Midnight's Children (10 page)

“Is that him?” Padma asks, in some confusion. “That fat soft cowardly plumpie? Is he going to be your father?”

T
HAT WAS THE END
of the optimism epidemic. In the morning a sweeper-woman entered the offices of the Free Islam Convention 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 raise. 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 pay-masters 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 color 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 mélange of odors, filled with unease, the whiff of things concealed mingling with the odors 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 fulfill his duties 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, flighty 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 underground, 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-in 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 weightiness 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; nor 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 him find out for himself, after his life-time 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
?”