Midnight's Children (30 page)

“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 of you.”

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. O 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! O 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 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.

R
EALITY 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-odors 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 permissable in these circumstances. Rereading 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 …

Yé Akashvani hai
. This is All-India Radio.

Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani café, 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-fames, 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 odors 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-aping 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 sacred, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust.