept their worries secret - no father wants a
damaged child), he burst into sound, and became, in that respect at any
rate, utterly normal, 'It's as if,' Amina whispered to Mary, 'he's decided
to put our minds at rest.'
There was one more serious problem. Amina and Mary took a few days to
notice it. Busy with the mighty, complex processes of turning themselves
into a two-headed mother, their vision clouded by a fog of stenchy
underwear, they failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids. Amina,
remembering how, during her pregnancy, the weight of her unborn child had
held time as still as a dead green pond, began to wonder whether the reverse
might not be taking place now - whether the baby had some magical power over
all the time in his immediate vicinity, and was speeding it up, so that
mother-and-ayah never had enough time to do everything that needed doing, so
that the baby could grow at an apparently fantastic rate; lost in such
chronological daydreams, she didn't notice my problem. Only when she
shrugged the idea off, and told herself I was just a good strapping boy with
a big appetite, an early developer, did the veils of maternal love part
sufficiently for her and Mary to yelp, in unison: 'Look, baap-re-baap! Look,
Madam! See, Mary! The little chap never blinks!'
The eyes were too blue: Kashmiri-blue, changeling-blue, blue with the
weight of unspilled tears, too blue to blink. When I was fed, my eyes did
not flutter; when virginal Mary set me across her shoulder, crying, 'Oof, so
heavy, sweet Jesus!' I burped without nictating. When Ahmed Sinai limped
splint-toed to my crib, I yielded to jutting lips with keen and batless gaze
... 'Maybe a mistake, Madam,' Mary suggested. 'Maybe the little sahib is
copying us - blinking when we blink.' And Amina: 'We'll blink in turn and
watch.' Their eyelids opening-and-closing alternately, they observed my icy
blueness; but there was not the slightest tremor; until Amina took matters
into her own hands and reached into the cradle to stroke my eyelids
downwards. They closed: my breathing altered, instantly, to the contented
rhythms of sleep. After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in
turns to open and close my lids. 'He'll learn, Madam,' Mary comforted Amina,
'He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure.' I
learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his
eyes open all the time.
Now, looking back through baby eyes, I can see it all perfectly - it's
amazing how much you can remember when you try. What I can see: the city,
basking like a bloodsucker lizard in the summer heat. Our Bombay: it looks
like a hand but it's really a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing
food and talent from everywhere else in India. A glamorous leech, producing
nothing except films bush-shirts fish ... in the aftermath of Partition, I
see Vishwanath the postboy bicycling towards our two-storey hillock, vellum
envelope in his saddlebag, riding his aged Arjuna Indiabike past a rotting
bus -abandoned although it isn't the monsoon season, because its driver
suddenly decided to leave for Pakistan, switched off the engine and
departed, leaving a full busload of stranded passengers, hanging off the
windows, clinging to the roof-rack, bulging through the doorway... I can
hear their oaths, son-of-a-pig, brother-of-a-jackass; but they will cling to
their hard-won places for two hours before they leave the bus to its fate.
And, and: here is India's first swimmer of the English Channel, Mr Pushpa
Roy, arriving at the gates of the Breach Candy Pools. Saffron bathing-cap on
his head, green trunks wrapped in flag-hued towel, this Pushpa has declared
war on the whites-only policy of the baths. He holds a cake of Mysore
sandalwood soap; draws himself up; marches through the gate ... whereupon
hired Pathans seize him, Indians save Europeans from an Indian mutiny as
usual, and out he goes, struggling valiantly, frogmarched into Warden Road
and flung into the dust. Channel swimmer dives into the street, narrowly
missing camels taxis bicycles (Vishwanath swerves to avoid his cake of soap)
... but he is not deterred; picks himself up; dusts himself down; and
promises to be back tomorrow. Throughout my childhood years, the days were
punctuated by the sight of Pushpa the swimmer, in saffron cap and
flag-tinted towel, diving unwillingly into Warden Road. And in the end his
indomitable campaign won a victory, because today the Pools permit certain
Indians - 'the better sort' - to step into their map-shaped waters. But
Pushpa does not belong to the better sort; old now and forgotten, he watches
the Pools from afar ... and now more and more of the multitudes are flooding
into me - such as Bano Devi, the famous lady wrestler of those days, who
would only wrestle men and threatened to marry anyone who beat her, as a
result of which vow she never lost a bout; and (closer to home now) the
sadhu under our garden tap, whose name was Purushottam and whom we (Sonny,
Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus and I) would always call Puru-the-guru - believing
me to be the Mubarak, the Blessed One, he devoted his life to keeping an eye
on me, and filled his days teaching my father palmistry and witching away my
mother's verrucas; and then there is the rivalry of the old bearer Musa and
the new ayah Mary, which will grow until it explodes; in short, at the end
of 1947, life in Bombay was as teeming, as manifold, as multitudinously
shapeless as ever... except that I had arrived; I was already beginning to
take my place at the centre of the universe; and by the time I had finished,
I would give meaning to it all. You don't believe me? Listen: at my
cradle-side, Mary Pereira is singing a little song:
Anything you want to be, you can be:
You can be just what-all you want.
By the time of my circumcision by a barber with a cleft palate from the
Royal Barber House on Gowalia Tank Road (I was just over two months old), I
was already much in demand at Methwold's Estate. (Incidentally, on the
subject of the circumcision: I still swear that I can remember the grinning
barber, who held me by the foreskin while my member waggled frantically like
a slithering snake; and the razor descending, and the pain; but I'm told
that, at the time, I didn't even blink.)
Yes, I was a popular little fellow: my two mothers, Amina and Mary,
couldn't get enough of me. In all practical matters, they were the most
intimate of allies. After my circumcision, they bathed me together; and
giggled together as my mutilated organ waggled angrily in the bathwater. 'We
better watch this boy, Madam,' Mary said naughtily, 'His thing has a life of
its own!' And Amina, 'Tch, tch, Mary, you're terrible, really ...' But then
amid sobs of helpless laughter, 'Just see, Madam, his poor little soo-soo!'
Because it was wiggling again, thrashing about, like a chicken with a
slitted gullet... Together, they cared for me beautifully; but in the matter
of emotion, they were deadly rivals. Once, when they took me for a pram-ride
through the Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill, Amina overheard Mary telling
the other ayahs, 'Look: here's my own big son' - and felt oddly threatened.
Baby Saleem became, after that, the battleground of their loves; they strove
to outdo one another in demonstrations of affection; while he, blinking by
now, gurgling aloud, fed on their emotions, using it to accelerate his
growth, expanding and swallowing infinite hugs kisses chucks-under-the-chin,
charging towards the moment when he would acquire the essential
characteristic of human beings: every day, and only in those rare moments
when I was left alone with the fisherman's pointing finger, I tried to heave
myself erect in my cot.
(And while I made unavailing efforts to get to my feet, Amina, too, was
in the grip of a useless resolve - she was trying to expel from her mind the
dream of her unnameable husband, which had replaced the dream of flypaper on
the night after I was born; a dream of such overwhelming reality that it
stayed with her throughout her waking hours. In it, Nadir Khan came to her
bed and impregnated her; such was the mischievous perversity of the dream
that it confused Amina about the parentage of her child, and provided me,
the child of midnight, with a fourth father to set beside Winkie and
Methwold and Ahmed Sinai. Agitated but helpless in the clutches of the
dream, my mother Amina began at that time to form the fog of guilt which
would, in later years, surround her head like a dark black wreath.)
I never heard Wee Willie Winkie in his prime. After his blind-eyed
bereavement, his sight gradually returned; but something harsh and bitter
crept into his voice. He told us it was asthma, and continued to arrive at
Methwold's Estate once a week to sing songs which were, like himself, relics
of the Methwold era. 'Good Night, Ladies,' he sang; and, keeping up to date,
added 'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By' to his repertoire, and, a little later,
'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' Placing a sizeable infant with
menacingly knocking knees on a small mat beside him in the circus-ring, he
sang songs filled with nostalgia, and nobody had the heart to turn him away.
Winkie and the fisherman's finger were two of the few survivals of the days
of William Methwold, because after the Englishman's disappearance his
successors emptied his palaces of their abandoned contents. Lila Sabarmati
preserved her pianola; Ahmed Sinai kept his whisky-cabinet; old man Ibrahim
came to terms with ceiling-fans; but the goldfish died, some from
starvation, others as a result of being so colossally overfed that they
exploded in little clouds of scales and undigested fish-food; the dogs ran
wild, and eventually ceased to roam the Estate; and the fading clothes in
the old almirahs were distributed amongst the sweeper-women and other
servants on the Estate, so that for years afterwards the heirs of William
Methwold were cared for by men and women wearing the increasingly ragged
shirts and cotton print dresses of their erstwhile masters. But Winkie and
the picture on my wall survived; singer and fisherman became institutions of
our lives, like the cocktail hour, which was already a habit too powerful to
be broken. 'Each little tear and sorrow,' Winkie sang, 'only brings you
closer to me...' And his voice grew worse and worse, until it sounded like a
sitar whose resonating drum, made out of lacquered pumpkin, had been eaten
away by mice; 'It's asthma,' he insisted stubbornly. Before he died he lost
his voice completely; doctors revised his diagnosis to throat cancer; but
they were wrong, too, because Winkie died of no disease but of the
bitterness of losing a wife whose infidelity he never suspected. His son,
named Shiva after the god of procreation and destruction, sat at his feet in
those early days, silently bearing the burden of being the cause (or so he
thought) of his father's slow decline; and gradually, down the years, we
watched his eyes filling with an anger which could not be spoken; we watched
his fists close around pebbles and hurl them, ineffectually at first, more
dangerously as he grew, into the surrounding emptiness. When Lila
Sabarmati's elder son was eight, he took it upon himself to tease young
Shiva about his surliness, his unstarched shorts, his knobbly knees;
whereupon the boy whom Mary's crime had doomed to poverty and accordions
hurled a sharp flat stone, with a cutting edge like a razor, and blinded his
tormentor in the right eye. After Eyeslice's accident, Wee Willie Winkie
came to Methwold's Estate alone, leaving his son to enter the dark
labyrinths from which only a war would save him.
Why Methwold's Estate continued to tolerate Wee Willie Winkie despite
the decay of his voice and the violence of his son: he had, once, given them
an important clue about their lives. 'The first birth,' he had said, 'will
make you real.'
As a direct result of Winkie's clue, I was, in my early days, highly in
demand. Amina and Mary vied for my attention; but in every house on the
Estate, there were people who wanted to know me; and eventually Amina,
allowing her pride in my popularity to overcome her reluctance to let me out
of her sight, agreed to lend me, on a kind of rota basis, to the various
families on the hill. Pushed by Mary Pereira in a sky-blue pram, I began a
triumphal progress around the red-tiled palaces, gracing each in turn with
my presence, and making them seem real to their owners. And so, looking back
now through the eyes of Baby Saleem, I can reveal most of the secrets of my
neighbourhood, because the grown-ups lived their lives in my presence
without fear of being observed, not knowing that, years later, someone would
look back through baby-eyes and decide to let the cats out of their bags.
So here is old man Ibrahim, dying with worry because, back in Africa,
governments are nationalizing his sisal plantations; here is his elder son
Ishaq fretting over Ms hotel business, which is running into debt, so that
he is obliged to borrow money from local gangsters; here are Ishaq's eyes,
coveting his brother's wife, though why Nussie-the-duck should have aroused
sexual interest in anyone is a mystery to me; and here
is
Nussie's husband,
Ismail the lawyer, who has learned an important lesson from Ms son's
forcep-birth: 'Nothing comes out right in life,' he tells his duck of a
wife, 'unless it's forced out.' Applying this philosophy to his legal
career, he embarks on a career of bribing judges and fixing juries; all
children have the power to change their parents, and Sonny turned Ms father
into a highly successful crook. And, moving across to Versailles Villa, here
is Mrs Dubash with her shrine to the god Ganesh, stuck in the corner of an
apartment of such supernatural untidiness that, in our house, the word
'dubash' became a verb meaning 'to make a mess' ... 'Oh, Saleem, you've
dubashed your room again, you black man!' Mary would cry. And now the cause
of the mess, leaning over the hood of my pram to chuck me under the chin:
Adi Dubash, the physicist, genius of atoms and litter. His wife, who is
already carrying Cyrus-the-great within her, hangs back, growing her child,
with something fanatical gleaming in the inner corners of her eyes, biding
its time; it will not emerge until Mr Dubash, whose daily life was spent
working with the most dangerous substances in the world, dies by choking on
an orange from which his wife forgot to remove the pips. I was never invited
into the flat of Dr Narlikar, the child-hating gynaecologist; but in the
homes of Lila Sabarmati and Homi Catrack I became a voyeur, a tiny party to
Lila's thousand and one infidelities, and eventually a witness to the
beginnings of the liaison between the naval officer's wife and the
film-magnate-and-racehorse-owner; which, all in good time, would serve me
well when I planned a certain act of revenge.
Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I'm bound
to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was
bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views on the subject, being a
Blessed One to a guru under a tap, a voyeur to Lola Sabarmati; in the eyes
of Nussie-the-duck I was a rival, and a more successful rival, to her own
Sonny (although, to her credit, she never showed her resentment, and asked
to borrow me just like everyone else); to my two-headed mother I was all
kinds of babyish things - they called me joonoo-moonoo, and putch-putch, and
little-piece-of-the-moon.
But what, after all, can a baby do except swallow all of it and hope to
make sense of it later? Patiently, dry-eyed, I imbibed Nehru-letter and
Winkle's prophecy; but the deepest impression of all was made on the day
when Homi Catrack's idiot daughter sent her thoughts across the circus-ring
and into my infant head.
Toxy Catrack, of the outsize head and dribbling mouth; Toxy, who stood
at a barred top-floor window, stark naked, masturbating with motions of
consummate self-disgust; who spat hard and often through her bars, and
sometimes hit us on the head ... she was twenty-one years old, a gibbering
half-wit, the product of years of inbreeding; but inside my head she was
beautiful, because she had not lost the gifts with which every baby is born
and which life proceeds to erode. I can't remember anything Toxy said when
she sent her thoughts to whisper to me; probably nothing except gurgles and
spittings; but she gave a door in my mind a little nudge, so that when an
accident took place in a washing-chest it was probably Toxy who made it
possible.
That's enough for the moment, about the first days of Baby Saleem
-already my very presence is having an effect on history; already Baby
Saleem is working changes on the people around him; and, in the case of my
father, I am convinced that it was I who pushed him into the excesses which
led, perhaps inevitably, to the terrifying time of the freeze.
Ahmed Sinai never forgave his son for breaking hi
s
toe. Even after the
splint was removed, a tiny limp remained. My father leaned over my crib and
said, 'So, my son: you're starting as you mean to go on. Already you've
started bashing your poor old father!' In my opinion, this was only half a
joke. Because, with my birth, everything changed for Ahmed Sinai. His
position in the household was undermined by my coming. Suddenly Amina's
assiduity had acquired different goals; she never wheedled money out of him
any more, and the napkin in his lap at the breakfast-table felt sad pangs of
nostalgia for the old days. Now it was, 'Your son needs so-and-so,' or
'Janum, you must give money for such-and-such.' Bad show, Ahmed Sinai
thought. My father was a self-important man.
And so it was my doing that Ahmed Sinai fell, in those days after my
birth, into the twin fantasies which were to be his undoing, into the unreal
worlds of the djinns and of the land beneath the sea.
A memory of my father in a cool-season evening, sitting on my bed (I
was seven years old) and telling me, in a slightly thickened voice, the
story of the fisherman who found the djinn in a bottle washed up on the
beach... 'Never believe in a djinn's promises, my son! Let them out of the
bottle and they'll eat you up!' And I, timidly - because I could smell
danger on my father's breath: 'But, Abba, can a djinn really live inside a
bottle?' Whereupon my father, in a mercurial change of mood, roared with
laughter and left the room, returning with a dark green bottle with a white
label. 'Look,' he said sonorously, 'Do you want to see the djinn in here?'
'No!' I squealed in fright; but 'Yes!' yelled my sister the Brass Monkey
from the neighbouring bed ... and cowering together in excited terror we
watched him unscrew the cap and dramatically cover the bottleneck with the
palm of his hand; and now, in the other hand, a cigarette-lighter
materialized. 'So perish all evil djinns!' my father cried; and, removing
his palm, applied the flame to the neck of the bottle. Awestruck, the Monkey
and I watched an eerie flame, blue-green-yellow, move in a slow circle down
the interior walls of the bottle; until, reaching the bottom, it flared
briefly and died. The next day I provoked gales of laughter when I told
Sonny, Eyeslice and Hairoil, 'My father fights with djinns; he beats them;
it's true!... And it was true. Ahmed Sinai, deprived of wheedles and
attention, began, soon after my birth, a life-long struggle with
djinn-bottles. But I was mistaken about one thing: he didn't win.
Cocktail-cabinets had whetted his appetite; but it was my arrival that
drove him to it... In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry stare. The
only way to get a drink was to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and
so a new breed of doctors sprang up, djinn-doctors, one of whom, Dr Sharabi,
was introduced to my father by Homi Catrack next door. After that, on the
first of every month, my father and Mr Catrack and many of the city's most
respectable men queued up outside Dr Sharabi's mottled-glass surgery door,
went in, and emerged with the little pink chitties of alcoholism. But the
permitted ration was too small for my father's needs; and so he began to
send his servants along, too, and gardeners, bearers, drivers (we had a
motor-car now, a 1946 Rover with running-boards, just like William
Methwold's), even old Musa and Mary Pereira, brought my father back more and
more pink chitties, which he took to Vijay Stores opposite the circumcising
barbershop .in Gowalia Tank Road and exchanged for the brown paper bags of
alcoholism, inside which were the chinking green bottles, full of djinn. And
whisky, too: Ahmed Sinai blurred the edges of himself by drinking the green
bottles and red labels of his servants. The poor, having little else to
peddle, sold their identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father
turned them into liquid and drank them down.
At six o'clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the
djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue
of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with
the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was
replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.
After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the
ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as
ever, and he didn't relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way
to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the
edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my
mother's preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office
door - Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries. After nights in
which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language -
'What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse -
what difference?" And then tears, and Amina, 'Oh, janum - don't torture me!'
which, in turn, provoked, 'Torture my foot! You think it's torture for a man
to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!' - my father
limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while
Amina began to notice how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left
suddenly, flouncing down our drive without any notice; and you must judge
whether she chose to be blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but
she did nothing about it, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act
of recognition was to give the girls a collective name. 'Those Anglos,' she
said to Mary, revealing a touch of snobbery, 'with their funny names,
Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I
don't know what. What should I care about them? Cheap type females. I call
them all his Coca-Cola girls - that's what they all sound like.'
While Ahmed pinched bottoms, Amina became long-suffering; but he might
have been glad if she had appeared to care.
Mary Pereira said, 'They aren't so funny names, Madam; beg your pardon,
but they are good Christian words.' And Amina remembered Ahmed's cousin
Zohra making fun of dark skin - and, falling over herself to apologize,
tumbled into Zohra's mistake: 'Oh, notion, Mary, how could you think I was
making fun of you?'
Horn-templed, cucumber-nosed, I lay in my crib and listened; and
everything that happened, happened because of me ... One day in January
1948, at five in the afternoon, my father was visited by Dr Narlikar. There
were embraces as usual, and slaps on the back. 'A little chess?' my father
asked, ritually, because these visits were getting to be a habit. They would
play chess in the old Indian way, the game of shatranj, and, freed by the
simplicities of the chess-board from the convolutions of his life, Ahmed
would daydream for an hour about the re-shaping of the Quran; and then it
would be six o'clock, cocktail hour, time for the djinns ... but this
evening Narlikar said, 'No.' And Ahmed, 'No? What's this
no
? Come, sit,
play, gossip ...' Narlikar, interrupting: 'Tonight, brother Sinai, there is
something I must show you.' They are in a 1946 Rover now, Narlikar working
the crankshaft and jumping in; they are driving north along Warden Road,
past Mahalaxmi Temple on the left and Willingdon Club golf-course on the
right, leaving the race-track behind them, cruising along Hornby Vellard
beside the sea wall; Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium is in sight, with its giant
cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, Bano Devi the Invincible Woman and Dara
Singh, mightiest of all... there are channa-vendors and dog-walkers
promenading by the sea. 'Stop,' Narlikar commands, and they get out. They
stand facing the sea; sea-breeze cools their faces; and out there, at the
end of a narrow cement path in the midst of the waves, is the island on
which stands the tomb of Haji Ali the mystic. Pilgrims are strolling between
Vellard and tomb.
'There,' Narlikar points, 'What do you see?' And Ahmed, mystified,
'Nothing. The tomb. People. What's this about, old chap?' And Narlikar,
'None of that.
There
!' And now Ahmed sees that Narlikar's pointing finger is
aimed at the cement path ... 'The promenade?' he asks, 'What's that to you?
In some minutes the tide will come and cover it up; everybody knows ...'
Narlikar, his skin glowing like a beacon, becomes philosophical. 'Just so,
brother Ahmed; just so. Land and sea; sea and land; the eternal struggle,
not so?' Ahmed, puzzled, remains silent. 'Once there were seven islands,'
Narlikar reminds Mm, 'Worli, Mahim, Salsette, Matunga, Colaba, Mazagaon,
Bombay. The British joined them up. Sea, brother Ahmed, became land. Land
arose, and did not sink beneath the tides!' Ahmed is anxious for his whisky;
his lip begins to jut while pilgrims scurry off the narrowing path. 'The
point,' he demands. And Narlikar, dazzling with effulgence: 'The point,
Ahmed bhai, is
this
!'
It comes out of his pocket: a little plaster-of-paris model two inches
high: the tetrapod! Like a three-dimensional Mercedes-Benz sign, three legs
standing on his palm, a fourth rearing lingam-fashion into the evening air,
it transfixes my father. 'What is it?' he asks; and now Narlikar tells him:
'This is the baby that will make us richer than Hyderabad, bhai! The little
gimmick that will make you, you and me, the masters of
that!
He points
outwards to where sea is rushing over deserted cement pathway... 'The land
beneath the sea, my friend! We must manufacture these by the thousand - by
tens of thousands! We must tender for reclamation contracts; a fortune is
waiting; don't miss it, brother, this is the chance of a lifetime!'
Why did my father agree to dream a gynaecologist's entrepreneurial
dream? Why, little by little, did the vision of full-sized concrete
tetrapods marching over sea walk, four-legged conquerors triumphing over the
sea, capture him as surely as it had the gleaming doctor? Why, in the
following years, did Ahmed dedicate himself to the fantasy of every
island-dweller - the myth of conquering the waves? Perhaps because he was
afraid of missing yet another turning; perhaps for the fellowship of games
of shatranj; or maybe it was Narlikar's plausibility - 'Your capital and my
contacts, Ahmed bhai, what problem can there be? Every great man in this
city has a son brought into the world by me; no doors will close. You
manufacture; I will get the contract! Fifty-fifty; fair is fair!' But, in my
view, there is a simpler explanation. My father, deprived of wifely
attention, supplanted by
bis
son, blurred by whisky and djinn, was trying to
restore his position in the world; and the dream of tetrapods offered him
the chance. Whole-heartedly, he threw himself into the great folly; letters
were written, doors knocked upon, black money changed hands; all of which
served to make Ahmed Sinai a name known in the corridors of the Sachivalaya
- in the passageways of the State Secretariat they got the whiff of a Muslim
who was throwing his rupees around like water. And Ahmed Sinai, drinking
himself to sleep, was unaware of the danger he was in.
Our lives, at this period, were shaped by correspondence. The Prime
Minister wrote to me when I was just seven days old - before I could even
wipe my own nose I was receiving fan letters from
Times of India
readers;
and one morning in January Ahmed Sinai, too, received a letter he would
never forget.
Red eyes at breakfast were followed by the shaven chin of the working
day; footsteps down the stairs; alarmed giggles of Coca-Cola girl. The
squeak of a chair drawn up to a desk topped with green leathercloth.
Metallic noise of a metal paper-cutter being lifted, colliding momentarily
with telephone. The brief rasp of metal slicing envelope; and one minute
later, Ahmed was running back up the stairs, yelling for my mother,
shouting:
'Amina! Come here, wife! The bastards have shoved my balls in an
ice-bucket!'
In the days after Ahmed received the formal letter informing him of the
freezing of all his assets, the whole world was talking at once ... 'For
pity's sake, janum, such language!' Amina is saying - and is it my
imagination, or does a baby blush in a sky-blue crib?
And Narlikar, arriving in a lather of perspiration, 'I blame myself
entirely; we made ourselves too public. These are bad times, Sinai bhai -
freeze a Muslim's assets, they say, and you make him run to Pakistan,
leaving all his wealth behind him. Catch the lizard's tail and he'll snap it
off! This so-called secular state gets some damn clever ideas.'
'Everything,' Ahmed Sinai is saying, 'bank account; savings bonds; the
rents from the Kurla properties - all blocked, frozen. By order, the letter
says. By order they will not let me have four annas, wife - not a chavanni
to see the peepshow!'
'It's those photos in the paper,' Amina decides. 'Otherwise how could
those jumped-up clever dicks know whom to prosecute? My God, janum, it's my
fault ...'
'Not ten pice for a twist of channa,' Ahmed Sinai adds, 'not one anna
to give alms to a beggar. Frozen - like in the fridge!'
'It's my fault,' Ismail Ibrahim is saying, 'I should have warned you,
Sinai bhai. I have heard about these freezings - only well-off Muslims are
selected, naturally. You must fight ...'
'... Tooth and nail!' Homi Catrack insists, 'Like a lion! Like
Aurangzeb - your ancestor, isn't it? - like the Rani of Jhansi! Then let's
see what kind of country we've ended up in!'
'There are law courts in this State,' Ismail Ibrahim adds;
Nussie-the-duck smiles a bovine smile as she suckles Sonny; her fingers
move, absently stroking Ms hollows, up and around, down and about, in a
steady, unchanging rhythm ... 'You must accept my legal services,' Ismail
tells Ahmed, 'Absolutely free, my good friend. No, no I won't hear of it.
How can it be? We are neighbours.'
'Broke,' Ahmed is saying, 'Frozen, like water.'
'Come on now,' Amina interrupts him; her dedication rising to new
heights, she leads him towards her bedroom... 'Janum, you need to lie for
some time.' And Ahmed: 'What's this, wife? A time like this -cleaned out;
finished; crushed like ice - and you think about...' But she has closed the
door; slippers have been kicked off; arms are reaching towards him; and some
moments later her hands are stretching down down down; and then, 'Oh my
goodness, janum, I thought you were just talking dirty but it's true! So
cold, Allah, so coooold, like little round cubes of ice!'
Such things happen; after the State froze my father's assets, my mother
began to feel them growing colder and colder. On the first day, the Brass
Monkey was conceived - just in time, because after that, although Amina lay
every night with her husband to warm him, although she snuggled up tightly
when she felt him shiver as the icy fingers of rage and powerlessness spread
upwards from his loins, she could no longer bear to stretch out her hand and
touch because his little cubes of ice had become too frigid to hold.
They - we - should have known something bad would happen. That January,
Chowpatty Beach, and Juhu and Trombay, too, were littered with the ominous
corpses of dead pomfret, which floated, without the ghost of an explanation,
belly-side-up, like scaly fingers in to shore.
Snakes and ladders
And other omens: comets were seen exploding above the Back Bay; it was
reported that flowers had been seen bleeding real blood; and in February the
snakes escaped from the Schaapsteker Institute. The rumour spread that a mad
Bengali snake-charmer, a Tubriwallah, was travelling the country, charming
reptiles from captivity, leading them out of snake farms (such as the
Schaapsteker, where snake venom's medicinal functions were studied, and
antivenenes devised) by the Pied Piper fascination of his flute, in
retribution for the partition of his beloved Golden Bengal. After a while
the rumours added that the Tubriwallah was seven feet tall, with bright blue
skin. He was Krishna come to chastise his people; he was the sky-hued Jesus
of the missionaries.
It seems that, in the aftermath of my changeling birth, while I
enlarged myself at breakneck speed, everything that could possibly go wrong
began to do so. In the snake winter of early 1948, and in the succeeding hot
and rainy seasons, events piled upon events, so that by the time the Brass
Monkey was born in September we were all exhausted, and ready for a few
years' rest.
Escaped cobras vanished into the sewers of the city; banded kraits were
seen on buses. Religious leaders described the' snake escape as a warning -
the god Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the
nation's official renunciation of its deities. ('We are a secular State,'
Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed
Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary
had been asking, 'How are we going to live now, Madam?' Homi Catrack
introduced us to Dr Schaapsteker himself. He was eighty-one years old;
his
tongue flicked constantly in and out between his papery lips; and he was
prepared to pay cash rent for a top-floor apartment overlooking the Arabian
Sea. Ahmed Sinai, in those days, had taken to his bed; the icy cold of the
freeze impregnated his bedsheets; he downed vast quantities of whisky for
medicinal purposes, but it failed to warm him up ... so it was Amina who
agreed to let the upper storey of Buckingham Villa to the old snake-doctor.
At the end of February, snake poison entered our lives.
Dr Schaapsteker was a man who engendered wild stories. The more
superstitious orderlies at his Institute swore that he had the capacity of
dreaming every night about being bitten by snakes, and thus remained immune
to their bites. Others whispered that he was half-snake himself, the child
of an unnatural union between a woman and a cobra. His obsession with the
venom of the banded krait -
bungarus fasciatus -
was becoming legendary.
There is no known antivenene to the bite of
bungarus:
but Schaapsteker had
devoted his life to finding one. Buying broken-down horses from the Catrack
stables (among others) he injected them with small doses of poison; but the
horses, unhelpfully, failed to develop antibodies, frothed at the mouth,
died standing up and had to be transformed into glue. It was said that Dr
Schaapsteker - 'Sharpsticker sahib' - had now acquired the power of killing
horses simply by approaching them with a hypodermic syringe ... but Amina
paid no attention to these tall stories. 'He is an old gentleman,' she told
Mary Pereira; 'What should we care about people who black-tongue him? He
pays his rent, and permits us to live.' Amina was grateful to the European
snake-doctor, particularly in those days of the freeze when Ahmed did not
seem to have the nerve to fight.
'My beloved father and mother,' Amina wrote, 'By my eyes and head I
swear I do not know why such things are happening to us ... Ahmed is a good
man, but this business has hit him hard. If you have advice for your
daughter, she is greatly in need of it.' Three days after they received this
letter, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother arrived at Bombay Central Station by
Frontier Mail; and Amina, driving them home in our 1946 Rover, looked out of
a side window and saw the Mahalaxmi Racecourse; and had the first germ of
her reckless idea.
'This modern decoration is all right for you young people,
whatsits-name,' Reverend Mother said. 'But give me one old-fashioned takht
to sit on. These chairs are so soft, whatsitsname, they make me feel like
I'm falling.'
'Is he ill?' Aadam Aziz asked. 'Should I examine him and prescribe
medicines?'
'This is no time to hide in bed,' Reverend Mother pronounced. 'Now he
must be a man, whatsitsname, and do a man's business.'
'How well you both look, my parents,' Amina cried, thinking that her
father was turning into an old man who seemed to be getting shorter with the
passing years; while Reverend Mother had grown so wide that armchairs,
though soft, groaned beneath her weight... and sometimes, through a trick-of
the light, Amina thought she saw, in the centre of her father's body, a dark
shadow like a hole.
'What is left in this India?' Reverend Mother asked, hand slicing air.
'Go, leave it all, go to Pakistan. See how well that Zulfikar is doing - he
will give you a start. Be a man, my son - get up and start again!'
'He doesn't want to speak now,' Amina said, 'he must rest.'
'Rest?' Aadam Aziz roared. 'The man is a jelly!'
'Even Alia, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother said, 'all on her own, gone
to Pakistan - even she is making a decent life, teaching in a fine school.
They say she will be headmistress soon.'
'Shhh, mother, he wants to sleep ... let's go next door ...'
'There is a time to sleep, whatsitsname, and a time to wake! Listen:
Mustapha is making many hundreds of rupees a month, whatsitsname, in the
Civil Service. What is your husband? Too good to work?'
'Mother, he is upset. His temperature is so low ...'
'What food are you giving? From today, whatsitsname, I will run your
kitchen. Young people today - like babies, whatsitsname!'
'Just as you like, mother.'
'I tell you whatsitsname, it's those photos in the paper. I wrote
-didn't I write? - no good would come of that. Photos take away pieces of
you. My God, whatsitsname, when I saw your picture, you had become so
transparent I could see the writing from the other side coming right through
your face!'
'But that's only ...'
'Don't tell me your stories, whatsitsname! I give thanks to God you
have recovered from that photography!'
After that day, Amina was freed from the exigencies of running her
home. Reverend Mother sat at the head of the dining-table, doling out food
(Amina took plates to Ahmed, who stayed in bed, moaning from time to time,
'Smashed, wife! Snapped - like an icicle!'); while, in the kitchens, Mary
Pereira took the time to prepare, for the benefit of their visitors, some of
the finest and most delicate mango pickles, lime chutneys and cucumber
kasaundies in the world. And now, restored to the status of daughter in her
own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people's food seeping
into her - because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of
intransigence, dishes imbued with the personality of their creator; Amina
ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination. And,
althiough Mary's pickles had a partially counteractive effect - since she
had stirred into them the guilt of her heart, and the fear of discovery, so
that, good as they tasted, they had the power of making those who ate them
subject to nameless uncertainties and dreams of accusing fingers - the diet
provided by Reverend Mother filled Amina with a kind of rage, and even
produced slight signs of improvement in her defeated husband. So that
finally the day came when Amina, who had been watching me play incompetently
with toy horses of sandal wood in the bath, inhaling the sweet odours of
sandalwood which the bathwater released, suddenly rediscovered within
herself the adventurous streak which was her inheritance from her fading
father, the streak which had brought Aadam Aziz down from
bis
mountain
valley; Amina turned to Mary Pereira and said, 'I'm fed up. If nobody in
this house is going to put things right, then it's just going to be up to
me!'
Toy horses galloped behind Amina's eyes as she left Mary to dry me and
marched into her bedroom. Remembered glimpses of Mahalaxmi Racecourse
cantered in her head as she pushed aside saris and petticoats. The fever of
a reckless scheme flushed her cheeks as she opened the lid of an old tin
trunk... filling her purse with the coins and rupee notes of grateful
patients and wedding-guests, my mother went to the races.
With the Brass Monkey growing inside her, my mother stalked the
paddocks of the racecourse named after the goddess of wealth; braving
early-morning sickness and varicose veins, she stood in line at the Tote
window, putting money on three-horse accumulators and long-odds outsiders.
Ignorant of the first thing about horses, she backed mares known not to be
stayers to win long races; she put her money on jockeys because she liked
their smiles. Clutching a purse full of the dowry which had lain untouched
in its trunk since her own mother had packed it away, she took wild flutters
on stallions who looked fit for the Schaapsteker Institute ... and won, and
won, and won.
'Good news,' Ismail Ibrahim is saying, 'I always thought you should
fight the bastards. I'll begin proceedings at once ... but it will take
cash, Amina. Have you got cash?'
'The money will be there.'
'Not for myself,' Ismail explains, 'My services are, as I said, free,
gratis absolutely. But, forgive me, you must know how things are, one must
give little presents to people to smooth one's way ...'
'Here,' Amina hands him an envelope, 'Will this do for now?'
'My God,' Ismail Ibrahim drops the packet in surprise and rupee notes
in large denominations scatter all over his sitting-room floor, 'Where did
you lay your hands on ...' And Amina, 'Better you don't ask - and I won't
ask how you spend it.'
Schaapsteker money paid for our food bills; but horses fought our war.
The streak of luck of my mother at the race-track was so long, a seam so
rich, that if it hadn't happened it wouldn't have been credible ... for
month after month, she put her money on a jockey's nice tidy hair-style or a
horse's pretty piebald colouring; and she never left the track without a
large envelope stuffed with notes.
'Things are going well,' Ismail Ibrahim told her, 'But Amina sister,
God knows what you are up to. Is it decent? Is it legal?' And Amina: 'Don't
worry your head. What can't be cured must be endured. I am doing what must
be done.'
Never once in all that time did my mother take pleasure in her mighty
victories; because she was weighed down by more than a baby - eating
Reverend Mother's curries filled with ancient prejudices, she had become
convinced that gambling was the next worst thing on earth, next to alcohol;
so, although she was not a criminal, she felt consumed by sin.
Verrucas plagued her feet, although Purushottam the sadhu, who sat
under our garden tap until dripping water created a bald patch amid the
luxuriantly matted hair on his head, was a marvel at charming them away; but
throughout the snake winter and the hot season, my mother fought her
husband's fight.
You ask: how is it possible? How could a housewife, however assiduous,
however determined, win fortunes on the horses, day after racing day, month
after month? You think to yourself: aha, that Homi Catrack, he's a
horse-owner; and everyone knows that most of the races are fixed; Amina was
asking her neighbour for hot tips! A plausible notion; but Mr Catrack
himself lost as often as he won; he saw my mother at the race-track and was
astounded by her success. ('Please,' Amina asked him, 'Catrack Sahib, let
this be our secret. Gambling is a terrible thing; it would be so shaming if
my mother found out.' And Catrack, nodding dazedly, said, 'Just as you
wish.') So it was not the Parsee who was behind it - but perhaps I can offer
another explanation. Here it is, in a sky-blue crib in a sky-blue room with
a fisherman's pointing finger on the wall: here, whenever his mother goes
away clutching a purse full of secrets, is Baby Saleem, who has acquired an
expression of the most intense concentration, whose eyes have been seized by
a singleness of purpose of such enormous power that it has darkened them to
deep navy blue, and whose nose is twitching strangely while he appears to be
watching some distant event, to be guiding it from a distance, just as the
moon controls the tides.
'Coming to court very soon,' Ismail Ibrahim said, 'I think you can be
fairly confident ... my God, Amina, have you found King Solomon's Mines?'
The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with
Snakes and Ladders. О perfect balance of rewards and penalties! О seemingly
random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down
snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of
trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated
him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the
ladders and nibbling snakes.
All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as
no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder
you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a
ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick
affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things,
the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of
ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of
staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions,
Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and
Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose ... but I found, very early in my
life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity -beca
use, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a
ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake ... Keeping things
simple for the moment, however, I record that no sooner had my mother
discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she
was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes.
Amina's brother Hanif had not gone to Pakistan. Following the childhood
dream which he had whispered to Rashid the rickshaw-boy in an Agra
cornfield, he had arrived in Bombay and sought employ, ment in the great
film studios. Precociously confident, he had not only succeeded in becoming
the youngest man ever to be given a film to direct in the history of the
Indian cinema; he had also wooed and married one of the brightest stars of
that celluloid heaven, the divine Pia, whose face was her fortune, and whose
saris were made of fabrics whose designers had clearly set out to prove that
it was possible to incorporate every colour known to man in a single
pattern. Reverend Mother did not approve of the divine Pia, but Hanif of all
my family was the one who was free of her confining influence; a jolly,
burly man with the booming laugh of the boatman Tai and the explosive,
innocent anger of his father Aadam Aziz, he took her to live simply in a
small, un-filmi apartment on Marine Drive, telling her, 'Plenty of time to
live like Emperors after I've made my name.' She acquiesced; she starred in
his first feature, which was partly financed by Homi Catrack and partly by
D. W. Rama Studios (Pvt.) Ltd - it was called
The Lovers of Kashmir,
and one
evening in the midst of her racing days Amina Sinai went to the premiere.
Her parents did not come, thanks to Reverend Mother's loathing of the
cinema, against which Aadam Aziz no longer had the strength to struggle -
just as he, who had fought with Mian Abdullah against Pakistan, no longer
argued with her when she praised the country, retaining just enough strength
to dig in his heels and refuse to emigrate; but Ahmed Sinai, revived by his
mother-in-law's cookery, but resentful of her continued presence, got to his
feet and accompanied his wife. They took their seats, next to Hanif and. Pia
and the male star of the film, one of India's most successful 'lover-boys',
I. S. Nayyar. And, although they didn't know it, a serpent waited in the
wings... but in the meanwhile, let us permit Hanif Aziz to have his moment;
because
The Lovers of Kashmir
contained a notion which was to provide my
uncle with a spectacular, though brief, period of triumph. In those days it
was not permitted for lover-boys and their leading ladies to touch one
another on screen, for fear that their osculations might corrupt the
nation's youth ... but thirty-three minutes after the beginning of
The
Lovers
the premiere audience began to give off a low buzz of shock, because
Pia and Nayyar had begun to kiss - not one another - but
things.
Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with all the rich fullness of her
painted lips; then passed it to Nayyar; who planted, upon its opposite face,
a virilely passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as
the indirect kiss - and how much more sophisticated a notion it was than
anything in our current cinema; how pregnant with longing and eroticism! The
cinema audience (which would, nowadays, cheer raucously at the sight of a
young couple diving behind
л
bush, which would then begin to shake
ridiculously - so low have we sunk in our ability to suggest) watched,
riveted to the screen, as the love of Pia and Nayyar, against a background
of Dal Lake and ice-blue Kashmiri sky, expressed itself in kisses applied to
cups of pink Kashmiri tea; by the fountains of Shalimar they pressed their
lips to a sword ... but now, at the height of Hanif Aziz's triumph, the
serpent refused to wait; under its influence, the house-lights came up.
Against the larger-than-life figures of Pia and Nayyar, kissing mangoes as
they mouthed to playback music, the figure of a timorous, inadequately
bearded man was seen, marching on to the stage beneath the screen,
microphone in hand. The Serpent can take most unexpected forms; now, in the
guise of this ineffectual house-manager, it unleashed its venom. Pia and
Nayyar faded and died; and the amplified voice of the bearded man said:
'Ladies and gents, your pardon; but there is terrible news.' His voice broke
- a sob from the Serpent, to lend power to its teeth! - and then continued,
'This afternoon, at Birla House in Delhi, our beloved Mahatma was killed.
Some madman shot him in the stomach, ladies and gentlemen - our Bapu is
gone!'
The audience had begun to scream before he finished; the poison of his
words entered their veins - there were grown men rolling in the aisles
clutching their bellies, not laughing but crying,
Hai Ram! Hai Ram! -
and
women tearing their hair: the city's finest coiffures tumbling around the
ears of the poisoned ladies - there were film-stars yelling like fishwives
and something terrible to smell in the air - and Hanif whispered, 'Get out
of here, big sister - if a Muslim did this thing there will be hell to pay.'
For every ladder, there is a snake ... and for forty-eight hours after
the abortive end of
The Lovers of Kashmir,
our family remained within the
walls of Buckingham Villa ('Put furniture against the doors, whatsitsname!'
Reverend Mother ordered. 'If there are Hindu servants, let them go home!');
and Amina did not dare to visit the racetrack.
But for every snake, there is a ladder: and finally the radio gave us a
name. Nathuram Godse. 'Thank God,' Amina burst out, 'It's not a Muslim
name!'
And Aadam, upon whom the news of Gandhi's death had placed a new burden
of age: 'This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!'
Amina, however, was full of the light-headedness of relief, she was
rushing dizzily up the long ladder of relief... 'Why not, after all? By
being Godse he has saved our lives!'
Ahmed Sinai, after rising from his supposed sickbed, continued to
behave like an invalid. In a voice like cloudy glass he told Amina, 'So, you
have told Ismail to go to court; very well, good; but we will lose. In these
courts you have to buy judges...' And Amina, rushing to Ismail, 'Never -
never under any circumstances - must you tell Ahmed about the money. A man
must keep his pride.' And, later on, 'No, janum, I'm not going anywhere; no,
the baby is not being tiring at all; you rest, I must just go to shop -
maybe I will visit Hanif- we women, you know, must fill up our days!'
And coming home with envelopes brimming with rupee-notes ... 'Take,
Ismail, now that he's up we have to be quick and careful!' And sitting
dutifully beside her mother in the evenings, 'Yes, of course you're right,
and Ahmed will be getting so rich soon, you'll just see!'
And endless delays in court; and envelopes, emptying; and the growing
baby, nearing the point at which Amina will not be able to insert herself
behind the driving-wheel of the 1946 Rover; and can her luck hold?; and Musa
and Mary, quarrelling like aged tigers.
What starts fights?
What remnants of guilt fear shame, pickled by time in Mary's
intestines, led her willingly? unwillingly? to provoke the aged bearer in a
dozen different ways - by a tilt of the nose to indicate her superior
status; by aggressive counting of rosary beads under the nose of the devout
Muslim; by acceptance of the title mausi, little mother, bestowed upon her
by the other Estate servants, which Musa saw as a threat to his status; by
excessive familiarity with the Begum Sahiba -little giggled whispers in
corners, just loud enough for formal, stiff, correct Musa to hear and feel
somehow cheated?
What tiny grain of grit, in the sea of old age now washing over the old
bearer, lodged between
bis
lips to fatten into the dark pearl of hatred -
into what unaccustomed torpors did Musa fall, becoming leaden of hand and
foot, so that vases were broken, ashtrays spilled, and a veiled hint of
forthcoming dismissal - from Mary's conscious or unconscious lips? - grew
into an obsessive fear, which rebounded upon the person who started it off?
And (not to omit social factors) what was the brutalizing effect of
servant status, of a servants' room behind a blackstoved kitchen, in which
Musa was obliged to sleep along with gardener, odd-job boy, and hamal -
while Mary slept in style on a rush mat beside a new-born child?
And was Mary blameless or not? Did her inability to go to church
-because in churches you found confessionals, and in confessionals secrets
could not be kept - turn sour inside her and make her a little sharp, a
little hurtful?
Or must we look beyond psychology - seeking our answer in statements
such as, there was a snake lying in wait for Mary, and Musa was doomed to
learn about the ambiguity of ladders? Or further still, beyond
snake-and-ladder, should we see the Hand of Fate in the quarrel - and say,
in order for Musa to return as explosive ghost, in order for him to adopt
the role of Bomb-in-Bombay, it was necessary to engineer a departure ... or,
descending from such sublimities to the ridiculous, could it be that Ahmed
Sinai - whom whisky provoked, whom djinns goaded into excesses of rudeness -
had so incensed the aged bearer that his crime, with which he equalled
Mary's record, was committed out of the injured pride of an abused old
servitor - and was nothing to do with Mary at all?
Ending questions, I confine myself to facts: Musa and Mary were
perpetually at daggers drawn. And yes: Ahmed insulted him, and Amina's
pacifying efforts may not have been successful; and yes: the fuddling
shadows of age had convinced him he would be dismissed, without warning, at
any moment; and so it was that Amina came to discover, one August morning,
that the house had been burgled.
The police came. Amina reported what was missing: a silver spittoon
encrusted with lapis lazuli; gold coins; bejewelled samovars and silver
tea-services; the contents of a green tin trunk. Servants were lined up in
the hall and subjected to the threats of Inspector Johnny Vakeel. 'Come on,
own up now' - lathi-stick tapping against his leg -'or you'll see what we
can't do to you. You want to stand on one leg all day and night? You want
water thrown over you, sometimes boiling hot, sometimes freezing cold? We
have many methods in the Police Force ..." And now a cacophony of noise from
servants, Not me, Inspector Sahib, I am honest boy; for pity's sake, search
my things, sahib! And Amina: 'This is too much, sir, you go too far. My Mary
I know, anyway, is innocent. I will not have her questioned.' Suppressed
irritation of police officer. A search of belongings is instituted - 'Just
in case, Madam. These fellows have limited intelligence - and maybe you
discovered the theft too soon for the felon to abscond with the booty!'
The search succeeds. In the bedroll of Musa the old bearer: a silver
spittoon. Wrapped in
his
puny bundle of clothes: gold coins, a silver
samovar. Secreted under his charpoy bed: a missing tea-service. And now Musa
has thrown himself at Ahmed Sinai's feet; Musa is begging, 'Forgive, sahib!
I was mad; I thought you were going to throw me into the street!' but Ahmed
Sinai will not listen; the freeze is upon him; 'I feel so weak,' he says,
and leaves the room; and Amina, aghast, asks: 'But, Musa, why did you make
that terrible oath?'
... Because, in the interim between line-up in passageway and
discoveries in servants' quarters, Musa had said to his master: 'It was not
me, sahib. If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper! May my old
skin run with sores!'
Amina, with horror on her face, awaits Musa's reply. The bearer's old
face twists into a mask of anger; words are spat out. 'Begum Sahiba, I only
took your precious possessions, but you, and your sahib, and his father,
have taken my whole life; and in my old age you have humiliated me with
Christian ayahs.'
There is silence in Buckingham Villa - Amina has refused to press
charges, but Musa is leaving. Bedroll on his back, he descends a spiral iron
staircase, discovering that ladders can go down as well as up; he walks away
down hillock, leaving a curse upon the house.
And (was it the curse that did it?) Mary Pereira is about to discover
that even when you win a battle; even when staircases operate in your
favour, you can't avoid a snake.
Amina says, 'I can't get you any more money, Ismail; have you had
enough?' And Ismail, 'I hope so - but you never know - is there any chance
of... ?' But Amina: 'The trouble is, I've got so big and all, I can't get in
the car any more. It will just have to do.'
... Time is slowing down for Amina once more; once again, her eyes look
through leaded glass, in which red tulips, green-stemmed, dance in unison;
for a second time, her gaze lingers on a clocktower which has not worked
since the rains of 1947; once again, it is raining. The racing season is
over.
A pale blue clocktower: squat, peeling, inoperational. It stood on
black-tarred concrete at the end of the circus-ring - the flat roof of the
upper storey of the buildings along Warden Road, which abutted our
two-storey hillock, so that if you climbed over Buckingham Villa's boundary
wall, flat black tar would be under your feet. And beneath black tar, Breach
Candy Kindergarten School, from which, every afternoon during term, there
rose the tinkling music of Miss Harrison's piano playing the unchanging
tunes of childhood; and below that, the shops, Reader's Paradise, Fatbhoy
Jewellery, Chimalker's Toys and Bombelli's, with its windows filled with One
Yards of Chocolates. The door to the clocktower was supposed to be locked,
but it was a cheap lock of a kind Nadir Khan would have recognized: made in
India. And on three successive evenings immediately before my first
birthday, Mary Pereira, standing by my window at night, noticed a shadowy
figure floating across the roof, his hands full of shapeless objects, a
shadow which filled her with an unidentifiable dread. After the third night,
she told my mother; the police were summoned; and Inspector Vakeel returned
to Methwold's Estate, accompanied by a special squad of crack officers -
'all deadeye shots. Begum Sahiba; just you leave it all to us!' - who,
disguised as sweepers, with guns concealed under their rags, kept the
clocktower under surveillance while sweeping up the dust in the circus-ring.
Night fell. Behind curtains and chick-blinds, the inhabitants of
Methwold's Estate peered fearfully in the direction of the clocktower.
Sweepers, absurdly, went about their duties in the dark. Johnny Vakeel took
up a position on our verandah, rifle just out of sight... and, at midnight,
a shadow came over the side wall of the Breach Candy school and made its way
towards the tower, with a sack slung over one shoulder ... 'He must enter,'
Vakeel had told Amina; 'Must be sure we get the proper johnny.' The johnny,
padding across flat tarred roof, arrived at the tower; entered.
'Inspector Sahib, what are you waiting for?'
'Shhh, Begum, this is police business; please go inside some way. We
shall take him when he comes out; you mark my words. Caught,' Vakeel said
with satisfaction, 'like a rat in a trap.'
'But who is he?'
'Who knows?' Vakeel shrugged. 'Some badmaash for sure. There are bad
eggs everywhere these days.'
... And then the silence of the night is split like milk by a single,
sawn-off shriek; somebody lurches against the inside of the clocktower door;
it is wrenched open; there is a crash; and something streaks out on to black
tarmac. Inspector Vakeel leaps into action, swinging up his rifle, shooting
from the hip like John Wayne; sweepers extract marksmen's weapons from their
brushes and blaze away ... shrieks of excited women, yells of servants ...
silence.
What lies, brown and black, banded and serpentine on the black tarmac?
What, leaking black blood, provokes Dr Schaapsteker to screech from his
top-floor vantage-point: 'You complete fools! Brothers of cockroaches! Sons
of transvestites!' ... what, flick-tongued, dies while Vakeel races on to
tarred roof?
And inside the clocktower door? What weight, falling, created such an
almighty crash? Whose hand wrenched a door open; in whose heel are visible
the two red, flowing holes, filled with a venom for which there is no known
antivenene, a poison which has killed stablefuls of worn-out horses? Whose
body is carried out of the tower by plain-clothes men, in a dead march,
coffinless, with imitation sweepers for pallbearers? Why, when the moonlight
falls upon the dead face, does Mary Pereira fall like a sack of potatoes to
the floor, eyes rolling upwards in their sockets, in a sudden and dramatic
faint?
And lining the interior walls of the clocktower: what are these strange
mechanisms, attached to cheap time-pieces - why are there so many bottles
with rags stuffed into their necks?
'Damn lucky you called my boys out, Begum Sahiba,' Inspector Vakeel is
saying. 'That was Joseph D'Costa - on our Most Wanted list. Been after him
for a year or thereabouts. Absolute black-hearted badmaash. You should see
the walls inside that clocktower! Shelves, filled from floor to ceiling with
home-made bombs. Enough explosive power to blow this hill into the sea!'
Melodrama piling upon melodrama; life acquiring the colouring of a
Bombay talkie; snakes following ladders, ladders succeeding snakes; in the
midst of too much incident, Baby Saleem fell ill. As if incapable of
assimilating so many goings-on, he closed his eyes and became red and
flushed. While Amina awaited the results of Ismail's case against the State
authorities; while the Brass Monkey grew in her womb; while Mary entered a
state of shock from which she would fully emerge only when Joseph's ghost
returned to haunt her; while umbilical cord hung in pickle-jar and Mary's
chutneys filled our dreams with pointing fingers; while Reverend Mother ran
the kitchens, my grandfather examined me and said, 'I'm afraid there is no
doubt; the poor lad has typhoid.'
'O God in heaven,' Reverend Mother cried out, 'What dark devil has
come, whatsitsname, to sit upon this house?'
This is how I have heard the story of the illness which nearly stopped
me before I'd started: day and night, at the end of August 1948, mother and
grandfather looked after me; Mary dragged herself out of her guilt and
pressed cold flannels to my forehead; Reverend Mother sang lullabies and
spooned food into my mouth; even my father, forgetting momentarily his own
disorders, stood flapping helplessly in the doorway. But the night came when
Doctor Aziz, looking as broken as an old horse, said, 'There is nothing more
I can do. He will be dead by morning.' And in the midst of wailing women and
the incipient labour of my mother who had been pushed into it by grief and
the tearing of Mary Pereira's hair there was a knock; a servant announced Dr
Schaapsteker; who handed my grandfather a little bottle and said, 'I make no
bones about it: this is kill or cure. Two drops exactly; then wait and see.'
My grandfather, sitting head in hands in the rubble of his medical
learning, asked, 'What is it?' And Dr Schaapsteker, nearly eighty-two,
tongue flicking at the corners of his mouth: 'Diluted venene of the king
cobra. It has been known to work.'
Snakes can lead to triumph, just as ladders can be descended: my
grandfather, knowing I would die anyway, administered the cobra poison. The
family stood and watched while poison spread through the child's body ...
and six hours later, my temperature had returned to normal. After that, my
growth-rate lost its phenomenal aspects; but something was given in exchange
for what was lost: life, and an early awareness of the ambiguity of snakes.
While my temperature came down, my sister was being born at Narlikar's
Nursing Home. It was September ist; and the birth was so uneventful, so
effortless that it passed virtually unnoticed on Methwold's Estate; because
on the same day Ismail Ibrahim visited my parents at the clinic and
announced that the case had been won ... While Ismail celebrated, I was
grabbing the bars of my cot; while he cried, 'So much for freezes! Your
assets are your own again! By order of the High Court!', I was heaving
red-faced against gravity; and while Ismail announced, with a straight face,
'Sinai bhai, the rule of law has won a famous victory,' and avoided my
mother's delighted, triumphant eyes, I, Baby Saleem, aged exactly one year,
two weeks and one day, hauled myself upright in my cot.
The effects of the events of that day were twofold: I grew up with legs
that were irretrievably bowed, because I had got to my feet too early; and
the Brass Monkey (so called because of her thick thatch of red-gold hair,
which would not darken until she was nine) learned that, if she was going to
get any attention in her life, she would have to make plenty of noise.
Accident in a washing-chest
It has been two whole days since Padma stormed out of my life. For two
days, her place at the vat of mango kasaundy has been taken by another woman
- also thick of waist, also hairy of forearm; but, in my eyes, no
replacement at all! - while my own dung-lotus has vanished into I don't know
where. A balance Mas been upset; I feel.cracks widening down the length of
my body; because suddenly I am alone, without my necessary ear, and it isn't
enough. I am seized by a sudden fist of anger: why should I be so
unreasonably treated by my one disciple? Other men have recited stories
before me; other men were not so impetuously abandoned. When Valmiki, the
author of the
Ramayana,
dictated his masterpiece to elephant-headed Ganesh,
did the god walk out on him halfway? He certainly did not. (Note that,
despite my Muslim background, I'm enough of a Bombayite to be well up in
Hindu stories, and actually I'm very fond of the image of trunk-nosed,
flap-eared Ganesh solemnly taking dictation!)
How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition,
necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience? How to do without
her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps - kept? - my feet on the
ground? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle,
supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the
lotus-goddess of the present... but must I now become reconciled to the
narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?
I am, perhaps, hiding behind all these questions. Yes, perhaps that's
right. I should speak plainly, without the cloak of a question-mark: our
Padma has gone, and I miss her. Yes, that's it.
But there is still work to be done: for instance:
In the summer of 1956, when most things in the world were still larger
than myself, my sister the Brass Monkey developed the curious habit of
setting fire to shoes. While Nasser sank ships at Suez, thus slowing down
the movements of the world by obliging it to travel around the Cape of Good
Hope, my sister was also trying to impede our progress. Obliged to fight for
attention, possessed by her need to place herself at the centre of events,
even of unpleasant ones (she was my sister, after all; but no prime minister
wrote letters to her, no sadhus watched her from their places under garden
taps; unprophesied, un-photographed, her life was a struggle from the
start), she carried her war into the world of footwear, hoping, perhaps,
that by burning our shoes she would make us stand still long enough to
notice that she was there ... she made no attempt at concealing her crimes.
When my father entered his room to find a pair of black Oxfords on fire, the
Brass Monkey was standing over them, match in hand. His nostrils were
assailed by the unprecedented odour of ignited boot-leather, mingled with
Cherry Blossom boot-polish and a little Three-In-One oil ... 'Look, Abba!'
the Monkey said charmingly, 'Look how pretty -just the exact colour of my
hair!'
Despite all precautions, the merry red flowers of my sister's obsession
blossomed all over the Estate that summer, blooming in the sandals of
Nussie-the-duck and the film-magnate footwear of Homi Catrack; hair-coloured
flames licked at Mr Dubash's down-at-heel suedes and at Lila Sabarmati's
stiletto heels. Despite the concealment of matches and the vigilance of
servants, the Brass Monkey found her ways, undeterred by punishment and
threats. For one year, on and off, Methwold's Estate was assailed by the
fumes of incendiarized shoes; until her hair darkened into anonymous brown,
and she seemed to lose interest in matches.
Amina Sinai, abhorring the idea of beating her children,
temperamentally incapable of raising her voice, came close to her wits'end;
and the Monkey was sentenced, for day after day, to silence. This was my
mother's chosen disciplinary method: unable to strike us, she ordered us to
seal our lips. Some echo, no doubt, of the great silence with which her own
mother had tormented Aadam Aziz lingered in her ears - because silence, too,
has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any
sound - and with an emphatic
'Chup!'
she would place a finger across her
lips and command our tongues to be still. It was a punishment which never
failed to cow me into submission; the Brass Monkey, however, was made of
less pliant stuff. Soundlessly, behind lips clamped tight as her
grandmother's, she plotted the incineration of leather -just as once, long
ago, another monkey in another city had performed the act which made
inevitable the burning of a leathercloth godown ...
She was as beautiful (if somewhat scrawny) as I was ugly; but she was
from the first, mischievous as a whirlwind and noisy as a crowd. Count the
windows and vases, broken accidentally-on-purpose; number, if you can, the
meals that somehow flew off her treacherous dinner-plates, to stain valuable
Persian rugs! Silence was, indeed, the worst punishment she could have been
given; but she bore it cheerfully, standing innocently amid the ruins of
broken chairs and shattered ornaments.
Mary Pereira said, 'That one! That Monkey! Should have been born with
four legs!' But Amina, in whose mind the memory of her narrow escape from
giving birth to a two-headed son had obstinately refused to fade, cried,
'Mary! What are you saying? Don't even think such things!' ... Despite my
mother's protestations, it was true that the Brass Monkey was as much animal
as human; and, as all the servants and children on Methwold's Estate knew,
she had the gift of talking to birds, and to cats. Dogs, too: but after she
was bitten, at the age of six, by a supposedly rabid stray, and had to be
dragged kicking and screaming to Breach Candy Hospital, every afternoon for
three weeks, to be given an injection in the stomach, it seems she either
forgot their language or else refused to have any further dealings with
them. From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of
dangerous independence. The Brass Monkey was never so furious as when anyone
spoke to her in words of love; desperate for affection, deprived of it by my
overpowering shadow, she had a tendency to turn upon anyone who gave her
what she wanted, as if she were defending herself against the possibility of
being tricked.
... Such as the time when Sonny Ibrahim plucked up his courage to tell
her, 'Hey, listen, Saleem's sister - you're a solid type. I'm, um, you know,
damn keen on you ...' And at once she marched across to where his father and
mother were sipping lassi in the gardens of Sans Souci to say, 'Nussie
auntie, I don't know what your Sonny's been getting up to. Only just now I
saw him and Cyrus behind a bush, doing such funny rubbing things with their
soo-soos!' ...
The Brass Monkey had bad table manners; she trampled flowerbeds; she
acquired the tag of problem-child; but she and I were close-as-close, in
spite of framed letters from Delhi and sadhu-under-the-tap. From the
beginning, I decided to treat her as an ally, not a competitor; and, as a
result, she never once blamed me for my preeminence in our household,
saying, 'What's to blame? Is it your fault if they think you're so great?'
(But when, years later, I made the same mistake as Sonny, she treated me
just the same.)
And it was Monkey who, by answering a certain wrong-number telephone
call, began the process of events which led to my accident in a white
washing-chest made of slatted wood.
Already, at the age of nearlynine, I knew this much: everybody was
waiting for me. Midnight and baby-snaps, prophets and prime ministers had
created around me a glowing and inescapable mist of expectancy ... in which
my father pulled me into his squashy belly in the cool of the cocktail hour
to say, 'Great things! My son: what is not in store for you? Great deeds, a
great life!' While I, wriggling between jutting lip and big toe, wetting his
shirt with my eternally leaking nose-goo, turned scarlet and squealed, 'Let
me go, Abba! Everyone will
see!'
And he, embarrassing me beyond belief,
bellowed, 'Let them look! Let the whole world see how I love my son!'... and
my grandmother, visiting us one winter, gave me advice, too: 'Just pull up
your socks, whatsitsname, and you'll be better than anyone in the whole wide
world!' ... Adrift in this haze of anticipation, I had already felt within
myself the first movings of that shapeless animal which still, on these
Padmaless nights, champs and scratches in my stomach: cursed by a multitude
of hopes and nicknames (I had already acquired Sniffer and Snotnose), I
became afraid that everyone was wrong - that my much-trumpeted existence
might turn out to be utterly useless, void, and without the shred of a
purpose. And it was to escape from this beast that I took to hiding myself,
from an early age, in my mother's large white washing-chest; because
although the creature was inside me, the comforting presence of enveloping
soiled linen seemed to lull it into sleep.
Outside the washing-chest, surrounded by people who seemed to possess a
devastatingly clear sense of purpose, I buried myself in fairy-tales. Hatim
Tai and Batman, Superman and Sinbad helped to get me through the nearlynine
years. When I went shopping with Mary Pereira - overawed by her ability to
tell a chicken's age by looking at its neck, by the sheer determination with
which she stared dead pomfrets in the eyes - I became Aladdin, voyaging in a
fabulous cave; watching servants dusting vases with a dedication as majestic
as it was obscure, I imagined Ali Baba's forty thieves hiding in the dusted
urns; in the garden, staring at Purushottam the sadhu being eroded by water,
I turned into the genie of the lamp, and thus avoided, for the most part,
the terrible notion that I, alone in the universe, had no idea what I should
be, or how I should behave. Purpose: it crept up behind me when I stood
staring down from my window at European girls cavorting in the map-shaped
pool beside the sea. 'Where do you get it?' I yelped aloud; the Brass
Monkey, who shared my sky-blue room, jumped half-way out of her skin. I was
then nearlyeight; she was almostseven. It was a very early age at which to
be perplexed by meaning.
But servants are excluded from washing-chests; school buses, too, are
absent. In my nearlyninth year I had begun to attend the Cathedral and John
Connon Boys' High School on Outram Road in the old Fort district; washed and
brushed every morning, I stood at the foot of our two-storey hillock,
white-shorted, wearing a blue-striped elastic belt with a snake-buckle,
satchel over my shoulder, my mighty cucumber of a nose dripping as usual;
Eyeslice and Hairoil, Sonny Ibrahim and precocious Cyrus-the-great waited
too. And on the bus, amid rattling seats and the nostalgic cracks of the
window-panes, what certainties! What nearlynine-year-old certitudes about
the future! A boast from Sonny: 'I'm going to be a bullfighter; Spain!
Chiquitas! Hey, toro, toro!' His satchel held before him like the muleta of
Manolete, he enacted his future while the bus rattled around Kemp's Corner,
past Thomas Kemp and Co. (Chemists), beneath the Air-India rajah's poster
('See you later, alligator! I'm off to London on Air-India!') and the other
hoarding, on which, throughout my childhood, the Kolynos Kid, a gleamtoothed
pixie in a green, elfin, chlorophyll hat proclaimed the virtues of Kolynos
Toothpaste: 'Keep Teeth Kleen and Keep Teeth Brite! Keep Teeth Kolynos
Super
White!' The kid on his hoarding, the children in the bus: one-dimensional,
flattened by certitude, they knew what they were for. Here is Glandy Keith
Colaco, a thyroid balloon of a child with hair already sprouting tuftily on
his lip: 'I'm going to run my father's cinemas; you bastards want to watch
movies, you'll have to come an' beg me for seats!' ... And Fat Perce
Fishwala, whose obesity is due to nothing but overeating, and who, along
with Glandy Keith, occupies the privileged position of class bully: 'Bah!
That's nothing! I'll have diamonds and emeralds and moonstones! Pearls as
big as my balls!' Fat Perce's father runs the city's other jewellery
business; his great enemy is the son of Mr Fatbhoy, who, being small and
intellectual, comes off badly in the war of the pearl-tcsticled children ...
And Eyeslice, announcing his future as a Test cricketer, with a fine
disregard for his one empty socket; and Hairoil, who is as slicked-down and
neat as his brother is curly-topped and dishevelled, says, 'What selfish
bums you are! I shall follow my father into the Navy; I shall defend my
country!' Whereupon he is pelted with rulers, compasses, inky pellets ... in
the school bus, as it clattered past Chowpatty Beach, as it turned left off
Marine Drive beside the apartment of my favourite uncle Hanif and headed
past Victoria Terminus towards Flora Fountain, past Churchgate Station and
Crawford Market, I held my peace; I was mild-mannered Clark Kent protecting
my secret identity; but what on earth was that? 'Hey, Snotnose!' Glandy
Keith yelled, 'Hey, whaddya suppose our Sniffer'11 grow up to be?' And the
answering yell from Fat Perce Fishwala, 'Pinocchio!' And the rest, joining
in, sing a raucous chorus of 'There are no strings on me!' ... while
Cyrus-the-great sits quiet as genius and plans the future of the nation's
leading nuclear research establishment.
And, at home, there was the Brass Monkey with her shoe-burning; and my
father, who had emerged from the depths of his collapse to fall, once more,
into the folly of tetrapods ... 'Where do you find it?' I pleaded at my
window; the fisherman's finger pointed, misleadingly, out to sea.
Banned from washing-chests: cries of 'Pinocchio! Cucumber-nose!
Goo-face!' Concealed in my hiding-place, I was safe from the memory of Miss
Kapadia, the teacher at Breach Candy Kindergarten, who had, on my first day
at school, turned from her blackboard to greet me, seen my nose, and dropped
her duster in alarm, smashing the nail on her big toe, in a screechy but
minor echo of my father's famous mishap; buried amongst soiled hankies and
crumpled pajamas, I could forget, for a time, my ugliness.
Typhoid 'attacked me; krait-poison cured me; and my early, overheated
growth-rate cooled off. By the time I was nearlynine, Sonny Ibrahim was an
inch and a half taller than I. But one piece of Baby Saleem seemed immune to
disease and extract-of-snakes. Between my eyes, it mushroomed outwards and
downwards, as if all my expansionist forces, driven out of the rest of my
body, had decided to concentrate on this single incomparable thrust...
between my eyes and above my lips, my nose bloomed like a prize marrow. (But
then, I was spared wisdom teeth; one should try to count one's blessings.)
What's in a nose? The usual answer: 'That's simple. A breathing
apparatus; olfactory organs; hairs.' But in my case, the answer was simpler
still, although, I'm bound to admit, somewhat repellent: what was in my nose
was snot. With apologies, I must unfortunately insist on details: nasal
congestion obliged me to breathe through my mouth, giving me the air of a
gasping goldfish; perennial blockages doomed me to a childhood without
perfumes, to days which ignored the odours of musk and chambeli and mango
kasaundy and home-made ice-cream: and dirty washing, too. A disability in
the world outside washing-chests can be a positive advantage once you're in.
But only for the duration of your stay.
Purpose-obsessed, I worried about my nose. Dressed in the bitter
garments which arrived regularly from my headmistress aunt Alia, I went to
school, played French cricket, fought, entered fairy-tales... and worried.
(In those days, my aunt Alia had begun to send us an unending stream of
children's clothes, into whose seams she had sewn her old maid's bile; the
Brass Monkey and I were clothed in her gifts, wearing at first the
baby-things of bitterness, then the rompers of resentment; I grew up in
white shorts starched with the starch of jealousy, while the Monkey wore the
pretty flowered frocks of Alia's undimmed envy ... unaware that our wardrobe
was binding us in the webs of her revenge, we led our well-dressed lives.)
My nose: elephantine as the trunk of Ganesh, it should, I thought, have been
a superlative breather; a smeller without an answer, as we say; instead, it
was permanently bunged-up, and as useless as a wooden sikh-kabab.
Enough. I sat in the washing-chest and forgot my nose; forgot about the
climbing of Mount Everest in 1953 - when grubby Eyeslice giggled, 'Hey, men!
You think that Tenzing could climb up Sniffer's face?' - and about the
quarrels between my parents over my nose, for which Ahmed Sinai never tired
of blaming Amina's father: 'Never before in my family has there been a nose
like it! We have excellent noses; proud noses; royal noses, wife!' Ahmed
Sinai had already begun, at that time, to believe in the fictional ancestry
he had created for the benefit of William Methwold; djinn-sodden, he saw
Mughal blood running in his veins... Forgotten, too, the night when I was
eight and a half, and my father, djinns on his breath, came into my bedroom
to rip the sheets off me and demand: 'What are you up to? Pig! Pig from
somewhere?' I looked sleepy; innocent; puzzled. He roared on.
'Chhi-chhi!
Filthy! God punishes boys who do that! Already he's made your nose as big as
poplars. He'll stunt your growth; he'll make your soo-soo shrivel up!' And
my mother, arriving nightdressed in the startled room, 'Janum, for pity's
sake; the boy was only sleeping.' The djinn roared through my father's lips,
possessing him completely: 'Look on his face! Whoever got a nose like that
from sleeping?'
There are no mirrors in a washing-chest; rude jokes do not enter it,
nor pointing fingers. The rage of fathers is muffled by used sheets and
discarded brassieres. A washing-chest is a hole in the world, a place which
civilization has put outside itself, beyond the pale; this makes it the
finest of hiding-places. In the washing-chest, I was like Nadir Khan in his
underworld, safe from all pressures, concealed from the demands of parents
and history ...
... My father, pulling me into his squashy belly, speaking in a voice
choked with instant emotion: 'All right, all right, there, there, you're a
good boy; you can be anything you want; you just have to want it enough!
Sleep now ...' And Mary Pereira, echoing him in her little rhyme: 'Anything
you want to be, you can be; You can be just what-all you want!' It had
already occurred to me that our family believed implicitly in good business
principles; they expected a handsome return for their investment in me.
Children get food shelter pocket-money longholidays and love, all of it
apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of
compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' they sing;
but I, Pin( cchio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit
motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected,
from me, the immense dividend of greatness. Don't misunderstand m;:. I
didn't mind. I was, at that time, a dutiful child. I longed to give them
what they wanted, what soothsayers and framed letters had promised them; I
simply did not know how. Where did greatness come from? How did you get
some?
When?...
When I was seven years old, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother
came to visit us. On my seventh birthday, dutifully, I permitted myself to
be dressed up like the boys in the fisherman picture; hot and constricted in
the outlandish garb, I smiled and smiled. 'See, my little
piece-of-the-moon!' Amina cried cutting a cake covered with candied farmyard
animals, 'So
chweet!
Never takes out one tear!' Sandbagging down the floods
of tears lurking just beneath my eyes, the tears of heat discomfort and the
absence of One Yard Of Chocolates in my pile of presents, I took a slice of
cake to Reverend Mother, who was ill in bed. I had been given a doctor's
stethoscope; it was around my neck. She gave me permission to examine her; I
prescribed more exercise. 'You must walk across the room, to the almirah and
back, once a day. You may lean on me; I am the doctor.' Stethoscoped English
milord guided witchmoled grandmother across the room; hobblingly,
creakingly, she obeyed.
After three months of this treatment, she made a full recovery. The
neighbours came to celebrate, bearing rasgullas and gulab-jamans and other
sweets. Reverend Mother, seated regally on a takht in the living-room,
announced: 'See my grandson? He cured me, whatsits-name. Genius! Genius,
whatsitsname: it is a gift from God.' Was that it, then? Should I stop
worrying? Was genius something utterly unconnected with wanting, or learning
how, or knowing about, or being able to? Something which, at the appointed
hour, would float down around my shoulders like an immaculate, delicately
worked pashmina shawl? Greatness as a falling mantle: which never needed to
be sent to the dhobi. One does not beat genius upon a stone ... That one
clue, my grandmother's one chance sentence, was my only hope; and, as it
turned out, she wasn't very far wrong. (The accident is almost upon me; and
the children of midnight are waiting.)
Years later, in Pakistan, on the very night when the roof was to fall
in on her head and squash her flatter than a rice-pancake, Amina Sinai saw
the old washing-chest in a vision. When it popped up inside her eyelids, she
greeted it like a not-particularly-welcome cousin. 'So it's you again,' she
told it, 'Well, why not? Things keep coming back to me these days. Seems you
just can't leave anything behind.' She had grown prematurely old like all
the women in our family; the chest reminded her of the year in which old age
had first begun creeping up on her. The great heat of 1956 - which Mary
Pereira told me was caused by little blazing invisible insects - buzzed in
her ears once again. 'My corns began killing me then,' she said aloud, and
the Civil Defence official who had called to enforce the blackout smiled
sadly to himself and thought, Old people shroud themselves in the past
during a war; that way they're ready to die whenever required. He crept awaу
past the mountains of defective terry towels which filled most of the house,
and left Amina to discuss her dirty laundry in private ... Nussie Ibrahim -
Nussie-the-duck -used to admire Amina: 'Such
posture,
my dear, that you've
got! Such
tone!
I swear it's a wonder to me: you glide about like you're on
an invisible
trolley!'
But in the summer of the heat insects, my elegant
mother finally lost her battle against verrucas, because the sadhu
Purushottam suddenly lost his magic. Water had worn a bald patch in his
hair; the steady dripping of the years had worn him down. Was he
disillusioned with his blessed child, his Mubarak? Was it my fault that his
mantras lost their power? With an air of great trouble, he told my mother,
'Never mind; wait only; I'll fix your feet for sure.' But Amina's corns grew
worse; she went to doctors who froze them with carbon dioxide at absolute
zero; but that only brought them back with redoubled vigour, so that she
began to hobble, her gliding days done for ever; and she recognized the
unmistakable greeting of old age. (Chock-full of fantasy, I transformed her
into a silkie -'Amma, maybe you're a mermaid really, taking human form for
the love of a man - so every step is like walking on razor blades!' My
mother smiled, but did not laugh.)
1956. Ahmed Sinai and Dr Narlikar played chess and argued -my father
was a bitter opponent of Nasser, while Narlikar admired him openly. 'The man
is bad for business,' Ahmed said; 'But he's got style,' Narlikar responded,
glowing passionately, 'Nobody pushes him around.' At the same time,
Jawaharlal Nehru was consulting astrologers about the country's Five Year
Plan, in order to avoid another Karamstan; and while the world combined
aggression and the occult, I lay concealed in a washing-chest which wasn't
really big enough for comfort any more; and Amina Sinai became filled with
guilt.
She was already trying to put out of her mind her adventure at the
race-track; but the sense of sin which her mother's cooking had given her
could not be escaped; so it was not difficult for her to think of the
verrucas as a punishment... not only for the years-ago escapade at
Mahalaxmi, but for failing to save her husband from the pink chitties of
alcoholism; for the Brass Monkey's untamed, unfeminine ways; and for the
size of her only son's nose. Looking back at her now, it seems to me that a
fog of guilt had begun to form around her head - her black skin exuding
black cloud which hung before her eyes. (Padma would believe it; Padma would
know what I mean!) And as her guilt grew, the fog thickened - yes, why not?
- there were days when you could hardly see her head above her neck!...
Amina had become one of those rare people who take the burdens of the world
upon their own backs; she began to exude the magnetism of the willingly
guilty; and from then on everyone who came into contact with her felt the
most powerful of urges to confess their own, private guilts. When they
succumbed to my mother's powers, she would smile at them with a sweet sad
foggy smile and they would go away, lightened, leaving their burdens on her
shoulders; and the fog of guilt thickened. Amina heard about servants being
beaten and officials being bribed; when my uncle Hanif and his wife the
divine Pia came to call they related their quarrels in minute detail; Lila
Sabarmati confided her infidelities to my mother's graceful, inclined,
long-suffering ear; and Mary Pereira had to fight constantly against the
almost-irresistible temptation to confess her crime.
Faced with the guilts of the world, my mother smiled foggily and shut
her eyes tight; and by the time the roof fell in on her head her eyesight
was badly impaired; but she could still see the washing-chest.
What was really at the bottom of my mother's guilt? I mean really,
beneath verrucas and djinns and confessions? It was an unspeakable malaise,
an affliction which could not even be named, and which no longer confined
itself to dreams of an underworld husband ... my mother had fallen (as my
father would soon fall) under the spell of the telephone.
In the afternoons of that summer, afternoons as hot as towels, the
telephone would ring. When Ahmed Sinai was asleep in his room, with his keys
under his pillow and umbilical cords in his almirah, telephonic shrilling
penetrated the buzzing of the heat insects; and my mother, verruca-hobbled,
came into the hall to answer. And now, what expression is this, staining her
face the colour of drying blood? ... Not knowing that she's being observed,
what fish-like flutterings of lips are these, what strangulated mouthings?
... And why, after listening for a full five minutes, does my mother say, in
a voice like broken glass, 'Sorry: wrong number'? Why are diamonds
glistening on her eyelids? ... The Brass Monkey whispered to me, 'Next time
it rings, let's find out.'
Five days later. Once more it is afternoon; but today Amina is away,
visiting Nussie-the-duck, when the telephone demands attention. 'Quick!
Quick or it'll wake him!' The Monkey, agile as her name, picks up the
receiver before Ahmed Sinai has even changed the pattern of his snoring ...
'Hullo? Yaas? This is seven zero five six one; hullo?' We listen, every
nerve on edge; but for a moment there is nothing at all. Then, when we're
about to give up, the voice comes. '... Oh ... yes ... hullo ..." And the
Monkey, shouting almost, 'Hullo? Who is it, please?' Silence again; the
voice, which has not been able to prevent itself from speaking, considers
its answer; and then, '... Hullo... This is Shanti Prasad Truck Hire
Company, please?...' And the Monkey, quick as a flash: 'Yes, what d'you
want?' Another pause; the voice, sounding embarrassed, apologetic almost,
says, 'I want to rent a truck.'
О feeble excuse of telephonic voice! О transparent flummery of ghosts!
The voice on the phone was no truck-renter's voice; it was soft, a little
fleshy, the voice of a poet... but after that, the telephone rang regularly;
sometimes my mother answered it, listened in silence while her mouth made
fish-motions, and finally, much too late, said, 'Sorry, wrong number'; at
other times the Monkey and I clustered around it, two ears to earpiece,
while the Monkey took orders for trucks. I wondered: 'Hey, Monkey, what
d'you think? Doesn't the guy ever wonder why the trucks don't
arrive?'
And
she, wide-eyed, flutter-voiced: 'Man, do you suppose ... maybe they
do!'
But I couldn't see how; and a tiny seed of suspicion was planted in me,
a tiny glimmering of a notion that our mother might have a secret - our
Amma! Who always said, 'Keep secrets and they'll go bad inside you; don't
tell things and they'll give you stomach-ache!' - a minute spark which my
experience in the washing-chest would fan into a forest fire. (Because this
time, you see, she gave me proof.)
And now, at last, it is time for dirty laundry. Mary Pereira was fond
of telling me, 'If you want to be a big man, baba, you must be very clean.
Change clothes,' she advised, 'take regular baths. Go, baba, or I'll send
you to the washerman, and he'll wallop you on his stone.' She also
threatened me with bugs: 'All right, stay filthy, you will be nobody's
darling except the flies'. They will sit on you while you sleep; eggs
they'll lay under your skin!' In part, my choice of hiding-place was an act
of defiance. Braving dhobis and houseflies, I concealed myself in the
unclean place; I drew strength and comfort from sheets and towels; my nose
ran freely into the stone-doomed linens; and always, when I emerged into the
world from my wooden whale, the sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered
with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and
dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.
One afternoon in June, I tiptoed down the corridors of the sleeping
house towards my chosen refuge; sneaked past my sleeping mother into the
white-tiled silence of her bathroom; lifted the lid off my goal; and plunged
into its soft continuum of (predominantly white) textiles, whose only
memories were of my earlier visits. Sighing softly, I pulled down the lid,
and allowed pants and vests to massage away the pains of being alive,
purposeless and nearly nine years old.
Electricity in the air. Heat, buzzing like bees. A mantle, hanging
somewhere in the sky, waiting to fall gently around my shoulders ...
somewhere, a finger reaches towards a dial; a dial whirs around and around,
electrical pulses dart along cable, seven, zero, five, six, one, The
telephone rings. Muffled shrilling of a bell penetrates the washing-chest,
in which a nearlynineyearold boy lies uncomfortably concealed ... I, Saleem,
became stiff with the fear of discovery, because now more noises entered the
chest: squeak of bedsprings; soft clatter of slippers along corridor; the
telephone, silenced in mid-shrill; and - or is this imagination? Was her
voice too soft to hear? - the words, spoken too late as usual: 'Sorry. Wrong
number.'
And now, hobbling footsteps returning to the bedroom; and the worst
fears of the hiding boy are fulfilled. Doorknobs, turning, scream warnings
at him; razor-sharp steps cut him deeply as they move
across cool white dies. He stays frozen as ice, still as a stick; his
nose drips silently into dirty clothes. A pajama-cord - snake-like harbinger
of doom! - inserts itself into his left nostril. To sniff would be to die:
he refuses to think about it.
... Clamped tight in the grip of terror, he finds his eye looking
through a chink in dirty washing ... and sees a woman crying in a bathroom.
Rain dropping from a thick black cloud. And now more sound, more motion: his
mother's voice has begun to speak, two syllables, over and over again; and
her hands have begun to move. Ears muffled by underwear strain to catch the
sounds - that one:
dir? Bir? Dil? -
and the other:
Ha? Ra?
No - Na. Ha and
Ra are banished; Dil and Bir vanish forever; and the boy hears, in his ears,
a name which has not been spoken since Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai:
Nadir. Nadir. Na. Dir. Na.
And her hands are moving. Lost in their memory of other days, of what
happened after games of hit-the-spittoon in an Agra cellar, they flutter
gladly at her cheeks; they hold her bosom tighter than any brassieres; and
now they caress her bare midriff, they stray below decks ... yes, this is
what we used to do, my love, it was enough, enough for me, even though my
father made us, and you ran, and now the telephone,
Nadirnadirnadirnadirnadirnadir... hands which held telephone now hold flesh,
while in another place what does another hand do? To what, after replacing
receiver, is another hand getting up? ... No matter; because here, in her
spied-out privacy, Amina Sinai repeats an ancient name, again and again,
until finally she bursts out with, 'Arre Nadir Khan, where have you come
from now?'
Secrets. A man's name. Never-before-glimpsed motions of the hands. A
boy's mind filled with thoughts which have no shape, tormented by ideas
which refuse to settle into words; and in a left nostril, a pajama-cord is
snaking up up up, refusing to be ignored ... And now - О shameless mother!
Revealer of duplicity, of emotions which have no place in family life; and
more: О brazen unveiler of Black Mango! - Amina Sinai, drying her eyes, is
summoned by a more trivial necessity; and as her son's right eye peers out
through the wooden slats at the top of the washing-chest, my mother unwinds
her sari! While I, silently in the washing-chest: 'Don't do it don't do it
don't do!' ... but I cannot close my eye. Unblinking pupil takes in
upside-down image of sari falling to the floor, an image which is, as usual,
inverted by the mind; through ice-blue eyes I see a slip follow the sari;
and then - О horrible! - my mother, framed in laundry and slatted wood,
bends over to pick up her clothes! And there it is, searing my retina - the
vision of my mother's rump, black as night, rounded and curved, resembling
nothing on earth so much as a gigantic, black Alfonso mango! In the
washing-chest, unnerved by the vision, I wrestle with myself... self-control
becomes simultaneously imperative and impossible ... under the thunderclap
influence of the Black Mango, my nerve cracks; pajama-cord wins its victory;
and while Amina Sinai seats herself on a commode, I ... what? Not sneeze; it
was less than a sneeze. Not a twitch, either; it was more than that. It's
time to talk plainly: shattered by two-syllabic voice and fluttering hands,
devastated by Black Mango, the nose of Saleem Sinai, responding to the
evidence of maternal duplicity, quivering at the presence of maternal rump,
gave way to a pajama-cord, and was possessed by a cataclysmic - a
world-altering - an irreversible
sniff.
Pajama-cord rises painfully half an
inch further up the nostril. But other things are rising, too: hauled by
that feverish inhalation, nasal liquids are being sucked relentlessly up up
up, nose-goo flowing upwards, against gravity, against nature. Sinuses are
subjected to unbearable pressure ... until, inside the nearlynineyearold
head, something bursts. Snot rockets through a breached dam into dark new
channels. Mucus, rising higher than mucus was ever intended to rise. Waste
fluid, reaching as far, perhaps, as the frontiers of the brain ... there is
a shock. Something electrical has been moistened.
Pain.
And then noise, deafening manytongued terrifying,
inside his head!. ...
Inside a white wooden washing-chest, within the darkened auditorium of my
skull, my nose began to sing.
But just now there isn't time to listen; because one voice is very
close indeed. Amina Sinai has opened the lower door of the washing-chest; I
am tumbling downdown with laundry wrapped around my head like a caul.
Pajama-cord jerks out of my nose; and now there is lightning flashing
through the dark clouds around my mother - and a refuge has been lost
forever.
'I didn't look!' I squealed up through socks and sheets. I didn't see
one thing, Ammi, I swear!!'
And years later, in a cane chair among reject towels and a radio
announcing exaggerated war victories, .Amina would remember how with thumb
and forefinger around the ear of her lying son she led him to Mary Pereira,
who was sleeping as usual on a cane mat in a sky-blue room; how she said,
'This young donkey; this good-for-nothing from nowhere is not to speak for
one whole day.'... And, just before the roof fell in on her, she said aloud:
'It was my fault. I brought him up too badly.' As the explosion of the bomb
ripped through the air, she added, mildly but firmly, addressing her last
words on earth to the ghost of a washing-chest: 'Go away now, I've seen
enough On Mount Sinai, the prophet Musa or Moses heard disembodied
commandments; on Mount Hira, the prophet Muhammad (also known as Mohammed,
Mahomet, the Last-But-One, and Mahound) spoke to the Archangel. (Gabriel or
Jibreel, as you please.) And on the stage of the Cathedral and John Connon
Boys' High School, run 'under the auspices' of the Anglo-Scottish Education
Society, my friend Cyrus-the-great, playing a female part as usual, heard
the voices of St Joan speaking the sentences of Bernard Shaw. But Cyrus is
the odd one out: unlike Joan, whose voices were heard in a field, but like
Musa or Moses, like Muhammad the Penultimate, I heard voices on a hill.
Muhammad (on whose name be peace, let me add; I don't want to offend
anyone) heard a voice saying, 'Recite!' and thought he was going mad; I
heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio; and
with lips sealed by maternal command, I was unable to ask for comfort.
Muhammad, at forty, sought and received reassurance from wife and friends:
'Verily,' they told him, 'you are the Messenger of God'; I, suffering my
punishment at nearlynine, could neither seek Brass Monkey's assistance nor
solicit softening words from Mary Pereira. Muted for an evening and a night
and a morning, I struggled, alone, to understand what had happened to me;
until at last I saw the shawl of genius fluttering down, like an embroidered
butterfly, the mantle of greatness settling upon my shoulders.
In the heat of that silent night (I was silent; outside me, the sea
rustled like distant paper; crows squawked in the throes of their feathery
nightmares; the puttering noises of tardy taxi-cabs wafted up from Warden
Road; the Brass Monkey, before she fell asleep with her face frozen into a
mask of curiosity, begged, 'Come on, Saleem; nobody's listening; what did
you do? Tell tell tell!' ... while, inside me, the voices rebounded against
the walls of my skull) I was gripped by hot fingers of excitement - the
agitated insects of excitement danced in my stomach - because finally, in
some way I did not then fully understand, the door which Toxy Catrack had
once nudged in my head had been forced open; and through it I could glimpse
-shadowy still, undefined, enigmatic - my reason for having been born.
Gabriel or Jibreel told Muhammad: 'Recite!' And then began The
Recitation, known in Arabic as Al-Quran: 'Recite: In the Name of the Lord
thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood ..." That was on Mount Hira
outside Mecca Sharif; on a two-storey hillock opposite Breach Candy Pools,
voices also instructed me to recite: Tomorrow!' I thought excitedly.
'Tomorrow!'
By sunrise, I had discovered that the voices could be controlled - I
was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select
individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will; switch off my
newly-discovered inner ear. It was astonishing how soon fear left me; by
morning, I was thinking, 'Man, this is better than All-India Radio, man;
better than Radio Ceylon!'
To demonstrate the loyalty of sisters: when the twenty-four hours were
up, on the dot, the Brass Monkey ran into my mother's bedroom. (It was, I
think, a Sunday: no school. Or perhaps not - that was the summer of the
language marches, and the schools were often shut, because of the danger of
violence on the bus-routes.)
'The time's up!' she exclaimed, shaking my mother out of sleep. 'Amma,
wake up: it's time: can he talk now?'
'All right,' my mother said, coming into a sky-blue room to embrace me,
'you're forgiven now. But never hide in there again ...'
'Amma,' I said eagerly, 'my Ammi, please listen. I must tell you
something. Something big. But please, please first of all, wake Abba.'
And after a period of 'What?' 'Why?' and 'Certainly not,' my mother saw
something extraordinary sitting in my eyes and went to wake Ahmed Sinai
anxiously, with 'Janum, please come. I don't know what's got into Saleem.'
Family and ayah assembled in the sitting-room. Amid cut-glass vases and
plump cushions, standing on a Persian rug beneath the swirling shadows of
ceiling-fans, I smiled into their anxious eyes and prepared my revelation.
This was it; the beginning of the repayment of their investment; my first
dividend - first, I was sure, of many ... my black mother, lip-jutting
father, Monkey of a sister and crime-concealing ayah waited in hot
confusion.
Get it out. Straight, without frills. 'You should be the first to
know,' I said, trying to give my speech the cadences of adulthood. And then
I told them. 'I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my
head. I think - Ammi, Abboo, I really think - that Archangels have started
to talk to me.'
There! I thought. There! It's said! Now there will be pats on the back,
sweetmeats, public announcements, maybe more photographs; now their chests
will puff up with pride. О blind innocence of childhood! For my honesty -
for my open-hearted desperation to please - I was set upon from all sides.
Even the Monkey: 'O
God,
Saleem, all this tamasha, all this performance, for
one of your stupid
cracks?'
And worse than the Monkey was Mary Pereira:
'Christ Jesus! Save, us, Lord! Holy Father in Rome, such blasphemy I've
heard today!' And worse than Mary Pereira was my mother Amina Sinai: Black
Mango concealed now, her own unnameable names still warm upon her lips, she
cried, 'Heaven forfend! The child will bring down the roof upon our heads!'
(Was that my fault, too?) And Amina continued: 'You black man! Goonda! О
Saleem, has your brain gone raw? What has happened to my darling baby boy -
are you growing into a madman - a
torturer!?'
And worse than Amina's
shrieking was my father's silence; worse than her fear was the wild anger
sitting on his forehead; and worst of all was my father's hand, which
stretched out suddenly, thick-fingered, heavy-jointed, strong-as-an-ox,to
fetch me a mighty blow on the side of my head, so that I could never hear
properly in my left ear after that day; so that I fell sideways across the
startled room through the scandalized air and shattered a green tabletop of
opaque glass; so that, having been certain of myself for the first time in
my life, I was plunged into a green, glass-cloudy world filled with cutting
edges, a world in which I could no longer tell the people who mattered most
about the goings-on inside my head; green shards lacerated my hands as I
entered that swirling universe in which I was doomed, until it was far too
late, to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was
for.
In a white-tiled bathroom beside a washing-chest, my mother daubed me
with Mercurochrome; gauze veiled my cuts, while through the door my father's
voice commanded, 'Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me? Let him
enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!'
That night, Amina Sinai would dream of Ramram Seth, who was floating
six inches above the ground, his eye-sockets filled with egg-whites,
intoning: 'Washing will hide him ... voices will guide him' ... but when,
after several days in which the dream sat upon her shoulders wherever she
went, she plucked up the courage to ask her disgraced son a little more
about his outrageous claim, he replied in a voice as restrained as the
unwept tears of his childhood: 'It was just fooling, Amma. A stupid joke,
like you said.'
She died, nine years later, without discovering the truth.
All-India radio
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the
past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the
present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a
large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row
by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the
stars' faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque
proportions; the illusion dissolves - or rather, it becomes clear that the
illusion itself
is
reality ... we have come from 1915 to 1956, so we're a
good deal closer to the screen... abandoning my metaphor, then, I reiterate,
entirely without a sense of shame, my unbelievable claim: after a curious
accident in a washing-chest, I became a sort of radio.
... But today, I feel confused. Padma has not returned - should I alert
the police? Is she a Missing Person? - and in her absence, my certainties
are falling apart. Even my nose has been playing tricks on me - by day, as I
stroll between the pickle-vats tended by our army of strong, hairy-armed,
formidably competent women, I have found myself failing to distinguish
lemon-odours from lime. The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor
sahib has been crossed in - what? - surely not
love? ...
Padma, and the
cracks spreading all over me, radiating like a spider's web from my navel;
and the heat... a little confusion is surely permissible in these
circumstances. Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology.
The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong
date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have
been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.
Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my
desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything - to
re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a
central role? Today, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it
to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I've
started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began
...
Ye Akashvani hai.
This is All-India Radio.
Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby
Irani cafe, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light
with only a cheap transistor for company. A hot night; bubbling air filled
with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle-vats; voices in the dark.
Pickle-fumes, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of
memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then ...
it was hot then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was
awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one
deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat... it was not the voices (then
or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea
- the idea that his parents' outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their
love; that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a
kind of shameful deformity ... while I, now, Padma-less, send these words
into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he ...
I no longer have his gift; he never had mine. There are times when he seems
a stranger, almost ... he had no cracks. No spiders' webs spread through him
in the heat.
Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is
hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied
my dinner, but that of having lost my cook.
And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive
through the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in
our part of the world, to symbolize impotence - ever since the notorious
free-transistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented
what men could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied) ... then, the
nearlynineyearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines.
Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat-haze,
then and now, blurs his then-time into mine ... my confusion, travelling
across the heat-waves, is also his.
What grows best in the heat: cane-sugar; the coconut palm; certain
millets such as bajra, ragi and jowar; linseed, and (given water) tea and
rice. Our hot land is also the world's second largest producer of cotton -
at least, it was when I learned geography under the mad eye of Mr Emil
Zagallo, and the steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador. But the
tropical summer grows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the
imagination blossom, to fill the close perspiring nights with odours as
heavy as musk, which give men dark dreams of discontent... then as now,
unease was in the air. Language marchers demanded the partition of the state
of Bombay along linguistic boundaries - the dream of Maharashtra was at the
head of some processions, the mirage of Gujarat led the others forward.
Heat, gnawing at the mind's divisions between fantasy and reality, made
anything seem possible; the half-waking chaos of afternoon siestas fogged
men's brains, and the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires.
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.
In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through the daytime
streets; by night, they rioted in my head.
We shall be watching your life
with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.
It's time to talk about the voices.
But if only our Padma were here ...
I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father's hand -
walloping my ear in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another,
bodiless hand, which once hit him full in the face - at least had one
salutary effect: it obliged me to reconsider and finally to abandon my
original, Prophet-apeing position. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I
withdrew deep inside myself, despite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue
room with her pesterings: 'But what did you do it
for,
Saleem? You who're
always too good and all?' ... until she fell into dissatisfied sleep with
her mouth still working silently, and I was alone with the echoes of my
father's violence, which buzzed in my left ear, which whispered, 'Neither
Michael nor Anael; not Gabriel; forget Cassiel, Sachiel and Samael!
Archangels no longer speak to mortals; the Recitation was completed in
Arabia long ago; the last prophet will come only to announce the End.' That
night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of
the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not after all been
chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far from being
scared, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust.
Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you're always reading about in the
sensational magazines. But I ask for patience - wait. Only wait. It was
telepathy; but also more than telepathy. Don't write me off too easily.
Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming
millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In
the beginning, when I was content to be an audience - before I began to
act
-
there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from
Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Luck-now Urdu to the Southern
slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said
within the walls of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn
that below the surface transmissions - the front-of-mind stuff which is what
I'd originally been picking up - language faded away, and was replaced by
universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words ... but
that was after I heard, beneath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other
precious signals, utterly different from everything else, most of them faint
and distant, like far-off drums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke
through the fish-market cacophony of my voices... those secret, nocturnal
calk, like calling out to like ... the unconscious beacons of the children
of midnight, signalling nothing more than their existence, transmitting
simply: 'I.' From far to the North, 'I.' And the South East West: 'I.' 'I.'
'And I.'
But I mustn't get ahead of myself. In the beginning, before I broke
through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening; and soon
I was able to 'tune' my inner ear to those voices which I could understand;
nor was it long before I picked out, from the throng, the voices of my own
family; and of Mary Pereira; and of friends, classmates, teachers. In the
street, I learned how to identify the mind-stream of passing strangers - the
laws of Doppler shift continued to operate in these paranormal realms, and
the voices grew and diminished as the strangers passed.
All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing
in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father's wrath, and anxious to keep my
right ear in good working order, I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy,
the difficulties of concealing knowledge are almost insurmountable; but
fortunately, my nearest and dearest were as anxious to forget my outburst as
I was to conceal the truth.
'O, you Saleem! Such things you talked yesterday! Shame on you, boy:
you better go wash out your mouth with soap!'... The morning after my
disgrace, Mary Pereira, shaking with indignation like one of her jellies,
suggested the perfect means of my rehabilitation. Bowing my head contritely,
I went, without a word, into the bathroom, and there, beneath the amazed
gaze of ayah and Monkey, scrubbed teeth tongue roofofmouth gums with a
toothbrush covered in the sharp foul lather of Coal Tar Soap. The news of my
dramatic atonement rushed rapidly around the house, borne by Mary and
Monkey; and my mother embraced me, 'There, good boy; we'll say no more about
it,' and Ahmed Sinai nodded gruffly at the breakfast table, 'At least the
boy has the grace to admit when he's gone too far.'
As my glass-inflicted cuts faded, it was as though my announcement was
also erased; and by the time of my ninth birthday, nobody besides myself
remembered anything about the day when I had taken the name of Archangels in
vain. The taste of detergent lingered on my tongue for many weeks, reminding
me of the need for secrecy.
Even the Brass Monkey was satisfied by my show of contrition - in her
eyes, I had returned to form, and was once more the goody-two-shoes of the
family. To demonstrate her willingness to re-establish the old order, she
set fire to my mother's favourite slippers, and regained her rightful place
in the family doghouse. Amongst outsiders, what's more - displaying a
conservatism you'd never have suspected in such a tomboy - she closed ranks
with my parents, and kept my one aberration a secret from her friends and
mine.
In a country where any physical or mental peculiarity in a child is a
source of deep family shame, my parents, who had become accustomed to facial
birthmarks, cucumber-nose and bandy legs, simply refused to see any more
embarrassing things in me; for my part, I did not once mention the buzzings
in my ear, the occasional ringing bells of deafness, the intermittent pain.
I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing.
But imagine the confusion inside my head! Where, behind the hideous
face, above the tongue tasting of soap, hard by the perforated eardrum,
lurked a not-very-tidy mind, as full of bric-a-brac as nine-year-old pockets
... imagine yourself inside me somehow, looking out through my eyes, hearing
the noise, the voices, and now the obligation of not letting people know,
the hardest part was acting surprised, such as when my mother said Hey
Saleem guess what we're going for a picnic to the Aarey Milk Colony and I
had to go Ooo, exciting!, when I had known all along because I had heard her
unspoken inner voice And on my birthday seeing all the presents in the
donors' minds before they were even unwrapped And the treasure hunt ruined
because there in my father's head was the location of each clue every prize
And much harder things such as going to see my father in his ground-floor
office, here we are, and the moment I'm in there my head is full of
godknowswhat rot because he's thinking about his secretary, Alice or
Fernanda, his latest Coca-Cola girl, he's undressing her slowly in his head
and it's in my head too, she's sitting stark naked on a cane-bottomed chair
and now getting up, crisscross marks all across her rump, that's my father
thinking, MY FATHER, now he's looking at me all funny What's the matter son
don't you feel well Yes fine Abba fine, must go now GOT TO GET AWAY homework
to do, Abba, and out, run away before he sees the clue on your face (my
father always said that when I was lying there was a red light flashing on
my forehead)... You see how hard it is, my uncle Hanif comes to take me to
the wrestling, and even before we've arrived at Vallabhbai Patel Stadium on
Hornby Vellard I'm feeling sad We're walking with the crowds past giant
cardboard cut-outs of Dara Singh and Tagra Baba and the rest and his
sadness, my favourite uncle's sadness is pouring into me, it lives like a
lizard just beneath the hedge of his jollity, concealed by his booming laugh
which was once the laugh of the boatman Tai, we're sitting in excellent
seats as floodlights dance on the backs of the interlocked wrestlers and I
am caught in the unbreakable grip of my uncle's grief, the grief of his
failing film career, flop after flop, he'll probably never get a film again
But I mustn't let the sadness leak out of my eyes He's butting into my
thoughts, hey phaelwan, hey little wrestler, what's dragging your face down,
it looks longer than a bad movie, you want channa? pakoras? what? And me
shaking my head, No, nothing, Hanif mamu, so that he relaxes, turns away,
starts yelling Ohe come on Dara, that's the ticket, give him hell, Dara
yara!
And back home my mother squatting in the corridor with the ice-cream
tub, saying with her real outside-voice, You want to help me make it, son,
your favourite pistachio flavour, and I'm turning the handle, but her
inside-voice is bouncing against the inside of my head, I can see how she's
trying to fill up every nook and cranny of her thoughts with everyday
things, the price of pom-fret, the roster of household chores, must call in
the electrician to mend the ceiling-fan in the dining-room, how she's
desperately concentrating on parts of her husband to love, but the
unmentionable word keeps finding room, the two syllables which leaked out of
her in the bathroom that day, Na Dir Na Dir Na, she's finding it harder and
harder to put down the telephone when the wrong numbers come MY MOTHER I
tell you when a boy gets inside grown-up thoughts they can really mess him
up completely And even at night, no respite, I wake up at the stroke of
midnight with Mary Pereira's dreams inside my head Night after night Always
at my personal witching-hour, which also has meaning for her Her dreams are
plagued by the image of a man who has been dead for years, Joseph D'Costa,
the dream tells me the name, it is coated with a guilt I cannot understand,
the same guilt which seeps into us all every time we eat her chutneys, there
is a mystery here but because the secret is not in the front of her mind I
can't find it out, and meanwhile Joseph is there, each night, sometimes in
human form, but not always, sometimes he's a wolf, or a snail, once a
broomstick, but we (she-dreaming, I-looking in) know it's him, baleful
implacable accusative, cursing her in the language of his incarnations,
howling at her when he's wolf-Joseph, covering her in the slime-trails of
Joseph-the-snail, beating her with the business end of his broomstick
incarnation ... and in the morning when she's telling me to bathe clean up
get ready for school I have to bite back the questions, I am nine years old
and lost in the confusion of other people's lives which are blurring
together in the heat.
To end this account of the early days of my transformed life, I must
add one painful confession: it occurred to me that I could improve my
parents' opinion of me by using my new faculty to help out with my
schoolwork - in short, I began to cheat in class. That is to say, I tuned in
to the inner voices of my schoolteachers and also of my cleverer classmates,
and picked information out of their minds. I found that very few of my
masters could set a test without rehearsing the ideal answers in their minds
- and I knew, too, that on those rare occasions when the teacher was
preoccupied by other things, his private love-life or financial
difficulties, the solutions could always be found in the precocious,
prodigious mind of our class genius, Cyrus-the-great. My marks began to
improve dramatically - but not overly so, because I took care to make my
versions different from their stolen originals; even when I telepathi-cally
cribbed an entire English essay from Cyrus, I added a number of mediocre
touches of my own. My purpose was to avoid suspicion; I did not, but I
escaped discovery. Under Emil Zagallo's furious, interrogating eyes I
remained innocently seraphic; beneath the bemused, head-shaking perplexity
of Mr Tandon the English master I worked my treachery in silence - knowing
that they would not believe the truth even if, by chance or folly, I spilled
the beans.
Let me sum up: at a crucial point in the history of our child-nation,
at a time when Five Year Plans were being drawn up and elections were
approaching and language marchers were fighting over Bombay, a nine-year-old
boy named Saleem Sinai acquired a miraculous gift. Despite the many vital
uses to which his abilities could have been put by his impoverished,
underdeveloped country, he chose to conceal his talents, frittering them
away on inconsequential voyeurism and petty cheating. This behaviour - not,
I confess, the behaviour of a hero - was the direct result of a confusion in
his mind, which invariably muddled up morality - the desire to do what is
right - and popularity - the rather more dubious desire to do what is
approved of. Fearing parental ostracism, he suppressed the news of his
transformation; seeking parental congratulations, he abused his talents at
school. This flaw in his character can partially be excused on the grounds
of his tender years; but only partially. Confused thinking was to bedevil
much of his career.
I can be quite tough in my self-judgements when I choose.
What stood on the flat roof of the Breach Candy Kindergarten - a roof,
you will recall, which could be reached from the garden of Buckingham Villa,
simply by climbing over a boundary wall? What, no longer capable of
performing the function for which it was designed, watched over us that year
when even the winter forgot to cool down - what observed Sonny Ibrahim,
Eyeslice, Hairoil, and myself, as we played kabaddi, and French Cricket, and
seven-tiles, with the occasional participation of Cyrus-the-great and of
other, visiting friends: Fat Perce Fishwala and Glandy Keith Colaco? What
was present on the frequent occasions when Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi-Appah
yelled down from the top floor of Homi's home: 'Brats! Rackety
good-for-nothings! Shut your noise!' ... so that we all ran away, returning
(when she vanished from our sight) to make mute faces at the window at which
she'd stood? In short, what was it, tall and blue and flaking, which oversaw
our lives, which seemed, for a while, to be marking time, waiting not only
for the nearby time when we would put on long trousers, but also, perhaps,
for the coming of Evie Burns? Perhaps you'd like clues: what had once hidden
bombs? In what had Joseph D'Costa died of snake-bite? ...
When, after some months of inner torment, I at last sought refuge from
grown-up voices, I found it in an old clocktower, which nobody bothered to
lock; and here, in the solitude of rusting time, I paradoxically took my
first tentative steps towards that involvement with mighty events and public
lives from which I would never again be free ... never, until the Widow ...
Banned from washing-chests, I began, whenever possible, to creep
unobserved into the tower of crippled hours. When the circus-ring was
emptied by heat or chance or prying eyes; when Ahmed and Amina went off to
the Willingdon Club for canasta evenings; when the Brass Monkey was away,
hanging around her newly-acquired heroines, the Walsingham School for Girls'
swimming and diving team ... that is to say, when circumstances permitted, I
entered my secret hideout, stretched out on the straw mat I'd stolen from
the servants' quarters, closed my eyes, and let my newly-awakened inner ear
(connected, like all ears, to my nose) rove freely around the city - and
further, north and south, east and west - listening in to all manner of
things. To escape the intolerable pressures of eavesdropping on people I
knew, I practised my art upon strangers. Thus my entry into public affairs
of India occurred for entirely ignoble reasons - upset by too much intimacy,
I used the world outside our hillock for light relief.
The world as discovered from a broken-down clocktower: at first, I was
no more than a tourist, a child peeping through the miraculous peepholes of
a private 'Dilli-dekho' machine. Dugdugee-drums rattled in my left (damaged)
ear as I gained my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the eyes of a fat
Englishwoman suffering from the tummy-runs; after which, to balance south
against north, I hopped down to Madurai's Meenakshi temple and nestled
amongst the woolly, mystical perceptions of a chanting priest. I toured
Connaught Place in New Delhi in the guise of an auto-rickshaw driver,
complaining bitterly to my fares about the rising price of gasoline; in
Calcutta I slept rough in a section of drainpipe. By now thoroughly bitten
by the travel bug, I zipped down to Cape Comorin and became a fisher-woman
whose sari was as tight as her morals were loose ... standing on red sands
washed by three seas, I flirted with Dravidian beachcombers in a language I
couldn't understand; then up into the Himalayas, into the neanderthal
moss-covered hut of a Goojar tribal, beneath the glory of a completely
circular rainbow and the tumbling moraine of the Kolahoi glacier. At the
golden fortress of Jaisalmer I sampled the inner life of a woman making
mirrorwork dresses and at Khajuraho I was an adolescent village boy, deeply
embarrassed by the erotic, Tahtric carvings on the Chandela temples standing
in the fields, but unable to tear away my eyes ... in the exotic
simplicities of travel I was able to find a modicum of peace. But, in the
end, tourism ceased to satisfy; curiosity began to niggle; 'Let's find out,'
I told myself, 'what really goes on around here.'
With the eclectic spirit of my nine years spurring me on, I leaped into
the heads of film stars and cricketers - I learned the truth behind the
Filmfare
gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala, and I was at the crease with
Polly Umrigar at the Brabourne Stadium; I was Lata Mangeshkar the playback
singer and Bubu the clown at the circus behind Civil Lines ... and
inevitably, through the ramdom processes of my mind-hopping, I discovered
politics.
At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my
pajama-cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire ... at
another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food
shortage as usual: I was two months old and my mother had run out of
breast-milk. I occupied, briefly, the mind of a Congress Party worker,
bribing a village schoolteacher to throw his weight behind the party of
Gandhi and Nehru in the coming election campaign; also the thoughts of a
Keralan peasant who had decided to vote Communist. My daring grew: one
afternoon I deliberately invaded the head of our own State Chief Minister,
which was how I discovered, over twenty years before it became a national
joke, that Morarji Desai 'took his own water' daily ... I was inside him,
tasting the warmth as he gurgled down a frothing glass of urine. And finally
I hit my highest point: I became Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister and author
of framed letters: I sat with the great man amongst a bunch of gaptoothed,
stragglebeard astrologers and adjusted the Five Year Plan to bring it into
harmonic alignment with the music of the spheres ... the high life is a
heady thing. 'Look at me!' I exulted silently. 'I can go any place I want!'
In that tower which had once been filled choc-a-bloc with the explosive
devices of Joseph D'Costa's hatred, this phrase (accompanied by appropriate
ticktock sound effects) plopped fully-formed into my thoughts: 'I am the
tomb in Bombay .. .watch me explode!'
Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a
world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were
mine,
that the bodies I
occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the
whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was
somehow
making them happen ...
which is to say, I had entered into the
illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the
land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. 'I can find out any damn
thing!' I triumphed, 'There isn't a thing I cannot know!'
Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the
spirit of self-aggrandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an
instinct for self-preservation. If I had not believed myself in control of
the flooding multitudes, their massed identities would have annihilated mine
... but there in my clocktower, filled with the cockiness of my,glee, I
became Sin, the ancient moon-god (no, not Indian: I've imported him from
Hadhramaut of old), capable of acting-at-a-distance and shifting the tides
of the world.
But death, when it visited Methwold's Estate, still managed to take me
by surprise.
Even though the freezing of his assets had ended many years ago, the
zone below Ahmed Sinai's waist had remained as cold as ice. Ever since the
day he had cried out, 'The bastards are shoving my balls in an ice-bucket!',
and Amina had taken them in her hands to warm them so that her fingers got
glued to them by the cold, his sex had lain dormant, a woolly elephant in an
iceberg, like the one they found in Russia in '56. My mother Amina, who had
married for children, felt the uncreated lives rotting in her womb and
blamed herself for becoming unattractive to him, what with her corns and
all. She discussed her unhappiness with Mary Pereira, but the ayah only told
her that there was no happiness to be gained from 'the mens'; they made
pickles together as they talked, and Amina stirred her disappointments into
a hot lime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes.
Although Ahmed Sinai's office hours were filled with fantasies of
secretaries taking dictation in the nude, visions of his Fernandas or Poppys
strolling around the room in their birthday suits with crisscross cane-marks
on their rumps, his apparatus refused to respond; and one day, when the real
Fernanda or Poppy had gone home, he was playing chess with Dr Narlikar, his
tongue (as well as his game) made somewhat loose by djinns, and he confided
awkwardly, 'Narlikar, I seem to have lost interest in you-know-what.'
A gleam of pleasure radiated from the luminous gynaecologist; the
birth-control fanatic in the dark, glowing doctor leaped out through his
eyes and made the following speech: 'Bravo!' Dr Narlikar cried, 'Brother
Sinai,
damn good show!
You - and, may I add, myself - yes, you and I, Sinai
bhai, are persons of rare spiritual worth! Not for us the panting
humiliations of the flesh - is it not a finer thing, I ask you, to eschew
procreation - to avoid adding one more miserable human life to the vast
multitudes which are presently beggaring our country - and, instead, to bend
our energies to the task of giving them
more land to stand on?
I tell you,
my friend: you and I and our tetrapods: from the very oceans we shall bring
forth soil!' To consecrate this oration, Ahmed Sinai poured drinks; my
father and Dr Narlikar drank a toast to their four-legged concrete dream.
'Land, yes! Love, no!' Dr Narlikar said, a little unsteadily; my father
refilled his glass.
By the last days of 1956, the dream of reclaiming land from the sea
with the aid of thousands upon thousands of large concrete tetrapods - that
same dream which had been the cause of the freeze -and which was now, for my
father, a sort of surrogate for the sexual activity which the aftermath of
the freeze denied him - actually seemed to be coming close to fruition. This
time, however, Ahmed Sinai was spending his money cautiously; this time he
remained hidden in the background, and his name appeared on no documents;
this time, he had learned the lessons of the freeze and was determined to
draw as little attention to himself as possible; so that when Dr Narlikar
betrayed him by dying, leaving behind him no record of my father's
involvement in the tetrapod scheme, Ahmed Sinai (who was prone, as we have
seen, to react badly in the face of disaster) was swallowed up by the mouth
of a long, snaking decline from which he would not emerge until, at the very
end of his days, he at last fell in love with his wife.
This is the story that got back to Methwold's Estate: Dr Narlikar had
been visiting friends near Marine Drive; at the end of the visit, he had
resolved to stroll down to Chowpatty Beach and buy himself some bhel-puri
and a little coconut milk. As he strolled briskly along the pavement by the
sea-wall, he overtook the tail-end of a language march, which moved slowly
along, chanting peacefully. Dr Narlikar neared the place where, with the
Municipal Corporation's permission, he had arranged for a single, symbolic
tetrapod to be placed upon the sea-wall, as a kind of icon pointing the way
to the future; and here he noticed a thing which made him lose his reason. A
group of beggar-women had clustered around the tetrapod and were performing
the rite of puja. They had lighted oil-lamps at the base of the object; one
of them had painted the ом-symbol on its upraised tip; they were chanting
prayers as they gave the tetrapod a thorough and worshipful wash.
Technological miracle had been transformed into Shiva-lingam; Doctor
Narlikar, the opponent of fertility, was driven wild at this vision, in
which it seemed to him that all the old dark priapic forces of ancient,
procreative India had been unleashed upon the beauty of sterile
twentieth-century concrete ... sprinting along, he shouted his abuse at the
worshipping women, gleaming fiercely in his rage; reaching them, he kicked
away their little dia-lamps; it is said he even tried to push the women. And
he was seen by the eyes of the language marchers.
The ears of the language marchers heard the roughness of his tongue;
the marchers' feet paused, their voices rose in rebuke. Fists were shaken;
oaths were oathed. Whereupon the good doctor, made incautious by anger,
turned upon the crowd and denigrated its cause, its breeding and its
sisters. A silence fell and exerted its powers. Silence guided marcher-feet
towards the gleaming gynaecologist, who stood between the tetrapod and the
wailing women. In silence the marchers' hands reached out towards Narlikar
and in a deep hush he clung to four-legged concrete as they attempted to
pull him towards them. In absolute soundlessness, fear gave Dr Narlikar the
strength of limpets; his arms stuck to the tetrapod and would not be
detached. The marchers applied themselves to the tetrapod ... silently they
began to rock it; mutely the force of their numbers overcame its weight. In
an evening seized by a demonic quietness the tetrapod tilted, preparing to
become the first of its kind to enter the waters and begin the great work of
land reclamation. Dr Suresh Narlikar, his mouth opening in a voiceless A,
clung to it like a phosphorescent mollusc ... man and four-legged concrete
fell without a sound. The splash of the waters broke the spell.
It was said that when Dr Narlikar fell and was crushed into death by
the weight of his beloved obsession, nobody had any trouble locating the
body because it sent light glowing upwards through the waters like a fire.
'Do you know what's happening?' 'Hey, man, what gives?' - children,
myself included, clustered around the garden hedge of Escorial Villa, in
which was Dr Narlikar's bachelor apartment; and a hamal of Lila Sabarmati's,
taking on an air of grave dignity, informed us, 'They have brought his death
home, wrapped in silk.'
I was not allowed to see the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay wreathed in
saffron flowers on his hard, single bed; but I got to know all about it
anyway, because the news of it spread far beyond the confines of his room.
Mostly, I heard about it from the Estate servants, who found it quite
natural to speak openly of a death, but rarely said much about life, because
in life everything was obvious. From Dr Narlikar's own bearer I learned that
the death had, by swallowing large quantities of the sea, taken on the
qualities of water: it had become a fluid thing, and looked happy, sad or
indifferent according to how the light hit it. Homi Catrack's gardener
interjected: 'It is dangerous to look too long at death; otherwise you come
away with a little of it inside you, and there are effects.' We asked:
effects? what effects? which effects? how? And Purushottam the sadhu, who
had left his place under the Buckingham Villa garden tap for the first time
in years, said: 'A death makes the living see themselves too clearly; after
they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated.' This extraordinary
claim was, in fact, borne out by events, because afterwards Toxy Catrack's
nurse Bi-Appah, who had helped to clean up the body, became shriller, more
shrewish, more terrifying than ever; and it seemed that everyone who saw the
death of Dr Narlikar as it lay in state was affected, Nussie Ibrahim became
even sillier and more of a duck, and Lila Sabarmati, who lived upstairs from
the death and had helped to arrange its room, afterwards gave in to a
promiscuity which had always been lurking within her, and set herself on a
road at whose end there would be bullets, and her husband Commander
Sabarmati conducting the Colaba traffic with a most unusual baton ...
Our family, however, stayed away from the death. My father refused to
go and pay his respects, and would never refer to his late friend by name,
calling him simply: 'that traitor'.
Two days later, when the news had been in the papers, Dr Narlikar
suddenly acquired an enormous family of female relations. Having been a
bachelor and misogynist all his life, he was engulfed, in death, by a sea of
giant, noisy, omnicompetent women, who came crawling out from strange
corners of the city, from milking jobs at Amul Dairies and from the
box-offices of cinemas, from street-side soda-fountains and unhappy
marriages; in a year of processions the Narlikar women formed their own
parade, an enormous stream of outsize womanhood flowing up our two-storey
hillock to fill Dr Narlikar's apartment so full that from the road below you
could see their elbows sticking out of the windows and their behinds
overflowing on to the verandah. For a week nobody got any sleep because the
wailing of the Narlikar women filled the air; but beneath their howls the
women were proving as competent as they looked. They took over the running
of the Nursing Home; they investigated all of Narlikar's business deals; and
they cut my father out of the tetrapod deal just as coolly as you please.
After all those years my father was left with nothing but a hole in his
pocket, while the women took Narlikar's body to Benares to have it cremated,
and the Estate servants whispered to me that they had heard how the Doctor's
ashes were sprinkled on the waters of Holy Ganga at Manikarnika-ghat at
dusk, and they did not sink, but floated on the surface of the water like
tiny glowing firebugs, and were washed out to sea where their strange
luminosity must have frightened the captains of ships.
As for Ahmed Sinai: I swear that it was after Narlikar's death and the
arrival of the women that he began, literally, to fade... gradually his skin
paled, his hair lost its colour, until within a few months he had become
entirely white except for the darkness of his eyes. (Mary Pereira told
Amina: 'That man is cold in the blood; so now his skin has made ice, white
ice like a fridge.') I should say, in all honesty, that although he
pretended to be worried by his transformation into a white man, and went to
see doctors and so forth, he was secretly rather pleased when they failed to
explain the problem or prescribe a cure, because he had long envied
Europeans their pigmentation. One day, when it was permissible to make jokes
again (a decent interval had been allowed to elapse after Dr Narlikar's
death), he told Lila Sabarmati at the cocktail hour: 'All the best people
are white under the skin; I have merely given up pretending.' His
neighbours, all of whom were darker than he, laughed politely and felt
curiously ashamed.
Circumstantial evidence indicates that the shock of Narlikar's death
was responsible for giving me a snow-white father to set beside my ebony
mother; but (although I don't know how much you're prepared to swallow) I
shall risk giving an alternative explanation, a theory developed in the
abstract privacy of my clocktower... because during my frequent psychic
travels, I discovered something rather odd: during the first nine years
after Independence, a similar pigmentation disorder (whose first recorded
victim may well have been the Rani of Cooch Naheen) afflicted large numbers
of the nation's business community. All over India, I stumbled across good
Indian businessmen, their fortunes thriving thanks to the first Five Year
Plan, which had concentrated on building up commerce... businessmen who had
become or were becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan
(even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming
masters of their own destinies had drained the colour from their cheeks ...
in which case, perhaps my father was a late victim of a widespread, though
generally unremarked phenomenon. The businessmen of India were turning
white.
That's enough to chew on for one day. But Evelyn Lilith Burns is
coming; the Pioneer Cafe is getting painfully close; and - more vitally -
midnight's other children, including my alter ego Shiva, he of the deadly
knees, are pressing extremely hard. Soon the cracks will be wide enough for
them to escape ...
By the way: some time around the end of 1956, in all probability, the
singer and cuckold Wee Willie Winkie also met his death.
Love in Bombay
During Ramzan, the month of fasting, we went to the movies as often as
we could. After being shaken awake at five a.m. by my mother's assiduous
hand; after pre-dawn breakfasts of melon and sugared lime-water, and
especially on Sunday mornings, the Brass Monkey and I took it in turns (or
sometimes called out in unison) to remind Amina: 'The
ten-thirty-in-the-morning show! It's Metro Cub Club day, Amma, pleeeese!'
Then the drive in the Rover to the cinema where we would taste neither
Coca-Cola nor potato crisps, neither Kwality ice-cream nor samosas in greasy
paper; but at least there was air-conditioning, and Cub Club badges pinned
to our clothes, and competitions, and birthday-announcements made by a
compere with an inadequate moustache; and finally, the film, after the
trailers with their introductory titles, 'Next Attraction' and 'Coming
Soon', and the cartoon ('In A Moment, The Big Film; But First ... !'):
Quentin Durward,
perhaps, or
Scaramouche.
'Swashbuckling!' we'd say to one
another afterwards, playing movie critic; and, 'A rumbustious, bawdy romp!'
- although we were ignorant of swashbuckles and bawdiness. There was not
much praying in our family (except on Eid-ul-Fitr, when my father took me to
the Friday mosque to celebrate the holiday by tying a handkerchief around my
head and pressing my forehead to the ground) ... but we were always willing
to fast, because we liked the cinema.
Evie Burns and I agreed: the world's greatest movie star was Robert
Taylor. I also liked Jay Silverheels as Tonto; but his kemo-sabay, Clayton
Moore, was too fat for the Lone Ranger, in my view.
Evelyn Lilith Burns arrived on New Year's Day, 1957, to take up
residence with her widower father in an apartment in one of the two squat,
ugly concrete blocks which had grown up, almost without pur noticing them,
on the lower reaches of our hillock, and which were oddly segregated:
Americans and other foreigners lived (like Evie) in Noor Ville; arriviste
Indian success-stories ended up in Laxmi Vilas. From the heights of
Methwold's Estate, we looked down on them all, on white and brown alike; but
nobody ever looked down on Evie Burns - except once. Only once did anyone
get on top of her.
Before I climbed into my first pair of long pants, I fell in love with
Evie; but love was a curious, chain-reactive thing that year. To save time,
I shall place all of us in the same row at the Metro cinema; Robert Taylor
is mirrored in our eyes as we sit in flickering trances -and also in
symbolic sequence: Saleem Sinai is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Evie
Burns who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Sonny
Ibrahim who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with the Brass Monkey who is
sitting next to the aisle and feeling starving hungry ... I loved Evie for
perhaps six months of my life; two years later, she was back in America,
knifing an old woman and being sent to reform school.
A brief expression of my gratitude is in order at this point: if Evie
had not come to live amongst us, my story might never have progressed beyond
tourism-in-a-clocktower and cheating in class ... and then there would have
been no climax in a widows' hostel, no clear proof of my meaning, no coda in
a fuming factory over which there presides the winking, saffron-and-green
dancing figure of the neon goddess Mumbadevi. But Evie Burns (was she snake
or ladder? The answer's obvious:
both)
did come, complete with the silver
bicycle which enabled me not only to discover the midnight children, but
also to ensure the partition of the state of Bombay.
To begin at the beginning: her hair was made of scarecrow straw, her
skin was peppered with freckles and her teeth lived in a metal cage. These
teeth were, it seemed, the only things on earth over which she was powerless
- they grew wild, in malicious crazy-paving overlaps, and stung her
dreadfully when she ate ice-cream. (I permit myself this one generalization:
Americans have mastered the universe, but have no dominion over their
mouths; whereas India is impotent, but her children tend to have excellent
teeth.)
Racked by toothaches, my Evie rose magnificently above the pain.
Refusing to be ruled by bone and gums, she ate cake and drank Coke whenever
they were going; and never complained. A tough kid, Evie Burns: her conquest
of suffering confirmed her sovereignty over us all. It has been observed
that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to
push it out.
Once, I shyly gave her a necklace of flowers (queen-of-the-night for my
lily-of-the-eve), bought with my own pocket-money from a hawker-woman at
Scandal Point. 'I don't wear flowers,' Evelyn Lilith said, and tossed the
unwanted chain into the air, spearing it before it fell with a pellet from
her unerring Daisy air-pistol. Destroying flowers with a Daisy, she served
notice that she was not to be manacled, not even by a necklace: she was our
capricious, whirligig Lill-of-the-Hill. And also Eve. The Adam's-apple of my
eye.
How she arrived: Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice and Hairoil Sabarmati, Cyrus
Dubash, the Monkey and I were playing French cricket in the circus-ring
between Methwold's four palaces. A New Year's Day game: Toxy clapping at her
barred window; even Bi-Appah was in good humour and not, for once, abusing
us. Cricket - even French cricket, and even when played by children - is a
quiet game: peace anointed in linseed oil. The kissing of leather and
willow; sprinkled applause; the occasional cry - 'Shot! Shot, sir!' -
'Owzatt??'
but Evie on her bicycle was having none of that.
'Hey, you! Alia you! Hey, whassamatter? You all deaf or what?'
I was batting (elegantly as Ranji, powerfully as Vinoo Mankad) when she
charged up the hill on her two-wheeler, straw hair flying, freckles ablaze,
mouth-metal flashing semaphore messages in the sunlight, a scarecrow astride
a silver bullet... 'Hey, you widda leaky nose! Stop watching the schoopid
ball, ya crumb! I'll showya something worth watching!'
Impossible to picture Evie Burns without also conjuring up a bicycle;
and not just any two-wheeler, but one of the last of the great old-timers,
an Arjuna Indiabike in mint condition, with drop-handlebars wrapped in
masking tape and five gears and a seat made of reccine cheetah-skin. And a
silver frame (the colour, I don't need to tell you, of the Lone Ranger's
horse) ... slobby Eyeslice and neat Hairoil, Cyrus the genius and the
Monkey, and Sonny Ibrahim and myself - the best of friends, the true sons of
the Estate, its heirs by right of birth - Sonny with the slow innocence he
had had ever since the forceps dented his brain and me with my dangerous
secret knowledge - yes, all of us, future bullfighters and Navy chiefs and
all, stood frozen in open-mouthed attitudes as Evie Burns began to ride her
bike, fasterfasterfaster, around and around the edges of the circus-ring.
'Lookit me now: watch me go, ya dummies!'
On and off the cheetah-seat, Evie performed. One foot on the seat, one
leg stretched out behind her, she whirled around us; she built up speed and
then did a headstand on the seat! She could straddle the front wheel, facing
the rear, and work the pedals the wrong way round ... gravity was her slave,
speed her element, and we knew that a power had come among us, a witch on
wheels, and the flowers of the hedgerows threw her petals, the dust of the
circus-ring stood up in clouds of ovation, because the circus-ring had found
its mistress, too: it was the canvas beneath the brush of her whirling
wheels.
Now we noticed that our heroine packed a Daisy air-pistol on her right
hip ... 'More to come, ya zeroes!' she yelled, and drew the weapon. Her
pellets gave stones the gift of flight; we threw annas into the air and she
gunned them down, stone-dead. 'Targets! More targets!' - and Eyeslice
surrendered his beloved pack of rummy cards without a murmur, so that she
could shoot the heads off the kings. Annie Oakley in tooth-braces - nobody
dared question her sharp-shooting, except once, and that was the end of her
reign, during the great cat invasion; and there were extenuating
circumstances.
Flushed, sweating, Evie Burns dismounted and announced: 'From now on,
there's a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians? Any arguments?'
No arguments; I knew then that I had fallen in love.
At Juhu Beach with Evie: she won the camel-races, could drink more
coconut milk than any of us, could open her eyes under the sharp salt water
of the Arabian Sea.
Did six months make such a difference? (Evie was half a year older than
me.) Did it entitle you to talk to grown-ups as an equal? Evie was seen
gossiping with old man Ibrahim Ibrahim; she claimed Lila Sabarmati was
teaching her to put on make-up; she visited Homi Catrack to gossip about
guns. (It was the tragic irony of Homi Catrack's life that he, at whom a gun
would one day be pointed, was a true
aficionado
of firearms ... in Evie he
found a fellow-creature, a motherless child who was, unlike his own Toxy, as
sharp as a knife and as bright as a bottle. Incidentally, Evie Burns wasted
no sympathy on poor Toxy Catrack. 'Wrong inna head,' she opined carelessly
to us all, 'Oughta be put down like rats.' But Evie: rats are not weak!
There was more that was rodent-like in your face than in the whole body of
your despised Tox.)
That was Evelyn Lilith; and within weeks of her arrival, I had set
off
the chain reaction from whose effects I would never fully recover.
It began with Sonny Ibrahim, Sonny-next-door, Sonny of the
forcep-hollows, who has been sitting patiently in the wings of my story,
awaiting his cue. In those days, Sonny was a badly bruised fellow: more than
forceps had dented him. To love the Brass Monkey (even in the nine-year-old
sense of the word) was no easy thing to do.
As I've said, my sister, born second and unheralded, had begun to react
violently to any declarations of affection. Although she was believed to
speak the languages of birds and cats, the soft words of lovers roused in
her an almost animal rage; but Sonny was too simple to be warned off. For
months now, he had been pestering her with statements such as, 'Saleem's
sister, you're a pretty solid type!' or, 'Listen, you want to be my girl? We
could go to the pictures with your ayah, maybe ...' And for an equal number
of months, she had been making him suffer for his love - telling tales to
his mother; pushing him into mud-puddles accidentally-on-purpose; once even
assaulting him physically, leaving him with long raking claw-marks down his
face and an expression of sad-dog injury in his eyes; but he would not
learn. And so, at last, she had planned her most terrible revenge.
The Monkey attended Walsingham School for Girls on Nepean Sea Road; a
school full of tall, superbly muscled Europeans, who swam like fish and
dived like submarines. In their spare time, they could be seen from our
bedroom window, cavorting in the map-shaped pool of the Breach Candy Club,
from which we were, of course, barred ... and when I discovered that the
Monkey had somehow attached herself to these segregated swimmers, as a sort
of mascot, I felt genuinely aggrieved with her for perhaps the first time
... but there was no arguing with her; she went her own way. Beefy
fifteen-year-old white girls let her sit with them on the Walsingham school
bus. Three such females would wait with her every morning at the same place
where Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus-the-great and I awaited the bus from
the Cathedral School.
One morning, for some forgotten reason, Sonny and I were the only boys
at the stop. Maybe there was a bug going round or something. The Monkey
waited until Mary Pereira had left us alone, in the care of the beefy
swimmers; and then suddenly the truth of what she was planning flashed into
my head as, for no particular reason, I tuned into her thoughts; and I
yelled 'Hey!' - but too late. The Monkey screeched, 'You keep out of this!'
and then she and the three beefy swimmers had jumped upon Sonny Ibrahim,
street-sleepers and beggars and bicycling clerks were watching with open
amusement, because they were ripping every scrap of clothing off his body
... 'Damn it man, are you going just to stand and watch?' -Sonny yelling for
help, but I was immobilized, how could I take sides between my sister and my
best friend, and he, 'I'll tell my daddy on you!', tearful now, while the
Monkey, 'That'll teach you to talk shit - and that'll teach you', his shoes,
off; no shirt any more; his vest, dragged off by a high-board diver, 'And
that'll teach you to write your sissy love letters', no socks now, and
plenty of tears, and 'There!' yelled the Monkey; the Walsingham bus arrived
and the assailants and my sister jumped in and sped away, 'Ta-ta-ba-ta,
lover-boy!' they yelled, and Sonny was left in the street, on the pavement
opposite Chimalker's and Reader's Paradise, naked as the day he was born;
his forcep-hollows glistened like rock-pools, because Vaseline had dripped
into them from his hair; and his eyes were wet as well, as he, 'Why's she do
it, man? Why, when I only told her I liked ...'
'Search me,' I said, not knowing where to look, 'She does things,
that's all.' Not knowing, either, that the time would come when she did
something worse to me.
But that was nine years later ... meanwhile, early in 1957, election
campaigns had begun: the Jan Sangh was campaigning for rest homes for aged
sacred cows; in Kerala, E. M. S. Namboodiripad was promising that Communism
would give everyone food and jobs; in Madras, the Anna-D.M.K. party of C. N.
Annadurai fanned the flames of regionalism; the Congress fought back with
reforms such as the Hindu Succession Act, which gave Hindu women equal
rights of inheritance ... in short, everybody was busy pleading his own
cause; I, however, found myself tongue-tied in the face of Evie Burns, and
approached Sonny Ibrahim to ask him to plead on my behalf.
In India, we've always been vulnerable to Europeans ... Evie had only
been with us a matter of weeks, and already I was being sucked into a
grotesque mimicry of European literature. (We had done
Cyrano,
in a
simplified version, at school; I had also read the
Classics Illustrated
comic book.) Perhaps it would be fair to say that Europe repeats itself, in
India, as farce ... Evie was American. Same thing.
'But hey, man, that's no-fair man, why don't you do it yourself?'
'Listen, Sonny,' I pleaded, 'you're my friend, right?'
'Yeah, but you didn't even help ...'
'That was my sister, Sonny, so how could I?'
'No, so you have to do your own dirty ...'
'Hey, Sonny, man, think. Think only. These girls need careful handling,
man. Look how the Monkey flies off the handle! You've got the experience,
yaar, you've been through it. You'll know how to go gently this time. What
do I know, man? Maybe she doesn't like me even. You want me to have my
clothes torn off, too? That would make you feel better?'
And innocent, good-natured Sonny, '... Well, no ...'
'Okay, then. You go. Sing my praises a little. Say never mind about my
nose. Character is what counts. You can do that?'
'... Weeeelll ... I ... okay, but you talk to your sis also, yah?'
Til talk, Sonny. What can I promise? You know what she's like. But I'll
talk to her for sure.'
You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will
undo them at a stroke. For every victorious election campaign, there are
twice as many that fail ... from the verandah of Buckingham Villa, through
the slats of the chick-blind, I spied on Sonny Ibrahim as he canvassed my
chosen constituency ... and heard the voice of the electorate, the rising
nasality of Evie Burns, splitting the air with scorn: 'Who?
Him?
Whynt'cha
tell him to jus' go blow his nose? That sniffer? He can't even ride a
bike!'
Which was true.
And there was worse to come; because now (although a chick-blind
divided the scene into narrow slits) did I not see the expression on Evie's
face begin to soften and change? - did Evie's hand (sliced lengthways by the
chick) not reach out towards my electoral agent? -and weren't those Evie's
fingers (the nails bitten down to the quick) touching Sonny's
temple-hollows, the fingertips getting covered in dribbled Vaseline? - and
did Evie say or did she not: 'Now you, Pr instance: you're
cute'?
Let me
sadly affirm that I did; it did; they were; she did.
Saleem Sinai loves Evie Burns; Evie loves Sonny Ibrahim; Sonny is potty
about the Brass Monkey; but what does the Monkey say?
'Don't make me sick, Allah,' my sister said when I tried - rather
nobly, considering how he'd failed me - to argue Sonny's case. The voters
had given the thumijs-down to us both.
I wasn't giving in just yet. The siren temptations of Evie Burns - who
never cared about me, I'm bound to admit - led me inexorably towards my
fall. (But I hold nothing against her; because my fall led to a rise.)
Privately, in my clocktower, I took time off my trans-subcontinental
rambles to consider the wooing of my freckled Eve. 'Forget middlemen,' I
advised myself, 'You'll have to do this personally.' Finally, I formed my
scheme: I would have to share her interests, to make her passions mine ...
guns have never appealed to me. I resolved to learn how to ride a bike.
Evie, in those days, had given in to the many demands of the
hillock-top children that she teach them her bicycle-arts; so it was a
simple matter for me to join the queue for lessons. We assembled in the
circus-ring; Evie, ring-mistress supreme, stood in the centre of five
wobbly, furiously concentrating cyclists ... while I stood beside her,
bikeless. Until Evie's coming I'd shown no interest in wheels, so I'd never
been given any ... humbly, I suffered the lash of Evie's tongue.
'Where've you been
living,
fat nose? I suppose you wanna borrow mine?'
'No,' I lied penitently, and she relented. 'Okay, okay,' Evieshrugged,
'Get in the saddle and lessee whatchou're made of.'
Let me reveal at once that, as I climbed on to the silver Arjuna
Indiabike, I was filled with the purest elation; that, as Evie walked
roundandround, holding the bike by the handlebars, exclaiming, 'Gotcha
balance yet?
Mo?
Geez, nobody's got all year!' - as Evie and I perambulated,
I felt ... what's the word? ... happy.
Roundandroundand ... Finally, to please her, I stammered, 'Okay ... I
think I'm ... let me,' and instantly I was on my own, she had given me a
farewell shove, and the silver creature flew gleaming and uncontrollable
across the circus-ring ... I heard her shouting: 'The brake! Use the goddamn
brake, ya dummy!' - but my hands couldn't move, I had gone rigid as a plank,
and there LOOK OUT in front of me was the blue two-wheeler of Sonny Ibrahim,
collision course, OUTA THE WAY YA CRAZY, Sonny in the saddle, trying to
swerve and miss, but still blue streaked towards silver, Sonny swung right
but I went the same way EEYAH MY BIKE and silver wheel touched blue, frame
kissed frame, I was flying up and over handlebars towards Sonny who had
embarked on an identical parabola towards me CRASH bicycles fell to earth
beneath us, locked in an intimate embrace CRASH suspended in mid-air Sonny
and I met each other, Sonny's head greeted mine ... Over nine years ago I
had been born with bulging temples, and Sonny had been given hollows by
forceps; everything is for a reason, it seems, because now my bulging
temples found their way into Sonny's hollows. A perfect fit. Heads fitting
together, we began our descent to earth, falling clear of the bikes,
fortunately, WHUMMP and for a moment the world went away.
Then Evie with her freckles on fire, 'O ya little creep, ya pile of
snot, ya wrecked my ...' But I wasn't listening, because circus-ring
accident had completed what washing-chest calamity had begun, and they were
there in my head, in the front now, no longer a muffled background noise I'd
never noticed, all of them, sending their here-I-am signals, from north
south east west... the other children born during that midnight hour,
calling 'I,' 'I,' T and 'I.'
'Hey! Hey, snothead! You okay? ... Hey, where's his
mother?'
Interruptions, nothing but interruptions! The different parts of my
somewhat complicated life refuse, with a wholly unreasonable obstinacy, to
stay neatly in their separate compartments. Voices spill out of their
clocktower to invade the circus-ring, which is supposed to be Evie's domain
... and now, at the very moment when I should be describing the fabulous
children of ticktock, I'm being whisked away by Frontier Mail - spirited off
to the decaying world of my grandparents, so that Aadam Aziz is getting in
the way of the natural unfolding of my tale. Ah well.
What can't be cured
must be endured.
That January, during my convalescence from the severe concussion I
received in my bicycling accident, my parents took us off to Agra for a
family reunion that turned out worse than the notorious (and arguably
fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta. For two weeks we were obliged to listen
to Emerald and Zulfikar (who was now a Major-General and insisted on being
called a General) dropping names, and also hints of their fabulous wealth,
which had by now grown into the seventh largest private fortune in Pakistan;
their son Zafar tried (but only once!) to pull the Monkey's fading red
pig-tails. And we were obliged to watch in silent horror while my Civil
Servant uncle Mustapha and his half-Irani wife Sonia beat and bludgeoned
their litter of nameless, genderless brats into utter anonymity; and the
bitter aroma of Alia's spinsterhood filled the air and ruined our food; and
my father would retire early to begin his secret nightly war against the
djinns; and worse, and worse, and worse.
One night I awoke on the stroke of twelve to find my grandfather's
dream inside my head, and was therefore unable to avoid seeing him as he saw
himself - as a crumbling old man in whose centre, when the light was right,
it was possible to discern a gigantic shadow. As the convictions which had
given strength to his youth withered away under the combined influence of
old age, Reverend Mother and the absence of like-minded friends, an old hole
was reappearing in the middle of his body, turning him into just another
shrivelled, empty old man, over whom the God (and other superstitions)
against which he'd fought for so long was beginning to reassert His dominion
... meanwhile, Reverend Mother spent the entire fortnight finding little
ways of insulting my uncle Hanif's despised film-actress wife. And that was
also the time when I was cast as a ghost in a children's play, and found, in
an old leather attache-case on top of my grandfather's almirah, a sheet
which had been chewed by moths, but whose largest hole was man-made: for
which discovery I was repaid (you will recall) in roars of grandparental
rage.
But there was one achievement. I was befriended by Rashid the
rickshaw-wallah (the same fellow who had, in his youth, screamed silently in
a cornfield and helped Nadir Khan into Aadam Aziz's toilet): taking me under
his wing - and without telling my parents, who would have forbidden it so
soon after my accident - he taught me how to ride a bicycle. By the time we
left, I had this secret tucked away with all my others: only I didn't intend
this one to stay secret for very long.
... And on the train home, there were voices hanging on to the outside
of the compartment: 'Ohe, maharaj! Open up, great sir!' -fare-dodgers'
voices fighting with the ones I wanted to listen to, the new ones inside my
head - and then back to Bombay Central Station, and the drive home past
racecourse and temple, and now Evelyn Lilith Burns is demanding that I
finish her part first before concentrating on higher things.
'Home again!' the Monkey shouts. 'Hurray ... Back-to-Bom!' (She is in
disgrace. In Agra, she incinerated the General's boots.)
It is a matter of record that the States Reorganization Committee had
submitted its report to Mr Nehru as long ago as October 1955; a year later,
its recommendations had been implemented. India had been divided anew, into
fourteen states and six centrally-administered 'territories'. But the
boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any
natural features of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words.
Language divided us: Kerala was for speakers of Malayalam, the only
palindromically-named tongue on earth; in Karnataka you were supposed to
speak Kanarese; and the amputated state of Madras - known today as Tamil
Nadu - enclosed the
aficionados
of Tamil. Owing to some oversight, however,
nothing was done with the state of Bombay; and in the city of Mumbadevi, the
language marches grew longer and noisier and finally metamorphosed into
political parties, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti ('United Maharashtra
Party') which stood for the Marathi language and demanded the creation of
the Deccan state of Maharashtra, and the Maha Gujarat Parishad ('Great
Gujarat Party') which marched beneath the banner of the Gujarati language
and dreamed of a state to the north of Bombay City, stretching all the way
to the Kathiawar peninsula and the Rann of Kutch ... I am warming over all
this cold history, these old dead struggles between the barren angularity of
Marathi which was born in the arid heat of the Deccan and Gujarati's boggy,
Kathiawari softness, to explain why, on the day in February 1957 immediately
following our return from Agra, Methwold's Estate was cut off from the city
by a stream of chanting humanity which flooded Warden Road more completely
than monsoon water, a parade so long that it took two days to pass, and of
which it was said that the statue of Sivaji had come to life to ride stonily
at its head. The demonstrators carried black flags; many of them were
shopkeepers on hartal; many were striking textile-workers from Mazagaon and
Matunga; but on our hillock, we knew nothing about their jobs; to us
children, the endless ant-trail of language in Warden Road seemed as
magnetically fascinating as a light-bulb to a moth. It was a demonstration
so immense, so intense in its passions, that it made all previous marches
vanish from the mind as if they had never occurred - and we had all been
banned from going down the hill for even the tiniest of looks. So who was
the boldest of us all? Who urged us to creep at least half-way down, to the
point where the hillock-road swung round to face Warden Road in a steep
U-bend? Who said, 'What's to be scared of? We're only going half-way for a
peek'? ...
Wide-eyed, disobedient Indians followed their freckled American
chief. (They lulled Dr Narlikar - marchers did,' Hairoil warned us in a
shivery voice. Evie spat on his shoes.)
But I, Saleem Sinai, had other fish to fry. 'Evie,' I said with quiet
offhandedness, 'how'd you like to see me bicycling?' No response. Evie was
immersed in the-spectacle ... and was that her fingerprint in Sonny
Ibrahim's left forcep-hollow, embedded in Vaseline for all the world to see?
A second time, and with slightly more emphasis, I said, 'I can do it, Evie.
I'll do it on the Monkey's cycle. You want to watch?' And now Evie, cruelly,
'I'm watching this. This is good. Why'd I wanna watch
you?
And me, a little
snivelly now, 'But I
learned,
Evie, you've
got
to ...' Roars from Warden
Road below us drown my words. Her back is to me; and Sonny's back, the backs
of Eyeslice and Hairoil, the intellectual rear of Cyrus-the-great... my
sister, who has seen the fingerprint too, and looks displeased, eggs me on:
'Go on. Go on, show her. Who's she think she is?' And up on her bike ...
'I'm doing it, Evie, look!' Bicycling in circles, round and round the little
cluster of children, 'See? You
see?'
A moment of exultation; and then Evie,
deflating impatient couldn't-care-less; 'Willya get outa my way, fer
Petesake? I wanna see
lhat!'
Finger, chewed-off nail and all, jabs down in
the direction of the language march; I am dismissed in favour of the parade
of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti! And despite the Monkey, who loyally,
'That's not fair! He's doing it really
good? -
and in spite of the
exhilaration of the thing-in-itself- something goes haywire inside me; and
I'm riding round Evie, fasterfasterfaster, crying sniffing out of control,
'So what is it with you, anyway? What do I have to do to ...' And then
something else takes over, because I realize I don't have to ask her, I can
just get inside that freckled mouth-metalled head and find out, for once I
can really get to know what's going on... and in I go, still bicycling, but
the front of her mind is all full up with Marathi language-marchers, there
are American pop songs stuck in the corners of her thoughts, but nothing I'm
interested in; and now, only now, now for the very first time, now driven on
by the tears of unrequited love, I begin to probe ... I find myself pushing,
diving, forcing my way behind her defences ... into the secret place where
there's a picture of her mother who wears a pink smock and holds up a tiny
fish by the tail, and I'm ferreting deeperdeeperdeeper, where is it, what
makes her tick, when she gives a sort of jerk and swings round to stare at
me as I bicycle roundandroundandround-androundand ...
'Get out!' screams Evie Burns. Hands lifted to forehead. I bicycling,
wet-eyed, diving ininin: to where Evie stands in the doorway of a clapboard
bedroom holding a, holding a something sharp and glinty with red dripping
off it, in the doorway of a, my God and on the bed a woman, who, in a pink,
my God, and Evie with the, and red staining the pink, and a man coming, my
God, and no no no no no ...
'GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!' Bewildered children watch as Evie screams,
language march forgotten, but suddenly remembered again, because Evie has
grabbed the back of the Monkey's bike WHAT'RE YOU DOING EVIE as she pushes
it THERE GET OUT YA BUM THERE GET OUT TO HELL!- She's pushed me
hard-as-hard, and I losing control hurtling down the slope round the end of
the U-bend downdown, MY GOD THE MARCH past Band Box laundry, past Noor Ville
and Laxmi Vilas, AAAAA and down into the mouth of the march, heads feet
bodies, the waves of the march parting as I arrive, yelling blue murder,
crashing into history on a runaway, young-girl's bike.
Hands grabbing handlebars as I slow down in the impassioned throng.
Smiles filled with good teeth surround me. They are not friendly smiles.
'Look look, a little laad-sahib comes down to join us from the big rich
hill!' In Marathi which I hardly understand, it's my worst subject at
school, and the smiles asking, 'You want to join S.M.S., little princeling?'
And I, just about knowing what's being said, but dazed into telling the
truth, shake my head No. And the smiles, 'Oho! The young nawab does not like
our tongue! What does he like?' And another smile, 'Maybe Gujarati! You
speak Gujarati, my lord?' But my Gujarati was as bad as my Marathi; I only
knew one thing in the marshy tongue of Kathiawar; and the smiles, urging,
and the fingers, prodding, 'Speak, little master! Speak some Gujarati!' - so
I told them what I knew, a rhyme I'd learned from Glandy Keith Colaco at
school, which he used when he was bullying Gujarati boys, a rhyme designed
to make fun of the speech rhythms of the language:
Soo che? Saru che!
Danda le ke maru che!
How are you? - I am well! - ГII take a stick and thrash you to hell!
A
nonsense; a nothing; nine words of emptiness... but when I'd retited them,
the smiles began to laugh; and then voices near me and then further and
further away began to take up my chant, HOW ARE YOU? I AM WELL!, and they
lost interest in me, 'Go go with your bicycle, masterji,' they scoffed, I'LL
TAKE A STICK AND THRASH YOU то HELL, I fled away up the hillock as my chant
rushed forward and back, up to the front .and down to the back of the
two-day-long procession, becoming, as it went, a song of war.
That afternoon, the head of the procession of the Samyukta Maharashtra
Samiti collided at Kemp's Corner, with the head of a Maha Gujarat Parishad
demonstration; S.M.S. voices chanted 'Soo che? Saru che!' and M.G.P. throats
were opened in fury; under the posters of the Air-India rajah and of the
Kolynos Kid, the two parties fell upon one another with no little zeal, and
to the tune of my little rhyme the first of the language riots got under
way, fifteen killed, over three hundred wounded.
In this way I became directly responsible for triggering off the
violence which ended with the partition of the state of Bombay, as a result
of which the city became the capital of Maharashtra - so at least I was on
the winning side.
What was it in Evie's head? Crime or dream? I never found out; but I
had learned something else: when you go deep inside someone's head,
they can
feel you in there.
Evelyn Lilith Burns didn't want much to do with me after that day; but,
strangely enough, I was cured of her. (Women have always been the ones to
change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch
must answer for who I am; and the Widow, who I'm keeping for the end; and
after the end, Padma, my goddess of dung. Women have fixed me all right, but
perhaps they were never central - perhaps the place which they should have
filled, the hole in the centre of me which was my inheritance from my
grandfather Aadam Aziz, was occupied for too long by my voices. Or perhaps
-one must consider all possibilities - they always made me a little afraid.)
My tenth birthday
'Oh mister, what to say? Everything is my own poor fault!'
Padma is back. And, now that I have recovered from the poison and am at
my desk again, is too overwrought to be silent. Over and over, my returned
lotus castigates herself, beats her heavy breasts, wails at the top of her
voice. (In my fragile condition, this is fairly distressing; but I don't
blame her for anything.)
'Only believe, mister, how much I have your well-being at heart! What
creatures we are, we women, never for one moment at peace when our men lie
sick and low ... I am so happy you are well, you don't know!'
Padma's story (given in her own words, and read back to her for '
eye-rolling, high-wailing, mammary-thumping confirmation): 'It was my own
foolish pride and vanity, Saleem baba, from which cause I did run from you,
although the job here is good, and you so much needing a looker-after! But
in a short time only I was dying to return.
'So then I thought, how to go back to this man who will not love me and
only does some foolish writery? (Forgive, Saleem baba, but I must tell it
truly. And love, to us women, is the greatest thing of all.)
'So I have been to a holy man, who taught me what I must do. Then with
my few pice I have taken a bus into the country to dig for herbs, with which
your manhood could be awakened from its sleep ... imagine, mister, I have
spoken magic with these words: "Herb thou hast been uprooted by Bulls!" Then
I have ground herbs in water and milk and said, "Thou potent and lusty herb!
Plant which Varuna had dug up for him by Gandharva! Give my Mr Saleem thy
power. Give heat like that of Fire of Indra. Like the male antelope, О herb,
thou hast all the force that Is, thou hast powers of Indra, and the lusty
force of beasts."
'With this preparation I returned to find you alone as always and as
always with your nose in paper. But jealousy, I swear, I have put behind me;
it sits on the face and makes it old. О God forgive me, quietly I put the
preparation in your food!... And then, hai-hai, may Heaven forgive me, but I
am a simple woman, if holy men tell me, how should I argue? ... But now at
least you are better, thanks be to God, and maybe you will not be angry.'
Under the influence of Padma's potion, I became delirious for a week.
My dung-lotus swears (through much-gnashed teeth) that I was stiff as a
board, with bubbles around my mouth. There was also a fever. In my delirium
I babbled about snakes; but I know that Padma is no serpent, and never meant
me harm.
'This love, mister,' Padma is wailing, 'It will drive a woman to
craziness.'
I repeat: I don't blame Padma. At the feet of the Western Ghats, she
searched for the herbs of virility,
mucuna pruritus
and the root of
feronia
elephantum;
who knows what she found? Who knows what, mashed with milk and
mingled with my food, flung my innards into that state of'churning' from
which, as all students of Hindu cosmology will know, Indra created matter,
by stirring the primal soup in his own great milk-churn? Never mind. It was
a noble attempt; but I am beyond regeneration - the Widow has done for me.
Not even the real
mucuna
could have put an end to my incapacity;
feronia
would never have engendered in me the 'lusty force of beasts'.
Still, I am at my table once again; once again Padma sits at my feet,
urging me on. I am balanced once more - the base of my isosceles triangle is
secure. I hover at the apex, above present and past, and feel fluency
returning to my pen.
A kind of magic has been worked, then; and Padma's excursion in search
of love-potions has connected me briefly with that world of ancient learning
and sorcerers' lore so despised by most of us nowadays; but (despite
stomach-cramps and fever and frothings at the mouth) I'm glad of its
irruption into my last days, because to contemplate it is to regain a
little, lost sense of proportion.
Think of this: history, in my version, entered a new phase on August
15th, 1947 - but in another version, that inescapable date is no more than
one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga, in which the cow of
morality has been reduced to standing, teeter-ingly, on a single leg!
Kali-Yuga - the losing throw in our national dice-game; the worst of
everything; the age when property gives a man rank, when wealth is equated
with virtue, when passion becomes the sole bond between men and women, when
falsehood brings success (is it any wonder, in such a time, that I too have
been confused about good and evil?) ... began on Friday, February 18th, 3102
B.C.; and will last a mere 432,000 years! Already feeling somewhat dwarfed,
I should add nevertheless that the Age of Darkness is only the fourth phase
of the present Maha-Yuga cycle which is, in total, ten times as long; and
when you consider that it takes a thousand Maha-Yugas to make just one Day
of Brahma, you'll see what I mean about proportion.
A little humility at this point (when I'm trembling on the brink of
introducing the Children) does not, I feel, come amiss.
Padma shifts her weight, embarrassed. 'What are you talking?' she asks,
reddening a little. 'That is brahmin's talk; what's it to do with me?'
... Born and raised in the Muslim tradition, I find myself overwhelmed
all of a sudden by an older learning; while here beside me is my Padma,
whose return I had so earnestly desired... my Padma! The Lotus Goddess; the
One Who Possesses Dung; who is Honey-Like, and Made of Gold; whose sons are
Moisture and Mud ...
'You must be fevered still,' she expostulates, giggling. 'How made of
gold, mister? And you know I have no chil ...'
... Padma, who along with the yaksa genii, who represent the sacred
treasure of the earth, and the sacred rivers, Ganga Yamuna Sarasvati, and
the tree goddesses, is one of the Guardians of Life, beguiling and
comforting mortal men while they pass through the dream-web of Maya ..
Padma, the Lotus calyx, which grew out of Vishnu's navel, and from which
Brahma himself was born; Padma the Source, the mother of Time! ...
'Hey,' she is sounding worried now, 'let me feel your forehead!'
... And where, in this scheme of things, am I? Am I (beguiled and
comforted by her return) merely mortal - or something more? Such as - yes,
why not - mammoth-trunked, Ganesh-nosed as I am -perhaps, the Elephant. Who,
like Sin the moon, controls the waters, bringing the gift of rain ... whose
mother was Ira, queen consort of Kashyap, the Old Tortoise Man, lord and
progenitor of all creatures on the earth ... the Elephant who is also the
rainbow, and lightning, and whose symbolic value, it must be added, is
highly problematic and unclear.
Well, then: elusive as rainbows, unpredictable as lightning, garrulous
as Ganesh, it seems I have my own place in the ancient wisdom, after all.
'My God.' Padma is rushing for a towel to wet in cold water, 'your
forehead is on fire! Better you lie down now; too soon for all this writing!
The sickness is talking; not you.'
But I've already lost a week; so, fever or no fever, I must press on;
because, having (for the moment) exhausted this strain of old-time fabulism,
I am coming to the fantastic heart of my own story, and must write in plain
unveiled fashion, about the midnight children.
Understand what I'm saying: during the first hour of August 15th
,
1947
- between midnight and one a.m. - no less than one thousand and one children
were born within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India. In
itself, that is not an unusual fact (although the resonances of the number
are strangely literary) - at the time, births in our part of the world
exceeded deaths by approximately six hundred and eighty-seven an hour. What
made the event noteworthy (noteworthy! There's a dispassionate word, if you
like!) was the nature of these children, every one of whom was, through some
freak of biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the
moment, or just conceivably by sheer coincidence (although synchronicity on
such a scale would stagger even C. G. Jung), endowed with features, talents
or faculties which can only be described as miraculous. It was as though -
if you will permit me one moment of fancy in what will otherwise be, I
promise, the most, sober account I can manage - as though history, arriving
at a point of the highest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in
that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from
anything the world had seen up to that time.
If a similar miracle was worked across the border, in the
newly-partitioned-off Pakistan, I have no knowledge of it; my perceptions
were, while they lasted, bounded by the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the
Himalaya mountains, but also by the artificial frontiers which pierced
Punjab and Bengal.
Inevitably, a number of these children failed to survive. Malnutrition,
disease and the misfortunes of everyday life had accounted for no less than
four hundred and twenty of them by the time I became conscious of their
existence; although it is possible to hypothesize that these deaths, too,
had their purpose, since 420 has been, since time immemorial, the number
associated with fraud, deception and trickery. Can it be, then, that the
missing infants were eliminated because they had turned out to be somehow
inadequate, and were not the true children of that midnight hour? Well, in
the first place, that's another excursion into fantasy; in the second, it
depends on a view of life which is both excessively theological and
barbarically cruel. It is also an unanswerable question; any further
examination of it is therefore profitless.
By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all
nearing their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant, for the most part, of one
another's existence - although there were certainly exceptions. In the town
of Baud, on the Mahanadi river in Orissa, there was a pair of twin sisters
who were already a legend in the region, because despite their impressive
plainness they both possessed the ability of making every man who saw them
fall hopelessly and often suicidally in love with them, so that their
bemused parents were endlessly pestered by a stream of men offering their
hands in marriage to either or even both of the bewildering children; old
men who had forsaken the wisdom of their beards and youths who ought to have
been becoming besotted with the actresses in the travelling picture-show
which visited Baud once a month; and there was another, more disturbing
procession of bereaved families cursing the twin girls for having bewitched
their sons into committing acts of violence against themselves, fatal
mutilations and scourgings and even (in one case) self-immolation. With the
exception of such rare instances, however, the children of midnight had
grown up quite unaware of their true siblings, their fellow-chosen-ones
across the length and breadth of India's rough and badly-proportioned
diamond.
And then, as a result of a jolt received in a bicycle-accident, I,
Saleem Sinai, became aware of them all.
To anyone whose personal cast of mind is too inflexible to accept these
facts, I have this to say: That's how it was; there can be no retreat from
the truth. I shall just have to shoulder the burden of the doubter's
disbelief. But no literate person in this India of ours can be wholly immune
from the type of information I am in the process of unveiling - no reader of
our national press can have failed to come across a series of - admittedly
lesser - magic children and assorted freaks. Only last week there was that
Bengali boy who announced himself as the reincarnation of Rabindranath
Tagore and began to extemporize verses of remarkable quality, to the
amazement of his parents; and I can myself remember children with two heads
(sometimes one human, one animal), and other curious features such as
bullock's horns.
I should say at once that not all the children's gifts were desirable,
or even desired by the children themselves; and, in some cases, the children
had survived but been deprived of their midnight-given qualities. For
example (as a companion piece to the story of the Baudi twins) let me
mention a Delhi beggar-girl called Sundari, who was born in a street behind
the General Post Office, not far from the rooftop on which Amina Sinai had
listened to Ramram Seth, and whose beauty was so intense that within moments
of her birth it succeeded in blinding her mother and the neighbouring women
who had been assisting at her delivery; her father, rushing into the room
when he heard the women's screams, had been warned by them just in time; but
his one fleeting glimpse of his daughter so badly impaired his vision that
he was unable, afterwards, to distinguish between Indians and foreign
tourists, a handicap which greatly affected his earning power as a beggar.
For some time after that Sundari was obliged to have a rag placed across her
face; until an old and ruthless great-aunt took her into her bony arms and
slashed her face nine times with a kitchen knife. At the time when I became
aware of her, Sundari was earning a healthy living, because nobody who
looked at her could fail to pity a girl who had clearly once been too
beautiful to look at and was now so cruelly disfigured; she received more
alms than any other member of her family.
Because none of the children suspected that their time of birth had
anything to do with what they were, it took me a while to find it out. At
first, after the bicycle accident (and particularly once language marchers
had purged me of Evie Burns), I contented myself with discovering, one by
one, the secrets of the fabulous beings who had suddenly arrived in my
mental field of vision, collecting them ravenously, the way some boys
collect insects, and others spot railway trains; losing interest in
autograph books and all other manifestations of the gathering instinct, I
plunged whenever possible into the separate, and altogether brighter reality
of the five hundred and eighty-one. (Two hundred and sixty-six of us were
boys; and we were outnumbered by our female counterparts - three hundred and
fifteen of them, including Parvati. Parvati-the-witch.)
Midnight's children! ... From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of
stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any reflective surface in the
land - through lakes and (with greater difficulty) the polished metal bodies
of automobiles ... and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish...
and children with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri
Hills, and from the great watershed of the Vindhyas, a boy who could
increase or reduce his size at will, and had already (mischievously) been
the cause of wild panic and rumours of the return of Giants ... from
Kashmir, there was a blue-eyed child of whose original sex I was never
certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as
she (or he) pleased. Some of us called this child Narada, others Markandaya,
depending on which old fairy story of sexual change we had heard ... near
Jalna in the heart of the parched Deccan I found a water-divining youth, and
at Budge-Budge outside Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had
the power of inflicting physical wounds, so that after a few adults had
found themselves bleeding freely as a result of some barb flung casually
from her lips, they had decided to lock her in a bamboo cage and float her
off down the Ganges to the Sundarbans jungles (which are the rightful home
of monsters and phantasms); but nobody dared approach her, and she moved
through the town surrounded by a vacuum of fear; nobody had the courage to
deny her food. There was a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers
were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert; and
more and more and more ... overwhelmed by their numbers, and by the exotic
multiplicity of their gifts, I paid little attention, in those early days,
to their ordinary selves; but inevitably our problems, when they arose, were
the everyday, human problems which arise from character-and-environment; in
our quarrels, we were just a bunch of kids.
One remarkable fact: the closer to midnight our birth-times were, the
greater were our gifts. Those children born in the last seconds of the hour
were (to be frank) little more than circus freaks: bearded girls, a boy with
the fully-operative gills of a freshwater mahaseer trout, Siamese twins with
two bodies dangling off a single head and neck -the head could speak in two
voices, one male, one female, and every language and dialect spoken in the
subcontinent; but for all their mar-vellousness, these were the
unfortunates, the living casualties of that numinous hour. Towards the
half-hour came more interesting and useful faculties - in the Gir Forest
lived a witch-girl with the power of healing by the laying-on of hands, and
there was a wealthy tea-planter's son in Shillong who had the blessing (or
possibly the curse) of being incapable of forgetting anything he ever saw or
heard. But the children born in the first minute of all - for these children
the hour had reserved the highest talents of which men had ever dreamed. If
you, Padma, happened to possess a register of births in which times were
noted down to the exact second, you, too, would know what scion of a great
Lucknow family (born at twenty-one seconds past midnight) had completely
mastered, by the age of ten, the lost arts of alchemy, with which he
regenerated the fortunes of his ancient but dissipated house; and which
dhobi's daughter from Madras (seventeen seconds past) could fly higher than
any bird simply by closing her eyes; and to which Benarsi silversmith's son
(twelve seconds after midnight) was given the gift of travelling in time and
thus prophesying the future as well as clarifying the past ... a gift which,
children that we were, we trusted implicitly when it dealt with things gone
and forgotten, but derided when he warned us of our own ends... fortunately,
no such records exist; and, for my part, I shall not reveal - or else, in
appearing to reveal, shall falsify - their names and even their locations;
because, although such evidence would provide absolute proof of my claims,
still the children of midnight deserve, now, after everything, to be left
alone; perhaps to forget; but I hope (against hope) to remember ...
Parvati-the-witch was born in Old Delhi in a slum which clustered
around the steps of the Friday mosque. No ordinary slum, this, although the
huts built out of old packing cases and pieces of corrugated tin and shreds
of jute sacking which stood higgledy-piggledy in the shadow of the mosque
looked no different from any other shanty-town ... because this was the
ghetto of the magicians, yes, the very same place which had once spawned a
Hummingbird whom knives had pierced and pie-dogs had failed to save ... the
conjurers' slum, to which the greatest fakirs and prestidigitators and
illusionists in the land continually flocked, to seek their fortune in the
capital city. They found tin huts, and police harassment, and rats ...
Parvati's father had once been the greatest conjurer in Oudh; she had grown
up amid ventriloquists who could make stones tell jokes and contortionists
who could swallow their own legs and fire-eaters who exhaled flames from
their arseholes and tragic clowns who could extract glass tears from the
corners of their eyes; she had stood mildly amid gasping crowds while her
father drove spikes through her neck; and all the time she had guarded her
own secret, which was greater than any of the illusionist flummeries
surrounding her; because to Parvati-the-witch, born a mere seven seconds
after midnight on August 15th, had been given the powers of the true adept,
the illuminatus, the genuine gifts of conjuration and sorcery, the art which
required no artifice.
So among the midnight children were infants with powers of
transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry ... but two of us were born on
the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees
and knees and nose ... to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of
Rama, who could draw the undrawable.bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient
prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!)... and to me,
the greatest talent of all -the ability to look into the hearts and minds of
men.
But it is Kali-Yuga; the children of the hour of darkness were born,
I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found
it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.
There; now I've said it. That is who I was - who we were.
Padma is looking as if her mother had died - her face, with its
opening-shutting mouth, is the face of a beached pomfret. 'O baba!' she says
at last. 'O baba! You are sick; what have you said?'
No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don't
make the mistake of dismissing what I've unveiled as mere delirium; or even
as the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated
before that I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and
read aloud to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal,
by-the-hairs-of-my-mother's-head truth.
Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.
A thousand and one children were born; there were a thousand and one
possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time before;
and there were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children can be made
to represent many things, according to your point of view: they can be seen
as the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our
myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a
modernizing, twentieth-century economy; or as the true hope of freedom,
which is now forever extinguished; but what they must not become is the
bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind. No: illness is neither here
nor there.
'All right, all right, baba,' Padma attempts to placate me. 'Why become
so cross? Rest now, rest some while, that is all I am asking.'
Certainly it was a hallucinatory time in the days leading up to my
tenth birthday; but the hallucinations were not in my head. My father, Ahmed
Sinai, driven by the traitorous death of Dr Narlikar and by the increasingly
powerful effect of djinns-and-tonics, had taken flight into a dream-world of
disturbing unreality; and the most insidious aspect of his slow decline was
that, for a very long time, people mistook it for the very opposite of what
it was ... Here is Sonny's mother, Nussie-the-duck, telling Amina one
evening in our garden: 'What great days for you all, Amina sister, now that
your Ahmed is in his prime! Such a fine man, and so much he is prospering
for his family's sake!' She says it loud enough for him to hear; and
although he pretends to be telling the gardener what to do about the ailing
bougainvillaea, although he assumes an expression of humble
self-deprecation, it's utterly unconvincing, because his bloated body has
begun, without his knowing it, to puff up and strut about. Even Purushottam,
the dejected sadhu under the garden tap, looks embarrassed.
My fading father ... for almost ten years he had always been in a good
mood at the breakfast table, before he shaved his chin; but as his facial
hairs whitened along with his fading skin, this fixed point of happiness
ceased to be a certainty; and the day came when he lost his temper at
breakfast for the first time. That was the day on which taxes were raised
and tax thresholds simultaneously lowered; my father flung down the
Times of
India
with a violent gesture and glared around him with the red eyes I knew
he only wore in his tempers. 'It's like going to the bathroom!' he exploded,
cryptically; egg toast tea shuddered in the blast of his wrath. 'You raise
your shirt and lower your trousers! Wife, this government is going to the
bathroom all over us!' And my mother, blushing pink through the black,
'Janum, the children, please,' but he had stomped off, leaving me with a
clear understanding of what people meant when they said the country was
going to pot.
In the following weeks my father's morning chin continued to fade, and
something more than the peace of the breakfast table was lost: he began to
forget what sort of man he'd been in the old days before Narlikar's treason.
The rituals of our home life began to decay. He began to stay away from the
breakfast table, so that Amina could not wheedle money out of him; but, to
compensate, he became careless with his cash, and his discarded clothes were
full of rupee notes and coins, so that by picking his pockets she could make
ends meet. But a more depressing indication of his withdrawal from family
life was that he rarely told us bedtime stories any more, and when he did we
didn't enjoy them, because they had become ill-imagined and unconvincing.
Their subject-matter was still the same, princes goblins flying horses and
adventures in magic lands, but in his perfunctory voice we could hear the
creaks and groans of a rustling, decayed imagination.
My father had succumbed to abstraction. It seems that Narlikar's death
and the end of his tetrapod dream had shown Ahmed Sinai the unreliable
nature of human relationships; he had decided to divest himself of all such
ties. He took to rising before dawn and locking himself with his current
Fernanda or Flory in his downstairs office, outside whose windows the two
evergreen trees he planted to commemorate my birth and the Monkey's had
already grown tall enough to keep out most of the daylight when it arrived.
Since we hardly ever dared disturb him, my father entered a deep solitude, a
condition so unusual in our overcrowded country as to border on abnormality;
he began to refuse food from our kitchen and to live on cheap rubbish
brought daily by his girl in a tiffin-carrier, lukewarm parathas and soggy
vegetable samosas and bottles of fizzy drinks. A strange perfume wafted out
from under his office door; Amina took it for the odour of stale air and
second-rate food; but it's my belief that an old scent had returned in a
stronger form, the old aroma of failure which had hung about him from the
earliest days.
He sold off the many tenements or chawls which he'd bought cheaply on
his arrival in Bombay, and on which our family's fortunes had been based.
Freeing himself from all business connections with human beings - even his
anonymous tenants in Kurla and Worli, in Matunga and Mazagaon and Mahim - he
liquefied
his
assets, and entered the rarefied and abstract air of financial
speculation. Locked in his office, in those days, his one contact with the
outside world (apart from his poor Fernandas) was his telephone. He spent
his day deep in conference with this instrument, as it put his money into
such-andsuch shares or soandso stocks, as it invested in government bonds or
bear market equities, selling long or short as he commanded ... and
invariably getting the best price of the day. In a streak of good fortune
comparable only to my mother's success on the horses all those years
previously, my father and his telephone took the stock exchange by storm, a
feat made more remarkable by Ahmed Sinai's constantly-worsening drinking
habits. Djinn-sodden, he nevertheless managed to ride high on the abstract
undulations of the money market, reacting to its emotional, unpredictable
shifts and changes the way a lover does to his beloved's slightest whim ...
he could sense when a share would rise, when the peak would come; and he
always got out before the fall. This was how his plunge into the abstract
solitude of his telephonic days was disguised, how his financial coups
obscured his steady divorce from reality; but under cover of his growing
riches, his condition was getting steadily worse.
Eventually the last of his calico-skirted secretaries quit, being
unable to tolerate life in an atmosphere so thin and abstract as to make
breathing difficult; and now my father sent for Mary Pereira and coaxed her
with, 'We're friends, Mary, aren't we, you and I?', to which the poor woman
replied, 'Yes, sahib, I know; you will look after me when I'm old,' and
promised to find him a replacement. The next day she brought him her sister,
Alice Pereira, who had worked for all kinds of bosses and had an almost
infinite tolerance of men. Alice and Mary had long since made up their
quarrel over Joe D'Costa; the younger woman was often upstairs with us at
the end of the day, bringing her qualities of sparkle and sauciness into the
somewhat oppressive air of our home. I was fond of her, and it was through
her that we learned of my father's greatest excesses, whose victims were a
budgerigar and a mongrel dog.
By July Ahmed Sinai had entered an almost permanent state of
intoxication; one day, Alice reported, he had suddenly gone off for a drive,
making her fear for his life, and returned somehow or other with a shrouded
bird-cage in which, he said, was his new acquisition, a bulbul or Indian
nightingale. 'For God knows how long,' Alice confided, 'he tells me all
about bulbuls; all fairy stories of its singing and what-all; how this
Calipha was captivated by its song, how the singing could make longer the
beauty of the night; God knows what the poor man was babbling, quoting
Persian and Arabic, I couldn't make top or bottom of it. But then he took
off the cover, and in the cage is nothing but a talking budgie, some crook
in Chor Bazaar must have painted the feathers! Now how could I tell the poor
man, him so excited with his bird and all, sitting there calling out, "Sing,
little bulbul! Sing!" ... and it's so funny, just before it died from the
paint it just repeated his line back at him, straight out like that -not
squawky like a bird, you know, but in his own self-same voice:
Sing! Little
bulbul, sing!'
But there was worse on the way. A few days later I was sitting with
Alice on the servants' spiral iron staircase when she said, 'Baba, I don't
know what got into your daddy now. All day sitting down there cursing curses
at the dog!'
The mongrel bitch we named Sherri had strolled up to the two-storey
hillock earlier that year and simply adopted us, not knowing that life was a
dangerous business for animals on Methwold's Estate; and in his cups Ahmed
Sinai made her the guinea-pig for his experiments with the family curse.
This was that same fictional curse which he'd dreamed up to impress
William Methwold, but now in the liquescent chambers of his mind the djinns
persuaded him that it was no fiction, that he'd just forgotten the words; so
he spent long hours in his insanely solitary office experimenting with
formulae ... 'Such things he is cursing the poor creature with!' Alice said,
'I wonder she don't drop down dead straight off!'
But Sherri just sat there in a corner and grinned stupidly back at him,
refusing to turn purple or break out in boils, until one evening he erupted
from his office and ordered Amina to drive us all to Hornby Vellard. Sherri
came too. We promenaded, wearing puzzled expressions, up and down the
Vellard, and then he said, 'Get in the car, all of you.' Only he wouldn't
let Sherri in... as the Rover accelerated away with my father at the wheel
she began to chase after us, while the Monkey yelled Daddydaddy and Amina
pleaded Janumplease and I sat in mute horror, we had to drive for miles,
almost all the way to Santa Cruz airport, before he had his revenge on the
bitch for refusing to succumb to his sorceries... she burst an artery as she
ran and died spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of
a hungry cow.
The Brass Monkey (who didn't even like dogs) cried for a week; my
mother became worried about dehydration and made her drink gallons of water,
pouring it into her as if she were a lawn, Mary said; but I liked the new
puppy my father bought me for my tenth birthday, out of some flicker of
guilt perhaps: her name was the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, and she had a
pedigree chock-full of champion Alsatians, although in time my mother
discovered that that was as false as the mock-bulbul, as imaginary as my
father's forgotten curse and Mughal ancestry; and after six months she died
of venereal disease. We had no pets after that.
My father was not the only one to approach my tenth birthday with his
head lost in the clouds of his private dreams; because here is Mary Pereira,
indulging in her fondness for making chutneys, kasaundies and pickles of all
descriptions, and despite the cheery presence of her sister Alice there is
something haunted in her face.
'Hullo, Mary!' Padma - who seems to have developed a soft spot for my
criminal ayah - greets her return to centre-stage. 'So what's eating
her
?
'
This, Padma: plagued by her nightmares of assaults by Joseph D'Costa,
Mary was finding it harder and harder to get sleep. Knowing what dreams had
in store for her, she forced herself to stay awake; dark rings appeared
under her eyes, which were covered in a thin, filmy glaze; and gradually the
blurriness of her perceptions merged waking and dreaming into something very
like each other ... a dangerous condition to get into, Padma. Not only does
your work suffer but things start escaping from your dreams.. .Joseph
D'Costa had, in fact, managed to cross the blurred frontier, and now
appeared in Buckingham Villa not as a nightmare, but as a full-fledged
ghost. Visible (at this time) only to Mary Pereira, he began haunting her in
all the rooms of our home, which, to her horror and shame, he treated as
casually as if it were his own. She saw him in the drawing-room amongst
cut-glass vases and Dresden figurines and the rotating shadows of ceiling
fans, lounging in soft armchairs with his long raggedy legs sprawling over
the arms; his eyes were filled up with egg-whites and there were holes in
his feet where the snake had bitten him. Once she saw him in Amina Begum's
bed in the afternoon, lying down cool as cucumber right next to my sleeping
mother, and she burst out, 'Hey, you! Go on out from there! What do you
think, you're some sort of lord?' - but she only succeeded in awaking my
puzzled mother. Joseph's ghost plagued Mary wordlessly; and the worst of it
was that she found herself growing accustomed to him, she found forgotten
sensations of fondness nudging at her insides, and although she told herself
it was a crazy thing to do she began to be filled with a kind of nostalgic
love for the spirit of the dead hospital porter.
But the love was not returned; Joseph's egg-white eyes remained
expressionless; his lips remained set in an accusing, sardonic grin; and at
last she realized that this new manifestation was no different from her old
dream-Joseph (although it never assaulted her), and that if she was ever to
be free of him she would have to do the unthinkable thing and confess her
crime to the world. But she didn't confess, which was probably my fault -
because Mary loved me like her own unconceived and inconceivable son, and to
make her confession would have hurt me badly, so for my sake she suffered
the ghost of her conscience and stood haunted in the kitchen (my father had
sacked the cook one djinn-soaked evening) cooking our dinner and becoming,
accidentally, the embodiment of the opening line of my Latin textbook,
Ora
Maritima:
'By the side of the sea, the ayah cooked the meal.'
Ora maritima,
ancilla cenam parat.
Look into the eyes of a cooking ayah, and you will see
more than textbooks ever know.
On my tenth birthday, many chickens were coming home to roost. On my
tenth birthday, it was clear that the freak weather -storms, floods,
hailstones from a cloudless sky - which had succeeded the intolerable heat
of 1956, had managed to wreck the second Five Year Plan. The government had
been forced - although the elections were just around the corner - to
announce to the world that it could accept no more development loans unless
the lenders were willing to wait indefinitely for repayment. (But let me not
overstate the case: although the production of finished steel reached only
2.4 million tons by the Plan's end in 1961, and although, during those five
years, the number of landless and unemployed masses actually increased, so
that it was greater than it had ever been under the British Raj, there were
also substantial gains. The production of iron ore was almost doubled; power
capacity did double; coal production leaped from thirty-eight million to
fifty-four million tons. Five billion yards of cotton textiles were produced
each year. Also large numbers of bicycles, machine tools, diesel engines,
power pumps and ceiling fans. But I can't help ending on a downbeat:
illiteracy survived unscathed; the population continued to mushroom.)
On my tenth birthday, we were visited by my uncle Hanif, who made
himself excessively unpopular at Methwold's Estate by booming cheerily,
'Elections coming! Watch out for the Communists!'
On my tenth birthday, when my uncle Hanif made his gaffe, my mother
(who had begun disappearing on mysterious 'shopping trips') dramatically and
unaccountably blushed.
On my tenth birthday, I was given an Alsatian puppy with a false
pedigree who would shortly die of syphilis.
On my tenth birthday, everyone at Methwold's Estate tried hard to be
cheerful, but beneath this thin veneer everyone was possessed by the same
thought: 'Ten years, my God! Where have they gone? What have we done?'
On my tenth birthday, old man Ibrahim announced his support for the
Maha Gujarat Parishad; as far as possession of the city of Bombay was
concerned, he nailed his colours to the losing side.
On my tenth birthday, my suspicions aroused by a blush, I spied on my
mother's thoughts; and what I saw there led to my beginning to follow her,
to my becoming a private eye as daring as Bombay's legendary Dom Minto, and
to important discoveries at and in the vicinity of the Pioneer Cafe.
On my tenth birthday, I had a party, which was attended by my family,
which had forgotten how to be gay, by classmates from the Cathedral School,
who had been sent by their parents, and by a number of mildly bored girl
swimmers from the Breach Candy Pools, who permitted the Brass Monkey to fool
around with them and pinch their bulging musculatures; as for adults, there
were Mary and Alice Pereira, and the Ibrahims and Homi Catrack and Uncle
Hanif and Pia Aunty, and Lila Sabarmati to whom the eyes of every
schoolboy (and also Homi Catrack) remained firmly glued, to the considerable
irritation of Pia. But the only member of the hilltop gang to attend was
loyal Sonny Ibrahim, who had defied an embargo placed upon the festivities
by an embittered Evie Burns. He gave me a message: 'Evie says to tell you
you're out of the gang.'
On my tenth birthday, Evie, Eyeslice, Hairoil and even Cyrus-the-great
stormed my private hiding-place; they occupied the clock-tower, and deprived
me of its shelter.
On my tenth birthday, Sonny looked upset, and the Brass Monkey detached
herself from her swimmers and became utterly furious with Evie Burns. Til
teach her,' she told me. 'Don't you worry, big brother; I'll show that one,
all right.'
On my tenth birthday, abandoned by one set of children, I learned that
five hundred and eighty-one others were celebrating their birthdays, too;
which was how I understood the secret of my original hour of birth; and,
having been expelled from one gang, I decided to form my own, a gang which
was spread over the length and breadth of the country, and whose
headquarters were behind my eyebrows.
And on my tenth birthday, I stole the initials of the Metro Cub Club -
which were also the initials of the touring English cricket team - and gave
them to the new Midnight Children's Conference, my very own M.C.C.
That's how it was when I was ten: nothing but trouble outside my head,
nothing but miracles inside it.
At the Pioneer Cafe
No colours except green and black the walls are green the sky is black
(there is no roof) the stars are green the Widow is green but her hair is
black as black. The Widow sits on a high high chair the chair is green the
seat is black the Widow's hair has a centre-parting it is green on the left
and on the right black. High as the sky the chair is green the seat is black
the Widow's arm is long as death its skin is green the fingernails are long
and sharp and black. Between the walls the children green the walls are
green the Widow's arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children
scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow's arm is hunting see
the children run and scream the Widow's hand curls round them green and
black. Now one by one the children mmff are stifled quiet the Widow's hand
is lifting one by one the children green their blood is black unloosed by
cutting fingernails it splashes black on walls (of green) as one by one the
curling hand lifts children high as sky the sky is black there are no stars
the Widow laughs her tongue is green but her teeth are black. And children
torn in two in Widow hands which rolling rolling halves of children roll
them into little balls the balls are green the night is black. And little
balls fly into night between the walls the children shriek as one by one the
Widow's hand. And in a corner the Monkey and I (the walls are green the
shadows black) cowering crawling wide high walls green fading into black
there is no roof and Widow's hand comes onebyone the children scream and
mmff and little balls and hand and scream and mmff and splashing stains of
black. Now only she and I and no more screams the Widow's hand comes hunting
hunting the skin is green the nails are black towards the corner hunting
hunting while we shrink closer into the corner our skin is green our fear is
black and now the Hand comes reaching reaching and she my sister pushes me
out out of the corner while she stays cowering staring the hand the nails
are curling scream and mmff and splash of black and up into the high as sky
and laughing Widow tearing I am rolling into little balls the balls are
green and out into the night the night is black ...
The fever broke today. For two days (I'm told) Padma has been sitting
up all night, placing cold wet flannels on my forehead, holding me through
my shivers and dreams of Widow's hands; for two days she has been blaming
herself for her potion of unknown herbs. 'But,' I reassure her, 'this time,
it wasn't anything to do with that.' I recognize this fever; it's come up
from inside me and from nowhere else; like a bad stink, it's oozed through
my cracks. I caught exactly such a fever on my tenth birthday, and spent two
days in bed; now, as my memories return to leak out of me, this old fever
has come back, too. 'Don't worry,' I say, 'I caught these germs almost
twenty-one years ago.'
We are not alone. It is morning at the pickle-factory; they have
brought my son to see me. Someone (never mind who) stands beside Padma at my
bedside, holding him in her arms. 'Baba, thank God you are better, you don't
know what you were talking in your sickness.' Someone speaks anxiously,
trying to force her way into my story ahead of time; but it won't work...
someone, who founded this pickle-factory and its ancillary bottling works,
who has been looking after my impenetrable child, just as once ... wait on!
She nearly wormed it out of me then, but fortunately I've still got my wits
about me, fever or no fever! Someone will just have to step back and remain
cloaked in anonymity until it's her turn; and that won't be until the very
end. I turn my eyes away from her to look at Padma. 'Do not think,' I
admonish her, 'that because I had a fever, the things I told you were not
completely true. Everything happened just as I described.'
'O God, you and your stories,' she cries, 'all day, all night -you have
made yourself sick! Stop some time, na, what will it hurt?' I set my lips
obstinately; and now she, with a sudden change of mood: 'So, tell me now,
mister: is there anything you want
7
'
'Green chutney,' I request, 'Bright green - green as grasshoppers.' And
someone who cannot be named remembers and tells Padma (speaking in the soft
voice which is only used at sickbeds and funerals), 'I know what he means.'
... Why, at this crucial instant, when all manner of things were .
waiting to be described - when the Pioneer Cafe was so close, and the
rivalry of knees and nose - did I introduce a mere condiment into the
conversation? (Why do I waste time, in this account, on a humble preserve,
when I could be describing the elections of 1957 -when all India is waiting,
twenty-one years ago, to vote?) Because I sniffed the air; and scented,
behind the solicitous expressions of my visitors, a sharp whiff of danger. I
intended to defend myself; but I required the assistance of chutney ...
I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what
has remained undescribed: through green-tinged glass windows, my room looks
out on to an iron catwalk and then down to the cooking-floor, where copper
vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps,
working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle fumes; while
(looking the other way, through a green-tinged window on the world) railway
tracks shine dully in morning sun, bridged over at regular intervals by the
messy gantries of the electrification system. In daylight, our
saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance above the factory doors; we
switch her off to save power. But electric trains are using power:
yellow-and-brown local trains clatter south towards Churchgate Station from
Dadar and Borivli, from Kurla and Bassein Road. Human flies hang in thick
white-trousered dusters from the trains; I do not deny that, within the
factory walls, you may also see some flies. But there are also compensating
lizards, hanging stilly upside-down on the ceiling, their jowls reminiscent
of the Kathiawar peninsula ... sounds, too, have been waiting to be heard:
bubbling of vats, loud singing, coarse imprecations, bawdy humour of
fuzz-armed women; the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped admonitions of overseers; the
all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the adjacent bottling-works; and
rush of trains, and the buzzing (infrequent, but inevitable) of flies ...
while grasshopper-green chutney is being extracted from its vat, to be
brought on a wiped-clean plate with saffron and green stripes around the
rim, along with another plate piled high with snacks from the local Irani
shop; while what-has-now-been-shown goes on as usual, and
what-can-now-be-heard fills the air (to say nothing of what can be smelled),
I, alone in bed in my office realize with a start of alarm that outings are
being suggested.
'... When you are stronger,' someone who cannot be named is saying, 'a
day at Elephanta, why not, a nice ride in a motor-launch, and all those
caves with so-beautiful carvings; or Juhu Beach, for swimming and
coconut-milk and camel-races; or Aarey Milk Colony, even! ...' And Padma:
'Fresh air, yes, and the little one will like to be with his father.' And
someone, patting my son on his head: 'There, of course, we will all go. Nice
picnic; nice day out. Baba, it will do you good ...'
As chutney arrives, bearer-borne, in my room, I hasten to put a stop to
these suggestions. 'No,' I refuse. 'I have work to do.' And I see a look
pass between Padma and someone; and I see that I've been right to be
suspicious. Because I've been tricked by offers of picnics once before! Once
before, false smiles and offers of Aarey Milk Colony have fooled me into
going out of doors and into a motor car; and then before I knew it there
were hands seizing me, there were hospital corridors and doctors and nurses
holding me in place while over my nose a mask poured anaesthetic over me and
a voice said, Count now, count to ten ... I know what they are planning.
'Listen,' I tell them, 'I don't need doctors.'
And Padma, 'Doctors? Who is talking about...' But she is fooling
nobody; and with a little smile I say, 'Here: everybody: take some chutney.
I must tell you some important things.'
And while chutney - the same chutney which, back in 1957, my ayah Mary
Pereira had made so perfectly; the grasshopper-green chutney which is
forever associated with those days - carried them back into the world of my
past, while chutney mellowed them and made them receptive, I spoke to them,
gently, persuasively, and by a mixture of condiment and oratory kept myself
out of the hands of
the pernicious green-medicine men. I said: 'My son will understand. As
much as for any living being, I'm telling my story for him, so that
afterwards, when I've lost my struggle against cracks, he will know.
Morality, judgment, character ... it all starts with memory ... and I am
keeping carbons.'
Green chutney on chilli-pakoras, disappearing down someone's gullet;
grasshopper-green on tepid chapatis, vanishing behind Padma's lips. I see
them begin to weaken, and press on. 'I told you the truth,' I say yet again,
'Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects,
eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also;
but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually
coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone
else's version more than his own.'
Yes: I said 'sane'. I knew what they were thinking: 'Plenty of children
invent imaginary friends; but one thousand and one! That's just crazy!' The
midnight children shook even Padma's faith in my narrative; but I brought
her round, and now there's no more talk of outings.
How I persuaded them: by talking about my son, who needed to know my
story; by shedding light on the workings of memory; and by other devices,
some naively honest, others wily as foxes. 'Even Muhammad,' I said, 'at
first believed himself insane: do you think the notion never crossed my
mind? But the Prophet had his Khadija, his Abu-Bakr, to reassure him of the
genuineness of his Calling; nobody betrayed him into the hands of
asylum-doctors.' By now, the green chutney was filling them with thoughts of
years ago; I saw guilt appear on their faces, and shame. 'What is truth?' I
waxed rhetorical, 'What is sanity? Did Jesus rise up from the grave? Do
Hindus not accept - Padma - that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma
dreamed, is dreaming the universe; that we only see dimly through that
dream-web, which is Maya. Maya,' I adopted a haughty, lecturing tone, 'may
be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit.
Apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of
things: all these are parts of Maya. If I say that certain things took place
which you, lost in Brahma's dream, find hard to believe, then which of us is
right? Have some more chutney,' I added graciously, taking a generous
helping myself. 'It tastes very good.'
Padma began to cry. 'I never said I didn't believe, she wept. 'Of
course, every man must tell his story in his own true way; but...'
'But,' I interrupted conclusively, 'you also - don't you - want to know
what happens? About the hands that danced without touching, and the knees?
And later, the curious baton of Commander Sabarmati, and of course the
Widow? And the Children - what became of them?'
And Padma nodded. So much for doctors and asylums; I have been left to
write. (Alone, except for Padma at my feet.) Chutney and oratory, theology
and curiosity: these are the things that saved me. And one more - call it
education, or class-origins; Mary Pereira would have called it my
'brought-up'. By my show of erudition and by the purity of my accents, I
shamed them into feeling unworthy of judging me; not a very noble deed, but
when the ambulance is waiting round the corner, all's fair. (It was: I
smelled it.) Still - I've had a valuable warning. It's a dangerous business
to try and impose one's view of things on others.
Padma: if you're a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little
uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.
Meanwhile, I am ten years old, and working out how to hide in the boot
of my mother's car.
That was the month when Purushottam the sadhu (whom I had never told
about my inner life) finally despaired of his stationary existence and
contracted the suicidal hiccups which assailed him for an entire year,
frequently lifting him bodily several inches off the ground so that his
water-balded head cracked alarmingly against the garden tap, and finally
killed him, so that one evening at the cocktail hour he toppled sideways
with his legs still locked in the lotus position, leaving my mother's
verrucas without any hope of salvation; when I would often stand in the
garden of Buckingham Villa in the evenings, watching the Sputniks cross the
sky, and feeling as simultaneously exalted and isolated as little Laika, the
first and still the only dog to be shot into space (the Baroness Simki von
der Heiden, shortly to contract syphilis, sat beside me following the bright
pinprick of Sputnik II with her Alsatian eyes - it was a time of great
canine interest in the space race); when Evie Burns and her gang occupied my
clocktower, and washing-chests had been both forbidden and outgrown, so that
for the sake of secrecy and sanity I was obliged to limit my visits to the
midnight children to our private, silent hour - I communed with them every
midnight, and only at midnight, during that hour which is reserved for
miracles, which is somehow outside time; and when - to get to the point - I
resolved to prove, with the evidence of my own eyes, the terrible thing I
had glimpsed sitting in the front of my mother's thoughts. Ever since I lay
hidden in a washing-chest and heard two scandalous syllables, I had been
suspecting my mother of secrets; my incursions into her thought processes
confirmed my suspicions; so it was with a hard glint in my eye, and a steely
determination, that I visited Sonny Ibrahim one afternoon after school, with
the intention of enlisting his help.
I found Sonny in his room, surrounded by posters of Spanish bullfights,
morosely playing Indoor Cricket by himself. When he saw me he cried
unhappily, 'Hey man I'm damn sorry about Evie man she won't listen to anyone
man what the hell'd you do to her anyway?'... But I held up a dignified
hand, commanding and being accorded silence.
'No time for that now, man,' I said. 'The thing is, I need to know how
to open locks without keys.'
A true fact about Sonny Ibrahim: despite all his bullfighting dreams,
his genius lay in the realm of mechanical things. For some time now, he had
taken on the job of maintaining all the bikes on Methwold's Estate in return
for gifts of comic-books and a free supply of fizzy drinks. Even Evelyn
Lilith Burns gave her beloved Indiabike into his care. All machines, it
seemed, were won over by the innocent delight with which he caressed their
moving parts; no contraption could resist his ministrations. To put it
another way: Sonny Ibrahim had become (out of a spirit of pure inquiry) an
expert at picking locks.
Now offered a chance of demonstrating his loyalty to me, his eyes
brightened. 'Jus' show me the lock, man! Lead me to the thing!'
When we were sure we were unobserved, we crept along the driveway
between Buckingham Villa and Sonny's Sans Souci; we stood behind my family's
old Rover; and I pointed at the boot. 'That's the one,' I stated. 'I need to
be able to open it from the outside, and the inside also.'
Sonny's eyes widened. 'Hey, what're you up to, man? You running away
from home secretly and all?'
Finger to lips, I adopted a mysterious expression. 'Can't explain,
Sonny,' I said solemnly, 'Top-drawer classified information.'
'Wow, man,' Sonny said, and showed me in thirty seconds how to open the
boot with the aid of a strip of thin pink plastic. 'Take it, man,' said
Sonny Ibrahim, 'You need it more than me.'
Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother,
had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love
with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could never manage to love one part,
the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet
were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the
accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to
recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally
succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to
the words of wrong-number callers ... shortly after my tenth birthday (when
I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me
after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her
recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong
number, on urgent shopping trips. But now, hidden in the boot of the Rover,
there travelled with her a stowaway, who lay hidden and protected by stolen
cushions, clutching a thin strip of pink plastic in his hand.
O, the suffering one undergoes in the name of righteousness! The
bruising and the bumps! The breathing-in of rubbery boot-air through jolted
teeth! And constantly, the fear of discovery ... 'Suppose she really does go
shopping? Will the boot suddenly fly open? Will live chickens be flung in,
feet tied together, wings clipped, fluttery pecky birds invading my
hidey-hole? Will she see, my God, I'll have to be silent for a week!' My
knees drawn in beneath my chin - which was protected-against knee-bumps by
an old faded cushion - I voyaged into the unknown in the vehicle of maternal
perfidy. My mother was a cautious driver; she went slowly, and turned
corners with care; but afterwards I was bruised black and blue and Mary
Pereira berated me soundly for getting into fights: 'Arre God what a thing
it's a wonder they didn't smash you to pieces completely my God what will
you grow up into you bad black boy you haddi-phaelwan you skin-and-bone
wrestler!'
To take my mind off the jolting darkness I entered, with extreme
caution, that part of my mother's mind which was in charge of driving
operations, and as a result was able to follow our route. (And, also, to
discern in my mother's habitually tidy mind an alarming degree of disorder.
I was already beginning, in those days, to classify people by their degree
of internal tidiness, and to discover that I preferred the messier type,
whose thoughts, spilling constantly into one another so that anticipatory
images of food interfered with the serious business of earning a living and
sexual fantasies were superimposed upon their political musings, bore a
closer relationship to my own pell-mell tumble of a brain, in which
everything ran into everything else and the white dot of consciousness
jumped about like a wild flea from one thing to the next... Amina Sinai,
whose assiduous ordering-instincts had provided her with a brain of almost
abnormal neatness, was a curious recruit to the ranks of confusion.)
We headed north, past Breach Candy Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north
along Horaby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali's island
tomb, north off what had once been (before the dream of the first William
Methwold became a reality) the island of Bombay. We were heading towards the
anonymous mass of tenements and fishing-villages and textile-plants and
film-studios that the city became in these northern zones (not far from
here! Not at all far from where I sit within view of local trains!) ... an
area which was, in those days, utterly unknown to me; I rapidly became
disoriented and was then obliged to admit to myself that I was lost. At
last, down an unprepossessing side-street full of drainpipe-sleepers and
bicycle-repair shops and tattered men and boys, we stopped. Clusters of
children assailed my mother as she descended; she, who could never shoo away
a fly, handed out small coins, thus enlarging the crowd enormously.
Eventually, she struggled away from them and headed down the street; there
was a boy pleading, 'Gib the car poliss, Begum? Number one A-class poliss,
Begum? I watch car until you come, Begum? I very fine watchman, ask anyone!'
... In some panic, I listened in for her reply. How could I get out of this
boot under the eyes of a guardian-urchin? There was the embarrassment of it;
and besides, my emergence would have created a sensation in the street... my
mother said, 'No.' She was disappearing down the street; the would-be
polisher and watchman gave up eventually; there was a moment when all eyes
turned to watch the passing of a second car, just in case it, too, stopped
to disgorge a lady who gave away coins as if they were nuts; and in that
instant (I had been looking through several pairs of eyes to help me choose
my moment) I performed my trick with the pink plastic and was out in the
street beside a closed car-boot in a flash. Setting my lips grimly, and
ignoring all outstretched palms, I set off in the direction my mother had
taken, a pocket-sized sleuth with the nose of a bloodhound and a loud drum
pounding in the place where my heart should have been ... and arrived, a few
minutes later, at the Pioneer Cafe.
Dirty glass in the window; dirty glasses on the tables - the Pioneer
Cafe was not much when compared to the Gaylords and Kwalitys of the city's
more glamorous parts; a real rutputty joint, with painted boards proclaiming
LOVELY LASSI and FUNTABULOUS FALOODA and BHEL-PURIBOMBAY FASHION, with filmi
playback music blaring out from a cheap radio by the cash-till, a long
narrow greeny room lit by flickering neon, a forbidding world in which
broken-toothed men sat at reccine-covered tables with crumpled cards and
expressionless eyes. But for all its grimy decrepitude, the Pioneer Cafe was
a repository of many dreams. Early each morning, it would be full of the
best-looking ne'er-do-wells in the city, all the goondas and taxi-drivers
and petty smugglers and racecourse tipsters who had once, long ago, arrived
in the city dreaming of film stardom, of grotesquely vulgar homes and black
money payments; because every morning at six, the major studios would send
minor functionaries to the Pioneer Cafe to rope in extras for the day's
shooting. For half an hour each morning, when D. W. Rama Studios and
Filmistan Talkies and R К Films were taking their pick, the Pioneer was the
focus of all the city's ambitions and hopes; then the studio scouts left,
accompanied by the day's lucky ones, and the Cafe emptied into its habitual,
neon-lit torpor. Around lunchtime, a different set of dreams walked into the
Cafe, to spend the afternoon hunched over cards and Lovely Lassi and rough
bins - different men with different hopes: I didn't know it then, but the
afternoon Pioneer was a notorious Communist Party hangout.
It was afternoon; I saw my mother enter the Pioneer Cafe; not daring to
follow her, I stayed in the street, pressing my nose against a spider-webbed
corner of the grubby window-pane; ignoring the curious glances I got -
because my whites, although boot-stained, were nevertheless starched; my
hair, although boot-rumpled, was well-oiled; my shoes, scuffed as they were,
were still the plimsolls of a prosperous child - I followed her with my eyes
as she went hesitantly and verruca-hobbled past rickety tables and hard-eyed
men; I saw my mother sit down at a shadowed table at the far end of the
narrow cavern; and then I saw the man who rose to greet her.
The skin on his face hung in folds which revealed that he had once been
overweight; his teeth were stained with paan. He wore a clean white kurta
with Lucknow-work around the buttonholes. He had long hair, poetically long,
hanging lankly over his ears; but the top of his head was bald and shiny.
Forbidden syllables echoed in my ears: Na. Dir. Nadir. I realized that I
wished desperately that I'd never resolved to come.
Once upon a time there was an underground husband who fled, leaving
loving messages of divorce; a poet whose verses didn't even rhyme, whose
life was saved by pie-dogs. After a lost decade he emerged from
goodness-knows-where, his skin hanging loose in memory of his erstwhile
plumpness; and, like his once-upon-a-time wife, he had acquired a new name
... Nadir Khan was now Qasim Khan, official candidate of the official
Communist Party of India. Lal Qasim. Qasim the Red. Nothing is without
meaning: not without reason are blushes red. My uncle Hanif said, 'Watch out
for the Communists!' and my mother turned scarlet; politics and emotions
were united in her cheeks ... through the dirty, square, glassy
cinema-screen of the Pioneer Gate's window, I watched Amina Sinai and the
no-longer-Nadir play out their love scene; they performed with the
ineptitude of genuine amateurs.
On the reccine-topped table, a packet of cigarettes: State Express 555.
Numbers, too, have significance: 420, the name given to frauds; 1001, the
number of night, of magic, of alternative realities - a number beloved of
poets and detested by politicians, for whom all alternative versions of the
world are threats; and 555, which for years I believed to be the most
sinister of numbers, the cipher of the Devil, the Great Beast, Shaitan
himself! (Cyrus-the-great told me so, and I didn't contemplate the
possibility of his being wrong. But he was: the true daemonic number is not
555, but 666: yet, in my mind, a dark aura hangs around the three fives to
this day.)... But I am getting carried away. Suffice to say that
Nadir-Qasim's preferred brand was the aforesaid State Express; that the
figure five was repeated three times on the packet; and that its
manufacturers were W.D. & H.O. Wills. Unable to look into my mother's face,
I concentrated on the cigarette-packet, cutting from two-shot of lovers to
this extreme close-up of nicotine.
But now hands enter the frame - first the hands of Nadir-Qasim, their
poetic softness somewhat callused these days; hands flickering like
candle-flames, creeping forward across reccine, then jerking back; next a
woman's hands, black as jet, inching forwards like elegant spiders; hands
lifting up, off reccine tabletop, hands hovering above three fives,
beginning the strangest of dances, rising, falling, circling one another,
weaving in and out between each other, hands longing for touch, hands
outstretching tensing quivering demanding to be - but always at last jerking
back, fingertips avoiding fingertips, because what I'm watching here on my
dirty glass cinema-screen is, after ail, an Indian movie, in which physical
contact is forbidden lest it corrupt the watching flower of Indian youth;
and there are feet beneath the table and faces above it, feet advancing
towards feet, faces tumbling softly towards faces, but jerking away all of a
sudden in a cruel censor's cut ... two strangers, each bearing a screen-name
which is not the name of their birth, act out their half-unwanted roles. I
left the movie before the end, to slip back into the boot of the unpolished
unwatched Rover, wishing I hadn't gone to see it, unable to resist wanting
to watch it all over again.
What I saw at the very end: my mother's hands raising a half-empty
glass of Lovely Lassi; my mother's lips pressing gently, nostalgically
against the mottled glass; my mother's hands handing the glass to her
Nadir-Qasim; who also applied, to the opposite side of the glass, his own,
poetic mouth. So it was that life imitated bad art, and my uncle Hanif's
sister brought the eroticism of the indirect kiss into the green neon
dinginess of the Pioneer Cafe.
To sum up: in the high summer of 1957, at the peak of an election
campaign, Amina Sinai blushed inexplicably at a chance mention of the
Communist Party of India. Her son - in whose turbulent thoughts there was
still room for one more obsession, because a ten-year-old brain can
accommodate any number of fixations - followed her into the north of the
city, and spied on a pain-filled scene of impotent love. (Now that Ahmed
Sinai was frozen up, Nadir-Qasim didn't even have a sexual disadvantage;
torn between a husband who locked himself in an office and cursed mongrels,
and an ex-husband who had once, lovingly, played games of hit-the-spittoon,
Amina Sinai was reduced to glass-kissery and hand-dances.)
Questions: did I ever, after that time, employ the services of pink
plastic? Did I return to the cafe of extras and Marxists? Did I confront my
mother with the heinous nature of her offence - because what mother has any
business to - never mind about what once-upon-a-time - in full view of her
only son, how could she how could she how could she? Answers: I did not; I
did not; I did not.
What I did: when she went on 'shopping trips', I lodged myself in her
thoughts. No- longer anxious to gain the evidence of my own eyes, I rode in
my mother's head, up to the north of the city; in this unlikely incognito, I
sat in the Pioneer Cafe and heard conversations about the electoral
prospects of Qasim the Red; disembodied but wholly present, I trailed my
mother as she accompanied Qasim on his rounds, up and down the tenements of
the district (were they the same chawls which my father had recently sold,
abandoning his tenants to their fate?), as she helped him to get water-taps
fixed and pestered landlords to initiate repairs and disinfections. Amina
Sinai moved amongst the destitute on behalf of the Communist Party - a fact
which never failed to leave her amazed. Perhaps she did it because of the
growing impoverishment of her own life; but at the age of ten I wasn't
disposed to be sympathetic; and in my own way, I began to dream dreams of
revenge.
The legendary Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid, is said to have enjoyed moving
incognito amongst the people of Baghdad; I, Saleem Sinai, have also
travelled in secret through the byways of my city, but I can't say I had
much fun.
Matter of fact descriptions of the outre and bizarre, and their
reverse, namely heightened, stylized versions of the everyday - these
techniques, which are also attitudes of mind, I have lifted - or perhaps
absorbed - from the most formidable of the midnight children, my rival, my
fellow-changeling, the supposed son of Wee Willie Winkie:
Shiva-of-the-knees. They were techniques which, in his case, were applied
entirely without conscious thought, and their effect was to create a picture
of the world of startling uniformity, in which one could mention casually,
in passing as it were, the dreadful murders of prostitutes which began to
fill the gutter-press in those days (while the bodies filled the gutters),
while lingering passionately on the intricate details of a particular hand
of cards. Death, and defeat at rummy were all of a piece to Shiva; hence his
terrifying, nonchalant violence, which in the end ... but to begin with
beginnings:
Although, admittedly, it's my own fault, I'm bound to say that if you
think of me purely as a radio, you'll only be grasping half the truth.
Thought is as often pictorial or purely emblematic as verbal; and anyway, in
order to communicate with, and understand, my colleagues in the Midnight
Children's Conference, it was necessary for me quickly to advance beyond the
verbal stage. Arriving in their infinitely various minds, I was obliged to
get beneath the surface veneer of front-of-mind thoughts in incomprehensible
tongues, with the obvious (and previously demonstrated) effect that they
became aware of my presence. Remembering the dramatic effect such an
awareness had had on Evie Burns, I went to some pains to alleviate the shock
of my entry. In all cases, my standard first transmission was an image of my
face, smiling in what I trusted was a soothing, friendly, confident and
leader-like fashion, and of a hand stretched out in friendship. There were,
however, teething troubles.
It took me a little while to realize that my picture of myself was
heavily distorted by my own self-consciousness about my appearance; so that
the portrait I sent across the thought-waves of the nation, grinning like a
Cheshire cat, was about as hideous as a portrait could be, featuring a
wondrously enlarged nose, a completely non-existent chin and giant stains on
each temple. It's no wonder that I was often greeted by yelps of mental
alarm. I, too, was often similarly frightened by the self-images of my
ten-year-old fellows. When we discovered what was happening, I encouraged
the membership of the Conference, one by one, to go and look into a mirror,
or a patch of still water; and then we did manage to find out what we really
looked like. The only problems were that our Keralan member (who could, you
remember, travel through mirrors) accidentally ended up emerging through a
restaurant mirror in the smarter part of New Delhi, and had to make a
hurried retreat; while the blue-eyed member for Kashmir fell into a lake and
accidentally changed sex, entering as a girl and emerging as a beautiful
boy.
When I first introduced myself to Shiva, I saw in his mind the
certifying image of a short, rat-faced youth with filed-down teeth and two
of the biggest knees the world has ever seen.
Faced with a picture of such grotesque proportions, I allowed the smile
on my own beaming image to wither a little; my outstretched hand began to
falter and twitch. And Shiva, feeling my presence, reacted at first with
utter rage; great boiling waves of anger scalded the inside of my head; but
then, 'Hey - look - I know you! You're the rich kid from Methwold's Estate,
isn't it?' And I, equally astonished, 'Winkle's son - the one who blinded
Eyeslice!' His self-image puffed up with pride. 'Yah, yaar, that's me.
Nobody messes with me, man!' Recognition reduced me to banalities: 'So!
How's your father, anyway? He doesn't come round ...' And he, with what felt
very like relief: 'Him, man? My father's dead.'
A momentary pause; then puzzlement - no anger now - and Shiva, 'Lissen,
yaar, this is damn good - how you doin' it?' I launched into my standard
explanation, but after a few instants he interrupted, 'So! Lissen, my father
said I got born at exactly midnight also - so don't you see, that makes us
joint bosses of this gang of yours! Midnight is best, agreed? So - those
other kids gotta do like we tell them!' There rose before my eyes the image
of a second, and more potent, Evelyn Lilith Burns ... dismissing this unkind
notion, I explained, "That wasn't exactly my idea for the Conference; I had
in mind something more like a, you know, sort of loose federation of equals,
all points of view given free expression..." Something resembling a violent
snort echoed around the walls of my head. 'That, man, that's only rubbish.
What we ever goin' to do with a gang like that? Gangs gotta have gang
bosses. You take me -' (the puff of pride again) 'I been running a gang up
here in Matunga for two years now. Since I was eight. Older kids and all.
What d'you think of that?' And I, without meaning to, 'What's it do, your
gang - does it have rules and all?' Shiva-laughter in my ears ... 'Yah,
little rich boy: one rule. Everybody does what I say or I squeeze the
shit
outa them with my knees!' Desperately, I continued to try and win Shiva
round to my point of view: 'The thing is, we must be here for a
purpose,
don't you think? I mean, there has to be a
reason,
you must agree? So what I
thought, we should try and work out what it is, and then, you know, sort of
dedicate our lives to...' 'Rich kid,' Shiva yelled, 'you don't know one damn
thing! What
purpose,
man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got
reason,
yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason
in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this
country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you - you got
to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die.
That's reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping
wind!'
And now I, in my midnight bed, begin to shake ... 'But history,' I say,
'and the Prime Minister wrote me a letter... and don't you even believe in
... who knows what we might...' He, my alter ego, Shiva, butted in: 'Lissen,
little boy - you're so full of crazy stuff, I can see I'm going to have to
take this thing over. You tell that to all these other freak kids!'
Nose and knees and knees and nose ... the rivalry that began that night
would never be ended, until two knives slashed, downdown-down ... whether
the spirits of Mian Abdullah, whom knives killed years before, had leaked
into me, imbuing me with the notion of loose federalism and making me
vulnerable to knives, I cannot say; but at that point I found a measure of
courage and told Shiva, 'You can't run the Conference; without me, they
won't even be able to listen to you!'
And he, confirming the declaration of war: 'Rich kid, they'll want to
know about me; you just try and stop me!'
'Yes,' I told him, I'll try.'
Shiva, the god of destruction, who is also most potent of deities;
Shiva, greatest of dancers; who rides on a bull; whom no force can resist...
the boy Shiva, he told us, had to fight for survival from his earliest days.
And when his father had, about a year previously, completely lost his
singing voice, Shiva had had to defend himself against Wee Willie Winkie's
parental zeal. 'He blindfolded me, man! He wrapped a rag around my eyes an'
took me to the roof of the chawl, man! You know what was in his hand? A
sister-sleeping hammer, man! A hammer! Bastard was going to smash my legs
up, man - it happens, you know, rich boy, they do it to kids so they can
always earn money begging - you get more if you're all broken up, man! So
I'm pushed over till I'm lying down on the roof, man; and then -' And then
hammer swinging down towards knees larger and knobblier than any
policeman's, an easy target, but now the knees went into action, faster than
lightning the knees parted - felt the breath of the down-rushing hammer and
spread wide apart; and then hammer plunging between knees, still held in his
father's hand; and then, the knees rushing together like fists. The hammer,
clattering harmlessly on concrete. The wrist of Wee Willie Winkie, clamped
between the knees of his blindfolded son. Hoarse breaths escaping from the
lips of the anguished father. And still the knees, closing ininin, tighter
and tighter, until there is a snap. 'Broke his goddamn wrist, man! That
showed him - damn fine, no? I swear!'
Shiva and I were born under Capricorn rising; the constellation left me
alone, but it gave Shiva its gift. Capricorn, as any astrologer will tell
you, is the heavenly body with power over the knees.
On election day, 1957, the All-India Congress was badly shocked.
Although it won the election, twelve million votes made the Communists the
largest single opposition party; and in Bombay, despite the efforts of Boss
Patil, large numbers of electors failed to place their crosses against the
Congress symbol of sacred-cow-and-suckling-calf, preferring the less emotive
pictograms of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti and Maha Gujarat Parishad.
When the Communist peril was discussed on our hillock, my mother continued
to blush; and we resigned ourselves to the partition of the state of Bombay.
One member of the Midnight Children's Conference played a minor role in
the elections. Winkle's supposed son Shiva was recruited by - well, perhaps
I will not name the party; but only one party had really large sums to spend
- and on polling day, he and his gang, who called themselves Cowboys, were
to be seen standing outside a polling station in the north of the city, some
holding long stout sucks, others juggling with stones, still others picking
their teeth with knives, all of them encouraging the electorate to use its
vote with wisdom and care ... and after the polls closed, were seals broken
on ballot-boxes? Did ballot-stuffing occur? At any rate, when the votes were
counted, it was discovered that Qasim the Red had narrowly failed to win the
seat; and my rival's paymasters were well pleased.
... But now Padma says, mildly, 'What date was it?' And, without
thinking, I answer: 'Some time in the spring.' And then it occurs to me that
I have made another error - that the election of 1957 took place before, and
not after, my tenth birthday; but although I have racked my brains, my
memory refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events. This is
worrying. I don't know what's gone wrong.
She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in
your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!'
But if small things go, will large things be close behind?
Alpha and Omega
There was turmoil in Bombay in the months after the election; there is
turmoil in my thoughts as I recall those days. My error has upset me badly;
so now, to regain my equilibrium, I shall place myself firmly on the
familiar ground of Methwold's Estate; leaving the history of the Midnight
Children's Conference to one side, and the pain of the Pioneer Cafe to
another, I shall tell you about the fall of Evie Burns.
I have titled this episode somewhat oddly. 'Alpha and Omega' stares
back at me from the page, demanding to be explained - a curious heading for
what will be my story's half-way point, one that reeks of beginnings and
ends, when you could say it should be more concerned with middles; but,
unrepentantly, I have no intention of changing it, although there are many
alternative titles, for instance 'From Monkey to Rhesus', or 'Finger Redux',
or - in a more allusive style - 'The Gander', a reference, obviously, to the
mythical bird, the hamsa or parahamsa, symbol of the ability to live in two
worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the world of land-and-water and the
world of air, of flight. But 'Alpha and Omega' it is; 'Alpha and Omega' it
remains. Because there are beginnings here, and all manner of ends; but
you'll soon see what I mean.
Padma clicks her tongue in exasperation. 'You're talking funny again,'
she criticizes, 'Are you going to tell about Evie or not?'
... After the general election, the Central Government continued to
shilly-shally about the future of Bombay. The State was to be partitioned;
then not to be partitioned; then partition reared its head again. And as for
the city itself - it was to be the capital of Maharashtra; or of both
Maharashtra and Gujarat; or an independent state of its own ... while the
government tried to work out what on earth to do, the city's inhabitants
decided to encourage it to be quick. Riots proliferated (and you could still
hear the old battle-song of the Mahrattas -
How are you? I am well! I'll
take a stick and thrash you to hell! -
rising above the fray); and to make
things worse, the weather joined in the melee. There was a severe drought;
roads cracked; in the villages, peasants were being forced to kill their
cows; and on Christmas Day (of whose significance no boy who attended a
mission school and was attended upon by a Catholic ayah could fail to be
aware) there was a series of loud explosions at the Wal-keshwar Reservoir
and the main fresh-water pipes which were the city's lifelines began to blow
fountains into the air like giant steel whales. The newspapers were full of
talk of saboteurs; speculation over the criminals' identities and political
affiliation jostled for space against reports of the continuing wave of
whore-murders. (I was particularly interested to learn that the murderer had
his own curious 'signature'. The corpses of the ladies of the night were all
strangled to death; there were bruises on their necks, bruises too large to
be thumbprints, but wholly consistent with the marks which would be left by
a pair of giant, preternaturally powerful knees.)
But I digress. What, Padma's frown demands, does all this have to do
with Evelyn Lilith Burns? Instantly, leaping to attention, as it were, I
provide the answer: in the days after the destruction of the city's
fresh-water supply, the stray cats of Bombay began to congregate in those
areas of the city where water was still relatively plentiful; that is to
say, the better-off areas, in which each house owned its own overhead or
underground water-tank. And, as a result, the two-storey hillock of
Methwold's Estate was invaded by an army of thirsting felines; cats swarming
all over the circus-ring, cats climbing bougainvillaea creepers and leaping
into sitting-rooms, cats knocking over flower-vases to drink the plant-stale
water, cats bivouacked in bathrooms, slurping liquid out of water-closets,
cats rampant in the kitchens of the palaces of William Methwold. The
Estate's servants were vanquished in their attempts to repel the great cat
invasion; the ladies of the Estate were reduced to helpless exclamations of
horror. Hard dry worms of cat-excrement were everywhere; gardens were ruined
by sheer feline force of numbers: and at night sleep became an impossibility
as the army found voice, and sang its thirst at the moon. (The Baroness
Simki von der Heiden refused to fight the cats; she was already showing
signs of the disease which would shortly lead to her extermination.)
Nussie Ibrahim rang my mother to announce, 'Amina sister, it is the end
of the world.'
She was wrong; because on the third day after the great cat invasion,
Evelyn Lilith Burns visited each Estate household in turn, carrying her
Daisy air-gun casually in one hand, and offered, in return for bounty money,
to end the plague of pussies double-quick.
All that day, Methwold's Estate echoed with the sounds of Evie's
air-gun and the agonized wauls of the cats, as Evie stalked the entire army
one by one and made herself rich. But (as history so often demonstrates) the
moment of one's greatest triumph also contains the seeds of one's final
downfall; and so it proved, because Evie's persecution of the cats was,' as
far as the Brass Monkey was concerned, absolutely the last straw.
'Brother,' the Monkey told me grimly, 'I told you I'd get that girl;
now, right now, the time has come.'
Unanswerable questions: was it true that my sister had acquired the
languages of cats as well as birds? Was it her fondness for feline life
which pushed her over the brink? ... by the time of the great cat invasion,
the Monkey's hair had faded into brown; she had broken her habit of burning
shoes; but still, and for whatever reason, there was a fierceness in her
which none of the rest of us ever possessed; and she went down into the
circus-ring and yelled at the top of her voice: 'Evie! Evie Burns! You come
out here, this minute, wherever you are!'
Surrounded by fleeing cats, the Monkey awaited Evelyn Burns. I went out
on to the first-floor verandah to watch; from their verandahs, Sonny and
Eyeslice and Hairoil and Cyrus were watching too. We saw Evie Burns appear
from the direction of the Versailles Villa kitchens; she was blowing the
smoke away from the barrel of her gun.
'You Indians c'n thank your stars you got me around,' Evie declared,
'or you'd just've got eaten by these cats!'
We saw Evie fall silent as she saw the thing sitting tensely in the
Monkey's eyes; and then like a blur the Monkey descended on Evie and a
battle began which lasted for what seemed like several hours (but it can
only have been a few minutes). Shrouded in the dust of the circus-ring they
rolled kicked scratched bit, small tufts of hair flew out of the dust-cloud
and there were elbows and feet in dirtied white socks and knees and
fragments of frock flying out of the cloud; grown-ups came running, servants
couldn't pull them apart, and in the end Homi Catrack's gardener turned his
hose on them to separate them... the Brass Monkey stood up a little
crookedly and shook the sodden hem of her dress, ignoring the cries of
retribution proceeding from the lips of Amina Sinai and Mary Pereira;
because there in the hose-wet dirt of the circus-ring lay Evie Burns, her
tooth-braces broken, her hair matted with dust and spittle, her spirit and
her dominion over us broken for once and for all.
A few weeks later her father sent her home for good, 'To get a decent
education away from these savages,' he was heard to remark; I only heard
from her once, six months later, when right out of the blue she wrote me the
letter which informed me that she had knifed an old lady who had objected to
her assault on a cat. 'I gave it to her all right,' Evie wrote, 'Tell your
sister she just got lucky.' I salute that unknown old woman: she paid the
Monkey's bill.
More interesting than Evie's last message is a thought which occurs to
me now, as I look back down the tunnel of time. Holding before my eyes the
image of Monkey and Evie rolling in the dirt, I seem to discern the driving
force behind their battle to the death, a motive far deeper than the mere
persecution of cats: they were fighting over me. Evie and my sister (who
were, in many ways, not at all dissimilar) kicked and scratched, ostensibly
over the fate of a few thirsty strays; but perhaps Evie's kicks were aimed
at me, perhaps they were the violence of her anger at my invasion of her
head; and then maybe the strength of the Monkey was the strength of
sibling-loyalty, and her act of war was actually an act of love.
Blood, then, was spilled in the circus-ring. Another rejected title for
these pages - you may as well know - was 'Thicker Than Water'. In those days
of water shortages, something thicker than water ran down the face of Evie
Burns; the loyalties of blood motivated the Brass Monkey; and in the streets
of the city, rioters spilled each other's blood. There were bloody murders,
and perhaps it is not appropriate to end this sanguinary catalogue by
mentioning, once again, the rushes of blood to my mother's cheeks. Twelve
million votes were coloured red that year, and red is the colour of blood.
More blood will flow soon: the types of blood, A and O, Alpha and Omega -
and another, a third possibility - must be kept in mind. Also other factors:
zygosity, and Kell antibodies, and that most mysterious of sanguinary
attributes, known as rhesus, which is also a type of monkey.
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
But before blood has its day, I shall take wing (like the parahamsa
gander who can soar out of one element into another) and return, briefly, to
the affairs of my inner world; because although the fall of Evie Burns ended
my ostracism by the hilltop children, still I found it difficult to forgive;
and for a time, holding myself solitary and aloof, I immersed myself in the
events inside my head, in the early history of the association of the
midnight children.
To be honest: I didn't like Shiva. I disliked the roughness of his
tongue, the crudity of his ideas; and I was beginning to suspect him of a
string of terrible crimes - although I found it impossible to find any
evidence in his thoughts, because he, alone of the children of midnight,
could close off from me any part of his thoughts he chose to keep to himself
- which, in itself, increased my growing dislike and suspicion of the
rat-faced fellow. However, I was nothing if not fair; and it would not have
been fair to have kept him apart from the other members of the Conference.
I should explain that as my mental facility increased, I found that it
was possible not only to pick up the children's transmissions; not only to
broadcast my own messages; but also (since I seem to be stuck with this
radio metaphor) to act as a sort of national network, so that by opening my
transformed mind to all the children I could turn it into a kind of forum in
which they could talk to one another, through me. So, in the early days of
1958, the five hundred and eighty-one children would assemble, for one hour,
between midnight and one a.m., in the lok sabha or parliament of my brain.
We were as motley, as raucous, as undisciplined as any bunch of five
hundred and eighty-one ten year olds; and on top of our natural exuberance,
there was the excitement of our discovery of each other. After one hour of
top-volume yelling jabbering arguing giggling, I would fall exhausted into a
sleep too deep for nightmares, and still wake up with a headache; but I
didn't mind. Awake I was obliged to face the multiple miseries of maternal
perfidy and paternal decline, of the fickleness of friendship and the varied
tyrannies of school; asleep, I was at the centre of the most exciting world
any child had ever discovered. Despite Shiva, it was nicer to be asleep.
Shiva's conviction that he (or he-and-I) was the natural leader of our
group by dint of his (and my) birth on the stroke of midnight had, I was
bound to admit, one strong argument in its favour. It seemed to me then - it
seems to me now - that the midnight miracle had indeed been remarkably
hierarchical in nature, that the children's abilities declined dramatically
on the basis of the distance of their time of birth from midnight; but even
this was a point of view which was hotly contested ...
'Whatdoyoumeanhowcanyousaythat,' they chorused, the boy from the Gir forest
whose face was absolutely blank and featureless (except for eyes noseholes
spaceformouth) and could take on any features he chose, and Harilal who
could run at the speed of the wind, and God knows how many others... 'Who
says it's better to do one thing or another?' And, 'Can you fly? I can
fly!'
And, 'Yah, and me, can you turn one fish into fifty?' And, 'Today I went to
visit tomorrow. You can do that? Well then -' ... in the face of such a
storm of protest, even Shiva changed his tune; but he was 'to find a new
one, which would be much more dangerous - dangerous for the Children, and
for me.
Because I had found that I was not immune to the lure of leadership.
Who found the Children, anyway? Who formed the Conference? Who gave them
their meeting-place? Was I not the joint-eldest, and should I not receive
the respect and obeisances merited by my senior-ity? And didn't the one who
provided the club-house run the club?... To which Shiva, 'Forget all that,
man. That club-shub stuff is only for you rich boys!' But - for a time - he
was overruled. Parvati-the-witch, the conjurer's daughter from Delhi, took
my part (just as, years later, she would save my life), and announced, 'No,
listen now, every, body: without Saleem we are nowhere, we can't talk or
anything, he is right. Let him be the chief!' And I, 'No, never mind
chief,
just think of me as a ... a big brother, maybe. Yes; we're a family, of a
kind. I'm just the oldest, me.' To which Shiva replied, scornful, but unable
to argue: 'Okay, big brother: so now tell us what we do?'
At this point I introduced the Conference to the notions which plagued
me all this time: the notions of purpose, and meaning. 'We must think,' I
said, 'what we are for.'
I record, faithfully, the views of a typical selection of the
Conference members (excepting the circus-freaks, and the ones who, like
Sundari the beggar-girl with the knife-scars, had lost their powers, and
tended to remain silent in our debates, like poor relations at a feast):
among the philosophies and aims suggested were collectivism - 'We should all
get together and live somewhere, no? What would we need from anyone else?' -
and individualism - 'You say we; but we together are unimportant; what
matters is that each of us has a gift to use for his or her own good' -
filial duty - 'However we can help our father-mother, that is what it is for
us to do' - and infant revolution -'Now at last we must show all kids that
it is possible to get rid of parents!' - capitalism - 'Just mink what
businesses we could do! How rich, Allah, we could be!' - and altruism - 'Our
country needs gifted people; we must ask the government how it wishes to use
our skills' - science - 'We must allow ourselves to be studied* - and
religion - 'Let us declare ourselves to the world, so that all may glory in
God' - courage - 'We should invade Pakistan!' - and cowardice - 'O heavens,
we must stay secret, just mink what they will do to us, stone us for witches
or what-all!'; there were declarations of women's rights and pleas for the
improvement of the lot of untouchables; landless children dreamed of land
and tribals from the hills, of Jeeps; and there were, also, fantasies of
power. "They can't stop us, man! We can bewitch, and fly, and read minds,
and turn them into frogs, and make gold and fishes, and they will fall in
love with us, and we can vanish through mirrors and change our sex ... how
will they be able to fight?'
I won't deny I was disappointed. I shouldn't have been; there was
nothing unusual about the children except for their gifts; their heads were
full of all the usual things, fathers mothers money food land possessions
fame power God. Nowhere, in the thoughts .of the Conference, could I find
anything as new as ourselves ... but then I was on the wrong track, too; I
could not see any more clearly than anyone else; and even when Soumitra the
time-traveller said, 'I'm telling you - all this is pointless - they'll
finish us before we start!' we all ignored him; with the optimism of youth -
which is a more virulent form of the same disease that once infected my
grandfather Aadam Aziz - we refused to look on the dark side, and not a
single one of us suggested that the purpose of Midnight's Children might be
annihilation; that we would have no meaning until we were destroyed.
For the sake of their privacy, I am refusing to distinguish the voices
from one another; and for other reasons. For one thing, my narrative could
not cope with five hundred and eighty-one fully-rounded personalities; for
another, the children, despite their won-drously discrete and varied gifts,
remained, to my mind, a sort of many-headed monster, speaking in the myriad
tongues of Babel; they were the very essence of multiplicity, and I see no
point in dividing them now. (But there were exceptions. In particular, there
was Shiva; and there was Parvati-the-witch.)
... Destiny, historical role, numen: these were mouthfuls too large for
ten-year-old gullets. Even, perhaps, for mine; despite the ever-present
admonitions of the fisherman's pointing finger and the Prime Minister's
letter, I was constantly distracted from my sniff-given marvels by the tiny
occurrences of everyday life, by feeling hungry or sleepy, by monkeying
around with the Monkey, or going to the cinema to see
Cobra Woman
or
Vera
Cruz,
by my growing longing for long trousers and by the inexplicable
below-the-belt heat engendered by the approaching School Social at which we,
the boys of the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School, would be
permitted to dance the box-step and the Mexican Hat Dance with the girls
from our sister institution - such as Masha Miovic the champion
breast-stroker ('Нее hee,' said Glandy Keith Colaco) and Elizabeth Purkiss
and Janey Jackson - European girls, my God, with loose skirts and kissing
ways! - in short, my attention was continually seized by the painful,
engrossing torture of growing up.
Even a symbolic gander must come down, at last, to earth; so it isn't
nearly enough for me now (as it was not then) to confine my story to its
miraculous aspects; I must return (as I used to return) to the quotidian; I
must permit blood to spill.
The first mutilation of Saleem Sinai, which was rapidly followed by the
second, took place one Wednesday early in 1958 - the Wednesday of the
much-anticipated Social - under the auspices of the Anglo-Scottish Education
Society. That is, it happened at school.
Saleem's assailant: handsome, frenetic, with a barbarian's shaggy
moustache: I present the leaping, hair-tearing figure of Mr Emil Zagallo,
who taught us geography and gymnastics, and who, that morning,
unintentionally precipitated the crisis of my life. Zagallo claimed to be
Peruvian, and was fond of calling us jungle-Indians, bead-lovers; he hung a
print of a stern, sweaty soldier in a pointy tin hat and metal pantaloons
above his blackboard and had a way of stabbing a finger at it in times of
stress and shouting, 'You see heem, you savages? Thees man eez civilization!
You show heem respect: he's got a
sword!'
And he'd swish his cane through
the stonewalled air. We called him Pagal-Zagal, crazy Zagallo, because for
all his talk of llamas and conquistadores and the Pacific Ocean we knew,
with the absolute certainty of rumour, that he'd been born in a Mazagaon
tenement and his Goanese mother had been abandoned by a decamped shipping
agent; so he was not only an 'Anglo' but probably a bastard as well. Knowing
this, we understood why Zagallo affected his Latin accent, and also why he
was always in a fury, why he beat his fists against the stone walk of the
classroom; but the knowledge didn't stop us being afraid. And this Wednesday
morning, we knew we were in for trouble, because Optional Cathedral had been
cancelled.
The Wednesday morning double period was Zagallo's geography class; but
only idiots and boys with bigoted parents attended it, because it was also
the time when we could choose to troop off to St Thomas's Cathedral in
crocodile formation, a long line of boys of every conceivable religious
denomination, escaping from school into the bosom of the Christians'
considerately optional God. It drove Zagallo wild, but he was helpless;
today, however, there was a dark glint in his eye, because the Croaker (that
is to say, Mr Crusoe the headmaster) had announced at morning Assembly that
Cathedral was cancelled. In a bare, scraped voice emerging from his face of
an anaesthetized frog, he sentenced us to double geography and Pagal-Zagal,
taking us all by surprise, because we hadn't realized that God was permitted
to exercise an option, too. Glumly we trooped into Zagallo's lair; one of
the poor idiots whose parents never allowed them to go to Cathedral
whispered viciously into my ear, 'You jus' wait: hell really get you guys
today.'
Padma: he really did.
Seated gloomily in class: Glandy Keith Colaco, Fat Perce Fishwala,
Jimmy Kapadia the scholarship boy whose father was a taxi-driver, Hairoil
Sabarmati, Sonny Ibrahim, Cyrus-the-great and I. Others, too, but there's no
time now, because with eyes narrowing in delight, crazy Zagallo is calling
us to order.
'Human geography,' Zagallo announces. 'Thees ees
what?
Kapadia?'
'Please sir don't know sir.' Hands fly into the air - five belong to
church-banned idiots, the sixth inevitably to Cyrus-the-great. But Zagallo
is out for blood today: the godly are going to suffer. 'Feelth from the
jongle,' he buffets Jimmy Kapadia, then begins to twist an ear casually,
'Stay in class sometimes and find out!'
'Ow ow ow yes sir sorry sir ...' Six hands are waving but Jimmy's ear
is in danger of coming off. Heroism gets the better of me ... 'Sir please
stop sir he has a heart condition sir!' Which is true; but the truth is
dangerous, because now Zagallo is rounding on me: 'So, a leetle arguer, ees
eet?' And I am being led by my hair to the front of the class. Under the
relieved eyes of my fellow-pupils -
thank God it's him not us -
I writhe in
agony beneath imprisoned tufts.
'So answer the question. You know what ees human geography?'
Pain fills my head, obliterating all notions of telepathic cheatery:
'Aiee sir no sir ouch!'
... And now it is possible to observe a joke descending on Zagallo, a
joke pulling his face apart into the simulacrum of a smile; it is possible
to watch his hand darting forward, thumb-and-forefinger extended; to note
how thumb-and-forefinger close around the tip of my nose and pull downwards
... where the nose leads, the head must follow, and finally the nose is
hanging down and my eyes are obliged to stare damply at Zagallo's sandalled
feet with their dirty toehails while Zagallo unleashes his wit.
'See, boys - you see what we have here? Regard, please, the heedeous
face of thees primitive creature. It reminds you of?'
And the eager responses: 'Sir the devil sir.' 'Please sir one cousin of
mine!' 'No sir a vegetable sir I don't know which.' Until Zagallo, shouting
above the tumult, 'Silence! Sons of baboons! Thees object here' - a tug on
my nose -
'thees
is human geography!'
'How sir where sir what sir?'
Zagallo is laughing now. 'You don't see?' he guffaws. 'In the face of
thees ugly ape you don't see the whole map of
India?'
'Yes sir no sir you show us sir!'
'See here - the Deccan peninsula hanging down!' Again ouchmy-nose.
'Sir sir if that's the map of India what are the stains sir?' It is
Glandy Keith Colaco feeling bold. Sniggers, titters from my fellows. And
Zagallo, taking the question in his stride: 'These stains,' he cries, 'are
Pakistan! Thees birthmark on the right ear is the East Wing; and thees
horrible stained left cheek, the West! Remember, stupid boys: Pakistan ees a
stain on the face of India!'
'Ho ho,' the class laughs, 'Absolute master joke, sir!'
But now my nose has had enough; staging its own, unprompted revolt
against the grasping thumb-and-forefinger, it unleashes a weapon of its own
... a large blob of shining goo emerges from the left nostril, to plop into
Mr Zagallo's palm. Fat Perce Fishwala yells, 'Lookit that, sir! The drip
from his nose, sir! Is that supposed to be
Ceylon?'
His palm smeared with goo, Zagallo loses his jokey mood. 'Animal,' he
curses me, 'You see what you do?' Zagallo's hand releases my nose; returns
to hair. Nasal refuse is wiped into my neatly-parted locks. And now, once
again, my hair is seized; once again, the hand is pulling... but upwards
now, and my head has jerked upright, my feet are moving on to tiptoe, and
Zagallo, 'What are you? Tell me what you are!'
'Sir an animal sir!'
The hand pulls harder higher. 'Again.' Standing on my toenails now, I
yelp: 'Aiee sir an animal an animal please sir aiee!'
And still harder and still higher ... 'Once more!' But suddenly it
ends; my feet are flat on the ground again; and the class has fallen into a
deathly hush.
'Sir,' Sonny Ibrahim is saying, 'you pulled his hair out, sir.'
And now the cacophony: 'Look sir, blood.' 'He's bleeding sir.
1
'Please sir shall I take him to the nurse?'
Mr Zagallo stood like a statue with a clump of my hair in his fist.
While I - too shocked to feel any pain - felt the patch on my head where Mr
Zagallo had created a monkish tonsure, a circle where hair would never grow
again, and realized that the curse of my birth, which connected me to my
country, had managed to find yet one more unexpected expression of itself.
Two days later, Croaker Crusoe announced that, unfortunately, Mr Emil
Zagallo was leaving the staff for personal reasons; but I knew what the
reasons were. My uprooted hairs had stuck to his hands, like bloodstains
that wouldn't wash out, and nobody wants a teacher with hair on
Ids
palms,
'The first sign of madness,' as Glandy Keith was fond of saying, 'and the
second sign is looking for them.'
Zagallo's legacy: a monk's tonsure; and, worse than that, a whole set
of new taunts, which my classmates flung at me while we waited for school
buses to take us home to get dressed for the Social: 'Snot-nose is a
bal-die!' and, 'Sniffer's got a map-face!' When Cyrus arrived in the
bus-queue, I tried to turn the crowd against him, by attempting to set up a
chant of'Cyrus-the-great, Born on a plate, In nineteen hundred and
forty-eight,' but nobody took up the offer.
So we come to the events of the Cathedral School Social. At which
bullies became instruments of destiny, and fingers were transmuted into
fountains, and Masha Miovic, the legendary breast-stroker, fell into a dead
faint... I arrived at the Social with the nurse's bandage still on my head.
I was late, because it hadn't been easy to persuade my mother to let me
come; so by the time I stepped into the Assembly Hall, beneath streamers and
balloons and the professionally suspicious gazes of bony female chaperones,
all the best girls were already box-stepping and Mexican-Hatting with
absurdly smug partners. Naturally, the prefects had the pick of the ladies;
I watched them with passionate envy, Guzder and Joshi and Stevenson and
Rushdie and Talyarkhan and Tayabali and Jussawalla and Wagle and King; I
tried butting in on them during excuse-mes but when they saw my bandage and
my cucumber of a nose and the stains on my face they just laughed and turned
their backs ... hatred burgeoning in my bosom, I ate potato chips and drank
Bubble-Up and Vimto and told myself, 'Those jerks; if they knew who I was
they'd get out of my way pretty damn quick!' But still the fear of revealing
my true nature was stronger than my somewhat abstract desire for the
whirling European girls.
'Hey, Saleem, isn't it? Hey, man, what happened to you?' I was dragged
out of my bitter, solitary reverie (even Sonny had someone to dance with;
but then, he had his forcep-hollows, and he didn't wear underpants - there
were reasons for his attractiveness) by a voice behind my left shoulder, a
low, throaty voice, full of promises - but also of menace. A girl's voice. I
turned with a sort of jump and found myself staring at a vision with golden
hair and a prominent and famous chest ... my God, she was fourteen years
old, why was she talking to me? ... 'My name is Masha Miovic,' the vision
said, 'I've met your sister.'
Of course! The Monkey's heroines, the swimmers from Walsingham School,
would certainly know the Schools champion breast-stroker!... 'I know ..." I
stuttered, 'I know your name.'
'And I know yours,' she straightened my tie, 'so that's fair.' Over her
shoulder, I saw Glandy Keith and Fat Perce watching us in drooling paroxysms
of envy. I straightened my back and pushed out my shoulders. Masha Miovic
asked again about my bandage. 'It's nothing,' I said in what I hoped was a
deep voice, 'A sporting accident.' And then, working feverishly to hold my
voice steady, 'Would you like to ... to dance?'
'Okay,' said Masha Miovic, 'But don't try any smooching.'
Saleem takes the floor with Masha Miovic, swearing not to smooch.
Saleem and Masha, doing the Mexican Hat; Masha and Saleem, box-
stepping with the best of them! I allow my face to adopt a superior
expression; you see, you don't have to be a prefect to get a girl! ... The
dance ended; and, still on top of my wave of elation, I said, 'Would you
care for a stroll, you know, in the quad?'
Masha Miovic smiling privately. 'Well, yah, just for a sec; but hands
off, okay?'
Hands off, Saleem swears. Saleem and Masha, taking the air ... man,
this is fine. This is the life. Goodbye Evie, hello breast-stroke ... Glandy
Keith Colaco and Fat Perce Fishwala step out of the shadows of the
quadrangle. They are giggling: 'Нее hee.' Masha Miovic looks puzzled as they
block our path. 'Hoo hoo,' Fat Perce says, 'Masha, hoo hoo. Some date you
got there.' And I, 'Shut up, you.' Whereupon Glandy Keith, 'You wanna know
how he got his war-wound, Mashy?' And Fat Perce, 'Нее hoo ha.' Masha says,
'Don't be
crude;
he got it in a sporting accident!' Fat Perce and Glandy
Keith are almost falling over with mirth; then Fishwala reveals all.
'Zagallo pulled his hair out in class!' Нее hoo. And Keith, 'Snotnose is a
bal-die!' And both together, 'Sniffer's got a map-face!' There is puzzlement
on Masha Miovic's face. And something more, some budding spirit of sexual
mischief... 'Saleem, they're being so rude about you!'
'Yes,' I say, 'ignore them.' I try to edge her away. But she goes on,
'You aren't going to let them get away with it?' There are beads of
excitement on her upper lip; her tongue is in the corner of her mouth; the
eyes of Masha Miovic say,
What are you? A man or a mouse? ...
and under the
spell of the champion breast-stroker, something else floats into my head:
the image of two irresistible knees; and now I am rushing at Colaco and
Fishwala; while they are distracted by giggles, my knee drives into Glandy's
groin; before he's dropped, a similar genuflection has laid Fat Perce low. I
turn to my mistress; she applauds, softly. 'Hey man, pretty good.'
But now my moment has passed; and Fat Perce is picking himself up, and
Glandy Keith is already moving towards me ... abandoning all pretence of
manhood, I turn and run. And the two bullies are after me and behind them
comes Masha Miovic calling, 'Where are you running, little hero?' But
there's no time for her now, mustn't let them get me, into the nearest
classroom and try and shut the door, but Fat Perce's foot is in the way and
now the two of them are inside too and I dash at the door, I grab it with my
right hand, trying to force it open,
get out if you can,
they are pushing
the door shut, but I'm pulling with the strength of my fear, I have it open
a few inches, my hand curls around it, and now Fat Perce slams all his
weight against the door and it shuts too fast for me to get my hand out of
the way and it's shut. A thud. And outside, Masha
Miovic arrives and looks down at the floor; and sees the top third of
my middle finger lying there like a lump of well-chewed bubble-gum. This was
the point at which she fainted.
No pain. Everything very far away. Fat Perce and Glandy Keith fleeing,
to get help or to hide. I look at my hand out of pure curiosity. My finger
has become a fountain: red liquid spurts out to the rhythm of my heart-beat.
Never knew a finger held so much blood. Pretty. Now here's nurse, don't
worry, nurse. Only a scratch.
Your parents are being phoned; Mr Crusoe is
getting his car keys.
Nurse is putting a great wad of cotton-wool over the
stump. Filling up like red candyfloss. And now Crusoe. Get in the car,
Saleem, your mother is going straight to the hospital. Yes sir. And the bit,
has anybody got the
bit?
Yes headmaster here it is. Thank you nurse.
Probably no use but you never know. Hold this while I drive, Saleem ... and
holding up my severed finger-dp in my unmutilated left hand, I am driven to
the Breach Candy Hospital through the echoing streets of night.
At the hospital: white walls stretchers everyone talking at once. Words
pour around me like fountains. 'O God preserve us, my little
piece-of-the-moon, what have they done to you?' To which old Crusoe, 'Heh
heh. Mrs Sinai. Accidents will happen. Boys will be.' But my mother,
enraged, 'What kind of school? Mr Caruso? I'm here with my son's finger in
pieces and you tell me. Not good enough. No, sir.' And now, while Crusoe,
'Actually the name's - like Robinson, you know - heh heh,' the doctor is
approaching and a question is being asked, whose answer will change the
world.
'Mrs Sinai, your blood group, please? The boy has lost blood. A
transfusion may be necessary.' And Amina: 'I am A; but my husband, O.' And
now she is crying, breaking down, and still the doctor, 'Ah; in that case,
are you aware of your son's ...' But she, the doctor's daughter, must admit
she cannot answer the question: Alpha or Omega? 'Well in that case a very
quick test; but on the subject of rhesus?' My mother, through her tears:
'Both my husband and I, rhesus positive.' And the doctor, 'Well, good, that
at least.'
But when I am on the operating table - 'Just sit there, son, I'll give
you a local anaesthetic, no, madam, he's in shock, total anaesthesia would
be impossible, all right son, just hold your finger up and still, help him
nurse, and it'll be over in a jiffy' - while the surgeon is sewing up the
stump and performing the miracle of transplanting the roots of the nail, all
of a sudden there's a fluster in the background, a million miles away, and
'Have you got a second Mrs Sinai' and I can't hear properly ... words float
across the in-finite distance ... Mrs Sinai, you are sure? О and A? A and O?
And rhesus negative, both of you? Heterozygous or homozygous? No, there must
be some mistake, how can he be... I'm sorry, absolutely clear... positive
... and neither A nor ... excuse me, Madam, but is he your ... not adopted
or ... The hospital nurse interposes herself between me and miles-away
chatter, but it's no good, because now my mother is shrieking, 'But of
course you must believe me, doctor; my God,
of course he is our son!'
Neither A nor O. And the rhesus factor: impossibly negative. And
zygosity offers no clues. And present in the blood, rare Kell antibodies.
And my mother, crying, crying-crying, crying... 'I don't understand. A
doctor's daughter, and I don't understand.'
Have Alpha and Omega unmasked me? Is rhesus pointing its unanswerable
finger? And will Mary Pereira be obliged to ... I wake up in a cool, white,
Venetian-blinded room with All-India Radio for company. Tony Brent is
singing: 'Red Sails In The Sunset'.
Ahmed Sinai, his face ravaged by whisky and now by something worse,
stands beside the Venetian blind. Amina, speaking in whispers. Again,
snatches across the million miles of distance. Janumplease. Ibegyou. No,
what are you saying. Of course it was. Of course you are the. How could you
think I would. Who could it have. О God don't just stand and look. I swear
Iswearonmymother'shead. Now shh he is ...
A new song from Tony Brent, whose repertoire today is uncannily similar
to Wee Willie Winkie's: 'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' hangs in
the air, floating on radio waves. My father advances on my bed, towers over
me, I've never seen him look like this before. 'Abba...' And he, 'I should
have known. Just look, where am I in that face. That nose, I should have
...' He turns on his heel and leaves the room; my mother follows him, too
distraught to whisper now: 'No, janum, I won't let you believe such things
about me! I'll kill myself! I'll,' and the door swings shut behind them.
There is a noise outside: like a clap. Or a slap. Most of what matters in
your life takes place in your absence.
Tony Brent begins crooning his latest hit into my good ear: and assures
me, melodiously, that 'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By'.
... And now I, Saleem Sinai, intend briefly to endow my self-then with
the benefits of hindsight; destroying the unities and conventions of fine
writing, I make him cognizant of what was to come, purely so that he can be
permitted to think the following thoughts: 'O eternal opposition of inside
and outside! Because a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole,
anything but homogeneous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside
him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. The body, on the
other hand, is homogeneous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, a
sacred temple, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness. But
the loss of my finger (which was conceivably foretold by the pointing digit
of Raleigh's fisherman), not to mention the removal of certain hairs from my
head, has undone all that. Thus we enter into a state of affairs which is
nothing short of revolutionary; and its effect on history is bound to be
pretty damn startling. Uncork the body, and God knows what you permit to
come tumbling out. Suddenly you are forever other than you were; and the
world becomes such that parents can cease to be parents, and love can turn
to hate. And these, mark you, are only the effects on private life. The
consequences for the sphere of public action, as will be shown, are -were -
will be no less profound.'
Finally, withdrawing my gift of foreknowledge, I leave you with the
image of a ten-year-old boy with a bandaged finger, sitting in a hospital
bed, musing about blood and noises-like-claps and the expression on his
father's face; zooming out slowly into long-shot, I allow the sound-track
music to drown my words, because Tony Brent is reaching the end of his
medley, and his finale, too, is the same as Winkie's: 'Good Night, Ladies'
is the name of the song. Merrily it rolls along, rolls along, rolls along
...
(Fade-out.)
The Kolynos Kid
From ayah to Widow, I've been the sort of person
to whom things have
been done;
but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing himself as
protagonist. Despite Mary's crime; setting aside typhoid and snake-venom;
dismissing two accidents, in washing-chest and circus-ring (when Sonny
Ibrahim, master lock-breaker, permitted my budding horns of temples to
invade his forcep-hollows, and through this combination unlocked the door to
the midnight children); disregarding the effects of Evie's push and my
mother's infidelity; in spite of losing my hair to the bitter violence of
Emil Zagallo and my finger to the lip-licking goads of Masha Miovic; setting
my face against all indications to the contrary, I shall now amplify, in the
manner and with the proper solemnity of a man of science, my claim to a
place at the centre of things.
'... Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,' the
Prime Minister wrote, obliging me scientifically to face the question:
In
what sense?
How, in what terms, may the career of a single . individual be
said to impinge on the fate of a nation? I must answer in adverbs and
hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both
actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term
'modes of connection' composed of dualistically-combined configurations' of
the two pairs of opposed adverbs given above. This is why hyphens are
necessary: ac'tively-literally, passively-metaphorically,
actively-metaphorically and pas-sively-literally, I was inextricably
entwined with my world.
Sensing Padma's unscientific bewilderment, I revert to the
inexactitudes of common speech: By the combination of'active' and 'literal'
I mean, of course, all actions of mine which directly -
literally -
affected,
or altered the course of, seminal historical events, for instance the manner
in which I provided the language marchers with their battle-cry. The union
of 'passive' and 'metaphorical' encompasses all socio-political trends and
events which, merely by existing, affected me metaphorically - for example,
by reading between the lines of the episode entitled 'The Fisherman's
Pointing Finger', you will perceive the unavoidable connection between the
infant state's attempts at rushing towards full-sized adulthood and my own
early, explosive efforts at growth ... Next, 'passive' and 'literal', when
hyphenated, cover all moments at which national events had a direct bearing
upon the lives of myself and my family - under this heading you should file
the freezing of my father's assets, and also the explosion at Walkeshwar
Reservoir, which unleased the great cat invasion. And finally there is the
'mode' of the 'active-metaphorical', which groups together those occasions
on which things done by or to me were mirrored in the macrocosm of public
affairs, and my private existence was shown to be symbolically at one with
history. The mutilation of my middle finger was a case in point, because
when I was detached from my fingertip and blood (neither Alpha nor Omega)
rushed out in fountains, a similar thing happened to history, and all sorts
of everywhichthing began pouring out all over us; but because history
operates on a grander scale than any individual, it took a good deal longer
to stitch it back together and mop up the mess.
'Passive-metaphorical', 'passive-literal', 'active-metaphorical': the
Midnight Children's Conference was all three; but it never became what I
most wanted it to be; we never operated in the first, most significant of
the 'modes of connection'. The 'active-literal' passed us by.
Transformation without end: nine-fingered Saleem has been brought to
the doorway of the Breach Candy Hospital by a squat blonde nurse whose face
is frozen into a smile of terrifying insincerity. He is blinking in the hot
glare of the outside world, trying to focus on two swimming shadow-shapes
coming towards him out of the sun; 'See?' the nurse coos, 'See who's come to
get you, then?' And Saleem realizes that something terrible has gone wrong
with the world, because his mother and father, who should have come to
collect him, have apparently been transformed
en route
into his ayah Mary
Pereira and his Uncle Hanif.
Hanif Aziz boomed like the horns of ships in the harbour and smelted
like an old tobacco factory. I loved him dearly, for his laughter, his
unshaven chin, his air of having been put together rather loosely, his lack
of co-ordination which made his every movement fraught with risk. (When he
visited Buckingham Villa my mother hid the cut-glass vases.) Adults never
trusted him to behave with proper decorum ('Watch out for the Communists!'
he bellowed, and they blushed), which was a bond between himself and all
children - other people's children, since he and Pia were childless. Uncle
Hanif who would one day, without warning, take a walk off the roof of his
home.
... He wallops me in the back, toppling me forwards into Mary's arms.
'Hey, little wrestler! You look fine!' But Mary, hastily, 'But so thin,
Jesus! They haven't been feeding you properly? You want cornflour pudding?
Banana mashed with milk? Did they give you chips?' ... while Saleem is
looking round at this new world in which everything seems to be going too
fast; his voice, when it comes, sounds high-pitched, as though somebody had
speeded it up: 'Amma-Abba?' he asks. The Monkey?' And Hanif booms, 'Yes,
tickety-boo! The boy is really ship-shape! Come on phaelwan: a ride in my
Packard, okay?' And talking at the same time is Mary Pereira, 'Chocolate
cake,' she is promising, 'laddoos, pista-ki-lauz, meat samosas, kulfi. So
thin you got, baba, the wind will blow you away.' The Packard is driving
away; it is failing to turn off Warden Road, up the two-storey hillock; and
Saleem, 'Hanif mamu, where are we ...' No time to get it out; Hanif roars,
'Your Pia aunty is waiting! My God, you see if we don't have a number one
good time!' His voice drops conspiratorially: 'Lots,' he says darkly,
'of
fun.'
And Mary: 'Arre baba yes! Such steak! And green chutney!' ... 'Not the
dark one,' I say, captured at last; relief appears on the cheeks of my
captors. 'No no no,' Mary babbles, 'light green, baba. Just like you like.'
And,
'Pale
green!' Hanif is bellowing, 'My God, green like grasshoppers!'
All too fast... we are at Kemp's Corner now, cars rushing around like
bullets ... but one
thing
is unchanged. On
Ids
billboard, the Kolynos Kid is
grinning, the eternal pixie grin of the boy in the green chlorophyll cap,
the lunatic grin of the timeless Kid, who endlessly squeezes an
inexhaustible tube of toothpaste on to a bright green brush:
Keep Teeth
Kleen And Keep Teeth Brite, Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White! .
.. and you may
wish to think of me, too, as an involuntary Kolynos Kid, squeezing crises
and transformations out of a bottomless tube, extruding time on to my
metaphorical toothbrush; clean, white time with green chlorophyll in the
stripes.
This, then, was the beginning of my first exile. (There will be a
second, and a third.) I bore it uncomplainingly. I had guessed, of course,
that there was one question I must never ask; that I had been loaned out,
like a comic-book from the Scandal Point Second Hand Library, for some
indefinite period; and that when my parents wanted me back, they would send
for me. When, or even if: because I blamed myself not a little for my
banishment. Had I not inflicted upon myself one more deformity to add to
bandylegs cucumbernose horn-temples staincheeks? Was it not possible that my
mutilated finger had been (as my announcement of my voices had nearly been),
for my long-suffering parents, the last straw? That I was no longer a good
business risk, no longer worth the investment of their love and protection?
... I decided to reward my uncle and aunt for their kindness in taking in so
wretched a creature as myself, to play the model nephew and await events.
There were times when I wished that the Monkey would come and see me, or
even call me on the phone; but dwelling on such matters only punctured the
balloon of my equanimity, so I did my best to put them out of my mind.
Besides, living with Hanif and Pia Aziz turned out to be exactly what my
uncle had promised: lots of fun.
They made all the fuss of me that children expect, and accept
graciously, from childless adults. Their flat overlooking Marine Drive
wasn't large, but there was a balcony from which I could drop monkey-nut
shells on to the heads of passing pedestrians; there was no spare bedroom,
but I was offered a deliciously soft white sofa with green stripes (an early
proof of my transformation into the Kolynos Kid); ayah Mary, who had
apparently followed me into exile, slept on the floor by my side. By day,
she filled my stomach with the promised cakes and sweetmeats (paid for, I
now believe, by my mother); I should have grown immensely fat, except that I
had begun once again to grow in other directions, and at the end of the year
of accelerated history (when I was only eleven and a half) I had actually
attained my full adult height, as if someone had grasped me by the folds of
my puppy-fat and squeezed them harder than any toothpaste-tube, so that
inches shot out of me under the pressure. Saved from obesity by the Kolynos
effect, I basked in my uncle and aunt's delight at having a child around the
house. When I spilt 7-Up on the carpet or sneezed into my dinner, the worst
my uncle would say was 'Hai-yo! Black man!' in his booming steamship's
voice, spoiling the effect by grinning hugely. Meanwhile, my aunty Pia was
becoming the next in the long series of women who have bewitched and finally
undone me good and proper.
(I should mention that, while I stayed in the Marine Drive apartment,
my testicles, forsaking the protection of pelvic bone, decided prematurely
and without warning to drop into their little sacs. This event, too, played
its part in what followed.)
My mumani - my aunty - the divine Pia Aziz: to live with her was to
exist in the hot sticky heart of a Bombay talkie. In those days, my uncle's
career in the cinema had entered a dizzy decline, and, for such is the way
of the world, Pia's star had gone into decline along with his. In her
presence, however, thoughts of failure were impossible. Deprived of film
roles, Pia had turned her life into a feature picture, in which I was cast
in an increasing number of bit-parts. I was the Faithful Body-Servant: Pia
in petticoats, soft hips rounding towards my desperately-averted eyes,
giggling while her eyes, bright with antimony, flashed imperiously - 'Come
on, boy, what are you shy for, holds these pleats in my sari while I fold.'
I was her Trusted Confidant, too. While my uncle sat on chlorophyll-striped
sofa pounding out scripts which nobody would ever film, I listened to the
nostalgic soliloquy of my aunt, trying to keep my eyes away from two
impossible orbs, spherical as melons, golden as mangoes: I refer, you will
have guessed, to the adorable breasts of Pia mumani. While she, sitting on
her bed, one arm flung across her brow, declaimed: 'Boy, you know, I am
great actress; I have interpreted several major roles! But look, what fate
will do! Once, boy, goodness knows who would beg absolutely to come to this
flat; once the reporters of
Filmfare
and
Screen Goddess
would pay
black-money to get inside! Yes, and dancing, and I was well-known at Venice
restaurant - all of those great jazzmen came to sit at my feet, yes, even
that Braz. Boy, after
Lovers of Kashmir,
who was a bigger star? Not Poppy;
not Vyjayantimala; not one person!' And I, nodding emphatically,
no-naturally-nobody, while her wondrous skin-wrapped melons heaved and ...
With a dramatic cry, she went on: 'But even then, in the time of our
world-beating fame, every picture a golden jubilee movie, this uncle of
yours wants to live in a two-room flat like a clerk! So I make no fuss; I am
not like some of your cheap-type actresses; I live simply and ask for no
Cadillacs or air-conditioners or Dunlopillo beds from England; no swimming
pools shaped like bikinis like that Roxy Vishwanatham's! Here, like a wife
of the masses, I have stayed; here, now, I am rotting! Rotting, absolutely.
But I know this: my face is my fortune; after that, what riches do I need?'
And I, anxiously agreeing: 'Mumani, none; none at all.' She shrieked wildly;
even my slap-deafened ear was penetrated. 'Yes, of course, you also want me
to be poor! All the world wants Pia to be in rags! Even that one, your
uncle, writing his boring-boring scripts! О my God, I tell him, put in
dances, or exotic locations! Make your villains villainous, why not, make
heroes like men! But he says, no, all that is rubbish, he sees that now -
although once he was not so proud! Now he must write about ordinary people
and social problems! And I say, yes, Hanif, do that, that is good; but put
in a little comedy routine, a little dance for your Pia to do, and tragedy
and drama also; that is what the Public is wanting!' Her eyes were brimming
with tears. 'So you know what he is writing now? About ...' she looked as if
her heart would break '... the Ordinary Life of a Pickle Factory!'
'Shh, mumani, shh,' I beg, 'Hanif mamu will hear!'
'Let him hear!' she stormed, weeping copiously now; 'Let his mother
hear also, in Agra; they will make me die for shame!'
Reverend Mother had never liked her actress daughter-in-law. I
overheard her once telling my mother: 'To marry an actress, whatsits-name,
my son has made his bed in the gutter, soon, whatsitsname, she will be
making him drink alcohol and also eat some pig.' Eventually, she accepted
the inevitability of the match with bad grace; but she took to writing
improving epistles to Pia. 'Listen, daughter,' she wrote, 'don't do this
actressy thing. Why to do such shameless behaviour? Work, yes, you girls
have modern ideas, but to dance naked on the screen! When for a small sum
only you could acquire the concession on a good petrol pump. From my own
pocket I would get it for you in two minutes. Sit in an office, hire
attendants; that is proper work.' None of us ever knew whence Reverend
Mother acquired her dream of petrol pumps, which would be the growing
obsession of her old age; but she bombarded Pia with it, to the actress's
disgust.
'Why that woman doesn't ask me to be shorthand typist?' Pia wailed to
Hanif and Mary and me at breakfast. 'Why not taxi-driver, or handloom
weaver? I tell you, this pumpery-shumpery makes me wild.'
My uncle quivered (for once in his life) on the edge of anger. "There
is a child present,' he said, 'and she is your mother; show her respect.'
'Respect she can have,' Pia flounced from the room, 'but she wants gas'
... And my most-treasured bit-part of all was played out when during Pia and
Hanif's regular card-games with friends, I was promoted to occupy the sacred
place of the son she never had. (Child of an unknown union, I have had more
mothers than most mothers have children; giving birth to parents has been
one of my stranger talents - a form of reverse fertility beyond the control
of contraception, and even of the Widow herself.) In the company of
visitors, Pia Aziz would cry: 'Look, friends, here's my own crown prince!
The jewel in my ring! The pearl in my necklace!' And she would draw me
towards her, cradling my head so that my nose was pushed down against her
chest and nestled wonderfully between the soft pillows of her indescribable
... unable to cope with such delights, I pulled my head away. But I was her
slave; and I know now why she permitted herself such familiarity with me.
Prematurely testicled, growing rapidly, I nevertheless wore (fraudulently)
the badge of sexual innocence: Saleem Sinai, during his sojourn at his
uncle's home, was still in shorts. Bare knees proved my childishness to Pia;
deceived by ankle-socks, she held my face against her breasts while her
sitar-perfect voice whispered in my good ear: 'Child, child, don't fear;
your clouds will soon roll by.'
For my uncle, as well as my histrionic aunt, I acted out (with growing
polish) the part of the surrogate son. Hanif Aziz was to be found during the
day on the striped sofa, pencil and exercise book in hand, writing his
pickle epic. He wore his usual lungi wound loosely around his waist and
fastened with an enormous safety-pin; his legs protruded hairily from its
folds. His fingernails bore the stains of a lifetime of Gold Flakes; his
toenails seemed similarly discoloured. I imagined him smoking cigarettes
with his toes. Highly impressed by the vision, I asked him if he could, in
fact, perform this feat; and without a word, he inserted Gold Flake between
big toe and its sidekick and wound himself into bizarre contortions. I
clapped wildly, but he seemed to be in some pain for the rest of the day.
I ministered to his needs as a good son should, emptying ashtrays,
sharpening pencils, bringing water to drink; while he, who after his
fabulist beginnings had remembered that he was his father's son and
dedicated himself against everything which smacked of the unreal, scribbled
out his ill-fated screenplay.
'Sonny Jim,' he informed me, 'this damn country has been dreaming for
five thousand years. It's about time it started waking up.' Hanif was fond
of railing against princes and demons, gods and heroes, against, in fact,
the entire iconography of the Bombay film; in the temple of illusions, he
had become the high priest of reality; while I, conscious of my miraculous
nature, which involved me beyond all mitigation in the (Hanif-despised)
myth-life of India, bit my lip and didn't know where to look.
Hanif Aziz, the only realistic writer working in the Bombay film
industry, was writing the story of a pickle-factory created, run and worked
in entirely by women. There were long scenes describing the formation of a
trade union; there were detailed descriptions of the pickling process. He
would quiz Mary Pereira about recipes; they would discuss, for hours, the
perfect blend of lemon, lime and garam masala. It is ironic that this
arch-disciple of naturalism should have been so skilful (if unconscious) a
prophet of his own family's fortunes; in the indirect kisses of the
Lovers
of Kashmir
he foretold my mother and her Nadir-Qasim's meetings at the
Pioneer Cafe; and in his unfilmed chutney scenario, too, there lurked a
prophecy of deadly accuracy.
He besieged Homi Catrack with scripts. Catrack produced none of them;
they sat in the small Marine Drive apartment, covering every available
surface, so that you had to pick them off the toilet seat before you could
lift it; but Catrack (out of charity? Or for another, soon-to-be-revealed
reason?) paid my uncle a studio salary. That was how they survived, Hanif
and Pia, on the largess of the man who would, in time, become the second
human being to be murdered by mushrooming Saleem.
Homi Catrack begged him, 'Maybe just one love scene?' And Pia, 'What do
you think, village people are going to give their rupees to see women
pickling Alfonsos?' But Hanif, obdurately: 'This is a film about work, not
kissing. And nobody pickles Alfonsos. You must use mangoes with bigger
stones.'
The ghost of Joe D'Costa did not, so far as I know, follow Mary Pereira
into exile; however,
his
absence only served to increase her anxiety. She
began, in these Marine Drive days, to fear that he would become visible to
others besides herself, and reveal, during her absence, the awful secrets of
what happened at Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home on Independence night. So each
morning she left the apartment in a state of jelly-like worry, arriving at
Buckingham Villa in near-collapse; only when she found that Joe had remained
both invisible and silent did she relax. But after she returned to Marine
Drive, laden with samosas and cakes and chutneys, her anxiety began to mount
once again ... but
за
I had resolved (having troubles enough of my Own) to
keep out of all heads except the Children's, I did not understand why.
Panic attracts panic; on her journeys, sitting in jam-packed buses (the
trams had just been discontinued), Mary heard all sorts of rumours and
tittle-tattle, which she relayed to me as matters of absolute fact.
According to Mary, the country was in the grip of a sort of supernatural
invasion. 'Yes, baba, they say in Kurukshetra an old Sikh woman woke up in
her hut and saw the old-time war of the Kurus and Pandavas happening right
outside! It was in the papers and all, she pointed to the place where she
saw the chariots of Arjun and Kama, and there were truly wheel-marks in the
mud! Baap-re-baap, such so-bad things: at Gwalior they have seen the ghost
of the Rani of Jhansi; rakshasas have been seen many-headed like Ravana,
doing things to women and pulling down trees with one finger. I am good
Christian woman, baba; but it gives me fright when they tell that the tomb
of Lord Jesus is found in Kashmir. On the tombstones are carved two pierced
feet and a local fisherwoman has sworn she saw them bleeding - real blood,
God save us! - on Good Friday ... what is happening, baba, why these old
things can't stay dead and not plague honest folk?' And I, wide-eyed,
listening; and although my uncle Hanif roared with laughter, I remain,
today, half-convinced that in that time of accelerated events and diseased
hours the past of India rose up to confound her present; the new-born,
secular state was being given an awesome reminder of its fabulous antiquity,
in which democracy and votes for women were irrelevant... so that people
were seized by atavistic longings, and forgetting the new myth of freedom
reverted to their old ways, their old regionalist loyalties and prejudices,
and the body politic began to crack. As I said: lop off just one ringer-tip
and you never know what fountains of confusion you will unleash.
'And cows, baba, have been vanishing into thin air; poof! and in the
villages, the peasants must starve.'
It was at this time that I, too, was possessed by a strange demon; but
in order that you may understand me properly, I must begin my account of the
episode on an innocent evening, when Hanif and Pia Aziz had a group of
friends round for cards.
My aunty was prone to exaggerate; because although
Filmfare
and
Screen
Goddess
were absent, my uncle's house was a popular place. On card-evenings,
it would burst at the seams with jazzmen gossiping about quarrels and
reviews in American magazines, and singers who carried throat-sprays in
their handbags, and members of the Uday Shankar dance-troupe, which was
trying to form a new style of dance by fusing Western ballet with
bharatanatyam; there were musicians who had been signed up to perform in the
All-India Radio music festival, the Sangeet Sammelan; there were painters
who argued violently amongst each other. The air was thick with political,
and other, chatter. 'As a matter of fact, I am the only artist in India who
paints with a genuine sense of ideological commitment!' - 'O, it's too bad
about Ferdy, he'll never get another band after this' - 'Menon? Don't talk
to me about Krishna. I knew him when he had principles. I, myself, have
never abandoned ...''... One, Hanif yaar, why we don't see Lal Qasim here
these days?' And my uncle, looking anxiously towards me: 'Shh ... what
Qasim? I don't know any person by that name.'
... And mingling with the hubbub in the apartment, there was the
evening colour and noise of Marine Drive: promenaders with dogs, buying
chambeli and channa from hawkers; the cries of beggars and bhcl-puri
vendors; and the lights coming on in a great arcing necklace, round and up
to Malabar Hill ... I stood on the balcony with Mary Pereira, turning my bad
ear to her whispered rumours, the city at my back and the crowding, chatting
card-schools before my eyes. And one day, amongst the card-players, I
recognized the sunken-eyed, ascetic form of Mr Homi Catrack. Who greeted me
with embarrassed heartiness: 'Hi there, young chap! Doing fine? Of course,
of course you are!'
My uncle Hanif played rummy dedicatedly; but he was in the thrall of a
curious obsession - namely, that he was determined never to lay down a hand
until he completed a thirteen-card sequence in hearts. Always hearts; all
the hearts, and nothing but the hearts would do. In his quest for this
unattainable perfection, my uncle would discard perfectly good
threes-of-a-kind, and whole sequences of spades clubs diamonds, to the
raucous amusement of his friends. I heard the renowned shehnai-player Ustad
Changez Khan (who dyed his hair, so mat on hot evenings the tops of his ears
were discoloured by running black fluid) tell my uncle: 'Come on, mister;
leave this heart business, and just play like the rest of us fellows.' My
uncle confronted temptation; then boomed above the din, 'No, dammit, go to
the devil and leave me to my game!' He played cards like a fool; but I, who
had never seen such singleness of purpose, felt like clapping.
One of the regulars at Hanif Aziz's legendary card-evenings was a
Times
of India
staff photographer, who was full of sharp tales and scurrilous
stories. My uncle introduced me to him: 'Here's the fellow who put you on
the front page, Saleem. Here is Kalidas Gupta. A terrible photographer; a
really badmaash type. Don't talk to him too long; he'll make your head spin
with scandal!' Kalidas had a head of silver hair and a nose like an eagle. I
thought he was wonderful. 'Do you really know scandals?' I asked him; but
all he said was, 'Son, if I told, they would make your ears burn.' But he
never found out that the evil genius, the e
minence grise
behind the greatest
scandal the city had ever known was none other than Saleem Snotnose ... I
mustn't race ahead. The affair of the curious baton of Commander Sabarmati
must be recounted in its proper place. Effects must not (despite the
tergiversatory nature of time in 1958) be permitted to precede causes.
I was alone on the balcony. Mary Pereira was in the kitchen helping Pia
to prepare sandwiches and cheese-pakoras; Hanif Aziz was immersed in his
search for the thirteen hearts; and now Mr Homi Catrack came out to stand
beside me. 'Breath of fresh air,' he said. 'Yes, sir,' I replied. 'So,' he
exhaled deeply. 'So, so. Life is treating you good? Excellent little fellow.
Let me shake you by the hand.' Ten-year-old hand is swallowed up by film
magnate's fist (the left hand; the mutilated right hand hangs innocently by
my side) ... and now a shock. Left palm feels paper being thrust into it -
sinister paper, inserted by dexterous fist! Catrack's grip tightens; his
voice becomes low, but also cobra-like, sibilant; inaudible in the room with
the green-striped sofa, his words penetrate my one good ear: 'Give this to
your aunty. Secretly secretly. Can do? And keep mum; or I'll send the police
to cut your tongue out.' And now, loud and cheery. 'Good! Glad to see you in
such high spirits!' Homi Catrack is patting me on the head; and moving back
to his game.
Threatened by policemen, I have remained silent for two decades; but no
longer. Now, everything has to come out.
The card-school broke up early: 'The boy has to sleep,' Pia was
whispering, 'Tomorrow he goes to school again.' I found no opportunity of
being alone with my aunt; I was tucked up on my sofa with the note still
clutched in my left fist. Mary was asleep on the floor ... I decided to
feign a nightmare. (Deviousness did not come unnaturally to me.)
Unfortunately, however, I was so tired that I fell asleep; and, in the
event, there was no need to pretend: because I dreamed the murder of my
classmate Jimmy Kapadia.
... We are playing football in the main stairwell at school, on red
tiles, slipping sliding. A black cross set in the blood-red tiles. Mr Crusoe
at the head of the stairs: 'Mustn't slide down the banisters boys that cross
is where one boy fell.'Jimmy plays football on the cross. 'The cross is
lies,' Jimmy says, 'They tell you lies to spoil your fun.' His mother calls
up on the telephone. 'Don't play Jimmy your bad heart.' The bell. The
telephone, replaced, and now the bell ... Ink-pellets stain the classroom
air. Fat Perce and Glandy Keith have fun. Jimmy wants a pencil, prods me in
the ribs. 'Hey man, you got a pencil, give. Two ticks, man.' I give. Zagallo
enters. Zagallo's hand is up for silence: look at my hair growing on his
palm! Zagallo in pointy tin-soldier hat ... I must have my pencil back.
Stretching out my finger giving Jimmy a poke. 'Sir, please look sir, Jimmy
fell!' 'Sir I saw sir Snotnose poked!' 'Snotnose shot Kapadia, sir!' 'Don't
play Jimmy your bad heart!' 'You be quiet,' Zagallo cries, 'Jongle feelth,
shut up.'
Jimmy in a bundle on the floor. 'Sir sir please sir will they put up a
cross?' He borrowed a pencil, I poked, he fell. His father is a taxi-driver.
Now the taxi drives into class; a dhobi-bundle is put on the back seat, out
goes Jimmy. Ding, a bell. Jimmy's father puts down the taxi flag. Jimmy's
father looks at me: 'Snotnose, you'll have to pay the fare.' 'But please sir
haven't got the money sir.' Arid Zagallo: 'We'll put it on your bill.' See
my hair on Zagallo's hand. Flames are pouring from Zagallo's eyes. 'Five
hundred meelion, what's one death?' Jimmy is dead; five hundred million
still alive. I start counting: one two three. Numbers march over Jimmy's
grave. One million two million three million four. Who cares if anyone,
anyone dies. One hundred million and one two three. Numbers march through
the classroom now. Crushing pounding two hundred million three four five.
Five hundred million still alive. And only one of me ...
... In the dark of the night, I awoke from the dream of Jimmy Kapadia's
death which became the dream of annihilation-by-numbers, yelling howling
screaming, but still with the paper in my fist; and a door flew open, to
reveal my uncle Hanif and aunt Pia. Mary Pereira tried to comfort me, but
Pia was imperious, she was a divine swirl of petticoats and dupatta, she
cradled me in her arms: 'Never mind! My diamond, never mind now!' And Uncle
Hanif, sleepily: 'Hey, phaelwan! It's okay now; come on, you come with us;
bring the boy, Pia!' And now I'm safely in Pia's arms; 'Just for tonight, my
pearl, you can sleep with us!' - and there I am, nestling between aunt and
uncle, huddling against my mumani's perfumed curves.
Imagine, if you can, my sudden joy; imagine with what speed the
nightmare fled from my thoughts, as I nestled against my extraordinary
aunt's petticoats! As she re-arranged herself, to get comfortable, and one
golden melon caressed my cheek! As Pia's hand sought out mine and grasped it
firmly ... now I discharged my duty. When my aunt's hand wrapped itself
around mine, paper passed from palm to palm. I felt her stiffen, silently;
then, although I snuggled up closer closer closer, she was lost to me; she
was reading in the dark, and the stiffness of her body was increasing; and
then suddenly I knew that I had been tricked, that Catrack was my enemy; and
only the threat of policemen prevented me from telling my uncle.
(At school, the next day, I was told of Jimmy Kapadia's tragic death,
suddenly at home, of a heart seizure. Is it possible to kill a human being
by dreaming his death? My mother always said so; and, in that case, Jimmy
Kapadia was my first murder victim. Homi Catrack was to be the next.)
When I returned from my first day back at school, having basked in the
unusual sheepishness of Fat Perce and Glandy Keith ('Lissen, yaar, how did
we know your finger was in the ... hey, man, we got free tickets for a
picture tomorrow, you want to come?') and my equally unexpected popularity
('No more Zagallo! Solid, man! You really lost your hair for something
good!'), aunty Pia was out. I sat quietly with uncle Hanif while, in the
kitchen, Mary Pereira prepared dinner. It was a peaceful little family
scene; but the peace was shattered, abruptly, by the crash of a slamming
door. Hanif dropped his pencil as Pia, having slammed the front door, flung
open the living-room door with equal force. Then he boomed cheerfully, 'So,
wife: what's the drama?' ... But Pia was not to be defused. 'Scribble,' she
said, her hand slicing air, 'Allah, don't stop for me! So much talent, a
person cannot go to the pot in this house without finding your genius. Are
you happy, husband? We are making much money? God is good to you?' Still
Hanif remained cheerful. 'Come Pia, our little guest is here. Sit, have tea
...' Actress Pia froze in an attitude of disbelief. 'O God! Such a family I
have come to! My life is in ruins, and you offer tea; your mother offers
petrol! All is madness ...' And uncle Hanif, frowning now: 'Pia, the boy
...'A shriek. 'Ahaaa! The boy - but the boy has suffered; he is suffering
now; he knows what it is to lose, to feel forlorn! I, too, have been
abandoned: I am great actress, and here I sit surrounded by tales of
bicycle-postmen and donkey-cart drivers! What do you know of a woman's
grief? Sit, sit, let some fat rich Parsee film-producer give you charity,
never mind that your wife wears paste jewels and no new saris for two years;
a woman's back is broad, but, beloved husband, you have made my days into
deserts! Go, ignore me now, just leave me in peace to jump from the window!
I will go into the bedroom now,' she concluded, 'and if you hear no more
from me it is because my heart is broken and I am dead.' More doors slammed:
it was a terrific exit.
Uncle Hanif broke a pencil, absent-mindedly, into two halves. He shook
his head wonderingly: 'What's got into her?' But I knew. I, bearer of
secrets, threatened by policemen, I knew and bit my lip. Because, trapped as
I was in the crisis of the marriage of my uncle and aunt, I had broken my
recently-made rule and entered Pia's head; I had seen her visit to Homi
Catrack and knew that, for years now, she had been his fancy-woman; I had
heard him telling her that he had tired of her charms, and there was
somebody else now; and I, who would have hated him enough just for seducing
my beloved aunt, found myself hating him twice as passionately for doing her
the dishonour of discarding her.
'Go to her,' my uncle was saying, 'Maybe you can cheer her up.'
The boy Saleem moves through repeatedly-slammed doors to the sanctum of
his tragic aunt; and enters, to find her loveliest of bodies splayed out in
wondrous abandon across the marital bed -where, only last night, bodies
nestled against bodies - where paper passed from hand .to hand ... a hand
flutters at her heart; her chest heaves; and the boy Saleem stammers, 'Aunt,
О aunt, I'm sorry.'
A banshee-wail from the bed. Tragedienne's arms, flying outwards
towards me. 'Hai! Hai, hai! Ai-hai-hai!' Needing no further invitation, I
fly towards those arms; I fling myself between them, to lie atop my mourning
aunt. The arms close around me, tightertighter, nails digging through my
school-white shirt, but I don't care! - Because something has started
twitching below my S-buckled belt. Aunty Pia thrashes about beneath me in
her despair and I thrash with her, remembering to keep my right hand clear
of the action. I hold it stiffly out above the fray. One-handed, I begin to
caress her, not knowing what I'm doing, I'm only ten years old and still in
shorts, but I'm crying because she's crying, and the room is full of the
noise - and on the bed as two bodies thrash, two bodies begin to acquire a
kind of rhythm, unnameable unthinkable, hips pushing up towards me, while
she yells, 'О! О God, О God, O!' And maybe I am yelling too, I can't say,
something is taking over from grief here, while my uncle snaps pencils on a
striped sofa, something getting stronger, as she writhes and twists beneath
me, and at last in the grip of a strength greater than my strength I am
bringing down my right hand, I have forgotten my finger, and when it touches
her breast, wound presses against skin ...
'Yaaaouuuu!' I scream with the pain; and my aunt, snapping out of the
macabre spell of those few moments, pushes me off her and delivers a
resounding wallop to my face. Fortunately, it is the left cheek; there is no
danger of damage to my remaining good ear.
'Badmaash!'
my aunty screams, 'A
family of maniacs and perverts, woeis me, what woman ever suffered so
badly?'
There is a cough in the doorway. I am standing up now, shivering with
pain. Pia is standing, too, her hair dripping off her head like tears. Mary
Pereira is in the doorway, coughing, scarlet confusion all over her skin,
holding a brown paper parcel in her hands.
'See, baba, what I have forgotten,' she finally manages to say, 'You
are a big man now: look, your mother has sent you two pairs of nice, white
long trousers.'
After I got so indiscreetly carried away while trying to cheer up my
aunt, it became difficult foi me to remain in the apartment on Marine Drive.
Long intense telephone calls were made regularly during the next few days;
Hanif persuading someone, while Pia gesticulated, that perhaps now, after
five weeks ... and one evening after I got back from school, my mother
picked me up in our old Rover, and my first exile came to an end.
Neither during our drive home, nor at any other time, was I given any
explanation for my exile. I decided, therefore, that I would not make it my
business to ask. I was wearing long pants now; I was, therefore, a man, and
must bear my troubles accordingly. I told my mother: 'The finger is not so
bad. Hanif mamu has taught me to hold the pen differently, so I can write
okay.' She seemed to be concentrating very hard on the road. 'It was a nice
holiday,' I added, politely. 'Thank you for sending me.'
'O child,' she burst out, 'with your face like the sun coming out, what
can I tell you? Be good with your father; he is not happy these days.' I
said I would try to be good; she seemed to lose control of the wheel and we
passed dangerously near a bus. 'What a world,' she said after a time,
'Terrible things happen and you don't know how.
'
'I know,' I agreed, 'Ayah has been telling me.' My mother looked at me
fearfully, then glared at Mary in the back seat. 'You black woman,' she
cried, 'what have you been saying?' I explained about Mary's stories of
miraculous events, but the dire rumours seemed to calm my mother down. 'What
do you know,' she sighed, 'You are only a child.'
What do I know, Amma? I know about the Pioneer Cafe! Suddenly, as we
drove home, I was filled once again with my recent lust for revenge upon my
perfidious mother, a lust which had faded in the brilliant glare of my
exile, but which now returned and was united with my new-born loathing of
Homi Catrack. This two-headed lust was the demon which possessed me, and
drove me into doing the worst thing I ever did ... 'Everything will be all
right,' my mother was saying, 'You just wait and see.' Yes, mother.
It occurs to me that I have said nothing, in this entire piece, about
the Midnight Children's Conference; but then, to tell the truth, they didn't
seem very important to me in those days. I had other things on my mind.
Commander Sabarmati's baton
A few months later, when Mary Pereira finally confessed her crime, and
revealed the secrets of her eleven-year-long haunting by the ghost of Joseph
D'Costa, we learned that, after her return from exile, she was badly shocked
by the condition into which the ghost had fallen in her absence. It had
begun to decay, so that now bits of it were missing: an ear, several toes on
each foot, most of its teeth; and there was a hole in its stomach-larger
than an egg. Distressed by this crumbling spectre, she asked it (when she
was sure nobody else was within earshot): 'O God, Joe, what you been doing
to yourself?' He replied that the responsibility of her crime had been
placed squarely on his shoulders until she confessed, and it was playing
hell with his system. From that moment it became inevitable that she would
confess; but each time she looked at me she found herself prevented from
doing so. Still, it was only a matter of time.
In the meanwhile, and utterly ignorant of how close I was to being
exposed as a fraud, I was attempting to come to terms with a Methwold's
Estate in which, too, a number of transformations had occurred. In the first
place, my father seemed to want nothing more to do with me, an attitude of
mind which I found hurtful but (considering my mutilated body) entirely
understandable. In the second place, there was the remarkable change in the
fortunes of the Brass Monkey. 'My position in this household,' I was obliged
to admit to myself, 'has been usurped.' Because now it was the Monkey whom
my father admitted into the abstract sanctum of his office, the Monkey whom
he smothered in
his
squashy belly, and who was obliged to bear the burdens
of his dreams about the future. I even heard Mary Pereira singing to the
Monkey the little ditty which had been my theme-song all my days: 'Anything
you want to be,' Mary sang, 'you can be; You can be just what-all you want!'
Even my mother seemed to have caught the mood; and now it was my sister who
always got the biggest helping of
chips
at the dinner-table, and the extra
nargisi kofta, and the choicest pasanda. While I - whenever anyone in the
house chanced to look at me - was conscious of a deepening furrow between
their eyebrows, and an atmosphere of confusion and distrust. But how could I
complain? The Monkey had tolerated my special position for years. With the
possible exception of the time I fell out of a tree in our garden after she
nudged me (which could have been an accident, after all), she had accepted
my primacy with excellent grace and even loyalty. Now it was my turn;
long-trousered, I was required to be adult about my demotion. 'This growing
up,' I told myself, 'is harder than I expected.'
The Monkey, it must be said, was no less astonished than I at her
elevation to the role of favoured child. She did her best to fall from
grace, but it seemed she could do no wrong. These were the days of her
flirtation with Christianity, which was partly due to the influence of her
European school-friends and partly to the rosary-fingering presence of Mary
Pereira (who, unable to go to church because of her fear of the
confessional, would regale us instead with Bible stories); mostly, however,
I believe it was an attempt by the Monkey to regain her old, comfortable
position in the family doghouse (and, speaking of dogs, the Baroness Simki
had been put to sleep during my absence, lulled by promiscuity).
My sister spoke highly of gentle Jesus meek and mild; my mother smiled
vaguely and patted her on the head. She went around the house humming hymns;
my mother took up the tunes and sang along. She requested a nun's outfit to
replace her favourite nurse's dress; it was given to her. She threaded
chick-peas on a string and used them as a rosary, muttering
Hail-Mary-full-of-grace, and my parents praised her skill with her hands.
Tormented by her failure to be punished, she mounted to extremes of
religious fervour, reciting the Our Father morning and night, fasting in the
weeks of Lent instead of during Ramzan, revealing an unsuspected streak of
fanaticism which would, later, begin to dominate her personality; and still,
it appeared, she was tolerated. Finally she discussed the matter with me.
'Well, brother,' she said, 'looks like from now on I'll just have to be the
good guy, and you can have all the fun.'
She was probably right; my parents' apparent loss of interest in me
should have given me a greater measure of freedom; but I was mesmerized by
the transformations which were taking place in every aspect of my life, and
fun, in such circumstances, seemed hard to have.
I was altering physically; too early, soft fuzz was appearing on my
chin, and my voice swooped, out of control, up and down the vocal register.
I had a strong sense of absurdity: my lengthening limbs were making me
clumsy, and I must have cut a clownish figure, as I outgrew shirts and
trousers and stuck gawkily and too far out of the ends of my clothes. I felt
somehow conspired against, by these garments which flapped comically around
my ankles and wrists; and even when I turned inwards to my secret Children,
I found change, and didn't like it.
The gradual disintegration of the Midnight Children's Conference -which
finally fell apart on the day the Chinese armies came down over the
Himalayas to humiliate the Indian fauj - was already well under way. When
novelty wears off, boredom, and then dissension, must inevitably ensue. Or
(to put it another way) when a finger is mutilated, and fountains of blood
flow out, all manner of vilenesses become possible ... whether or not the
cracks in the Conference were the (active-metaphorical) result of my
finger-loss, they were certainly widening. Up in Kashmir, Narada-Markandaya
was falling into the solipsistic dreams of the true narcissist, concerned
only with the erotic pleasures of constant sexual alterations; while
Soumitra the time-traveller, wounded by our refusal to listen to his
descriptions of a future in which (he said) the country would be governed by
a urine-drinking dotard who refused to die, and people would forget
everything they had ever learned, and Pakistan would split like an amoeba,
and the prime ministers of each half would be assassinated by their
successors, both of whom - he swore despite our disbelief -would be called
by the same name ... wounded Soumitra became a regular absentee from our
nightly meetings, disappearing for long periods into the spidery labyrinths
of Time. And the sisters from Baud were content with their ability to
bewitch fools young and old. 'What can this Conference help?' they inquired.
'We already have too many lovers.' And our alchemist member was busying
himself in a laboratory built for him by his father (to whom he had revealed
his secret); pre-occupied with the Philosopher's Stone, he had very little
time for us. We had lost him to the lure of gold.
And there were other factors at work as well. Children, however
magical, are not immune to their parents; and as the prejudices and
world-views of adults began to take over their minds, I found children from
Maharashtra loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners reviling
Dravidian 'blackies'; there were religious rivalries; and class entered our
councils. The rich children turned up their noses at being in such lowly
company; Brahmins began to feel uneasy at permitting even their thoughts to
touch the thoughts of untouchables; while, among the low-born, the pressures
of poverty and Communism were becoming evident ... and, on top of all this,
there were clashes of personality, and the hundred squalling rows which are
unavoidable in a parliament composed entirely of half-grown brats.
In this way the Midnight Children's Conference fulfilled the prophecy
of the Prime Minister and became, in truth, a mirror of the nation; the
passive-literal mode was at work, although I railed against it, with
increasing desperation, and finally with growing resignation ... 'Brothers,
sisters!' I broadcast, with a mental voice as uncontrollable as its physical
counterpart, 'Do not let this happen! Do not permit the endless duality of
masses-and-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us to come between us! We,'
I cried passionately, 'must be a third principle, we must be the force which
drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being
new, can we fulfil the promise of our birth!' I had supporters, and none
greater than Parvati-the-witch; but I felt them slipping away from me, each
distracted by his or her own life ... just as, in truth, I was being
distracted by mine. It was as though our glorious congress was turning out
to be more than another of the toys of childhood, as though long trousers
were destroying what midnight had created ... 'We must decide on a
programme,' I pleaded, 'our own Five Year Plan, why not?' But I could hear,
behind my anxious broadcast, the amused laughter of my greatest rival; and
there was SMva in all our heads, saying scornfully, 'No, little rich boy;
there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty, and
have-and-lack, and right-and-left; there is only me-against-the-world! The
world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their
dreams; the world, little Snotnose, is things. Things and their makers rule
the world; look at Birla, and Tata, and all the powerful: they make things.
For things, the country is run. Not for people. For things, America and
Russia send aid; but five hundred million stay hungry. When you have things,
then there is time to dream; when you don't, you fight.' The Children,
listening fascinatedly as we fought... or perhaps not, perhaps even our
dialogue failed to hold their interest. And now I: 'But people are not
tilings; if we come together, if we love each other, if we show that this,
just this, this people-together, this Conference, this
children-sticking-together-through-thick-and-thin, can be that third way...'
But Shiva, snorting: 'Little rich boy, that's all just wind. All that
importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-human-ity. Today, what
people are is just another kind of thing.' And I, Saleem, crumbling: 'But
... free will ... hope ... the great soul, otherwise known as
mahatma,
of
mankind ... and what of poetry, and art, and ...' Whereupon SMva seized his
victory: 'You see? I knew you'd turn out to be like that. Mushy, like
overcooked rice. Sentimental as a grandmother. Go, who wants your rubbish?
We all have lives to live. Hell's bells, cucumber-nose, I'm fed up with your
Conference. It's got nothing to do with one single thing.'
You ask: there are ten-year-olds? I reply: Yes, but. You say: did
ten-year-olds, or even almost-elevens, discuss the role of the individual in
society? And the rivalry of capital and labour? Were the internal stresses
of agrarian and industrialized zones made explicit? And conflicts in
socio-cultural heritages? Did children of less than four thousand days
discuss identity, and the inherent conflicts of capitalism? Having got
through fewer than one hundred thousand hours, did they contrast Gandhi and
Marxlenin, power and impotence? Was collectivity opposed to singularity? Was
God killed by children? Even allowing for the truth of the supposed
miracles, can we now believe that urchins spoke like old men with beards?
I say: maybe not in these words; maybe not in words at all, but in the
purer language of thought; but yes, certainly, this is what was at the
bottom of it all; because children are the vessels into which adults pour
their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us. Poison,
and after a gap of many years, a Widow with a knife.
In short: after my return to Buckingham Villa, even the salt of the
midnight children lost its savour; there were nights, now, when I did not
even bother to set up my nationwide network; and the demon lurking inside me
(it had two heads) was free to get on with its devilment. (I never knew
about Shiva's guilt or innocence of whore-murders; but such was the
influence of Kali-Yuga that I, the good guy and natural victim, was
certainly responsible for two deaths. First came Jimmy Kapadia; and second
was Homi Catrack.)
If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or
rather, it is murdered.
We all had our troubles in those, days. Homi Catrack had his idiot
Toxy, and the Ibrahims had other worries: Sonny's father Ismail, after years
of bribing judges and juries, was in danger of being investigated by the Bar
Commission; and Sonny's uncle Ishaq, who ran the second-rate Embassy Hotel
near Flora Fountain, was reputedly deep in debt to local gangsters, and
worried constantly about being 'bumped off' (in those days, assassinations
were becoming as quotidian as the heat) ... so perhaps it isn't surprising
that we had all forgotten about the existence of Professor Schaapsteker.
(Indians grow larger and more powerful as they age; but Schaapsteker was a
European, and his kind unfortunately fade away with the years, and,often
completely disappear.)
But now, driven, perhaps, by my demon, my feet led me upstairs to the
top floor of Buckingham Villa, where I found a mad old man, incredibly tiny
and shrunken, whose narrow tongue darted constantly in and out between his
lips - flicking, licking: the former searcher after antivenenes, assassin of
horses, Sharpsticker sahib, now ninety-two and no longer of his eponymous
Institute, but retired into a dark top-floor apartment filled with tropical
vegetation and serpents pickled in brine. Age, failing to draw his teeth and
poison-sacs, had turned him instead into the incarnation of snakehood; like
other Europeans who stay too long, the ancient insanities of India had
pickled his brains, so that he had come to believe the superstitions of the
Institute orderlies, according to whom he was the last of a line which began
when a king cobra mated with a woman who gave birth to a human (but
serpentine) child ... it seems that all my life I've only had to turn a
corner to tumble into yet another new and fabulously transmogrified world.
Climb a ladder (or even a staircase) and you find a snake awaiting you.
The curtains were always drawn; in Schaapsteker's rooms, the sun
neither rose nor set, and no clocks ticked. Was it the demon, or our mutual
sense of isolation which drew us together?... Because, in those days of the
Monkey's ascendancy and the Conference's decline, I began to ascend the
stairs whenever possible, and listen to the ravings of the crazy, sibilant
old man.
His first greeting to me, when I stumbled into his unlocked lair, was:
'So, child - you have recovered from the typhoid.' The sentence stirred time
like a sluggish dust-cloud and rejoined me to my one-year-old self; I
remembered the story of how Schaapsteker had saved my life with
snake-poison. And afterwards, for several weeks, I sat at his feet, and he
revealed to me the cobra which lay coiled within myself.
Who listed, for my benefit, the occult powers of snakes? (Their shadows
kill cows; if they enter a man's dreams, his wife conceives; if they are
killed, the murderer's family is denied male issue for twenty generations.)
And who described to me - with the aid of books and stuffed corpses - the
cobra's constant foes? 'Study your enemies, child,' he hissed, 'or they will
surely kill you.' ... At Schaapsteker's feet, I studied the mongoose and the
boar, the dagger-billed adjutant bird and the barasinha deer, which crushes
snakes' heads under its feet; and the Egyptian ichneumon, and ibis; the
four-feet-high secretary bird, fearless and hook-beaked, whose appearance
and name made me think suspicious thoughts about my father's Alice Pereira;
and the jackal buzzard, the stink cat, the honey ratel from the hills; the
road runner, the peccary, and the formidable cangamba bird. Schaapsteker,
from the depths of his senility, instructed me in life. 'Be wise, child.
Imitate the action of the snake. Be secret; strike from the cover of a
bush.'
Once he said: 'You must think of me as another father. Did I not give
you your life when it was lost?' With this statement he proved that he was
as much under my spell as I under his; he had accepted that he, too, was one
of that endless series of parents to whom I alone had the power of giving
birth. And although, after a time, I found the air in his chambers too
oppressive, and left him once more to the isolation from which he would
never again be disturbed, he had shown me how to proceed. Consumed by the
two-headed demon of revenge, I used my telepathic powers (for the first
time) as a weapon; and in this way I discovered the details of the
relationship between Homi Catrack and Lila Sabarmati. Lila and Pia were
always rivals in beauty; it was the wife of the heir-apparent to the title
of Admiral of the Fleet who had become the film magnate's new fancy-woman.
While Commander Sabarmati was at sea on manoeuvres, Lila and Homi were
performing certain manoeuvres of their own; while the lion of the seas
awaited' the death of the then-Admiral, Homi and Lila, too, were making an
appointment with the Reaper. (With my help.)
'Be secret,' said Sharpsticker sahib; secretly, I spied on my enemy
Homi, and on the promiscuous mother of Eyeslice and Hairoil (who were very
full of themselves of late, ever since, in fact, the papers announced that
Commander Sabarmati's promotion was a mere formality.
Only a matter of time
...). 'Loose woman,' the demon within me whispered silently, 'Perpetrator of
the worst of maternal perfidies! We shall turn you into an awful example;
through you we shall demonstrate the fate which awaits the lascivious. О
unobservant adulteress! Did you not see what sleeping around did to the
illustrious Baroness Simki von der Heiden? - who was, not to put too fine a
point upon it, a bitch, just like yourself.'
My view of Lila Sabarmati has mellowed with age; after all, she and I
had one thing in common - her nose, like mine, possessed tremendous powers.
Hers, however, was a purely worldly magic: a wrinkle of nasal skin could
charm the steeliest of Admirals; a tiny flare of the nostrils ignited
strange fires in the hearts of film magnates. I am a little regretful about
betraying that nose; it was a little like stabbing a cousin in the back.
What I discovered: every Sunday morning at ten a.m., Lila Sabarmati
drove Eyeslice and Hairoil to the Metro cinema for the weekly meetings of
the Metro Cub Club. (She volunteered to take the rest of us, too; Sonny and
Cyrus, the Monkey and I piled into her Indian-made Hindustan car.) And while
we drove towards Lana Turner or Robert Taylor or Sandra Dee, Mr Homi Catrack
was also preparing himself for a weekly rendezvous. While Lila's Hindustan
puttered along beside railway-lines, Homi was knotting a cream silk scarf
around his throat; while she halted at red lights, he donned a Technicolored
bush-coat; when she was ushering us into the darkness of the auditorium, he
was putting on gold-rimmed sunglasses; and when she left us to watch our
film, he, too, was abandoning a child. Toxy Catrack never failed to react to
his departures by wailing kicking thrashing-of-legs; she knew what was going
on, and not even Bi-Appah could restrain her.
Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and
Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and
Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The world is full of love
stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.
When Lila drove her Hindustan to an address off Colaba Causeway, she was
Juliet coming out on to her balcony; when cream-scarfed, gold-shaded Homi
sped off to meet her (in the same Studebaker in which my mother had once
been rushed to Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home), he was Leander swimming the
Hellespont towards Hero's burning candle. As for my part in the business - I
will not give it a name.
I confess: what I did was no act of heroism. I did not battle Homi on
horseback, with fiery eyes and flaming sword; instead, imitating the action
of the snake, I began to cut pieces out of newspapers. From GOAN LIBERATION
COMMITTEE LAUNCHES SATYAGRAHA CAMPAIGN I extracted the letters 'COM';
SPEAKER OF E-PAK ASSEMBLY DECLARED MANIAC gave me my second syllable, 'MAN'.
I found 'DER' concealed in NEHRU CONSIDERS RESIGNATION AT CONGRESS ASSEMBLY;
into my second word now, I excised 'SAB' from RIOTS, MASS ARRESTS IN RED-RUN
KERALA: SABOTEURS RUN AMOK: GHOSH ACCUSES CONGRESS GOONDAS, and got 'ARM'
from CHINESE ARMED FORCES' BORDER ACTIVITIES SPURN BANDUNG PRINCIPLES. To
complete the name, I snipped the letters 'ATI' from DULLES FOREIGN POLICY is
INCONSISTENT, ERRATIC, P.M. AVERS. Cutting up history to suit my nefarious
purposes, I seized on WHY INDIRA GANDHI is CONGRESS PRESIDENT NOW and kept
the 'WHY'; but I refused to be tied exclusively to politics, and turned to
advertising for the 'DOES YOUR' in DOES YOUR CHEWING GUM LOSE ITS FLAVOUR?
BUT P.K. KEEPS ITS SAVOUR! A sporting human-interest story, MOHUN BAGAN
CENTRE-FORWARD TAKES WIFE, gave me its last word, and 'GO то' I took from
the tragic MASSES GO то ABUL KALAM AZAD'S FUNERAL. Now I was obliged to find
my words in little pieces once again: DEATH ON SOUTH COL: SHERPA PLUNGES
provided me with a much-needed 'COL', but 'ABA' was hard to find, turning up
at last in a cinema advertisement: ALI-BABA, SEVENTEENTH SUPERCOLOSSAL WEEK
- PLANS FILLING UP FAST! ... Those were the days when Sheikh Abdullah, the
Lion of Kashmir, was campaigning for a plebiscite in his state to determine
its future; his courage gave me the syllable 'CAUSE', because it led to this
headline: ABDULLAH 'INCITEMENT' CAUSE OF HIS RE-ARREST - GOVT SPOKESMAN.
Then, too, Acharya Vinobha Bhave, who had spent ten years persuading
landowners to donate plots to the poor in his bhoodan campaign, announced
that donations had passed the million-acre mark, and launched two new
campaigns, asking for the donations of whole villages ('gramdan') and of
individual lives ('jivandan'). When J. P. Narayan announced the dedication
of his life to Bhave's work, the headline NARAYAN WALKS IN BHAVE'S WAY gave
me
my
much-sought 'WAY'. I had nearly finished now; plucking an 'ON' from
PAKISTAN ON COURSE FOR POLITICAL CHAOS: FACTION STRIFE BEDEVILS PUBLIC
AFFAIRS, and a 'SUNDAY' from the masthead of the
Sunday Blitz,
I found
myself just one word short. Events in East Pakistan provided me with my
finale. FURNITURE HURLING SLAYS DEPUTY E-PAK SPEAKER: MOURNING PERIOD
DECLARED gave me 'MOURNING', from which, deftly and deliberately, I excised
the letter 'u'. I needed a terminal question-mark, and found it at the end
of the perennial query of those strange days: AFTER NEHRU, WHO?
In the secrecy of a bathroom, I glued my completed note - my first
attempt at rearranging history - on to a sheet of paper; snake-like, I
inserted the document in my pocket, like poison in a sac. Subtly, I arranged
to spend an evening with Eyeslice and Hairoil. We played a game: 'Murder in
the Dark' ... During a game of murder, I slipped inside Commander
Sabarmati's almirah and inserted my lethal missive into the inside pocket of
his spare uniform. At that moment (no point hiding it) I felt the delight of
the snake who hits its target, and feels its fangs pierce its victim's heel
...
COMMANDER SABARMATI (my note read)
WHY DOES YOUR WIFE GO TO COLABA
CAUSEWAY ON SUNDAY MORNING?
No, I am no longer proud of what I did; but remember that my demon of
revenge had two heads. By unmasking the perfidy of Lila Sabarmati, I hoped
also to administer a salutary shock to my own mother. Two birds with one
stone; there were to be two punished women, one impaled on each fang of my
forked snake's tongue. It is not untrue to say that what came to be known as
the Sabarmati affair had its real beginnings at a dingy cafe in the north of
the city, when a stowaway watched a ballet of circling hands.
I was secret; I struck from the cover of a bush. What drove me? Hands
at the Pioneer Cafe; wrong-number telephone calls; notes slipped to me on
balconies, and passed under cover of bedsheets; my mother's hypocrisy and
Pia's inconsolable grief: 'Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai
-hai
!' ... Mine was a slow
poison; but three weeks later, it had its effect.
It emerged, afterwards, that after receiving my anonymous note
Commander Sabarmati had engaged the services of the illustrious Dom Minto,
Bombay's best-known private detective. (Minto, old and almost lame, had
lowered his rates by then.) He waited until he received Minto's report. And
then:
That Sunday morning, six children sat in a row at the Metro Cub Club,
watching
Francis The Talking Mule And The Haunted House.
You see, I had my
alibi; I was nowhere near the scene of the crime. Like Sin, the crescent
moon, I acted from a distance upon the tides of the world ... while a mule
talked on a screen, Commander Sabarmati visited the naval arsenal. He signed
out a good, long-nosed revolver; also ammunition. He held, in his left hand,
a piece of paper on which an address had been written in a private
detective's tidy hand; in his right hand, he grasped the un-holstered gun.
By taxi, the Commander arrived at Colaba Causeway. He paid off the cab,
walked gun-in-hand down a narrow gully past shirt-stalls and toyshops, and
ascended the staircase of an apartment block set back from the gully at the
rear of a concrete courtyard. He rang the doorbell of apartment 18c; it was
heard in 18b by an Anglo-Indian teacher giving private Latin tuition. When
Commander Sabarmati's wife Lila answered the door, he shot her twice in the
stomach at point-blank range. She fell backwards; he marched past her, and
found Mr Homi Catrack rising from the toilet, his bottom unwiped, pulling
frantically at his trousers. Commander Vinoo Sabarmati shot him once in the
genitals, once in the heart and once through the right eye. The gun was not
silenced; but when it had finished speaking, there was an enormous silence
in the apartment. Mr Catrack sat down on the toilet after he was shot and
seemed to be smiling.
Commander Sabarmati walked out of the apartment block with the smoking
gun in his hand (he was seen, through the crack of a door, by a terrified
Latin tutor); he strolled along Colaba Causeway until he saw a traffic
policeman on his little podium. Commander Sabarmati told the policeman, 'I
have only now killed my wife and her lover with this gun; I surrender myself
into your...' But he had been waving the gun under the policeman's nose; the
officer was so scared that he dropped his traffic-conducting baton and fled.
Commander Sabar-mati, left alone on the policeman's pedestal amid the sudden
confusion of the traffic, began to direct the cars, using the smoking gun as
a baton. This is how he was found by the posse of twelve policemen who
arrived ten minutes later, who sprang courageously upon him and seized him
hand and foot, and who removed from him the unusual baton with which, for
ten minutes, he had expertly conducted the traffic.
A newspaper said of the Sabarmati affair: 'It is a theatre in which
India will discover who she was, what she is, and what she might become.'...
But Commander Sabarmati was only a puppet; I was the puppet-master, and the
nation performed my play - only I hadn't meant it! I didn't think he'd ... I
only wanted to ... a scandal, yes, a scare, a lesson to all unfaithful wives
and mothers, but not that, never, no.
Aghast at the result of my actions, I rode the turbulent thought-waves
of the city ... at the Parsee General Hospital, a doctor said, 'Begum
Sabarmati will live; but she will have to watch what she eats.'... But Homi
Catrack was dead ... And who was engaged as the lawyer for the defence? -
Who said, 'I will defend him free gratis and for nothing'? - Who, once the
victor of the Freeze Case, was now the Commander's champion? Sonny Ibrahim
said, 'My father will get him off if anyone can.'
Commander Sabarmati was the most popular murderer in the history of
Indian jurisprudence. Husbands acclaimed his punishment of an errant wife;
faithful women felt justified in their fidelity. Inside Lila's own sons, I
found these thoughts: 'We knew she was like that. We knew a Navy man
wouldn't stand for it.' A columnist in the
Illustrated Weekly of India,
writing a pen-portrait to go alongside the 'Personality of the Week'
full-colour caricature of the Commander, said: 'In the Sabarmati Case, the
noble sentiments of the Ramayana combine with the cheap melodrama of the
Bombay talkie; but as for the chief protagonist, all agree on his
upstandingness; and he is undeniably an attractive chap.'
My revenge on my mother and Homi Catrack had precipitated a national
crisis... because Naval regulations decreed that no man who had been in a
civil jail could aspire to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. So Admirals,
and city politicians, and of course Ismail Ibrahim, demanded: 'Commander
Sabarmati must stay in a Navy jail. He is innocent until proven guilty. His
career must not be ruined if it can possibly be avoided.' And the
authorities: 'Yes.' And Commander Sabarmati, safe in the Navy's own lock-up,
discovered the penalties of fame - deluged with telegrams of support, he
awaited trial; flowers filled his cell, and although he asked to be placed
on an ascetic's diet of rice and water, well-wishers inundated him with
tiffin-carriers filled with birianis and pista-ki-lauz and other rich foods.
And, jumping the queue in the Criminal Court, the case began in double-quick
time ... The prosecution said, 'The charge is murder in the first degree.'
Stern-jawed, strong-eyed, Commander Sabarmati replied: 'Not guilty.'
My mother said, 'O my God, the poor man, so sad, isn't it?' I said,
'But an unfaithful wife is a terrible thing, Amma...' and she turned away
her head.
The prosecution said, 'Here is an open and shut case. Here is motive,
opportunity, confession, corpse and premeditation: the gun signed out, the
children sent to the cinema, the detective's report. What else to say? The
state rests.'
And public opinion: 'Such a good man, Allah!'
Ismail Ibrahim said: 'This is a case of attempted suicide.'
To which, public opinion: '?????????'
Ismail Ibrahim expounded: 'When the Commander received Dom Minto's
report, he wanted to see for himself if it was true; and if so, to kill
himself. He signed out the gun; it was for himself. He went to the Colaba
address in a spirit of despair only; not as killer, but as dead man! But
there - seeing his wife there, jury members! - seeing her half-clothed with
her shameless lover! - jury members, this good man, this great man saw red.
Red, absolutely, and while seeing red he did his deeds. Thus there is no
premeditation, and so no murder in the first degree. Killing yes, but not
cold-blooded. Jury members, you must find him not guilty as charged.'
And buzzing around the city was, 'No, too much ... Ismail Ibrahim has
gone too far this time ... but, but ... he has got a jury composed mostly of
women ... and not rich ones ... therefore doubly susceptible, to the
Commander's charm and the lawyer's wallet ... who knows? Who can tell?' The
jury said, 'Not guilty.'
My mother cried, 'Oh wonderful! ... But, but: is it
justice
?' And
thejudge, answering her: 'Using the powers vested in me, I reverse this
absurd verdict. Guilty as charged.'
O, the wild furor of those days! When Naval dignitaries and bishops and
other politicians demanded, 'Sabarmati must stay in the Navy jail pending
High Court appeal. The bigotry of one judge must not ruin this great man!'
And police authorities, capitulating, 'Very well.' The Sabarmati Case goes
rushing upwards, hurtling towards High Court hearing at unprecedented speed
... and the Commander tells his lawyer, 'I feel as though destiny is no
longer in my control; as though something has taken over ... let us call it
Fate.'
I say: 'Call it Saleem, or Snotnose, or Sniffer, or Stainface; call it
little-piece-of-the-moon.'
The High Court verdict: 'Guilty as charged.' The press headlines:
SABARMATI FOR CIVIL JAIL AT LAST? Ismail Ibrahim's statement: 'We are going
all the way! To the Supreme Court!' And now, the bombshell. A pronouncement
from the State Chief Minister himself: 'It is a heavy thing to make an
exception to the law; but in view of Commander Sabarmati's service to his
country, I am permitting him to remain in Naval confinement pending the
Supreme Court decision.'
And more press headlines, stinging as mosquitoes: STATE GOVERNMENT
FLOUTS LAW! SABARMATI SCANDAL NOW A PUBLIC DISGRACE ! ... When I realized
that the press had turned against the Commander, I knew he was done for.
The Supreme Court verdict: 'Guilty.'
Ismail Ibrahim said: 'Pardon! We appeal for pardon to the President of
India!'
And now great matters are to be weighed in Rashtrapati Bhavan - behind
the gates of President House, a man must decide if any man can be set above
the law; whether the assassination of a wife's fancy-man should be set aside
for the sake of a Naval career; and still higher things - is India to give
her approval to the rule of law, or to the ancient principle of the
overriding primacy of heroes? If Rama himself were alive, would we send him
to prison for slaying the abductor of Sita? Great matters; my vengeful
irruption into the history of my age was certainly no trivial affair.
The President of India said, 'I shall not pardon this man.'
Nussie Ibrahim (whose husband had lost his biggest case) wailed, 'Hai!
Ai-hai!' And repeated an earlier observation: 'Amina sister, that good man
going to prison - I tell you, it is the end of the world!'
A confession, trembling just beyond my lips: 'It was all my doing,
Amma; I wanted to teach you a lesson. Amma, do not go to see other men, with
Lucknow-work on their shirt; enough, my mother, of teacup-kissery! I am in
long trousers now, and may speak to you as a man.' But it never spilled out
of me; there was no need, because I heard my mother answering a wrong-number
telephone call - and with a strange, subdued voice, speak into the
mouthpiece as follows: 'No; nobody by that name here; please believe what I
am telling you, and never call me again.'
Yes, I had taught my mother a lesson; and after the Sabarmati affair
she never saw her Nadir-Qasim in the flesh, never again, not as long as she
lived; but, deprived of him, she fell victim to the fate of all women in our
family, namely the curse of growing old before her time; she began to
shrink, and her hobble became more pronounced, and there was the emptiness
of age in her eyes.
My revenge brought in its wake a number of unlooked-for developments;
perhaps the most dramatic of these was the appearance in the gardens of
Methwold's Estate of curious flowers, made out of wood and tin, and
hand-painted with bright red lettering ... the fatal signboards erected in
all the gardens except our own, evidence that my powers exceeded even my own
understanding, and that, having once been exiled from my two-storey hillock,
I had now managed to send everyone else away instead.
Signboards in the gardens of Versailles Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans
Souci; signboards nodding to each other in the sea-breeze of the cocktail
hour. On each signboard could be discerned the same seven letters, all
bright red, all twelve inches high: FOR SALE. That was the signboards'
message.
FOR SALE- Versailles Villa, its owner dead on a toilet seat; the sale
was handled by the ferocious nurse Bi-Appah on behalf of poor idiot Toxy;
once the sale was complete, nurse and nursed vanished forever, and Bi-Appah
held, on her lap, a bulging suitcase filled with banknotes ... I don't know
what happened to Toxy, but considering the avarice of her nurse, I'm sure it
was nothing good ... FOR SALE, the Sabarmati apartment in Escorial Villa;
Lila Sabarmati was denied custody of her children and faded out of our
lives, while Eyeslice and Hairoil packed their bags and departed into the
care of the Indian Navy, which had placed itself
in loco parentis
until
their father completed his thirty years in jail ... FOR SALE, too, the
Ibrahims' Sans Souci, because Ishaq Ibrahim's Embassy Hotel had been burned
down by gangsters on the day of Commander Sabarmati's final defeat, as
though the criminal classes of the city were punishing the lawyer's family
for his failure; and then Ismail Ibrahim was suspended from practice,
owing
to certain proofs of professional misconduct
(to quote the Bombay Bar
Commission's report); financially 'embarrassed', the Ibrahims also passed
out of our lives; and, finally FORSALE, the apartment of Cyrus Dubash and
his mother, because during the hue and cry of the Sabarmati affair, and
almost entirely unnoticed, the nuclear physicist had died his
orange-pip-choking death, thus unleashing upon Cyrus the religious
fanaticism of his mother and setting in motion the wheels of the period of
revelations which will be the subject of my next little piece.
The signboards nodded in the gardens, which were losing their memories
of goldfish and cocktail-hours and invading cats; and who took them down?
Who were the heirs of the heirs of William Methwold? ... They came swarming
out of what had once been the residence of Dr Narlikar: fat-bellied and
grossly competent women, grown fatter and more competent than ever on their
tetrapod-given wealth (because those were the years of the great land
reclamations) . The Narlikar women - from the Navy they bought Commander
Sabarmati's flat, and from the departing Mrs Dubash her Cyrus's home; they
paid Bi-Appah in used banknotes, and the Ibrahims' creditors were appeased
by Narlikar cash.
My father, alone of all the residents, refused to sell; they offered
him vast sums, but he shook his head. They explained their dream - a dream
of razing the buildings to the ground and erecting on the two-storey hillock
a mansion which would soar thirty stories into the skies, a triumphant pink
obelisk, a signpost of their future; Ahmed Sinai, lost in abstractions,
would have none of it. They told him, 'When you're surrounded by rubble
you'll have to sell for a song'; he (remembering their tetrapodal perfidy)
was unmoved.
Nussie-the-duck said, as she left, 'I told you so, Amina sister - the
end! The end of the world!' This time she was right and wrong; after August
1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had,
indeed, come to an end.
Padma - did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin
orb, on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two
cheap metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No, of course
not; but I did. It was a world full of labels:
Atlantic Ocean
and
Amazon
and
Tropic of Capricorn.
And, at the North Pole, it bore the legend: MADE AS
ENGLAND. By the August of the nodding signboards and the rapaciousness of
the Narlikar women, this tin world had lost its stand; I found Scotch Tape
and stuck the earth together at the Equator, and then, my urge for play
overcoming my respect, began to use it as a football. In the aftermath of
the Sabarmati affair, when the air was filled with the repentance of my
mother and the private tragedies of Methwold's heirs, I clanked my tin
sphere around the Estate, secure in the knowledge that the world was still
in one piece (although held together by adhesive tape) and also at my feet
... until, on the day of Nussie-the-duck's last eschatological lament - on
the day Sonny Ibrahim ceased to be Sonny-next-door - my sister the Brass
Monkey descended on me in an inexplicable rage, yelling, 'O God, stop your
kicking, brother; you don't feel even a little
bad
today?' And jumping high
in the air, she landed with both feet on the North Pole, and crushed the
world into the dust of our driveway under her furious heels.
It seems the departure of Sonny Ibrahim, her reviled adorer, whom she
had stripped naked in the middle of the road, had affected the Brass Monkey,
after all, despite her lifelong denial of the possibility of love.
Revelations
От Hare Khusro Hare Khusrovand От
Know, О unbleivers, that in the dark Midnights of CELESTIAL SPACE in a
time before Time lay the sphere of Blessed KHUSROVAND!!! Even MODERN
SCIENTISTS now affirm that for
generations
they have LIED to conceal from
the People whose
right it is to know
of the Unquestionabel TRUE existance of
this HOLY HOME OF TRUTH!!! Leading Intellectuals the World Over, also in
America, speak of the ANTI-RELIGIOUS CONSPIRACY of reds, JEWS, etc., to hide
these VITAL NEWS! The Veil lifts now. Blessed LORD KHUSRO comes with
Irrefutable Proofs. Read and believe!
Know that in TRUE-EXISTING Khusrovand lived Saints whose Spiritual
Purity-Advancement was such that they had, through MEDITATION &c., gained
powers FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, powers Beyond Imagining! They SAW THROUGH steel,
and could BEND GIRDERS with TEETH!!!
* * * now! * * *
For 1st Time, such powers may be used
In Your Service! LORD KHUSRO is
* * * here! * * *
Hear of the Fall of Khusrovand: how the RED DEVIL
Bhimutha
(BLACK be
his name) unleashed a fearsome Hail of Meteorites (which has been well
chronicled by WORLD OBSERVATORIES, but not Explained) ... so horrible a RAIN
OF STONE, that Fair Khusrovand was RUINED & its Saints DESTROYD.
But noble
Juraell
and beauteous
Khalila
were wise. SACRIFICING
THEMSELVES in an ecstasy of Kundalini Art, they saved the SOUL of their
unborn son LORD KHUSRO. Entering True Oneness in a Supreme Yogic Trance
(whose powers are now ACCEPTED in WHOLE WORLD!) they transformed their Noble
Spirits into a Flashing
Beam
of KUNDALINI LIFE FORCE ENERGY LIGHT, of which
today's wellknown LASER is a common imitation &
Copy.
Along this BEAM, Soul
of unborn Khusro flew, traversing the BOTTOMLESS DEEPS of Celestial
Space-Eternity, until by OUR LUCK! it came to our own Duniya (World) &
lodged in Womb of a humble Parsee matron of Good Family.
So the Child was born & was of true Goodness & Unparalleled BRAIN
(giving the LIE to that LIE, that we are all Born Equal! Is a Crook the
equal of Saint? OF COURSE NOT!!) But for some Time his true nature lay
Hidden, until while portraying and Earth-Saint in a DRAMA production (of
which LEADING CRITICS have said, The Purity of His Performance Defied The
Blief), he CAME AWAKE & knew WHO he WAS. Now has he taken up his True Name,
LORD
KHUSRO
KHUSROVANI
* BHAGWAN *
& is Set Forth humbly with Ash on his Ascetic's Brow to heal Disease
and End Droughts & FIGHT the Legions of
Bhimutha
wherever they may Come. For
BE AFRAID!
Bhimutha's
RAIN OF STONE will come to us ALSO! Do not heed LIES
of politicos poets Reds &cetera. PUT YOUR TRUST in Only True Lord
KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO
KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO
& send Donations to POBox 555, Head Post Office, Bombay-1.
BLESSINGS! BEAUTY!! TRUTH!!!
0m Hare Khusro Hare Khusrovand От
Cyrus-the-great had a nuclear physicist for a father and, for a mother,
a religious fanatic whose faith had gone sour inside her as a result of so
many years of being suppressed by the domineering rationality of her Dubash;
and when Cyrus's father choked on an orange from which his mother had
forgotten to remove the pips, Mrs Dubash applied herself to the task of
erasing her late husband from the personality of her son - of remaking Cyrus
in her own strange image,
Cyrus-the-great, Ватт a plate, In nineteen hundred
and forty-eight -
Cyrus the school prodigy - Cyrus as Saint Joan in Shaw's
play - all these Cyruses, to whom we had grown accustomed, with whom we had
grown up, now disappeared; in their place there emerged the overblown,
almost bovinely placid figure of Lord Khusro Khusrovand. At the age often,
Cyrus vanished from the Cathedral School and the meteoric rise of India's
richest guru began. (There are as many versions of India as Indians; and,
when set beside Cyrus's India, my own version seems almost mundane.)
Why did he let it happen? Why did posters cover the city, and
advertisements fill the newspapers, without a peep out of the child genius?
... Because Cyrus (although he used to lecture us, not un-mischievously, on
the Parts of a Wooman's Body) was simply the most malleable of boys, and
would not have dreamed of crossing his mother. For his mother, he put on a
sort of brocade skirt and a turban; for the sake of filial duty, he
permitted millions of devotees to kiss his little finger. In the name of
maternal love, he truly became Lord Khusro, the most successful holy child
in history; in no time at all he was being hailed by crowds half a million
strong, and credited with miracles; American guitarists came to sit at his
feet, and they all brought their cheque-books along. Lord Khusrovand
acquired accountants, and tax havens, and a luxury liner called the
Khusrovand Starship,
and an aircraft -
Lord Khusro's Astral Plane.
And
somewhere inside the faintly-smiling, benediction-scattering boy ... in a
place which was forever hidden by his mother's frighteningly efficient
shadow (she had, after all, lived in the same house as the Narlikar women;
how well did she know them? How much of their awesome competence leaked into
her?), there lurked the ghost of a boy who had been my friend.
'That Lord Khusro?' Padma asks, amazed. 'You mean that same mahaguru
who drowned at sea last year?' Yes, Padma; he could not walk on water; and
very few people who have come into contact with me have been vouchsafed a
natural death ... let me confess that I was somewhat resentful of Cyrus's
apotheosis. 'It should have been me,' I even thought, 'I am the magic child;
not only my primacy at home, but even my true innermost nature, has now been
purloined.'
Padma: I never became a 'mahaguru'; millions have never seated
themselves at my feet; and it was my own fault, because one day, many years
ago, I had gone to hear Cyrus's lecture on the Parts of a Wooman's Body.
'What?' Padma shakes her head, puzzled. 'What's this now?'
The nuclear physicist Dubash possessed a beautiful marble statuette - a
female nude - and with the help of this figurine, his son would give expert
lectures on female anatomy to an audience of sniggering boys. Not free;
Cyrus-the-great charged a fee. In exchange for anatomy, he demanded
comic-books - and I, in all innocence, gave him a copy of that most precious
of Superman
comics, the one containing the frame-story, about the explosion
of the planet Krypton and the rocket-ship in which Jor-El his father
despatched him through space, to land on earth and be adopted by the good,
mild Kents... did nobody else see it? In all those years, did no person
understand that what Mrs Dubash had done was to rework and reinvent the most
potent of all modern myths - the legend of the coming of the superman? I saw
the hoardings trumpeting the coming of Lord Khusro Khusrovand Bhagwan; and
found myself obliged, yet again, to accept responsibility for the events of
my turbulent, fabulous world.
How I admire the leg-muscles of my solicitous Padma! There she squats,
a few feet from my table, her sari hitched up in fisherwoman-fashion.
Calf-muscles show no sign of strain; thigh-muscles, rippling through
sari-folds, display their commendable stamina. Strong enough to squat
forever, simultaneously defying gravity and cramp, my Padma listens
unhurriedly to my lengthy tale; О mighty pickle-woman! What reassuring
solidity, how comforting an air of permanence, in her biceps and triceps ...
for my admiration extends also to her arms, which could wrestle mine down in
a trice, and from which, when they enfold me nightly in futile embraces,
there is no escape. Past our crisis now, we exist in perfect harmony: I
recount, she is recounted to; she ministers, and I accept her ministrations
with grace. I am, in fact, entirely content with the uncomplaining thews of
Padma Mangroli, who is, unaccountably, more interested in me than my tales.
Why I have chosen to expound on Padma's musculature: these days, it's
to those muscles, much as to anything or -one (for instance, my son, who
hasn't even learned to read as yet), that I'm telling my story. Because I am
rushing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible, and overstatements,
and jarring alterations in tone; I'm racing the cracks, but I remain
conscious that errors have already been made, and that, as my decay
accelerates (my writing speed is having trouble keeping up), the risk of
unreliability grows ... in this condition, I am learning to use Padma's
muscles as my guides. When she's bored, I can detect in her fibres the
ripples of uninterest; when she's unconvinced, there is a tic which gets
going in her cheek. The dance of her musculature helps to keep me on the
rails; because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually
happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his
audience to believe... Padma, having accepted the story of Cyrus-the-great,
gives me the courage to speed on, into the worst time of my eleven-year-old
life (there is, was, worse to come) - into the August-and-September when
revelations flowed faster than blood.
Nodding signboards had scarcely been taken down when the demolition
crews of the Narlikar women moved in; Buckingham Villa was enveloped in the
tumultuous dust of the dying palaces of William Methwold. Concealed by dust
from Warden Road below, we were nevertheless still vulnerable to telephones;
and it was the telephone which informed us, in the tremulous voice of my
aunt Pia, of the suicide of my beloved uncle Hanif. Deprived of the income
he had received from Homi Catrack, my uncle had taken his booming voice and
his obsessions with hearts and reality up to the roof of his Marine Drive
apartment block; he had stepped out into the evening sea-breeze, frightening
the beggars so much (when he fell) that they gave up pretending to be blind
and ran away yelling ... in death as in life, Hanif Aziz espoused the cause
of truth and put illusion to flight. He was nearly thirty-four years old.
Murder breeds death; by killing Homi Catrack, I had killed my uncle, too. It
was my fault; and the dying wasn't over yet.
The family gathered at Buckingham Villa: from Agra, Aadam Aziz and
Reverend Mother; from Delhi, my uncle Mustapha, the Civil Servant who had
polished the art of agreeing with his superiors to the point at which they
had stopped hearing him, which is why he never got promoted; and his
half-Irani wife Sonia and their children who had been so thoroughly beaten
into insignificance that I can't even remember how many of them there were;
and from Pakistan, bitter Alia, and even General Zulfikar and my aunt
Emerald, who brought twenty-seven pieces of luggage and two servants, and
never stopped looking at their watches and inquiring about the date. Their
son Zafar also came. And, to complete the circle, my mother brought Pia to
stay in our house, 'at least for the forty-day mourning period, my sister.'
For forty days, we were besieged by the dust; dust creeping under the
wet towels we placed around all the windows, dust slyly following in each
mourning arrival, dust filtering through the very walls to hang like a
shapeless wraith in the air,' dust deadening the sounds of formal ululation
and also the deadly sniping of grieving kinsfolk; the remnants of Methwold's
Estate settled on my grandmother and goaded her towards a great fury; they
irritated the pinched nostrils of Punchinello-faced General Zulfikar and
forced him to sneeze on to
his
chin. In the ghost-haze of the dust it
sometimes seemed we could discern the shapes of the past, the mirage of Lila
Sabarmati's pulverized pianola or the prison bars at the window of Toxy
Catrack's cell; Dubash's nude statuette danced in dust-form through our
chambers, and Sonny Ibrahim's bullfight-posters visited us as clouds. The
Narlikar women had moved away while bulldozers did their work; we were alone
inside the dust-storm, which gave us all the appearance of neglected
furniture, as if we were chairs and tables which had been abandoned for
decades without covering-sheets; we looked like the ghosts of ourselves. We
were a dynasty born out of a nose, the aquiline monster on the face of Aadam
Aziz, and the dust, entering our nostrils in our time of grief, broke down
our reserve, eroded the barriers which permit families to survive; in the
dust storm of the dying palaces
things
were said and seen and done from
which none of us ever recovered.
It was started by Reverend Mother, perhaps because the years had filled
her out until she resembled the Sankara Acharya mountain in her native
Srinagar, so that she presented the dust with the largest surface area to
attack. Rumbling up from her mountainous body came a noise like an
avalanche, which, when it turned into words, became a fierce attack on aunt
Pia, the bereaved widow. We had all noticed that my mumani was behaving
unusually. There was an unspoken feeling that an actress of her standing
should have risen to the challenge of widowhood in high style; we had
unconsciously been eager to see her grieving, looking forward to watching an
accomplished tragedienne orchestrate her own calamity, anticipating a
forty-day raga in which bravura and gentleness, howling pain and soft
despond would all be blended in the exact proportions of art; but Pia
remained still, dry-eyed, and anticlimactically composed. Amina Sinai and
Emerald Zulfikar wept and rent their hair, trying to spark off Pia's
talents; but finally, when it seemed nothing would move Pia, Reverend Mother
lost patience. The dust entered her disappointed fury and increased its
bitterness. 'That woman, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother rumbled, didn't I
tell you about her? My son, Allah, he could have been anything, but no,
whatsitsname, she must make him ruin his life; he must jump off a roof,
whatsitsname, to be free of her.'
It was said; could not be unsaid. Pia sat like stone; my insides shook
like cornflour pudding. Reverend Mother went grimly on; she swore an oath
upon the hairs of her dead son's head. 'Until that woman shows my son's
memory some respect, whatsitsname, until she takes out a wife's true tears,
no food will pass my lips. It is shame and scandal, whatsitsname, how she
sits with antimony instead of tears in her eyes!' The house resounded with
this echo of her old wars with Aadam Aziz. And until the twentieth day of
the forty, we were all afraid that my grandmother would die of starvation
and the forty days would have to start all over again. She lay dustily on
her bed; we waited and feared.
I broke the stalemate between grandmother and aunt; so at least I can
legitimately claim to have saved one life. On the twentieth day, I sought
out Pia Aziz who sat in her ground-floor room like a blind woman; as an
excuse for my visit, I apologized clumsily for my indiscretions in the
Marine Drive apartment. Pia spoke, after a distant silence: 'Always
melodrama,' she said, flatly, 'In his family members, in his work. He died
for his hate of melodrama; it is why I would not cry.' At the time I did not
understand; now I'm sure that Pia Aziz was exactly right. Deprived of a
livelihood by spurning the cheap-thrill style of the Bombay cinema, my uncle
strolled off the edge of a roof; melodrama inspired (and perhaps tainted)
his final dive to earth. Pia's refusal to weep was in honour of his memory
... but the effort of admitting it breached the walls of her self-control.
Dust made her sneeze; the sneeze brought tears to her eyes; and now the
tears would not stop, and we all witnessed our hoped-for performance after
all, because once they fell they fell like Flora Fountain, and she was
unable to resist her own talent; she shaped the flood like the performer she
was, introducing dominant themes and subsidiary motifs, beating her
astonishing breasts in a manner genuinely painful to observe, now squeezing,
now pummelling... she tore her garments and her hair. It was an exaltation
of tears, and it persuaded Reverend Mother to eat. Dal and pistachio-nuts
poured into my grandmother while salt water flooded from my aunt. Now Naseem
Aziz descended upon Pia, embracing her, turning the solo into a duet,
mingling the music of reconciliation with the unbearably beautiful tunes of
grief. Our palms itched with inexpressible applause. And the best was still
to come, because Pia, the artiste, brought her epic efforts to a superlative
close. Laying her head in her mother-in-law's lap, she said in a voice
filled with submission and emptiness, 'Ma, let your unworthy daughter listen
to you at last; tell me what to do, I will do.' And Reverend Mother,
tearfully: 'Daughter, your father Aziz and I will go to Rawalpindi soon; in
our old age we will live near our youngest daughter, our Emerald. You will
also come, and a petrol pump will be purchased.' And so it was that Reverend
Mother's dream began to come true, and Pia Aziz agreed to relinquish the
world of films for that of fuel. My uncle Hanif, I thought, would probably
have approved.
The dust affected us all during those forty days; it made Ahmed Sinai
churlish and raucous, so that he refused to sit in the company of his
in-laws and made Alice Pereira relay messages to the mourners, messages
which he also yelled out from his office: 'Keep the racket down! I am
working in the middle of this hullabaloo!' It made General Zulfikar and
Emerald look constantly at calendars and airline timetables, while their son
Zafar began to boast to the Brass Monkey that he was getting his father to
arrange a marriage between them. 'You should think you're lucky,' this cocky
cousin told my sister, 'My father is a big man in Pakistan.' But although
Zafar had inherited his father's looks, the dust had clogged up the Monkey's
spirits, and she didn't have the heart to fight him. Meanwhile my aunt Alia
spread her ancient, dusty disappointment through the air and my most absurd
relatives, the family of my uncle Mustapha, sat sullenly in corners and were
forgotten, as usual; Mustapha Aziz's moustache, proudly waxed and upturned
at the tips when he arrived, had long since sagged under the depressive
influence of the dust.
And then, on the twenty-second day of the mourning period, my
grandfather, Aadam Aziz, saw God.
He was sixty-eight that year - still a decade older than the century.
But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll; his eyes were
still blue, but
his
back was bent. Shuffling around Buckingham Villa in
embroidered skull-cap and full-length chugha-coat - coated, too, in a thin
film of dust - he munched aimlessly on raw carrots and sent thin streaks of
spittle down the grizzled white contours of his chin. And as he declined,
Reverend Mother grew larger and stronger; she, who had once wailed pitifully
at the sight of Mercurochrome, now appeared to thrive on his weakness, as
though their marriage had been one of those mythical unions in which succubi
appear to men as innocent damsels, and, after luring them into the
matrimonial bed, regain their true, awful aspect and begin to swallow their
souls ... my grandmother, in those days, had acquired a moustache almost as
luxuriant as the dustily-sagging hair on the upper lip of her one surviving
son. She sat cross-legged on her bed, smearing her lip with a mysterious
fluid which set hard around the hairs and was then ripped off by a sharp,
violent hand; but the remedy only served to exacerbate the ailment.
'He has become like a child again, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother told
my grandfather's children, 'and Hanif has finished him off,' She warned us
that he had begun to see things. 'He talks to people who are not there,' she
whispered loudly while he wandered through the room sucking his teeth, 'How
he calls out, whatsitsname! In the middle of the night!' And she mimicked
him: 'Ho, Tai? Is it you?' She told us children about the boatman, and the
Hummingbird, and the Rani of Cooch Naheen. 'Poor man has lived too long,
whatsitsname; no father should see his son die first.'... And Amina,
listening, shook her head in sympathy, not knowing that Aadam Aziz would
leave her this legacy - that she, too, in her last days, would be visited by
things which had no business to return.
We could not use the ceiling-fans for the dust; perspiration ran down
the face of my stricken grandfather and left streaks of mud on his cheeks.
Sometimes he would grab anyone who was near him and speak with utter
lucidity: 'These Nehrus will not be happy until they have made themselves
hereditary kings!' Or, dribbling into the face of a squirming General
Zulfikar: 'Ah, unhappy Pakistan! How ill-served by her rulers!' But at other
times he seemed to imagine himself in a gemstone store, and muttered,'...
Yes: there were emeralds and rubies ...' The Monkey whispered to me, 'Is
grandpa going to die?'
What leaked into me from Aadam Aziz: a certain vulnerability to women,
but also its cause, the hole at the centre of himself caused by his (which
is also my) failure to believe or disbelieve in God. And something else as
well - something which, at the age of eleven, I saw before anyone else
noticed. My grandfather had begun to crack.
'In the head?' Padma asks, 'You mean in the upper storey?'
The boatman Tai said:' The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba,just under
the water's skin.'
I saw the cracks in his eyes - a delicate tracery of
colourless lines against the blue; I saw a network of fissures spreading
beneath his leathery skin; and I answered the Monkey's question: 'I think he
is.' Before the end of the forty-day mourning period, my grandfather's skin
had begun to split and flake and peel; he could hardly open his mouth to eat
because of the cuts in the corners of his lips; and his teeth began to drop
like Flitted flies. But a crack-death can be slow; and it was a long time
before we knew about the other cracks, about the disease which was nibbling
at his bones, so that finally his skeleton disintegrated into powder inside
the weatherbeaten sack of his skin.
Padma is looking suddenly panicky. 'What are you saying? You, mister:
are you telling that you also... what nameless thing can eat up any man's
bones?
Is it ...'
No time to pause now; no time for sympathy or panic; I have already
gone further than I should. Retreating a little in time, I must mention that
something also leaked into Aadam Aziz from me; because on the twenty-third
day of the mourning period, he asked the entire family to assemble in the
same room of glass vases (no need to hide them from my uncle now) and
cushions and immobilized fans, the same room in which I had announced
visions of my own ... Reverend Mother had said, 'He has become like a child
again'; like a
child,
my grandfather announced that, three weeks after he
had heard of the death of a son whom he had believed to be alive and well,
he had seen with his own eyes the God in whose death he had tried all his
life to believe. And, like a child, he was not believed. Except by one
person ... 'Yes, listen,' my grandfather said, his voice a weak imitation of
his old booming tones, 'Yes, Rani? You are here? And Abdullah? Come, sit,
Nadir, this is news - where is Ahmed? Alia will want him here... God, my
children; God, whom I fought all my life. Oskar? Ilse? - No, of course. I
know they are dead. You think I'm old, maybe foolish; but I have seen God.'
And the story, slowly, despite rambles and diversions, comes inching out: at
midnight, my grandfather awoke in his darkened room. Someone eke present -
someone who was not his wife. Reverend Mother, snoring in her bed. But
someone. Someone with shining dust on him, lit by the setting moon. And
Aadam Aziz, 'Ho, Tai? Is it y6u?' And Reverend Mother, mumbling in her
sleep, 'O, sleep, hiusband, forget this...' But the someone, the something,
cries in a loud startling (and startled?) voice, 'Jesus Christ Almighty!'
(Amid the cut-glass vases, my grandfather laughs apologetically heh-heh, for
mentioning the infidel name.) 'Jesus Christ Almighty!' and my grandfather
looking, and seeing, yes, there are holes in hands, perforations in the feet
as there once were in a ... But he is rubbing his eyes, shaking his head,
saying: 'Who? What name? What did you say?" And the apparition,
startling-startled, 'God! God!' And, after a pause, 'I didn't think you
could see me.'
'But I saw Him,' my grandfather says beneath motionless fans. 'Yes, Г
can't deny it, I surely did.'... And the apparition: 'You're the one whose
son died'; and my grandfather, with a pain in his chest: 'Why? Why did that
happen?' To which the creature, made visible only by dust: 'God has his
reasons, old man; life's like that, right?'
Reverend Mother dismissed us all. 'Old man doesn't know what he means,
whatsitsname. Such a thing, that grey hairs should make a man blaspheme!'
But Mary Pereira left with her face pale as bedsheets; Mary knew whom Aadam
Aziz had seen - who, decayed by his responsibility for her crime, had holes
in hands and feet; whose heel had been penetrated by a snake; who died in a
nearby clocktower, and had been mistaken for God.
I may as well finish my grandfather's story here and now; I've gone
this far, and the opportunity may not present itself later on ... somewhere
in the depths of my grandfather's senility, which inevitably reminded me of
the craziness of Professor Schaapsteker upstairs, the bitter idea took root
that God, by his off-hand attitude to Hanif's suicide, had proved his own
culpability in the affair; Aadam grabbed General Zulfikar by his military
lapels and whispered to him: 'Because I never believed, he stole my son!'
And Zulfikar: 'No, no, Doctor Sahib, you must not trouble yourself so...'
But Aadam Aziz never forgot his vision; although the details of the
particular deity he had seen grew blurred in his mind, leaving behind only a
passionate, drooling desire for revenge (which lust is also common to us
both) ... at the end of the forty-day mourning period, he would refuse to go
to Pakistan (as Reverend Mother had planned) because that was a country
built especially for God; and in the remaining years of his life he often
disgraced himself by stumbling into mosques and temples with his old man's
stick, mouthing imprecations and lashing out at any worshipper or holy man
within range. In Agra, he was tolerated for the sake of the man he had once
been; the old ones at the Cornwallis Road paan-shop played hit-the-spittoon
and reminisced with compassion about the Doctor Sahib's past. Reverend
Mother was obliged to yield to him for this reason if for no other - the
iconoclasm of his dotage would have created a scandal in a country where he
was not known.
Behind his foolishness and his rages, the cracks continued to spread;
the disease munched steadily on his bones, while hatred ate the rest of him
away. He did not die, however, until 1964. It happened like this: on
Wednesday, December 25th, 1963 - on Christmas Day! - Reverend Mother awoke
to find her husband gone. Coming out into the courtyard of her home, amid
hissing geese and the pale shadows of the dawn, she called for a servant;
and was told that the Doctor Sahib had gone by rickshaw to the railway
station. By the time she reached the station, the train had gone; and in
this way my grandfather, following some unknown impulse, began his last
journey, so that he could end his story where it (and mine) began, in a city
surrounded by mountains and set upon a lake.
The valley lay hidden in an eggshell of ice; the mountains had closed
in, to
snarl like angry jaws around the city on the lake...
winter in
Srinagar; winter in Kashmir. On Friday, December 27th, a man answering to my
grandfather's description was seen, chugha-coated, drooling, in the vicinity
of the Hazratbal Mosque. At four forty-five on Saturday morning, Haji
Muhammad Khalil Ghanai noticed the theft, from the Mosque's inner sanctum,
of the valley's most treasured relic: the holy hair of the Prophet Muhammad.
Did he? Didn't he? If it was him, why did he not enter the Mosque,
stick in hand, to belabour the faithful as he had become accustomed to
doing? If not him, then why? There were rumours of a Central Government plot
to 'demoralize the Kashmir! Muslims', by stealing their sacred hair; and
counter-rumours about Pakistani
agents provocateurs,
who supposedly stole
the relic to foment unrest... did they? Or not? Was this bizarre incident
truly political, or was it the penultimate attempt at revenge upon God by a
father who had lost his son? For ten days, no food was cooked in any Muslim
home; there were riots and burnings of cars; but my grandfather was above
politics now, and is not known to have joined in any processions. He was a
man with a single mission; and what is known is that on January 1st, 1964 (a
Wednesday, just one week after his departure from Agra), he set his face
towards the hill which Muslims erroneously called the Takht-e-Sulaiman,
Solomon's seat, atop which stood a radio mast, but also the black blister of
the temple of the acharya Sankara. Ignoring the distress of the city, my
grandfather climbed; while the cracking sickness within him gnawed patiently
through his bones. He was not recognized.
Doctor Aadam Aziz
(Heidelberg-returned)
died five days before the
government announced that its massive search for the single hair of the
Prophet's head had been successful. When the State's holiest saints
assembled to authenticate the hair, my grandfather was unable to tell them
the truth. (If they were wrong ... but I can't answer the questions I've
asked.) Arrested for the crime - and later released on grounds of ill-health
- was one Abdul Rahim Bande; but perhaps my grandfather, had he lived, could
have shed a stranger light on the affair ... at midday on January ist, Aadam
Aziz arrived outside the temple of Sankara Acharya. He was seen to raise his
walking-stick; inside the temple, women performing the rite of puja at the
Shiva-lingam shrank back - as women had once shrunk from the wrath of
another, tetrapod-obsessed doctor; and then the cracks claimed him, and his
legs gave way beneath him as the bones disintegrated, and the effect of his
fall was to shatter the rest of his skeleton beyond all hope of repair. He
was identified by the papers in the pocket of his chugha-coat: a photograph
of his son, and a half-completed (and fortunately, correctly addressed)
letter to his wife. The body, too fragile to be transported, was buried in
the valley of his birth.
I am watching Padma; her muscles have begun to twitch
distractedly.'Consider this,' I say. 'Is what happend to my grandfather so
very strange? Compare it with the mere fact of the holy fuss over the theft
of a hair; because every last detail of that is true, and by comparison, an
old man's death is surely perfectly normal.' Padma relaxes; her muscles give
me the go-ahead. Because I've spent too long on Aadam Aziz; perhaps I'm
afraid of what must be told next; but the revelation will not be denied.
One last fact: after the death of my grandfather, Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru fell ill and never recovered his health. This fatal
sickness finally killed him on May 27th, 1964.
If I hadn't wanted to be a hero, Mr Zagallo would never have pulled out
my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn't
have taunted me; Masha Miovic wouldn't have goaded me into losing my finger.
And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent
me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led
to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn't died, perhaps my uncle
would not have strolled off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my
grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of
climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my
family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the
father of the nation was Nehru. Nehru's death; can I avoid the conclusion
that that, too, was all my fault?
But now we're back in 1958; because on the thirty-seventh day of the
mourning period, the truth, which had been creeping up on Mary Pereira - and
therefore on me - for over eleven years, finally came out into the open;
truth, in the shape of an old, old man, whose stench of Hell penetrated even
my clogged-up nostrils, and whose body lacked fingers and toes and was
littered with boils and holes, walked up our two-storey hillock and appeared
through the dust-cloud to be seen by Mary Pereira, who was cleaning the
chick-blinds on the verandah.
Here, then, was Mary's nightmare come true; here, visible through the
pall of dust, was the ghost of Joe D'Costa, walking towards the ground-floor
office of Ahmed Sinai! As if it hadn't been enough to show himself to Aadam
Aziz ... 'Arre, Joseph,' Mary screamed, dropping her duster, 'you go away
now! Don't come here now! Don't be bothering the sahibs with your troubles!
О God, Joseph, go, go na, you will kill me today!' But the ghost walked on
down the driveway.
Mary Pereira, abandoning chick-blinds, leaving them hanging askew,
rushes into the heart of the house to throw herself at the feet of my mother
- small fat hands joined in supplication - 'Begum Sahiba! Begum Sahiba,
forgive me!' And my mother astounded: 'What is this, Mary? What has got your
goat?' But Mary is beyond dialogue, she is weeping uncontrollably, crying 'O
God my hour has come, my darling Madam, only let me go peacefully, do not
put me in the jailkhana!' And also, 'Eleven years, my Madam, see if I
haven't loved you all, О Madam, and that boy with his face like the moon;
but now I am killed, I am no-good woman, I shall burn in hell!
Funtoosh!'
cried Mary, and again, 'It's finished;
funloosh!'
Still I did not guess what was coming; not even when Mary threw herself
upon me (I was taller than her now; her tears wet my neck): 'O baba, baba;
today you, must learn a thing, such a thing I have done; but come now...'
and the little woman drew herself up with immense dignity, '... I will tell
you all before that Joseph does. Begum, children, all you other great sirs
and madams, come now to sahib's office, and I will tell.'
Public announcements have punctuated my life; Amina in a Delhi gully,
and Mary in a sunless office ... with my whole family trooping amazedly
behind us, I went downstairs with Mary Pereira, who would not let go of my
hand.
What was in the room with Ahmed Sinai? What had given my father a face
from which djinns and money had been chased away and replaced by a look of
utter desolation? What sat huddled up in the corner of the room, filling the
air with a sulphurous stench? What, shaped like a man, lacked fingers and
toes, whose face seemed to bubble like the hot springs of New Zealand (which
I'd seen in the
Wonder Book of Wonders)?
... No time to explain, because Mary
Pereira has begun to talk, gabbling out a secret which has been hidden for
over eleven years, pulling us all out of the dream-world she invented when
she changed name-tags, forcing us into the horror of the truth. And all the
time she held on to me; like a mother protecting her child, she shielded me
from my family. (Who were learning... as I was ... that they were not ...)
... It was just after midnight and in the streets there were fireworks
and crowds, the many-headed monster roaring, I did it for my Joseph, sahib,
but please don't send me to jail, look the boy is a good boy, sahib, I am a
poor woman, sahib, one mistake, one minute in so many years, not jailkhana
sahib, I will go, eleven years I gave but I will go now, sahib, only this is
a good boy, sahib, you must not send him, sahib, after eleven years he is
your son ... O, you boy with your face like the sun coming out, О Saleem my
piece-of-the-moon, you must know that your father was Winkie and your mother
is also dead ...
Mary Pereira ran out of the room.
Ahmed Sinai said, in a voice as faraway as a bird: 'That, in the
corner, is my old servant Musa, who tried to rob me once.'
(Can any narrative stand so much so soon? I glance towards Padma; she
appears to be stunned, like a fish.)
Once upon a time there was a servant who robbed my father; who swore he
was innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should
prove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I
told you then he was a time-bomb, and he had returned to explode. Musa had,
indeed, contracted leprosy; and had returned across the silence of the years
to beg for my father's forgiveness, so that he could be released from his
self-inflicted curse.
... Someone was called God who was not God; someone else was taken for
a ghost, and was not a ghost; and a third person discovered that although
his name was Saleem Sinai, he was not his parents' son ...
'I forgive you,' Ahmed Sinai said to the leper. After that day, he was
cured of one of his obsessions; he never tried again to discover his own
(and wholly imaginary) family curse.
'I couldn't tell it any other way,' I say to Padma. Too painful; I had
to just blurt it out, all crazy-sounding, just like that.'
'O, mister,' Padma blubbers helplessly, 'O, mister, mister!'
'Come on now,' I say, 'It's an old story.'
But her tears aren't for me; for the moment, she's forgotten about
what-chews-at-bones-beneath-the-skin; she's crying over Mary Pereira, of
whom, as I've said, she had become excessively fond.
'What happened to her?' she says with red eyes. 'That Mary?'
I am seized by an irrational anger. I shout: 'You ask her!'
Ask her how she went home to the city of Panjim in Goa, how she told
her ancient mother the story of her shame! Ask how her mother went wild with
the scandal (appropriately enough: it was a time for old folk to lose their
wits)! Ask: did daughter and old mother go into the streets to seek
forgiveness? Was that not the one time in each ten years when the mummified
corpse of St Francis Xavier (as holy a relic as the Prophet's hair) is taken
from its vault in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus and carried around the town?
Did Mary and old distraught Mrs Pereira find themselves pressing up against
the catafalque; was the old lady beside herself with grief for her
daughter's crime? Did old Mrs Pereira, shouting, 'Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai!',
clamber up on to the bier to kiss the foot of the Holy One? Amidst
uncountable crowds, did Mrs Pereira enter a holy frenzy? Ask! Did she or
didn't she, in the clutches of her wild spirit, place her lips around the
big toe on St Francis's left foot? Ask for yourself: did Mary's mother
bite
the toe right off?
'How?' Padma wails, unnerved by my wrath. 'How,
ask?'
...
And is this also true: were the papers making it up when they wrote
that the old lady had been miraculously punished; when they quoted Church
sources and eye-witnesses, who described how the old woman was turned into
solid stone? No? Ask her if it's true that the Church sent a stone-statue
figure of an old woman around the towns and the villages of Goa, to show
what happened to those who misbehave with "the saints? "Ask: was this statue
not seen in several villages simultaneously - and does that prove fraud, or
a further miracle? 'You know I can't ask anyone,' Padma howls ... but I,
feeling my fury subside, am making no more revelations tonight.
Baldly, then: Mary Pereira left us, and went to her mother in Goa. But
Alice Pereira stayed; Alice remained in Ahmed Sinai's office, and typed, and
fetched snacks and fizzy drinks.
As for me - at the end of the mourning period for my uncle Hanif, I
entered my second exile.
Movements performed by pepperpots
I was obliged to come to the conclusion that Shiva, my rival, my
changeling brother, could no longer be admitted into the forum of my mind;
for reasons which were, I admit, ignoble. I was afraid he would discover
what I was sure I could not conceal from him - the secrets of our birth.
Shiva, for whom the world was things, for whom history could only be
explained as the continuing struggle of oneself-against-the-crowd, would
certainly insist on claiming his birthright; and, aghast at the very notion
of my knock-kneed antagonist replacing me in the blue room of my childhood
while I, perforce, walked morosely off the two-storey hillock to enter the
northern slums; refusing to accept that the prophecy of Ramram Seth had been
intended for Winkie's boy, that it was to Shiva that Prime Ministers had
written, and for Shiva that fishermen pointed out to sea ... placing, in
short, a far higher value on my eleven-year-old sonship than on mere blood,
I resolved that my destructive, violent alter ego should never again enter
the increasingly fractious councils of the Midnight Children's Conference;
that I would guard my secret -which had once been Mary's - with my very
life.
There were nights, at this time, when I avoided convening the
Conference at all - not because of the unsatisfactory turn it had taken, but
simply because I knew it would take time, and cool blood, to erect a barrier
around my new knowledge which could deny it to the Children; eventually, I
was confident, I would manage this ... but I was afraid of Shiva. Most
ferocious and powerful of the Children, he would penetrate where others
could not go ... At any rate, I avoided my fellow-Children; and then
suddenly it was too late, because, having exiled Shiva, I found myself
hurled into an exile from which I was incapable of contacting my
more-than-five-hundred colleagues: I was flung across the Partition-created
frontier into Pakistan.
Late in September 1958, the mourning period for my uncle Hanif Aziz
came to an end; and, miraculously, the dust-cloud which had enveloped us was
settled by a merciful shower of rain. When we had bathed and put on
newly-washed clothes and switched on the ceiling-fans, we emerged from
bathrooms filled, briefly, with the illusory optimism of freshly-soaped
cleanliness; to discover a dusty, unwashed Ahmed Sinai, whisky-bottle in his
hand, his eyes rimmed with blood, swaying upstairs from his office in the
manic grip of djinns. He had been wrestling, in his private world of
abstraction, with the unthinkable realities which Mary's revelations had
unleashed; and owing to some cockeyed functioning of the alcohol, had been
seized by an indescribable rage which he directed, neither at Mary's
departed back, not at the changeling in his midst, but at my mother - at, I
should say, Amina Sinai. Perhaps because he knew he should beg her
forgiveness, and would not, Ahmed ranted at her for hours within the shocked
hearing of her family; I will not repeat the names he called her, nor the
vile courses of action he recommended she should take with her life. But in
the end it was Reverend Mother who intervened.
'Once before, my daughter,' she said, ignoring Ahmed's continuing
ravings, 'your father and I, whatsitsname, said there was no shame in
leaving an inadequate husband. Now I say again: you have, whatsitsname, a
man of unspeakable vileness. Go from him; go today, and take your children,
whatsitsname, away from these oaths which he spews from his lips like an
animal, whatsitsname, of the gutter. Take your children, I say, whatsitsname
-
both
your children,' she said, clutching me to her bosom. Once Reverend
Mother had legitimized me, there was no one to oppose her; it seems to me
now, across the years, that even my cursing father was affected by her
support of the eleven-year-old snotnosed child.
Reverend Mother fixed everything; my mother was like putty- like
potter's clay! - in her omnipotent hands. At that time, my grandmother (I
must continue to call her that) still believed that she and Aadam Aziz would
shortly be emigrating to Pakistan; so she instructed my aunt Emerald to take
us all with her - Amina, the Monkey, myself, even my aunty Pia - and await
her coming. 'Sisters must care for sisters, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother
said, 'in times of trouble.' My aunt Emerald looked highly displeased; but
both she and General Zulfikar acquiesced. And, since my father was in a
lunatic temper which made us fear for our safety, and the Zulfikars had
already booked themselves on a ship which was to sail that night, I left my
lifelong home that very day, leaving Ahmed Sinai alone with Alice Pereira;
because when my mother left her second husband, all the other servants
walked out, too.
In Pakistan, my second period of hurtling growth came to an end. And,
in Pakistan, I discovered that somehow the existence of a frontier 'jammed'
my thought-transmissions to the more-than-five-hundred; so that, exiled once
more from my home, I was also exiled from the gift which was my truest
birthright: the gift of the midnight children.
We lay anchored off the Rann of Kutch on a heat-soaked afternoon. Heat
buzzed in my bad left ear; but I chose to remain on deck, watching as small,
vaguely ominous rowing boats and fishermen's dhows ran a ferry service
between our ship and the Rann, transporting objects veiled in canvas back
and forth, back and forth. Below decks, the adults were playing
housie-housie; I had no idea where the Monkey was. It was the first time I
had ever been on a real ship (occasional visits to American warships in
Bombay harbour didn't count, being merely tourism; and there was always the
embarrassment of being in the company of dozens of highly-pregnant ladies,
who always came on these tour parties in the hope that they would enter
labour and give birth to children who qualified, by virtue of their seaborne
birth, for American citizenship). I stared through the heat-haze at the
Rann.
The Rann of Kutch
... I'd always thought it a magical name, and
half-feared-half-longed to visit the place, that chameleon area which was
land for half the year and sea for the other half, and on which, it was
said, the receding ocean would abandon all manner of fabulous debris, such
as treasure-chests, white ghostly jellyfish, and even the occasional
gasping, freak-legendary figure of a merman. Gazing for the first time upon
this amphibian terrain, this bog of nightmare, I should have felt excited;
but the heat and recent events were weighing me down; my upper lip was still
childishly wet with nose-goo, but I felt oppressed by a feeling of having
moved directly from an overlong and dribbling childhood into a premature
(though still leaky) old age. My voice had deepened; I had been forced to
start shaving, and my face was spotted with blood where the razor had sliced
off the heads of pimples ... The ship's purser passed me and said, 'Better
get below, son. It's the hottest time just now.' I asked about the ferrying
boats. 'Just supplies,' he said and moved away, leaving me to contemplate a
future in which there was little to look forward to except the grudging
hospitality of General Zulfikar, the self-satisfied preening of my aunt
Emerald, who would no doubt enjoy showing off her worldly success and status
to her unhappy sister and bereaved sister-in-law, and the muscle-headed
cockiness of their son Zafar ... 'Pakistan,' I said aloud, 'What a complete
dump!' And we hadn't even arrived... I looked at the boats; they seemed to
be swimming through a dizzying haze. The deck seemed to be swaying violently
as well, although there was virtually no wind; and although I tried to grab
the rails, the boards were too quick for me: they rushed up and hit me on
the nose.
That was how I came to Pakistan, with a mild attack of sunstroke to add
to the emptiness of my hands and the knowledge of my birth; and what was the
name of the boat? What two sister-ships still plied between Bombay and
Karachi in those days before politics ended their journeys? Our boat was the
S.S.
Sabarmati;
its sister, which passed us just before we reached the
Karachi harbour, was the
Sarasvati.
We steamed into exile aboard the
Commander's namesake-ship, proving once again that there was no escape from
recurrence.
We reached Rawalpindi by hot, dusty train. (The General and Emerald
travelled in Air-Conditioned; they bought the rest of us ordinary
first-class tickets.) But it was cool when we reached 'Pindi and I set foot,
for the first time, in a northern city... I remember it as a low, anonymous
town; army barracks, fruit-shops, a sports goods industry; tall military men
in the streets; Jeeps; furniture carvers; polo. A town in which it was
possible to be very, very cold. And in a new and expensive housing
development, a vast house surrounded by a high wall which was topped by
barbed wire and patrolled by sentries: General Zulfikar's home. There was a
bath next to the double bed in which the General slept; there was a house
catch-phrase: 'Let's get organized!'; the servants wore green military
jerseys and berets; in the evenings the odours of bhang and charas floated
up from their quarters. The furniture was expensive and surprisingly
beautiful; Emerald could not be faulted on her taste. It was a dull,
lifeless house, for all its military airs; even the goldfish in the tank set
in the dining-room wall seemed to bubble listlessly; perhaps its most
interesting inhabitant was not even human. You will permit me, for a moment,
to describe the General's dog Bonzo. Excuse me: the General's old beagle
bitch.
This goitred creature of papery antiquity had been supremely indolent
and useless all her life; but while I was still recovering from sunstroke
she created the first furore of our stay - a sort of trailer for the
'revolution of the pepperpots'. General Zulfikar had taken her one day to a
military training-camp, where he was to watch a team of mine-detectors at
work in a specially-prepared minefield. (The General was anxious to mine the
entire Indo-Pak border. 'Let's get organized!' he would exclaim. 'Let's give
those Hindus something to worry! We'll blow their invaders into so many
pieces, there'll be no damn thing left to reincarnate.' He was not, however,
overly concerned about the frontiers of East Pakistan, being of the view
that 'those damn blackies can look after themselves'.) ... And now Bonzo
slipped her leash, and somehow evading the frantically clutching hands of
young jawans, waddled out into the minefield.
Blind panic. Mine-detecting soldiers picking their way in frenzied
slow-motion through the blasting zone. General Zulfikar and other Army brass
diving for shelter behind their grandstand, awaiting the explosion ... But
there was none; and when the flower of the Pakistan Army peeped out from
inside dustbins or behind benches, it saw Bonzo picking her way daintily
through the field of the lethal seeds, nose to ground, Bonzo-the-insouciant,
quite at her ease. General Zulfikar flung his peaked cap in the air. 'Damn
marvellous!' he cried in the thin voice which squeezed between his nose and
chin, 'The old lady can smell the mines!' Bonzo was drafted forthwith into
the armed forces as a four-legged mine-detector with the courtesy rank of
sergeant-major.
I mention Bonzo's achievement because it gave the General a stick with
which to beat us. We Sinais - and Pia Aziz - were helpless, non-productive
members of the Zulfikar household, and the General did not wish us to forget
it: 'Even a damn hundred-year-old beagle bitch can earn her damn living,' he
was heard to mutter, 'but my house is full of people who can't get organized
into one damn thing.' But before the end of October he would be grateful for
(at least) my presence ... and the transformation of the Monkey was not far
away.
We went to school with cousin Zafar, who seemed less anxious to marry
my sister now that we were children of a broken home; but his worst deed
came one weekend when we were taken to the General's mountain cottage in
Nathia Gali, beyond Murree. I was in a state of high excitement (my illness
had just been declared cured): mountains! The possibility of panthers! Cold,
biting air! - so that I thought nothing of it when the General asked me if
I'd mind sharing a bed with Zafar, and didn't even guess when they spread
the rubber sheet over the mattress ... I awoke in the small hours in a large
rancid pool of lukewarm liquid and began to yell blue murder. The General
appeared at our bedside and began to thrash the living daylights out of his
son. 'You're a big man now! Damn it to hell! Still, and still you do it! Get
yourself organized! Good for nothing! Who behaves in this damn way? Cowards,
that's who! Damn me if I'll have a coward for a son ...' The enuresis of my
cousin Zafar continued, however, to be the shame of his family; despite
thrashings, the liquid ran down his leg; and one day it happened when he was
awake. But that was after certain movements had, with my assistance, been
performed by pepperpots, proving to me that although the telepathic
air-waves were jammed in this country, the modes of connection still seemed
to function; active-literally as well as metaphorically, I helped change the
fate of the Land of the Pure.
The Brass Monkey and I were helpless observers, in those days, of my
wilting mother. She, who had always been assiduous in the heat, had begun to
wither in the northern cold. Deprived of two husbands, she was also deprived
(in her own eyes) of meaning; and there was also a relationship to rebuild,
between mother and son. She held me tightly one night and said, 'Love, my
child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but
made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.' But there
was a distance behind her gentleness, as though she were trying to persuade
herself ... a distance, too, in the Monkey's midnight whispers of, 'Hey,
brother, why don't we go and pour water over Zafar - they'll only think he's
wet his bed?' - and it was my sense of this gap which showed me that,
despite their use of
son
and
brother,
their imaginations were working hard
to assimilate Mary's confession; not knowing then that they would be unable
to succeed in their re-imaginings of
brother
and
son,
I remained terrified
of Shiva; and was accordingly driven even deeper into the illusory heart of
my desire to prove myself worthy of their kinship. Despite Reverend Mother's
recognition of me, I was never at my ease until, on a
more-than-three-years-distant verandah, my father said, 'Come, son; come
here and let me love you.' Perhaps that is why I behaved as I did on the
night of October yth, 1958.
... An eleven-year-old boy, Padma, knew very little about the internal
affairs of Pakistan; but he could see, on that October day, that an unusual
dinner-party was being planned. Saleem at eleven knew nothing about the
Constitution of 1956 and its gradual erosion; but his eyes were keen enough
to spot the Army security officers, the military police, who arrived that
afternoon to lurk secretly behind every garden bush. Faction strife and the
multiple incompetences of Mr Ghulam Mohammed were a mystery to him; but it
was clear that his aunt Emerald was putting on her finest jewels. The farce
of four-prime-ministers-in-two-years had never made him giggle; but he could
sense, in the air of drama hanging over the General's house, that something
like a final curtain was approaching. Ignorant of the emergence of the
Republican party, he was nevertheless curious about the guest-list for the
Zulfikar party; although he was in a country where names meant nothing - who
was Chaudhuri Muhammad Ali? Or Suhrawardy? Or Chundrigar, or Noon? - the
anonymity of the dinner-guests, which was carefully preserved by his uncle
and aunt, was a puzzling thing. Even though he had once cut Pakistani
headlines out of newspapers - FURNITURE HURLING SLAYS DEPUTYE-PAK SPEAKER -
he had no idea why, at six p.m., a long line of black limousines came
through the sentried walls of- the Zulfikar Estate; why flags waved on their
bonnets; why their occupants refused to smile; or why Emerald and Pia and my
mother stood behind General Zulfikar with expressions on their faces which
would have seemed more appropriate at a funeral than a social gathering. Who
what was dying? Who why were the limousine arrivals? - I had no idea; but I
was on my toes behind my mother, staring at the smoked-glass windows of the
enigmatic cars.
Car-doors opened; equerries, adjutants, leaped out of vehicles and
opened rear doors, saluted stiffly; a small muscle began to tic in my aunt
Emerald's cheek. And then, who descended from the flag-waving motors? What
names should be put to the fabulous array of moustaches, swagger-sticks,
gimlet-eyes, medals and shoulder-pips which emerged? Saleem knew neither
names nor serial numbers; ranks, however, could be discerned. Gongs and
pips, proudly worn on chests and shoulders, announced the arrival of very
top brass indeed. And out of the last car came a tall man with an
astonishingly round head, round as a tin globe although unmarked by lines of
longitude and latitude; planet-headed, he was not labelled like the orb
which the Monkey had once squashed; not MADE AS ENGLAND (although certainly
Sandhurst-trained) he moved through saluting gongs-and-pips; arrived at my
aunt Emerald; and added his own salute to the rest.
'Mr Commander-in-Chief,' my aunt said, 'be welcome in our home.'
'Emerald, Emerald,' came from the mouth set in the earth-shaped head -
the mouth positioned immediately beneath a neat moustache, 'Why such
formality, such takalluf?' Whereupon she embraced him with, 'Well then,
Ayub, you're looking wonderful.'
He was a General then, though Field-Marshalship was not far away ... we
followed him into the house; we watched him drink (water) and laugh
(loudly); at dinner we watched him again?saw how he ate like a peasant, so
that his moustache became stained with gravy ... 'Listen, Em,' he said,
'Always such preparations when I come! But I'm only a simple soldier; dal
and rice from your kitchens would be a feast for me.'
'A soldier, sir,' my aunt replied, 'but simple - never! Not once!'
Long trousers qualified me to sit at table, next to cousin Zafar,
surrounded by gongs-and-pips; tender years, however, placed us both under an
obligation to be silent. (General Zulfikar told' me in a military hiss, 'One
peep out of you and you're off to the guardhouse. If you want to stay, stay
mum. Got it?' Staying mum, Zafar and I were free to look and listen. But
Zafar,
unlike me, was not trying to prove himself worthy of his name ...)
What did eleven-year-olds hear at dinner? What did they understand by
jocund military references to 'that Suhrawardy, who always opposed the
Pakistan Idea' - or to Noon, 'who should have been called Sunset, what?' And
through discussions of election-rigging and black-money, what undercurrent
of danger permeated their skins, making the downy hairs on their arms stand
on end? And when the Commander-in-Chief quoted the Quran, how much of its
meaning was understood by eleven-year-old ears?
'It is written,' said the round-headed man, and the gongs-and-pips fell
silent,
'Aad and Thamoud we also destroyed. Satan had made their foul deeds
seem fair to them, keen-sighted though they were.'
It was as though a cue had been given; a wave of my aunt's hands
dismissed the servants. She rose to go herself; my mother and Pia went with
her. Zafar and I, too, rose from our seats; but
he,
he himself, called down
the length of the sumptuous table: 'The little men should stay. It is their
future, after all.' The little men, frightened but also proud, sat and
stayed mum, following orders.
Just men now. A change in the roundhead's face; something darker,
something mottled and desperate has occupied it... 'Twelve months ago,' he
says, 'I spoke to all of you. Give the politicians one year - is that not
what I said?' Heads nod; murmurs of assent. 'Gentlemen, we have given them a
year; the situation has become intolerable, and I am not prepared to
tolerate it any longer!' Gongs-and-pips assume stern, statesmanlike
expressions. Jaws are set, eyes gaze keenly into the future. 'Tonight,
therefore,' - yes! I was there! A few yards from him! - General Ayub and I,
myself and old Ayub Khan! - 'I am assuming control of the State.'
How do eleven-year-olds react to the announcement of a coup? Hearing
the words, '... national finances in frightening disarray ... corruption and
impurity are everywhere ...' do their jaws stiffen, too? Do their eyes focus
on brighter tomorrows? Eleven-year-olds listen as a General cries, 'The
Constitution is hereby abrogated! Central and Provincial legislatures are
dissolved! Political parties are forthwith abolished!' - how do you think
they feel?
When General Ayub Khan said, 'Martial Law is now imposed,' both cousin
Zafar and I understood that his voice - that voice filled with power and
decision and the rich timbre of my aunt's finest cooking - was speaking a
thing for which we knew only one word: treason. I'm proud to say I kept my
head; but Zafar lost control of a more embarrassing organ. Moisture stained
his trouser-fronts; the yellow moisture of fear trickled down his leg to
stain Persian carpets; gongs-and-pips smelled something, and turned upon him
with looks of infinite distaste; and then (worst of all) came laughter.
General Zulfikar had just begun saying, 'If you permit, sir, I shall
map out tonight's procedures,' when his son wet his pants. In cold fury my
uncle hurled his son from the room; 'Pimp! Woman!' followed Zafar out of the
dining-chamber, in his father's thin sharp voice; 'Coward! Homosexual!
Hindu!' leaped from Punchinello-face to chase his son up the stairs ...
Zulnkar's eyes settled on me. There was a plea in them.
Save the honour of
the family. Redeem me from the incontinence of my son.
'You, boy!' my uncle
said, 'You want to come up here and help me?'
Of course, I nodded. Proving my manhood, my fitness for sonship, I
assisted my uncle as he made the revolution. And in so doing, in earning his
gratitude, in stilling the sniggers of the assembled gongs-and-pips, I
created a new father for myself; General Zulfikar became the latest in the
line of men who have been willing to call me 'sonny', or 'sonny Jim', or
even simply 'my son'.
How we made the revolution: General Zulfikar described troop movements;
I moved pepperpots symbolically while he spoke. In the clutches of the
active-metaphorical mode of connection, I shifted salt-cellars and bowls of
chutney: This mustard-jar is Company A occupying Head Post Office; there are
two pepperpots surrounding a serving-spoon, which means Company В has seized
the airport. With the fate of the nation in my hands, I shifted condiments
and cutlery, capturing empty biriani-dishes with water-glasses, stationing
saltcellars, on guard, around water-jugs. And when General Zulfikar stopped
talking, the march of the table-service also came to an end. Ayub Khan
seemed to settle down in his chair; was the wink he gave me just my
imagination? - at any rate, the Commander-in-Chief said, 'Very good,
Zulfikar; good show.'
In the movements performed by pepperpots etcetera, one table-ornament
remained uncaptured: a cream-jug in solid silver, which, in our table-top
coup, represented the Head of State, President Iskander Mirza; for three
weeks, Mirza remained President.
An eleven-year-old boy cannot judge whether a President is truly
corrupt, even if gongs-and-pips say he is; it is not for eleven-year-olds to
say whether Mirza's association with the feeble Republican Party should have
disqualified him from high office under the new regime. Saleem Sinai made no
political judgments; but when, inevitably at midnight, on November 1st, my
uncle shook me awake and whispered, 'Come on, sonny, it's time you got a
taste of the real thing!', I leaped out of bed smartly; I dressed and went
out into the night, proudly aware that my uncle had preferred my company to
that of his own son.
Midnight. Rawalpindi speeding past us at seventy m.p.h. Motorcycles in
front of us beside us behind us. 'Where are we going Zulfy - uncle?'
Wait
and see.
Black smoked-windowed limousine pausing at darkened house. Sentries
guard the door with crossed rifles; which part, to let us through. I am
marching at my uncle's side, in step, through half-lit corridors; until we
burst into a dark room with a shaft of moonlight spotlighting a four-poster
bed. A mosquito net hangs over the bed like a shroud.
There is a man waking up, startled,
what the hell is going ...
But
General Zulfikar has a long-barrelled revolver; the tip of the gun is forced
mmff between the man's parted teeth. 'Shut up,' my uncle says,
superfluously. 'Come with us.' Naked overweight man stumbling from his bed.
His eyes, asking:
Are you going to shoot me?
Sweat rolls down ample belly,
catching moonlight, dribbling on to his soo-soo; but it is bitterly cold; he
is not perspiring from the heat. He looks like a white Laughing Buddha; but
not laughing. Shivering. My uncle's pistol is extracted from his mouth.
'Turn. Quick march!' ... And gun-barrel pushed between the cheeks of an
overfed rump. The man cries, 'For God's sake be careful; that thing has the
safety off!' Jawans giggle as naked flesh emerges into moonlight, is pushed
into black limousine ... That night, I sat with a naked man as my uncle
drove him to a military airfield; I stood and watched as the waiting
aircraft taxied, accelerated, flew. What began, active-metaphorically, with
pepperpots, ended then; not only did I overthrow a government - I also
consigned a president to exile.
Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all
human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots
... I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more
varied than I - even I - had dreamed.
'Really truly?' Padma asks. 'You were truly there?' Really truly. 'They
say that Ayub was a good man before he became bad,' Padma says; it is a
question. But Saleem, at eleven, made no such judgments. The movement of
pepperpots does not necessitate moral choices. What Saleem was concerned
with: not public upheaval, but personal rehabilitation. You see the paradox
- my most crucial foray into history up to that moment was inspired by the
most parochial of motives. Anyway, it was not 'my' country - or not then.
Not my country, although I stayed in it - as refugee, not citizen; entered
on my mother's Indian passport, I would have come in for a good deal of
suspicion, maybe even deported or arrested as a spy, had it not been for my
tender years and the power of my guardian with the Punch-like features - for
four long years.
Four years of nothing.
Except growing into a teenager. Except watching my mother as she fell
apart. Except observing the Monkey, who was a crucial year younger than me,
fall under the insidious spell of that God-ridden country; the Monkey, once
so rebellious and wild, adopting expressions of demureness and submission
which must, at first, have seemed false even to her; the Monkey, learning
how to cook and keep house, how to buy spices in the market; the Monkey,
making the final break with the legacy of her grandfather, by learning
prayers in Arabic and saying them at all prescribed times; the Monkey,
revealing the streak of puritan fanaticism which she had hinted at when she
asked for a nun's outfit; she, who spurned all offers of worldly love, was
seduced by the love of that God who had been named after a carved idol in a
pagan shrine built around a giant meteorite: Al-Lah, in the Qa'aba, the
shrine of the great Black Stone.
But nothing else.
Four years away from the midnight children; four years without Warden
Road and Breach Candy and Scandal Point and the lures of One Yard of
Chocolates; away from the Cathedral School and the equestrian statue of
Sivaji and melon-sellers at the Gateway of India: away from Divali and
Ganesh Chaturthi and Coconut Day; four years of separation from a father who
sat alone in a house he would not sell; alone, except for Professor
Schaapsteker, who stayed in his apartment and shunned the company of men.
Can nothing really happen for four years? Obviously, not quite. My
cousin Zafar, who had never been forgiven by his father for wetting his
pants in the presence of history, was given to understand that he would be
joining the Army as soon as he was of age. 'I want to see you prove you're
not a woman,' his father told him.
And Bonzo died; General Zulfikar shed manly tears.
And Mary's confession faded until, because nobody spoke of it, it came
to feel like a bad dream; to everyone except'me.
And (without any assistance from me) relations between India and
Pakistan grew worse; entirely without my help, India conquered Goa - 'the
Portuguese pimple on the face of Mother India'; I sat on the sidelines and
played no part in the acquisition of large-scale U.S. aid for Pakistan, nor
was I to blame for Sino-India border
skirmishes in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh; the Indian census of
1961 revealed a literacy level of 23.7 per cent, but I was not entered in
its records. The untouchable problem remained acute; I did nothing to
alleviate it; and in the elections of 1962, the All-India Congress won 361
out of 494 seats in the Lok Sabha, and over 61 per cent of all State
Assembly seats. Not even in this could my unseen hand be said to have moved;
except, perhaps, metaphorically: the
status quo
was preserved in India; in
my life, nothing changed either.
Then, on September 1st, 1962, we celebrated the Monkey's fourteenth
birthday. By this time (and despite my uncle's continued fondness for me) we
were well-established as social inferiors, the hapless poor relations of the
great Zulfikars; so the party was a skimpy affair. The Monkey, however, gave
every appearance of enjoying herself. 'It's my duty, brother,' she told me.
I could hardly believe my ears ... but perhaps my sister had an intuition of
her fate; perhaps she knew the transformation which lay in store for her;
why should I assume that I alone have had the powers of secret knowledge?
Perhaps, then, she guessed that when the hired musicians began to play
(shehnai and vina were present; sarangi and sarod had their turns; tabla and
sitar performed their virtuosic cross-examinations) , Emerald Zulfikar would
descend on her with callous elegance, demanding, 'Come on, Jamila, don't sit
there like a melon, sing us a song like any good girl would!'
And that with this sentence my emerald-icy aunt would have begun, quite
unwittingly, my sister's transformation from monkey into singer; because
although she protested with the sullen clumsiness of fourteen-year-olds, she
was hauled unceremoniously on to the musicians' dais by my organizing aunt;
and although she looked as if she wished the floor would open up beneath her
feet, she clasped her hands together; seeing no escape, the Monkey began to
sing.
I have not, I think, been good at describing emotions - believing my
audience to be capable
of joining in;
of imagining for themselves what I
have been unable to re-imagine, so that my story becomes yours as well ...
but when my sister began to sing, I was certainly assailed by an emotion of
such force that I was unable to understand it until, much later, it was
explained to me by the oldest whore in the world. Because, with her first
note, the Brass Monkey sloughed off her nick-name; she, who had talked to
birds (just as, long ago in a mountain valley, her great-grandfather used to
do), must have learned from songbirds the arts of song. With one good ear
and one bad ear, I listened to her faultless voice, which at fourteen was
the voice of a grown woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of
exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody
of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God; a voice which was
afterwards compared to that of Muhammed's muezzin Bilal, issuing from the
lips of a somewhat scrawny girl.
What I did not understand must wait to be told; let me record here that
my sister earned her name at her fourteenth birthday party, and was known
after that as Jamila Singer; and that I knew, as I listened to 'My Red
Dupatta Of Muslin' and 'Shahbaz Qalandar', that the process which had begun
during my first exile was nearing completion in my second; that, from now
on, Jamila was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to
her talent for ever.
Jamila sang - I, humbly, bowed my head. But before she could enter
fully into her kingdom, something else had to happen: I had to be properly
finished off.
Drainage and the desert
What-chews-on-bones refuses to pause ... it's only a matter of time.
This is what keeps me going: I hold on to Padma. Padma is what matters -
Padma-muscles, Padma's hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus ... who,
embarrassed, commands: 'Enough. Start. Start now.'
Yes, it must start with the cable. Telepathy set me apart;
telecommunications dragged me down ...
Amina Sinai was cutting verrucas out of her feet when the telegram
arrived ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away
from the date: my mother, right ankle on left knee, was scooping corn-tissue
out of the sole of her foot with a sharp-ended nail file on September 9th,
1962. And the time? The time matters, too. Well, then: in the afternoon. No,
it's important to be more ... At the stroke of three o'clock, which, even in
the north, is the hottest time of day, a bearer brought her an envelope on a
silver dish. A few seconds later, far away in New Delhi, Defence Minister
Krishna Menon (acting on his own initiative, during Nehru's absence at the
Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference) took the momentous decision to use
force if necessary against the Chinese army on the Himalayan frontier. The
Chinese must be ejected from the Thag La ridge,' Mr Menon said while my
mother tore open a telegram. 'No weakness will be shown.' But this decision
was a mere trifle when set beside the implications of my mother's cable;
because while the eviction operation, code-named LEGHORN, was doomed to
fail, and eventually to turn India into that most macabre of theatres, the
Theatre of War, the cable was to plunge me secretly but surely towards the
crisis which would end with my final eviction from my own inner world. While
the Indian XXXIII Corps were acting on instructions passed from Menon to
General Thapar, I, too, had been placed in great danger; as if unseen forces
had decided that I had also overstepped the boundaries of what I was
permitted to do or know or be; as though history had decided to put me
firmly in my place. I was left entirely without a say in the matter; my
mother read the telegram, burst into tears and said, 'Children, we're going
home!' ... after which, as I began by saying in another context, it was only
a matter of time.
What the telegram said: PLEASE COME QUICK SINAISAHIB SUFFERED HEARTBOOT
GRAVELY ILL SALAAMS ALICE PEREIRA.
'Of course, go at once, my darling,' my aunt Emerald told her sister,
'But what, my God, can be this
heartboot?'
It is possible, even probable, that I am only the first historian to
write the story of my undeniably exceptional life-and-times. Those who
follow in my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work,
this source-book, this Hadith or Purana or
Grundrisse,
for guidance and
inspiration. I say to these future exegetes: when you come to examine the
events which followed on from the 'heartboot cable', remember that at the
very eye of the hurricane which was unleashed upon me - the sword, to switch
metaphors, with which the
coup de grace
was applied - there lay a single
unifying force. I refer to telecommunications.
Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my undoing;
generously, however, I shall accuse nobody of conspiracy; although it would
be easy to believe that the controllers of communication had resolved to
regain their monopoly of the nation's air-waves.... I must return (Padma is
frowning) to the banal chain of cause-and-effect: we arrived at Santa Cruz
airport, by Dakota, on September 16th; but to explain the telegram, I must
go further back in time.
If Alice Pereira had once sinned, by stealing Joseph D'Costa from her
sister Mary, she had in these latter years gone a long way towards attaining
redemption; because for four years she had been Ahmed Sinai's only human
companion. Isolated on the dusty hillock which had once been Methwold's
Estate, she had borne enormous demands on her accommodating good nature. He
would make her sit with him until midnight while he drank djinns and ranted
about the injustices of his life; he remembered, after years of
forgetfulness, his old dream of translating and re-ordering the Quran, and
blamed his family for emasculating him so that he didn't have the energy to
begin such a task; in addition, because she was there, his anger often
directed itself at her, taking the form of long tirades filled with
gutter-oaths and the useless curses he had devised in the days of his
deepest abstraction. She attempted to be understanding: he was a lonely man;
his once-infallible relationship with the telephone had been destroyed by
the economic vagaries of the times; his touch in financial matters had begun
to desert him ... he fell prey, too, to strange fears. When the Chinese road
in the Aksai Chin region was discovered, he became convinced that the yellow
hordes would be arriving at Methwold's Estate in a matter of days; and it
was Alice who comforted him with ice-cold Coca-Cola, saying, 'No good
worrying. Those Chinkies are too little to beat our jawans. Better you drink
your Coke; nothing is going to change.'
In the end he wore her out; she stayed with him, finally, only because
she demanded and received large pay increases, and sent much of the money to
Goa, for the support of her sister Mary; but on September 1st, she, too,
succumbed to the blandishments of the telephone.
By then, she spent as much time on the instrument as her employer,
particularly when the Narlikar women called up. The formidable Narlikars
were, at that time, besieging my father, telephoning him twice a day,
coaxing and persuading him to sell, reminding him that his position was
hopeless, flapping around his head like vultures around a burning godown ...
on September 1st, like a long-ago vulture, they flung down an arm which
slapped him in the face, because they bribed Alice Pereira away from him.
Unable to stand him any more, she cried, 'Answer your own telephone! I'm
off.'
That night, Ahmed Sinai's heart began to bulge. Overfull of hate
resentment self-pity grief, it became swollen like a balloon, it beat too
hard, skipped beats, and finally felled him like an ox; at the Breach Candy
Hospital the doctors discovered that my father's heart had actually changed
shape - a new swelling had pushed lumpily out of the lower left ventricle.
It had, to use Alice's word, 'booted'.
Alice found him the next day, when, by chance, she returned to collect
a forgotten umbrella; like a good secretary, she enlisted the power of
telecommunications, telephoning an ambulance and tele-gramming us. Owing to
censorship of the mails between India and Pakistan, the 'heartboot cable'
took a full week to reach Amina Sinai.'Back-to-Bom!' I yelled happily,
alarming airport coolies. 'Back-to-Born!' I cheered, despite everything,
until the newly-sober Jamila said, 'Oh, Saleem,
honestly, shoo
!' Alice
Pereira met us at the airport (a telegram had alerted her); and then we were
in a real Bombay black-and-yellow taxi, and I was wallowing in the sounds of
hot-channa-hot hawkers, the throng of camels bicycles and people people
people, thinking how Mumbadevi's city made Rawalpindi look like a village,
rediscovering especially the colours, the forgotten vividness of gulmohr and
bougainvillaea, the livid green of the waters of the Mahalaxmi Temple
'tank', the stark black-and-white of the traffic policemen's sun umbrellas
and the blue-and-yellowness of their uniforms; but most of all the blue blue
blue of the sea ... only the grey of my father's stricken face distracted me
from the rainbow riot of the city, and made me sober up.
Alice Pereira left us at the hospital and went off to work for the
Narlikar women; and now a remarkable thing happened. My mother Amina Sinai,
jerked out of lethargy and depression and guilt-fogs and verruca-pain by the
sight of my father, seemed miraculously to regain her youth; with all her
old gifts of assiduity restored, she set about the rehabilitation of Ahmed,
driven by an unstoppable will. She brought him home to the first-floor
bedroom in which she had nursed him through the freeze; she sat with him day
and night, pouring her strength into his body. And her love had its reward,
because not only did Ahmed Sinai make a recovery so complete as to astound
Breach Candy's European doctors, but also an altogether more wonderful
change occurred, which was that, as Ahmed came to himself under Amina's
care, he returned not to the self which had practised curses and wrestled
djinns, but to the self he might always have been, filled with contrition
and forgiveness and laughter and generosity and the finest miracle of all,
which was love. Ahmed Sinai had, at long last, fallen in love with my
mother.
And I was the sacrificial lamb with which they anointed their love.
They had even begun to sleep together again; and although my sister -
with a flash of her old Monkey-self - said, 'In the same bed, Allah,
Mi-Mi,
how dirty!', I was happy for them; and even, briefly, happier for myself,
because I was back in the land of the Midnight Children's Conference. While
newspaper headlines marched towards war, I renewed my acquaintance with my
miraculous fellows, not knowing how many endings were in store for me.
On October 9th - INDIAN ARMY POISED FOR ALL-OUT EFFORT - I felt able to
convene the Conference (time and my own efforts had erected the necessary
barrier around Mary's secret). Back into my head they came; it was a happy
night, a night for burying old disagreements, for making our own all-out
effort at reunion. We repeated, over and over again, our joy at being back
together; ignoring the deeper truth - that we were like all families, that
family reunions are more delightful in prospect than in reality, and that
the time comes when all families must go their separate ways. On October
15th-UNPROVOKED ATTACK ON INDIA - the questionsI'd been dreading and trying
not to provoke began:
Why is Shiva not here?
And:
Why have you closed off
part of your mind?
On October 20th, the Indian forces were defeated - thrashed - by the
Chinese at Thag La ridge. An official Peking statement announced:
In
self-defence, Chinese frontier guards were compelled to strike back
resolutely.
But when, that same night, the children of midnight launched a
concerted assault on me, I had no defence. They attacked on a broad front
and from every direction, accusing me of secrecy, prevarication,
high-handedness, egotism; my mind, no longer a parliament chamber, became
the battleground on which they annihilated me. No longer 'big brother
Saleem', I listened helplessly while they tore me apart; because, despite
all their sound-and-fury, I could not unblock what I had sealed away; I
could not bring myself to tell them Mary's secret. Even Parvati-the-witch,
for so long my fondest supporter, lost patience with me at last. 'O,
Saleem,' she said, 'God knows what that Pakistan has done to you; but you
are badly changed.'
Once, long ago, the death of Mian Abdullah had destroyed another
Conference, which had been held together purely by the strength of his will;
now, as the midnight children lost faith in me, they also lost their belief
in the thing I had made for them. Between October 20th and November 2Oth, I
continued to convene - to attempt to convene - our nightly sessions; but
they fled from me, not one by one, but in tens and twenties; each night,
less of them were willing to tune in; each week, over a hundred of them
retreated into private life. In the high Himalayas, Gurkhas and Rajputs fled
in disarray from the Chinese army; and in the upper reaches of my mind,
another army was also destroyed by things - bickerings, prejudices, boredom,
selfishness - which I had believed too small, too petty to have touched
them.
(But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued
to believe - I continue now - that what-we-had-in-common would finally have
outweighed what-drove-us-apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate
responsibility for the end of the Children's Conference; because what
destroyed all possibility of renewal was the love of Ahmed and Amina Sinai.)
... And Shiva? Shiva, whom I cold-bloodedly denied his birthright?
Never once, in that last month, did I send my thoughts in search of him; but
his existence, somewhere in the world, nagged away at the corners of my
mind. Shiva-the-destroyer, Shiva Knoc-knees ... he became, for me, first a
stabbing twinge of guilt; then an obsession; and finally, as the memory of
his actuality grew dull, he became a sort of principle; he came to
represent, in my mind, all the vengefulness and violence and
simultaneous-love-and-hate-of-Things in the world; so that even now, when I
hear of drowned bodies floating like balloons on the Hooghly and exploding
when nudged by passing boats; or trains set on fire, or politicians killed,
or riots in Orissa or Punjab, it seems to me that the hand of Shiva lies
heavily over all these things, dooming us to flounder endlessly amid murder
rape greed war - that Shiva, in short, has made us who we are. (He, too, was
born on the stroke of midnight; he, like me, was connected to history. The
modes of connection - if I'm right in thinking they applied to me - enabled
him, too, to affect the passage of the days.)
I'm talking as if I never saw him again; which isn't true. But that, of
course, must get into the queue like everything else; I'm not strong enough
to tell that tale just now.
The disease of optimism, in those days, once again attained epidemic
proportions; I, meanwhile, was afflicted by an inflammation of the sinuses.
Curiously triggered off by the defeat of Thag La ridge, public optimism
about the war grew as fat (and as dangerous) as an overfilled balloon; my
long-suffering nasal passages, however, which had been overfilled all their
days, finally gave up the struggle against congestion. While
parliamentarians poured out speeches about 'Chinese aggression' and 'the
blood of our martyred jawans', my eyes began to stream with tears; while the
nation puffed itself up, convincing itself that the annihilation of the
little yellow men was at hand, my sinuses, too, puffed up and distorted a
face which was already so startling that Ayub Khan himself had stared at it
in open amazement. In the clutches of the optimism disease, students burned
Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-Lai in effigy; with optimism-fever on their brows,
mobs attacked Chinese shoemakers, curio dealers and restaurateurs. Burning
with optimism, the Government even interned Indian citizens of Chinese
descent - now 'enemy aliens' - in camps in Rajasthan. Birla Industries
donated a miniature rifle range to the nation; schoolgirls began to go on
military parade. But I, Saleem, felt as if I was about to die of
asphyxiation. The air, thickened by optimism, refused to enter my lungs.
Ahmed and Amina Sinai were amongst the worst victims of the renewed
disease of optimism; having already contracted it through the medium of
their new-born love, they entered into the public enthusiasm with a will.
When Morarji Desai, the urine-drinking Finance Minister, launched his
'Ornaments for Armaments' appeal, my mother handed over gold bangles and
emerald ear-rings; when Morarji floated an issue of defence bonds, Ahmed
Sinai bought them in bushels. War, it seemed, had brought a new dawn to
India; in the
Times of India,
a cartoon captioned 'War with China' showed
Nehru looking at graphs labelled 'Emotional Integration', 'Industrial Peace'
and 'People's Faith in Government' and crying, 'We never had it so good!'
Adrift in the sea of optimism, we - the nation, my parents, I - floated
blindly towards the reefs.
As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences. Similarities between
this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands
delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form
- or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden
within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes. Hence our
vulnerability to omens ... when the Indian flag was first raised, for
instance, a rainbow appeared above that Delhi field, a rainbow of saffron
and green; and we felt blessed. Born amidst correspondence, I have found it
continuing to hound me ... while Indians headed blindly towards a military
debacle, I, too, was nearing (and entirely without knowing it) a catastrophe
of my own.
Times of India
cartoons spoke of 'Emotional Integration'; in Buckingham
Villa, last remnant of Methwold's Estate, emotions had never been so
integrated. Ahmed and Amina spent their days like just-courting youngsters;
and while the Peking
People's Daily
complained, 'The Nehru Government has
finally shed its cloak of non-alignment', neither my sister nor I were
complaining, because for the first time in years we did not have to pretend
we were non-aligned in the war between our parents; what war had done for
India, the cessation of hostilities had achieved on our two-storey hillock.
Ahmed Sinai had even given up his nightly battle with the djinns.
By November 1st - INDIANS ATTACK UNDER COVER OF ARTILLERY - my nasal
passages were in a state of acute crisis. Although my mother subjected me to
daily torture by Vick's Inhaler and steaming bowls of Vick's ointment
dissolved in water, which, blanket over head, I was obliged to try and
inhale, my sinuses refused to respond to treatment. This was the day on
which my father held out his arms to me and said, 'Come, son - come here and
let me love you.' In a frenzy of happiness (maybe the optimism disease had
got to me, after all) I allowed myself to be smothered in his squashy belly;
but when he let me go, nose-goo had stained his bush-shirt. I think that's
what finally doomed me; because that afternoon, my mother went on to the
attack. Pretending to me that she was telephoning a friend, she made a
certain telephone call. While Indians attacked under cover of artillery,
Amina Sinai planned my downfall, protected by a lie.
Before I describe my entry into the desert of my later years, however,
I must admit the possibility that I have grievously wronged my parents.
Never once, to my knowledge, never once in all the time since Mary Pereira's
revelations, did they set out to look for the true son of their blood; and I
have, at several points in this narrative, ascribed this failure to a
certain lack of imagination - I have said, more or less, that I remained
their son because they could not imagine me out of the role. And there are
worse interpretations possible, too - such as their reluctance to accept
into their bosom an -urchin who had spent eleven years in the gutter; but I
wish to suggest a nobler motive: maybe, despite everything, despite
cucumber-nose stainface chinlessness horn-temples bandy-legs finger-loss
monk's-tonsure and my (admittedly unknown to them) bad left ear, despite
even the midnight baby-swap of Mary Pereira... maybe, I say, in spite of all
these provocations, my parents loved me. I withdrew from them into my secret
world; fearing their hatred, I did not admit the possibility that their love
was stronger than ugliness, stronger even then blood. It is certainly likely
that what a telephone call arranged, what finally took place on November
21st, 1962, was done for the highest of reasons; that my parents ruined me
for love.
The day of November 20th was a terrible day; the night was a terrible
night... six days earlier, on Nehru's seventy-third birthday, the great
confrontation with the Chinese forces had begun; the Indian army - JAWANS
SWING INTO ACTION! - had attacked the Chinese at Walong. News of the
disaster of Walong, and the rout of General Kaul and four battalions,
reached Nehru on Saturday 18th; on Monday 20th, it flooded through radio and
press and arrived at Methwold's Estate. ULTIMATE PANIC IN NEW DELHI! INDIAN
FORCES IN TATTERS! That day - the last day of my old life - I sat huddled
with my sister and parents around our Telefunken radiogram, while
telecommunications struck the fear of God and China into our hearts. And my
father now said a fateful thing: 'Wife,' he intoned gravely, while Jamila
and I shook with fear, 'Begum Sahiba, this country is finished. Bankrupt.
Funtoosh.' The evening paper proclaimed the end of the optimism disease:
PUBLIC MORALE DRAINS AWAY. And after that end, there were others to come;
other things would also drain away.
I went to bed with my head full of Chinese faces guns tanks ... but at
midnight, my head was empty and quiet, because the midnight Conference had
drained away as well; the only one of the magic children who was willing to
talk to me was Parvati-the-witch, and we, dejected utterly by what
Nussie-the-duck would have called 'the end of the world', were unable to do
more than simply commune in silence.
And other, more mundane drainages: a crack appeared in the mighty
Bhakra Nangal Hydro-Electric Dam, and the great reservoir behind it flooded
through the fissure ... and the Narlikar women's reclamation consortium,
impervious to optimism or defeat or anything except the lure of wealth,
continued to draw land out of the depths of the seas ... but the final
evacuation, the one which truly gives this episode its title, took place the
next morning, just when I had relaxed and thought that something, after all,
might turn out all right ... because in the morning we heard the improbably
joyous news that the Chinese had suddenly, without needing to, stopped
advancing; having gained control of the Himalayan heights, they were
apparently content; CEASEFIRE! the newspapers screamed, and my mother almost
fainted in relief. (There was talk that General Kaul had been taken
prisoner; the President of India, Dr Radhakrishan, commented,
'Unfortunately, this report is completely untrue.')
Despite streaming eyes and puffed-up sinuses, I was happy; despite even
the end of the Children's Conference, I was basking in the new glow of
happiness which permeated Buckingham Villa; so when my mother suggested,
'Let's go and celebrate! A picnic, children, you'd like that?' I naturally
agreed with alacrity. It was the morning of November 21st; we helped make
sandwiches and parathas; we stopped at a fizzy-drinks shop and loaded ice in
a tin tub and Cokes in a crate into the boot of our Rover; parents in the
front, children in the back, we set off. Jamila Singer sang for us as we
drove.
Through inflamed sinuses, I asked: 'Where are we going? Juhu?
Elephanta? Marve? Where?' And my mother, smiling awkwardly: 'Surprise; wait
and see.' Through streets filled with relieved, rejoicing crowds we drove
... 'This is the wrong way,' I exclaimed; 'This isn't the way to a beach?'
My parents both spoke at once, reassuringly, brightly: 'Just one stop first,
and then we're off; promise.'
Telegrams recalled me; radiograms frightened me; but it was a telephone
which booked the date time place of my undoing ... and my parents lied to
me.
... We halted in front of an unfamiliar building in Carnac Road.
Exterior: crumbling. All its windows: blind. 'You coming with me, son?'
Ahmed Sinai got out of the car; I, happy to be accompanying my father on his
business, walked jauntily beside him. A brass plate on the doorway:
Ear Nose
Throat Clinic.
And I, suddenly alarmed: 'What's this, Abba? Why have we come
...' And my father's hand, tightening on my shoulder - and then a man in a
white coat - and nurses - and 'Ah yes Mr. Sinai so this is young Saleem -
right on time - fine, fine'; while I, 'Abba, no - what about the picnic -';
but doctors are steering me along now, my father is dropping back, the man
in the coat calls to him, 'Shan't be long - damn good news about the war,
no?' And the nurse, 'Please accompany me for dressing and anaesthesia.'
Tricked! Tricked, Padma! I told you: once, picnics tricked me; and then
there was a hospital and a room with a hard bed and bright hanging lamps and
me crying, 'No no no,' and the nurse, 'Don't be stupid now, you're almost a
grown man, lie down,' and I, remembering how nasal passages had started
everything in my head, how nasal fluid had been sniffed upupup into
somewhere-that-nosefluid-shouldn't-go, how .the connection had been made
which released my voices, was kicking yelling so that they had to hold me
down, 'Honestly,' the nurse said, 'such a baby, I never saw.'
And so what began in a washing-chest ended on an operating table,
because I was held down hand-and-foot and a man saying 'You won't feel a
thing, easier than having your tonsils out, get those sinuses fixed in no
time, complete clear-out,' and me 'No please no,' but the voice continued,
'I'll put this mask on you now, just count to ten.'
Count. The numbers marching one two three.
Hiss of released gas. The numbers crushing me four five six.
Faces swimming in fog. And still the tumultuous numbers, I was crying,
I think, the numbers pounding seven eight nine.
Ten.
'Good God, the boy's still conscious. Extraordinary. We'd better try
another - can you hear me? Saleem, isn't it? Good chap, just give me another
ten!' Can't catch me. Multitudes have teemed inside my head. The master of
the numbers, me. Here they go again 'leven twelve.
But they'll never let up until... thirteen fourteen fifteen ... O God O
God the fog dizzy and falling back back back, sixteen, beyond war and
pepperpots, back back, seventeen eighteen nineteen.
Twen
There was a washing-chest and a boy who sniffed too hard. His mother
undressed and revealed a Black Mango. Voices came, which were not the voices
of Archangels. A hand, deafening the left ear. And what grew best in the
heat: fantasy, irrationality, lust. There was a clocktower refuge, and
cheatery-in-class. And love in Bombay caused a bicycle-accident;
horn-temples entered forcep-hollows, and five hundred and eighty-one
children visited my head. Midnight's children: who may have been the
embodiment of the hope of freedom, who may also have been
freaks-who-ought-to-be-finished-off. Parvati-the-witch, most loyal of all,
and Shiva, who became a principle of life. There was a question of purpose,
and the debate between ideas and things. There were knees and nose and nose
and knees.
Quarrels, began, and the adult world infiltrated the children's; there
was selfishness and snobbishness and hate. And the impossibility of a third
principle; the fear of coming-to-nothing-after-all began to grow. And what
nobody said: that the purpose of the five hundred and eighty-one lay in
their destruction; that they had come, in order to come to nothing.
Prophecies were ignored when they spoke to this effect.
And revelations, and the closing of a mind; and exile, and
four-years-after return; suspicions growing, dissension breeding, departures
in twenties and tens. And, at the end, just one voice left; but optimism
lingered - what-we-had-in-common retained the possibility of overpowering
what-forced-us-apart.
Until:
Silence outside me. A dark room (blinds down). Can't see anything
(nothing there to see).
Silence inside me. A connection broken (for ever). Can't hear anything
(nothing there to hear).
Silence, like a desert. And a clear, free nose (nasal passages full of
air). Air, like a vandal, invading my private places.
Drained. I have been drained. The parahamsa, grounded.
(For good.)
O, spell it out, spell it out: the operation whose ostensible purpose
was the draining of my inflamed sinuses and the once-and-for-all clearing of
my nasal passages had the effect of breaking whatever connection had been
made in a washing-chest; of depriving me of nose-given telepathy; of
banishing me from the possibility of midnight children.
Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names
have not acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than
mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles.
Sinai
contains Ibn Sina,
master magician, Sufi adept; and also Sin the moon, the ancient god of
Hadhramaut, with his own mode of connection, his powers of
action-at-a-distance upon the tides of the world. But Sin is also the letter
S, as sinuous as a snake; serpents lie coiled within the name. And there is
also the accident of transliteration - Sinai, when in Roman script, though
not in Nastaliq, is also the name of the place-of-revelation, of
put-off-thy-shoes, of commandments and golden calves; but when all that is
said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes
lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert - of
barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end.
In Arabia -
Arabia Deserta -
at the time of the prophet Muhammad, other
prophets also preached: Maslama of the tribe of the Banu Hanifa in the
Yamama, the very heart of Arabia; and Hanzala ibn Safwan; and Khalid ibn
Sinan. Maslama's God was ar-Rahman, 'the Merciful'; today Muslims pray to
Allah, ar-Rahman. Khalid ibn Sinan was sent to the tribe of 'Abs; for a
time, he was followed, but then he was lost. Prophets are not always false
simply because they are overtaken, and swallowed up, by history. Men of
worth have always roamed the desert.
'Wife,' Ahmed Sinai said, 'this country is finished.' After ceasefire
and drainage, these words returned to haunt him; and Amina began to persuade
him to emigrate to Pakistan, where her surviving sisters already were, and
to which her mother would go after her father's death. 'A fresh start,' she
suggested, 'Janum, it would be lovely. What is left for us on this
God-forsaken hill?'
So in the end Buckingham Villa was delivered into the clutches of the
Narlikar women, after all; and over fifteen years late, my family moved to
Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. Ahmed Sinai left very little behind; there
are ways of transmitting money with the help of multi-national companies,
and my father knew those ways. And I, although sad to leave the city of my
birth, was not unhappy about moving away from the city in which Shiva lurked
somewhere like a carefully-concealed land-mine.
We left Bombay, finally, in February 1963; and on the day of our
departure I took an old tin globe down to the garden and buried it amongst
the cacti. Inside it: a Prime Minister's-letter, and a jumbo-sized
front-page baby-snap, captioned 'Midnight's Child' ... They may not be holy
relics - I do not presume to compare the trivial memorabilia of my life with
the Hazratbal hair of the Prophet, or the body of St Francis Xavier in the
Cathedral of Bom Jesus - but they are all that has survived of my past: a
squashed tin globe, a mildewed letter, a photograph. Nothing else, not even
a silver spittoon. Apart from a Monkey-crushed planet, the only records are
sealed in the closed books of heaven, Sidjeen and Illiyun, the Books of Evil
and Good; at any rate, that's the story.
... Only when we were aboard S.S.
Sabarmati,
and anchored off the Rann
of Kutch, did I remember old Schaapsteker; and wondered, suddenly, if anyone
had told him we were going. I didn't dare to ask, for fear that the answer
might be
no;
so as I thought of the demolition crew getting to work, and
pictured the machines of destruction smashing into my father's office and my
own blue room, pulling down the servants' spiral iron staircase and the
kitchen in which Mary Pereira had stirred her fears into chutneys and
pickles, massacring the verandah where my mother had sat with the child in
her belly like a stone, I ako had an image of a mighty, swinging ball
crashing into the domain of Sharpsticker sahib, and of the old crazy man
himself, pale wasted flick-tongued, being exposed there on top of a
crumbling house, amid falling towers and red-tiled roof, old Schaapsteker
shrivelling ageing dying in the sunlight which he hadn't seen for so many
years. But perhaps I'm dramatizing; I may have got all this from an old film
called
Lost Horizon,
in which beautiful women shrivelled and died when they
departed from Shangri-La.
For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake. We
arrived in Karachi on February 9th - and within months, my sister Jamila had
been launched on the career which would earn her the names of 'Pakistan's
Angel' and 'Bulbul-of-the-Faith'; we had left Bombay, but we gained
reflected glory. And one more thing: although I had been drained - although
no voices spoke in my head, and never would again - there was one
compensation: namely that, for the first time in my life, I was discovering
the astonishing delights of possessing a sense of smell.
Jamila Singer
It turned out to be a sense so acute as to be capable of distinguishing
the glutinous reek of hypocrisy behind the welcoming smile with which my
spinster aunt Alia greeted us at the Karachi docks. Irremediably embittered
by my father's years-ago defection into the arms of her sister, my
headmistress aunt had acquired the heavy-footed corpulence of undimmed
jealousy; the thick dark hairs of her resentment sprouted through most of
the pores of her skin. And perhaps she succeeded in deceiving my parents and
Jamila with her spreading arms, her waddling run towards us, her cry of
'Ahmed bhai, at last! But better late than never!', her spider-like - and
inevitably accepted - offers of hospitality; but I, who had spent much of my
babyhood in the bitter mittens and soured pom-pom hats of her envy, who had
been unknowingly infected with failure by the innocent-looking baby-things
into which she had knitted her hatred, and who, moreover, could clearly
remember what it was like to be possessed by revenge-lust, I,
Saleem-the-drained, could smell the vengeful odours leaking out of her
glands. I was, however, powerless to protest; we were swept into the Datsun
of her vengeance and driven away down Bunder Road to her house at Guru
Mandir - like flies, only more foolish, because we celebrated our captivity.
... But what a sense of smell it was! Most of us are conditioned, from
the cradle onwards, into recognizing the narrowest possible spectrum of
fragrances; I, however, had been incapable of smelling a thing all my life,
and was accordingly ignorant of all olfactory taboos. As a result, I had a
tendency not to feign innocence when someone broke wind - which landed me in
a certain amount of parental trouble; more important, however, was my nasal
freedom to inhale a very great deal more than the scents of purely physical
origin with which the rest of the human race has chosen to be content. So,
from the earliest days of my Pakistani adolescence, I began to learn the
secret aromas of the world, the heady but quick-fading perfume of new love,
and also the deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate. (It was not long after
my arrival in the 'Land of the Pure' that I discovered within myself the
ultimate impurity of sister-love; and the slow burning fires of my aunt
filled my nostrils from the start.) A nose will give you knowledge, but not
power-over-events; my invasion of Pakistan, armed (if that's the right word)
only with a new manifestation of my nasal inheritance, gave me the powers of
sniffing-out-the-truth, of smelling-what-was-in-the-air, of following
trails; but not the only power an invader needs - the strength to conquer my
foes.
I won't deny it: I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay. Set
between the desert and bleakly saline creeks whose shores were littered with
stunted mangroves, my new city seemed to possess an ugliness which eclipsed
even my own; having grown too fast - its population had quadrupled since
1947 - it had acquired the misshapen lumpiness of a gigantic dwarf. On my
sixteenth birthday, I was given a Lambretta motor-scooter; riding the city
streets on my windowless vehicle, I breathed in the fatalistic hopelessness
of the slum dwellers and the smug defensiveness of the rich; I was sucked
along the smell-trails of dispossession and also fanaticism, lured down a
long underworld corridor at whose end was the door to Tai Bibi, the oldest
whore in the world ... but I'm running away with myself. At the heart of my
Karachi was Alia Aziz's house, a large old building on Clayton Road (she
must have wandered in it for years like a ghost with nobody to haunt), a
place of shadows and yellowed paint, across which there fell, every
afternoon, the long accusing shadow of the minaret of the local mosque. Even
when, years later in the magicians' ghetto, I lived in another mosque's
shade, a shade which was, at least for a time, a protective, unmenacing
penumbra, I never lost my Karachi-born view of mosque-shadows, in which, it
seemed to me, I could sniff the narrow, clutching, accusative odour of my
aunt. Who bided her time; but whose vengeance, when it came, was crushing.
It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had
not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert's power. Oases shone in the
tarmac of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst
the hovels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city
(whose only common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had
started life as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient
powers of apparition-mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only
the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to
their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by
illusionary sand-dunes and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the
knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant
'submission', my new fellow-citizens exuded the flat boiled odours of
acquiescence, which were depressing to a nose which had smelt - at the very
last, and however briefly - the highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay.
Soon after our arrival - and, perhaps, oppressed by the mosque-shadowed
air of the Clayton Road house - my father resolved to build us a new home.
He bought a. plot of land in the smartest of the 'societies', the new
housing development zones; and on my sixteenth birthday, Saleem acquired
more than a Lambretta - I learned the occult powers of umbilical cords.
What, pickled in brine, sat for sixteen years in my father's almirah,
awaiting just such a day? What, floating like a water-snake in an old
pickle-jar, accompanied us on our sea-journey and ended up buried in hard,
barren Karachi-earth? What had once nourished life in a womb - what now
infused earth with miraculous life, and gave birth to a split-level,
American-style modern bungalow?... Eschewing these cryptic questions, I
explain that, on my sixteenth birthday, my family (including Alia aunty)
assembled on our plot of Korangi Road earth; watched by the eyes of a team
of labourers and the beard of a mullah, Ahmed handed Saleem a pickaxe; I
drove it inaugurally into the ground. 'A new beginning,' Amina said,
'Inshallah, we shall all be new people now.' Spurred on by her noble and
unattainable desire, a workman rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a
pickle-jar was produced. Brine was discarded on the thirsty ground; and
what-was-left-inside received the mullah's blessings. After which, an
umbilical cord - was it mine? Or Shiva's? - was implanted in the earth; and
at once, a house began to grow. There were sweetmeats and soft drinks; the
mullah, displaying remarkable hunger, consumed thirty-nine laddoos; and
Ahmed Sinai did not once complain of the expense. The spirit of the buried
cord inspired the workmen; but although the foundations were dug very deep,
they would not prevent the house from falling down before we ever lived in
it.
What I surmised about umbilical cords: although they possessed the
power of growing houses, some were evidently better at the job than others.
The city of Karachi proved my point; clearly constructed on top of entirely
unsuitable cords, it was full of deformed houses, the stunted hunchback
children of deficient lifelines, houses growing mysteriously blind, with no
visible windows, houses which looked like radios or air-conditioners or
jail-cells, crazy top-heavy edifices which fell over with monotonous
regularity, like drunks; a wild proliferation of mad houses, whose
inadequacies as living quarters were exceeded only by their quite
exceptional ugliness. The city obscured the desert; but either the cords, or
the infertility of the soil, made it grow into something grotesque.
Capable of smelling sadness and joy, of sniffing out intelligence and
stupidity with my eyes closed, I arrived at Karachi, and adolescence -
understanding, of course, that the subcontinent's new nations and I had all
left childhood behind; that growing pains and strange awkward alterations of
voice were in store for us all. Drainage censored my inner life; my sense of
connection remained undrained.
Saleem invaded Pakistan armed only with a hypersensitive nose; but,
worst of all, he invaded
from the wrong direction
! All successful conquests
of that part of the world have begun in the north; all conquerors have come
by land. Sailing ignorantly against the winds of history, I reached Karachi
from the south-east, and by sea. What followed should not, I suppose, have
surprised me.
With hindsight, the advantages of sweeping down from the north are
self-evident. From the north came the Umayyad generals, Hajjaj bin Yusuf and
Muhammad bin Qasim; also the Ismailis. (Honeymoon Lodge, where it is said
Aly Khan sojourned with Rita Hayworth, overlooked our plot of umbilicized
earth; rumour has it that the film-star created much scandal by wandering in
the grounds dressed in a series of fabulous, gauzy, Hollywood negligees.) O
ineluctable superiority of northernness! From which direction did Mahmud of
Ghazni descend upon these Indus plains, bringing with him a language
boasting no fewer than three forms of the letter S? The inescapable answer:
se, sin and swad were northern intruders. And Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, who
overthrew the Ghaznavids and established the Delhi Caliphate? Sam Ghuri's
son, too, moved southwards on his progress.
And Tughlaq, and the Mughal Emperors ... but I've made my point. It
remains only to add that ideas, as well as armies, swept south south south
from the northern heights: the legend of Sikandar But-Shikan, the Iconoclast
of Kashmir, who at the end of the fourteenth century destroyed every Hindu
temple in the Valley (establishing a precedent for my grandfather),
travelled down from the hills to the river-plains; and five hundred years
later the mujahideen movement of Syed Ahmad Barilwi followed the
well-trodden trail. Barilwi's ideas: self-denial, hatred-of-Hindus, holy
war... philosophies as well as kings (to cut this short) came from the
opposite direction to me.
Saleem's parents said, 'We must all become new people'; in the land of
the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with
Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah's
(like India's first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived
in a country whose population of deities rivalled the numbers of its people,
so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities,
my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body was
to show a marked preference for the impure. Mopla-like, I was doomed to be a
misfit; but, in the end, purity found me out, and even I, Saleem, was
cleansed of my misdeeds.
After my sixteenth birthday, I studied history at my aunt Alia's
college; but not even learning could make me feel a part of this country
devoid of midnight children, in which my fellow-students took out
processions to demand a stricter, more Islamic society -proving that they
had contrived to become the antitheses of students everywhere else on earth,
by demanding more-rules-not-less. My parents, however, were determined to
put down roots; although Ayub Khan and Bhutto were forging an alliance with
China (which had so recently been our enemy), Ahmed and Amina would listen
to no criticisms of their new home; and my father bought a towel factory.
There was a new brilliance about my parents in those days; Amina had
lost her guilt-fog, her verrucas seemed not to be playing up any more; while
Ahmed, although still whitened, had felt the freeze of his loins thawing
under the heat of his newfound love for his wife. On some mornings, Amina
had toothmarks on her neck; she giggled uncontrollably at times, like a
schoolgirl. 'You two, honestly,' her sister Alia said, 'Like honeymooners or
I don't know what.' But I could smell what was hidden behind Alia's teeth;
what stayed inside when the friendly words came out... Ahmed Sinai named his
towels after his wife: Amina Brand.
'Who are these multi-multis? These Dawoods, Saigols, Haroons?' he cried
gaily, dismissing the richest families in the land. 'Who are Valikas or
Zulfikars? I could eat them ten at a time. You wait!', he promised, 'In two
years the whole world will be wiping itself on an Amina Brand cloth. The
finest terry-cloth! The most modern machines! We shall make the whole world
clean and dry; Dawoods and Zulfikars will beg to know my secret; and I will
say, yes, the towels are high-quality; but the secret is not in the
manufacturing; it was love that conquered all.' (I discerned, in my father's
speech, the lingering effects of the optimism virus.)
Did Amina Brand conquer the world in the name of cleanliness (which is
next to ...)? Did Valikas and Saigols come to ask Ahmed Sinai, 'God, we're
stumped, yaar, how'd you do it?' Did high-quality terry-cloth, in patterns
devised by Ahmed himself - a little gaudy, but never mind, they were born of
love - wipe away the moist-ness of Pakistanis and export-markets alike? Did
Russians Englishmen Americans wrap themselves in my mother's immortalized
name? ... The story of Amina Brand must wait awhile; because the career of
Jamila Singer is about to take off; the mosque-shadowed house on Clayton
Road has been visited by Uncle Puffs.
His real name was Major (Retired) Alauddin Latif; he had heard about my
sister's voice from 'my darn good friend General Zulfikar; use to be with
him in the Border Patrol Force back in '47.' He turned up at Alia Aziz's
house shortly after Jamila's fifteenth birthday, beaming and bouncing,
revealing a mouth filled with solid gold teeth. 'I'm a simple fellow,' he
explained, 'like our illustrious President. I keep my cash where it's safe.'
Like our illustrious President, the Major's head was perfectly spherical;
unlike Ayub Khan, Latif had left the Army and entered show-business.
'Pakistan's absolute number-one impresario, old man,' he told my father.
'Nothing to it but organization; old Army habit, dies darn hard.' Major
Latif had a proposition: he wanted to hear Jamila sing, 'And if she's two
per cent as good as I'm told, my good sir, I'll make her famous! Oh, yes,
overnight, certainly! Contacts: that's all it takes; contacts and
organization; and yours truly Major (Retired) Latif has the lot.
Alauddin
Latif,' he stressed, flashing goldly at Ahmed Sinai, 'Know the story? I just
rub my jolly old lamp and out pops the genie bringing fame and fortune. Your
girl will be in darn good hands.
Dam
good.'
It is fortunate for Jamila Singer's legion of fans that Ahmed Sinai was
a man in love with his wife; mellowed by his own happiness, he failed to
eject Major Latif on the spot. I also believe today that my parents had
already come to the conclusion that their daughter's gift was too
extraordinary to keep to themselves; the sublime magic of her angel's voice
had begun to teach them the inevitable imperatives of talent. But Ahmed and
Amina had one concern. 'Our daughter,' Ahmed said - he was always the more
old-fashioned of the two beneath the surface - 'is from a good family; but
you want to put her on a stage in front of God knows how many strange men
... ?' The Major looked affronted. 'Sir,' he said stiffly, 'you think I am
not a man of sensibility? Got daughters myself, old man. Seven, thank God.
Set up a little travel agency business for them; strictly over the
telephone, though. Wouldn't dream of sitting them in an office-window. It's
the biggest telephonic travel agency in the place, actually. We send
train-drivers to England, matter of fact; bus-wallahs, too. My point,' he
added hastily, 'is that your daughter would be given as much respect as
mine. More, actually; she's going to be a star!'
Major Latif's daughters - Sana and Rafia and five other -afias -were
dubbed, collectively, 'the Puffias' by the remaining Monkey in my sister;
their father was nicknamed first Tather-Puffia' and then Uncle - a courtesy
title - Puffs. He was as good as his word; in six months Jamila Singer was
to have hit records, an army of admirers, everything; and all, as I'll
explain in a moment, without revealing her face.
Uncle Puffs became a fixture in our lives; he visited the Clayton Road
house most evenings, at what I used to think of as the cocktail hour, to sip
pomegranate juice and ask Jamila to sing a little something. She, who was
growing into the sweetest-natured of girls, always obliged ... afterwards he
would clear his throat as if something had got stuck in it and begin to joke
heartily with me about getting married. Twenty-four-carat grins blinded me
as he, 'Time you took a wife, young man. Take my advice: pick a girl with
good brains and bad teeth; you'll have got a friend and a safe-deposit box
rolled into one!' Uncle Puffs' daughters, he claimed, all conformed to the
above description ... I, embarrassed, smelling out that he was only
half-joking, would cry, 'O, Uncle
Puffs!'
He knew his nick-name; quite liked
it, even. Slapping my thigh, he cried, 'Playing hard to get, eh? Darn right.
O.K., my boy: you pick one of my girls, and I guarantee to have all her
teeth pulled out; by the time you marry her she'll have a million-buck smile
for a dowry!' Whereupon my mother usually contrived to change the subject;
she wasn't keen on Uncle Puffs' idea, no matter how pricey the dentures ...
on that first night, as so often afterwards, Jamila sang to Major Alauddin
Latif. Her voice wafted out through the window and silenced the traffic; the
birds stopped chattering and, at the hamburger shop across the street, the
radio was switched off; the street was full of stationary people, and my
sister's voice washed over them ... when she finished, we noticed that Uncle
Puffs was crying.
'A jewel,' he said, honking into a handkerchief, 'Sir and Madam, your
daughter is a jewel. I am humbled, absolutely. Darn humbled. She has proved
to me that a golden voice is preferable even to golden teeth.'
And when Jamila Singer's fame had reached the point at which she could
no longer avoid giving a public concert, it was Uncle Puffs who started the
rumour that she had been involved in a terrible, disfiguring car-crash; it
was Major (Retired) Latif who devised her famous, all-concealing, white silk
chadar, the curtain or veil, heavily embroidered in gold brocade-work and
religious calligraphy, behind which she sat demurely whenever she performed
in public. The chadar of Jamila Singer was held up by two tireless, muscular
figures, also (but more simply) veiled from head to foot - the official
story was that they were her female attendants, but their sex was impossible
to determine through their burqas; and at its very centre, the Major had cut
a hole. Diameter: three inches. Circumference: embroidered in finest gold
thread. That was how the history of our family once again became the fate of
a nation, because when Jamila sang with her lips pressed against the
brocaded aperture, Pakistan fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl whom
it only ever glimpsed through a gold-and-white perforated sheet.
The accident rumour set the final seal on her popularity; her concerts
packed out the Bambino theatre in Karachi and filled the Shalimar-bagh in
Lahore; her records constantly topped the sales charts. And as she became
public property, 'Pakistan's Angel', 'The Voice of the Nation', the
'Bulbul-e-Din' or nightingale-of-the-faith, and began to receive one
thousand and one firm proposals of marriage a week; as she became the whole
country's favourite daughter and grew into an existence which threatened to
overwhelm her place in our own family, so she fell prey to the twin viruses
of fame, the first of which made her the victim of her own public image,
because the accident-rumour obliged her to wear a gold-and-white burqa at
all times, even in my aunt Alia's school, which she continued to attend;
while the second virus subjected her to the exaggerations and
simplifications of self which are the unavoidable side-effects of stardom,
so that the blind and blinding devoutness and the right-or-wrong nationalism
which had already begun to emerge in her now began to dominate her
personality, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Publicity
imprisoned her inside a gilded tent; and, being the new
daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident
aspects of the national persona than to the child-world of her Monkey years.
Jamila Singer's voice was on Voice-Of-Pakistan Radio constantly, so
that in the villages of West and East Wings she came to seem like a
superhuman being, incapable of being fatigued, an angel who sang to her
people through all the days and nights; while Ahmed Sinai, whose few
remaining qualms about his daughter's career had been more than allayed by
her enormous earnings (although he had once been a Delhi man, he was by now
a true Bombay Muslim at heart, placing cash matters above most other
things), became fond of telling my sister: 'You see, daughter: decency,
purity, art and good business sense can be one and the same things; your old
father has been wise enough to work that out.' Jamila smiled sweetly and
agreed ... she was growing out of scrawny tomboy youth into a slender,
slant-eyed, golden-skinned beauty whose hair was nearly long enough to sit
on; even her nose looked good. 'In my daughter,' Ahmed Sinai told Uncle
Puffs proudly, 'it is my side of the family's noble features which have
prevailed.' Uncle Puffs cast a quizzical, awkward glance at me and cleared
his throat. 'Darn fine-looking girl, sir,' he told my father, 'Top-hole, by
gum.'
The thunder of applause was never far from my sister's ears; at her
first, now-legendary Bambino recital (we sat in seats provided by Uncle
Puffs - 'Best darn seats in the house!' - beside his seven Puffias, all
veiled ... Uncle Puffs dug me in the ribs, 'Hey, boy -choose! Take your
pick! Remember: the dowry!' and I blushed and stared hard at the stage), the
cries of '
Wah! Wah!'
were sometimes louder than Jamila's voice; and after
the show we found Jamila back-stage drowning in a sea of flowers, so that we
had to fight our way through the blossoming camphor garden of the nation's
love, to find that she was almost fainting, not from fatigue, but from the
overpoweringly sweet perfume of adoration with which the blooms had filled
the room. I, too, felt my head beginning to swim; until Uncle Puffs began to
hurl flowers in great bushels from an open window - they were gathered by a
crowd of fans - while he cried, 'Flowers arc fine, darn it, but even a
national heroine needs air!'
There was applause, too, on the evening Jamila Singer (and family) was
invited to President House to sing for the commander of pepper-pots.
Ignoring reports in foreign magazines about embezzled money and Swiss bank
accounts, we scrubbed ourselves until we shone; a family in the towel
business is obliged to be spotlessly clean. Uncle Puffs gave his gold teeth
an extra-careful polish; and in a large hall dominated by garlanded
portraits of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Quaid-i-Azam,
and of his assassinated friend and successor Liaquat Ali, a perforated sheet
was held up and my sister sang. Jamila's voice fell silent at last; the
voice of gold braid succeeded her brocade-bordered song. 'Jamila daughter,'
we heard, 'your voice will be a sword for purity; it will be a weapon with
which we shall cleanse men's souls.' President Ayub was, by his own
admission, a simple soldier; he instilled in my sister the simple, soldierly
virtues of faith-in-leaders and trust-in-God; and she, 'The President's will
is the voice of my heart.' Through the hole in a perforated sheet, Jamila
Singer dedicated herself to patriotism; and the diwan-i-khas, the hall of
this private audience, rang with applause, polite now, not the wild
wah-wahing of the Bambino crowd, but the regimented approbation of braided
gongs-and-pips and the delighted clapping of weepy parents. 'I say!' Uncle
Puffs whispered, 'Darn fine, eh?'
What I could smell, Jamila could sing. Truth beauty happiness pain:
each had its separate fragrance, and could be distinguished by my nose;
each, in Jamila's performances, could find its ideal voice. My nose, her
voice: they were exactly complementary gifts; but they were growing apart.
While Jamila sang patriotic songs, my nose seemed to prefer to linger on the
uglier smells which invaded it: the bitterness of Aunt Alia, the hard
unchanging sunk of my fellow-students' closed minds; so that while she rose
into the clouds, I fell into the gutter.
Looking back, however, I think I was already in love with her, long
before I was told ... is there proof of Saleem's unspeakable sister-love?
There is. Jamila Singer had one passion in common with the vanished Brass
Monkey; she loved bread. Chapatis, parathas, tandoori nans? Yes, but. Well
then: was yeast preferred? It was; my sister -despite patriotism - hankered
constantly after leavened bread. And, in all Karachi, what was the only
source of quality, yeasty loaves? Not a baker's; the best bread in the city
was handed out through a hatch in an otherwise blind wall, every Thursday
morning, by the sisters of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia. Each week, on
my Lambretta scooter, I brought my sister the warm fresh loaves of nuns.
Despite long snaking queues; making light of the overspiced, hot, dung-laden
odour of the narrow streets around the nunnery; ignoring all other calls
upon my time, I fetched the bread. Criticism was entirely absent from my
heart; never once did I ask my sister whether this last relic of her old
flirtation with Christianity might not look rather bad in her new role of
Bulbul of the Faith ...
Is it possible to trace the origins of unnatural love? Did Saleem, who
had yearned after a place in the centre of history, become besotted with
what he saw in his sister of his own hopes for life? Did much-mutilated
no-longer-Snotnose, as broken a member of the Midnight Children's Conference
as the knife-scarred beggar-girl Sundari, fall in love with the new
wholeness of his sibling? Once the Mubarak, the Blessed One, did I adore in
my sister the fulfilment of my most private dreams? ... I shall say only
that I was unaware of what had happened to me until, with a scooter between
my sixteen-year-old thighs, I began to follow the spoors of whores.
While Alia smouldered; during the early days of Amina Brand towels;
amid the apotheosis of Jamila Singer; when a split-level house, rising by
command of an umbilical cord, was still far from complete; in the time of
the late-flowering love of my parents; surrounded by the somehow barren
certitudes of the land of the pure, Saleem Sinai came to terms with himself.
I will not say he was not sad; refusing to censor my past, I admit he was as
sullen, often as uncooperative, certainly as spotty as most boys of his age.
His dreams, denied the children of midnight, became filled with nostalgia to
the point of nausea, so that he often woke up gagging with the heavy musk of
regret overpowering his senses; there were nightmares of numbers marching
one two three, and of a tightening, throttling pair of prehensile knees ...
but there was a new gift, and a Lambretta scooter, and (though still
unconscious) a humble, submissive love of his sister ... jerking my
narrator's eyes away from the described past, I insist that Saleem,
then-as-now, succeeded in turning his attention towards the
as-yet-undescribed future. Escaping, whenever possible, from a residence in
which the acrid fumes of his aunt's envy made life unbearable, and also from
a college filled with other equally dislikeable smells, I mounted my
motorized steed and explored the olfactory avenues of my new city. And after
we heard of my grandfather's death in Kashmir, I became even more determined
to drown the past in the thick, bubbling scent-stew of the present... O
dizzying early days before categorization! Formlessly, before I began to
shape them, the fragrances poured into me: the mournful decaying fumes of
animal faeces in the gardens of the Frere Road museum, the pustular body
odours of young men in loose pajamas holding hands in Sadar evenings, the
knife-sharpness of expectorated betel-nut and the bitter-sweet commingling
of betel and opium: 'rocket paans' were sniffed out in the hawker-crowded
alleys between Elphin-stone Street and Victoria Road. Camel-smells,
car-smells, the gnat-like irritation of motor-rickshaw fumes, the aroma of
contraband cigarettes and 'black-money', the competitive effluvia of the
city's bus-drivers and the simple sweat of their sardine-crowded passengers.
(One bus-driver, in those days, was so incensed at being overtaken by his
rival from another company - the nauseating odour of defeat poured from his
glands - that he took his bus round to his opponent's house at night, hooted
until the poor fellow emerged, and ran him down beneath wheels reeking, like
my aunt, of revenge.) Mosques poured over me the itr of devotion; I could
smell the orotund emissions of power sent out by flag-waving Army motors; in
the very hoardings of the cinemas I could discern the cheap tawdry perfumes
of imported spaghetti Westerns and the most violent martial-arts films ever
made. I was, for a time, like a drugged person, my head reeling beneath the
complexities of smell; but then my overpowering desire for form asserted
itself, and I survived.
Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorated; the borders were closed, so that
we could not go to Agra to mourn my grandfather; Reverend Mother's
emigration to Pakistan was also somewhat delayed. In the meantime, Saleem
was working towards a general theory of smell: classification procedures had
begun. I saw this scientific approach as my own, personal obeisance to the
spirit of my grandfather ... to begin with, I perfected my skill at
distinguishing, until I could tell apart the infinite varieties of betel-nut
and (with my eyes shut) the twelve different available brands of fizzy
drink. (Long before the American commentator Herbert Feldman came to Karachi
to deplore the existence of a dozen aerated waters in a city which had only
three suppliers of bottled milk, I could sit blindfolded and tell Pakola
from Hoffman's Mission, Citra Cola from Fanta. Feldman saw these drinks as a
manifestation of capitalist imperialism; I, sniffing out which was Canada
Dry and which 7-Up, unerringly separating Pepsi from Coke, was more
interested in passing their subtle olfactory test. Double Kola and Kola
Kola, Perri Cola and Bubble Up were blindly indentified and named.) Only
when I was sure of my mastery of physical scents did I move on to those
other aromas which only I could smell: the perfumes of emotions and all the
thousand and one drives which make us human: love and death, greed and
humility, have and have-not were labelled and placed in neat compartments of
my mind.
Early attempts at ordering: I tried to classify smells by
colour-boiling underwear and the printer's ink of the
Daily Jang
shared a
quality of blueness, while old teak and fresh farts were both dark brown.
Motor-cars and graveyards I jointly classified as grey ... there was, too,
classification-by-weight: flyweight smells (paper), bantam odours
(soap-fresh bodies, grass), welterweights (perspiration,
queen-of-the-night); shahi-korma and bicycle-oil were light-heavy-weight in
my system, while anger, patchouli, treachery and dung were among the
heavyweight stinks of the earth. And I had a geometric system also: the
roundness of joy and the angularity of ambition; I had elliptical smells,
and also ovals and squares ... a lexicographer of the nose, I travelled
Bunder Road and the P.E.C.H.S.; a lepidopterist, I snared whins like
butterflies in the net of my nasal hairs. O wondrous voyages before the
birth of philosophy!... Because soon I understood that my work must, if it
was to have any value, acquire a moral dimension; that the only important
divisions were the infinitely subtle gradations of good and evil smells.
Having realized the crucial nature of morality, having sniffed out that
smells could be sacred or profane, I invented, in the isolation of my
scooter-trips, the science of nasal ethics.
Sacred: purdah-veils, halal meat, muezzin's towers, prayer-mats;
profane: Western records, pig-meat, alcohol. I understood now why mullahs
(sacred) refused to enter aeroplanes (profane) on the night before
Id-ul-Fitr, not even willing to enter vehicles whose secret odour was the
antithesis of godliness in order to make sure of seeing the new moon. I
learned the olfactory incompatibility of Islam and socialism, and the
inalienable opposition existing between the after-shave of Sind Club members
and the poverty-reek of the street-sleeping beggars at the Club gates ...
more and more, however, I became convinced of an ugly truth - namely that
the sacred, or good, held little interest for me, even when such aromas
surrounded my sister as she sang; while the pungency of the gutter seemed to
possess a fatally irresistible attraction. Besides, I was sixteen; things
were stirring beneath my belt, behind my duck-white pants; and no city which
locks women away is ever short of whores. While Jamila sang of holiness and
love-of-country, I explored profanity and lust. (I had money to burn; my
father had become generous as well as loving.)
At the eternally unfinished Jinnah Mausoleum I picked up the women of
the street. Other youths came here to seduce American girls away, taking
them off to hotel rooms or swimming pools; I preferred to retain my
independence and pay. And eventually I nosed out the whore of whores, whose
gifts were a mirror for my own. Her name was Tai Bibi, and she claimed to be
five hundred and twelve.
But her smell! The richest spoor he, Saleem, had ever sniffed; he felt
bewitched by something in it, some air of historic majesty ... he found
himself saying to the toothless creature: 'I don't care about your age; the
smell's the thing.'
('My God,' Padma interrupts, 'Such a thing - how could you?') Though
she never hinted at any connection with a Kashmiri boatman, her name exerted
the strongest of pulls; although she may have been humouring Saleem when she
said, 'Boy, I am five hundred and twelve,' his sense of history was
nevertheless aroused. Think of me what you like; I spent one hot, humid
afternoon in a tenement-room containing a flea-ridden mattress and a naked
lightbulb and the oldest whore in the world.
What finally made Tai Bibi irresistible? What gift of control did she
possess which put other whores to shame? What maddened the newly-sensitized
nostrils of our Saleem? Padma: my ancient prostitute possessed a mastery
over her glands so total that she could alter her bodily odours to match
those of anyone on earth. Eccrines and apoc-rines obeyed the instructions of
her antiquated will; and although she said, 'Don't expect me to do it
standing up; you couldn't pay enough for that,' her gifts of perfume were
more than he could bear. (...
'Chhi-chhi,'
Padma covers her ears, 'My God,
such a dirty-filthy man, I never knew!' ...)
So there he was, this peculiar hideous youth, with an old hag who said,
'I won't stand up; my corns,' and then noticed that the mention of corns
seemed to arouse him; whispering the secret of her eccrine-and-apocrine
facility, she asked if he'd like her to imitate anyone's smells, he could
describe and she could try, and by trial-and-error they could ... and at
first he jerked away, No no no, but she coaxed him in her voice like
crumpled paper, until because he was alone, out of the world and out of all
time, alone with this impossible mythological old harridan, he began to
describe odours with all the perspicacity of his miraculous nose, and Tai
Bibi began to imitate his descriptions, leaving him aghast as by
trial-and-error she succeeded in reproducing the body odours of his mother
his aunts, oho you like that do you little sahibzada, go on, stick your nose
as close as you like, you're a funny fellow for sure ... until suddenly, by
accident, yes, I swear I didn't make her do it, suddenly during
trial-and-error the most unspeakable fragrance on earth wafts out of the
cracked wrinkled leather-ancient body, and now he can't hide what she sees,
oho, little sahibzada, what have I hit on now, you don't have to tell who
she is but this one is the one for sure.
And Saleem, 'Shut up shut up -' But Tai Bibi with the relent-lessness
of her cackling antiquity presses on, 'Oho yes, certainly, your lady-love,
little sahibzada - who? Your cousin, maybe? Your sister...' Saleem's hand is
tightening into a fist; the right hand, despite mutilated finger,
contemplates violence... and now Tai Bibi, 'My God yes! Your sister! Go on,
hit me, you can't hide what's sitting there in the middle of your forehead!
...' And Saleem gathering up his clothes struggling into trousers Shut up
old hag While she Yes go, go, but if you don't pay me I'll, I'll, you see
what I don't do, and now rupees flying across the room floating down around
five-hundred-and-twelve-year-old courtesan, Take take only shut your hideous
face, while she Careful my princeling you're not so handsome yourself,
dressed now and rushing from the tenement, Lambretta scooter waiting but
urchins have urinated on the seat, he is driving away as fast as he can go,
but the truth is going with him, and now Tai Bibi leaning out of a window
shouts, 'Hey, bhaenchud! Hey, little sister-sleeper, where you running?
What's true is true is true ...!'
You may legitimately ask: Did it happen in just this ... And surely she
couldn't have been five hundred and ... but I swore to confess everything,
and I insist that I learned the unspeakable secret of my love for Jamila
Singer from the mouth and scent-glands of that most exceptional of whores.
'Our Mrs Braganza is right,' Padma is scolding me, 'She says there is
nothing but dirt in the heads of the mens.' I ignore her; Mrs Braganza, and
her sister Mrs Fernandes, will be dealt with in due course; for the moment,
the latter must be content with the factory accounts while the former looks
after my son. And while I, to recapture the rapt attention of my revolted
Padma Bibi, recount a fairy-tale.
Once upon a time, in the far northern princedom of Kif, there lived a
prince who had two beautiful daughters, a son of equally remarkable good
looks, a brand-new Rolls-Royce motor car, and excellent political contacts.
This prince, or Nawab, believed passionately in progress, which was why he
had arranged the engagement of his elder daughter to the son of the
prosperous and well-known General Zulfikar; for his younger daughter he had
high hopes of a match with the son of the President himself. As for his
motor-car, the first ever seen in his mountain-ringed valley, he loved it
almost as much as his children; it grieved him that his subjects, who had
become used to using the roads of Kif for purposes of social intercourse,
quarrels and games of hit-the-spittoon, refused to get out of its way.
He
issued a proclamation explaining that the car represented the future, and
must be allowed to pass; the people ignored the notice, although it was
pasted to shop-fronts and walls and even, it is said, to the sides of cows.
The second notice was more peremptory, ordering the citizenry to clear the
highways when they heard the horn of the car; the Kifis, however, continued
to smoke and spit and argue in the streets. The third notice, which was
adorned with a gory drawing, said that the car would henceforth run down
anybody who failed to obey its horn. The Kifis added new, more scandalous
pictures to the one on the poster; and then the Nawab, who was a good man
but not one of infinite patience, actually did as he threatened. When the
famous singer Jamila arrived with her family and impresario to sing at her
cousin's engagement ceremony, the car drove her without trouble from border
to palace; and the Nawab said proudly, 'No trouble; the car is respected
now. Progress has occurred.'
The Nawab's son Mutasim, who had travelled abroad and wore his hair in
something called a 'beetle-cut', was a source of worry to his father;
because although he was so good-looking that, whenever he travelled around
Kif, girls with silver nose-jewellery fainted in the heat of his beauty, he
seemed to take no interest in such matters, being content with his
polo-ponies and the guitar on which he picked out strange Western songs. He
wore bush-shirts on which musical notation and foreign street-signs jostled
against the half-clad bodies of pink-skinned girls. But when Jamila Singer,
concealed within a gold-brocaded burqa, arrived at the palace, Mutasim the
Handsome - who owing to his foreign travels had never heard the rumours of
her disfigurement - became obsessed with the idea of seeing her face; he
fell head-over-heels with the glimpses of her demure eyes he saw through her
perforated sheet.
In those days, the President of Pakistan had decreed an election; it
was to take place on the day after the engagement ceremony, under a form of
suffrage called Basic Democracy. The hundred million people of Pakistan had
been divided up into a hundred and twenty thousand approximately equal
parts, and each part was represented by one Basic Democrat. The electoral
college of one hundred and twenty thousand 'B.D.s' were to elect the
President. In Kif, the 420 Basic Democrats included mullahs, road-sweepers,
the Nawab's chauffeur, numerous men who sharecropped hashish on the Nawab's
estate, and other loyal citizens; the Nawab had invited all of these to his
daughter's hennaing ceremony. He had, however, also been obliged to invite
two real badmashes, the returning officers of the Combined Opposition Party.
These badmashes quarrelled constantly amongst themselves, but the Nawab was
courteous and welcoming. 'Tonight you are my honoured friends,' he told
them, 'and tomorrow is another day.' The badmashes ate and drank as if they
had never seen food before, but everybody - even Mutasim the Handsome, whose
patience was shorter than his father's - was told to treat them well.
The Combined Opposition Party, you will not be surprised to hear, was a
collection of rogues and scoundrels of the first water, united only in their
determination to unseat the President and return to the bad old days in
which civilians, and not soldiers, lined their pockets from the public
exchequer; but for some reason they had acquired a formidable leader. This
was Mistress Fatima Jinriah, the sister of the founder of the nation, a
woman of such desiccated antiquity that the Nawab suspected she had died
long ago and been stuffed by a master taxidermist - a notion supported by
his son, who had seen a movie called
El Cid
in which a dead man led an army
into battle ... but there she was nevertheless, goaded into electioneering
by the President's failure to complete the marbling of her brother's
mausoleum; a terrible foe, above slander and suspicion. It was even said
that her opposition to the President had shaken the people's faith in him -
was he not, after all, the reincarnation of the great Islamic heroes of
yesteryear? Of Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, of Iltutmish and the Mughals? Even in
Kif itself, the Nawab had noticed C.O.P. stickers appearing in curious
places; someone had even had the cheek to affix one to the boot of the
Rolls. 'Bad days,' the Nawab told his son. Mutasim replied, 'That's what
elections get you - latrine cleaners and cheap tailors must vote to elect a
ruler?'
But today was a day for happiness; in the zenana chambers, women were
patterning the Nawab's daughter's hands and feet with delicate traceries of
henna; soon General Zulfikar and his son Zafar would arrive. The rulers of
Kif put the election out of their heads, refusing to think of the crumbling
figure of Fatima Jinnah, the mader-i-millat or mother of the nation who had
so callously chosen to confuse her children's choosing.
In the quarters of Jamila Singer's party, too, happiness reigned
supreme. Her father, a towel-manufacturer who could not seem to relinquish
the soft hand of his wife, cried, 'You see? Whose daughter is performing
here? Is it a Haroon girl? A Valika woman? Is it a Dawood of Saigol wench?
Like hell!' ... But his son Saleem, an unfortunate fellow with a face like a
cartoon, seemed to be gripped by some deep malaise, perhaps overwhelmed by
his presence at the scene of great historical events; he glanced towards his
gifted sister with something in his eyes which looked like shame.
That afternoon, Mutasim the Handsome took Jamila's brother Saleem to
one side and tried hard to make friends; he showed Saleem the peacocks
imported from Rajasthan before Partition and the Nawab's precious collection
of books of spells, from which he extracted such talismans and incantations
as would help him rule with sagacity; and while Mutasim (who was not the
most intelligent or cautious of youths) was escorting Saleem around the
polo-field, he confessed that he had written out a love-charm on a piece of
parchment, in the hope of pressing it against the hand of the famous Jamila
Singer and making her fall in love. At this point Saleem acquired the air of
a bad-tempered dog and tried to turn away; but Mutasim now begged to know
what Jamila Singer really looked like. Saleem, however, kept his silence;
until Mutasim, in the grip of a wild obsession, asked to be brought close
enough to Jamila to press his charm against her hand. Now Saleem, whose sly
look did not register on love-struck Mutasim, said, 'Give me the parchment';
and Mutasim, who, though expert in the geography of European cities, was
innocent in things magical, yielded his charm to Saleem, thinking it would
still work on his behalf, even if applied by another.
Evening approached at the palace; the convoy of cars bringing General
and Begum Zulfikar, their son Zafar, and friends, approached, too. But now
the wind changed, and began to blow from the north: a cold wind, and also an
intoxicating one, because in the north of Kif were the best hashish fields
in the land, and at this time of year the female plants were ripe and in
heat. The air was filled with the perfume of the heady lust of the plants,
and all who breathed it became doped to some extent. The vacuous beatitude
of the plants affected the drivers in the convoy, which only reached the
palace by great good fortune, having overturned a number of street-side
barber-stalls and invaded at least one tea-shop, leaving the Kifis wondering
whether the new horseless carriages, having stolen the streets, were now
going to capture their homes as well.
The wind from the north entered the enormous and highly sensitive nose
of Saleem, Jamila's brother, and made him so drowsy that he fell asleep in
his room; so that he missed the events of an evening during which, he
afterwards learned, the hashashin wind had transformed the behaviour of the
guests at the engagement ceremony, making them giggle convulsively and gaze
provocatively at one another through heavy-lidded eyes; braided Generals sat
splay-legged on gilded chairs and dreamed of Paradise. The mehndi ceremony
took place amid a sleepy contentment so profound that nobody noticed when
the bridegroom relaxed so completely that he wet his pants; and even the
quarrelling badmashes from the C.O.P. linked arms and sang a folk-song. And
when Mutasim the Handsome, possessed by the lustiness of hashish-plants,
attempted to plunge behind the great gold-and-silken sheet with its single
hole, Major Alauddin Latif restrained him with beatific good humour,
preventing him from seeing Jamila Singer's face without even bloodying his
nose. The evening ended when all the guests fell asleep at their tables; but
Jamila Singer was escorted to her rooms by a sleepily, beaming Latif.
At midnight, Saleem awoke to find that he still clutched the magical
parchment of Mutasim the Handsome in his right hand; and since the wind from
the north was still blowing gently through his room, he made up his mind to
creep, in chappals and dressing-gown, through the darkened passages of the
lovely palace, past all the accumulated debris of a decaying world, rusting
suits of armour and ancient tapestries which provided centuries of food for
the palace's one billion moths, giant mahaseer trout swimming in glass seas,
and a profusion of hunting trophies including a tarnished golden teetar-bird
on a teak plinth which commemorated the day on which an earlier Nawab, in
the company of Lord Curzon and party, had shot III, III teetars in a single
day; he crept past the statues of dead birds into the zenana chambers where
the women of the palace slept, and then, sniffing the air, he selected one
door, turned the handle and went inside.
There was a giant bed with a floating mosquito-net caught in a stream
of colourless light from the maddening, midnight moon; Saleem moved towards
it, and then stopped, because he had seen, at the window, the figure of a
man trying to climb into the room. Mutasim the Handsome, made shameless by
his infatuation and the hashashin wind, had resolved to look at Jamila's
face, no matter what the cost .. .And Saleem, invisible in the shadows of
the room cried out: 'Hands up! Or I shoot!' Saleem was bluffing; but
Mutasim, whose hands were on the window sill, supporting his full weight,
did not know that, and was placed in a quandary: to hang on and be shot, or
let go and fall? He attempted to argue back, 'You shouldn't be here
yourself,' he said, 'I'll tell Amina Begum.' He had recognized the voice of
his oppressor; but Saleem pointed out the weakness of his position, and
Mutasim, pleading, 'Okay, only don't fire,' was permitted to descend the way
he'd come. After that day, Mutasim persuaded his father to make a formal
proposal of marriage to Jamila's parents; but she, who had been born and
raised without love, retained her old hatred of all who claimed to love her,
and turned him down. He left Kif and came to Karachi, but she would not
entertain his importunate proposals; and eventually he joined the Army and
became a martyr in the war of 1965.
The tragedy of Mutasim the Handsome, however, is only a subplot in our
story; because now Saleem and his sister were alone, and she awakened by the
exchange between the two youths, asked, 'Saleem? What is happening?'
Saleem approached his sister's bed; his hand sought hers; and parchment
was pressed against skin. Only now did Saleem, his tongue loosened by the
moon and the lust-drenched breeze, abandon all notions of purity and confess
his own love to his open-mouthed sister.
There was a silence; then she cried, 'Oh, no, how can you -', but the
magic of the parchment was doing battle with the strength of her hatred of
love; so although her body grew stiff and jerky as a wrestler's, she
listened to him explaining that there was no sin, he had worked it all out,
and after all, they were not truly brother and sister; the blood in his
veins was not the blood in hers; in the breeze of that insane night he
attempted to undo all the knots which not even Mary Pereira's confession had
succeeded in untying; but even as he spoke he could hear his words sounding
hollow, and realized that although what he was saying was the literal truth,
there were other truths which had become more important because they had
been sanctified by time; and although there was no need for shame or horror,
he saw both emotions on her forehead, he smelt them on her skin, and, what
was worse, he could feel and smell them in and upon himself. So, in the end,
not even the magic parchment of Mutasim the Handsome was powerful enough to
bring Saleem Sinai and Jamila Singer together; he left her room with bowed
head, followed by her deer-startled eyes; and in time the effects of the
spell faded altogether, and she took a dreadful revenge. As he left the room
the corridors of the palace were suddenly filled with the shriek of a
newly-affianced princess, who had awoken from a dream of her wedding-night
in which her marital bed had suddenly and unaccountably become awash in
rancid yellow liquid; afterwards, she made inquiries, and when she learned
the prophetic truth of her dream, resolved never to reach puberty while
Zafar was alive, so that she could stay in her palatial bedroom and avoid
the foul-smelling horror of his weakness.
The next morning, the two badmashes of the Combined Opposition Party
awoke to find themselves back in their own beds; but when they had dressed,
they opened the door of their chamber to find two of the biggest soldiers in
Pakistan outside it, standing peacefully with crossed rifles, barring the
exit. The badmashes shouted and wheedled, but the soldiers stayed in
position until the polls were closed; then they quietly disappeared. The
badmashes sought out the Nawab, finding him in his exceptional rose-garden;
they waved their arms and raised their voices; travesty-of-justice was
mentioned, and electoral-jiggery-pokery; also chicanery; but the Nawab
showed them thirteen new varieties of Kin rose, crossbred by himself. They
ranted on - death-of-democracy, autocratic-tyranny - until he smiled gently,
gently, and said, 'My friends, yesterday my daughter was betrothed to Zafar
Zulfikar; soon, I hope, my other girl will wed our President's own dear son.
Think, then - what dishonour for me, what scandal on my name, if even one
vote were cast in Kif against my future relative! Friends, I am a man to
whom honour is of concern; so stay in my house, eat, drink; only do not ask
for what I cannot give.'
And we all lived happily
... at any rate, even without the traditional
last-sentence fiction of fairy-tales, my story does indeed end in fantasy;
because when Basic Democrats had done their duty, the newspapers -
Jang,
Dawn, Pakistan Times -
announced a crushing victory for the President's
Muslim League over the Mader-i-Millat's Combined Opposition Party; thus
proving to me that I have been only the humblest of jugglers-with-facts; and
that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality
quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except
what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my
Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence - that in the first I was beset
by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift,
disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities
and lies.
A little bird whispers in my ear: 'Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a
monopoly of untruth.' I accept the criticism; I know, I know. And, years
later, the Widow knew. And Jamila: for whom
what-had-been-sanctified-as-truth (by Time, by habit, by a grandmother's
pronouncement, by lack of imagination, by a father's acquiescence) proved
more believable than what she knew to be so.
How Saleem achieved purity
What is waiting to be told: the return of ticktock. But now time is
counting down to an end, not a birth; there is, too, a weariness to be
mentioned, a general fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will
be the only solution, because human beings, like nations and fictional
characters, can simply run out of steam, and then there's nothing for it but
to finish with them.
How a piece fell out of the moon, and Saleem achieved purity ... the
clock is ticking now; and because all countdowns require a zero, let me
state that the end came on September 22nd, 1965; and that the precise
instant of the arrival-at-zero was, inevitably, the stroke of midnight.
Although the old grandfather clock in my aunt Alia's house, which kept
accurate time but always chimed two minutes late, never had a chance to
strike.
My grandmother Naseem Aziz arrived in Pakistan in mid-1964, leaving
behind an India in which Nehru's death had precipitated a bitter power
struggle. Morarji Desai, the Finance Minister, and Jagjivan Ram, most
powerful of the untouchables, united in their determination to prevent the
establishment of a Nehru dynasty; so Indira Gandhi was denied the
leadership. The new Prime Minister was Lal Bahadur Shastri, another member
of that generation of politicians who seemed to have been pickled in
immortality; in the case of Shastri, however, this was only maya, illusion.
Nehru and Shastri have both fully proved their mortality; but there are
still plenty of the others left, clutching Time in their mummified fingers
and refusing to let it move ... in Pakistan, however, the clocks ticked and
locked.
Reverend Mother did not overtly approve of my sister's career; it
smacked too much of film-stardom. 'My family, whatsitsname,' she sighed to
Pia mumani, 'is even less controllable than the price of gas.' Secretly,
however, she may have been impressed, because she respected power and
position and Jamila was now so exalted as to be welcome in the most powerful
and best-placed houses in the land ... my grandmother settled in Rawalpindi;
however, with a strange show of independence, she chose not to live in the
house of General Zulfikar. She and my aunt Pia moved into a modest bungalow
in the old part of town; and by pooling their savings, purchased a
concession on the long-dreamed-of petrol pump.
Naseem never mentioned Aadam Aziz, nor would she grieve over him; it
was almost as though she were relieved that my querulous grandfather, who
had in his youth despised the Pakistan movement, and who in all probability
blamed the Muslim League for the death of his friend Mian Abdullah, had by
dying permitted her to go alone into the Land of the Pure. Setting her face
against the past, Reverend Mother concentrated on gasoline and oil. The pump
was on a prime site, near the Rawalpindi-Lahore grand trunk road-it did very
well. Pia and Naseem took it in turns to spend the day in the manager's
glass booth while attendants filled up cars and Army trucks. They proved a
magical combination. Pia attracted customers with the beacon of a beauty
which obstinately refused to fade; while Reverend Mother, who had been
transformed by bereave, ment into a woman who was more interested in other
people's lives than her own, took to inviting the pump's customers into her
glass booth for cups of pink Kashmiri tea; they would accept with some
trepidation, but when they realized that the old lady did not propose to
bore them with endless reminiscences, they relaxed, loosened collars and
tongues, and Reverend Mother was able to bathe in the blessed oblivion of
other people's lives. The pump rapidly became famous in those parts, drivers
began to go out of their way to use it - often on two consecutive days, so
that they could both feast their eyes on my divine aunt and tell their woes
to my eternally patient grandmother, who had developed the absorbent
properties of a sponge, and always waited until her guests had completely
finished before squeezing out of her own lips a few drops of simple, firm
advice - while their cars were filled up with petrol and polished by
pump-attendants, my grandmother would re-charge and polish their lives. She
sat in her glass confessional and solved the problems of the world; her own
family, however, seemed to have lost importance in her eyes.
Moustachioed, matriarchal, proud: Naseem Aziz had found her own way of
coping with tragedy; but in finding it had become the first victim of that
spirit of detached fatigue which made the end the only possible solution.
(Tick, tock.) ... However, on the face of it, she appeared to have not the
slightest intention of following her husband into the camphor garden
reserved for the righteous; she seemed to have more in common with the
methuselah leaders of her abandoned India. She grew, with alarming rapidity,
wider and wider; until builders were summoned to expand her glassed-in
booth. 'Make it big big,' she instructed them, with a rare flash of humour,
'Maybe I'll still be here after a century, whatsitsname, and Allah knows how
big I'll have become; I don't want to be troubling you every ten-twelve
years.'
Pia Aziz, however, was not content with 'pumpery-shumpery'. She began a
series of liaisons with colonels cricketers polo-players diplomats, which
were easy to conceal from a Reverend Mother who had lost interest in the
doings of everyone except strangers; but which were otherwise the talk of
what was, after all, a small town. My aunt Emerald took Pia to task; she
replied: 'You want me to be forever howling and pulling hair? I'm still
young; young folk should gad a little.' Emerald, thin-lipped: 'But be a
little respectable ... the family name ...' At which Pia tossed her head.
'You be respectable, sister,' she said, 'Me, I'll be alive.'
But it seems to me that there was something hollow in Pia's
self-assertion; that she, too, felt her personality draining away with the
years; that her feverish romancing was a last desperate attempt to behave
'in character' - in the way a woman like her was supposed to do. Her heart
wasn't in it; somewhere inside, she, too, was waiting for an end ... In my
family, we have always been vulnerable to things which fall from the skies,
ever since Ahmed Sinai was slapped by a vulture-dropped hand; and bolts from
the blue were only a year away.
After the news of my grandfather's death and the arrival of Reverend
Mother in Pakistan, I began to dream repeatedly of Kashmir; although I had
never walked in Shalimar-bagh, I did so at night; I floated in shikaras and
climbed Sankara Acharya's hill as my grandfather had; I saw lotus-roots and
mountains like angry jaws. This, too, may be seen as an aspect of the
detachment which came to afflict us all (except Jamila, who had God and
country to keep her going) - a reminder of my family's separateness from
both India and Pakistan. In Rawalpindi, my grandmother drank pink Kashmiri
tea; in Karachi, her grandson was washed by the waters of a lake he had
never seen. It would not be long before the dream of Kashmir spilled over
into the minds of the rest of the population of Pakistan;
connection-to-history refused to abandon me, and I found my dream becoming,
in 1965, the common property of the nation, and a factor of prime importance
in the coming end, when all manner of things fell from the skies, and I was
purified at last.
Saleem could sink no lower: I could smell, on myself, the cess-pit
stink of my iniquities. I had come to the Land of the Pure, and sought the
company of whores - when I should have been forging a new, upright life for
myself, I gave birth, instead, to an unspeakable (and also unrequited) love.
Possessed by the beginnings of the great fatalism which was to overwhelm me,
I rode the city streets on my Lambretta; Jamila and I avoided each, other as
much as possible, unable, for the first time in our lives, to say a word to
one another.
Purity - that highest of ideals! - that angelic virtue for which
Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister's songs!
- seemed very far away; how could I have known that history - which has the
power of pardoning sinners - was at that moment counting down towards a
moment in which it would manage, at one stroke, to cleanse me from head to
foot?
In the meantime, other forces were spending themselves; Alia Aziz had
begun to wreak her awful spinster's revenge.
Guru Mandir days: paan-smells, cooking-smells, the languorous odour of
the shadow of the minaret, the mosque's long pointing finger: while my aunt
Alia's hatred of the man who had abandoned her and of the sister who had
married him grew into a tangible, visible thing, it sat on her living-room
rug like a great gecko, reeking of vomit; but it seemed I was the only one
to smell it, because Alia's skill at dissimulation had grown as rapidly as
the hairiness of her chin and her adeptness with the plasters with which,
each evening, she ripped her beard out by the roots.
My aunt Alia's contribution to the fate of nations - through her school
and college - must not be minimized. Having allowed her old-maid
frustrations to leak into the curricula, the bricks and also the students at
her twin educational establishments, she had raised a tribe of children and
young adults who felt themselves possessed by an ancient vengefulness,
without fully knowing why. O omnipresent aridity of maiden aunts! It soured
the paintwork of her home; her furniture was made lumpy by the harsh
stuffing of bitterness; old-maid repressions were sewn into curtain-seams.
As once long ago into baby things of. Bitterness, issuing through the
fissures of the earth.
What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the
lonely madness of the years, raised to the level of an art-form: the
impregnation of food with emotions. To whom she remained second in her
achievements in this field: my old ayah, Mary Pereira. By whom, today, both
old cooks have been outdone: Saleem Sinai, pickler-in-chief at the Braganza
pickle works ... nevertheless, while we lived in her Guru Mandir mansion,
she fed us the birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord; and
little by little, even the harmonies of my parents' autumnal love went out
of tune.
But good things must also be said about my aunt. In politics, she spoke
out vociferously against government-by-military-say-so; if she had not had a
General for a brother-in-law, her school and college might well have been
taken out of her hands. Let me not show her entirely through the dark glass
of my private despondency: she had given lecture-tours in the Soviet Union
and America. Also, her food tasted good. (Despite its hidden content.)
But the air and the food in that mosque-shadowed house began to take
its toll ... Saleem, under the doubly dislocating influence of his awful
love and Alia's food, began to blush like a beetroot whenever his sister
appeared in his thoughts; while Jamila, unconsciously seized by a longing
for fresh air and food unseasoned by dark emotions, began to spend less and
less time there, travelling instead up and down the country (but never to
the East Wing) to give her concerts. On those increasingly rare occasions
when brother and sister found themselves in the same room they would jump,
startled, half an inch
off
the floor, and then, landing, stare furiously at
the spot over which they had leaped, as if it had suddenly become as hot as
a bread-oven. At other times, too, they indulged in behaviour whose meaning
would have been transparently obvious, were it not for the fact that each
occupant of the house had other things on his or her mind: Jamila, for
instance, took to keeping on her gold-and-white travelling veil indoors
until she was sure her brother was out, even if she was dizzy with heat;
while Saleem - who continued, slave-fashion, to fetch leavened bread from
the nunnery of Santa Ignacia - avoided handing her the loaves himself; on
occasion he asked his poisonous aunt to act as intermediary. Alia looked at
him with amusement and asked, 'What's wrong with
you,
boy - you haven't got
an infectious disease?' Saleem blushed furiously, fearing that his aunt had
guessed about his encounters with paid women; and maybe she had, but she was
after bigger fish.
... He also developed a penchant for lapsing into long broody silences,
which he interrupted by bursting out suddenly with a meaningless word: 'No!'
or, 'But!' or even more arcane exclamations, such as 'Bang!' or 'Whaam!'
Nonsense words amidst clouded silences: as if Saleem were conducting some
inner dialogue of such intensity that fragments of it, or its pain, boiled
up from time to time past the surface of his lips. This inner discord was
undoubtedly worsened by the curries of disquiet which we were obliged to
eat; and at the end, when Amina was reduced to talking to invisible
washing-chests and Ahmed, in the desolation of his stroke, was capable of
little more than dribbles and giggles, while I glowered silently in my own
private withdrawal, my aunt must have been well-pleased with the
effectiveness of her revenge upon the Sinai clan; unless she, too, was
drained by the fulfilment of her long-nurtured ambition; in which case she,
too, had run out of possibilities, and there were hollow overtones in her
footsteps as she stalked through the insane asylum of her home with her chin
covered in hair-plasters, while her niece jumped over suddenly-hot patches
of floor and her nephew yelled 'Yaa!' out of nowhere and her erstwhile
suitor sent spittle down his chin and Amina greeted the resurgent ghosts of
her past: 'So it's you again; well, why not? Nothing ever seems to go away.'
Tick, tock ...
In January 1965, my mother Amina Sinai discovered that
she was pregnant again, after a gap of seventeen years. When she was sure,
she told her good news to her big sister Alia, giving my aunt the
opportunity of perfecting her revenge. What Alia said to my mother is not
known; what she stirred into her cooking must remain a matter for
conjecture; but the effect on Amina was devastating. She was plagued by
dreams of a monster child with a cauliflower instead of a brain; she was
beset by phantoms of Ramram Seth, and the old prophecy of a child with two
heads began to drive her wild all over again. My mother was forty-two years
old; and the fears (both natural and Alia-induced) of bearing a child at
such an age tarnished the brilliant aura which had hung around her ever
since she nursed her husband into his loving autumn; under the influence of
the kormas of my aunt's vengeance - spiced with forebodings as well as
cardamoms - my mother became afraid of her child. As the months passed, her
forty-two years began to take a terrible toll; the weight of her four
decades grew daily, crushing her beneath her age. In her second month, her
hair went white. By the third, her face had shrivelled like a rotting mango.
In her fourth month she was already an old woman, lined and thick, plagued
by verrucas once again, with the inevitability of hair sprouting all over
her face; she seemed shrouded once more in a fog of shame, as though the
baby were a scandal in a lady of her evident antiquity. As the child of
those confused days grew within her, the contrast between its youth and her
age increased; it was at this point that she collapsed into an old cane
chair and received visits from the spectres of her past. The disintegration
of my mother was appalling in its suddenness; Ahmed Sinai, observing
helplessly, found himself, all of a sudden, unnerved, adrift, unmanned.
Even now, I find it hard to write about those days of the end of
possibility, when my father found his towel factory crumbling in his hands.
The effects of Alia's culinary witchcraft (which operated both through his
stomach, when he ate, and his eyes, when he saw his wife) were now all too
apparent in him: he became slack at factory management, and irritable with
his work-force.
To sum up the ruination of Amina Brand Towels: Ahmed Sinai began
treating his workers as peremptorily as once, in Bombay, he had mis-treated
servants, and sought to inculcate, in master weavers and assistant packers
alike, the eternal verities of the master-servant relationship. As a result
his work-force walked out on him in droves, explaining, for instance, 'I am
not your latrine-cleaner, sahib; I am qualified Grade One weaver,' and in
general refusing to show proper gratitude for his beneficence in having
employed them. In the grip of the befuddling wrath of my aunt's packed
lunches, he let them all go, and hired a bunch of ill-favoured slackers who
pilfered cotton spools and machine parts but were willing to bow and scrape
whenever required to do so; and the percentage of defective towels rocketed
alarmingly, contracts were not fulfilled, re-orders shrank alarmingly. Ahmed
Sinai began bringing home mountains - Himalayas! - of reject towelling,
because the factory warehouse was full to overflowing of the sub-standard
product of his mismanagement; he took to drink again, and by the summer of
that year the house in Guru Mandir was awash in the old obscenities of his
battle against the djinns, and we had to squeeze sideways past the Everests
and Nanga-Parbats of badly-made terrycloth which lined the passages and
hall.
We had delivered ourselves into the lap of my fat aunt's long-simmered
wrath; with the single exception of Jamila, who was least affected owing to
her long absences, we all ended up with our geese well and truly cooked. It
was a painful and bewildering time, in which the love of my parents
disintegrated under the joint weight of their new baby and of my aunt's
age-old grievances; and gradually the confusion and ruin seeped out through
the windows of the house and took over the hearts and minds of the nation,
so that war, when it came, was wrapped in the same fuddled haze of unreality
in which we had begun to live.
My father was heading steadily towards his stroke; but before the bomb
went off in his brain, another fuse was lit: in April 1965, we heard about
the peculiar incidents in the Rann of Kutch.
While we thrashed like flies in the webs of my aunt's revenge, the mill
of history continued to grind. President Ayub's reputation was in decline:
rumours of malpractice in the 1964 election buzzed about, refusing to be
swatted. There was, too, the matter of the President's son: Gauhar Ayub,
whose enigmatic Gandhara Industries made him a 'multi-multi' overnight. O
endless sequence of nefarious sons-of-the-great! Gauhar, with his bullyings
and ran tings; and later, in India, Sanjay Gandhi and his Maruti Car Company
and his Congress Youth; and most recently of all, Kami Lal Desai ... the
sons of the great unmake their parents. But I, too, have a son; Aadam Sinai,
flying in the face of precedent, will reverse the trend. Sons can be better
than their fathers, as well as worse ... in April 1965, however, the air
buzzed with the fallibility of sons. And whose son was it who scaled the
walls of President House on April 1st - what unknown father spawned the
foul-smelling fellow who ran up to the President and fired a pistol at his
stomach? Some fathers remain mercifully unknown to history; at any rate, the
assassin failed, because his gun miraculously jammed. Somebody's son was
taken away by police to have his teeth pulled out one by one, to have his
nails set on fire; burning cigarette-ends were no doubt pressed against the
tip of his penis, so it would probably not be much consolation for that
nameless, would-be assassin to know that he had simply been carried away by
a tide of history in which sons (high and low) were frequently observed to
behave exceptionally badly. (No: I do not exempt myself.)
Divorce between news and reality: newspapers quoted foreign economists
- PAKISTAN A MODEL FOR EMERGING NATIONS - while peasants (unreported) cursed
the so-called 'green revolution', claiming that most of the newly-drilled
water-wells had been useless, poisoned, and in the wrong places anyway;
while editorials praised the probity of the nation's leadership, rumours,
thick as flies, mentioned Swiss bank accounts and the new American
motor-cars of the President's son. The Karachi
Dawn
spoke of another dawn -
GOOD INDO-PAK RELATIONS JUST AROUND THE CORNER? - but, in the Rann of Kutch,
yet another inadequate son was discovering a different story.
In the cities, mirages and lies; to the north, in the high mountains,
the Chinese were building roads and planning nuclear blasts; but it is time
to revert from the general to the particular; or, to be more exact, to the
General's son, my cousin, the enuretic Zafar Zulfikar. Who became, between
April and July, the archetype of all the many disappointing sons in the
land; history, working through him, was also pointing its finger at Gauhar,
at future-Sanjay and Kanti-Lal-to-come; and, naturally, at me.
So - cousin Zafar. With whom I had much in common at that time ... my
heart was full of forbidden love; his trousers, despite all his efforts,
filled continually with something rather more tangible, but equally
forbidden. I dreamed of mythical lovers, both happy and star-crossed - Shah
Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal, but also Montague-and-Capulet; he dreamed of his
Kifi fiancee, whose failure to arrive at puberty even after her sixteenth
birthday must have made her seem, in his thoughts, a fantasy of an
unattainable future ... in April 1965, Zafar was sent on manoeuvres to the
Pakistan-controlled zone of the Rann of Kutch.
Cruelty of the continent towards the loose-bladdered: Zafar, although a
Lieutenant, was the laughing-stock of the Abbottabad military base. There
was a story that he had been instructed to wear a rubber undergarment like a
balloon around his genitals, so that the glorious uniform of the Pak Army
should not be desecrated; mere jawans, when he passed, would make a blowing
movement of their cheeks, as if they were puffing up the balloon. (All this
became public later, in the statement he made, in floods of tears, after his
arrest for murder.) It is possible that Zafar's assignment to the Rann of
Kutch was thought up by a tactful superior, who was only trying to get him
out of the firing-line of Abbottabad humour ... Incontinence doomed Zafar
Zulfikar to a crime as heinous as my own. I loved my sister; while he ...
but let me tell the story the right way up.
Ever since Partition, the Rann had been 'disputed territory.';
although, in practice, neither side had much heart for the dispute. On the
hillocks along the 23rd parallel, the unofficial frontier, the Pakistan
Government had built a string of border posts, each with its lonely garrison
of six men and one beacon-light. Several of these posts were occupied on
April 9th, 1965, by troops of the Indian Army; a Pakistani force, including
my cousin Zafar, which had been in the area on manoeuvres, engaged in an
eighty-two-day struggle for the frontier. The war in the Rann lasted until
July 1st. That much is fact; but everything else lies concealed beneath the
doubly hazy air of unreality and make-believe which affected all goings-on
in those days, and especially all events in the phantasmagoric Rann ... so
that the story I am going to tell, which is substantially that told by my
cousin Zafar, is as likely to be true as anything; as anything, that is to
say, except what we were officially told.
... As the young Pakistani soldiers entered the marshy terrain of the
Rann, a cold clammy perspiration broke out on their foreheads, and they were
unnerved by the greeny sea-bed quality of the light; they recounted stories
which frightened them even more, legends of terrible things which happened
in this amphibious zone, of demonic sea-beasts with glowing eyes, of
fish-women who lay with their fishy heads underwater, breathing, while their
perfectly-formed and naked human lower halves lay on the shore, tempting the
unwary into fatal sexual acts, because it is well known that nobody may love
a fish-woman and live ... so that by the time they reached the border posts
and went to war, they were a scared rabble of seventeen-year-old boys, and
would certainly have been annihilated, except that the opposing Indians had
been subjected to the green air of the Rann even longer than they; so in
that sorcerers' world a crazy war was fought in which each side thought it
saw apparitions of devils fighting alongside its foes; but in the end the
Indian forces yielded; many of them collapsed in floods of tears and wept,
Thank God, it's over; they told about the great blubbery things which
slithered around the border posts at night, and the floating-in-air spirits
of drowned men with seaweed wreaths and seashells in their navels. What the
surrendering Indian soldiers said, within my cousin's hearing: 'Anyway,
these border posts were unmanned; we just saw them empty and came inside.'
The mystery of the deserted border posts did not, at first, seem like a
puzzle to the young Pakistani soldiers who were required to occupy them
until new border guards were sent; my cousin Lieutenant Zafar found his
bladder and bowels voiding themselves with hysterical frequency for the
seven nights he spent occupying one of the posts with only five jawans for
company. During nights filled with the shrieks of witches and the nameless
slithery shufflings of the dark, the six youngsters were reduced to so
abject a state that nobody laughed at my cousin any more, they were all too
busy wetting their own pants. One of the jawans whispered in terror during
the ghostly evil of their last-but-one night: 'Listen, boys, if I had to sit
here for a living, I'd bloody well run away, too!'
In a state of utter jelly-like breakdown the soldiers sweated in the
Rann; and then on the last night their worst fears came true, they saw an
army of ghosts coming out of the darkness towards them; they were in the
border post nearest the sea-shore, and in the greeny moonlight they could
see the sails of ghost-ships, of phantom dhows; and the ghost-army
approached, relentlessly, despite the screams of the soldiers, spectres
bearing moss-covered chests and strange shrouded litters piled high with
unseen things; and when the ghost-army came in through the door, my cousin
Zafar fell at their feet and began to gibber horribly.
The first phantom to enter the outpost had several missing teeth and a
curved knife stuck in his belt; when he saw the soldiers in the hut his eyes
blazed with a vermilion fury. 'God's pity!' the ghost chieftain said, 'What
are you mother-sleepers here for? Didn't you all get properly paid off?'
Not ghosts; smugglers. The six young soldiers found themselves in
absurd postures of abject terror, and although they tried to redeem
themselves, their shame was engulfingly complete ... and now we come to it.
In whose name were the smugglers operating? Whose name fell from the lips of
the smuggler-chief, and made my cousin's eyes open in horror? Whose fortune,
built originally on the miseries of fleeing Hindu families in 1947, was now
augmented by these spring-and-summer smugglers' convoys through the
unguarded Rann and thence into the cities of Pakistan? Which Punch-faced
General, with a voice as thin as a razor-blade, commanded the phantom
troops? ... But I shall concentrate on facts. In July 1965, my cousin Zafar
returned on leave to his father's house in Rawalpindi; and one morning he
began to walk slowly towards his father's bedroom, bearing on his shoulders
not only the memory of a thousand childhood humiliations and blows; not only
the shame of his lifelong enuresis; but also the knowledge that his own
father had been responsible for what-happened-at-the-Rann, when Zafar
Zulfikar was reduced to gibbering on a floor. My cousin found his father in
his bedside bath, and slit his' throat with a long, curved smuggler's knife.
Hidden behind newspaper reports - DASTARDLY INDIAN INVASION REPELLED BY
OUR GALLANT BOYS-the truth about General Zulfikar became a ghostly,
uncertain thing; the paying-off of border guards became, in the papers,
INNOCENT SOLDIERS MASSACRED BY INDIAN FAUJ; and who would spread the story
of my uncle's vast smuggling activities? What General, what politician did
not possess the transistor radios of my uncle's illegality, the
air-conditioning units and the imported watches of his sins? General
Zulfikar died; cousin Zafar went to prison and was spared marriage to a Kifi
princess who obstinately refused to menstruate precisely in order to be
spared marriage to him; and the incidents in the Rann of Kutch became the
tinder, so to speak, of the larger fire that broke out in August, the fire
of the end, in which Saleem finally, and in spite of himself, achieved his
elusive purity.
As for my aunt Emerald: she was given permission to emigrate; she had
made preparations to do so, intending to leave for Suffolk in England, where
she was to stay with her husband's old commanding officer, Brigadier Dodson,
who had begun, in his dotage, to spend his time in the company of equally
old India hands, watching old films of the Delhi Durbar and the arrival of
George V at the Gateway of India... she was looking forward to the empty
oblivion of nostalgia and the English winter when the war came and settled
all our problems.
On the first day of the 'false peace' which would last a mere
thirty-seven days, the stroke hit Ahmed Sinai. It left him paralysed all the
way down his left side, and restored him to the dribbles and giggles of his
infancy; he, too, mouthed nonsense-words, showing a marked preference for
the naughty childhood names of excreta. Giggling 'Caeca!' and 'Soo-soo!' my
father came to the end of his chequered career, having once more, and for
the last time, lost his way, and also his battle with the djinns. He sat,
stunned and cackling, amid the faulty towels of his life; amid faulty
towels, my mother, crushed beneath the weight of her monstrous pregnancy,
inclined her head gravely as she was visited by Lila Sabarmati's pianola, or
the ghost of her brother Hanif, or a pair of hands which danced,
moths-around-a-flame, around and around her own... Commander Sabarmati came
to see her with his curious baton in his hand, and Nussie-the-duck
whispered, "The end, Amina sister! The end of the world!' in my mother's
withering ear ... and now, having fought my way through the diseased reality
of my Pakistan years, having struggled to make a little sense out of what
seemed (through the mist of my aunt Alia's revenge) like a terrible, occult
series of reprisals for tearing up our Bombay roots, I have reached the
point at which I must tell you about ends.
Let me state this quite unequivocally: it is my firm conviction that
the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 was nothing more nor
less than the elimination of my benighted family from the face of the earth.
In order to understand the recent history of our times, it is only necessary
to examine the bombing-pattern of that war with an analytical, unprejudiced
eye.
Even ends have beginnings; everything must be told in sequence. (I have
Padma, after all, squashing all my attempts to put the cart before the
bullock.) By August 8th, 1965, my family history had got itself into a
condition from which what-.was-achieved-by-bombing-patterns provided a
merciful relief. No: let me use the important word: if we were to be
purified, something on the scale of what followed was probably necessary.
Alia Aziz, sated with her terrible revenge; my aunt Emerald, widowed
and awaiting exile; the hollow lasciviousness of my aunt Pia and the
glass-boothed withdrawal of my grandmother Naseem Aziz; my cousin Zafar,
with his eternally pre-pubertal princess and his future of wetting
mattresses in jail-cells; the retreat into childishness of my father and the
haunted, accelerated ageing of pregnant Amina Sinai ... all these terrible
conditions were to be cured as a result of the adoption, by the Government,
of my dream of visiting Kashmir. In the meantime, the flinty refusals of my
sister to countenance my love had driven me into a deeply fatalistic frame
of mind; in the grip of my new carelessness about my future I told Uncle
Puffs that I was willing to marry any one of the Puffias he chose for me.
(By doing so, I doomed them all; everyone who attempts to forge ties with
our household ends up by sharing our fate.)
I am trying to stop being mystifying. Important to concentrate on good
hard facts. But which facts? One week before my eighteenth birthday, on
August 8th, did Pakistani troops in civilian clothing cross the cease-fire
line in Kashmir and infiltrate the Indian sector, or did they not? In Delhi,
Prime Minister Shastri announced 'massive infiltration ... to subvert the
state'; but here is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's Foreign Minister, with
his riposte: 'We categorically deny any involvement in the rising against
tyranny by the indigenous people of Kashmir.'
If it happened, what were the motives? Again, a rash of possible
explanations: the continuing anger which had been stirred up by the Rann of
Kutch; the desire to settle, once-and-for-all, the old issue of
who-should-possess-the-Perfect-Valley?... Or one which didn't get into the
papers: the pressures of internal political troubles in Pakistan - Ayub's
government was tottering, and a war works wonders at such times. This reason
or that or the other? To simplify matters, I present two of my own: the war
happened because I dreamed Kashmir into the fantasies of our rulers;
furthermore, I remained impure, and the war was to separate
me
from my sins.
Jehad, Padma! Holy war!
But who attacked? Who defended? On my eighteenth birthday, reality took
another terrible beating. From the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi, an
Indian prime minister (not the same one who wrote me a long-ago letter) sent
me this birthday greeting: 'We promise that force will be met with force,
and aggression against us will never be allowed to succeed!' While jeeps
with loud-hailers saluted me in Guru Mandir, reassuring me: 'The Indian
aggressors will be utterly overthrown! We are a race of warriors! One
Pathan; one Punjabi Muslim is worth ten of those babus-in-arms!'
Jamila Singer was called north, to serenade our worth-ten jawans. A
servant paints blackout on the windows; at night, my father, in the
stupidity of his second childhood, opens the windows and turns on the
lights. Bricks and stones fly through the apertures: my eighteenth-birthday
presents. And still events grow more and more confused: on August soth, did
Indian troops cross the cease-fire line near Uri to 'chase out the Pakistan
raiders' - or to initiate an attack? When, on September 1st, our
ten-times-better soldiers crossed the line at Chhamb, were they aggressors
or were they not?
Some certainties: that the voice of Jamila Singer sang Pakistani troops
to their deaths; and that muezzins from their minarets - yes, even on
Clayton Road - promised us that anyone who died in battle went straight to
the camphor garden. The mujahid philosophy of Syed Ahmad Barilwi ruled the
air; we were invited to make sacrifices 'as never before'.
And on the radio, what destruction, what mayhem! In the first five days
of the war Voice of Pakistan announced the destruction of more aircraft than
India had ever possessed; in eight days, All-India Radio massacred the
Pakistan Army down to, and considerably beyond, the last man. Utterly
distracted by the double insanity of the war and my private life, I began to
think desperate thoughts ... Great sacrifices: for instance, at the battle
for Lahore? - On September 6th, Indian troops crossed the Wagah border, thus
hugely broadening the front of the war, which was no longer limited to
Kashmir; and did great sacrifices take place, or not? Was it true that the
city was virtually defenceless, because the Pak Army and Air Force were ail
in the Kashmir sector? Voice of Pakistan said: O memorable day! O unarguable
lesson in the fatality of delay! The Indians, confident of capturing the
city,
stopped for breakfast.
All-India Radio announced the fall of Lahore;
meanwhile, a private aircraft spotted the breakfasting invaders. While the
B.B.C. picked up the A.I.R. story, the Lahore militia was mobilized. Hear
the Voice of Pakistan! - old men, young boys, irate grandmothers fought the
Indian Army; bridge by bridge they battled, with any available weapons! Lame
men loaded their pockets with grenades, pulled out the pins, flung
themselves beneath advancing Indian tanks; toothless old ladies
disembowelled Indian babus with pitchforks! Down to the last man and child,
they died: but they saved the city, holding off the Indians until air
support arrived! Martyrs, Padma! Heroes, bound for the perfumed garden!
Where the men would be given four beauteous houris, untouched by man or
djinn; and the women, four equally virile males!
Which of your Lord's
blessings would you deny?
What a thing this holy war is, in which with one
supreme sacrifice men may atone for all their evils! No wonder Lahore was
defended; what did the Indians have to look forward to? Only re-incarnation
- as cockroaches, maybe, or scorpions, or green-medicine-wallahs - there's
really no comparison.
But did it or didn't it? Was that how it happened? Or was All-India
Radio
-great tank battle, huge Pak losses, 450 tanks destroyed-
telling the
truth?
Nothing was real; nothing certain. Uncle Puffs came to visit the
Clayton Road house, and there were no teeth in his mouth. (During India's
China war, when our loyalties were different, my mother had given gold
bangles and jewelled ear-rings to the 'Ornaments for Armaments' campaign;
but what was that when set against the sacrifice of an entire mouthful of
gold?) 'The nation,' he said indistinctly through his untoothed gums, 'must
not, darn it, be short of funds on account of one man's vanity!' - But did
he or didn't he? Were teeth truly sacrificed in the name of holy war, or
were they sitting in a cupboard at home? 'I'm afraid,' Uncle Puffs said
gummily, 'you'll have to wait for that special dowry I promised.' -
Nationalism or meanness? Was his baring of gums a supreme proof of his
patriotism, or a slimy ruse to avoid filling a Puffna-mouth with gold?
And were there parachutists or were there not? '... have been dropped
on every major city,' Voice of Pakistan announced. 'All able-bodied persons
are to stay up with weapons; shoot on sight after dusk curfew.' But in
India, 'Despite Pakistani air-raid provocation,' the radio claimed, 'we have
not responded!' Who to believe? Did Pakistani fighter-bombers truly make
that 'daring raid' which caught one-third of the Indian Air Force helplessly
grounded on tarmac? Did they didn't they? And those night-dances in the sky,
Pakistani Mirages and Mysteres against India's less romantically-titled
MiGs: did Islamic mirages and mysteries do battle with Hindu invaders, or
was it all some kind of astonishing illusion? Did bombs fall? Were
explosions true? Could even a death be said to be the case?
And Saleem? What did he do in the war?
This: waiting to be drafted, I went in search of friendly,
obliterating, sleep-giving, Paradise-bringing bombs.
The terrible fatalism which had overcome me of late had taken on an
even more terrible form; drowning in the disintegration of family, of both
countries to which I had belonged, of everything which can sanely be called
real, lost in the sorrow of my filthy unrequited love, I sought out the
oblivion of- I'm making it sound too noble; no orotund phrases must be used.
Baldly, then: I rode the night-streets of the city, looking for death.
Who died in the holy war? Who, while I in bright white kurta and
pajamas went Lambretta-borne into the curfewed streets, found what I was
looking for? Who, martyred by war, went straight to a perfumed garden? Study
the bombing pattern; learn the secrets of rifle-shots.
On the night of September 22nd, air-raids took place over every
Pakistani city. (Although All-India Radio ...) Aircraft, real or fictional,
dropped actual or mythical bombs. It is, accordingly, either a matter of
fact or a figment of a diseased imagination that of the only three bombs to
hit Rawalpindi and explode, the first landed on the bungalow in which my
grandmother Naseem Aziz and my aunty Pia were hiding under a table; the
second tore a wing off the city jail, and spared my cousin Zafar a life of
captivity; the third destroyed a large darkling mansion surrounded by a
sentried wall; sentries were at their posts, but could not prevent Emerald
Zolfikar from being carried off to a more distant place than Suffolk. She
was being visited, that night, by the Nawab of Kif and his mulishly
unmaturing daughter; who was also spared the necessity of becoming an adult
woman. In Karachi, three bombs were also enough. The Indian planes,
reluctant to come down low, bombed from a great height; the vast majority of
their missiles fell harmlessly into the sea. One bomb, however, annihilated
Major (Retired) Alauddin Latif and all his seven Puffias, thus releasing me
from my promise for ever; and there were two last bombs. Meanwhile, at the
front, Mutasim the Handsome emerged from his tent to go to the toilet; a
noise like a mosquito whizzed (or did not whiz) towards him, and he died
with a full bladder under the impact of a sniper's bullet.
And still I must tell you about two-last-bombs.
Who survived? Jamila Singer, whom bombs were unable to find; in India,
the family of my uncle Mustapha, with whom bombs could not be bothered; but
my father's forgotten distant relative Zohra and her husband had moved to
Amritsar, and a bomb sought them out as well.
And two-more-bombs demand to be told.
... While I, unaware of the intimate connection between the war and
myself, went foolishly in search of bombs; after the curfew-hour I rode, but
vigilante bullets failed to find their target ... and sheets of flame rose
from a Rawalpindi bungalow, perforated sheets at whose centre hung a
mysterious dark hole, which grew into the smoke-image of an old wide woman
with moles on her cheeks ... and one by one the war eliminated my drained,
hopeless family from the earth.
But now the countdown was at an end.
And at last I turned my Lambretta homewards, so that I was at the Guru
Mandir roundabout with the roar of aircraft overhead, mirages and mysteries,
while my father in the idiocy of his stroke was switching on lights and
opening windows even though a Civil Defence official had just visited them
to make sure the blackout was complete; and when Amina Sinai was saying to
the wraith of an old white washing-chest, 'Go away now - I've seen enough of
you,' I was scooting past Civil Defence jeeps from which angry fists saluted
me; and before bricks and stones could extinguish the lights in my aunt
Alia's house, the whining came, and I should have known there was no need to
go looking elsewhere for death, but I was still in the street in the
midnight shadow of the mosque when it came, plummeting towards the
illuminated windows of my father's idiocy, death whining like pie-dogs,
transforming itself into falling masonry and sheets of flame and a wave of
force so great that it sent me spinning off my Lambretta, while within the
house of my aunt's great bitterness my father mother aunt and unborn brother
or sister who was only a week away from starting life, all of them all of
them all squashed flatter than rice-pancakes, the house crashing in on their
heads like a waffle-iron, while over on Korangi Road a last bomb, meant for
the oil-refinery, landed instead on a split-level American-style residence
which an umbilical cord had not quite managed to complete; but at Guru
Mandir many stories were coming to an end, the story of Amina and her
long-ago underworld husband and her assiduity and public announcement and
her son-who-was-not-her-son and her luck with horses and verrucas and
dancing hands in the pioneer Cafe and last defeat by her sister, and of
Ahmed who always lost his way and had a lower lip which stuck out and a
squashy belly and went white in a freeze and succumbed to abstraction and
burst dogs open in the street and fell in love too late and died because of
his vulnerability of what-falls-out-of-the-sky; flatter than pancakes now,
and around them the house exploding collapsing, an instant of destruction of
such vehemence that things which had been buried deep in forgotten tin
trunks flew upward into the air while other things people memories were
buried under rubble beyond hope of salvation; the fingers of the explosion
reaching down down to the bottom of an almirah and unlocking a green tin
trunk, the clutching hand of the explosion flinging trunk-contents into air,
and now something which has hidden unseen for many years is circling in the
night like a whirligig piece of the moon, something catching the light of
the moon and falling now falling as I pick myself up dizzily after the
blast, something twisting turning somersaulting down, silver as moonlight, a
wondrously worked silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazuli, the past
plummeting towards me like a vulture-dropped hand to become
what-purifies-and-sets-me-free, because now as I look up there is a feeling
at the back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite
moment of utter clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before
my parents' funeral pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, before
I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting, but
also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the
necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free, because all the Saleems
go pouring out of me, from the baby who appeared in jumbo-sized frontpage
baby-snaps to the eighteen-year-old with his filthy dirty love, pouring out
goes shame and guilt and wanting-to-please and needing-to-be-loved and
determined-to-find-a-historical-role and growing-too-fast, I am free of
Snotnose and Stainface and Baldy and Sniffer and Mapface and washing-chests
and Evie Burns and language marches, liberated from Kolynos Kid and the
breasts of Pia mumani and Alpha-and-Omega, absolved of the multiple murders
of Homi Catrack and Hanif and Aadam Aziz and Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, I have shaken off five-hundred-year-old whores and confessions of
love at dead of night, free now, beyond caring, crashing on to tarmac,
restored to innocence and purity by a tumbling piece of the moon, wiped
clean as a wooden writing-chest, brained (just as prophesied) by my mother's
silver spittoon.
On the morning of September 23rd, the United Nations announced the end
of hostilities between India and Pakistan. India had occupied
less than 500 square miles of Pakistani soil; Pakistan had conquered
just 340 square miles of its Kashmiri dream. It was said that the ceasefire
came because both sides had run out of ammunition, more or less
simultaneously; thus the exigencies of international diplomacy, and the
politically-motivated manipulations of arms suppliers, prevented the
wholesale annihilation of my family. Some of us survived, because nobody
sold our would-be assassins the bombs bullets aircraft necessary for the
completion of our destruction. Six years later, however, there was another
war.
Book Three
The buddha
Obviously enough (because otherwise I should have to introduce at this
point some fantastic explanation of my continued presence in this 'mortal
coil'), you may number me amongst those whom the war of '65 failed to
obliterate. Spittoon-brained, Saleem suffered a merely partial erasure, and
was only wiped clean whilst others, less fortunate, were wiped out;
unconscious in the night-shadow of a mosque, I was saved by the exhaustion
of ammunition dumps.
Tears - which, in the absence of the Kashmir! cold, have absolutely no
chance of hardening into diamonds - slide down the bosomy contours of
Padma's cheeks. 'O, mister, this war tamasha, kills the best and leaves the
rest!' Looking as though hordes of snails have recently crawled down from
her reddened eyes, leaving their glutinous shiny trails upon her face, Padma
mourns my bomb-flattened clan. I remain dry-eyed as usual, graciously
refusing to rise to the unintentional insult implied by Padma's lachrymose
exclamation.
'Mourn for the living,' I rebuke her gently, 'The dead have their
camphor gardens.' Grieve for Saleem! Who, barred from celestial lawns by the
continued beating of his heart, awoke once again amid the clammy metallic
fragrances of a hospital ward; for whom there were no houris, untouched by
man or djinn, to provide the promised consolations of eternity - I was lucky
to receive the grudging, bedpan-clattering ministrations of a bulky male
nurse who, while bandaging my head, muttered sourly that, war or no war, the
doctor sahibs liked going to their beach shacks on Sundays. 'Better you'd
stayed knocked out one more day,' he mouthed, before moving further down the
ward to spread more good cheer.
Grieve for Saleem - who, orphaned and purified, deprived of the hundred
daily pin-pricks of family life, which alone could deflate the great
ballooning fantasy of history and bring it down to a more manageably human
scale, had been pulled up by his roots to be flung unceremoniously across
the years, fated to plunge memoryless into an adulthood whose every aspect
grew daily more grotesque.
Fresh snail-tracks on Padma's cheeks. Obliged to attempt some sort of
"There, there', I resort to movie-trailers. (How I loved them at the old
Metro Cub Club! O smacking of lips at the sight of the title NEXT
ATTRACTION, superimposed on undulating blue velvet! O anticipatory
salivation before screens trumpeting COMING SOON! -Because the promise of
exotic futures has always seemed, to my mind, the perfect antidote to the
disappointments of the present.) 'Stop, stop," I exhort my mournfully
squatting audience, I'm not finished yet! There is to be electrocution and a
rain-forest; a pyramid of heads on a field impregnated by leaky marrowbones;
narrow escapes are coming, and a minaret that screamed! Padma, there is
still plenty worth telling: my further trials, in the basket of invisibility
and in the shadow of another mosque; wait for the premonitions of Resham
Bibi and the pout of Parvati-the-witch! Fatherhood and treason also, and of
course that unavoidable Widow, who added to my history of drainage-above the
final ignominy of voiding-below ... in short, there are still
next-attractions and coming-soons galore; a chapter ends when one's parents
die, but a new kind of chapter also begins.'
Somewhat consoled by my offers of novelty, my Padma sniffs; wipes away
mollusc-slime, dries eyes; breathes in deeply ... and, for the
spittoon-brained fellow we last met in his hospital bed, approximately five
years pass before my dung-lotus exhales.
(While Padma, to calm herself, holds her breath, I permit myself to
insert a Bombay-talkie-style close-up - a calendar ruffled by a breeze, its
pages flying off in rapid succession to denote the passing of the years; I
superimpose turbulent long-shots of street riots, medium shots of burning
buses and blazing English-language libraries owned by the British Council
and the United States Information Service; through the accelerated
flickering of the calendar we glimpse the fall of Ayub Khan, the assumption
of the presidency by General Yahya, the promise of elections... but now
Padma's lips are parting, and there is no time to linger-on the
angrily-opposed images of Mr Z. A. Bhutto and Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman;
exhaled air begins to issue invisibly from her mouth, and the dream-faces of
the leaders of the Pakistan People's Party and the Awami League shimmer and
fade out; the gusting of her emptying lungs paradoxically stills the breeze
blowing the pages of my calendar, which conies to rest upon a date late in
1970, before the election which split the country in two, before the war of
West Wing against East Wing, P.P.P. against Awami League, Bhutto against
Mujib ... before the election of 1970, and far away from the public stage,
three young soldiers are arriving at a mysterious camp in the Murree Hills.)
Padma has regained her self-control. 'Okay, okay,' she expostulates,
waving an arm in dismissal of her tears, 'Why you're waiting? Begin,' the
lotus instructs me loftily, 'Begin all over again.'
The camp in (he hills will be found on no maps; it is too far from the
Murree road for the barking of its dogs to be heard, even by the
sharpest-eared of motorists. Its wire perimeter fence is heavily
camouflaged; the gate bears neither symbol nor name. Yet it does, did,
exist; though its existence has been hotly denied - at the fall of Dacca,
for instance, when Pakistan's vanquished Tiger Niazi was quizzed on this
subject by his old chum, India's victorious General Sam Manekshaw, the Tiger
scoffed: 'Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities? Never heard
of it; you've been misled, old boy. Damn ridiculous idea, if you don't mind
my saying.' Despite what the Tiger said to Sam, I insist: the camp was there
all right ...
... 'Shape up!' Brigadier Iskandar is yelling at his newest recruits,
Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar. 'You're a CUTIA unit now!'
Slapping swagger-stick against thigh, he turns on his heels and leaves them
standing on the parade-ground, simultaneously fried by mountain sun and
frozen by mountain air. Chests out, shoulders back, rigid with obedience,
the three youths hear the giggling voice of the Brigadier's batman, Lala
Moin:
So you're the poor suckers who get the man-dog!'
In their bunks that night: 'Tracking and intelligence!' whispers Ayooba
Baloch, proudly. 'Spies, man! O.S.S. 117 types! Just let us at those Hindus
- see what we don't do! Ka-dang! Ka-pow! What weaklings, yara, those Hindus!
Vegetarians all! Vegetables,' Ayooba hisses, 'always lose to meat.' He is
built like a tank. His crew-cut begins just above his eyebrows.
And Farooq, 'You think there'll be war?' Ayooba snorts. 'What else? How
not a war? Hasn't Bhutto sahib promised every peasant one acre of land? So
where it'll come from? For so much soil, we must conquer Punjab and Bengal!
Just wait only; after the election, when People's Party has won - then
Ka-pow! Ka-blooey!'
Farooq is troubled: 'Those Indians have Sikh troops, man. With so-long
beards and hair, in the heat it pricks like crazy and they all go mad and
fight like hell ...!'
Ayooba gurgles with amusement. 'Vegetarians, I swear, yaar ... how are
they going to beat beefy types like us?' But Farooq is long and stringy.
Shaheed Dar whispers, 'But what did he mean: man-dog?' ... Morning. In
a hut with a blackboard, Brigadier Iskandar polishes knuckles on lapels
while one Sgt-Mjr Najmuddin briefs new recruits. Question-and-answer format;
Najmuddin provides both queries and replies. No interruptions are to be
tolerated. While above the blackboard the garlanded portraits of President
Yahya and Mutasim the Martyr stare sternly down. And through the (closed)
windows, the persistent barking of dogs... Najmuddin's inquiries and
responses are also barked. What are you here for? - Training. In what field?
- Pursuit-and-capture. How will you work? - In canine units of three persons
and one dog. What unusual features? - Absence of officer personnel,
necessity of taking own decisions, concomitant requirement for high Islamic
sense of self-discipline and responsibility. Purpose of units? - To root out
undesirable elements. Nature of such elements? - Sneaky, well-disguised,
could-be-anyone. Known intentions of same? - To be abhorred: destruction of
family life, murder of God, expropriation of landowners, abolition of
film-censorship. To what ends? - Annihilation of the State, anarchy, foreign
domination. Accentuating causes of concern? - Forthcoming elections; and
subsequently, civilian rule. (Political prisoners have been are being freed.
All types of hooligans are abroad.) Precise duties of units? -To obey
unquestioningly; to seek unflaggingly; to arrest remorselessly. Mode of
procedure? - Covert; efficient; quick. Legal basis of such detentions? -
Defence of Pakistan Rules, permitting the pick-up of undesirables, who may
be held incommunicado for a period of six months. Footnote: a renewable
period of six months. Any questions? - No. Good. You are CUTIA Unit 22.
She-dog badges will be sewn to lapels. The acronym CUTIA, of course, means
bitch.
And the man-dog?
Cross-legged, blue-eyed, staring into space, he sits beneath a tree.
Bodhi trees do not grow at this altitude; he makes do with a chinar. His
nose: bulbous, cucumbery, tip blue with cold. And on his head a monk's
tonsure where once Mr Zagallo's hand. And a mutilated finger whose missing
segment fell at Masha Miovic's feet after Glandy Keith had slammed. And
stains on his face like a map ...
'Ekkkhh-thoo!'
(He spits.)
His teeth are stained; betel-juice reddens his gums. A red stream of
expectorated paan-fluid leaves his lips, to hit, with commendable accuracy,
a beautifully-wrought silver spittoon, which sits before him on the ground.
Ayooba Shaheed Farooq are staring in amazement. 'Don't try to get it away
from him," Sgt-Mjr Najmuddin indicates the spittoon, 'It sends him wild.'
Ayooba begins, 'Sir sir I thought you said three persons and a -', but
Najmuddin barks, 'No questions! Obedience without queries! This is your
tracker; that's that. Dismiss.'
At that time, Ayooba and Farooq were sixteen and a half years old.
Shaheed (who had lied about his age) was perhaps a year younger. Because
they were so young, and had not had time to acquire the type of memories
which give men a firm hold on reality, such as memories of love or famine,
the boy soldiers were highly susceptible to the influence of legends and
gossip. Within twenty-four hours, in the course of mess-hall conversations
with other CUTIA units, the man-dog had been fully mythologized ... 'From a
really important family, man!' - 'The idiot child, they put him in the Army
to make a man of him!' - 'Had a war accident in '65, yaar, can't won't
remember a thing about it!' - 'Listen, I heard he was the brother of - 'No,
man, that's crazy, she is good, you know, so simple and holy, how would she
leave her brother?' - 'Anyway he refuses to talk about it.' - 'I heard one
terrible thing, she hated him, man, that's why she!' - 'No memory, not
interested in people, lives like a dog!' - 'But the tracking business is
true all right! You see that nose on him?' - 'Yah, man, he can follow any
trail on earth!' - 'Through water, baba, across rocks! Such a tracker, you
never saw!' - 'And he can't feel a thing! That's right! Numb, I swear;
head-to-foot numb! You touch him, he wouldn't know - only by smell he knows
you're there!' - 'Must be the war wound!' - 'But that spittoon, man, who
knows? Carries it everywhere like a love-token!' - 'I tell you, I'm glad
it's you three; he gives me the creeps, yaar, it's those blue eyes.' - 'You
know how they found out about his nose? He just wandered into a minefield,
man, I swear, just picked his way through, like he could smell the damn
mines!' - 'O, no, man, what are you talking, that's an old story, that was
that first dog in the whole CUTIA operation, that Bonzo, man, don't mix us
up!' - Hey, you Ayooba, you better watch your step, they say V.I.P.s are
keeping their eyes on him!' - 'Yah, like I told you, Jamila Singer ..." -
'O, keep your mouth shut, we all heard enough of your fairy-tales!'
Once Ayooba, Farooq and Shaheed had become reconciled to their strange,
impassive tracker (it was after the incident at the latrines), they gave him
the nickname of buddha, 'old man'; not just because he must have been seven
years their senior, and had actually taken part in the six-years-ago war of
'65, when the three boy soldiers weren't even in long pants, but because
there hung around him an air of great antiquity. The buddha was old before
his time.
O fortunate ambiguity of transliteration! The Urdu word 'buddha',
meaning old man, is pronounced with the Ds hard and plosive. But there is
also Buddha, with soft-tongued Ds, meaning
he-who-achieved-enlightenment-under-the-bodhi-tree ... Once upon a time, a
prince, unable to bear the suffering of the world, became capable of
not-living-in-the-world as well as living in it; he was present, but also
absent; his body was in one place, but his spirit was elsewhere. In ancient
India, Gautama the Buddha sat enlightened under a tree at Gaya; in the deer
park at Sarnath he taught others to abstract themselves from worldly sorrows
and achieve inner peace; and centuries later, Saleem the buddha sat under a
different tree, unable to remember grief, numb as ice, wiped clean as a
slate ... With some embarrassment, I am forced to admit that amnesia is the
kind of gimmick regularly used by our lurid film-makers. Bowing my head
slightly, I accept that my life has taken on, yet again, the tone of a
Bombay talkie; but after all, leaving to one side the vexed issue of
reincarnation, there is only a finite number of methods of achieving
rebirth. So, apologizing for the melodrama, I must doggedly insist that I,
he, had begun again; that after years of yearning for importance, he (or I)
had been cleansed of the whole business; that after my vengeful abandonment
by Jamila Singer, who wormed me into the Army to get me out her sight, I (or
he) accepted the fate which was my repayment for love, and sat uncomplaining
under a chinar tree; that, emptied of history, the buddha learned the arts
of submission, and did only what was required of him. To sum up: I became a
citizen of Pakistan.
It was arguably inevitable that, during the months of training, the
buddha should begin to irritate Ayooba Baloch. Perhaps it was because he
chose to live apart from the soldiers, in a straw-lined ascetic's stall at
the far end of the kennel-barracks; or because he was so often to be found
sitting cross-legged under his tree, silver spittoon clutched in hand, with
unfocused eyes and a foolish smile on his lips - as if he were actually
happy that he'd lost his brains! What's more, Ayooba, the apostle of meat,
may have found his tracker insufficiently virile. 'Like a brinjal, man,' I
permit Ayooba to complain, 'I swear - a vegetable!'
(We may also, taking the wider view, assert that irritation was in the
air at the year's turn. Were not even General Yahya and Mr Bhutto getting
hot and bothered about the petulant insistence of Sheikh Mujib on his right
to form the new government? The wretched Bengali's Awami League had won 160
out of a possible 162 East Wing seats; Mr Bhutto's P.P.P. had merely taken
81 Western constituencies. Yes, an irritating election. It is easy to
imagine how irked Yahya and Bhutto, West Wingers both, must have been! And
when even the mighty wax peevish, how is one to blame the small man? The
irritation of Ayooba Baloch, let us conclude, placed him in excellent, Dot
to say exalted company.)
On training manoeuvres, when Ayooba Shaheed Farooq scrambled after the
buddha as he followed the faintest of trails across bush rocks streams, the
three boys were obliged to admit his skill; but still Ayooba, tank-like,
demanded: 'Don't you remember really? Nothing? Allah, you don't feel
bad?
Somewhere you've maybe got mother father sister,' but the buddha interrupted
him gently: 'Don't try and fill my head with that history. I am who I am,
that's all there is.' His accent was so pure, 'Really classy Lucknow-type
Urdu,
wah-wah!'
Farooq said admiringly, that Ayooba Baloch, who spoke
coarsely, like a tribesman, fell silent; and the three boys began to believe
the rumours even more fervently. They were unwillingly fascinated by this
man with his nose like a cucumber and his head which rejected memories
families histories, which contained absolutely nothing except smells ...
'like a bad egg that somebody sucked dry,' Ayooba muttered to his
companions, and then, returning to his central theme, added, 'Allah, even
his nose looks like a vegetable.'
Their uneasiness lingered. Did they sense, in the buddha's numbed
blankness, a trace of 'undesirability'? - For was not his rejection of
past-and-family just the type of subversive behaviour they were dedicated to
'rooting out'? The camp's officers, however, were deaf to Ayooba's requests
of 'Sir sir can't we just have a real dog sir?' ... so that Farooq, a born
follower who had already adopted Ayooba as his leader and hero, cried, 'What
to do? With that guy's family contacts, some high-ups must've told the
Brigadier to put up with him, that's all.'
And (although none of the trio would have been able to express the
idea) I suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of
schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every
Pakistani heart. In those days, the country's East and West Wings were
separated by the unbridgeable land-mass of India; but past and present, too,
are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion was the glue of Pakistan,
holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself
as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of
personality, holding together our then and our now. Enough philosophizing:
what I am saying is that by abandoning consciousness, seceding from history,
the buddha was setting the worst of examples - and the example was followed
by no less a personage than Sheikh Mujib, when he led the East Wing into
secession and declared it independent as 'Bangladesh'! Yes, Ayooba Shaheed
Farooq were right to feel ill-at-ease - because even in those depths of my
withdrawal from responsibility, I remained responsible, through the workings
of the metaphorical modes of connection, for the belligerent events of 1971.
But I must go back to my new companions, so that I can relate the
incident at the latrines: there was Ayooba, tank-like, who led the unit, and
Farooq, who followed contentedly. The third youth, however, was a gloomier,
more private type, and as such closest to my heart. On his fifteenth
birthday Shaheed Dar had lied about his age and enlisted. That day, his
Punjabi sharecropper father had taken Shaheed into a field and wept all over
his new uniform. Old Dar told his son the meaning of his name, which was
'martyr', and expressed the hope that he would prove worthy of it, and
perhaps become the first of their family members to enter the perfumed
garden, leaving behind this pitiful world in which a father could not hope
to pay his debts and also feed his nineteen children. The overwhelming power
of names, and the resulting approach of martyrdom, had begun to prey heavily
on Shaheed's mind; in his dreams, he began to see his death, which took the
form of a bright pomegranate, and floated in mid-air behind him, following
him everywhere, biding its time. The disturbing and somewhat unheroic vision
of pomegranate death made Shaheed an inward, unsmiling fellow.
Inwardly, unsmilingly, Shaheed observed various CUTIA units being sent
away from the camp, into action; and became convinced that his time, and the
time of the pomegranate, was very near. From departures of
three-men-and-a-dog units in camouflaged jeeps, he deduced a growing
political crisis; it was February, and the irritations of the exalted were
becoming daily more marked. Ayooba-the-tank, however, retained a local point
of view. His irritation was also mounting, but its object was the buddha.
Ayooba had become infatuated with the only female in the camp, a skinny
latrine cleaner who couldn't have been over fourteen and whose nipples were
only just beginning to push against her tattered shirt: a low type,
certainly, but she was all that there was, and for a latrine cleaner she had
very nice teeth and a pleasant line in saucy over-the-shoulder glances ...
Ayooba began to follow her around, and that was how he spied her going into
the buddha's straw-lined stall, and that was why he leaned a bicycle against
the building and stood on the seat, and that was why he fell off, because he
didn't like what he saw. Afterwards he spoke to the latrine girl, grabbing
her roughly by the arm: 'Why do it with that crazy - why, when I, Ayooba,
am, could be - ?' and she replied that she liked the man-dog, he's funny,
says he can't feel anything, he rubs his hosepipe inside me but can't even
feel, but it's nice, and he tells that he likes my smell. The frankness of
the urchin girl, the honesty of latrine cleaners, made Ayooba sick; he told
her she had a soul composed of pig-droppings, and a tongue caked with
excrement also; and in the throes of his jealousy he devised the prank of
the jump-leads, the trick of the electrified urinal. The location appealed
to him; it had a certain poetic justice.
'Can't feel, huh?' Ayooba sneered to Farooq and Shaheed, 'Just wait on:
I'll make him jump for sure.'
On February loth (when Vahya, Bhutto and Mujib were refusing to engage
in high-level talks), the buddha felt the call of nature. A somewhat
concerned Shaheed and a gleeful Farooq loitered by the latrines; while
Ayooba, who had used jump-leads to attach the metal footplates of the
urinals to the battery of a jeep, stood out of sight behind the latrine hut,
beside the jeep, whose motor was running. The buddha appeared, with his eyes
as dilated as a charas-chewer's and his gait of walking-through-a-cloud, and
as he floated into the latrine Farooq called out, 'Ohe! Ayooba, yara!' and
began to giggle. The childsoldiers awaited the howl of mortified anguish
which would be the sign that their vacuous tracker had begun to piss,
allowing electricity to mount the golden stream and sting him in his numb
and urchin-rubbing hosepipe.
But no shriek came; Farooq, feeling confused and cheated, began to
frown; and as time went by Shaheed grew nervous and yelled over to Ayooba
Baloch, 'You Ayooba! What you doing, man?' To which Ayooba-the-tank, 'What
d'you think, yaar, I turned on the juice five minutes ago!' ... And now
Shaheed ran - FULL TILT! - into the latrine, to find the buddha urinating
away with an expression of foggy pleasure, emptying a bladder which must
have been filling up for a fortnight, while the current passed up into him
through his nether cucumber, apparently unnoticed, so that he was filling up
with electrkity and there was a blue crackle playing around the end of his
gargantuan nose; and Shaheed who didn't have the courage to touch this
impossible being who could absorb electricity through his hosepipe screamed,
'Disconnect, man, or he'll fry like an onion here!' The buddha emerged from
the latrine, unconcerned, buttoning himself with his right hand while the
left hand held his silver spittoon; and the three child-soldiers understood
that it was really true, Allah, numb as ice, anaesthetized against feelings
as well as memories ... For a week after the incident, the buddha could not
be touched without giving an electric shock, and not even the latrine girl
could visit him in his stall.
Curiously, after the jump-lead business, Ayooba Baloch stopped
resenting the buddha, and even began to treat him with respect; the canine
unit was forged by that bizarre moment into a real team, and was ready to
venture forth against the evildoers of the earth.
Ayooba-the-tank failed to give the buddha a shock; but where the small
man fails, the mighty triumph. (When Yahya and Bhutto decided to make Sheikh
Mujib jump, there were no mistakes.)
On March 15th, 1971, twenty units of the CUTIA agency assembled in a
hut with a blackboard. The garlanded features of the President gazed down
upon sixty-one men and nineteen dogs; Yahya Khan had just offered Mujib the
olive branch of immediate talks with himself and Bhutto, to resolve all
irritations; but his portrait maintained an impeccable poker-face, giving no
clue to his true, shocking intentions ... while Brigadier Iskandar rubbed
knuckles on lapels, Sgt-Mjr Najmuddin issued orders: sixty-one men and
nineteen dogs were instructed to shed their uniforms. A tumultuous rustling
in the hut: obeying without query, nineteen individuals remove identifying
collars from canine necks. The dogs, excellently trained, cock eyebrows but
refrain from giving voice; and the buddha, dutifully, begins to undress.
Five dozen fellow humans follow his lead; five dozen stand to attention in a
trice, shivering in the cold, beside neat piles of military berets pants
shoes shirts and green pullovers with leather patches at the elbows.
Sixty-one men, naked except for imperfect underwear, are issued (by Lala
Moin the batman) with Army-approved mufti. Najmuddin barks a command; and
then there they all are, some in lungis and kurtas, some in Pathan turbans.
There are men in cheap rayon pants and men in striped clerks' shirts. The
buddha is in dhoti and kameez; he is comfortable, but around him are
soldiers squirming in ill-fitting plain-clothes. This is, however, a
military operation; no voice, human or canine, is raised in complaint.
On March 15th, after obeying sartorial instructions, twenty CUTIA units
were flown to Dacca, via Ceylon; among them were Shaheed Dar, Farooq Rashid,
Ayooba Baloch and their buddha. Also flying to the East Wing by this
circuitous route were sixty thousand of the West Wing's toughest troops:
sixty thousand, like sixty-one, were all in mufti. The General Officer
Commanding (in a nattily blue double-breasted suit) was Tikka Khan; the
officer responsible for Dacca, for its taming and eventual surrender, was
called Tiger Niazi. He wore bush-shirt, slacks and a jaunty little trilby on
his head.
Via Ceylon we flew, sixty thousand and sixty-one innocent airline
passengers, avoiding overflying India, and thus losing our chance of
watching, from twenty thousand feet, the celebrations of Indira Gandhi's New
Congress Party, which had won a landslide victory - 350 out of a possible
515 seats in the Lok Sabha - in another recent election. Indira-ignorant,
unable to see her campaign slogan, GARIBI HATAO, Get Rid of Poverty,
blazoned on walls and banners across the great diamond of India, we landed
in Dacca in the early spring, and were driven in specially-requisitioned
civilian buses to a military camp. On this last stage of our journey,
however, we were unable to avoid hearing a snatch of song, issuing from some
unseen gramophone. The song was called 'Amar Sonar Bangla' ('Our Golden
Bengal', author: R. Tagore) and ran, in part: 'During spring the fragrance
of your mango-groves maddens my heart with delight.' However, none of us
could understand Bengali, so we were protected against the insidious
subversion of the lyric, although our feet did inadvertently tap (it must be
admitted) to the tune.
At first, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha were not told the name
of the city to which they had come. Ayooba, envisaging the destruction of
vegetarians, whispered: 'Didn't I tell you? Now we'll show them! Spy stuff,
man! Plain clothes and all! Up and at 'em, Number 22 Unit! Ka-bang! Ka-dang!
Ka-pow!'
But we were not in India; vegetarians were not our targets; and after
days of cooling our heels, uniforms were issued to us once again. This
second transfiguration took place on March 25th.
On March 25th, Yahya and Bhutto abruptly broke off their talks with
Mujib and returned to the West Wing. Night fell; Brigadier Iskandar,
followed by Najmuddin and Lala Moin, who was staggering under the weight of
sixty-one uniforms and nineteen dog-collars, burst into the CUTIA barracks.
Now Najmuddin: 'Snap to it! Actions not words! One-two double-quick time!'
Airline passengers donned uniforms and took up arms; while Brigadier
Iskandar at last announced the purpose of our trip. 'That Mujib,' he
revealed, 'We'll give him what-for all right. We'll make him jump for sure!'
(It was on March 25th, after the breakdown of the talks with Bhutto and
Yahya, that Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman proclaimed the state of Bangladesh.)
CUTIA units emerged from barracks, piled into waiting jeeps; while,
over the loudspeakers of the military base, the recorded voice of Jamila
Singer was raised in patriotic hymns. (And Ayooba, nudging the buddha:
'Listen, come on, don't you recognize - think, man, isn't that your own dear
- Allah, this type is good for nothing but sniffing!')
At midnight - could it, after all, have been at any other time? -sixty
thousand crack troops also left their barracks;
passengers-who-had-flown-as-civilians now pressed the starter buttons of
tanks. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha, however, were personally
selected to accompany Brigadier Iskandar on the greatest adventure of the
night. Yes, Padma: when Mujib was arrested, it was I who sniffed him out.
(They had provided me with one of his old shirts; it's easy when you've got
the smell.)
Padma is almost beside herself with anguish. 'But mister, you didn't,
can't have, how would you do such a thing ... ?' Padma: I did. I have sworn
to tell everything; to conceal no shred of the truth. (But there are
snail-tracks on her face, and she must have an explanation.)
So - believe me, don't believe, but this is what it was like! - I must
reiterate that everything ended, everything began again, when a spittoon hit
me on the back of the head. Saleem, with his desperation for meaning, for
worthy purpose, for genius-like-a-shawl, had gone; would not return until a
jungle snake - for the moment, anyway, there is was only the buddha; who
recognizes no singing voice as his relative; who remembers neither fathers
nor mothers; for whom midnight holds no importance; who, some time after a
cleansing accident, awoke in a military hospital bed, and accepted the Army
as his lot; who submits to the life in which he finds himself, and does his
duty; who follows orders; who lives both in-the-world and not-in-the-world;
who bows his head; who can track man or beast through streets or down
rivers; who neither knows nor cares how, under whose auspices, as a favour
to whom, at whose vengeful instigation he was put into uniform; who is, in
short, no more and no less than the accredited tracker of CUTIA Unit 22.
But how convenient this amnesia is, how much it excuses! So permit me
to criticize myself: the philosophy of acceptance to which the buddha
adhered had consequences no more and no less unfortunate than his previous
lust-for-centrality; and here, in Dacca, those consequences were being
revealed.
'No, not true,' my Padma wails; the same denials have been made about
most of what befell that night.
Midnight, March 25th, 1971: past the University, which was being
shelled, the buddha led troops to Sheikh Mujib's lair. Students and
lecturers came running out of hostels; they were greeted by bullets, and
Mercurochrome stained the lawns. Sheikh Mujib, however, was not shot;
manacled, manhandled, he was led by Ayooba Baloch to a waiting van. (As once
before, after the revolution of the pepperpots ... but Mujib was not naked;
he had on a pair of green-and-yellow striped pajamas.) And while we drove
through city streets, Shaheed looked out of windows and saw things that
weren't-couldn't-have-been true: soldiers entering women's hostels without
knocking; women, dragged into the street, were also entered, and again
nobody troubled' to knock. And newspaper offices, burning with the dirty
yellowblack smoke of cheap gutter newsprint, and the offices of trade
unions, smashed to the ground, and roadside ditches filling up with people
who were not merely asleep - bare chests were seen, and the hollow pimples
of bullet-holes. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq watched in silence through moving
windows as our boys, our soldiers-for-Allah, our worth-ten-babus jawans held
Pakistan together by turning flamethrowers machine-guns hand-grenades on the
city slums. By the time we brought Sheikh Mujib to the airport, where Ayooba
stuck a pistol into his rump and pushed him on to an aircraft which flew him
into West Wing captivity, the buddha had closed his eyes. ('Don't fill my
head with all this history,' he had once told Ayooba-the-tank, 'I am what I
am and that's all there is.')
And Brigadier Iskandar, rallying his troops: 'Even now there are
subversive elements to be rooted out.'
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy
... dog-soldiers strain at the leash, and then, released, leap joyously to
their work. O wolfhound chases of undesirables! O prolific seizings of
professors and poets! O unfortunate shot-while-resisting arrests of Awami
Leaguers and fashion correspondents! Dogs of war cry havoc in the city; but
although tracker-dogs are tireless, soldiers are weaker: Farooq Shaheed
Ayooba take turns at vomiting as their nostrils are assailed by the stench
of burning slums. The buddha, in whose nose the stench spawns images of
searing vividness, continues merely to do his job. Nose them out: leave the
rest to the soldier-boys. CUTIA units stalk the smouldering wreck of the
city. No undesirable is safe tonight; no hiding-place impregnable.
Bloodhounds track the fleeing enemies of national unity; wolfhounds, not to
be outdone, sink fierce teeth into their prey.
How many arrests - ten, four-hundred-and-twenty, one-thousand-and-one?
- did our own Number 22 Unit make that night? How many intellectual
lily-livered Daccans hid behind women's saris and had to be yanked into the
streets? How often did Brigadier Iskandar -'Smell this! That's the stink of
subversion!' - unleash the war-hounds of unity? There are things which took
place on the night of March 25th which must remain permanently in a state of
confusion.
Futility of statistics: during 1971, ten million refugees fled across
the borders of East Pakistan-Bangladesh into India - but ten million (like
all numbers larger than one thousand and one) refuses to be understood.
Comparisons do not help: 'the biggest migration in the history of the human
race' - meaningless. Bigger than Exodus, larger than the Partition crowds,
the many-headed monster poured into India. On the border, Indian soldiers
trained the guerrillas known as Mukti Bahini; in Dacca, Tiger Niazi ruled
the roost.
And Ayooba Shaheed Farooq? Our boys in green? How did they take to
battling against fellow meat-eaters? Did they mutiny? Were officers -
Iskandar, Najmuddin, even Lala Moin - riddled with nauseated bullets? They
were not. Innocence had been lost; but despite a new grimness about the
eyes, despite the irrevocable loss of certainty, despite the eroding of
moral absolutes, the unit went on with its work. The buddha was not the only
one who did as he was told ... while somewhere high above the struggle, the
voice of Jamila Singer fought anonymous voices singing the lyrics of R.
Tagore: 'My life passes in the shady village homes filled with rice from
your fields; they madden my heart with delight.'
Their hearts maddened, but not with delight, Ayooba and company
followed orders; the buddha followed scent-trails. Into the heart of the
city, which has turned violent maddened bloodsoaked as the West Wing
soldiers react badly to their knowledge-of-wrongdoing, goes Number 22 Unit;
through the blackened streets, the buddha concentrates on the ground,
sniffing out trails, ignoring the ground-level chaos of cigarette-packs
cow-dung fallen-bicycles abandoned-shoes; and then on other assignments, out
into the countryside, where entire villages are being burned owing to their
collective responsibility for harbouring Mukti Bahini, the buddha and three
boys track down minor Awami League officials and well-known Communist types.
Past migrating villagers with bundled possessions on their heads; past
torn-up railway tracks and burnt-out trees; and always, as though some
invisible force were directing their footsteps, drawing them into a darker
heart of madness, their missions send them south south south, always nearer
to the sea, to the mouths of the Ganges and the sea.
And at last - who were they following then? Did names matter any more?
- they were given a quarry whose skills must have been the
equal-and-opposite of the buddha's own, otherwise why did it take so long to
catch him? At last - unable to escape their training,
pursue-relentlessly-arrest-remorselessly, they are in the midst of a mission
without an end, pursuing a foe who endlessly eludes them, but they cannot
report back to base empty-handed, and on they go, south south south, drawn
by the eternally-receding scent-trail; and perhaps by something more:
because, in my life, fate has never been unwilling to lend a hand.
They have commandeered a boat, because the buddha said the trail led
down the river; hungry unslept exhausted in a universe of abandoned
rice-paddies, they row after their unseen prey; down the great brown river
they go, until the war is too far away to remember, but still the scent
leads them on. The river here has a familiar name: Padma. But the name is a
local deception; in reality the river is still Her, the mother-water,
goddess Ganga streaming down to earth through Shiva's hair. The buddha has
not spoken for days; he just points, there, that way, and on they go, south
south south to the sea.
A nameless morning. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq awaking in the boat of their
absurd pursuit, moored by the bank of Padma-Ganga - to find him gone.
'Allah-Allah,' Farooq yelps, 'Grab your ears and pray for pity, he's brought
us to this drowned place and run off, it's all your fault, you Ayooba, that
trick with the jump-leads and this is his revenge!' ... The sun, climbing.
Strange alien birds in the sky. Hunger and fear like mice in their bellies:
and whatif, whatif the Mukti Bahini... parents are invoked. Shaheed has
dreamed his pomegranate dream. Despair, lapping at the edges of the boat.
And in the distance, near the horizon, an impossible endless huge green
wall, stretching right and left to the ends of the earth! Unspoken fear: how
can it be, how can what we are seeing be true, who builds walls across the
world? ... And then Ayooba, 'Look-look, Allah!' Because coming towards them
across the rice-paddies is a bizarre slow-motion chase: first the buddha
with that cucumber-nose, you could spot it a mile off, and following him,
splashing through paddies, a gesticulating peasant with a scythe, Father
Time enraged, while running along a dyke a woman with her sari caught up
between her legs, hair loose, voice pleading screaming, while the scythed
avenger stumbles through drowned rice, covered from head to foot in water
and mud. Ayooba roars with nervous relief: 'The old billy-goat! Couldn't
keep his hands off the local women! Come on, buddha, don't let him catch
you, he'll slice off both your cucumbers!' And Farooq, 'But then what? If
the buddha is sliced, what then?' And now Ayooba-the-tank is pulling a
pistol out of its holster. Ayooba aiming: both hands held out in front,
trying not to shake, Ayooba squeezing: a scythe curves up into the air. And
slowly slowly the arms of a peasant rise up as though in prayer; knees kneel
in paddy-water; a face plunges below the water-level to touch its forehead
to the earth. On the dyke a woman wailing. And Ayooba tells the buddha:
'Next time I'll shoot you instead.' Ayooba-the-tank shaking like a leaf. And
Time lies dead in a rice-paddy.
But there is still the meaningless chase, the enemy who will never be
seen, and the buddha, 'Go that way,' and the four of them row on, south
south south, they have murdered the hours and forgotten the date, they no
longer know if they are chasing after or running from, but whichever it is
that pushes them is bringing them closer closer to the impossible green
wall, 'That way,' the buddha insists, and then they are inside it, the
jungle which is so thick that history has hardly ever found the way in. The
Sundarbans: it swallows them up.
In the Sundarbans
I'll own up: there was no last, elusive quarry, driving us south south
south. To all my readers, I should like to make this naked-breasted
admission: while Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were unable to distinguish between
chasing-after and running-from, the buddha knew what he was doing. Although
I'm well aware that I am providing any future commentators or venom-quilled
critics (to whom I say: twice before, I've been subjected to snake-poison;
on both occasions, I proved stronger than venenes) with yet more ammunition
- through admission-of-guilt, revelation-of-moral-turpitude,
proof-of-coward-ice - I'm- bound to say that he, the buddha, finally
incapable of continuing in the submissive performance of his duty, took to
his heels and fled. Infected by the soul-chewing maggots of pessimism
futility shame, he deserted, into the historyless anonymity of rain-forests,
dragging three children in his wake. What I hope to immortalize in pickles
as well as words: that condition of the spirit in which the consequences of
acceptance could not be denied, in which an overdose of reality gave birth
to a miasmic longing for flight into the safety of dreams ... But the
jungle, like all refuges, was entirely other -was both less and more - than
he had expected.
'I am glad,' my Padma says, 'I am happy you ran away.' But I insist:
not I. He. He, the buddha. Who, until the snake, would remain not-Saleem;
who, in spite of running-from, was still separated from his past; although
he clutched, in his limpet fist, a certain silver spittoon.
The jungle closed behind them like a tomb, and after hours of
increasingly weary but also frenzied rowing through incomprehensibly
labyrinthine salt-water channels overtowered by the cathedral-arching trees,
Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were hopelessly lost; they turned time and again to
the buddha, who pointed, 'That way', and then, 'Down there', but although
they rowed feverishly, ignoring fatigue, it seems as if the possibility of
ever leaving this place receded before them like the lantern of a ghost;
until at length they rounded on their supposedly infallible tracker, and
perhaps saw some small light of shame or relief glowing in his habitually
milky-blue eyes; and now Farooq whispered in the sepulchral greenness of the
forest: 'You don't know. You're just saying anything.' The buddha remained
silent, but in his silence they read their fate, and now that he was
convinced that the jungle had swallowed them the way a toad gulps down a
mosquito, now that he was sure he would never see the sun again, Ayooba
Baloch, Ayooba-the-tank himself, broke down utterly and wept like a monsoon.
The incongruous spectacle of this huge figure with a crew-cut blubbering
like a baby served to detach Farooq and Shaheed from their senses; so that
Farooq almost upset the boat by attacking the buddha, who mildly bore all
the fist-blows which rained down on his chest shoulders arms, until Shaheed
pulled Farooq down for the sake of safety. Ayooba Baloch cried without
stopping for three entire hours or days or weeks, until the rain began and
made his tears unnecessary; and Shaheed Dar heard himself saying, 'Now look
what you started, man, with your crying,' proving that they were already
beginning to succumb to the logic of the jungle, and that was only the start
of it, because as the mystery of evening compounded the unreality of the
trees, the Sundarbans began to grow in the rain.
At first they were so busy baling out their boat that they did not
notice; also, the water-level was rising, which may have confused them; but
in the last light there could be no doubt that the jungle was gaining in
size, power and ferocity; the huge stilt-roots of vast ancient mangrove
trees could be seen snaking about thirstily in the dusk, sucking in the rain
and becoming thicker than elephants' trunks, while the mangroves themselves
were getting so tall that, as Shaheed Dar said afterwards, the birds at the
top must have been able to sing to God. The leaves in the heights of the
great nipa palms began to spread like immense green cupped hands, swelling
in the nocturnal downpour until the entire forest seemed to be thatched; and
then the nipa-fruits began to fall, they were larger than any coconuts on
earth and gathered speed alarmingly as they fell from dizzying heights to
explode like bombs in the water. Rainwater was filling their boat; they had
only their soft green caps and an old ghee tin to bale with; and as night
fell and the nipa-fruits bombed them from the air, Shaheed Dar said,
'Nothing else to do - we must land,' although his thoughts were full of his
pomegranate-dream and it crossed his mind that this might be where it came
true, even if the fruits were different here.
While Ayooba sat in a red-eyed funk and Farooq seemed destroyed by his
hero's disintegration; while the buddha remained silent and bowed his head,
Shaheed alone remained capable of thought, because although he was drenched
and worn out and the night-jungle screeched around him, his head became
partly clear whenever he thought about the pomegranate of his death; so it
was Shaheed who ordered us, them, to row our, their, sinking boat to shore.
A nipa-fruit missed the boat by an inch and a half, creating such
turbulence in the water that they capsized; they struggled ashore in the
dark holding guns oilskins ghee-tin above their heads, pulled the boat up
after themselves, and past caring about bombarding nipa palms and snaking
mangroves, fell into their sodden craft and slept. When they awoke,
soaking-shivering in spite of the heat, the rain had become a heavy drizzle.
They found their bodies covered in three-inch-long leeches which were almost
entirely colourless owing to the absence of direct sunlight, but which had
now turned bright red because they were full of blood, and which, one by
one, exploded on the bodies of the four human beings, being too greedy to
stop sucking when they were full. Blood trickled down legs and on to the
forest floor; the jungle sucked it in, and knew what they were like.
When the falling nipa-fruits smashed on the jungle floor, they, too,
exuded a liquid the colour of blood, a red milk which was immediately
covered in a million insects, including giant flies as transparent as the
leeches. The flies, too, reddened as they filled up with the milk of the
fruit... all through the night, it seemed, the Sundarbans had continued to
grow. Tallest of all were the sundri trees which had given their name to the
jungle; trees high enough to block out even the faintest hope of sun. The
four of us, them, climbed out of the boat; and only when they set foot on a
hard bare soil crawling with pale pink scorpions and a seething mass of
dun-coloured earthworms did they remember their hunger and thirst. Rainwater
poured off leaves all around them, and they turned their mouths up to the
roof of the jungle and drank; but perhaps because the water came to them by
way of sundri leaves and mangrove branches and nipa fronds, it acquired on
its journey something of the insanity of the jungle, so that as they drank
they fell deeper and deeper into the thraldom of that livid green world
where the birds had voices like creaking wood and all the snakes were blind.
In the turbid, miasmic state of mind which the jungle induced, they prepared
their first meal, a combination of nipa-fruits and mashed earthworms, which
inflicted on them all a diarrhoea so violent that they forced themselves to
examine the excrement in case their intestines had fallen out in the mess.
Farooq said, 'We're going to die.' But Shaheed was possessed by a
powerful lust for survival; because, having recovered from the doubts of the
night, he had become convinced that this was not how he was supposed to go.
Lost in the rain-forest, and aware that the lessening of the monsoon
was only a temporary respite, Shaheed decided that there was little point in
attempting to find a way out when, at any moment, the returning monsoon
might sink their inadequate craft; under his instructions, a shelter was
constructed from oilskins and palm fronds; Shaheed said, 'As long as we
stick to fruit, we can survive.' They bad all long ago forgotten the purpose
of their journey; the chase, which had begun far away in the real world,
acquired in the altered light of the Sundarbans a quality of absurd fantasy
which enabled them to dismiss it once and for all.
So it was that Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha surrendered
themselves to the terrible phantasms of the dream-forest. The days passed,
dissolving into each other under the force of the returning rain, and
despite chills fevers diarrhoea they stayed alive, improving their shelter
by pulling down the lower branches of sundris and mangroves, drinking the
red milk of nipa-fruits, acquiring the skills of survival, such as the power
of strangling snakes and throwing sharpened sticks so accurately that they
speared multicoloured birds through their gizzards. But one night Ayooba
awoke in the dark to find the translucent figure of a peasant with a
bullet-hole in his heart and a scythe in his hand staring mournfully down at
him, and as he struggled to get out of the boat (which they had pulled in,
under the cover of their primitive shelter) the peasant leaked a colourless
fluid which flowed out of the hole in his heart and on to Ayooba's gun arm.
The next morning Ayooba's right arm refused to move; it hung rigidly by his
side as if it had been set in plaster. Although Farooq Rashid offered help
and sympathy, it was no use; the arm was held immovably in the invisible
fluid of the ghost.
After this first apparition, they fell into a state of mind in which
they would have believed the forest capable of anything; each night it sent
them new punishments, the accusing eyes of the wives of men they had tracked
down and seized, the screaming and monkey-gibbering of children left
fatherless by their work ... and in this first time, the time of punishment,
even the impassive buddha with his citified voice was obliged to confess
that he, too, had taken to waking up at night to find the forest closing in
upon him like a vice, so that he felt unable to breathe.
When it had punished them enough - when they were all trembling shadows
of the people they had once been - the jungle permitted them the
double-edged luxury of nostalgia. One night Ayooba, who was regressing
towards infancy faster than any of them, and had begun to suck his one
moveable thumb, saw his mother looking down at him, offering him the
delicate rice-based sweets of her love; but at the same moment as he reached
out for the laddoos, she scurried away, and he saw her climb a giant
sundri-tree to sit swinging from a high branch by her tail: a white
wraithlike monkey with the face of his mother visited Ayooba night after
night, so that after a time he was obliged to remember more about her than
her sweets: how she had liked to sit among the boxes of her dowry, as though
she, too, were simply some sort of thing, simply one of the gifts her father
gave to her husband; in the heart of the Sundarbans, Ayooba Baloch
understood his mother for the first time, and stopped sucking his thumb.
Farooq Rashid, too, was given a vision. At dusk one day he thought he saw
his brother running wildly through the forest, and became convinced that his
father had died. He remembered a forgotten day when his peasant father had
told him and his fleet-footed brother that the local landlord, who lent
money at 300 per cent, had agreed to buy his soul in return for the latest
loan. 'When I die,' old Rashid told Farooq's brother, 'you must open your
mouth and my spirit will fly inside it; then run run run, because the
zamindar will be after you!' Farooq, who had also started regressing
alarmingly, found in the knowledge of his father's death and the flight of
his brother the strength to give up the childish habits which the jungle had
at first re-created in him; he stopped crying when he was hungry and asking
Why. Shaheed Dar, too, was visited by a monkey with the face of an ancestor;
but all he saw was a father who had instructed him to earn his name. This,
however, also helped to restore in him the sense of responsibility which the
just-following-orders requirements of war had sapped; so it seemed that the
magical jungle, having tormented them with their misdeeds, was leading them
by the hand towards a new adulthood. And flitting through the night-forest
went the wraiths of their hopes; these, however, they were unable to see
clearly, or to grasp.
The buddha, however, was not granted nostalgia at first. He had taken
to sitting cross-legged under a sundri-tree; his eyes and mind seemed empty,
and at night, he no longer awoke. But finally the forest found a way through
to him; one afternoon, when rain pounded down on the trees and boiled off
them as steam, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq saw the buddha sitting under his tree
while a blind, translucent serpent bit, and poured venom into, his heel.
Shaheed Dar crushed the serpent's head with a stick; the buddha, who was
head-to-foot numb, seemed not to have noticed. His eyes were closed. After
this, the boy soldiers waited for the man-dog to die; but I was stronger
than the snake-poison. For two days he became as rigid as a tree, and his
eyes crossed, so that he saw the world in mirror-image, with the right side
on the left; at last he relaxed, and the look of milky abstraction was no
longer in his eyes. I was rejoined to the past, jolted into unity by
snake-poison, and it began to pour out through the buddha's lips. As his
eyes returned to normal, his words flowed so freely that they seemed to be
an aspect of the monsoon. The child-soldiers listened, spellbound, to the
stories issuing from his mouth, beginning with a birth at midnight, and
continuing unstoppably, because he was reclaiming everything, all of it, all
lost histories, all the myriad complex processes that go to make a man.
Open-mouthed, unable to tear themselves away, the child-soldiers drank his
life like leaf-tainted water, as he spoke of bed-wetting cousins,
revolutionary pepperpots, the perfect voice of a sister ... Ayooba Shaheed
Farooq would have (once upon a time) given anything to know that those
rumours had been true; but in the Sundarbans, they didn't even cry out.
And rushing on: to late-flowering love, and Jamila in a bedroom in a
shaft of light. Now Shaheed did murmur, 'So that's why, when he confessed,
after that she couldn't stand to be near ...' But the buddha continues, and
it becomes apparent that he is struggling to recall something particular,
something which refuses to return, which obstinately eludes him, so that he
gets to the end without finding it, and remains frowning and unsatisfied
even after he has recounted a holy war, and revealed what fell from the sky.
There was a silence; and then Farooq Rashid said, 'So much, yaar,
inside one person; so many bad things, no wonder he kept his mouth shut!'
You see, Padma: I have told this story before. But what refused to
return? What, despite the liberating venene of a colourless serpent, failed
to emerge from my lips? Padma: the buddha had forgotten his name. (To be
precise: his first name.)
And still it went on raining. The water-level was rising daily, until
it became clear that they would have to move deeper into the jungle, in
search of higher ground. The rain was too heavy for the boat to be of use;
so, still following Shaheed's instructions, Ayooba Farooq and the buddha
pulled it far away from the encroaching bank, tied mooring-rope around
sundri-trunk, and covered their craft with leaves; after which, having no
option, they moved ever further into the dense uncertainty of the jungle.
Now, once again, the Sundarbans changed its nature; once again Ayooba
Shaheed Farooq found their ears filled with the lamentations of families
from whose bosom they had torn what once, centuries ago, they had termed
'undesirable elements'; they rushed wildly forward into the jungle to escape
from the accusing, pain-filled voices of their victims; and at night the
ghostly monkeys gathered in the trees and sang the words of 'Our Golden
Bengal": '... O Mother, I am poor, but what little I have, I lay at thy
feet. And it maddens my heart with delight.' Unable to escape from the
unbearable torture of the unceasing voices, incapable of bearing for a
moment longer the burden of shame, which was now greatly increased by their
jungle-learned sense of responsibility, the three boy-soldiers were moved,
at last, to take desperate measures. Shaheed Dar stooped down and pkked up
two handfuls of rain-heavy jungle mud; in the throes of that awful
hallucination, he thrust the treacherous mud of the rain-forest into his
ears. And after him, Ayooba Baloch and Farooq Rashid stopped their ears also
with mud. Only the buddha left his ears (one good, one already bad)
unstopped; as though he alone were willing to bear the retribution of the
jungle, as though he were bowing his head before the inevitability of his
guilt ... The mud of the dream-forest, which no doubt also contained the
concealed translucency of jungle-insects and the devilry of bright orange
bird-droppings, infected the ears of the three boy-soldiers and made them
all as deaf as posts; so that although they were spared the singsong
accusations of the jungle, they were now obliged to converse in a
rudimentary form of sign-language. They seemed, however, to prefer their
diseased deafness to the unpalatable secrets which the sundri-leaves had
whispered in their ears.
At last, the voices stopped, though by now only the buddha (with his
one good ear) could hear them; at last, when the four wanderers were near
the point of panic, the jungle brought them through a curtain of tree-beards
and showed them a sight so lovely that it brought lumps to their throats.
Even the buddha seemed to tighten his grip on his spittoon. With one good
ear between the four of them, they advanced into a glade filled with the
gentle melodies of songbirds, in whose centre stood a monumental Hindu
temple, carved in forgotten centuries out of a single immense crag of rock;
its walls danced with friezes of men and women, who were depicted coupling
in postures of unsurpassable athleticism and sometimes, of highly comic
absurdity. The quartet moved towards this miracle with disbelieving steps.
Inside, they found, at long last, some respite from the endless monsoon, and
also the towering statue of a black dancing goddess, whom the boy-soldiers
from Pakistan could not name; but the buddha knew she was Kali, fecund and
awful, with the remnants of gold paint on her teeth. The four travellers lay
down at her feet and fell into a rain-free sleep which ended at what could
have been midnight, when they awoke simultaneously to find themselves being
smiled upon by four young girls of a beauty which was beyond speech.
Shaheed, who recalled the four houris awaiting him in the camphor garden,
thought at first that he had died in the night; but the houris looked real
enough, and their saris, under which they wore nothing at all, were torn and
stained by the jungle. Now as eight eyes stared into eight, saris were
unwound and placed, neatly folded, on the ground; after which the naked and
identical daughters of the forest came to them, eight arms were twined with
eight, eight legs were linked with eight legs more; below the statue of
multi-limbed Kali, the travellers abandoned themselves to caresses which
felt real enough, to kisses and love-bites which were soft and painful, to
scratches which left marks, and they realized that this this this was what
they had needed, what they had longed for without knowing it, that having
passed through the childish regressions and childlike sorrows of their
earliest jungle-days, having survived the onset of memory and responsibility
and the greater pains of renewed accusations, they were leaving infancy
behind for ever, and then forgetting reasons and implications and deafness,
forgetting everything, they gave themselves to the four identical beauties
without a single thought in their heads.
After that night, they were unable to tear themselves away from the
temple, except to forage for food, and every night the soft women of their
most contented dreams returned in silence, never speaking, always neat and
tidy with their saris, and invariably bringing the lost quartet to an
incredible united peak of delight. None of them knew how long this period
lasted, because in the Sundarbans time followed unknown laws, but at last
the day came when they looked at each other and realized they were becoming
transparent, that it was possible to see through their bodies, not clearly
as yet, but cloudily, like staring through mango-juice. In their alarm they
understood that this was the last and worst of the jungle's tricks, that by
giving them their heart's desire it was fooling them into using up their
dreams, so that as their dream-life seeped out of them they became as hollow
and translucent as glass. The buddha saw now that the colourlessness of
insects and leeches and snakes might have more to do with the depredations
worked on their insectly, leechy, snakish imaginations than with the absence
of sunlight... awakened as if for the first time by the shock of
translucency, they looked at the temple with new eyes, seeing the great
gaping cracks in the solid rock, realizing that vast segments could come
detached and crash down upon them at any moment; and then, in a murky corner
of the abandoned shrine, they saw the remnants of what might have been four
small fires -ancient ashes, scorch-marks on stone - or perhaps four funeral
pyres; and in the centre of each of the four, a small, blackened, fire-eaten
heap of uncrushed bones.
How the buddha left the Sundarbans: the forest of illusions unleashed
upon them, as they fled from temple towards boat, its last and most
terrifying trick; they had barely reached the boat when it came towards
them, at first a rumble in the far distance, then a roar which could
penetrate even mud-deafened ears, they had untied the boat and leapt wildly
into it when the wave came, and now they were at the mercy of the waters,
which could have crushed them effortlessly against sundri or mangrove or
nipa, but instead the tidal wave bore them down turbulent brown channels as
the forest of their torment blurred past them like a great green wall, it
seemed as if the jungle, having tired of its playthings, were ejecting them
unceremoniously from its territory; waterborne, impelled forwards and still
forwards by the unimaginable power of the wave, they bobbed pitifully
amongst fallen branches and the sloughed-off skins of water-snakes, until
finally they were hurled from the boat as the ebbing wave broke it against a
tree-stump, they were left sitting in a drowned rice-paddy as the wave
receded, in water up to their waists, but alive, borne out of the heart of
the jungle of dreams, into which I had fled in the hope of peace and found
both less and more, and back once more in the world of armies and dates.
When they emerged from the jungle, it was October 1971. And I am bound
to admit (but, in my opinion, the fact only reinforces my wonder at the
time-shifting sorcery of the forest) that there was no tidal wave recorded
that month, although, over a year previously, floods had indeed devastated
the region.
In the aftermath of the Sundarbans, my old life was waiting to reclaim
me. I should have known: no escape from past acquaintance. What you were is
forever who you are.
For seven months during the course of the year 1971, three soldiers and
their tracker vanished off the face of the war. In October, however, when
the rains ended and the guerrilla units of the Mukti Bahini began
terrorizing Pakistani military outposts; when Mukti Bahini snipers picked
off soldiers and petty officials alike, our quartet emerged from
invisibility and, having little option, attempted to rejoin the main body of
the occupying West Wing forces. Later, when questioned, the buddha would
always explain his disappearance with the help of a garbled story about
being lost in a jungle amid trees whose roots grabbed at you like snakes. It
was perhaps fortunate for him that he was never formally interrogated by
officers in the army of which he was a member. Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid
and Shaheed Dar were not subjected to such interrogations, either; but in
their case this was because they failed to stay alive long enough for any
questions to be asked.
... In an entirely deserted village of thatched huts with
dung-plastered mud walls - in an abandoned community from which even the
chickens had fled - Ayooba Shaheed Farooq bemoaned their fate. Rendered deaf
by the poisonous mud of the rain-forest, a disability which had begun to
upset them a good deal now that the taunting voices of the jungle were no
longer hanging in the air, they wailed their several wails, all talking at
once, none hearing the other; the buddha, however, was obliged to listen to
them all: to Ayooba, who stood facing a corner inside a naked room, his hair
enmeshed in a spider's web, crying 'My ears my ears, like bees buzzing
inside,' to Farooq who, petulantly, shouted, 'Whose fault, anyway? - Who,
with his nose that could sniff out any bloody thing? - Who said That way,
and that way? - And who, who will believe? - About jungles and temples and
transparent serpents? - What a story, Allah, buddha, we should shoot you
here-and-now!' While Shaheed, softly, 'I'm hungry.' Out once more in the
real world, they were forgetting the lessons of the jungle, and Ayooba, 'My
arm! Allah, man, my withered arm! The ghost, leaking fluid ...!' And
Shaheed, 'Deserters, they'll say - empty-handed, no prisoner, after so-many
months! - Allah, a court-martial, maybe, what do you think, buddha?' And
Farooq, 'You bastard, see what you made us do! O God, too much, our
uniforms! See, our uniforms, buddha - rags-and-tatters like a beggar-boy's!
Think of what the Brigadier - and that Najmuddin - on my mother's head I
swear I didn't - I'm not a coward! Not!' And Shaheed, who is killing ants
and licking them off his palm, 'How to rejoin, anyway? Who knows where they
are or if? And haven't we seen and heard how Mukti Bahini - thai! thai! they
shoot from their hiding-holes, and you're dead! Dead, like an ant!' But
Farooq is also talking, 'And not just the uniforms, man, the hair! Is this
military hair-cut? This, so-long, falling over ears like worms? This woman's
hair? Allah, they'll kill us dead - up against the wall and thai! thai! -
you see if they don't!' But now Ayooba-the-tank is calming down; Ayooba
holding his face in his hand; Ayooba saying softly to himself, 'O man, O
man. I came to fight those damn vegetarian Hindus, man. And here is
something too different, man. Something too bad.'
It is somewhere in November; they have been making their way slowly,
north north north, past fluttering newspapers in curious curlicued script,
through empty fields and abandoned settlements, occasionally passing a crone
with a bundle on a stick over her shoulder, or a group of eight-year-olds
with shifty starvation in their eyes and the threat of knives in their
pockets, hearing how the Mukti Bahini are moving invisibly through the
smoking land, how bullets come buzzing like bees-from-nowhere ... and now a
breaking-point has been reached, and Farooq, 'If it wasn't for you, buddha -
Allah, you freak with your blue eyes of a foreigner, O God, yaar, how you
stink!'
We all stink: Shaheed, who is crushing (with tatter-booted heel) a
scorpion on the dirty floor of the abandoned hut; Farooq, searching absurdly
for a knife with which to cut his hair; Ayooba, leaning his head against a
corner of the hut while a spider walks along the crown; and the buddha, too:
the buddha, who stinks to heaven, clutches in his right hand a tarnished
silver spittoon, and is trying to recall his name. And can summon up only
nicknames: Snotnose, Stainface, Baidy, Sniffer, Piece-of-the-Moon.
... He sat cross-legged amid the wailing storm of his companions' fear,
forcing himself to remember; but no, it would not come. And at last the
buddha, hurling spittoon against earthen floor, exclaimed to stone-deaf
ears: 'It's not - NOT - FAIR!'
In the midst of the rubble of war, I discovered fair-and-unfair.
Unfairness smelled like onions; the sharpness of its perfume brought tears
to my eyes. Seized by the bitter aroma of injustice, I remembered how Jamila
Singer had leaned over a hospital bed - whose?
What name
?- how military
gongs-and-pips were also present - how my sister - no, not my sister! how
she -
how she had said, 'Brother, I have to go away, to sing in service of
the country; the Army will look after you now - for me, they will look after
you so, so well.' She was veiled; behind white-and-gold brocade I smelled
her traitress's smile; through soft veiling fabric she planted on my brow
the kiss of her revenge; and then she, who always wrought a dreadful revenge
upon those who loved her best, left me to the tender mercies of
pips-and-gongs ... and after Jamila's treachery I remembered the long-ago
ostracism I suffered at the hands of Evie Burns; and exiles, and
picnic-tricks; and all the vast mountain of unreasonable occurrences
plaguing my life; and now, I lamented cucumber-nose, stain-face, bandy legs,
horn-temples, monk's tonsure, finger-loss, one-bad-ear, and the numbing,
braining spittoon; I wept copiously now, but still my name eluded me, and I
repeated - 'Not fair;
not fair,
NOT FAIR!' And, surprisingly,
Ayooba-the-tank moved away from his corner; Ayooba, perhaps recalling his
own breakdown in the Sundarbans, squatted down in front of me and wrapped
his one good arm around my neck. I accepted his comfortings; I cried into
his shirt; but then there was a bee, buzzing towards us; while he squatted,
with his back to the glassless window of the hut, something came whining
through the overheated air; while he said, 'Hey, buddha - come on, buddha -
hey, hey!' and while other bees, the bees of deafness, buzzed in his ears,
something stung him in the neck. He made a popping noise deep in his throat
and fell forwards on top of me. The sniper's bullet which killed Ayooba
Baloch would, but for his presence, have speared me through the head. In
dying, he saved my life.
Forgetting past humiliations; putting aside fair-and-unfair, and
what-can't-be-cured-must-be-endured, I crawled out from under the corpse of
Ayooba-the-tank, while Farooq, 'O God O God O!' and Shaheed, 'Allah, I don't
even know if my gun will -' And Farooq, again, 'O God O! O God, who knows
where the bastard is - !' But Shaheed, like soldiers in films, is flat
against the wall beside the window. In these positions: I on the floor,
Farooq crouched in a corner, Shaheed pressed against dung-plaster: we
waited, helplessly, to see what would transpire.
There was no second shot; perhaps the sniper, not knowing the size of
the force hidden inside the mud-walled hut, had simply shot and run. The
three of us remained inside the hut for a night and a day, until the body of
Ayooba Baloch began to demand attention. Before we left, we found pickaxes,
and buried him ... And afterwards, when the Indian Army did come, there was
no Ayooba Baloch to greet them with his theories of the superiority of meat
over vegetables; no Ayooba went into action, yelling, 'Ka-dang! Ka-blam!
Ka-pow!!'
Perhaps it was just as well.
... And sometime in December the three of us, riding on stolen
bicycles, arrived at a field from which the city of Dacca could be seen
against the horizon; a field in which grew crops so strange, with
so-nauseous an aroma, that we found ourselves incapable of remaining on our
bicycles. Dismounting before we fell off, we entered the terrible field.
There was a scavenging peasant moving about, whistling as he worked,
with an outsize gunny sack on his back. The whitened knuckles of the hand
which gripped the sack revealed his determined frame of mind; the whistling,
which was piercing but tuneful, showed that he was keeping his spirits up.
The whistle echoed around the field, bouncing off fallen helmets, resounding
hollowly from the barrels of mud-blocked rifles, sinking without trace into
the fallen boots of the strange, strange crops, whose smell, like the smell
of unfairness, was capable of bringing tears to the buddha's eyes. The crops
were dead, having been hit by some unknown blight... and most of them, but
not all, wore the uniforms of the West Pakistani Army. Apart from the
whistling, the only noises to be heard were the sounds of objects dropping
into the peasant's treasure-sack: leather belts, watches, gold
tooth-fillings, spectacle frames, tiffin-carriers, water flasks, boots. The
peasant saw them and came running towards them, smiling ingratiatingly,
talking rapidly in a wheedling voice that only the buddha was obliged to
hear. Farooq and Shaheed stared glassily at the field while the peasant
began his explanations.
'Plenty shooting!
Thaii! Ttiaiii!'
He made a pistol with his right
hand. He was speaking bad, stilted Hindi. 'Ho sirs! India has come, my sirs!
Ho yes!
Ho
yes.' - And all over the field, the crops were leaking nourishing
bone-marrow into the soil while he, 'No shoot I, my sirs. Ho no. I have news
- ho, such news! India comes! Jessore is fall, my sirs; in one-four days,
Dacca, also, yes-no?' The buddha listened; the buddha's eyes looked beyond
the peasant to the field. 'Such a things, my sir! India! They have one
mighty soldier fellow, he can kill six persons at one time, break necks
khrikk-khrikk
between his knees, my sirs? Knees - is right words?' He tapped
his own. 'I see, my sirs. With these eyes, ho yes! He fights with not guns,
not swords. With knees, and six necks go
khrikk-khrikk. Ho
God.' Shaheed was
vomiting in the field. Farooq Rashid had wandered to the far edge and stood
staring into a copse of mango trees. 'In one-two weeks is over the war, my
sirs! Everybody come back. Just now all gone, but I not, my sirs. Soldiers
came looking for Bahini and killed many many, also my son. Ho yes, sirs, ho
yes indeed.' The buddha's eyes had become clouded and dull. In the distance
he could hear the crump of heavy artillery. Columns of smoke trailed up into
the colourless December sky. The strange crops lay still, unruffled by the
breeze ... 'I stay, my sirs. Here I know names of birds and plants. Ho yes.
I am Deshmukh by name; vendor of notions by trade. I sell many so-fine
thing. You want? Medicine for constipation, damn good, ho yes. I have. Watch
you want, glowing in the dark? I also have. And book ho yes, and joke trick,
truly. I was famous in Dacca before. Ho yes, most truly. No shoot.'
The vendor of notions chattered on, offering for sale item after item,
such as a magical belt which would enable the wearer to speak Hindi - 'I am
wearing now, my sir, speak damn good, yes no? Many India soldier are buy,
they talk so-many different tongues, the belt is godsend from God!' - and
then he noticed what the buddha held in his hand. 'Ho sir! Absolute master
thing! Is silver? Is precious stone? You give; I give radio, camera, almost
working order, my sir! Is a damn good deals, my friend. For one spittoon
only, is damn fine. Ho yes. Ho yes, my sir, life must go on; trade must go
on, my sir, not true?'
'Tell me more,' the buddha said, 'about the soldier with the knees.'
But now, once again, a bee buzzes; in the distance, at the far end of
the field, somebody drops to his knees; somebody's forehead touches the
ground as if in prayer; and in the field, one of the crops, which had been
alive enough to shoot, also becomes very still. Shaheed Dar is shouting a
name:
'Farooq! Farooq, man!'
But Farooq refuses to reply.
Afterwards, when the buddha reminisced about the war to his uncle
Mustapha, he recounted how he had stumbled across the field of leaking
bonemarrow towards his fallen companion; and how, long before he reached
Farooq's praying corpse, he was brought up short by the field's greatest
secret.
There was a small pyramid in the middle of the field. Ants were
crawling over it, but it was not an anthill. The pyramid had six feet and
three heads and, in between, a jumbled area composed of bits of torso,
scraps of uniforms, lengths of intestine and glimpses of shattered bones.
The pyramid was still alive. One of its three heads had a blind left eye,
the legacy of a childhood argument. Another had hair that was thickly
plastered down with hair oil. The third head was the oddest: it had deep
hollows where the temples should have been, hollows that could have been
made by a gynaecologist's forceps which had held it too tightly at birth ...
it was this third head which spoke to the buddha:
'Hullo, man,' it said, 'What the hell are you here for?'
Shaheed Dar saw the pyramid of enemy soldiers apparently conversing
with the buddha; Shaheed, suddenly seized by an irrational energy, flung
himself upon me and pushed me to the ground, with, 'Who are you? - Spy?
Traitor? What? - Why do they know who you - ?' While Deshmukh, the vendor of
notions, flapped pitifully around us, 'Ho sirs! Enough fighting has been
already. Be normal now, my sirs. I beg. Ho God.'
Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told
him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that
entire war had been to re-unite me with an old life, to bring me back
together with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet
his old friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because
on the field of leaking bone-marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and
was greeted by a dying pyramid of heads: and in Dacca I was to meet
Parvati-the-witch.
When Shaheed calmed down and got off me, the pyramid was no longer
capable of speech. Later that afternoon, we resumed our journey towards the
capital. Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, called cheerfully after us: 'Ho
sirs! Ho my poor sirs! Who knows when a man will die? Who, my sirs, knows
why?'
Sam and the Tiger
Sometimes, mountains must move before old comrades can be reunited. On
December 15th, 1971, in the capital of the newly liberated state of
Bangladesh, Tiger Niazi surrendered to his old chum Sam Manekshaw; while I,
in my turn, surrendered to the embraces of a girl with eyes like saucers, a
pony-tail like a long shiny black rope, and lips which had not at that time
acquired what was to become their characteristic pout. These reunions were
not achieved easily; and as a gesture of respect for all who made them
possible, I shall pause briefly in my narrative to set out the whys and the
wherefores.
Let me, then, be perfectly explicit: if Yahya Khan and Z. A. Bhutto had
not colluded in the matter of the coup of March 25th, I would not have been
flown to Dacca in civilian dress; nor, in all likelihood, would General
Tiger Niazi have been in the city that December. To continue: the Indian
intervention in the Bangladesh dispute was also the result of the
interaction of great forces. Perhaps, if ten million had not walked across
the frontiers into India, obliging the Delhi Government to spend
$200,000,000 a month on refugee camps - the entire war of 1965, whose secret
purpose had been the annihilation of my family, had cost them only
$70,000,000! - Indian soldiers, led by General Sam, would never have crossed
the frontiers in the opposite direction. But India came for other reasons,
too: as I was to learn from the Communist magicians who lived in the shadow
of the Delhi Friday Mosque, the Delhi sarkar had been highly concerned by
the declining influence of Mujib's Awami League, and the growing popularity
of the revolutionary Mukti Bahini; Sam and the Tiger met in Dacca to prevent
the Bahini from gaining power. So if it were not for the Mukti Bahini,
Parvati-the-witch might never have accompanied the Indian troops on their
campaign of 'liberation' ... But even that is not a full explanation. A
third reason for Indian intervention was the fear that the disturbances in
Bangladesh would, if they were not quickly curtailed, spread across the
frontiers into West Bengal; so Sam and the Tiger, and also Parvati and I,
owe our meeting at least in part to the more turbulent elements in West
Bengali politics: the Tiger's defeat was only the beginning of a campaign
against the Left in Calcutta and its environs.
At any rate, India came; and for the speed of her coming - because in a
mere three weeks Pakistan had lost half her navy, a third of her army, a
quarter of her air force, and finally, after the Tiger surrendered, more
than half her population - thanks must be given to the Mukti Bahini once
more; because, perhaps naively, failing to understand that the Indian
advance was as much a tactical manoeuvre against them as a battle against
the occupying West Wing forces, the Bahini advised General Manekshaw on
Pakistani troop movements, on the Tiger's strengths and weaknesses; thanks,
too, to Mr Chou En-Lai, who refused (despite Bhutto's entreaties) to give
Pakistan any material aid in the war. Denied Chinese arms, Pakistan fought
with American guns, American tanks and aircraft; the President of the United
States, alone in the entire world, was resolved to 'tilt' towards Pakistan.
While Henry A. Kissinger argued the cause of Yahya Khan, the same Yahya was
secretly arranging the President's famous state visit to China ... there
were, therefore, great forces working against my reunion with Parvati and
Sam's with the Tiger; but despite the tilting President, it was all over in
three short weeks.
On the night of December 14th, Shaheed Dar and the buddha circled the
fringes of the invested city of Dacca; but the buddha's nose (you will not
have forgotten) was capable of sniffing out more than most. Following his
nose, which could smell safety and danger, they found a way through the
Indian lines, and entered the city under cover of night. While they moved
stealthily through streets in which nobody except a few starving beggars
could be seen, the Tiger was swearing to fight to the last man; but the next
day, he surrendered instead. What is not known: whether the last man was
grateful to be spared or peeved at missing his chance of entering the
camphor garden.
And so I returned to that city in which, in those last hours before
reunions, Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were not
possible, because our boys would not could not have behaved so badly; we saw
men in spectacles with heads like eggs being shot in side-streets, we saw
the intelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but it was
not true because it could not have been true, the Tiger was a decent chap,
after all, and our jawans were worth ten babus, we moved through the
impossible hallucination of the night, hiding in doorways while fires
blossomed like flowers, reminding me of the way the Brass Monkey used to set
fire to shoes to attract a little attention, there were slit throats being
buried in unmarked graves, and Shaheed began his, 'No, buddha - what a
thing, Allah, you can't believe your eyes - no, not true, how can it -
buddha, tell, what's got into my eyes?' And at last the buddha spoke,
knowing Shaheed could not hear: 'O, Shaheeda,' he said, revealing the depths
of his fastidiousness, 'a person must sometimes choose what he will see and
what he will not; look away, look away from there now.' But Shaheed was
staring at a maidan in which lady doctors were being bayoneted before they
were raped, and raped again before they were shot. Above them and behind
them, the cool white minaret of a mosque stared blindly down upon the scene.
As though talking to himself, the buddha said, 'It is time to think
about saving our skins; God knows why we came back.' The buddha entered the
doorway of a deserted house, a broken, peeling shell of an edifice which had
once housed a tea-shop, a bicycle-repair shop, a whorehouse and a tiny
landing on which a notary public must once have sat, because there was the
low desk on which he had left behind a pair of half-rimmed spectacles, there
were the abandoned seals and stamps which had once enabled him to be more
than an old nobody - stamps and seals which had made him an arbiter of what
was true and what was not. The notary public was absent, so I could not ask
him to verify what was happening, I could not give a deposition under oath;
but lying on the mat behind his desk was a loose flowing garment like a
djellabah, and without waiting any longer I removed my uniform, including
the she-dog badge of the CUTIA units, and became anonymous, a deserter, in a
city whose language I could not speak.
Shaheed Dar, however, remained in the street; in the first light of
morning he watched soldiers scurrying away from what-had-not-been-done; and
then the grenade came. I, the buddha, was still inside the empty house; but
Shaheed was unprotected by walls.
Who can say why how who; but the grenade was certainly thrown. In that
last instant of his un-bisected life, Shaheed was suddenly seized by an
irresistible urge to look up ... afterwards, in the muezzin's roost, he told
the buddha, 'So strange, Allah - the pomegranate - in my head, just like
that, bigger an' brighter than ever before - you know, buddha, like a
light-bulb - Allah, what could I do, I looked!' - And yes, it was there,
hanging above his head, the grenade of his dreams, hanging just above his
head, falling falling, exploding at waist-level, blowing his legs away to
some other part of the city.
When I reached him, Shaheed was conscious, despite bisection, and
pointed up, 'Take me up there, buddha, I want to I want,' so I carried what
was now only half a boy (and therefore reasonably light) up narrow spiral
stairs to the heights of that cool white minaret, where Shaheed babbled of
light-bulbs while red ants and black ants fought over a dead cockroach,
battling away along the trowel-furrows in the crudely-laid concrete floor.
Down below, amid charred houses, broken glass and smoke-haze, antlike people
were emerging, preparing for peace; the ants, however, ignored the antlike,
and fought on. And the buddha: he stood still, gazing milkily down and
around, . having placed himself between the top half of Shaheed and eyrie's
one piece of furniture, a low table on which stood a gramophone connected to
a loudspeaker. The buddha, protecting his halved companion from the
disillusioning sight of this mechanized muezzin, whose call to prayer would
always be scratched in the same places, extracted from the folds of his
shapeless robe a glinting object: and turned his milky gaze upon the silver
spittoon. Lost in contemplation, he was taken by surprise when the screams
began; and looked up to see an abandoned cockroach. (Blood had been seeping
along trowel-furrows; ants, following this dark viscous trail, had arrived
at the source of the leakage, and Shaheed expressed his fury at becoming the
victim of not one, but two wars.)
Coming to the rescue, feet dancing on ants, the buddha bumped his elbow
against a switch; the loudspeaker system was activated, and afterwards
people would never forget how a mosque had screamed out the terrible agony
of war.
After a few moments, silence. Shaheed's head slumped forward. And the
buddha, fearing discovery, put away his spittoon and descended into the city
as the Indian Army arrived; leaving Shaheed, who no longer minded, to assist
at the peacemaking banquet of the ants, I went into the early morning
streets to welcome General Sam.
In the minaret, I had gazed milkily at my spittoon; but the buddha's
mind had not been empty. It contained three words, which Shaheed's top half
had also kept repeating, until the ants: the same three which once, reeking
of onions, had made me weep on the shoulder of Ayooba Baloch - until the
bee, buzzing ... 'It's not fair,' the buddha thought, and then, like a
child, over and over, 'It's not fair,' and again, and again.
Shaheed, fulfilling his father's dearest wish, had finally earned his
name; but the buddha could still not remember his own.
How the buddha regained his name: Once, long ago, on another
independence day, the world had been saffron and green. This morning, the
colours were green, red and gold. And in the cities, cries of 'Jai Bangla!'
And voices of women singing 'Our Golden Bengal', maddening their hearts with
delight... in the centre of the city, on the podium of his defeat, General
Tiger Niazi awaited General Manekshaw. (Biographical details: Sam was a
Parsee. He came from Bombay. Bombayites were in for happy times that day.)
And amid green and red and gold, the buddha in his shapeless anonymous
garment was jostled by crowds; and then India came. India, with Sam at her
head.
Was it General Sam's idea? Or even Indira's? - Eschewing these
fruitless questions, I record only that the Indian advance into Dacca was
much more than a mere military parade; as befits a triumph, it was garlanded
with side-shows. A special I.A.F. troop transport had flown to Dacca,
carrying a hundred and one of the finest entertainers and conjurers India
could provide. From the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi they came, many of
them dressed for the occasion in the evocative uniforms of the Indian fauj,
so that many Daccans got the idea that the Indians' victory had been
inevitable from the start because even their uniformed jawans were sorcerers
of the highest order. The conjurers and other artistes marched beside the
troops, entertaining the crowds; there were acrobats forming human pyramids
on moving carts drawn by white bullocks; there were extraordinary female
contortionists who could swallow their legs up to their knees; there were
jugglers who operated outside the laws of gravity, so that they could draw
oohs and aahs from the delighted crowd as they juggled with toy grenades,
keeping four hundred and twenty in the air at a time; there were
card-tricksters who could pull the queen of chiriyas (the monarch of birds,
the empress of clubs) out of women's ears; there was the great dancer
Anarkali, whose name meant 'pomegranate-bud', doing leaps twists pirouettes
on a donkey-cart while a giant piece of silver nose-jewellery jingled on her
right nostril; there was Master Vikram the sitarist, whose sitar was capable
of responding to, and exaggerating, the faintest emotions in the hearts of
his audience, so that once (it was said) he had played before an audience so
bad-tempered, and had so greatly enhanced their foul humour, that if his
tabla-player hadn't made him stop his raga in mid-stream the power of his
music would have had them all knifing each other and smashing up the
auditorium ... today, Master Vikram's music raised the celebratory goodwill
of the people to fever-pitch; it maddened, let us say, their hearts with
delight.
And there was Picture Singh himself, a seven-foot giant who weighed two
hundred and forty pounds and was known as the Most Charming Man In The World
because of his unsurpassable skills as a snake-charmer. Not even the
legendary Tubriwallahs of Bengal could exceed his talents; he strode through
the happily shrieking crowds, twined from head to foot with deadly cobras,
mambas and kraits, all with their poison-sacs intact... Picture Singh, who
would be the last in the line of men who have been willing to become my
fathers ... and immediately behind him came Parvati-the-witch.
Parvati-the-witch entertained the crowds with the help of a large
wicker basket with a lid; happy volunteers entered the basket, and Parvati
made them disappear so completely that they could not return until she
wished them to; Parvati, to whom midnight had given the true gifts of
sorcery, had placed them at the service of her humble illusionist's trade;
so that she was asked, 'But how do you pull it off?'
And, 'Come on, pretty missy, tell the trick, why not?' - Parvati,
smiling beaming rolling her magic basket, came towards me with the
liberating troops.
The Indian Army marched into town, its heroes following the magicians;
among them, I learned afterwards, was that colossus of the war, the
rat-faced Major with the lethal knees ... but now there were still more
illusionists, because the surviving prestidigitators of the city came out of
hiding and began a wonderful contest, seeking to outdo anything and
everything the visiting magicians had to offer, and the pain of the city was
washed and soothed in the great glad outpouring of their magic. Then
Parvati-the-witch saw me, and gave me back my name.
'Saleem! O my god Saleem, you Saleem Sinai, is it you Saleem?'
The buddha jerks, puppet-fashion. Crowd-eyes staring. Parvati pushing
towards him. 'Listen, it must be you!' She is gripping his elbow. Saucer
eyes searching milky blue. 'My God, that nose, I'm not being rude, but of
course! Look, it's me, Parvati! O Saleem, don't be stupid now, come on come
on ...!'
'That's it,' the buddha says. 'Saleem: that was it.'
'O God, too much excitement!' she cries. 'Arre baap, Saleem, you
remember - the Children, yaar, O this is too good! So why are you looking so
serious when I feel like to hug you to pieces? So many years I only saw you
inside here,' she taps her forehead, 'and now you're here with a face like a
fish. Hey, Saleem! Come on, say one hullo at least.'
On December 15th, 1971, Tiger Niazi surrendered to Sam Manek-shaw; the
Tiger and ninety-three thousand Pakistani troops became prisoners of war. I,
meanwhile, became the willing captive of the Indian magicians, because
Parvati dragged me into the procession with, 'Now that I've found you I'm
not letting you go.'
That night, Sam and the Tiger drank chota pegs and reminisced about the
old days in the British Army. 'I say, Tiger,' Sam Manekshaw said, 'You
behaved jolly decently by surrendering.' And the Tiger, 'Sam, you fought one
hell of a war.' A tiny cloud passes across the face of General Sam, 'Listen,
old sport: one hears such damn awful lies. Slaughters, old boy, mass graves,
special units called CUTIA or some damn thing, developed for purposes of
rooting out opposition ... no truth in it, I suppose?' And the Tiger,
'Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities? Never heard of it.
Must've been misled, old man. Some damn bad intelligence-wallahs on both
sides. No, ridiculous, damn ridiculous, if you don't mind me saying.'
'Thought as much,' says General Sam, 'I say, bloody fine to see you, Tiger,
you old devil!' And the Tiger, 'Been years, eh, Sam? Too damn long.'
... While old friends sang 'Auld Lang Syne' in officers' messes, I made
my escape from Bangladesh, from my Pakistani years. 'I'll get you out,'
Parvati said, after I explained. 'You want it secret secret?'
I nodded. 'Secret secret.'
Elsewhere in the city, ninety-three thousand soldiers were preparing to
be carted off to P.O.W. camps; but Parvati-the-witch made me climb into a
wicker basket with a close-fitting lid. Sam Manekshaw was obliged to place
his old friend the Tiger under protective custody; but Parvati-the-witch
assured me, 'This way they'll never catch.'
Behind an army barracks where the magicians were awaiting their
transport back to Delhi, Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World,
stood guard when, that evening, I climbed into the basket of invisibility.
We loitered casually, smoking bins, waiting until there were no soldiers in
sight, while Picture Singh told me about his name. Twenty years ago, an
Eastman-Kodak photographer had taken his portrait - which, wreathed in
smiles and snakes, afterwards appeared on half the Kodak advertisements and
in-store displays in India; ever since when the snake-charmer had adopted
his present cognomen. 'What do you think, captain?' he bellowed amiably. 'A
fine name, isn't it so? Captain, what to do, I can't even remember what name
I used to have, from before, the name my mother-father gave me! Pretty
stupid, hey, captain?' But Picture Singh was not stupid; and there was much
more to him than charm. Suddenly his voice lost its casual, sleepy
good-nature; he whispered, 'Now! Now, captain, ek dum, double-quick time!'
Parvati whipped lid away from wicker; I dived head first into her cryptic
basket. The lid, returning, blocked out the day's last light.
Picture Singh whispered, 'Okay, captain - damn good!' And Parvati bent
down close to me; her lips must have been against the outside of the basket.
What Parvati-the-witch whispered through wickerwork:
'Hey, you Saleem: just to think! You and me, mister - midnight's
children, yaar! That's something, no?'
That's something ...
Saleem, shrouded in wickerwork darkness, was
reminded of years-ago midnights, of childhood wrestling bouts with purpose
and meaning; overwhelmed by nostalgia, I still did not understand what that
something was. Then Parvati whispered some other words, and, inside the
basket of invisibility, I, Saleem Sinai, complete with my loose anonymous
garment, vanished instantly into thin air.
'Vanished? How vanished, what vanished?' Padma's head jerks up; Padma's
eyes stare at me in bewilderment. I, shrugging, merely reiterate; Vanished,
just like that. Disappeared. Dematerialized. Like a djinn: poof, like so.
'So,' Padma presses me, 'she really-truly was a witch?' Really-truly. I
was in the basket, but also not in the basket; Picture Singh lifted it
one-handed and tossed it into the back of the Army truck taking him and
Parvati and ninety-nine others to the aircraft waiting at the military
airfield; I was tossed with the basket, but also not tossed. Afterwards,
Picture Singh said, 'No, captain, I couldn't feel your weight'; nor could I
feel any bump thump bang. One hundred and one artistes had arrived, by
I.A.F. troop transport, from the capital of India; one hundred and two
persons returned, although one of them was both there and not there. Yes,
magic spells can occasionally succeed. But also fail: my father, Ahmed
Sinai, never succeeded in cursing Sherri, the mongrel bitch.
Without passport or permit, I returned, cloaked in invisibility, to the
land of my birth; believe, don't believe, but even a sceptic will have to
provide another explanation for my presence here. Did not the Caliph Haroun
al-Rashid (in an earlier set of fabulous tales) also wander, unseen
invisible anonymous, cloaked through the streets of Baghdad? What Haroun
achieved in Baghdad streets, Parvati-the-witch made possible for me, as we
flew through the air-lanes of the subcontinent. She did it; I was invisible;
bas. Enough.
Memories of invisibility: in the basket, I learned what it was like,
will be like, to be dead. I had acquired the characteristics of ghosts!
Present, but insubstantial; actual, but without being or weight ... I
discovered, in the basket, how ghosts see the world. Dimly hazily faintly
... it was around me, but only just; I hung in a sphere of absence at whose
fringes, like faint reflections, could be seen the spectres of wickerwork.
The dead die, and are gradually forgotten; time does its healing, and they
fade - but in Parvati's basket I learned that the reverse is also true; that
ghosts, too, begin to forget; that the dead lose their memories of the
living, and at last, when they are detached from their lives, fade away -
that dying, in short, continues for a long time after death. Afterwards,
Parvati said, 'I didn't want to tell you - but nobody should be kept
invisible that long - it was dangerous, but what else was there to do?'
In the grip of Parvati's sorcery, I felt my hold on the world slip away
- and how easy, how peaceful not to never to return! - to float in this
cloudy nowhere, wafting further further further, like a seed-spore blown on
the breeze - in short, I was in mortal danger.
What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon.
Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless
a reminder of the outside ... clutching finely-wrought silver, which
glittered even in that nameless dark, I survived. Despite head-to-toe
numbness, I was saved, perhaps, by the glints of my precious souvenir.
No - there was more to it than spittoons: for, as we all know by now,
our hero is greatly affected by being shut up in confined spaces.
Transformations spring upon him in the enclosed dark. As a mere embryo in
the secrecy of a womb (not his mother's), did he not grow into the
incarnation of the new myth of August 15th, the child of ticktock - did he
not emerge as the Mubarak, the Blessed Child? In a cramped wash-room, were
name-tags not switched around? Alone in a washing-chest with a drawstring up
one nostril, did he not glimpse a Black Mango and sniff too hard, turning
himself and his upper cucumber into a kind of supernatural ham radio? Hemmed
in by doctors, nurses and anaesthetic masks, did he not succumb to numbers
and, having suffered drainage-above, move into a second phase, that of nasal
philosopher and (later) tracker supreme? Squashed, in a small abandoned hut,
beneath the body of Ayooba Baloch, did he not learn the meaning of
fair-and-unfair? Well, then - trapped in the occult peril of the basket of
invisibility, I was saved, not only by the glints of a spittoon, but also by
another transformation: in the grip of that awful disembodied loneliness,
whose smell was the smell of graveyards, I discovered anger.
Something was fading in Saleem and something was being born. Fading: an
old pride in baby-snaps and framed Nehru-letter; an old determination to
espouse, willingly, a prophesied historical role; and also a willingness to
make allowances, to understand how parents and strangers might legitimately
despise or exile him for his ugliness; mutilated fingers and monks' tonsures
no longer seemed like good enough excuses for the way in which he, I, had
been treated. The object of my wrath was, in fact, everything which I had,
until then, blindly accepted: my parents' desire that I should repay their
investment in me by becoming great; genius-Iike-a-shawl; the modes of
connection themselves inspired in me a blind, lunging fury. Why me? Why,
owing to accidents of birth prophecy etcetera, must I be responsible for
language riots and after-Nehru-who, for pepperpot-revolutions and bombs
which annihilated my family? Why should I, Saleem Snotnose, Sniffer,
Mapface, Piece-of-the-Moon, accept the blame for what-was-not-done by
Pakistani troops in Dacca? ...
Why, alone of all the
more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?
What my discovery of unfairness (smelling of onions) had begun, my
invisible rage completed. Wrath enabled me to survive the soft siren
temptations of invisibility; anger made me determined, after I was released
from vanishment in the shadow of a Friday Mosque, to 'begin, from that
moment forth, to choose my own, undestined future. And there, in the silence
of graveyard-reeking isolation, I heard the long-ago voice of the virginal
Mary Pereira, singing:
Anything you want to be, you kin be,
You kin be just what-all you want.
Tonight, as I recall my rage, I remain perfectly calm; the Widow
drained anger out of me along with everything else. Remembering my
basket-born rebellion against inevitability, I even permit myself a wry,
understanding smile. 'Boys,' I mutter tolerantly across the years to
Saleem-at-twenty-four, 'will be boys.' In the Widows' Hostel, I was taught,
harshly, once-and-for-all, the lesson of No Escape; now, seated hunched over
paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except
what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything
that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.
I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by
mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have
happened if I had not come. Nor am I particulary exceptional in this matter;
each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a
similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have
to swallow a world.
Although now, as the pouring-out of what-was-inside-me nears an end; as
cracks widen within - I can hear and feel the rip tear crunch - I begin to
grow thinner, translucent almost; there isn't much of me left, and soon
there will be nothing at all. Six hundred million specks of dust, and all
transparent, invisible as glass ...
But then I was angry. Glandular hyper-activity in a wicker amphora:
eccrine and apocrine glands poured forth sweat and stink, as if I were
trying to shed my fate through my pores; and, in fairness to my wrath, I
must record that it claimed one instant achievement - that when I tumbled
out of the basket of invisibility into the shadow of the mosque, I had been
rescued by rebellion from the abstraction of numbness; as I bumped out on to
the dirt of the magicians' ghetto, silver spittoon in hand, I realized that
I had begun, once again, to feel.
Some afflictions, at least, are capable of being conquered.
The shadow of the Mosque
No shadow of a doubt: an acceleration is taking place. Rip crunch crack
- while road surfaces split in the awesome heat, I, too, am being hurried
towards disintegration. What-gnaws-on-bones (which, as I have been regularly
obliged to explain to the too many women around me, is far beyond the powers
of medicine men to discern, much less to cure) will not be denied for long;
and still so much remains to be told ... Uncle Mustapha is growing inside
me, and the pout of Parvati-the-witch; a certain lock of hero's hair is
waiting in the wings; and also a labour of thirteen days, and history as an
analogue of a prime minister's hair-style; there is to be treason, and
fare-dodging, and the scent (wafting on breezes heavy with the ululations of
widows) of something frying in an iron skillet ... so that I, too, am forced
to accelerate, to make a wild dash for the finishing line; before memory
cracks beyond hope of re-assembly, I must breast the tape. (Although
already, already there are fadings, and gaps; it will be necessary to
improvise on occasion.)
Twenty-six pickle-jars stand gravely on a shelf; twenty-six special
blends, each with its identifying label, neatly inscribed with familiar
phrases: 'Movements Performed by Pepperpots', for instance, or 'Alpha and
Omega', or 'Commander Sabarmati's Baton'. Twenty-six rattle eloquently when
local trains go yellow-and-browning past; on my desk, five empty jars tinkle
urgently, reminding me of my uncompleted task. But now I cannot linger over
empty pickle-jars; the night is for words, and green chutney must wait its
turn.
... Padma is wistful: 'O, mister, how lovely Kashmir must be in August,
when here it is hot like a chilli!' I am obliged to reprove my
plump-yet-muscled companion, whose attention has been wandering; and to
observe that our Padma Bibi, long-suffering tolerant consoling, is beginning
to behave exactly like a traditional Indian wife. (And I, with my distances
and self-absorption, like a husband?) Of late, in spite of my stoic fatalism
about the spreading cracks, I have smelled, on Padma's breath, the dream of
an alternative (but impossible) future; ignoring the implacable finalities
of inner fissures, she has begun to exude the bitter-sweet fragrance of
hope-for-marriage. My dung-lotus, who remained impervious for so long to the
sneer-lipped barbs hurled by our workforce of downy-forearmed women; who
placed her cohabitation with me outside and above all codes of social
propriety, has seemingly succumbed to a desire for legitimacy... in short,
although she has not said a word on the subject, she is waiting for me to
make an honest woman of her. The perfume of her sad hopefulness permeates
her most innocently solicitous remarks - even at this very moment, as she,
'Hey, mister, why not - finish your writery and then take rest; go to
Kashmir, sit quietly for some time - and maybe you will take your Padma
also, and she can look after
...?'
Behind this burgeoning dream of a
Kashmir! holiday (which was once also the dream of Jehangir, the Mughal
Emperor; of poor forgotten Ilse Lubin; and, perhaps, of Christ himself), I
nose out the presence of another dream; but neither this nor that can be
fulfilled. Because now the cracks, the cracks and always the cracks are
narrowing my future towards its single inescapable fullpoint; and even Padma
must take a back seat if I'm to finish my tales.
Today, the papers are talking about the supposed political rebirth of
Mrs. Indira Gandhi; but when I returned to India, concealed in a wicker
basket, 'The Madam' was basking in the fullness of her glory. Today,
perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly into the insidious
clouds of amnesia; but I remember, and will set down, how I - how she - how
it happened that - no, I can't say it, I must tell it in the proper order,
until there is no option but to reveal ... On December 16th, 1971, I tumbled
out of a basket into an India in which Mrs. Gandhi's New Congress Party held
a more-than-two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.
In the basket of invisibility, a sense of unfairness turned into anger;
and something else besides - transformed by rage, I had also been
overwhelmed by an agonizing feeling of sympathy for the country which was
not only my twin-in-birth but also joined to me (so to speak) at the hip, so
that what happened to either of us, happened to us both. If I, snot-nosed
stain-faced etcetera, had had a hard time of it, then so had she, my
subcontinental twin sister; and now that I had given myself the right to
choose a better future, I was resolved that the nation should share it, too.
I think that when I tumbled out into dust, shadow and amused cheers, I had
already decided to save the country.
(But there are cracks and gaps ... had I, by then, begun to see that my
love for Jamila Singer had been, in a sense, a mistake? Had I already
understood how I had simply transferred on to her shoulders the adoration
which I now perceived to be a vaulting, all-encompassing love of country?
When was it that I realized that my truly-incestuous feelings were for my
true birth-sister, India herself, and not for that trollop of a crooner who
had so callously shed me, like a used snake-skin, and dropped me into the
metaphorical waste-basket of Army life? When when when? ... Admitting
defeat, I am forced to record that I cannot remember for sure.)
... Saleem sat blinking in the dust in the shadow of the mosque. A
giant was standing over him, grinning hugely, asking, 'Achha, captain, have
a good trip?' And Parvati, with huge excited eyes, pouring water from a
lotah into his cracked, salty mouth ... Feeling! The icy touch of water kept
cool in earthenware surahis, the cracked soreness of parched-raw lips,
silver-and-lapis clenched in a fist ... 'I can feel!' Saleem cried to the
good-natured crowd.
It was the time of afternoon called the chaya, when the shadow of the
tall red-brick-and-marble Friday Mosque fell across the higgledy shacks of
the slum clustered at its feet, that slum whose ramshackle tin roofs created
such a swelter of heat that it was insupportable to be inside the fragile
shacks except during the chaya and at night ... but now conjurers and
contortionists and jugglers and fakirs had gathered in the shade around the
solitary stand-pipe to greet the new arrival. 'I can feel!' I cried, and
then Picture Singh, 'Okay, captain - tell us, how it feels? - to be born
again, falling like baby out of Parvati's basket?' I could smell amazement
on Picture Singh; he was clearly astounded by Parvati's trick, but, like a
true professional, would not dream of asking her how she had achieved it. In
this way Parvati-the-witch, who had used her limitless powers to spirit me
to safety, escaped discovery; and also because, as I later discovered, the
ghetto of the magicians disbelieved, with the absolute certainty of
illusionists-by-trade, in the possibility of magic. So Picture Singh told
me, with amazement, 'I swear, captain - you were so light in there, like a
baby!' - But he never dreamed that my weightlessness had been anything more
than a trick.
'Listen, baby sahib,' Picture Singh was crying, 'What do you say,
baby-captain? Must I put you over my shoulder and make you belch?' - And now
Parvati, tolerantly: 'That one, baba, always making joke shoke.' She was
smiling radiantly at everyone in sight ... but there followed an
inauspicious event. A woman's voice began to wail at the back of the cluster
of magicians: 'Ai-o-ai-o! Ai-o-o!' The crowd parted in surprise and an old
woman burst through it and rushed at Saleem; I was required to defend myself
against a brandished frying pan, until Picture Singh, alarmed, seized her by
pan-waving arm and bellowed, 'Hey, capteena, why so much noise?' And the old
woman, obstinately: 'Ai-o-ai-o!'
'Resham Bibi,' Parvati said, crossly, 'You got ants in your brain?' And
Picture Singh, 'We got a guest, capteena - what'll he do with your shouting?
Arre, be quiet, Resham, this captain is known to our Parvati personal! Don't
be coming crying in front of him!'
'Ai-o-ai-o! Bad luck is come! You go to foreign places and bring it
here! Ai-oooo!'
Disturbed visages of magicians stared from Resham Bibi to me -because
although they were a people who denied the supernatural, they were artistes,
and like all performers had an implicit faith in luck,
good-luck-and-bad-luck, luck ... 'Yourself you said,' Resham Bibi wailed,
'this man is born twice, and not even from woman! Now comes desolation,
pestilence and death. I am old and so I know. Arre baba,' she turned
plaintively to face me, 'Have pity only; go now - go go quick!' There was a
murmur - 'It is true, Resham Bibi knows the old stories' - but then Picture
Singh became angry. 'The captain is my honoured guest,' he said, 'He stays
in my hut as long as he wishes, for short or for long. What are you all
talking? This is no place for fables.'
Saleem Sinai's first sojourn at the magicians' ghetto lasted only a
matter of days; but during that short time, a number of things happened to
allay the fears which had been raised by ai-o-ai-o. The plain, unadorned
truth is that, in those days, the ghetto illusionists and other artistes
began to hit new peaks of achievement - jugglers managed to keep one
thousand and one balls in the air at a time, and a fakir's as-yet-untrained
protegee strayed on to a bed of hot coals, only to stroll across it
unconcerned, as though she had acquired her mentor's gifts by osmosis; I was
told that the rope-trick had been successfully performed. Also, the police
failed to make their monthly raid on the ghetto, which had not happened
within living memory; and the camp received a constant stream of visitors,
the servants of the rich, requesting the professional services of one or
more of the colony at this or that gala evening's entertainment ... it
seemed, in fact, as though Resham Bibi had got things the wrong way round,
and I rapidly became very popular in the ghetto. I was dubbed Saleem
Kismeti, Lucky Saleem; Parvati was congratulated on having brought me to the
slum. And finally Picture Singh brought Resham Bibi to apologize.
'Pol'gize,' Resham said toothlessly and fled; Picture Singh added, 'It
is hard for the old ones; their brains go raw and remember upside down.
Captain, here everyone is saying you are our luck; but will you go from us
soon?' - And Parvati, staring dumbly with saucer eyes which begged no no no;
but I was obliged to answer in the affirmative.
Saleem, today, is certain that he answered, 'Yes'; that on the selfsame
morning, still dressed in shapeless robe, still inseparable from a silver
spittoon, he walked away, without looking back at a girl who followed him
with eyes moistened with accusations; that, strolling hastily past
practising jugglers and sweetmeat-stalls which filled his nostrils with the
temptations of rasgullas, past barbers offering shaves for ten paisa, past
the derelict maunderings of crones and the American-accented caterwauls of
shoe-shine boys who importuned bus-loads of Japanese tourists in identical
blue suits and incongruous saffron turbans which had been tied around their
heads by obsequiously mischievous guides, past the towering flight of stairs
to the Friday Mosque, past vendors of notions and itr-essences and
plaster-of-Paris replicas of the Qutb Minar and painted toy horses and
fluttering unslaughtered chickens, past invitations to cockfights and
empty-eyed games of cards, he emerged from the ghetto of the illusionists
and found himself on Faiz Bazar, facing the infinitely-extending walls of a
Red Fort from whose ramparts a prime minister had once announced
independence, and in whose shadow a woman had been met by a
peepshow-merchant, a Dilli-dekho man who had taken her into narrowing lanes
to hear her son's future foretold amongst mongeese and vultures and broken
men with leaves bandaged around their arms; that, to be brief, he turned to
his right and walked away from the Old City towards the roseate palaces
built by pink-skinned conquerors long ago: abandoning my saviours, I went
into New Delhi on foot.
Why? Why, ungratefully spurning the nostalgic grief of
Parvati-the-witch, did I set my face against the old and journey into
newness? Why, when for so many years I had found her my staunchest ally in
the nocturnal congresses of my mind, did I leave her so lightly in the
morning? Fighting past fissured blanks, I am able to remember two reasons;
but am unable to say which was paramount, or if a third ... firstly, at any
rate, I had been taking stock. Saleem, analysing his prospects, had had no
option but to admit to himself that they were not good. I was passport-less;
in law an illegal immigrant (having once been a legal emigrant); P.O. W.
camps were waiting for me everywhere. And even after setting aside my status
as defeated-soldier-on-the-run, the list of my disadvantages remained
formidable: I had neither funds nor a change of clothes; nor qualifications
- having neither completed my education nor distinguished myself in that
part of it which I had undergone; how was I to embark on my ambitious
project of nation-saving without a roof over my head or a family to protect
support assist ... it struck me like a thunderclap that I was wrong; that
here, in this very city, I had relatives - and not only relatives, but
influential ones! My uncle Mustapha Aziz, a senior Civil Servant, who when
last heard of had been number two in his Department; what better patron than
he for my Messianic ambitions? Under his roof, I could acquire contacts as
well as new clothes; under his auspices, I would seek preferment in the
Administration, and, as I studied the realities of government, would
certainly find the keys of national salvation; and I would have the ears of
Ministers, I would perhaps be on first-name terms with the great ...! It was
in the clutches of this magnificent fantasy that I told Parvati-the-witch,
'I must be off; great matters are afoot!' And, seeing the hurt in her
suddenly-inflamed cheeks, consoled her: 'I will come and see you often.
Often often.' But she was not consoled ... high-mindedness, then, was one
motive for abandoning those who had helped me; but was there not something
meaner, lowlier, more personal? There was. Parvati had drawn me secretly
aside behind a tin-and-cratewood shack; where cockroaches spawned, where
rats made love, where flies gorged themselves on pie-dog dung, she clutched
me by the wrist and became incandescent of eye and sibilant of tongue;
hidden in the putrid underbelly of the ghetto, she confessed that I was not
the first of the midnight children to have crossed her path! And now there
was a story of a Dacca procession, and magicians marching alongside heroes;
there was Parvati looking up at a tank, and there were Parvati-eyes
alighting on a pair of gigantic, prehensile knees... knees bulging proudly
through starched-pressed uniform; there was Parvati crying, 'O you! O you
...' and then the unspeakable name, the name of my guilt, of someone who
should have led my life but for a crime in a nursing home; Parvati and
Shiva, Shiva and Parvati, fated to meet by the divine destiny of their
names, were united in the moment of victory. 'A hero, man!' she hissed
proudly behind the shack. They will make him a big officer and all!' And now
what was produced from a fold of her ragged attire? What once grew proudly
on a hero's head and now nestled against a sorceress's breasts? 'I asked and
he gave,' said Parvati-the-witch, and showed me a lock of his hair.
Did I run from that lock of fateful hair? Did Saleem, fearing a reunion
with his alter ego, whom he had so-long-ago banned from the councils of the
night, flee back into the bosom of that family whose comforts had been
denied the war-hero? Was it high-mindedness or guilt? I can no longer say; I
set down only what I remember, namely that Parvati-the-witch whispered,
'Maybe he will come when he has time; and then we will be three!' And
another, repeated phrase: 'Midnight's children, yaar ... that's something,
no?' Parvati-the-witch reminded me of things I had tried to put out of my
mind; and I walked away from her, to the home of Mustapha Aziz.
Of my last miserable contact with the brutal intimacies of family life,
only fragments remain; however, since it must all be set down and
subsequently pickled, I shall attempt to piece together an account ... to
begin with, then, let me report that my Uncle Mustapha lived in a
commodiously anonymous Civil Service bungalow set in a tidy Civil Service
garden just off Rajpath in the heart of Lutyens's city; I walked along
what-had-once-been-Kingsway, breathing in the numberless perfumes of the
street, which blew out of State Handicraft Emporia arid the exhaust-pipes of
auto-rickshaws; the aromas of banyan and deodar mingled with the ghostly
scents of long-gone viceroys and mem-sahibs in gloves, and also with the
rather more strident bodily odours of gaudy rich begums and tramps. Here was
the giant election scoreboard around which (during the first
battle-for-power between Indira and Morarji Desai) crowds had thronged,
awaiting the results, asking eagerly: 'Is it a boy or a girl?' ... amid
ancient and modern, between India Gate and the Secretariat buildings, my
thoughts teeming with vanished (Mughal and British) empires and also with my
own history - because this was the city of the public announcement, of
many-headed monsters and a hand, falling from the sky - I marched resolutely
onwards, smelling, like everything else in sight, to high heaven. And at
last, having turned left towards Dupleix Road, I arrived at an anonymous
garden with a low wall and a hedge; in a corner of which I saw a signboard
waving in the breeze, just as once signboards had flowered in the gardens of
Methwold's Estate; but this echo of the past told a different story. Not FOR
SALE, with its three ominous vowels and four fateful consonants; the wooden
flower of my uncle's garden proclaimed strangely:
Mr Mustapha Aziz and Fly.
Not knowing that the last word was my uncle's habitual, desiccated
abbreviation of the throbbingly emotional noun 'family', I was thrown into
confusion by the nodding signboard; after I had stayed in his household for
a very short time, however, it began to seem entirely fitting, because the
family of Mustapha Aziz was indeed as crushed, as insect-like, as
insignificant as that mythically truncated Fly.
With what words was I greeted when, a little nervously, I rang a
doorbell, filled with hopes of beginning a new career? What face appeared
behind the wire-netted outer door and scowled in angry surprise? Padma: I
was greeted by Uncle Mustapha's wife, by my mad aunt Sonia, with the
exclamation;
'Ptui!
Allah! How the fellow stinks!'
And although I, ingratiatingly, 'Hullo, Sonia Aunty darling,' grinned
sheepishly at this wire-netting-shaded vision of my aunt's wrinkling Irani
beauty, she went on, 'Saleem, is it? Yes, I remember you. Nasty little brat
you were. Always thought you were growing up to be God or what. And why?
Some stupid letter the P.M.'s fifteenth assistant under-secretary must have
sent you.' In that first meeting I should have been able to foresee the
destruction of my plans; I should have smelled, on my mad aunt, the
implacable odours of Civil Service jealousy, which would thwart all my
attempts to gain a place in the world. I had been sent a letter, and she
never had; it made us enemies for life. But there was a door, opening; there
were whiffs of clean clothes and shower-baths; and I, grateful for small
mercies, failed to examine the deadly perfumes of my aunt.
My uncle Mustapha Aziz, whose once-proudly-waxed moustache had never
recovered from the paralysing dust-storm of the destruction of Methwold's
Estate, had been passed over for the headship of his Department no less than
forty-seven times, and had at last found consolation for his inadequacies in
thrashing his children, in ranting nightly about how he was clearly the
victim of anti-Muslim prejudice, in a contradictory but absolute loyalty to
the government of the day, and in an obsession with genealogies which was
his only hobby and whose intensity was greater even than my father Ahmed
Sinai's long-ago desire to prove himself descended from Mughal emperors. In
the first of these consolations he was willingly joined by his wife, the
half-Irani would-be-socialite Sonia (nee Khosrovani), who had been driven
certifiably insane by a life in which she had been required to begin 'being
a chamcha' (literally a spoon, but idiomatically a flatterer) to forty-seven
separate and successive wives of number-ones whom she had previously
alienated by her manner of colossal condescension when they had been the
wives of number-threes; under the joint batterings of my uncle and aunt, my
cousins had by now been beaten into so thorough a pulp that I am unable to
recall their number, sexes, proportions or features; their personalities, of
course, had long since ceased to exist. In the home of Uncle Mustapha, I sat
silently amongst my pulverized cousins listening to his nightly soliloquies
which contradicted themselves constantly, veering wildly between his
resentment of not having been promoted and his blind lap-dog devotion to
every one of the Prime Minister's acts. If Indira Gandhi had asked him to
commit suicide, Mustapha Aziz would have ascribed it to anti-Muslim bigotry
but also defended the statesmanship of the request, and, naturally,
performed the task without daring (or even wishing) to demur.
As for genealogies: Uncle Mustapha spent all his spare time filling
giant log-books with spider-like family trees, eternally researching into
and immortalizing the bizarre lineages of the greatest families in the land;
but one day during my stay my aunt Sonia heard about a rishi from Hardwar
who was reputedly three hundred and ninety-five years old and had memorized
the genealogies of every single Brahmin clan in the country. 'Even in that,'
she screeched at my uncle, 'you end up being number two!' The existence of
the Hardwar rishi completed her descent into insanity, so that her violence
towards her children increased to the point at which we lived in daily
expectation of murder, and in the end my uncle Mustapha was forced to have
her locked away, because her excesses were embarrassing him in his work.
This, then, was the family to which I had come. Their presence in Delhi
came to seem, in my eyes, like a desecration of my own past; in a city
which, for me, was forever possessed by the ghosts of the young Ahmed and
Amina, this terrible Fly was crawling upon sacred soil.
But what can never be proved for certain is that, in the years ahead,
my uncle's genealogical obsession would be placed at the service of a
government which was falling increasingly beneath the twin spells of power
and astrology; so that what happened at the Widows' Hostel might never have
happened without his help ... but no, I have been a traitor, too; I do not
condemn; all I am saying is that I once saw, amongst his genealogical
log-books, a black leather folder labelled TOP SECRET, and titled PROJECT
M.C.C.
The end is near, and cannot be escaped much longer; but while the
Indira sarkar, like her father's administration, consults daily with
purveyors of occult lore; while Benarsi seers help to shape the history of
India, I must digress into painful, personal recollections; because it was
at Uncle Mustapha's that I learned, for certain, about the deaths of my
family in the war of '65; and also about the disappearance, just a few days
before my arrival, of the famous Pakistani singer Jamila Singer.
... When mad aunt Sonia heard that I had fought on the wrong side in
the war, she refused to feed me (we were at dinner), and screeched, 'God,
you have a cheek, you know that? Don't you have a brain to think with? You
come to a Senior Civil Servant's house - an escaped war criminal, Allah! You
want to lose your uncle his job? You want to put us all out on the street?
Catch your ears for shame, boy! Go - go, get out, or better, we should call
the police and hand you over just now! Go, be a prisoner of war, why should
we care, you are not even our departed sister's true-born son ...'
Thunderbolts, one after the other: Saleem fears for his safety, and
simultaneously learns the inescapable truth about his mother's death, and
also that his position is weaker than he thought, because in this part of
his family the act of acceptance has not been made; Sonia, knowing what Mary
Pereira confessed, is capable of anything! ...
And I, feebly, 'My mother? Departed?' And now Uncle Mustapha, perhaps
feeling that his wife has gone too far, says reluctantly, 'Never mind,
Saleem, of course you must stay - he must, wife, what else to do? - and poor
fellow doesn't even know ..."
Then they told me.
It occurred to me, in the heart of that crazy Fly, that I owed the dead
a number of mourning periods; after I learned of the demise of my mother and
father and aunts Alia and Pia and Emerald, of cousin Zafar and his Kifi
princess, of Reverend Mother and my distant relative Zohra and her husband,
I resolved to spend the next four hundred days in mourning, as was right and
proper: ten mourning periods, of forty days each. And then, and then, there
was the matter of Jamila Singer ...
She had heard about my disappearance in the turmoil of the war in
Bangladesh; she, who always showed her love when it was too late, had
perhaps been driven a little crazy by the news. Jamila, the Voice of
Pakistan, Bulbul-of-the-Faith, had spoken out against the new rulers of
truncated, moth-eaten, war-divided Pakistan; while Mr Bhutto was telling the
U.N. Security Council, 'We will build a new Pakistan! A better Pakistan! My
country hearkens for me!', my sister was reviling him in public; she, purest
of the pure, most patriotic of patriots, turned rebel when she heard about
my death. (That, at least, is how I see it; all I heard from my uncle were
the bald facts; he had heard them through diplomatic channels, which do not
go in for psychological theorizing.) Two days after her tirade against the
perpetrators of the war, my sister had vanished off the face of the earth.
Uncle Mustapha tried to speak gently: 'Very bad things are happening over
there, Saleem; people disappearing all the time; we must fear the worst.'
No! No no no! Padma: he was wrong! Jamila did not disappear into the
clutches of the State; because that same night, I dreamed that she, in the
shadows of darkness and the secrecy of a simple veil, not the instantly
recognizable gold-brocade tent of Uncle Puffs but a common black burqa, fled
by air from the capital city; and here she is, arriving in Karachi,
unquestioned unarrested free, she is taking a taxi into the depths of the
city, and now there is a high wall with bolted doors and a hatch through
which, once, long ago, I received bread, the leavened bread of my sister's
weakness, she is asking to be let in, nuns are opening doors as she cries
sanctuary, yes, there she is, safely inside, doors being bolted behind her,
exchanging one kind of invisibility for another, there is another Reverend
Mother now, as Jamila Singer who once, as the Brass Monkey, flirted with
Christianity, finds safety shelter peace in the midst of the hidden order of
Santa Ignacia ... yes, she is there, safe, not vanished, not in the grip of
police who kick beat starve, but at rest, not in an unmarked grave by the
side of the Indus, but alive, baking bread, singing sweetly to the secret
nuns; I know, I know, I know. How do I know? A brother knows; that's all.
Responsibility, assaulting me yet again: because there is no way out of
it - Jamila's fall was, as usual, all my fault.
I lived in the home of Mr Mustapha Aziz for four hundred and twenty
days ... Saleem was in belated mourning for his dead; but do not think for
one moment that my ears were closed! Don't assume I didn't hear what was
being said around me, the repeated quarrels between uncle and aunt (which
may have helped him decide to consign her to the insane asylum): Sonia Aziz
yelling, 'That bhangi - that dirty-filthy fellow, not even your nephew, I
don't know what's got into you, we should throw him out on his ear!' And
Mustapha, quietly, replying: 'Poor chap is stricken with grief, so how can
we, you just have to look to see, he is not quite right in the head, has
suffered many bad things.' Not quite right in the head! That was tremendous,
coming from them - from that family beside which a tribe of gibbering
cannibals would have seemed calm and civilized! Why did I put up with it?
Because I was a man with a dream. But for four hundred and twenty days, it
was a dream which failed to come true.
Droopy-moustachioed, tall-but-stooped, an eternal number-two: my Uncle
Mustapha was not my Uncle Hanif. He was the head of the family now, the only
one of his generation to survive the holocaust of 1965; but he gave me no
help at all ... I bearded him in his genealogy-filled study one bitter
evening and explained - with proper solemnity and humble but resolute
gestures - my historic mission to rescue the nation from her fate; but he
sighed deeply and said, 'Listen, Saleem, what would you have me do? I keep
you in my house; you eat my bread and do nothing - but that is all right,
you are from my dead sister's house, and I must look after - so stay, rest,
get well in yourself; then let us see. You want a clerkship or so, maybe it
can be fixed; but leave these dreams of God-knows-what. Our country is in
safe hands. Already Indiraji is making radical reforms - land reforms, tax
structures, education, birth control - you can leave it to her and her
sarkar.' Patronizing me, Padma! As if I were a foolish child! O the shame of
it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts!
At every turn I am thwarted; a prophet in the wilderness, like Maslama,
like ibn Sinan! No matter how I try, the desert is my lot. O vile
unhelpfulness of lickspittle uncles! O fettering of ambitions by second-best
toadying relatives! My uncle's rejection of my pleas for preferment had one
grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested
her. He was, in fact, preparing me for my return to the magicians' ghetto,
and for ... for
her ...
the Widow.
Jealousy: that was it. The great jealousy of my mad aunt Sonia,
dripping like poison into my uncle's ears, prevented him from doing a single
thing to get me started on my chosen career. The great are eternally at the
mercy of tiny men. And also: tiny madwomen.
On the four hundred and eighteenth day of my stay, there was a change
in the atmosphere of the madhouse. Someone came to dinner: someone with a
plump stomach, a tapering head covered with oily .curls and a mouth as
fleshy as a woman's labia. I thought I recognized him from newspaper
photographs. Turning to one of my sexless ageless faceless cousins, I
inquired with interest, 'Isn't it, you know, Sanjay Gandhi?' But the
pulverized creature was too annihilated to be capable of replying ... was it
wasn't it? I did not, at that time, know what I now set down: that certain
high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons
of prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves ... a
few years later, there would be gangs of Sanjays all over India! No wonder
that incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth control on the rest of us ...
so maybe it was, maybe it wasn't; but someone disappeared into my uncle's
study with Mustapha Aziz; and that night - I sneaked a look - there was a
locked black leather folder saying TOP SECRET and also PROJECT M.C.C.; and
the next morning my uncle was looking at me differently, with fear almost,
or with that special look of loathing which Civil Servants reserve for those
who fall into official disfavour. I should have known then what was in store
for me; but everything is simple with hindsight. Hindsight comes to me now,
too late, now that I am finally consigned to the peripheries of history, now
that the connections between my life and the nation's have broken for good
and all ... to avoid my uncle's inexplicable gaze, I went out into the
garden; and saw Parvati-the-witch.
She was squatting on the pavement with the basket of invisibility by
her side; when she saw me her eyes brightened with reproach. 'You said you'd
come, but you never, so I,' she stuttered. I bowed my head. 'I have been in
mourning,' I said, lamely, and she, 'But still you could have - my God,
Saleem, you don't know, in our colony I can't tell anyone about my real
magic, never, not even Picture Singh who is like a father, I must bottle it
and bottle it, because they don't believe in such things, and I thought,
Here is Saleem come, now at last I will have one friend, we can talk, we can
be together, we have both been, and known, and arre how to say it, Saleem,
you don't care, you got what you wanted and went off just like that, I am
nothing to you, I know ...'
That night my mad aunt Sonia, herself only days away from confinement
in a strait-jacket (it got into the papers, a small piece on an inside page;
my uncle's Department must have been annoyed), had one of the fierce
inspirations of the profoundly insane and burst into the bedroom into which,
half an hour earlier, someone-with-saucer-eyes had climbed through a
ground-floor window; she found me in bed with Parvati-the-witch, and after
that my Uncle Mustapha lost interest in sheltering me, saying, 'You were
born from bhangis, you will remain a dirty type all your life'; on the four
hundred and twentieth day after my arrival, I left my uncle's house,
deprived of family ties, returned at last to that true inheritance of
poverty and destitution of which I had been cheated for so long by the crime
of Mary Pereira. Parvati-the-witch was waiting for me on the pavement; I did
not tell her that there was a sense in which I'd been glad of the
interruption, because as I kissed her in the dark of that illicit midnight I
had seen her face changing, becoming the face of a forbidden love; the
ghostly features of Jamila Singer replaced these of the witch-girl; Jamila
who was (I know it!) safely hidden in a Karachi nunnery was suddenly also
here, except that she had undergone a dark, transformation. She had begun to
rot, the dread! . pustules and cankers of forbidden love were spreading
across her face; just as once the ghost of Joe D'Costa had rotted in the
grip of the occult leprosy of guilt, so now the rancid flowers of incest
blossomed on my sister's phantasmal features, and I couldn't do it, couldn't
kiss touch look upon that intolerable spectral face, I had been on the verge
of jerking away with a cry of desperate nostalgia and shame when Sonia Aziz
burst in upon us with electric light and screams.
And as for Mustapha, well, my indiscretion with Parvati may also have
been, in his eyes, no more than a useful pretext for getting rid of me; but
that must remain in doubt, because the black folder was locked - all I have
to go on is a look in his eye, a smell of fear, three initials on a label -
because afterwards, when everything was finished, a fallen lady and her
labia-lipped son spent two days behind locked doors, burning files; and how
can we know whether-or-not one of them was labelled M.C.C.?
I didn't want to stay, anyway. Family: an overrated idea. Don't think I
was sad! Never for a moment imagine that lumps arose in my throat at my
expulsion from the last gracious home open to me! I tell you - I was in fine
spirits when I left... maybe there is something unnatural about me, some
fundamental lack of emotional response; but my thoughts have always aspired
to higher things. Hence my
resilience. Hit me: I bounce back. (But no resistance is of any use
against the cracks.)
To sum up: forsaking my earlier, naive hopes of preferment in public
service, I returned to the magicians' slum and the chaya of the Friday
Mosque. Like Gautama, the first and true Buddha, I left my life and comfort
and went like a beggar into the world. The date was February 23rd, 1973;
coal-mines and the wheat market were being nationalized, the price of oil
had begun to spiral up up up, would quadruple in a year, and in the
Communist Party of India, the split between Dange's Moscow faction and
Namboodiripad's C.P.I.(M.) had become unbridgeable; and I, Saleem Sinai,
like India, was twenty-five years, six months and eight days old.
The magicians were Communists, almost to a man. That's right: reds!
Insurrectionists, public menaces, the scum of the earth - a community of the
godless living blasphemously in the very shadow of the house of God!
Shameless, what's more; innocently scarlet; born with the bloody taint upon
their souk! And let me say at once that no sooner had I discovered this than
I, who had been raised in India's other true faith, which we may term
Businessism, and who had abandoned-been-abandoned-by its practitioners, felt
instantly and comfortingly at home. A renegade Businessist, I began
zealously to turn red and then redder, as surely and completely as my father
had once turned white, so that now my mission of saving-the-country could be
seen in a new light; more revolutionary methodologies suggested themselves.
Down with the rule of unco-operative box-wallah uncles and their beloved
leaders! Full of thoughts of direct-communication-with-the-masses, I settled
into the magicians' colony, scraping a living by amusing foreign and native
tourists with the marvellous perspicacities of my nose, which enabled me to
smell out their simple, touristy secrets. Picture Singh asked me to share
his shack. I slept on tattered sackcloth amongst baskets sibilant with
snakes; but I did not mind, just as I found myself capable of tolerating
hunger thirst mosquitoes and (in the beginning) the bitter cold of a Delhi
winter. This Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, was also the
ghetto's unquestioned chieftain; squabbles and problems were resolved
beneath the shade of his ubiquitous and enormous black umbrella; and I, who
could read and write as well as smell, became a sort of aide-de-camp to this
monumental man who invariably added a lecture on socialism to his serpentine
performances, and who was famous in the main streets and alleys of the city
for more than his snake-charmer's skills. I can say, with utter certainty,
that Picture Singh was the greatest man I ever met.
One afternoon during the chaya, the ghetto was visited by another copy
of that labia-lipped youth whom I'd seen at my Uncle Mustapha's. Standing on
the steps of the mosque, he unfurled a banner which was then held up by two
assistants. It read: ABOLISH POVERTY, and bore the cow-suckling-calf symbol
of the Indira Congress. His face looked remarkably like a plump calf's face,
and he unleashed a typhoon of halitosis when he spoke. 'Brothers-O!
Sisters-O! What does Congress say to you? This: that all men are created
equal!' He got no further; the crowd recoiled from his breath of bullock
dung under a hot sun, and Picture Singh began to guffaw. 'O ha ha, captain,
too good, sir!' And labia-lips, foolishly: 'Okay, you, brother, won't you
share the joke?' Picture Singh shook his head, clutched his sides: 'O
speech, captain! Absolute master speech!' His laughter rolled out from
beneath his umbrella to infect the crowd until all of us were rolling on the
ground, laughing, crushing ants, getting covered in dust, and the Congress
mooncalf's voice rose in panic: 'What is this? This fellow doesn't think we
are equals? What a low impression he must have - ' but now Picture Singh,
umbrella-over-head, was striding away towards his hut. Labia-lips, in
relief, continued his speech ... but not for long, because Picture returned,
carrying under his left arm a small circular lidded basket and under his
right armpit a wooden flute. He placed the basket on the step beside the
Congress-wallah's feet; removed the lid; raised flute to lips. Amid renewed
laughter, the young politico leaped nineteen inches into the air as a king
cobra swayed sleepily up from its home ... Labia-lips is crying: 'What are
you doing? Trying to kill me to death?' And Picture Singh, ignoring him, his
umbrella furled now, plays on, more and more furiously, and the snake
uncoils, faster faster Picture Singh plays until the flute's music fills
every cranny of the slum and threatens to scale the walls of the mosque, and
at last the great snake, hanging in the air, supported only by the
enchantment of the tune, stands nine feet long out of the basket and dances
on its tail... Picture Singh relents. Nagaraj subsides into coils. The Most
Charming Man In The World offers the flute to the Congress youth: 'Okay,
captain,' Picture Singh says agreeably, 'you give it a try.' But labia-lips:
'Man, you know I couldn't do it!' Whereupon Picture Singh seizes the cobra
just below the head, opens his own mouth wide wide wide, displaying an
heroic wreckage of teeth and gums; winking left-eyed at the Congress youth,
he inserts the snake's tongue-flicking head into his hideously yawning
orifice! A full minute passes before Picture Singh returns the cobra to its
basket. Very kindly, he tells the youth: 'You see, captain, here is the
truth of the business: some persons are better, others are less. But it may
be nice for you to think otherwise.'
Watching this scene, Saleem Sinai learned that Picture Singh and the
magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so
powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their
arts, but they never forgot what it was.
The problems of the magicians' ghetto were the problems of the
Communist movement in India; within the confines of the colony could be
found, in miniature, the many divisions and dissensions which racked the
Party in the country. Picture Singh, I hasten to add, was above it all; the
patriarch of the ghetto, he was the possessor of an umbrella whose shade
could restore harmony to the squabbling factions; but the disputes which
were brought into the shelter of the snake-charmer's umbrella were becoming
more and more bitter, as the prestidigitators, the pullers of rabbits from
hats, aligned themselves firmly behind Mr Dange's Moscow-line official
C.P.I., which supported Mrs Gandhi throughout the Emergency; the
contortionists, however, began to lean more towards the left and the
slanting intricacies of the Chinese-oriented wing. Fire-eaters and
sword-swallowers applauded the guerrilla tactics of the Naxalite movement;
while mesmerists and walkers-on-hot-coals espoused Namboodiripad's manifesto
(neither Muscovite nor Pekinese) and deplored the Naxa-lites' violence.
There were Trotskyist tendencies amongst card-sharpers, and even a
Communism-through-the-ballot-box movement amongst the moderate members of
the ventriloquist section. I had entered a milieu in which, while religious
and regionalist bigotry were wholly absent, our ancient national gift for
fissiparousness had found new outlets. Picture Singh told me, sorrowfully,
that during the 1971 general election a bizarre murder had resulted from the
quarrel between a Naxalite fire-eater and a Moscow-line conjurer who,
incensed by the former's views, had attempted to draw a pistol from his
magic hat; but no sooner had the weapon been produced than the supporter of
Ho Chi Minh had scorched his opponent to death in a burst of terrifying
flame.
Under his umbrella, Picture Singh spoke of a socialism which owed
nothing to foreign influences. 'Listen, captains,' he told warring
ventriloquists and puppeteers, 'will you go to your villages and talk about
Stalins and Maos? Will Bihari or Tamil peasants care about the killing of
Trotsky?' The chaya of his magical umbrella cooled the most intemperate of
the wizards; and had the effect, on me, of convincing me that one day soon
the snake-charmer Picture Singh would follow in the footsteps of Mian
Abdullah so many years ago; that, like the legendary Hummingbird, he would
leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will; and
that, unlike my grandfather's hero, he would not be stopped until he, and
his cause, had won the day ... but, but. Always a but but. What happened,
happened. We all know that.
Before I return to telling the story of my private life, I should like
it to be known that it was Picture Singh who revealed to me that the
country's corrupt, 'black' economy had grown as large as the official,
'white' variety, which he did by showing me a newspaper photograph of Mrs
Gandhi. Her hair, parted in the centre, was snow-white on one side and
blackasnight on the other, so that, depending on which profile she
presented, she resembled either a stoat or an ermine. Recurrence of the
centre-parting in history; and also, economy as an analogue of a Prime
Ministerial hair-style ... I owe these important perceptions to the Most
Charming Man In The World. Picture Singh it was who told me that Mishra, the
railway minister, was also the officially-appointed minister for bribery,
through whom the biggest deals in the black economy were cleared, and who
arranged for pay-offs to appropriate ministers and officials; without
Picture Singh, I might never have known about the poll-fixing in the state
elections in Kashmir. He was no lover of democracy, however: 'God damn this
election business, captain,' he told me, 'Whenever they come, something bad
happens; and our countrymen behave like clowns.' I, in the grip of my
fever-for-revolution, failed to take issue with my mentor.
There were, of course, a few exceptions to the ghetto's rules: one or
two conjurers retained their Hindu faith and, in politics, espoused the
Hindusectarian Jana Sangh party or the notorious Ananda Marg extremists;
there were even Swatantra voters amongst the jugglers. Non-politically
speaking, the old lady Resham Bibi was one of the few members of the
community who remained an incurable fantasist, believing (for instance) in
the superstition which forbade women to climb mango trees, because a mango
tree which had once borne the weight of a woman would bear sour fruit for
ever more ... and there was the strange fakir named Chishti Khan, whose face
was so smooth and lustrous that nobody knew whether he was nineteen or
ninety, and who had surrounded his shack with a fabulous creation of
bamboo-sticks and scraps of brightly-coloured paper, so that his home looked
like a miniature, multi-coloured replica of the nearby Red Fort. Only when
you passed through its castellated gateway did you realize that behind the
meticulously hyperbolic fa9ade of bamboo-and-paper crenellations and
ravelins hid a tin-and-card board hovel like all the rest. Chishti Khan had
committed the ultimate solecism of permitting his illusionist expertise to
infect his real life; he was not popular in the ghetto. The magicians kept
their distance, lest they become diseased by his dreams.
So you will understand why Parvati-the-witch, the possessor of truly
wondrous powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her
midnight-given gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community
which had constantly denied such possibilities.
On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of
sight, and the only danger was from scavengers-after-scrap, from
searchers-for-abandoned crates or hunters-for-corrugated-tin... that was
where Parvati-the-witch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a
humble shalwar-kameez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others,
midnight's sorceress performed for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a
child. Saucer-eye, rope-like pony-tail, fine full red lips ... I would never
have resisted her for so long if not for the face, the sick decaying eyes
nose lips of... There seemed at first to be no limits to Parvati's
abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were demons conjured? Did djinns
appear, offering riches and overseas travel on levitating rugs? Were frogs
turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose into jewels? Was there
selling-of-souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit of it; the magic which
Parvati-the-witch performed for me - the only magic she was ever willing to
perform - was of the type known as 'white'. It was as though the Brahmins'
'Secret Book', the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her; she
could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she permitted snakes
to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, involving praying
to the snake-god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the goodness of the
Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reciting a spell:
Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless; in a like
manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected)
- she could
cure sores and consecrate talismans - she knew the sraktya charm and the
Rite of the Tree. And all this, in a series of extraordinary night-time
displays, she revealed to me beneath the walls of the Mosque - but still she
was not happy.
As ever, I am obliged to accept responsibility; the scent of
mourn-fulness which hung around Parvati-the-witch was my creation. Because
she was twenty-five years old, and wanted more from me than my willingness
to be her audience; God knows why, but she wanted me in her bed - or, to be
precise, to lie with her on the lengdi of sackcloth which served her for a
bed in the hovel she shared with a family of contortionist triplets from
Kerala, three girls who were orphans just like her - just like myself.
What she did for me: under the power of her magic, hair began to grow
where none had grown since Mr Zagallo pulled too hard; her wizardry caused
the birthmarks on my face to fade under the healing applications of herbal
poultices; it seemed that even the bandiness of my legs was diminishing
under her care. (She could do nothing, however, for my one bad ear; there is
no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.)
But no matter how much she did for me, I was unable to do for her the thing
she desired most; because although we lay down together beneath the walk on
the blind side of the Mosque, the moonlight showed me her night-time face
turning, always turning into that of my distant, vanished sister... no, not
my sister... into the putrid, vilely disfigured face of Jamila Singer.
Parvati anointed her body with unguent oils imbued with erotic charm; she
combed her hair a thousand times with a comb made from aphrodisiac
deer-bones; and (I do not doubt it) in my absence she must have tried all
manner of lovers' sorceries; but I was in the grip of an older bewitchment,
and could not, it seemed, be released; I was doomed to find the faces of
women who loved me turning into the features of... but you know whose
crumbling features appeared, filling my nostrils with their unholy stench.
'Poor girl,' Padma sighs, and I agree; but until the Widow drained me
of past present future, I remained under the Monkey's spell.
When Parvati-the-witch finally admitted failure, her face developed,
over-night, an alarming and pronounced pout. She fell asleep in the hut of
the contortionist orphans and awoke with her full lips stuck in a protruding
attitude of unutterably sensuous pique. Orphaned triplets told her, giggling
worriedly, what had happened to her face; she tried spiritedly to pull her
features back into position, but neither muscles nor wizardry managed to
restore her to her former self; at last, resigning herself to her tragedy,
Parvati gave in, so that Resham Bibi told anyone who would listen: 'That
poor girl - a god must have blown on her when she was making a face.'
(That year, incidentally, the chic ladies of the cities were all
wearing just such an expression with erotic deliberation; the haughty
mannequins in the Eleganza - '73 fashion show all pouted as they walked
their catwalks. In the awful poverty of the magicians' slum, pouting
Parvati-the-witch was in the height of facial fashion.)
The magicians devoted much of their energies to the problem of making
Parvati smile again. Taking time off from their work, and also from the more
mundane chores of reconstructing tin-and-cardboard huts which had fallen
down in a high wind, or killing rats, they performed their most difficult
tricks for her pleasure; but the pout remained in place. Resham Bibi made a
green tea which smelted of camphor and forced it down Parvati's gullet. The
tea had the effect of constipating her so thoroughly that she was not seen
defecating behind her hovel for nine weeks. Two young jugglers conceived the
notion that she might have begun grieving for her deceased father all over
again, and applied themselves to the task of drawing his portrait on a shred
of old tarpaulin, which they hung above her sackcloth mat. Triplets made
jokes, and Picture Singh, greatly distressed, made cobras tie themselves in
knots; but none of it worked, because if Parvati's thwarted love was beyond
her own powers to cure, what hope could the others have had? The power of
Parvati's pout created, in the ghetto, a nameless sense of unease, which all
the magicians' animosity towards the unknown could not entirely dispel.
And then Resham Bibi hit upon an idea. 'Fools that we are,' she told
Picture Singh, 'we don't see what is under our noses. The poor girl is
twenty-five, baba - almost an old woman! She is pining for a husband!'
Picture Singh was impressed. 'Resham Bibi,' he told her approvingly, 'your
brain is not yet dead.'
After that, Picture Singh applied himself to the task of finding
Parvati a suitable young man; many of the younger men in the ghetto were
coaxed bullied threatened. A number of candidates were produced; but Parvati
rejected them all. On the night when she told Bismillah Khan, the most
promising fire-eater in the colony, to go somewhere else with his breath of
hot chillies, even Picture Singh despaired. That night, he said to me,
'Captain, that girl is a trial and a grief to me; she is your good friend,
you got any ideas?' Then an idea occurred to him, an idea which had had to
wait until he became desperate because even Picture Singh was affected by
considerations of class - automatically thinking of me as 'too good' for
Parvati, because of my supposedly 'higher' birth, the ageing Communist had
not thought until now that I might be ... 'Tell me one thing, captain,'
Picture Singh asked shyly, 'you are planning to be married some day?'
Saleem Sinai felt panic rising up inside himself.
'Hey, listen, captain, you like the girl, hey?' - And I, unable to deny
it, 'Of course.' And now Picture Singh, grinning from ear to ear, while
snakes hissed in baskets: 'Lake her a lot, captain? A
lot
lot?' But I was
thinking of Jamila's face in the night; and made a desperate decision:
'Pictureji, I can't marry her.' And now he, frowning: 'Are you maybe married
already, captain? Got wife-children waiting somewhere?' Nothing for it now;
I, quietly, shamefully, said: 'I can't marry anyone, Pictureji. I can't have
children.'
The silence in the shack was punctuated by sibilant snakes and the
calls of wild dogs in the night.
'You're telling truth, captain? Is a medical fact?'
'Yes'
'Because one must not lie about such things, captain. To lie about
one's manhood is bad, bad luck. Anything could happen, captain.
And I, wishing upon myself the curse of Nadir Khan, which was also the
curse of my uncle Hanif Aziz and, during the freeze and its long aftermath,
of my father Ahmed Sinai, was goaded into lying even more angrily: 'I tell
you,' Saleem cried, 'it ,s true, and that s that!'
Then, captain,' Pictureji said tragically, smacking wrist against
forehead, 'God knows what to do with that poor girl.'
A wedding
I married Parvati-the-witch on February 23rd, 1975, the second
anniversary of my outcast's return to the magicians' ghetto.
Stiffening of Padma: taut as a washing-line, my dung-lotus inquires:
'Married? But last night only you said you wouldn't - and why you haven't
told me all these days, weeks, months... ?' I look at her sadly, and remind
her that I have already mentioned the death of my poor Parvati, which was
not a natural death ... slowly Padma uncoils, as I continue: 'Women have
made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even
beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my
opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother
India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, there's
no escape from her.'
There have been thirty-two years, in this story, during which I
remained unborn; soon, I may complete thirty-one years of my own. For
sixty-three years, before and after midnight, women have done their best;
and also, I'm bound to say, their worst.
In a blind landowner's house on the shores of a Kashmir! lake, Naseem
Aziz doomed me to the inevitability of perforated sheets; and in the waters
of that same lake, Ilse Lubin leaked into history, and I have not forgotten
her deathwish;
Before Nadir Khan hid in his underworld, my grandmother had, by
becoming Reverend Mother, begun a sequence of women who changed their names,
a sequence which continues even today - and which even leaked into Nadir,
who became Qasim, and sat with dancing hands in the Pioneer Cafe; and after
Nadir's departure, my mother Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai;
And Alia, with the bitterness of ages, who clothed me in the
baby-things impregnated with her old-maid fury; and Emerald, who laid a
table on which I made pepperpots march;
There was the Rani of Cooch Naheen, whose money, placed at the disposal
of a humming man, gave birth to the optimism disease, which has recurred, at
intervals, ever since; and, in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi, a distant
relative called Zohra whose flirtations gave birth, in my father, to that
later weakness for Fernandas and Florys; So to Bombay. Where Winkie's Vanita
could not resist the centre-parting of William Methwold, and Nussie-the-duck
lost a baby-race; while Mary Pereira, in the name of love, changed the
baby-tags of history and became a second mother to me ...
Women and women and women: Toxy Catrack, nudging open the door which
would later let in the children of midnight; the terrors of her nurse
Bi-Appah; the competitive love of Amina and Mary, and what my mother showed
me while I lay concealed in a washing-chest: yes, the Black Mango, which
forced me to sniff, and unleashed what-were-not-Archangels! ... And Evelyn
Lilith Burns, cause of a bicycle-accident, who pushed me down a two-storey
hillock into the midst of history.
And the Monkey. I musn't forget the Monkey.
But also, also, there was Masha Miovic, goading me into finger-loss,
and my aunty Pia, filling my heart with revenge-lust, and Lila Sabarmati,
whose indiscretions made possible my terrible, manipulating,
newspaper-cut-out revenge;
And Mrs Dubash, who found my gift of a Superman comic and built it,
with the help of her son, into Lord Khusro Khusrovand;
And Mary, seeing a ghost.
In Pakistan, the land of submission, the home of purity, I watched the
transformation of Monkey-into-Singer, and fetched bread, and fell in love;
it was a woman, Tai Bibi, who told me the truth about myself. And in the
heart of my inner darkness, I turned to the Puffias, and was only narrowly
saved from the threat of a golden-dentured bride.
Beginning again, as the buddha, I lay with a latrine-cleaner and was
subjected to electrified urinals as a result; in the East, a farmer's wife
tempted me, and Time was assassinated in consequence; and there were houris
in a temple, and we only just escaped in time.
In the shadow of a mosque, Resham Bibi issued a warning.
And I married Parvati-the-witch.
'Oof, mister,' Padma exclaims, 'that's too much women!'
I do not disagree; because I have not even included her, whose dreams
of marriage and Kashmir have inevitably been leaking into me, making me
wish, if-only, if-only, so that, having once resigned myself to the cracks,
I am now assailed by pangs of discontent, anger, fear and regret.
But above all, the Widow.
'I swear!' Padma slaps her knee, 'Too much, mister; too much.'
How are we to understand my too-many women? As the multiple faces of
Bharat-Mata? Or as even more ... as the dynamic aspect of maya, as cosmic
energy, which is represented as the female organ?
Maya, in its dynamic aspect, is called Shakti; perhaps it is no
accident that, in the Hindu pantheon, the active power of a deity is
contained within his queen! Maya-Shakti mothers, but also 'muffles
consciousness in its dream-web'. Too-many-women: are they all aspects of
Devi, the goddess - who is Shakti, who slew the buffalo-demon, who defeated
the ogre Mahisha, who is Kali Durga Chandi Chamunda Uma Sati and Parvati ...
and who, when active, is coloured red?
'I don't know about that,' Padma brings me down to earth, 'They are
just women, that's all.'
Descending from my flight of fancy, I am reminded of the importance of
speed; driven on by the imperatives of rip tear crack, I abandon
reflections; and begin.
This is how it came about: how Parvati took her destiny into her own
hands; how a lie, issuing from my lips, brought her to the desperate
condition in which, one night, she extracted from her shabby garments a lock
of hero's hair, and began to speak sonorous words.
Spurned by Saleem, Parvati remembered who had once been his arch-enemy;
and, taking a bamboo stick with seven knots in it, and an improvized metal
hook attached to one end, she squatted in her shack and recited; with the
Hook of Indra in her right hand, and a lock of hair in her left, she
summoned him to her. Parvati called to Shiva; believe don't believe, but
Shiva came.
From the beginning there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees; but
throughout this narrative I've been pushing him, the other, into the
background (just as once, I banned him from the councils of the Children).
He can be concealed no longer, however; because one morning in May 1974 - is
it just my cracking memory, or am I right in thinking it was the 18th,
perhaps at the very moment at which the deserts of Rajasthan were being
shaken by India's first nuclear explosion? Was Shiva's explosion into my
life truly synchronous with
India's arrival, without prior warning, at the nuclear age? - he came
to the magicians' slum. Uniformed, gonged-and-pipped, and a Major now, Shiva
alighted from an Army motorcycle; and even through the modest khaki of his
Army pants it was easy to make out the phenomenal twin bulges of his lethal
knees... India's most decorated war hero, but once he led a gang of apaches
in the back-streets of Bombay; once, before he discovered the legitimized
violence of war, prostitutes were found throttled in gutters (I know, I know
- no proof); Major Shiva now, but also Wee Willie Winkie's boy, who still
remembered the words of long-silenced songs: 'Good Night, Ladies' still
echoed on occasion in his ears.
There are ironies here, which must not pass unnoticed; for had not
Shiva risen as Saleem fell? Who was the slum-dweller now, and who looked
down from commanding heights? There is nothing like a war for the
re-invention of lives ... On what may well have been May 18th, at any rate,
Major Shiva came to the magicians' ghetto, and strode through the cruel
streets of the slum with a strange expression on his face, which combined
the infinite disdain for poverty of the recently-exalted with something more
mysterious: because Major Shiva, drawn to our humble abode by the
incantations of Parvati-the-witch, cannot have known what force impelled him
to come.
What follows is a reconstruction of the recent career of Major Shiva; I
pieced the story together from Parvati's accounts, which I got out of her
after our marriage. It seems my arch-rival was fond of boasting to her about
his exploits, so you may wish to make allowances for the distortions of
truth which such chest-beating creates; however, there seems no reason to
believe that what he told Parvati and she repeated to me was very far
removed from what-was-the-case.
At the end of the war in the East, the legends of Shiva's awful
exploits buzzed through the streets of the cities, leaped on to newspaper
and into magazines, and thus insinuated themselves into the salons of the
well-to-do, settling in clouds as thick as flies upon the eardrums of the
country's hostesses, so that Shiva found himself elevated in social status
as well as military rank, and was invited to a thousand and one different
gatherings - banquets, musical soirees, bridge parties, diplomatic
receptions, party political conferences, great melas and also smaller, local
fetes, school sports days and fashionable balls - to be applauded and
monopolized by the noblest and fairest in the land, to all of whom the
legends of his exploits clung like flies, walking over their eyeballs so
that they saw the young man through the mist of his legend, coating their
fingertips so that they touched him through the magical film of his myth,
settling on their tongues so that they could not speak to him as they would
to an ordinary human being. The Indian Army, which was at that time fighting
a political battle against proposed expenditure cuts, understood the value
of so charismatic an ambassador, and permitted the hero to circulate amongst
his influential admirers; Shiva espoused his new life with a will.
He grew a luxuriant moustache to which his personal batman applied a
daily pomade of linseed-oil spiced with coriander; always elegantly turned
out in the drawing-rooms of the mighty, he engaged in political chit-chat,
and declared himself a firm admirer of Mrs Gandhi, largely because of his
hatred for her opponent Morarji Desai, who was intolerably ancient, drank
his own urine, had skin which rustled like rice-paper, and, as Chief
Minister of Bombay, had once been responsible for the banning of alcohol and
the persecution of young goondas, that is to say hooligans or apaches, or,
in other words, of the child Shiva himself... but such idle chatter occupied
a mere fraction of his thoughts, the rest of which were entirely taken up
with the ladies. Shiva, too, was besotted by too-much-women, and in those
heady days after the military victory acquired a secret reputation which (he
boasted to Parvati) rapidly grew to rival his official, public fame - a
'black' legend to set beside the 'white' one. What was whispered at the
hen-parties and canasta-evenings of the land? What was hissed through
giggles wherever two or three glittering ladies got together? This: Major
Shiva was becoming a notorious seducer; a ladies'-man; a cuckolder of the
rich; in short, a stud.
There were women - he told Parvati - wherever he went: their curving
bird-soft bodies quaking beneath the weight of their jewellery and lust,
their eyes misted over by his legend; it would have been difficult to refuse
them even had he wanted to. But Major Shiva had no intention of refusing. He
listened sympathetically to their little tragedies - impotent husbands,
beatings, lack-of-attention - to whatever excuses the lovely creatures
wished to offer. Like my grandmother at her petrol pump (but with more
sinister motives) he gave patient audience to their woes; sipping whisky in
the chandeliered splendour of ballrooms, he watched them batting their
eyelids and breathing suggestively while they moaned; and always, at last,
they contrived to drop a handbag, or spill a drink, or knock his
swagger-stick from his grasp, so that he would have to stoop to the floor to
retrieve whatever-had-fallen, and then he would see the notes tucked into
their sandals, sticking daintily out from under painted toes. In those days
(if the Major is to be believed) the lovely scandalous begums of India
became awfully clumsy, and their chap-pals spoke of rendezvous-at-midnight,
of trellises of bougainvillaea outside bedroom windows, of husbands
conveniently away launching ships or exporting tea or buying ball-bearings
from Swedes. While these unfortunates were away, the Major visited their
homes to steal their most prized possessions: their women fell into his
arms. It is possible (I have divided by half the Major's own figures) that
at the height of his philanderings there were no less than ten thousand
women in love with him.
And certainly there were children. The spawn of illicit midnights.
Beautiful bouncing infants secure in the cradles of the rich. Strewing
bastards across the map of India, the war hero went his way; but (and this,
too, is what he told Parvati) he suffered from the curious fault of losing
interest in anyone who became pregnant; no matter how beautiful sensuous
loving they were, he deserted the bedrooms of all who bore his children; and
lovely ladies with red-rimmed eyes were obliged to persuade their cuckolded
husbands that yes, of course it's your baby, darling, life-of-mine, doesn't
it look just like you, and of course I'm not sad, why should I be, these are
tears of joy..
One such deserted mother was Roshanara, the child-wife of the steel
magnate S. P. Shetty; and at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in Bombay, she
punctured the mighty balloon of his pride. He had been promenading about the
paddock, stooping every few yards to return ladies' shawls and parasols,
which seemed to acquire a life of their own and spring out of their owners'
hands as he passed; Roshanara Shetty confronted him here, standing squarely
in his path and refusing to budge, her seventeen-year-old eyes filled with
the ferocious pique of childhood. He greeted her coolly, touching his Army
cap, and attempted to pass; but she dug her needle-sharp nails into his arm,
smiling dangerously as ice, and strolled along beside him. As they walked
she poured her infantile poison into his ear, and her hatred and resentment
of her former lover gave her the skill to make him believe her. Callously
she whispered that it was so funny, my God, the way he strutted around in
high society like some kind of rooster, while all the time the ladies were
laughing at him behind his back, O yes, Major Sahib, don't fool yourself,
high-class women have always enjoyed sleeping with animals peasants brutes,
but that's how we think of you, my God it's disgusting just to watch you
eat, gravy down your chin, don't you think we see how you never hold teacups
by their handles, do you imagine we can't hear your belches and breakings of
wind, you're just our pet ape, Major Sahib, very useful, but basically a
clown.
After the onslaught of Roshanara Shetty, the young war hero began to
see his world differently. Now he seemed to see women giggling behind fans
wherever he went; he noticed strange amused sidelong glances which he'd
never noticed before; and although he tried to improve his behaviour, it was
no use, he seemed to become clumsier the harder he tried, so that food flew
off his plate on to priceless Kelim rugs and belches broke from his throat
with the roar of a train emerging from a tunnel and he broke wind with the
rage of typhoons. His glittering new life became, for him, a daily
humiliation; and now he reinterpreted the advances of the beautiful ladies,
understanding that by placing their love-notes beneath their toes they were
obliging him to kneel demeaningly at their feet ... as he learned that a man
may possess every manly attribute and still be despised for not knowing how
to hold a spoon, he felt an old violence being renewed in him, a hatred for
these high-ups and their power, which is why I am sure - why I
know -
that
when the Emergency offered Shiva-of-the-knees the chance of grabbing some
power for himself, he did not wait to be asked a second time.
On May 15th, 1974, Major Shiva returned to his regiment in Delhi; he
claimed that, three days later, he was suddenly seized by a desire to see
once more the saucer-eyed beauty whom he had first encountered long ago in
the conference of the Midnight Children; the pony-tailed temptress who had
asked him, in Dacca, for a single lock of his hair. Major Shiva declared to
Parvati that his arrival at the magicians' ghetto had been motivated by a
desire to be done with the rich bitches of Indian high society; that he had
been besotted by her pouting lips the moment he laid eyes on them; and that
these were the only reasons for asking her to go away with him. But I have
already been overgenerous to Major Shiva - in this, my own personal version
of history, I have allowed his account too much space; so I insist that,
whatever the knock-kneed Major might have thought, the thing that drew him
into the ghetto was quite simply and straightforwardly the magic of
Parvati-the-witch.
Saleem was not in the ghetto when Major Shiva arrived by motorcycle;
while nuclear explosions rocked the Rajasthani wastes, out of sight, beneath
the desert's surface, the explosion which changed my life also took place
out of my sight. When Shiva grasped Parvati by the wrist, I was with Picture
Singh at an emergency conference of the city's many red cells, discussing
the ins and outs of the national railway strike; when Parvati, without
demurring, took her place on the pillion of a hero's Honda, I was busily
denouncing the government's arrests of union leaders. In short, while I was
preoccupied with politics and my dream of national salvation, the powers of
Parvati's witchcraft had set in motion the scheme which would end with
hennaed palms, and songs, and the signing of a contract.
... I am obliged, perforce, to reply on the accounts of others; only
Shiva could tell what had befallen him; it was Resham Bibi who described
Parvati's departure to me on my return, saying, 'Poor girl, let her go, so
sad she has been for so long, what is to blame?'; and only Parvati could
recount to me what befell her while she was away.
Because of the Major's national status as a war hero, he was permitted
to take certain liberties with military regulations; so nobody took him to
task for importing a woman into what were not, after all, married men's
quarters; and he, not knowing what had brought about this remarkable
alteration in his life, sat down as requested in a cane chair, while she
took off his boots, pressed his feet, brought him water flavoured with
freshly-squeezed limes, dismissed his batman, oiled his moustache, caressed
his knees and after all that produced a dinner of biriani so exquisite that
he stopped wondering what was happening to him and began to enjoy it
instead. Parvati-the-witch turned those simple Army quarters into a palace,
a Kailasa fit for Shiva-the-god; and Major Shiva, lost in the haunted pools
of her eyes, aroused beyond endurance by the erotic protrusion of her lips,
devoted his undivided attentions to her for four whole months: or, to be
precise, for one hundred and seventeen nights. On September 12th, however,
things changed: because Parvati, kneeling at his feet, fully aware of his
views on the subject, told him that she was going to have his child.
The liaison of Shiva and Parvati now became a tempestuous business,
filled with blows and broken plates: an earthly echo of that eternal marital
battle-of-the-gods which their namesakes are said to perform atop Mount
Kailasa in the great Himalayas ... Major Shiva, at this time, began to
drink; also to whore. The whoring trails of the war hero around the capital
of India bore a strong resemblance to the Lambretta-travels of Saleem Sinai
along the spoors of Karachi streets; Major Shiva, unmanned in the company of
the rich by the revelations of Roshanara Shetty, had taken to paving for his
pleasures. And such was his phenomenal fecundity (he assured Parvati while
beating her) that he ruined the'careers of many a loose woman by giving them
babies whom they would love too much to expose; he sired around the capital
an army of street-urchins to -mirror the regiment of bastards he had
fathered on the begums of the chandeliered salons.
Dark clouds were gathering in political skies as well: in Bihar, where
corruption inflation hunger illiteracy landlessness ruled the roost,
Jaya-Prakash Narayan led a coalition of students and workers against the
governing Indira Congress; in Gujarat, there were riots, railway trains were
burned, and Morarji Desai went on a fast-unto-death to bring down the
corrupt government of the Congress (under Chimanbhai Patel) in that
drought-ridden state ... it goes without) saying that he succeeded without
being obliged to die; in short, while anger seethed in Shiva's mind, the
country was getting angry, too; and what was being born while something grew
in Parvati's belly? You know the answer: in late 1974, J. P. Narayan and
Morarji Desai formed the opposition party known as the Janata Morcha: the
people's front. While Major Shiva reeled from whore to whore, the Indira
Congress was reeling too.
And at last, Parvati released him from her spell. (No other explanation
will do; if he was not bewitched, why did he not cast her off the instant he
heard of her pregnancy? And if the spell had not been lifted, how could he
have done it at all?) Shaking his head as though awaking from a dream, Major
Shiva found himself in the company of a balloon-fronted slum girl, who now
seemed to him to represent everything he most feared - she became the
personification of the slums of his childhood, from which he had escaped,
and which now, through her, through her damnable child, were trying to drag
him down down down again ... dragging her by the hair, he hurled her on to
his motorcycle, and in a very short time she stood, abandoned, on the
fringes of the magicians' ghetto, having been returned whence she came,
bringing with her only one thing which she had not owned when she left: the
thing hidden inside her like an invisible man in a wicker basket, the thing
which was growing growing growing, just as she had planned.
Why do I say that? - Because it must be true; because what followed,
followed; because it is my belief that Parvati-the-witch became pregnant in
order to invalidate my only defence against marrying her. But I shall only
describe, and leave analysis to posterity.
On a cold day in January, when the muezzin's cries from the highest
minaret of the Friday Mosque froze as they left his lips and fell upon the
city as sacred snow, Parvati returned. She had waited until there could be
no possible doubt about her condition; her inner basket bulged through the
clean new garments of Shiva's now-defunct infatuation. Her lips, sure of
their coming triumph, had lost their fashionable pout; in her saucer-eyes,
as she stood on the steps of the Friday Mosque to ensure that as many people
as possible saw her changed appearance, there lurked a silvered gleam of
contentment. That was how I found her when I returned to the chaya of the
mosque with Picture Singh. I was feeling disconsolate, and the sight of
Parvati-the-witch on the steps, hands folded calmly over her swollen belly,
long rope-of-hair blowing gently in the crystal air, did nothing to cheer me
up.
Pictureji! and I had gone into the tapering tenement streets behind the
General Post Office, where memories of fortune-tellers peepshow-men healers
hung in the breeze; and here Picture Singh had performed an act which was
growing more political by the day. His legendary artistry drew large
good-natured crowds; and he made his snakes enact his message under the
influence of his weaving flute music. While I, in my role of apprentice,
read out a prepared harangue, serpents dramatized my speech. I spoke of the
gross inequities of wealth distribution; two cobras performed, in dumbshow,
the mime of a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar. Police harassment,
hunger disease illiteracy, were spoken of and also danced by serpents; and
then Picture Singh, concluding his act, began to talk about the nature of
red revolution, and promises began to fill the air, so that even before the
police materialized out of the back-doors of the post office to break up the
meeting with lathi-charges and tear-gas, certain wags in our audience had
begun to heckle the Most Charming Man In The World. Unconvinced, perhaps, by
the ambiguous mimes of the snakes, whose dramatic content was admittedly a
little obscure, a youth shouted out: 'Ohe, Pictureji, you should be in the
Government, man, not even Indiramata makes promises as nice as yours!'
Then the tear-gas came and we had to flee, coughing spluttering blind,
from riot police, like criminals, crying falsely as we ran. (Just as once,
in Jallianwalabagh - but at least there were no bullets on this occasion.)
But although the tears were the tears of gas, Picture Singh was indeed cast
down into an awesome gloom by the heckler's gibe, which had questioned the
hold on reality which was his greatest pride; and in the aftermath of gas
and sticks, I, too, was dejected, having suddenly identified a moth of
unease in my stomach, and realized that something in me objected to
Picture's portrayal in snake-dance of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich;
I found myself thinking, 'There is good and bad in all - and they brought me
up, they looked after me, Pictureji!' After which I began to see that the
crime of Mary Pereira had detached me from two worlds, not one; that having
been expelled from my uncle's house I could never fully enter the
world-according-to-Picture-Singh; that, in fact, my dream of saving the
country was a thing of mirrors and smoke; insubstantial, the maunderings of
a fool.
And then there was Parvati, with her altered profile, in the harsh
clarity of the winter day.
It was - or am I wrong? I must rush on; things are slipping from me all
the time - a day of horrors. It was then - unless it was another day - that
we found old Resham Bibi dead of cold, lying in her hut which she had built
out of Dalda Vanaspati packing-cases. She had turned bright blue,
Krishna-blue, blue as Jesus, the blue of Kashmiri sky, which sometimes leaks
into eyes; we burned her on the banks of the Jamuna amongst mud-flats and
buffalo, and she missed my wedding as a result, which was sad, because like
all old women she loved weddings, and had in the past joined in the
preliminary henna-ceremonies with energetic glee, leading the formal singing
in which the bride's friends insulted the groom and his family. On one
occasion her insults had been so brilliant and finely calculated that the
groom took umbrage and cancelled the wedding; but Resham had been undaunted,
saying that it wasn't her fault if young men nowadays were as faint-hearted
and inconstant as chickens.
I was absent when Parvati went away; I was not present when she
returned; and there was one more curious fact ... unless I have forgotten,
unless it was on another day... it seems to me, at any rate, that on the day
of Parvati's return, an Indian Cabinet Minister was in his railway carriage,
at Samastipur, when an explosion blew him into the history books; that
Parvati, who had departed amid the explosions of atom bombs, returned to us
when Mr L. N. Mishra, minister for railways and bribery, departed this world
for good. Omens and more omens... perhaps, in Bombay, dead pomfrets were
floating belly-side-up to shore.
January 26th, Republic Day, is a good time for illusionists. When the
huge crowds gather to watch elephants and fireworks, the city's tricksters
go out to earn their living. For me, however, the day holds another meaning;
it was on Republic Day that my conjugal fate was sealed.
In the days after Parvati's return, the old women of the ghetto formed
the habit of holding their ears for shame whenever they passed her; she, who
bore her illegitimate child without any appearance of guilt, would smile
innocently and walk on. But on the morning of Republic Day, she awoke to
find a rope hung with tattered shoes strung up above her door, and began to
weep inconsolably, her poise disintegrating under the force of this greatest
of insults. Picture Singh and I, leaving our shack laden with baskets of
snakes, came across her in her (calculated? genuine?) misery, and Picture
Singh set his jaw in an attitude of determination. 'Come back to the hut,
captain,' the Most Charming Man instructed me, 'We must talk.'
And in the hut, 'Forgive me, captain, but I must speak. I am thinking
it is a terrible thing for a man to go through life without children. To
have no son, captain: how sad for you, is it not?' And I, trapped by the lie
of impotence, remained silent while Pictureji suggested the marriage which
would preserve Parvati's honour and simultaneously solve the problem of my
self-confessed sterility; and despite my fears of the face of Jamila Singer,
which, superimposed on Parvati's, had the power of driving me to
distraction, I could not find it in myself to refuse.
Parvati -just as she had planned, I'm sure - accepted me at once, said
yes as easily and as often as she had said no in the past; and after that
the Republic Day celebrations acquired the air of having been staged
especially for our benefit, but what was in my mind was that once again
destiny, inevitability, the antithesis of choice had come to rule my life,
once again a child was to be born to a father who was not his father,
although by a terrible irony the child would be the true grandchild of his
father's parents; trapped in the web of these interweaving genealogies, it
may even have occurred to me to wonder what was beginning, what was ending,
and whether another secret countdown was in progress, and what would be born
with my child.
Despite the absence of Resham Bibi, the wedding went off well enough.
Parvati's formal conversion to Islam (which irritated Picture Singh, but on
which I found myself insisting, in another throwback to an earlier life) was
performed by a red-bearded Haji who looked ill-at-ease in the presence of so
many teasing, provocative members of the ungodly; under the shifting gaze of
this fellow who resembled a large and bearded onion she intoned her belief
that there was no God but God and that Muhammad was his prophet; she took a
name which I chose for her out of the repository of my dreams, becoming
Laylah, night, so that she too was caught up in the repetitive cycles of my
history, becoming an echo of all the other people who have been obliged to
change their names ... like my own mother Amina Sinai, Parvati-the-witch
became a new person in order to have a child.
At the henna ceremony, half the magicians adopted me, performing the
functions of my 'family'; the other half took Parvati's side, and happy
insults were sung late into the night while intricate traceries of henna
dried into the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet; and if the
absence of Resham Bibi deprived the insults of a certain cutting edge, we
were not overly sorry about the fact. During the nikah, the wedding proper,
the happy couple were seated on a dais hastily constructed out of the
Dalda-boxes of Resham's demolished shack, and the magicians filed solemnly
past us, dropping coins of small denominations into our laps; and when the
new Laylah Sinai fainted everyone smiled contentedly, because every good
bride should faint at her wedding, and nobody mentioned the embarrassing
possibility that she might have passed out because of the nausea or perhaps
the kicking-pains caused by the child inside her basket. That evening the
magicians put on a show so wonderful that rumours of it spread throughout
the Old City, and crowds gathered to watch, Muslim businessmen from a nearby
muhalla in which once a public announcement had been made and silversmiths
and milk-shake vendors from Chandni Chowk, evening strollers and Japanese
tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of
politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs; and there were
pink Europeans discussing camera lenses with the Japanese, there were
shutters clicking and flash bulbs popping, and I was told by one of the
tourists that India was indeed a truly wonderful country with many
remarkable traditions, and would be just fine and perfect if one did not
constantly have to eat Indian food. And at the valima, the consummation
ceremony (at which, on this occasion, no bloodstained sheets were held up,
with or without perforations, since I had spent our nuptial night with my
eyes shut tight and my body averted from my wife's, lest the unbearable
features of Jamila Singer come to haunt me. in the bewilderment of the
dark), the magicians surpassed their efforts of the wedding-night.
But when all the excitement had died down, I heard (with one good and
one bad ear) the inexorable sound of the future stealing up upon us: tick,
tock, louder and louder, until the birth of Saleem Sinai - and also of the
baby's father - found a mirror in the events of the night of the 25th of
June.
While mysterious assassins killed government officials, and narrowly
failed to get rid of Mrs Gandhi's personally-chosen Chief Justice, A. N.
Ray, the magicians' ghetto concentrated on another mystery: the ballooning
basket of Parvati-the-witch.
While the Janata Morcha grew in all kinds of bizarre directions, until
it embraced Maoist Communists (such as our very own contortionists,
including the rubber-limbed triplets with whom Parvati had lived before our
marriage - since the nuptials, we had moved into a hut of our own, which the
ghetto had built for us as a wedding present on the site of Resham's hovel)
and extreme right-wing members of the Ananda Marg; until Left-Socialists and
conservative Swatantra members joined its ranks ... while the people's front
expanded in this grotesque manner, I, Saleem, wondered incessantly about
what might be growing behind the expanding frontage of my wife.
While public discontent with the Indira Congress threatened to crush
the government like a fly, the brand-new Laylah Sinai, whose eyes had grown
wider than ever, sat as still as a stone while the
weight of the baby increased until it threatened to crush her bones to
powder; and Picture Singh, in an innocent echo of an ancient remark, said,
'Hey, captain! It's going to be big big: a real ten-chip whopper for sure!'
And then it was the twelfth of June.
History-books newspapers radio-programmes tell us that at two p.m. on
June I2th, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty, by Judge Jag Mohan
Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court, of two counts of campaign malpractice
during the election campaign of 1971; what has never previously been
revealed is that it was at precisely two p.m. that Parvati-the-witch (now
Laylah Sinai) became sure she had entered labour.
The labour of Parvati-Laylah lasted for thirteen days. On the first
day, while the Prime Minister was refusing to resign, although her
convictions carried with them a mandatory penalty barring her from public
office for six years, the cervix of Parvati-the-witch, despite contractions
as painful as mule-kicks, obstinately refused to dilate; Saleem Sinai and
Picture Singh, barred from the hut of her torment by the contortionist
triplets who had taken on the dudes of mid-wives, were obliged to listen to
her useless shrieks until a steady stream of fire-eaters card-sharpers
coal-walkers came up and slapped them on the back and made dirty jokes; and
it was only in my ears that the ticking could be heard ... a countdown to
God-knows what, until I became possessed by fear, and told Picture Singh, 'I
don't know what's going to come out of her, but it isn't going to be good
...' And Pictureji, reassuringly: 'Don't you worry, captain! Everything will
be fine! A ten-chip whopper, I swear!' And Parvati, screaming screaming, and
night fading into day, and on the second day, when in Gujarat Mrs Gandhi's
electoral candidates were routed by the Janata Morcha, my Parvati was in the
grip of pains so intense that they made her as stiff as steel, and I refused
to eat until the baby was born or whatever happened happened, I sat
cross-legged outside the hovel of her agony, shaking with terror in the
heat, begging don't let her die don't let her die, although I had never made
love to her during all the months of our marriage; in spite of my fear of
the spectre of Jamila Singer, I prayed and fasted, although Picture Singh,
'For pity's sake, captain,' I refused, and by the ninth day the ghetto had
fallen into a terrible hush, a silence so absolute that not even the calls
of the muezzin of the mosque could penetrate it, a soundlessness of such
immense powers that it shut out the roars of the Janata Morcha
demonstrations outside Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President's house, a
horror-struck muteness of the same awful enveloping magic as the great
silence which had once hung over my grandparents' house in Agra, so that on
the ninth day we could not hear Morarji Desai calling on President Ahmad to
sack the disgraced Prime Minister, and the only sounds in the entire world
were the ruined whimperings of Parvati-Laylah, as the contractions piled
upon her like mountains, and she sounded as though she were calling to us
down a long hollow tunnel of pain, while I sat cross-legged being
dismembered by her agony with the soundless sound of ticktock in my brain,
and inside the hut there were the contortionist triplets pouring water over
Parvati's body to replenish the moisture which was pouring out of her in
fountains, forcing a stick between her teeth to prevent her from biting out
her tongue, and trying to force down her eyelids over eyes which were
bulging so frighteningly that the triplets were afraid they would fall out
and get dirty on the floor, and then it was the twelfth day and I was half
dead of starvation while elsewhere in the city the Supreme Court was
informing Mrs Gandhi that she need not resign until her appeal, but must
neither vote in the Lok Sabha nor draw a salary, and while the Prime
Minister in her exultation at this partial victory began to abuse her
opponents in language of which a Koli fishwife would have been proud, my
Parvati's labour entered a phase in which despite her utter exhaustion she
found the energy to issue a string of foul-smelling oaths from her
colour-drained lips, so that the cesspit stink of her obscenities filled our
nostrils and made us retch, and the three contortionists fled from the hut
crying that she had become so stretched, so colourless that you could almost
see through her, and she would surely die if the baby did not come now, and
in my ears tick tock the pounding tick tock until I was sure, yes, soon soon
soon, and when the triplets returned to her bedside in the evening of the
thirteenth day they screamed Yes yes she has begun to push, come on Parvati,
push push push, and while Parvati pushed in the ghetto, J. P. Narayan and
Morarji Desai were also goading Indira Gandhi, while triplets yelled push
push push the leaders of the Janata Morcha urged the police and Army to
disobey the illegal orders of the disqualified Prime Minister, so in a sense
they were forcing Mrs Gandhi to push, and as the night darkened towards the
midnight hour, because nothing ever happens at any other time, triplets
began to screech it's coming coming coming, and elsewhere the Prime Minister
was giving birth to a child of her own ... in the ghetto, in the hut beside
which I sat cross-legged and starving to death, my son was coming coming
coming, the head is out, the triplets screeched, while members of the
Central Reserve Police arrested the heads of the Janata Morcha, including
the impossibly ancient and almost mythological figures of Morarji Desai and
J. P. Narayan, push push push, and in the heart of that terrible midnight
while ticktock pounded in my ears a child was born, a ten-chip whopper all
right, popping out so easily in the end that it was impossible to understand
what all the trouble had been. Parvati gave a final pitiable little yelp and
out he popped, while all over India policemen were arresting people, all
opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also
schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone
who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches, and
when the three contortionists had washed the baby and wrapped it in an old
sari and brought it out for its father to see, at exactly the same moment,
the word Emergency was being heard for the first time, and
suspension-of-civil rights, and censorship-of-the-press, and
armoured-units-on-special-alert, and arrest-of-subversive-elements;
something was ending, something was being born, and at the precise instant
of the birth of the new India and the beginning of a continuous midnight
which would not end for two long years, my son, the child of the renewed
ticktock, came out into the world.
And there is more: because when, in the murky half-light of that
endlessly prolonged midnight, Saleem Sinai saw his son for the first time,
he began to laugh helplessly, his brain ravaged by hunger, yes, but also by
the knowledge that his relentless destiny had played yet another of its
grotesque little jokes, and although Picture Singh, scandalized by my
laughter which in my weakness was like the giggling of a schoolgirl, cried
repeatedly, 'Come on, captain! Don't behave mad now! It is a son, captain,
be happy!', Saleem Sinai continued to acknowledge the birth by tittering
hysterically at fate, because the boy, the baby boy, the-boy-my-son Aadam,
Aadam Sinai was perfectly formed - except, that is, for his ears. On either
side of his head flapped audient protuberances like sails, ears so
colossally huge that the triplets afterwards revealed that when his head
popped out they had thought, for one bad moment, that it was the head of a
tiny elephant.
... 'Captain, Saleem captain,' Picture Singh was begging, 'be nice now!
Ears are not anything to go crazy for!'
He was born in Old Delhi ... once upon a time. No, that won't do,
there's no getting away from the date: Aadam Sinai arrived at a
night-shadowed slum on June 25th, 1975. And the time? The time matters, too.
As I said: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of
midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms. Oh, spell it out,
spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at Emergency, he
emerged. There were gasps; and, across the country, silences and fears. And
owing to the occult tyrannies of that benighted hour, he was mysteriously
handcuffed to history, his destinies indissolubly chained to those of his
country. Unprophesied, uncelebrated, he came; no prime ministers wrote him
letters; but, just the same, as my time of connection neared its end, his
began. He, of course, was left entirely without a say in the matter; after
all, he couldn't even wipe his own nose at the time.
He was the child of a father who was not his father; but also the child
of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it
together again;
He was the true great-grandson of his great-grandfather, but
elephantiasis attacked him in the ears instead of the nose - because he was
also the true son of Shiva-and-Parvati; he was elephant-headed Ganesh;
He was born with ears which flapped so high and wide that they must
have heard the shootings in Bihar and the screams of lathi-charged
dock-workers in Bombay ... a child who heard too much, and as a result never
spoke, rendered dumb by a surfeit of sound, so that between then-and-now,
from slum to pickle factory, I have never heard him utter a single word;
He was the possessor of a navel which chose to stick out instead of in,
so that Picture Singh, aghast, cried, 'His bimbi, captain! His bimbi,
look!', and he became, from the first days, the gracious recipient of our
awe;
A child of such grave good nature that his absolute refusal to cry or
whimper utterly won over his adoptive father, who gave up laughing
hysterically at the grotesque ears and began to rock the silent infant
gently in his arms;
A child who heard a song as he rocked in arms, a song sung in the
historical accents of a disgraced ayah: 'Anything you want to be, you kin
be; you kin be just what-all you want.'
But now that I've given birth to my flap-eared, silent son - there are
questions to be answered about that other, synchronous birth. Unpalatable,
awkward queries: did Saleem's dream of saving the nation leak, through the
osmotic tissues of history, into the thoughts of the Prime Minister herself?
Was my lifelong belief in the equation between the State and myself
transmuted, in 'the Madam's' mind, into that in-those-days-famous phrase:
India is Indira and Indira is India?
Were we competitors for centrality -
was she gripped by a lust for meaning as profound as my own - and was that,
was that why... ?
Influence of hair-styles on the course of history: there's another
ticklish business. If William Methwold had lacked a centre-parting, I might
not have been here today; and if the Mother of the Nation had had a coiffure
of uniform pigment, the Emergency she spawned might easily have lacked a
darker side. But she had white hair on one side and black on the other; the
Emergency, too, had a white part -public, visible, documented, a matter for
historians - and a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a
matter for us.
Mrs Indira Gandhi was born in November 1917 to Kamala and Jawaharlal
Nehru. Her middle name was Priyadarshini. She was not related to 'Mahatma'
M. K. Gandhi; her surname was the legacy of. her marriage, in 1952, to one
Feroze Gandhi, who became known as 'the nation's son-in-law'. They had two
sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, but in 1949 she moved back into her father's home
and became his 'official hostess'. Feroze made one attempt to live there,
too, but it was not a success. He became a ferocious critic of the Nehru
Government, exposing the Mundhra scandal and forcing the resignation of the
then Finance Minister, T. T. Krishnamachari - T.T.K.' himself. Mr Feroze
Gandhi died of a heart seizure in 1960, aged forty-seven. Sanjay Gandhi, and
his ex-model wife Menaka, were prominent during the Emergency. The Sanjay
Youth Movement was particularly effective in the sterilization campaign.
I have included this somewhat elementary summary just in case you had
failed to realize that the Prime Minister of India was, in 1975, fifteen
years a widow. Or (because the capital letter may be of use): a Widow.
Yes, Padma: Mother Indira really had it in for me.
Midnight
No! - But I must.
I don't want to tell it! - But I swore to tell it all. - No, I
renounce, not that, surely some things are better left...? - That won't
wash; what can't be cured, must be endured! - But surely not the whispering
walls, and treason, and snip snip, and the women with the bruised chests? -
Especially those things. - But how can I, look at me, I'm tearing myself
apart, can't even agree with myself, talking arguing like a wild fellow,
cracking up, memory going, yes, memory plunging into chasms and being
swallowed by the dark, only fragments remain, none of it makes sense any
more! - But I mustn't presume to judge; must simply continue (having once
begun) until the end; sense-and-nonsense is no longer (perhaps never was)
for me to evaluate. - But the horror of it, I can't won't mustn't won't
can't no! - Stop this; begin. - No! - Yes.
About the dream, then? I might be able to tell it as a dream. Yes,
perhaps a nightmare: green and black the Widow's hair and clutching hand and
children mmff and little balls and one-by-one and torn-in-half and little
balls go flying flying green and black her hand is green her nails are black
as black. - No dreams. Neither the time nor the place for. Facts, as
remembered. To the best of one's ability. The way it was: Begin. - No
choice? - None; when was there ever? There are imperatives, and
logical-consequences, and inevitabilities, and recurrences; there are
things-done-to, and accidents, and bludgeonings-of-fate; when was there ever
a choice? When options? When a decision freely-made, to be this or that or
the other? No choice; begin. -Yes.
Listen:
Endless night, days weeks months without the sun, or rather (because
it's important to be precise) beneath a sun as cold as a stream-rinsed
plate, a sun washing us in lunatic midnight light; I'm talking about the
winter of 1975-6. In the winter, darkness; and also tuberculosis.
Once, in a blue room overlooking the sea, beneath the pointing finger
of a fisherman, I fought typhoid and was rescued by snake-poison; now,
trapped in the dynastic webs of recurrence by my recognition of his sonship,
our Aadam Sinai was also obliged to spend his early months battling the
invisible snakes of a disease. The serpents of tuberculosis wound themselves
around his neck and made him gasp for air ... but he was a child of ears and
silence, and when he spluttered, there were no sounds; when he wheezed, no
raspings issued from his throat. In short, my son fell ill, and although his
mother, Parvati or Laylah, went in search of the herbs of her magical gift -
although infusions of herbs in well-boiled water were constantly
administered, the wraith-like worms of tuberculosis refused to be driven
away. I suspected, from the first, something darkly metaphorical in this
illness - believing that, in those midnight months when the age of my
connection-to-history overlapped with his, our private emergency was not
unconnected with the larger, macrocosmic disease, under whose influence the
sun had become as pallid and diseased as our son. Parvati-then (like
Padma-now) dismissed these abstract ruminations, attacking as mere folly my
growing obsession with light, in whose grip I began lighting little
dia-lamps in the shack of my son's illness, filling our hut with
candle-flames at noon ... but I insist on the accuracy of my diagnosis; 'I
tell you,' I insisted then, 'while the Emergency lasts, he will never become
well.'
Driven to distraction by her failure to cure that grave child who never
cried, my Parvati-Laylah refused to believe my pessimistic theories; but she
became vulnerable to every other cockeyed notion. When one of the older
women in the colony of the magicians told her - as Resham Bibi might have -
that the illness could not come out while the child remained dumb, Parvati
seemed to find that plausible. 'Sickness is a grief of the body,' she
lectured me, 'It must be shaken off in tears and groans.' That night, she
returned to the hut clutching a little bundle of green powder, wrapped in
newspaper and tied up with pale pink string, and told me that this was a
preparation of such power that it would oblige even a stone to shriek. When
she administered the medicine the child's cheeks began to bulge, as though
his mouth were full of food; the long-suppressed sounds of his babyhood
flooded up behind his lips, and he jammed his mouth shut in fury. It became
clear that the infant was close to choking as he tried to swallow back the
torrential vomit of pent-up sound which the green powder had stirred up; and
this was when we realized that we were in the presence of one of the earth's
most implacable wills. At the end of an hour during which my son turned
first saffron, then saffron-and-green, and finally the colour of grass, I
could not stand it any more and bellowed, 'Woman, if the little fellow wants
so much to stay quiet, we mustn't kill him for it!' I picked up Aadam to
rock him, and felt his little body becoming rigid, his knee-joints elbows
neck were filling up with the held-back tumult of unexpressed sounds, and at
last Parvati relented and prepared an antidote by mashing arrowroot and
camomile in a tin bowl while muttering strange imprecations under her
breath. After that, nobody ever tried to make Aadam Sinai do anything he did
not wish to do; we watched him battling against tuberculosis and tried to
find reassurance in the idea that a will so steely would surely refuse to be
defeated by any mere disease.
In those last days my wife Laylah or Parvati was also being gnawed by
the interior moths of despair, because when she came towards me for comfort
or warmth in the isolation of our sleeping hours, I still saw superimposed
upon her features the horribly eroded physiognomy of Jamila Singer; and
although I confessed to Parvati the secret of the spectre, consoling her by
pointing out that at its present rate of decay it would have crumbled away
entirely before long, she told me dolorously that spittoons and war had
softened my brain, and despaired of her marriage which would, as it
transpired, never be consummated; slowly, slowly there appeared on her lips
the ominous pout of her grief... but what could I do? What solace could I
offer - I, Saleem Snotnose, who had been reduced to poverty by the
withdrawal of my family's protection, who had chosen (if it was a choice) to
live by my olfactory gifts, earning a few paisa a day by sniffing out what
people had eaten for dinner the previous day and which of them were in love;
what consolation could I bring her, when I was already in the clutches of
the cold hand of that lingering midnight, and could sniff finality in the
air?
Saleem's nose (you can't have forgotten) could smell stranger things
than horse-dung. The perfumes of emotions and ideas, the odour of
how-things-were: all these were and are nosed out by me with ease. When the
Constitution was altered to give the Prime Minister well-nigh-absolute
powers, I smelted the ghosts of ancient empires in the air ... in that city
which was littered with the phantoms of Slave Kings and Mughals, of
Aurangzeb the merciless and the last, pink conquerors, I inhaled once again
the sharp aroma of despotism. It smelled like burning oily rags.
But even the nasally incompetent could have worked out that, during the
winter of 1975-6, something smelled rotten in the capital; what alarmed me
was a stranger, more personal stink: the whiff of personal danger, in which
I discerned the presence of a pair of treacherous, retributive knees ... my
first intimation that an ancient conflict, which began when a love-crazed
virgin switched name-tags, was shortly to end in a frenzy of treason and
snippings.
Perhaps, with such a warning pricking at my nostrils, I should have
fled - tipped off by a nose, I could have taken to my heels. But there were
practical objections: where would I have gone? And, burdened by wife and
son, how fast could I have moved? Nor must it be forgotten that I did flee
once, and look where I ended up: in the Sundarbans, the jungle of phantasms
and retribution, from which I only escaped by the skin of my teeth! ... At
any rate, I did not run.
It probably didn't matter; Shiva - implacable, traitorous, my enemy
from our birth - would have found me in the end. Because although a nose is
uniquely equipped for the purpose of sniffing-things-out, when it comes to
action there's no denying the advantages of a pair of grasping, choking
knees.
I shall permit myself one last, paradoxical observation on this
subject: if, as I believe, it was at the house of the wailing women that I
learned the answer to the question of purpose which had plagued me all my
life, then by saving myself from that palace of annihilations
I would also have denied myself this most precious of discoveries. To
put it rather more philosophically: every cloud has a silver lining.
Saleem-and-Shiva, nose-and-knees ... we shared just three things: the
moment (and its consequences) of our birth; the guilt of treachery; and our
son, Aadam, our synthesis, unsmiling, grave, with omni-audient ears. Aadam
Sinai was in many respects the exact opposite of Saleem. I, at my beginning,
grew with vertiginous speed; Aadam, wrestling with the serpents of disease,
scarcely grew at all. Saleem wore an ingratiating smile from the start;
Aadam had more dignity, and kept his grins to himself. Whereas Saleem had
subjugated his will to the joint tyrannies of family and fate, Aadam fought
ferociously, refusing to yield even to the coercion of green powder. And
while Saleem had been so determined to absorb the universe that he had been,
for a time, unable to blink, Aadam preferred to keep his eyes firmly closed
... although when, every so often, he deigned to open them, I observed their
colour, which was blue. Ice-blue, the blue of recurrence, the fateful blue
of Kashmiri sky ... but there is no need to elaborate further.
We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our
future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his
time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is
stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are
immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not
(as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams. How much was heard by those
flapping ears which seemed, on occasion, to be burning with the heat of
their knowledge? If he could have talked, would he have cautioned me against
treason and bulldozers? In a country dominated by the twin multitudes of
noises and smells, we could have been the perfect team; but my baby son
rejected speech, and I failed to obey the dictates of my nose.
'Arre baap,' Padma cries, 'Just tell what happened, mister! What is so
surprising if a baby does not make conversations?'
And again the rifts inside me: I can't. - You must. - Yes.
April 1976 found me still living in the colony or ghetto of the
magicians; my son Aadam was still in the grip of a slow tuberculosis that
seemed unresponsive to any form of treatment. I was full of forebodings (and
thoughts of flight); but if any one man was the reason for my remaining in
the ghetto, that man was Picture Singh.
Padma; Saleem threw in his lot with the magicians of Delhi partly out
of a sense of fitness - a self-flagellant belief in the rectitude of his
belated descent into poverty (I took with me, from my uncle's house, no more
than two shirts, white, two pairs trousers, also white, onetee-shirt,
decorated with pink guitars, and shoes, one pair, black); ' partly, I came
out of loyalty, having been bound by knots of gratitude to my rescuer,
Parvati-the-witch; but I stayed - when, as a literate young man, I might at
the very least have been a bank clerk or a night-school teacher of reading
and writing - because, all my life, consciously or unconsciously, I have
sought out fathers. Ahmed Sinai, Hanif Aziz, Sharpsticker sahib, General
Zulfikar have all been pressed into service in the absence of William
Methwold; Picture Singh was the last of this noble line. And perhaps, in my
dual lust for fathers and saving-the-country, I exaggerated Picture Singh;
the horrifying possibility exists that I distorted him (and have distorted
him again in these pages) into a dream-figment of my own imagination ... it
is certainly true that whenever I inquired, 'When are you going to lead us,
Pictureji - when will the great day come?', he, shuffling awkwardly,
replied, 'Get such things out from your head, captain; I am a poor man from
Rajasthan, and also the Most Charming Man In The World; don't make me
anything else.' But I, urging him on, 'There is a precedent - there was Mian
Abdullah, the Hummingbird ...' to which Picture, 'Captain, you got some
crazy notions.'
During the early months of the Emergency, Picture Singh remained in the
clutches of a gloomy silence reminiscent (once again!) of the great
Boundlessness of Reverend Mother (which had also leaked into my son ...),
and neglected to lecture his audiences in the highways and back-streets of
the Old and New cities as, in the past, he had insisted on doing; but
although he, 'This is a time for silence, captain', I remained convinced
that one day, one millennial dawn at midnight's end, somehow, at the head of
a great jooloos or procession of the dispossessed, perhaps playing his flute
and wreathed in deadly snakes, it would be Picture Singh who led us towards
the light ... but maybe he was never more than a snake-charmer; I do not
deny the possibility. I say only that to me my last father, tall gaunt
bearded, his hair swept back into a knot behind his neck, seemed the very
avatar of Mian Abdullah; but perhaps it was all an illusion, born of my
attempt to bind him to the threads of my history by an effort of sheer will.
There have been illusions in my life; don't think I'm unaware of the fact.
We are coming, however, to a time beyond illusions; having no option, I must
at last set down, in black and white, the climax I have avoided all evening.
Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax
should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, and must
jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I
had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
(Once, in a blue room, Ahmed Sinai improvised endings for fairy-tales whose
original conclusions he had long ago forgotten; the Brass Monkey and I
heard, down the years, all kinds of different versions of the journey of
Sinbad, and of the adventures of Hatim Tai ... if I began again, would I,
too, end in a different place?) Well then: I must content myself with shreds
and scraps: as I wrote centuries ago, the trick is to fill in the gaps,
guided by the few clues one is given. Most of what matters in our lives
takes place in our absence; I must be guided by the memory of a
once-glimpsed file with tell-tale initials; and by the other, remaining
shards of the past, lingering in my ransacked memory-vaults like broken
bottles on a beach ... Like scraps of memory, sheets of newsprint used to
bowl through the magicians' colony in the silent midnight wind.
Wind-blown newspapers visited my shack to inform me that my uncle,
Mustapha Aziz, had been the victim of unknown assassins; I neglected to shed
a tear. But there were other pieces of information; and from these, I must
build reality.
On one sheet of paper (smelling of turnips) I read that the Prime
Minister of India went nowhere without her personal astrologer. In this
fragment, I discerned more than turnip-whiffs; mysteriously, my nose
recognized, once again, the scent of personal danger. What I am obliged to
deduce from this warning aroma: soothsayers prophesied me; might not
soothsayers have undone me at the end? Might not a Widow, obsessed with the
stars, have learned from astrologers the secret potential of any children
born at that long-ago midnight hour? And was that why a Civil Servant,
expert in genealogies, was asked to trace ... and why he looked at me
strangely in the morning? Yes, you see, the scraps begin to fit together!
Padma, does it not become clear?
Indira is India and India is Indira ...
but
might she not have read her own father's letter to a midnight child, in
which her own, sloganized centrality was denied; in which the role of
mirror-of-the-nation was bestowed upon me? You see? You
see? ...
And there
is more, there is even clearer proof, because here is another scrap of the
Times of India,
in which the Widow's own news agency Samachar quotes her
when she speaks of her 'determination to combat the deep and widespread
conspiracy which has been growing'. I tell you: she did not mean the Janata
Morcha! No, the Emergency had a black part as well as a white, and here is
the secret which has lain concealed for too long beneath the mask of those
stifled days: the truest, deepest motive behind the declaration of a State
of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible
discombobulation of the children of midnight. (Whose Conference had, of
course, been disbanded years before; but the mere possibility of our
re-unification was enough to trigger off the red alert.)
Astrologers - I have no doubt - sounded the alarums; in a black folder
labelled M.C.C., names were gathered from extant records; but there was more
to it than that. There were also betrayals and confessions; there were knees
and a nose - a nose, and also knees.
Scraps, shreds, fragments: it seems to me that, immediately before 1
awoke with the scent of danger in my nostrils, I had dreamed that I was
sleeping. I awoke, in this most unnerving of dreams, to find a stranger in
my shack: a poetic-looking fellow with lank hair that wormed over his ears
(but who was very thin on top). Yes: during my last sleep before
what-has-to-be-described, I was visited by the shade of Nadir Khan, who was
staring perplexedly at a silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, asking
absurdly, 'Did you steal this? - Because otherwise, you must be - is it
possible? - my Mumtaz's little boy?' And when I confirmed, 'Yes, none other,
I am he -,' the dream-spectre of Nadir-Qasim issued a warning: 'Hide. There
is little time. Hide while you can.'
Nadir, who had hidden under my grandfather's carpet, came to advise me
to do likewise; but too late, too late, because now I came properly awake,
and smelled the scent of danger blaring like trumpets in my nose ... afraid
without knowing why, I got to my feet; and is it my imagination or did Aadam
Sinai open blue eyes to stare gravely into mine? Were my son's eyes also
filled with alarm? Had flap-ears heard what a nose had sniffed out? Did
father and son commune wordlessly in that instant before it all began? I
must leave the question-marks hanging, unanswered; but what is certain is
that Parvati, my Laylah Sinai, awoke also and asked, 'What's up, mister?
What's got your goat?' - And I, without fully knowing the reason: 'Hide;
stay in here and don't come out.'
Then I went outside.
It must have been morning, although the gloom of the endless midnight
hung over the ghetto like a fog ... through the murky light of the
Emergency, I saw children playing seven-tiles, and Picture Singh, with his
umbrella folded under his left armpit, urinating against the walls of the
Friday Mosque; a tiny bald illusionist was practising driving knives through
the neck of his ten-year-old apprentice, and already a conjurer had found an
audience, and was persuading large woollen balls to drop from the armpits of
strangers; while in another corner of the ghetto, Chand Sahib the musician
was practising his trumpet-playing, placing the ancient mouthpiece of a
battered horn against his neck and playing it simply by exercising his
throat-muscles ... there, over there, were the three contortionist triplets,
balancing surahis of water on their heads as they returned to their huts
from the colony's single stand-pipe ... in short, everything seemed in
order. I began to chide myself for my dreams and nasal alarums; but then it
started.
The vans and bulldozers came first, rumbling along the main road; they
stopped opposite the ghetto of the magicians. A loudspeaker began to blare:
'Civic beautification programme ... authorized operation of Sanjay Youth
Central Committee ... prepare instantly for evacuation to new site ... this
slum is a public eyesore, can no longer be tolerated ... all persons will
follow orders without dissent.' And while a loudspeaker blared, there were
figures descending from vans: a brightly-coloured tent was being hastily
erected, and there were camp beds and surgical equipment... and now from the
vans there poured a stream of finely-dressed young ladies of high birth and
foreign education, and then a second river of equally-well-dressed young
men: volunteers, Sanjay Youth volunteers, doing their bit for society... but
then I realized no, not volunteers, because all the men had the same curly
hair and lips-like-women's-labia, and the elegant ladies were all identical,
too, their features corresponding precisely to those of Sanjay's Menaka,
whom news-scraps had described as a 'lanky beauty', and who had once
modelled nighties for a mattress company ... standing in the chaos of the
slum clearance programme, I was shown once again that the ruling dynasty of
India had learned how to replicate itself; but then there was no time to
think, the numberless labia-lips and lanky-beauties were seizing magicians
and old beggars, people were being dragged towards the vans, and now a
rumour spread through the colony of magicians: 'They are doing nasbandi -
sterilization is being performed!' - And a second cry: 'Save your women and
children!' - And a riot is beginning, children who were just now playing
seven-tiles are hurling stones at the elegant invaders, and here is Picture
Singh rallying the magicians to his side, waving a furious umbrella, which
had once been a creator of harmony but was now transmuted into a weapon, a
flapping quixotic lance, and the magicians have become a defending army,
Molotov cocktails are magically produced and hurled, bricks are drawn out of
conjurers' bags, the air is thick with yells and missiles and the elegant
labia-lips and lanky-beauties are retreating before the harsh fury of the
illusionists; and there goes Picture Singh, leading the assault against the
tent of vasectomy ... Parvati or Laylah, disobeying orders, is at my side
now, saying, 'My God, what are they - ', and at this moment a new and more
formidable assault is unleashed upon the slum: troops are sent in against
magicians, women and children.
Once, conjurers card-tricksters puppeteers and mesmerists marched
triumphantly beside a conquering army; but all that is forgotten now, and
Russian guns are trained on the inhabitants of the ghetto. What chance do
Communist wizards have against socialist rifles? They, we, are running now,
every which way, Parvati and I are separated as the soldiers charge, I lose
sight of Picture Singh, there are rifle-butts beating pounding, I see one of
the contortionist triplets fall beneath the fury of the guns, people are
being pulled by the hair towards the waiting yawning vans; and I, too, am
running, too late, looking over my shoulder, stumbling on Dalda-cans empty
crates and the abandoned sacks of the terrified illusionists, and over my
shoulder through the murky night of the Emergency I see that all of this has
been a smoke-screen, a side-issue, because hurtling through the confusion of
the riot comes a mythical figure, an incarnation of destiny and destruction:
Major Shiva has joined the fray, and he is looking only for me. Behind me,
as I run, come the pumping knees of my doom ...
... The picture of a hovel comes into my mind: my son! And not only my
son: a silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli! Somewhere in the confusion
of the ghetto a child has been left alone ... somewhere a talisman, guarded
for so long, has been abandoned. The Friday Mosque watches impassively as I
swerve duck run between the tilting shacks, my feet leading me towards
flap-eared son and spittoon ... but what chance did I have against those
knees? The knees of the war hero are coming closer closer as I flee, the
joints of my nemesis thundering towards me, and he leaps, the legs of the
war hero fly through the air, closing like jaws around my neck, knees
squeezing the breath out of my throat, I am falling twisting but the knees
hold tight, and now a voice - the voice of treachery betrayal hate! -is
saying, as knees rest on my chest and pin me down in the thick dust of the
slum: 'So, little rich boy: we meet again. Salaam.' I spluttered; Shiva
smiled.
O shiny buttons on a traitor's uniform! Winking blinking like silver
... why did he do it? Why did he, who had once led anarchistic apaches
through the slums of Bombay, become the warlord of tyranny? Why did
midnight's child betray the children of midnight, and take me to my fate?
For love of violence, and the legitimizing glitter of buttons on uniforms?
For the sake of his ancient antipathy towards me? Or - I find this most
plausible - in exchange for immunity from the penalties imposed on the rest
of us... yes, that must be it; O birthright-denying war hero! O
mess-of-pottage-corrupted rival... But no, I must stop all this, and tell
the story as simply as possible: while troops chased arrested dragged
magicians from their ghetto, Major Shiva concentrated on me. I, too, was
pulled roughly towards a van; while bulldozers moved forwards into the slum,
a door was slammed shut... in the darkness I screamed, 'But my son! - And
Parvati, where is she, my Laylah? - Picture Singh! Save me, Pictureji!' -
But there were bulldozers now, and nobody heard me yelling.
Parvati-the-witch, by marrying me, fell victim to the curse of violent
death that hangs over all my people... I do not know whether Shiva, having
locked me in a blind dark van, went in search of her, or whether he left her
to the bulldozers ... because now the machines of destruction were in their
element, and the little hovels of the shanty-town were slipping sliding
crazily beneath the force of the irresistible creatures, huts snapping like
twigs, the little paper parcels of the puppeteers and the magic baskets of
the illusionists were being crushed into a pulp; the city was being
beautified, and if there were a few deaths, if a girl with eyes like saucers
and a pout of grief upon her lips fell beneath the advancing juggernauts,
well, what of it, an eyesore was being removed from the face of the ancient
capital... and rumour has it that, during the death-throes of the ghetto of
the magicians, a bearded giant wreathed in snakes (but this may be an
exaggeration) ran - FULL-TILT! - through the wreckage, ran wildly before the
advancing bulldozers, clutching in his hand the handle of an
irreparably-shattered umbrella, searching searching, as though his life
depended on the search.
By the end of that day, the slum which clustered in the shadow of the
Friday Mosque had vanished from the face of the earth; but not all the
magicians were captured; not all of them were carted off to the barbed-wire
camp called Khichripur, hotch-potch-town, on the far side of the Jamuna
River; they never caught Picture Singh, and it is said that the day after
the bulldozing of the magicians' ghetto, a new slum was reported in the
heart of the city, hard by the New Delhi railway station. Bulldozers were
rushed to the scene of the reported hovels; they found nothing. After that
the existence of the moving slum of the escaped illusionists became a fact
known to all the inhabitants of the city, but the wreckers never found it.
It was reported at Mehrauli; but when vasectomists and troops went there,
they found the Qutb Minar unbesmirched by the hovels of poverty.. Informers
said it had appeared in the gardens of the Jantar Mantar, Jai Singh's Mughal
observatory; but the machines of destruction, rushing to the scene, found
only parrots and sun-dials. Only after the end of the Emergency did the
moving slum come to a standstill; but that must wait for later, because it
is time to talk, at long last, and without losing control, about my
captivity in the Widows' Hostel in Benares.
Once Resham Bibi had wailed, 'Ai-o-ai-o!' - and she was right: I
brought destruction down upon the ghetto of my saviours; Major Shiva, acting
no doubt upon the explicit instructions of the Widow, came to the colony to
seize me; while the Widow's son arranged for his civic-beautification and
vasectomy programmes to carry out a diversionary manoeuvre. Yes, of course
it was all planned that way; and (if I may say so) most efficiently. What
was achieved during the riot of the magicians: no less a feat than the
unnoticed capture of the one person on earth who held the key to the
location of every single one of the children of midnight - for had I not,
night after night, tuned in to each and every one of them? Did I not carry,
for all time, their names addresses faces in my mind? I will answer that
question: I did. And I was captured.
Yes, of course it was all planned that way. Parvati-the-witch had told
me all about my rival; is it likely that she would not have mentioned me to
him? I will answer that question, too: it is not likely at all. So our war
hero knew where, in the capital, lurked the one person his masters wanted
most (not even my uncle Mustapha knew where I went after I left him; but
Shiva knew!) - and, once he had turned traitor, bribed, I have no doubt, by
everything from promises of preferment to guarantees of personal safety, it
was easy for him to deliver me into the hands of his mistress, the Madam,
the Widow with the particoloured hair.
Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you
will gain an understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of
this statement is also true.)
I lost something else that day, besides my freedom: bulldozers
swallowed a silver spittoon. Deprived of the last object connecting me to my
more tangible, historically-verifiable past, I was taken to Benares to face
the consequences of my inner, midnight-given life.
Yes, that was where it happened, in the palace of the widows on the
shores of the Ganges in the oldest living city in the world, the city which
was already old when the Buddha was young, Kasi Benares Varanasi, City of
Divine Light, home of the Prophetic Book, the horoscope of horoscopes, in
which every life, past present future, is already recorded. The goddess
Ganga streamed down to earth through Shiva's hair... Benares, the shrine to
Shiva-the-god, was where I was brought by hero-Shiva to face my fate. In the
home of horoscopes, I reached the moment prophesied in a rooftop room by
Ramram Seth: 'soldiers will try him ... tyrants will fry him!' the
fortune-teller had chanted; well, there was no formal trial - Shiva-knees
wrapped around my neck, and that was that - but I did smell, one winter's
day, the odours of something frying in an iron skillet ...
Follow the river, past Scindia-ghat on which young gymnasts in white
loincloths perform one-armed push-ups, past Manikarnika-ghat, the place of
funerals, at which holy fire can be purchased from the keepers of the flame,
past floating carcasses of dogs and cows - unfortunates for whom no fire was
bought, past Brahmins under straw umbrellas at Dasashwamedh-ghat, dressed in
saffron, dispensing blessings ... and now it becomes audible, a strange
sound, like the baying of distant hounds... follow follow follow the sound,
and it takes shape, you understand that it is a mighty, ceaseless wailing,
emanating from the blinded windows of a riverside palace: the Widows'
Hostel! Once upon a time, it was a maharajah's residence; but India today is
a modern country, and such places have been expropriated by the State. The
palace is a home for bereaved women now; they, understanding that their true
lives ended with the death of their husbands, but no longer permitted to
seek the release of sati, come to the holy city to pass their worthless days
in heartfelt ululations. In the palace of the widows lives a tribe of women
whose chests are irremediably bruised by the power of their continual
pummellings, whose hair it torn beyond repair, and whose voices are shredded
by the constant, keening expressions of their grief. It is a vast building,
a labyrinth of tiny rooms on the upper storeys giving way to the great halls
of lamentation below; and yes, that was where it happened, the Widow sucked
me into the private heart of her terrible empire, I was locked away in a
tiny upper room and the bereaved women brought me prison food. But I also
had other visitors: the war hero invited two of his colleagues along, for
purposes of conversation. In other words: I was encouraged to talk. By an
ill-matched duo, one fat, one thin, whom I named Abbott-and-Costello because
they never succeeded in making me laugh.
Here I record a merciful blank in my memory. Nothing can induce me to
remember the conversational techniques of that humourless, uniformed pair;
there is no chutney or pickle capable of unlocking the doors behind which I
have locked those days! No, I have forgotten, I cannot will not say how they
made me spill the beans - but I cannot escape the shameful heart of the
matter, which is that despite absence-of-jokes and the generally
unsympathetic manner of my two-headed inquisitor, I did most certainly talk.
And more than talk: under the influence of their unnamable - forgotten -
pressures, I became loquacious in the extreme. What poured, blubbering, from
my lips (and will not do so now): names addresses physical descriptions.
Yes, I told them everything, I named all five hundred and seventy-eight
(because Parvati, they informed me courteously, was dead, and Shiva gone
over to the enemy, and the five-hundred-and-eighty-first was doing the
talking...) - forced into treachery by the treason of another, I betrayed
the children of midnight. I, the Founder of the Conference, presided over
its end, while Abbott-and-Costello, unsmilingly, interjected from time to
time: 'Aha! Very good! Didn't know about her!' or, 'You are being most
co-operative; this fellow is a new one on us!'
Such things happen. Statistics may set my arrest in context; although
there is considerable disagreement about the number of 'political' prisoners
taken during the Emergency, either thirty thousand or a quarter of a million
persons certainly lost their freedom. The Widow said: 'It is only a small
percentage of the population of India.' All sorts of things happen during an
Emergency: trains run on time, black-money hoarders are frightened into
paying taxes, even the weather is brought to heel, and bumper harvests are
reaped; there is, I repeat, a white part as well as a black. But in the
black part, I sat bar-fettered in a tiny room, on a straw palliasse which
was the only article of furniture I was permitted, sharing my daily bowl of
rice with cockroaches and ants. And as for the children of midnight - that
fearsome conspiracy which had to be broken at all costs - that gang of
cut-throat desperadoes before whom an astrology-ridden Prime Minister
trembled in terror - the grotesque aberrational monsters of independence,
for whom a modern nation-state could have neither time nor compassion -
twenty-nine years old now, give or take a month or two, they were brought to
the Widows' Hostel, between April and December they were rounded up, and
their whispers began to fill the walls. The walls of my cell (paper-thin,
peeling-plastered, bare) began to whisper, into one bad ear and one good
ear, the consequences of my shameful confessions. A cucumber-nosed prisoner,
festooned with iron rods and rings which made various natural functions
impossible -walking, using the tin chamber-pot, squatting, sleeping - lay
huddled against peeling plaster and whispered to a wail.
It was the end; Saleem gave way to his grief. All my life, and through
the greater part of these reminiscences, I have tried to keep my sorrows
under lock and key, to prevent them from staining my sentences with their
salty, maudlin fluidities; but no more. I was given no reason (until the
Widow's Hand ...) for my incarceration: but who, of all the thirty thousand
or quarter of a million, was told why or wherefore? Who needed to be told?
In the walls, I heard the muted voices of the midnight children: needing no
further footnotes, I blubbered over peeling plaster.
What Saleem whispered to the wall between April and December 1976:
... Dear Children. How can I say this? What is there to say? My guilt
my shame. Although excuses are possible: I wasn't to blame about Shiva. And
all manner of folk are being locked up, so why not us? And guilt is a
complex matter, for are we not all, each of us in some sense responsible for
- do we not get the leaders we deserve? But no such excuses are offered. I
did it, I. Dear children: and my Parvati is dead. And my Jamila, vanished.
And everyone. Vanishing seems to be yet another of those characteristics
which recur throughout my history: Nadir Khan vanished from an underworld,
leaving a note behind; Aadam Aziz vanished, too, before my grandmother got
up to feed the geese; and where is Mary Pereira? I, in a basket,
disappeared; but Laylah or Parvati went phutt without the assistance of
spells. And now here we are, disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth. The
curse of vanishment, dear children, has evidently leaked into you. No, as to
the question of guilt, I refuse absolutely to take the larger view; we are
too close to what-is-happening, perspective is impossible, later perhaps
analysts will say why and wherefore, will adduce underlying economic trends
and political developments, but right now we're too close to the
cinema-screen, the picture is breaking up into dots, only subjective
judgments are possible. Subjectively, then, I hang my head in shame. Dear
children: forgive. No, I do not expect you to forgive.
Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We
should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming
to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are
preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can't be
helped. What can't be cured must be endured.
Good question, children: what must be endured? Why are we being amassed
here like this, one by one, why are rods and rings hanging from our necks?
And stranger confinements (if a whispering wall is to be believed):
who-has-the-gift-of-levitation has been tied by the ankles to rings set in
the floor, and a werewolf is obliged to wear a muzzle;
who-can-escape-through-mirrors must drink water through a hole in a lidded
can, so that he cannot vanish through the reflective surface of the drink;
and she-whose-looks-can-kill has her head in a sack, and the bewitching
beauties of Baud are likewise bag-headed. One of us can eat metal; his head
is jammed in a brace, unlocked only at mealtimes ... what is being prepared
for us? Something bad, children. I don't know what as yet, but it's coming.
Children: we, too, must prepare.
Pass it on: some of us have escaped. I sniff absences through the
walls. Good news, children! They cannot get us all. Soumitra, the
time-traveller, for instance - O youthful folly! O stupid we, to disbelieve
him so! - is not here; wandering, perhaps, in some happier time of his life,
he has eluded search-parties for ever. No, do not envy him; although I, too,
long on occasion to escape backwards, perhaps to the time when I, the apple
of the universal eye, made a triumphant tour as a baby of the palaces of
William Mcthwold - O insidious nostalgia for times of greater possibility,
before history, like a street behind the General Post Office in Delhi,
narrowed down to this final full point! - but we are here now; such
retrospection saps the spirit; rejoice, simply, that some of us are free!
And some of us are dead. They told me about my Parvati. Across whose
features, to the last, there fell the crumbling ghost-face of. No, we are no
longer five hundred and eighty-one. Shivering in the December cold, how many
of us sit walled-in and waiting? I ask my nose; it replies, four hundred and
twenty, the number of trickery and fraud. Four hundred and twenty,
imprisoned by widows; and there is one more, who struts booted around the
Hostel - I smell his stink approaching receding, the spoor of treachery! -
Major Shiva, war hero, Shiva-of-the-knees, supervises our captivity. Will
they be content with four hundred and twenty? Children: I don't know how
long they'll wait.
... No, you're making fun of me, stop, do not joke. Why whence
how-on-earth this good nature, this bonhomie in your passed-on whisperings?
No, you must condemn me, out of hand and without appeal - do not torture me
with your cheery greetings as one-by-one you are locked in cells; what kind
of time or place is this for salaams, namaskars, how-you-beens? - Children,
don't you understand, they could do anything to us, anything - no, how can
you say that, what do you mean with your what-could-they-do? Let me tell
you, my friends, steel rods are painful when applied to the ankles;
rifle-butts leave bruises on foreheads. What could they do? Live electric
wires up your anuses, children; and that's not the only possibility, there
is also hanging-by-the feet, and a candle - ah, the sweet romantic glow of
candlelight! - is less than comfortable when applied, lit, to the skin! Stop
it now, cease all this friendship, aren't you afraid! Don't you want to kick
stamp trample me to smithereens? Why these constant whispered reminiscences,
this nostalgia for old quarrels, for the war of ideas and things, why are
you taunting me with your calmness, your normality, your powers of
rising-above-the-crisis? Frankly, I'm puzzled, children: how can you, aged
twenty-nine, sit whispering flirtatiously to each other in your cells?
Goddamnit, this is not a social reunion!
Children, children, I'm sorry. I admit openly I have not been myself of
late. I have been a buddha, and a basketed ghost, and a would-be-saviour of
the nation ... Saieem has been rushing down blind alleys, has had
considerable problems with reality, ever since a spittoon fell like a
piece-of-the- ... pity me: I've even lost my spittoon. But I'mgoing wrong
again, I wasn't intending to ask for pity, I was going to say that perhaps I
see - it was I, not you, who failed to understand what is happening.
Incredible, children: we, who could not talk for five minutes without
disagreeing: we, who as children quarrelled fought divided distrusted broke
apart, are suddenly together, united, as one! O wondrous irony: the Widow,
by bringing us here, to break us, has in fact brought us together! O
self-fulfilling paranoia of tyrants ... because what can they do to us, now
that we're all on the same side, no language-rivalries, no religious
prejudices: after all, we are twenty-nine now, I should not be calling you
children ... ! Yes, here is optimism, like a disease: one day she'll have to
let us out and then, and then, wait and see, maybe we should form, I don't
know, a new political party, yes, the Midnight Party, what chance do
politics have against people who can multiply fishes and turn base metals
into gold? Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our
captivity; let Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility!
Children:
we've won!
Too painful. Optimism, growing like a rose in a dung-heap: it hurts me
to recall it. Enough: I forget the rest. - No! - No, very well, I remember
... What is worse than rods bar-fetters candles-against-the-skin? What beats
nail-tearing and starvation? I reveal the Widow's finest, most delicate
joke: instead of torturing us, she gave us hope. Which meant she had
something - no, more than something: the finest thing of all! -to take away.
And now, very soon now, I shall have to describe how she cut it off.
Ectomy (from, I suppose, the Greek): a cutting out. To which medical
science adds a number of prefixes: appendectomy tonsillectomy mastectomy
tubectomy vasectomy testectomy hysterectomy. Saieem would like to donate one
further item, free gratis and for nothing, to this catalogue of excisions;
it is, however, a term which properly belongs to history, although medical
science is, was involved:
Sperectomy: the draining-out of hope.
On New Year's Day, I had a visitor. Creak of door, rustle of expensive
chiffon. The pattern: green and black. Her glasses, green, her shoes were
black as black ... In newspaper articles this woman has been called 'a
gorgeous girl with big, rolling hips... she had run a jewellery boutique
before she took up social work... during the Emergency she was,
semi-ofncially, in charge of sterilization'. But I have my own name for her:
she was the Widow's Hand. Which one by one and children mmff and tearing
tearing little balls go ... greenly-blackly, she sailed into my cell.
Children: it begins. Prepare, children. United we stand. Let Widow's Hand do
Widow's work but after, after ... think of then. Now does not bear thinking
about... and she, sweetly, reasonably, 'Basically, you see, it is all a
question of God.'
(Are you listening, children? Pass it on.)
'The people of India,' the Widow's Hand explained, 'worship our Lady
like a god. Indians are only capable of worshipping one God.'
But I was brought up in Bombay, where Shiva Vishnu Ganesh Ahuramazda
Allah and countless others had their flocks ... 'What about the pantheon,' I
argued, 'the three hundred and thirty million gods of Hinduism alone? And
Islam, and Bodhisattvas
...?'
And now the answer: 'Oh yes! My God,
millions
of gods, you are right! But all manifestations of the same OM. You are
Muslim: you know what is OM ? Very well. For the masses, our Lady is a
manifestation of the OM.'
There are four hundred and twenty of us; a mere 0.00007 per cent of the
six-hundred-million strong population of India. Statistically insignificant;
even if we were considered as a percentage of the arrested thirty (or two
hundred and fifty) thousand, we formed a mere 1.4 (or 0.168) per cent! But
what I learned from the Widow's Hand is that those who would be gods fear no
one so much as other potential deities; and that, that and that only, is why
we, the magical children of midnight, were hated feared destroyed by the
Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of India but also aspired to be Devi,
the Mother-goddess in her most terrible-aspect, possessor of the shakti of
the gods, a multi-limbed divinity with a centre-parting and schizophrenic
hair... And that was how I learned my meaning in the crumbling palace of the
bruised-breasted women.
Who am I? Who were we? We were are shall be the gods you never had. But
also something else; and to explain that, I must tell the difficult part at
last.
All in a rush, then, because otherwise it will never come out, I tell
you that on New Year's Day, 1977, I was told by a gorgeous girl with rolling
hips that yes, they would be satisfied with four hundred and twenty, they
had verified one hundred and thirty-nine dead, only a handful had escaped,
so now it would begin, snip snip, there would be anaesthetic and
count-to-ten, the numbers marching one two three, and I, whispering to the
wall, Let them let them, while we live and stay together who can stand
against us? ... And who led us, one-by-one, to the chamber in the cellar
where, because we are not savages, sir, air-conditioning units had been
installed, and a table with a hanging lamp, and doctors nurses green and
black, their robes were green their eyes were black... who, with knobbly
irresistible knees, escorted me to the chamber of my undoing? But you know,
you can guess, there is only one war hero in this story, unable to argue
with the venom of his knees I walked wherever he ordered... and then I was
there, and a gorgeous girl with big rolling hips saying, 'After all, you
can't complain, you won't deny that you once made assertions of
Prophethood?', because they knew everything, Padma, everything everything,
they put me down on the table and the mask coming down over my face and
count-to-ten and numbers pounding seven eight nine...
Ten.
And 'Good God he's still conscious, be a good fellow, go on to twenty
...'
... Eighteen nineteen twen
They were good doctors: they left nothing to chance. Not for us the
simple vas- and tubectomies performed on the teeming nasses; because there
was a chance, just a chance that such operations could be reversed ...
ectomies were performed, but irreversibly: testicles were removed from sacs,
and wombs vanished for ever.
Test- and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the
possibility of reproducing themselves ... but that was only a side-effect,
because they were truly extraordinary doctors, and they drained us of more
than that: hope, too, was excised, and I don't know how it was done, because
the numbers had marched over me, I was out for the count, and all I can tell
you is that at the end of eighteen days on which the stupefying operations
were carried out at a mean rate of 23.33 per day, we were not only missing
little balls and inner sacs, but other things as well: in this respect, I
came off better than most, because drainage-above had robbed me of my
midnight-given telepathy, I had nothing to lose, the sensitivity of a nose
cannot be drained away... but as for the rest of them, for all those who had
come to the palace of the wailing widows with their magical gifts intact,
the awakening from anaesthesia was cruel indeed, and whispering through the
wall came the tale of their undoing, the tormented cry of children who had
lost their magic: she had cut it out of us, gorgeously with wide rolling
hips she had devised the operation of our annihilation, and now we were
nothing, who were we, a mere 0.00007 per cent, now fishes could not be
multiplied nor base metals transmuted; gone forever, the possibilities of
flight and lycanthropy and the originally-one-thousand-and-one marvellous
promises of a numinous midnight.
Drainage below: it was not a reversible operation.
Who were we? Broken promises; made to be broken.
And now I must tell you about the smell.
Yes, you must have all of it: however overblown, however
Bombay-talkie-melodramatic, you must let it sink in, you must
see!
What
Saleem smelled in the evening of January 18th, 1977: something frying in an
iron skillet, soft unspeakable somethings spiced with turmeric coriander
cumin and fenugreek ... the pungent inescapable fumes of
what-had-been-excised, cooking over a low, slow fire.
When four-hundred-and-twenty suffered ectomies, an avenging Goddess
ensured that certain ectomized parts were curried with onions and green
chillies, and fed to the pie-dogs of Benares. (There were four hundred and
twenty-one ectomies performed: because one of us, whom we called Narada or
Markandaya, had the ability of changing sex; he, or she, had to be operated
on twice.)
No, I can't prove it, not any of it. Evidence went up in smoke: some
was fed to pie-dogs; and later, on March 20th, files were burned by a mother
with particoloured hair and her beloved son.
But Padma knows what I can no longer do; Padma, who once, in her anger,
cried out: 'But what use
you,
my God, as a
lover?'
That part, at least, can
be verified: in the hovel of Picture Singh, I cursed myself with the lie of
impotence; I cannot say I was not warned, because he told me: 'Anything
could happen, captain.' It did.
Sometimes I feel a thousand years old: or (because I cannot, even now,
abandon form), to be exact, a thousand and one.
The Widow's Hand had rolling hips and once owned a jewellery boutique.
I began among jewels: in Kashmir, in 1915, there were rubies and diamonds.
My great-grandparents ran a gemstone store. Form - once again, recurrence
and shape! - no escape from it.
In the walls, the hopeless whispers of the stunned
four-hundred-and-nineteen; while the four-hundred-and-twentieth gives vent
-just once; one moment of ranting is permissible - to the following petulant
question ... at the top of my voice, I shriek: 'What about him? Major Shiva,
the traitor? Don't you care about him?' And the reply, from
gorgeous-with-big-rolling-hips: 'The Major has undergone voluntary
vasectomy.'
And now, in his sightless cell, Saleem begins to laugh, wholeheartedly,
without stinting: no, I was not laughing cruelly at my arch-rival, nor was I
cynically translating the word 'voluntary' into another word; no, I was
remembering stories told me by Parvati or Laylah, the legendary tales of the
war hero's philandering, of the legions of bastards swelling in the
unectomied bellies of great ladies and whores; I laughed because Shiva,
destroyer of the midnight children, had also fulfilled the other role
lurking in his name, the function of Shiva-lingam, of Shiva-the-procreator,
so that at this very moment, in the boudoirs and hovels of the nation, a new
generation of children, begotten by midnight's darkest child, was being
raised towards the future. Every Widow manages to forget something
important.
Late in March 1977, I was unexpectedly released from the palace of the
howling widows, and stood blinking like an owl in the sunlight, not knowing
how what why. Afterwards, when I had remembered how to ask questions, I
discovered that on January 18th (the very day of the end of snip-snip, and
of substances fried in an iron skillet: what further proof would you like
that we, the four hundred and twenty, were what the Widow feared most of
all?) the Prime Minister had, to the astonishment of all, called a general
election. (But now that you know about us, you may find it easier to
understand her over-confidence.) But on that day, I knew nothing about her
crushing defeat, nor about burning files; it was only later that I learned
how the tattered hopes of the nation had been placed in the custody of an
ancient dotard who ate pistachios and cashews and daily took a glass of 'his
own water'. Urine-drinkers had come to power. The Janata Party, with one of
its leaders trapped in a kidney-machine, did not seem to me (when I heard
about it) to represent a new dawn; but maybe I'd managed to cure myself of
the optimism virus at last - maybe others, with the disease still in their
blood, felt otherwise. At any rate, I've had - I had had, on that March day
- enough, more than enough of politics.
Four hundred and twenty stood blinking in the sunlight and tumult of
the gullies of Benares; four hundred and twenty looked at one another and
saw in each other's eyes the memory of their gelding, and then, unable to
bear the sight, mumbled farewells and dispersed, for the last time, into the
healing privacy of the crowds.
What of Shiva? Major Shiva was placed under military detention by the
new regime; but he did not remain there long, because he was permitted to
receive one visit: Roshanara Shetty bribed coquetted wormed her way into his
cell, the same Roshanara who had poured poison into his ears at Mahalaxmi
Racecourse and who had since been driven crazy by a bastard son who refused
to speak and did nothing he did not wish to do. The steel magnate's wife
drew from her handbag the enormous German pistol owned by her husband, and
shot the war hero through the heart. Death, as they say, was instantaneous.
The Major died without knowing that once, in a saffron-and-green
nursing home amid the mythological chaos of an unforgettable midnight, a
tiny distraught woman had changed baby-tags and denied him his birth-right,
which was that hillock-top world cocooned in money and starched white
clothes and things things things - a world he would dearly have loved to
possess.
And Saleem? No longer connected to history, drained above-and-below, I
made my way back to the capital, conscious that an age, which had begun on
that long-ago midnight, had come to a sort of end. How I travelled: I waited
beyond the platform at Benares or Varanaji station with nothing but a
platform-ticket in my hand, and leaped on to the step of a first-class
compartment as the mail-train pulled out heading west. And now, at last, I
knew how it felt to clutch on for dead life, while particles of soot dust
ash gritted in your eyes, and you were obliged to bang on the door and yell,
'Ohe, maharaj! Open up! Let me in, great sir, maharaj!' While inside, a
voice uttered familiar words 'On' no account is anyone to open. Just
fare-dodgers, that's all.'
In Delhi: Saleem asks questions. Have you seen where? Do you know if
the magicians? Are you acquainted with Picture Singh? A postman with the
memory of snake-charmers fading in his eyes points north. And, later, a
black-tongued paan-wallah sends me back the way I came. Then, at last, the
trail ceases meandering; street-entertainers put me on the scent. A
Dilli-dekho man with a peepshow machine, a mongoose-and-cobra trainer
wearing a paper hat like a child's sailboat, a girl in a cinema box-office
who retains her nostalgia for her childhood as a sorcerer's apprentice...
like fishermen, they point with fingers. West west west, until at last
Saleem arrives at the Shadipur bus depot on the western outskirts of the
city. Hungry thirsty enfeebled sick, skipping weakly out of the paths of
buses roaring in and out of the depot - gaily-painted buses, bearing
inscriptions on their bonnets such as
God Willing!
and other mottoes, for
instance
Thank God!
on their backsides - he comes to a huddle of ragged
tents clustered under a concrete railway bridge, and sees, in the shadow of
concrete, a snake-charming giant breaking into an enormous rotten-toothed
smile, and, in his arms, wearing a tee-shirt decorated with pink guitars, a
small boy of some twenty-one months, whose ears are the ears of elephants,
whose eyes are wide as saucers and whose face is as serious as the grave.
Abracadabra
To tell the truth, I lied about Shiva's death. My first out-and-out lie
-although my presentation of the Emergency in the guise of a
six-hundred-and-thirty-five-day-long midnight was perhaps excessively
romantic, and certainly contradicted by the available meteorological data.
Still and all, whatever anyone may think, lying doesn't come easily to
Saleem, and I'm hanging my head in shame as I confess ... Why, then, this
single barefaced lie? (Because, in actuality, I've no idea where my
changeling-rival went after the Widows' Hostel; he could be in hell or the
brothel down the road and I wouldn't know the difference.) Padma, try and
understand: I'm still terrified of him. There is unfinished business between
us, and I spend my days quivering at the thought that the war hero might
somehow have discovered the secret of his birth - was he ever shown a file
bearing three tell-tale initials? - and that, roused to wrath by the
irrecoverable loss of his past, he might come looking for me to exact a
stifling revenge ... is that how it will end, with the life being crushed
out of me by a pair of superhuman, merciless knees?
That's why I fibbed, anyway; for the first time, I fell victim to the
temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past
exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to
encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they
occurred. My present fear put a gun into Roshanara Shetty's hand; with the
ghost of Commander Sabarmati looking over my shoulder, I enabled her to
bribe coquette worm her way into his cell... in short, the memory of one of
my earliest crimes created the (fictitious) circumstances of my last.
End of confession: and now I'm getting perilously close to the end of
my reminiscences. It's night; Padma is in position; on the wall above my
head, a lizard has just gobbled up a fly; the festering heat of August,
which is enough to pickle one's brains, bubbles merrily between my ears; and
five minutes ago the last local train yellow-and-browned its way south to
Churchgate Station, so that I did not hear what Padma said with a shyness
cloaking a determination as powerful as oil. I had to ask her to repeat
herself, and the muscles of disbelief began to nictate in her calves. I must
at once record that our dung-lotus has proposed marriage, 'so that I can
look after you without going to shame in the eyes of the world.'
Just as I feared! But it's out in the open now, and Padma (I can tell)
will not take no for an answer. I have been protesting like a blushing
virgin: 'So unexpected! - and what about ectomy, and what was fed to
pie-dogs: don't you mind? - and Padma, Padma, there is still
what-chews-on-bones, it will turn you into a widow! - and just think one
moment, there is the curse of violent death, think of Parvati - are you
sure, are you sure you're sure ... ?' But Padma, her jaw set in the concrete
of a majestically unshakeable resolve, replied: 'You listen to me, mister -
but me no buts! Never mind all that fancy talk any more. There is the future
to think of.' The honeymoon is to be in Kashmir.
In the burning heat of Padma's determination, I am assailed by the
demented notion that it might be possible, after all, that she may be
capable of altering the ending of my story by the phenomenal force of her
will, that cracks - and death itself- might yield to the power of her
unquenchable solicitude ... 'There is the future to think of,' she warned me
- and maybe (I permit myself to think for the first time since I began this
narrative) - maybe there is! An infinity of new endings clusters around my
head, buzzing like heat-insects ... 'Let us be married, mister,' she
proposed, and moths of excitement stirred in my guts, as if she had spoken
some cabbalistic formula, some awesome abracadabra, and released me from my
fate - but reality is nagging at me. Love does not conquer all, except in
the Bombay talkies; rip tear crunch will not be defeated by a mere ceremony;
and optimism is a disease.
'On your birthday, how about?' she is suggesting. 'At thirty-one, a man
is a man, and is supposed to have a wife.'
How am I to tell her? How can I say, there are other plans for that
day, I am have always been in the grip of a form-crazy destiny which enjoys
wreaking its havoc on numinous days... in short, how am I to tell her about
death? I cannot; instead, meekly and with every appearance of gratitude, I
accept her proposal. I am, this evening, a man newly affianced; let no one
think harshly of me for permitting myself - and my betrothed lotus - this
last, vain, inconsequential pleasure.
Padma, by proposing a marriage, revealed her willingness to dismiss
everything I've told her about my past as just so much 'fancy talk'; and
when I returned to find Picture Singh beaming in the shadow of a railway
bridge, it rapidly became clear that the magicians, too, were losing their
memories. Somewhere in the many moves of the peripatetic slum, they had
mislaid their powers of retention, so that now they had become incapable of
judgment, having forgotten everything to which they could compare anything
that happened. Even the Emergency was rapidly being consigned to the
oblivion of the past, and the magicians concentrated upon the present with
the monomania of snails. Nor did they notice that they had changed; they had
forgotten that they had ever been otherwise, Communism had seeped out of
them and been gulped down by the thirsty, lizard-quick earth; they were
beginning to forget their skills in the confusion of hunger, disease, thirst
and police harassment which constituted (as usual) the present. To me,
however, this change in my old companions seemed nothing short of obscene.
Saleem had come through amnesia and been shown the extent of its immorality;
in his mind, the past grew daily more vivid while the present (from which
knives had disconnected him for ever) seemed colourless, confused, a thing
of no consequence; I, who could remember every hair on the heads of jailers
and surgeons, was deeply shocked by the magicians' unwillingness to look
behind them. 'People are like cats,' I told my son, 'you can't teach them
anything.' He looked suitably grave, but held his tongue.
My son Aadam Sinai had, when I rediscovered the phantom colony of the
illusionists, lost all traces of the tuberculosis which had afflicted his
earliest days. I, naturally, was certain that the disease had vanished with
the fall of the Widow; Picture Singh, however, told me that credit for the
cure must be given to a certain washerwoman, Durga by name, who had
wet-nursed him through his sickness, giving him the daily benefit of her
inexhaustibly colossal breasts. 'That Durga, captain,' the old snake-charmer
said, his voice betraying the fact that, in his old age, he had fallen
victim to the dhoban's serpentine charms, 'What a woman!'
She was a woman whose biceps bulged; whose preternatural breasts
unleashed a torrent of milk capable of nourishing regiments; and who, it was
rumoured darkly (although I suspect the rumour of being started by herself)
had two wombs. She was as full of gossip and tittle-tattle as she was of
milk: every day a dozen new stories gushed from her lips. She possessed the
boundless energy common to all practitioners of her trade; as she thrashed
the life out of shirts and saris on her stone, she seemed to grow in power,
as if she were sucking the vigour out of the clothes, which ended up fiat,
buttonless and beaten to death. She was a monster who forgot each day the
moment it ended. It was with the greatest reluctance that I agreed to make
her acquaintance; it is with the greatest reluctance that I admit her into
these pages. Her name, even before I met her, had the smell of new things;
she represented novelty, beginnings, the advent of new stories events
complexities, and I was no longer interested in anything new. However, once
Pictureji informed me that he intended to marry her, I had no option; I
shall deal with her, however, as briefly as accuracy permits.
Briefly, then: Durga the washerwoman was a succubus! A bloodsucker
lizard in human form! And her effect on Picture Singh was comparable only to
her power over her stone-smashed shirts: in a word, she flattened him.
Having once met her, I understood why Picture Singh looked old and forlorn;
deprived now of the umbrella of harmony beneath which men and women would
gather for advice and shade, he seemed to be shrinking daily; the
possibility of his becoming a second Hummingbird was vanishing before my
very eyes. Durga, however, flourished: her gossip grew more scatological,
her voice louder and more raucous, until at last she reminded me of Reverend
Mother in her later years, when she expanded and my grandfather shrank. This
nostalgic echo of my grandparents was the only thing of interest to me in
the personality of the hoydenish washerwoman.
But there is no denying the bounty of her mammary glands: Aadam, at
twenty-one months, was still suckling contentedly at her nipples. At first I
thought of insisting that he be weaned, but then remembered that my son did
exactly and only what he wished, and decided not to press the point. (And,
as it transpired, I was right not to do so.) As for her supposed double
womb, I had no desire to know the truth or otherwise of the story, and made
no inquiries.
I mention Durga the dhoban chiefly because it was she who, one evening
when we were eating a meal composed of twenty-seven grains of rice apiece,
first foretold my death. I, exasperated by her constant stream of news and
chit-chat, had exclaimed, 'Durga Bibi, nobody is interested in your
stories!' To which she, unperturbed, 'Saleem Baba, I have been good with you
because Pictureji says you must be in many pieces after your arrest; but, to
speak frankly, you do not appear to be concerned with anything except
lounging about nowadays. You should understand that when a man loses
interest in new matters, he is opening the door for the Black Angel.'
And although Picture Singh said, mildly, 'Come now, capteena, don't be
rough on the boy,' the arrow of Durga the dhoban found its mark.
In the exhaustion of my drained return, I felt the emptiness of the
days coating me in a thick gelatinous film; and although Durga offered, the
next morning, and perhaps in a spirit of genuine remorse for her harsh
words, to restore my strength by letting me suckle her left breast while my
son pulled on the right, 'and afterwards maybe you'll start thinking
straight again', intimations of mortality began to occupy most of my
thoughts; and then I discovered the mirror of humility at the Shadipur bus
depot, and became convinced of my approaching demise.
It was an angled mirror above the entrance to the bus garage; I,
wandering aimlessly in the forecourt of the depot, found my attention caught
by its winking reflections of the sun. I realized that I had not seen myself
in a mirror for months, perhaps years, and walked across to stand beneath
it. Looking upwards into the mirror, I saw myself transformed into a
big-headed, top-heavy dwarf; in the humblingly foreshortened reflection of
myself I saw that the hair on my head was now as grey as rainclouds; the
dwarf in the mirror, with his lined face and tired eyes, reminded me vividly
of my grandfather Aadam Aziz on the day he told us about seeing God. In
those days the afflictions cured by Parvati-the-witch had all (in the
aftermath of drainage) returned to plague me; nine-fingered, horn-templed,
monk's-tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber-nosed, castrated, and now
prematurely aged, I saw in the mirror of humility a human being to whom
history could do no more, a grotesque creature who had been released from
the pre-ordained destiny which had battered him until he was half-senseless;
with one good ear and one bad ear I heard the soft footfalls of the Black
Angel of death.
The young-old face of the dwarf in the mirror wore an expression of
profound relief.
I'm becoming gloomy; let's change the subject... Exactly twenty-four
hours before a paan-wallah's taunt provoked Picture Singh into travelling to
Bombay, my son Aadam Sinai made the decision which permitted us to accompany
the snake-charmer on his journey: overnight, without any warning, and to the
consternation of his washerwoman wet-nurse, who was obliged to decant her
remaining milk into five-litre vanaspati drums, flat-eared Aadam weaned
himself, soundlessly refusing the nipple and demanding (without words) a
diet of solid foods: pulped rice overboiled lentils biscuits. It was as
though he had decided to permit me to reach my private, and now-very-near,
finishing line.
Mute autocracy of a less-than-two-year-old infant: Aadam did not tell
us when he was hungry or sleepy or anxious to perform his natural functions.
He expected us to know. The perpetual attention he required may be one of
the reasons why I managed, in spite of all indications to the contrary, to
stay alive ... incapable of anything else in those days after my release
from captivity, I concentrated on watching my son. 'I tell you, captain,
it's lucky you came back,' Picture Singh joked, 'otherwise this one would
have turned us all into ayahs.' I understood once again that Aadam was a
member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far
tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars,
but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the
eyes of the child who was simultaneously not-my-son and also more my heir
than any child of my flesh could have been, I found in his empty, limpid
pupils a second mirror of humility, which showed me that, from now on, mine
would be as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster: the
traditional function, perhaps, of reminiscer, of teller-of-tales ... I
wondered if all over the country the bastard sons of Shiva were exerting
similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisaged for the second time
that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening,
rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything. (How
these children may, in the future, be identified: their bimbis stick out
instead of in.)
But it's time to get things moving: a taunt,
a.
last railway-train
heading south south south, a final battle ... on the day following the
weaning of Aadam, Saleem accompanied Picture Singh to Connaught Place, to
assist him in his snake-charming. Durga the dhoban agreed to take my son
with her to the dhobi-ghat: Aadam spent the day observing how power was
thrashed out of the clothes of the well-to-do and absorbed by the
succubus-woman. On that fateful day, when the warm weather was returning to
the city like a swarm of bees, I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed
silver spittoon. Picture Singh had provided me with a spittoon-surrogate, an
empty Dalda Vanaspati can, but although I used this to entertain my son with
my expertise in the gentle art of spittoon-hittery, sending long jets of
betel-juice across the grimy air of the magicians' colony, I was not
consoled. A question: why such grief over a mere receptacle of juices? My
reply is that you should never underestimate a spittoon. Elegant in the
salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, it permitted intellectuals to practise
the art-forms of the masses; gleaming in a cellar, it transformed Nadir
Khan's underworld into a second Taj Mahal; gathering dust in an old tin
trunk, it was nevertheless present throughout my history, covertly
assimilating incidents in washing-chests, ghost-visions, freeze-unfreeze,
drainage, exiles; falling from the sky like a piece of the moon, it
perpetrated a transformation. O talismanic spittoon! O beauteous lost
receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice! What sensitive person could
fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its loss?
... Beside me at the back of a bus bulging with humanity, Picture Singh
sat with snake-baskets coiled innocently on his lap. As we rattled and
banged through that city which was also filled with the resurgent ghosts of
earlier, mythological Delhis, the Most Charming Man In The World wore an air
of faded despondency, as if a battle in a distant darkroom were already over
... until my return, nobody had understood that Pictureji's real and
unvoiced fear was that he was growing old, that his powers were dimming,
that he would soon be adrift and incompetent in a world he did not
understand: like me, Picture Singh clung to the presence of Baby Aadam as if
the child were a torch in a long dark tunnel. 'A fine child, captain,' he
told me, 'a child of dignity: you hardly notice his ears.
'
That day, however, my son was not with us.
New Delhi smells assailed me in Connaught Place - the biscuity perfume
of the J. B. Mangharam advertisement, the mournful chalki-ness of crumbling
plaster; and there was also the tragic spoor of the auto-rickshaw drivers,
starved into fatalism by rising petrol costs; and green-grass-smells from
the circular park in the middle of the whirling traffic, mingled with the
fragrance of con-men persuading foreigners to change money on the black
market in shadowy archways, From the India Coffee House, under whose
marquees could be heard the endless babbling of gossips, there came the less
pleasant aroma of new stories beginning: intrigues marriages quarrels, whose
smells were all mixed up with those of tea and chili-pakoras. What I smelled
in Connaught Place: the begging nearby presence of a scar-faced girl who had
once been Sundari-the-too-beautiful; and loss-of-memory, and
turning-towards-the-future, and nothing-really-changes... turning away from
these olfactory intimations, I concentrated on the all-pervasive and simpler
odours of (human) urine and animal dung.
Underneath the colonnade of Block F in Connaught Place, next to a
pavement bookstall, a paan-wallah had his little niche. He sat cross-legged
behind a green glass counter like a minor deity of the place: I admit him
into these last pages because, although he gave off the aromas of poverty,
he was, in fact, a person of substance, the owner of a Lincoln Continental
motor-car, which he parked out of sight in Connaught Circus, and which he
had paid for by the fortunes he earned through his sales of contraband
imported cigarettes and transistor radios; for two weeks each year he went
to jail for a holiday, and the rest of the time paid several policemen a
handsome salary. In jail he was treated like a king, but behind his green
glass counter he looked inoffensive, ordinary, so that it was not easy
(without the benefit of a nose as sensitive as Saleem's) to tell that this
was a man who knew everything about everything, a man whose infinite network
of contacts made him privy to secret knowledge... to me he provided an
additional and not unpleasant echo of a similar character I had known in
Karachi during the time of my Lambretta voyages; I was so busy inhaling the
familiar perfumes of nostalgia that, when he spoke, he took me by surprise.
We had set up our act next to his niche; while Pictureji busied himself
polishing flutes and donning an enormous saffron turban, I performed the
function of barker. 'Roll up roll up - once in a life-time an opportunity
such as this - ladees, ladahs, come see come see come see! Who is here? No
common bhangi; no street-sleeping fraud; this, citizens, ladies and gents,
is the Most Charming Man In The World! Yes, come see come see: his photo has
been taken by Eastman-Kodak Limited! Come close and have no fear - PICTURE
SINGH is here!'... And other such garbage; but then the paan-wallah spoke:
'I know of a better act. This fellow is not number-one; oh, no,
certainly not. In Bombay there is a better man.'
That was how Picture Singh learned of the existence of his rival; and
why, abandoning all plans of giving a performance, he marched over to the
blandly smiling paan-wallah, reaching into his depths for his old voice of
command, and said, 'You will tell me the truth about this faker, captain, or
I will send your teeth down your gullet until they bite up your stomach.'
And the paan-wallah, unafraid, aware of the three lurking policemen who
would move in swiftly to protect their salaries if the need arose, whispered
to us the secrets of his omniscience, telling us who when where, until
Picture Singh said in a voice whose firmness concealed his fear: 'I will go
and show this Bombay fellow who is best. In one world, captains, there is no
room for two Most Charming Men.'
The vendor of betel-nut delicacies, shrugging delicately, expectorated
at our feet.
Like a magic spell, the taunts of a paan-wallah opened the door through
which Saleem returned to the city of his birth, the abode of his deepest
nostalgia. Yes, it was an open-sesame, and when we returned to the ragged
tents beneath the railway bridge, Picture Singh scrabbled in the earth and
dug up the knotted handkerchief of his security, the dirt-discoloured cloth
in which he had hoarded pennies for his old age; and when Durga the
washerwoman refused to accompany him, saying, 'What do you think, Pictureji,
I am a crorepati rich woman that I can take holidays and what-all?', he
turned to me with something very like supplication in his eyes and asked me
to accompany him, so that he did not have to go into his worst battle, the
test of his old age, without a friend... yes, and Aadam heard it too, with
his flapping ears he heard the rhythm of the magic, I saw his eyes light up
as I accepted, and then we were in a third-class railway carriage heading
south south south, and in the quinquesyl-labic monotony of the wheels I
heard the secret word: abracadabra abracadabra abracadabra sang the wheels
as they bore us back-to-Bom.
Yes, I had left the colony of the magicians behind me for ever, I was
heading abracadabra abracadabra into the heart of a nostalgia which would
keep me alive long enough to write these pages (and to create a
corresponding number of pickles); Aadam and Saleem and Picture Singh
squeezed into a third-class carriage, taking with us a number of baskets
tied up with string, baskets which alarmed the jam-packed humanity in the
carriage by hissing continually, so that the crowds pushed back back back,
away from the menace of the snakes, and allowed us a measure of comfort and
space; while the wheels sang their abracadabras to Aadam's flapping ears.
As we travelled to Bombay, the pessimism of Picture Singh expanded
until it seemed that it had become a physical entity which merely looked
like the old snake-charmer. At Mathura an American youth with pustular chin
and a head shaved bald as an egg got into our carriage amid the cacophony of
hawkers selling earthen animals and cups of chaloo-chai; he was fanning
himself with a peacock-feather fan, and the bad luck of peacock feathers
depressed Picture Singh beyond imagining. While the infinite flatness of the
Indo-Gangetic plain unfolded outside the window, sending the hot insanity of
the afternoon loo-wind to torment us, the shaven American lectured to
occupants of the carriage on the intricacies of Hinduism and began to teach
them mantras while extending a walnut begging bowl; Picture Singh was blind
to this remarkable spectacle and also deaf to the abracadabra of the wheels.
'It is no good, captain,' he confided mournfully, 'This Bombay fellow will
be young and strong, and I am doomed to be only the second most charming man
from now on.' By the time we reached Kotah Station, the odours of misfortune
exuded by the peacock-feather fan had possessed Pictureji utterly, had
eroded him so alarmingly that although everyone in the carriage was getting
out on the side farthest from the platform to urinate against the side of
the train, he showed no sign of needing to go. By Ratlam Junction, while my
excitement was mounting, he had fallen into a trance which was not sleep but
the rising paralysis of the pessimism. 'At this rate,' I thought, 'he won't
even be able to challenge this rival.' Baroda passed: no change. At Surat,
the old John Company depot, I realized I'd have to do something soon,
because abracadabra was bringing us closer to Bombay Central by the minute,
and so at last I picked up Picture Singh's old wooden flute, and by playing
it with such terrible ineptitude that all the snakes writhed in agony and
petrified the American youth into silence, by producing a noise so hellish
that nobody noticed the passing of Bassein Road, Kurla, Mahim, I overcame
the miasma of the peacock-feathers; at last Picture Singh shook himself out
of his despondency with a faint grin and said, 'Better you stop, captain,
and let me play that thing; otherwise some people are sure to die of pain.'
Serpents subsided in their baskets; and then the wheels stopped
singing, and we were there:
Bombay! I hugged Aadam fiercely, and was unable to resist uttering an
ancient cry: 'Back-to-Bom!' I cheered, to the bewilderment of the American
youth, who had never heard this mantra: and again, and again, and again:
'Back! Back-to-Bom!'
By bus down Bellasis Road, towards the Tardeo roundabout, we travelled
past Parsees with sunken eyes, past bicycle-repair shops and Irani cafes;
and then Hornby Vellard was on our right - where promenaders watched as
Sherri the mongrel bitch was left to spill her guts! Where cardboard
effigies of wrestlers still towered above the entrances to Vallabhbhai Patel
Stadium! - and we were rattling and 'banging past traffic-cops with
sun-umbrellas, past Mahalaxmi temple - and then Warden Road! The Breach
Candy Swimming Baths! And there, look, the shops ... but the names had
changed: where was Reader's Paradise with its stacks of Superman comics?
Where, the Band Box Laundry and Bombelli's, with their One Yard Of
Chocolates? And, my God, look, atop a two-storey hillock where once the
palaces of William Methwold stood wreathed in bougainvillaea and stared
proudly out to sea ... look at it, a great pink monster of a building, the
roseate skyscraper obelisk of the Narlikar women, standing over and
obliterating the circus-ring of childhood ... yes, it was my Bombay, but
also not-mine, because we reached Kemp's Corner to find the hoardings of
Air-India's little rajah and of the Kolynos Kid gone, gone for good, and
Thomas Kemp and Co. itself had vanished into thin air ... flyovers
crisscrossed where, once upon a time, medicines were dispensed and a pixie
in a chlorophyll cap beamed down upon the traffic. Elegiacally, I murmured
under my breath: 'Keep Teeth Kleen and Keep Teeth Brite! Keep Teeth Kolynos
Super White!' But despite my incantation, the past failed to reappear; we
rattled on down Gibbs Road and dismounted near Chowpatty Beach.
Chowpatty, at least, was much the same: a dirty strip of sand aswarm
with pickpockets, and strollers, and vendors of hot-channa-channa-hot, of
kulfi and bhel-puri and chutter-mutter; but further down Marine Drive I saw
what tetrapods had achieved. On land reclaimed by the Narlikar consortium
from the sea, vast monsters soared upwards to the sky, bearing strange alien
names: OBEROI-SHERATON screamed at me from afar. And where was the neon Jeep
sign? ... 'Come on, Pictureji,' I said at length, hugging Aadam to my chest,
'Let's go where we're going and be done with it; the city has been changed.'
What can I say about the Midnite-Confidential Club? That its location
is underground, secret (although known to omniscient paan-wallahs); its
door, unmarked; its clientele, the cream of Bombay society. What else? Ah,
yes: managed by one Anand 'Andy' Shroff, businessman-playboy, who is to be
found on most days tanning himself at the Sun 'n' Sand Hotel on Juhu Beach,
amid film-stars and disenfranchised princesses. I ask you: an Indian,
sun-bathing? But apparently it's quite normal, the international rules of
playboydom must be obeyed to the letter, including, I suppose, the one
stipulating daily worshipping of the sun.
How innocent I am (and I used to think that Sonny, forcep-dented, was
the simple one!) - I never suspected that places like the
Midnite-Confidential existed! But of course they do; and clutching flutes
and snake-baskets, the three of us knocked on its doors.
Movements visible through a small iron eye-level grille: a low
mellifluous female voice asked us to state our business. Picture Singh
announced: 'I am the Most Charming Man In The World. You are employing here
one other snake-charmer as cabaret; I will challenge him and prove my
superiority. For this I do not ask to be paid. It is, capteena, a question
of honour.'
It was evening; Mr Anand 'Andy' Shroff was, by good fortune, on the
premises. And, to cut a long story short, Picture Singh's challenge was
accepted, and we entered that place whose name had already unnerved me
somewhat, because it contained the word
midnight,
and because its initials
had once concealed my own, secret world: M.C.C., which stands for Metro Cub
Club, once also stood for the Midnight Children's Conference, and had now
been usurped by the secret nightspot. In a word: I felt invaded.
Twin problems of the city's sophisticated, cosmopolitan youth: how to
consume alcohol in a dry state; and how to romance girls in the best Western
tradition, by taking them out to paint the town red, while at the same time
preserving total secrecy, to avoid the very Oriental shame of a scandal? The
Midnite-Confidential was Mr Shroff's solution to the agonizing difficulties
of the city's gilded youth. In that underground of licentiousness, he had
created a world of Stygian darkness, black as hell; in the secrecy of
midnight darkness, the city's lovers met, drank imported liquor, and
romanced; cocooned in the isolating, artificial night, they canoodled with
impunity. Hell is other people's fantasies: every saga requires at least one
descent into Jahannum, and I followed Picture Singh into the inky negritude
of the Club, holding an infant son in my arms.
We were led down a lush black carpet - midnight-black, black as lies,
crow-black, anger-black, the black of 'hai-yo, black man!'; in short, a dark
rug - by a female attendant of ravishing sexual charms, who wore her sari
erotically low on her hips, with a jasmine in her navel; but as we descended
into the darkness, she turned towards us with a reassuring smile, and I saw
that her eyes were closed; unearthly luminous eyes had been painted on her
lids. I could not help but ask, 'Why...' To which she, simply: 'I am blind;
and besides, nobody who comes here wants to be seen. Here you are in a world
without faces or names; here people have no memories, families or past; here
is for
now,
for nothing except right now.'
And the darkness engulfed us; she guided us through that nightmare pit
in which light was kept in shackles and bar-fetters, that place outside
time, that negation of history... 'Sit here,' she said, 'The other snake-man
will come soon. When it is time, one light will shine on you; then begin
your contest.'
We sat there for - what? minutes, hours, weeks? - and there were the
glowing eyes of blind women leading invisible guests to their seats; and
gradually, in the dark, I became aware of being surrounded by soft, amorous
susurrations, like the couplings of velvet mice; I heard the chink of
glasses held by twined arms, and gentle brushings of lips; with one good ear
and one bad ear, I heard the sound of illicit sexuality filling the midnight
air ... but no, I did not want to know what was happening; although my nose
was able to smell, in the susurrating silence of the Club, all manner of new
stories and beginnings, of exotic and forbidden loves, and little invisible
contretemps and who-was-going-too-jar, in fact all sorts of juicy tit-bits,
I chose to ignore them all, because this was a new world in which I had no
place. My son, Aadam, however, sat beside me with ears burning with
fascination; his eyes shone in the darkness as he listened, and memorized,
and learned ... and then there was light.
A single shaft of light spilled into a pool on the floor of the
Midnight-Confidential Club. From the shadows beyond the fringe of the
illuminated area, Aadam and I saw Picture Singh sitting stiffly,
cross-legged, next to a handsome Brylcreemed youth; each of them was
surrounded by musical instruments and the closed baskets of their art. A
loudspeaker announced the beginning of that legendary contest for the tide
of Most Charming Man In The World; but who was listening? Did anyone even
pay attention, or were they too busy with lips tongues hands? This was the
name of Pictureji's opponent: the Maharaja of Cooch Naheen.
(I don't know: it's easy to assume a tide. But perhaps, perhaps he
really was the grandson of that old Rani who had once, long ago, been a
friend of Doctor Aziz; perhaps the heir to the supporter-of-the-Hummingbird
was pitted, ironically, against the man who might have been the second Mian
Abdullah! It's always possible; many maharajas have been poor since the
Widow revoked their civil-list salaries.)
How long, in that sunless cavern, did they struggle? Months, years,
centuries? I cannot say: I watched, mesmerized, as they strove to outdo one
another, charming every kind of snake imaginable, asking for rare varieties
to be sent from the Bombay snake-farm (where once Doctor Schaapsteker...);
and the Maharaja matched Picture Singh snake for snake, succeeding even in
charming constrictors, which only Pictureji had previously managed to do. In
that infernal Club whose darkness was another aspect of its proprietor's
obsession with the colour black (under whose influence he tanned his skin
darker darker every day at the Sun 'n' Sand), the two virtuosi goaded snakes
into impossible feats, making them tie themselves in knots, or bows, or
persuading them to drink water from wine-glasses, and to jump through fiery
hoops ... defying fatigue, hunger and age, Picture Singh was putting on the
show of his life (but was anyone looking? Anyone at all?) - and at last it
became clear that the younger man was tiring first; his snakes ceased to
dance in time to his flute; and finally, through a piece of sleight-of-hand
so fast that I did not see what happened, Picture Singh managed to knot a
king cobra around the Maharaja's neck.
What Picture said: 'Give me best, captain, or I'll tell it to bite.'
That was the end of the contest. The humiliated princeling left the
Club and was later reported to have shot himself in a taxi. And on the floor
of his last great battle, Picture Singh collapsed like a falling banyan
tree... blind attendants (to one of whom I entrusted Aadam) helped me carry
him from the field.
But the Midnight-Confidential had one trick left up its sleeve. Once a
night - just to add a little spice - a roving spotlight searched out one of
the illicit couples, and revealed them to the hidden eyes of their fellows:
a touch of luminary Russian roulette which, no doubt, made life more
thrilling for the city's young cosmopolitans ... and who was the chosen
victim that night? Who, horn-templed stain-faced cucumber-nosed, was drowned
in scandalous light? Who, made as blind as female attendants by the
voyeurism of light-bulbs, almost dropped the legs of his unconscious friend?
Saleem returned to the city of his birth to stand illuminated in a
cellar while Bombayites tittered at him from the dark.
Quickly now, because we have come to the end of incidents, I record
that, in a back room in which light was permitted, Picture Singh recovered
from his fainting fit; and while Aadam slept soundly, one of the blind
waitresses brought us a congratulatory, reviving meal. On the thali of
victory: samosas, pakoras, rice, dal, puris; and green chutney. Yes, a
little aluminium bowl of chutney, green, my God, green as grasshoppers...
and before long a puri was in my hand; and chutney was on the puri; and then
I had tasted it, and almost imitated the fainting act of Picture Singh,
because it carried me back to a day when I emerged nine-fingered from a
hospital and went into exile at the home of Hanif Aziz, and was given the
best chutney in the world... the taste of the chutney was more than just an
echo of that long-ago taste - it was the old taste itself, the very same,
with the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away ... in
frenzy of excitement, I grabbed the blind waitress by the arm; scarcely able
to contain myself, I blurted out: 'The chutney! Who made it?' I must have
shouted, because Picture, 'Quiet, captain, you'll wake the boy... and what's
the matter? You look like you saw your worst enemy's ghost!' And the blind
waitress, a little coldly: 'You don't like the chutney?' I had to hold back
an almighty bellow. 'I like it,' I said in a voice caged in bars of steel,
'I
like
it - now will you tell me where it's from?' And she, alarmed,
anxious to get away: 'It's Braganza Pickle; best in Bombay, everyone knows.'
I made her bring me the jar; and there, on the label, was the address:
of a building with a winking, saffron-and-green neon goddess over the gate,
a factory watched over by neon Mumbadevi, while local trains went
yellow-and-browning past: Braganza Pickles (Private) Ltd, in the sprawling
north of the town.
Once again an abracadabra, an open-sesame: words printed on a
chutney-jar, opening the last door of my life ... I was seized by an
irresistible determination to track down the maker of that impossible
chutney of memory, and said, 'Pictureji, I must go ...'
I do not know the end of the story of Picture Singh; he refused to
accompany me on my quest, and I saw in his eyes that the efforts of his
struggle had broken something inside him, that his victory was, in fact, a
defeat; but whether he is still in Bombay (perhaps working for Mr Shroff),
or back with his washer-woman; whether he is still alive or not, I am not
able to say... 'How can I leave you?' I asked, desperately, but he replied,
'Don't be a fool, captain; you have something you must do, then there is
nothing to do but do it. Go, go, what do I want with you? Like old Resham
told you: go, go quickly, go!'
Taking Aadam with me, I went.
Journey's end: from the underworld of the blind waitresses, I walked
north north north, holding my son in my arms; and came at last to where
flies are gobbled by lizards, and vats bubble, and strong-armed women tell
bawdy jokes; to this world of sharp-lipped overseers with conical breasts,
and the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the bottling-plant... and
who, at the end of my road, planted herself in front of me, arms akimbo,
hair glistening with perspiration on the forearms? Who, direct as ever,
demanded, 'You, mister: what you want?'
'Me!' Padma is yelling, excited and a little embarrassed by the memory.
'Of course, who else? Me me me!'
'Good afternoon, Begum,' I said. (Padma interjects: 'O you - always so
polite and all!') 'Good afternoon; may I speak to the manager?'
O grim, defensive, obstinate Padma! 'Not possible, Manager Begum is
busy. You must make appointment, come back later, so please go away just
now.'
Listen: I would have stayed, persuaded, bullied, even used force to get
past my Padma's arms; but there was a cry from the catwalk - this catwalk,
Padma, outside the offices! - the catwalk from which someone whom I have not
been willing to name until now was looking down, across gigantic pickle-vats
and simmering chutneys - someone rushing down clattering metal steps,
shrieking at the top of her voice:
'O my God, O my God, O Jesus sweet Jesus, baba, my son, look who's come
here, arre baba, don't you see me, look how thin you got, come, come, let me
kiss you, let me give you cake!'
Just as I had guessed, the Manager Begum of Braganza Pickles (Private)
Ltd, who called herself Mrs Braganza, was of course my erstwhile ayah, the
criminal of midnight, Miss Mary Pereira, the only mother I had left in the
world.
Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black
umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks,
stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of
taking offence at my voyeurism, calls: 'Watch this!' and proceeds to extrude
the longest turd I have ever seen. 'Fifteen inches!' he calls, 'How long can
you make yours?' Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to
tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have
been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into
my life, and I have no doubt that I'd have finished by proving his
indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted
times; but now I'm disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to
write. So, waving at the champion defecator, I call back: 'Seven on a good
day,' and forget him.
Tomorrow. Or the day after. The cracks will be waiting for August 15th.
There is still a little time: I'll finish tomorrow.
Today I gave myself the day off and visited Mary. A long hot dusty
bus-ride through streets beginning to bubble with the excitement of the
coming Independence Day, although I can smell other, more tarnished
perfumes: disillusion, venality, cynicism ... the nearly-thirty-one-year-old
myth of freedom is no longer what it was. New myths are needed; but that's
none of my business.
Mary Pereira, who now calls herself Mrs Braganza, lives with her sister
Alice, now Mrs Fernandas, in an apartment in the pink obelisk of the
Narlikar women on the two-storey hillock where once, in a demolished palace,
she slept on a servant's mat. Her bedroom occupies more or less the same
cube of air in which a fisherman's pointing finger led a pair of boyish eyes
out towards the horizon; in a teak rocking-chair, Mary rocks my son, singing
'Red Sails In The Sunset'. Red dhow-sails spread against the distant sky.
A pleasant enough day, on which old days are recalled. The day when I
realized that an old cactus-bed had survived the revolution of the Narlikar
women, and borrowing a spade from the mail, dug up a long-buried world: a
tin globe containing yellowed ant-eaten jumbo-size baby-snap, credited to
Kalidas Gupta, and a Prime Minister's letter. And days further off: for the
dozenth time we chatter about the change in Mary Pereira's fortunes. How she
owed it all to her dear Alice. Whose poor Mr Fernandes died of
colour-blindness, having become confused, in his old Ford Prefect, at one of
the city's then-few traffic lights. How Alice visited her in Goa with the
news that her employers, the fearsome and enterprising Narlikar women, were
willing to put some of their tetrapod-money into a pickle firm. 'I told
them, nobody makes achar-chutney like our Mary,' Alice had said, with
perfect accuracy, 'because she puts her feelings inside them.' So Alice
turned out to be a good girl in the end. And baba, what do you think, how
could I believe the whole world would want to eat my poor pickles, even in
England they eat. And now, just think, I sit here where your dear house used
to be, while God-knows what-all has happened to you, living like a beggar so
long, what a world, baapu-re!
And bitter-sweet lamentations: O, your poor mummy-daddy! That fine
madam, dead! And the poor man, never knowing who loved him or how to love!
And even the Monkey... but I interrupt, no, not dead: no, not true, not
dead. Secretly, in a nunnery, eating bread.
Mary, who has stolen the name of poor Queen Catharine who gave these
islands to the British, taught me the secrets of the pickling process.
(Finishing an education which began in this very air-space when I stood in a
kitchen as she stirred guilt into green chutney.) Now she sits at home,
retired in her white-haired old-age, once more happy as an ayah with a baby
to raise. 'Now you finished your writing-writing, baba, you should take more
time for your son.' But Mary, I did it for him. And she, switching the
subject, because her mind makes all sorts of flea-jumps these days: 'O baba,
baba, look at you, how old you got already!'
Rich Mary, who never-dreamed she would be rich, is still unable to
sleep on beds. But drinks sixteen Coca-Colas a day, unworried about teeth,
which have all fallen out anyway. A flea-jump: 'Why you getting married so
sudden sudden?' Because Padma wants. No, she is not in trouble, how could
she, in my condition? 'Okay, baba, I only asked.'
And the day would have wound down peacefully, a twilight day near the
end of time, except that now, at last, at the age of three years, one month
and two weeks. Aadam Sinai uttered a sound.
'Ab...' Arre, O my God, listen, baba, the boy is saying something! And
Aadam, very carefully: 'Abba...' Father. He is calling me father. But no, he
has not finished, there is strain on his face, and finally my son, who will
have to be a magician to cope with the world I'm leaving him, completes his
awesome first word: '... cadabba.'
Abracadabra! But nothing happens, we do not turn into toads, angels do
not fly in through the window: the lad is just flexing his muscles. I shall
not see his miracles.... Amid Mary's celebrations of Aadam's achievement, I
go back to Padma, and the factory; my son's enigmatic first incursion into
language has left a worrying fragrance in my nostrils.
Abracadabra: not an Indian word at all, a cabbalistic formula derived
from the name of the supreme god of the Basilidan gnostics, containing the
number 365, the number of the days of the year, and of the heavens, and of
the spirits emanating from the god Abraxas. 'Who,' I am wondering, not for
the first time, 'does the boy imagine he
is?
My special blends: I've been saving them up. Symbolic value of the
pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the
population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar;
six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every
pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains,
therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the
chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! I,
however, have pickled chapters. Tonight, by screwing the lid firmly on to
ajar bearing the legend
Special Formula No. 30; 'Abracadabra',
I reach the
end of my long-winded autobiography; in words and pickles, I have
immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both
methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfection.
These days, I manage the factory for Mary. Alice - 'Mrs Fernandes' -
controls the finances; my responsibility is for the creative aspects of our
work. (Of course I have forgiven Mary her crime; I need mothers as well as
fathers, and a mother is beyond blame.) Amid the wholly-female workforce of
Braganza Pickles, beneath the saffron-and-green winking of neon Mumbadevi, I
choose mangoes tomatoes limes from the women who come at dawn with baskets
on their heads. Mary, with her ancient hatred of 'the mens', admits no males
except myself into her new, comfortable universe... myself, and of course my
son. Alice, I suspect, still has her little liaisons; and Padma fell for me
from the first, seeing in me an outlet for her vast reservoir of pent-up
solicitude; I cannot answer for the rest of them, but the formidable
competence of the Narlikar females is reflected, on this factory floor, in
the strong-armed dedication of the vat-stirrers.
What is required for chutnification? Raw materials, obviously -fruit,
vegetables, fish, vinegar, spkes. Daily visits from Koli women with their
saris hitched up between their legs. Cucumbers aubergines mint. But also:
eyes, blue as ice, which are undeceived by the superficial blandishments of
fruit - which can see corruption beneath citrus-skin; fingers which, with
featheriest touch, can probe the secret inconstant hearts of green tomatoes:
and above all a nose capable of discerning the hidden languages of
what-must-be-pickled, its humours and messages and emotions ... at Braganza
Pickles, I supervise the production of Mary's legendary recipes; but there
are also my special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained
nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once
they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots
achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans ... believe
don't believe but it's true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be
unleashed upon the amnesiac nation.
(And beside them, one jar stands empty.)
The process of revision should be constant and endless; don't think I'm
satisfied with what I've done! Among my unhappinesses: an overly-harsh taste
from those jars containing memories of my father, a certain ambiguity in the
love-flavour of 'Jamila Singer' (Special Formula No. 22), which might lead
the unperceptive to conclude that I've invented the whole story of the
baby-swap to justify an incestuous love; vague implausibilides in the jar
labelled 'Accident in a Washing-chest' - the pickle raises questions which
are not fully answered, such as: Why did Saleem need an accident to acquire
his powers? Most of the other children didn't ... Or again, in 'All-India
Radio' and others, a discordant note in the orchestrated flavours: would
Mary's confession have come as a shock to a true telepath? Sometimes, in the
pickles' version of history, Saleem appears to have known too little; at
other times, too much ... yes, I should revise and revise, improve and
improve; but there is neither the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer
no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that's how
it happened.
There is also the matter of the spice bases. The intricacies of
turmeric and cumin, the subtlety of fenugreek, when to use large (and when
small) cardamoms; the myriad possible effects of garlic, garam masala, stick
cinnamon, coriander, ginger ... not to mention the flavourful contributions
of the occasional speck of dirt. (Saleem is no longer obsessed with purity.)
In the spice bases, I reconcile myself to the inevitable distortions of the
pickling process. To pickle is to give immortality, after all: fish,
vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain alteration,
a slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely? The art is to
change the flavour in degree, but not in kind; and above all (in my thirty
jars and ajar) to give it shape and 'form - that is to say, meaning. (I have
mentioned my fear of absurdity.)
One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may
be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may
rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them
that they possess the authentic taste of truth ... that they are, despite
everything, acts of love.
One empty jar ... how to end? Happily, with Mary in her teak
rocking-chair and a son who has begun to speak? Amid recipes, and thirty
jars with chapter-headings for names? In melancholy, drowning in memories of
Jamila and Parvati and even of Evie Burns? Or with the magic children... but
then, should I be glad that some escaped, or end in the tragedy of the
disintegrating effects of drainage? (Because in drainage lie the origins of
the cracks: my hapless, pulverized body, drained above and below, began to
crack because it was dried out. Parched, it yielded at last to the effects
of a lifetime's battering. And now there is rip tear crunch, and a stench
issuing through the fissures, which must be the smell of death. Control: I
must retain control as long as possible.)
Or with questions: now that I can, I swear, see the cracks on the backs
of my hands, cracks along my hairline and between my toes, why do I not
bleed? Am I already so emptied desiccated pickled? Am I already the mummy of
myself?
Or dreams: because last night the ghost of Reverend Mother appeared to
me, staring down through the hole in a perforated cloud, waiting for my
death so that she could weep a monsoon for forty days ... and I, floating
outside my body, looked down on the foreshortened image of my self, and saw
a grey-haired dwarf who once, in a mirror, looked relieved.
No, that won't do, I shall have to write the future as I have written
the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the
future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty ... What
cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place, is that I shall reach my
birthday, thirty-one today, and no doubt a marriage will take place, and
Padma will have henna-tracery on her palms and soles, and also a new name,
perhaps Naseem in honour of Reverend Mother's watching ghost, and outside
the window there will be fireworks and crowds, because it will be
Independence Day and the many-headed multitudes will be in the streets, and
Kashmir will be waiting. I will have train-tickets in my pocket, there will
be a taxi-cab driven by a country boy who once dreamed, at the Pioneer Cafe,
of film-stardom, we will drive south south south into the.heart of the
tumultuous crowds, who will be throwing balloons of paint at each other, at
the wound-up windows of the cab, as if it were the day of the paint-festival
of Holi; and along Hornby Vellard, where a dog was left to die, the crowd,
the dense crowd, the crowd without boundaries, growing until it fills the
world, will make progress impossible, we will abandon our taxi-cab and the
dreams of its driver, on our feet in the thronging crowd, and yes, I will be
separated from Padma, my dung-lotus extending an arm towards me across the
turbulent sea, until she drowns in the crowd and I am alone in the vastness
of the numbers, the numbers marching one two three, I am being buffeted
right and left while rip tear crunch reaches its climax, and my body is
screaming, it cannot take this kind of treatment any more, but now I see
familiar faces in the crowd, they are all here, my grandfather Aadam and his
wife Naseem, and Alia and Mustapha and Hanif and Emerald, and Arnina who was
Mumtaz, and Nadir who became Qasim, and Pia and Zafar who wet his bed and
also General Zulfikar, they throng around me pushing shoving crushing, and
the cracks are widening, pieces of my body are falling off, there is Jamila
who has left her nunnery to be present on this last day, night is falling
has fallen, there is a countdown ticktocking to midnight, fireworks and
stars, the cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, and I see that I shall never
reach Kashmir, like Jehangir the Mughal Emperor I shall die with Kashmir on
my lips, unable to see the valley of delights to which men go to enjoy life
or to end it, or both; because now I see other figures in the crowd, the
terrifying figure of a war-hero with lethal knees, who has found out how I
cheated him of his birth-right, he is pushing towards me through the crowd
which is now wholly composed of familiar faces, there is Rashid the rickshaw
boy arm-in-arm with the Rani of Cooch Naheen, and Ayooba Shaheed Farooq with
Mutasim the Handsome, and from another direction, the direction of Haji
Ali's island tomb, I see a mythological apparition approaching, the Black
Angel, except that as it nears me its face is green its eyes are black, a
centre-parting in its hair, on the left green and on the right black, its
eyes the eyes of Widows; Shiva and the Angel are closing closing, I hear
lies being spoken in the night, anything you want to be you kin be, the
greatest lie of all, cracking now, fission of Saleem, I am the bomb in
Bombay, watch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful
pressure of the crowd, bag of bones falling down down down, just as once at
Jallianwala, but Dyer seems not to be present today, no Mercurochrome, only
a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street, because I have
been so-many too-many persons, life unlike syntax allows one more than
three, and at last somewhere the striking of a clock, twelve chimes,
release.
Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two
three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of
voiceless dust, just as, all in good time, they will trample my son who is
not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his,
until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights
have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have
died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be
both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked
into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live
or die in peace.