Midnight's Children (32 page)

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 random 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 gap-toothed, 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-block 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 bomb 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 Doctor 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 gynecologist; the birth-control fanatic in the dark, glowing doctor leaped out through his eyes and made the following speech: “Bravo!” Doctor 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 Doctor Narlikar drank a toast to their four-legged concrete dream.

“Land, yes! Love, no!” Doctor 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 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 Doctor 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: Doctor 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. Doctor 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
OM
-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 gynecologist, 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 Doctor 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. Doctor 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 Doctor 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 Doctor 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 Doctor 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 Doctor 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 Doctor 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, Doctor 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 Doctor 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 arrival of the women that he began, literally, to fade … gradually his skin paled, his hair lost its color, 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 Doctor 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 neighbors, 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 color 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.