Midnight's Children (16 page)

“Arré 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 practicing, 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 practicing.”

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 gray alien things. And, while monkeys dance on a roof behind the post office, Hanuman the monkey dances with rage. Pounces on the gray things. Yes, they are loose enough, won’t take much rocking and pulling, pulling and rocking … watch Hanuman now, dragging the soft gray stones to the edge of the long drop of the outside wall of the Fort. See him tear at them: rip! rap! rop! … Look how deftly he scoops paper from the insides of the gray 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 gray 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 headdress of a demon, a papier-mâché devil-top which has faces grinning on every side of it … the appointed representative of the Ravana gang. The collector. Hearts thumping, the three businessman watch this specter 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 gray 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, shoveling 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 God-forsaken 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 soothsayer, were bone-setter and 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, sing-song, 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! “Newspapers praise 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 passage 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 Lifafa Das say, “Begun 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 kinds 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 rancor. “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 stomach? 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 his 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 later, through the grimy windows of the Pioneer Café; 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 gray dust of smoked leathercloth on his head … because of course they had burned the godown.