Midnight's Children (41 page)

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 colored red that year, and red is the color 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 center 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 favor. 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 seniority? 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, everybody: 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 think 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 think 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 wondrously 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 (“Hee 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 stone-walled 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 rumor, that he’d been 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 walls 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 anesthetized 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: he’ll 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.