Midnight's Children (6 page)

“Oskar died,” Ilse told him, sipping fresh lime water on his mother’s takht. “Like a comedian. He went to talk to the army and tell them not to be pawns. The fool really thought the troops would fling down their guns and walk away. We watched from a window and I prayed they wouldn’t just trample all over him. The regiment had learned to march in step by then, you wouldn’t recognize them. As he reached the streetcorner across from the parade ground he tripped over his own shoelace and fell into the street. A staff car hit him and he died. He could never keep his laces tied, that ninny” … here there were diamonds freezing in her lashes … “He was the type that gives anarchists a bad name.”

“All right,” Naseem conceded, “so you’ve got a good chance of landing a good job. Agra University, it’s a famous place, don’t think I don’t know. University doctor! … sounds good. Say you’re going for that, and it’s a different business.” Eyelashes drooped in the hole. “I will miss you, naturally …”

“I’m in love,” Aadam Aziz said to Ilse Lubin. And later, “… So I’ve only seen her through a hole in a sheet, one part at a time; and I swear her bottom blushes.”

“They must be putting something in the air up here,” Ilse said.

“Naseem, I’ve got the job,” Aadam said excitedly. “The letter came today. With effect from April 1919. Your father says he can find a buyer for my house and the gemstone shop also.”

“Wonderful,” Naseem pouted. “So now I must find a new doctor. Or maybe I’ll get that old hag again who didn’t know two things about anything.”

“Because I am an orphan,” Doctor Aziz said, “I must come myself in place of my family members. But I have come nevertheless, Ghani Sahib, for the first time without being sent for. This is not a professional visit.”

“Dear boy!” Ghani, clapping Aadam on the back. “Of course you must marry her. With an A-l fine dowry! No expense spared! It will be the wedding of the year, oh most certainly, yes!”

“I cannot leave you behind when I go,” Aziz said to Naseem. Ghani said, “Enough of this tamasha! No more need for this sheet tomfoolery! Drop it down, you women, these are young lovers now!”

“At last,” said Aadam Aziz, “I see you whole at last. But I must go now. My rounds … and an old friend is staying with me, I must tell her, she will be very happy for us both. A dear friend from Germany.”

“No, Aadam baba,” his bearer said, “since the morning I have not seen Ilse Begum. She hired that old Tai to go for a shikara ride.”

“What can be said, sir?” Tai mumbled meekly. “I am honored indeed to be summoned into the home of a so-great personage as yourself. Sir, the lady hired me for a trip to the Mughal Gardens, to do it before the lake freezes. A quiet lady, Doctor Sahib, not one word out of her all the time. So I was thinking my own unworthy private thoughts as old fools will and suddenly when I look she is not in her seat. Sahib, on my wife’s head I swear it, it is not possible to see over the back of the seat, how was I to tell? Believe a poor old boatman who was your friend when you were young …”

“Aadam baba,” the old bearer interrupted, “excuse me but just now I have found this paper on her table.”

“I know where she is,” Doctor Aziz stared at Tai. “I don’t know how you keep getting mixed up in my life; but you showed me the place once. You said: certain foreign women come here to drown.”

“I, Sahib?” Tai shocked, malodorous, innocent. “But grief is making your head play trick! How can I know these things?”

And after the body, bloated, wrapped in weeds, had been dredged up by a group of blank-faced boatmen, Tai visited the shikara halt and told the men there, as they recoiled from his breath of a bullock with dysentery, “He blames me, only imagine! Brings his loose Europeans here and tells me it is my fault when they jump into the lake! … I ask, how did he know just where to look? Yes, ask him that, ask that nakkoo Aziz!”

She had left a note. It read: “I didn’t mean it.”

I make no comment; these events, which have tumbled from my lips any old how, garbled by haste and emotion, are for others to judge. Let me be direct now, and say that during the long, hard winter of 1918-19, Tai fell ill, contracting a violent skin disease, akin to that European curse called the King’s Evil; but he refused to see Doctor Aziz, and was treated by a local homeopath. And in March, when the lake thawed, a marriage took place in a large marquee in the grounds of Ghani the landowner’s house. The wedding contract assured Aadam Aziz of a respectable sum of money, which would help buy a house in Agra, and the dowry included, at Doctor Aziz’s especial request, a certain mutilated bedsheet. The young couple sat on a dais, garlanded and cold, while the guests filed past dropping rupees into their laps. That night my grandfather placed the perforated sheet beneath his bride and himself and in the morning it was adorned by three drops of blood, which formed a small triangle. In the morning, the sheet was displayed, and after the consummation ceremony a limousine hired by the landowner arrived to drive my grandparents to Amritsar, where they would catch the Frontier Mail. Mountains crowded round and stared as my grandfather left his home for the last time. (He would return, once, but not to leave.) Aziz thought he saw an ancient boatman standing on land to watch them pass—but it was probably a mistake, since Tai was ill. The blister of a temple atop Sankara Acharya, which Muslims had taken to calling the Takht-e-Sulaiman, or Seat of Solomon, paid them no attention. Winter-bare poplars and snow-covered fields of saffron undulated around them as the car drove south, with an old leather bag containing, amongst other things, a stethoscope and a bedsheet, packed in the boot. Doctor Aziz felt, in the pit of his stomach, a sensation akin to weightlessness.

Or falling.

( … And now I am cast as a ghost. I am nine years old and the whole family, my father, my mother, the Brass Monkey and myself, are staying at my grandparents’ house in Agra, and the grandchildren—myself among them—are staging the customary New Year’s play; and I have been cast as a ghost. Accordingly—and surreptitiously so as to preserve the secrets of the forthcoming theatricals—I am ransacking the house for a spectral disguise. My grandfather is out and about his rounds. I am in his room. And here on top of this cupboard is an old trunk, covered in dust and spiders, but unlocked. And here, inside it, is the answer to my prayers. Not just a sheet, but one with a hole already cut in it! Here it is, inside this leather bag inside this trunk, right beneath an old stethoscope and a tube of mildewed Vick’s Inhaler … the sheet’s appearance in our show was nothing less than a sensation. My grandfather took one look at it and rose roaring to his feet. He strode up on stage and unghosted me right in front of everyone. My grandmother’s lips were so tightly pursed they seemed to disappear. Between them, the one booming at me in the voice of a forgotten boatman, the other conveying her fury through vanished lips, they reduced the awesome ghost to a weeping wreck. I fled, took to my heels and ran into the little cornfield, not knowing what had happened. I sat there—perhaps on the very spot on which Nadir Khan had sat!—for several hours, swearing over and over that I would never again open a forbidden trunk, and feeling vaguely resentful that it had not been locked in the first place. But I knew, from their rage, that the sheet was somehow very important indeed.)

I have been interrupted by Padma, who brought me my dinner and then withheld it, blackmailing me: “So if you’re going to spend all your time wrecking your eyes with that scribbling, at least you must read it to me.” I have been singing for my supper—but perhaps our Padma will be useful, because it’s impossible to stop her being a critic. She is particularly angry with my remarks about her name. “What do you know, city boy?” she cried—hand slicing the air. “In my village there is no shame in being named for the Dung Goddess. Write at once that you are wrong, completely.” In accordance with my lotus’s wishes, I insert, forthwith, a brief paean to Dung.

Dung, that fertilizes and causes the crops to grow! Dung, which is patted into thin chapati-like cakes when still fresh and moist, and is sold to the village builders, who use it to secure and strengthen the walls of kachcha buildings made of mud! Dung, whose arrival from the nether end of cattle goes a long way towards explaining their divine and sacred status! Oh, yes, I was wrong, I admit I was prejudiced, no doubt because its unfortunate odors do have a way of offending my sensitive nose—how wonderful, how ineffably lovely it must be to be named for the Purveyor of Dung!

… On April 6th, 1919, the holy city of Amritsar smelled (gloriously, Padma, celestially!) of excrement. And perhaps the (beauteous!) reek did not offend the Nose on my grandfather’s face—after all, Kashmiri peasants used it, as described above, for a kind of plaster. Even in Srinagar, hawkers with barrows of round dung-cakes were not an uncommon sight. But then the stuff was drying, muted, useful. Amritsar dung was fresh and (worse) redundant. Nor was it all bovine. It issued from the rumps of the horses between the shafts of the city’s many tongas, ikkas and gharries; and mules and men and dogs attended nature’s calls, mingling in a brotherhood of shit. But there were cows, too: sacred kine roaming the dusty streets, each patrolling its own territory, staking its claims in excrement. And flies! Public Enemy Number One, buzzing gaily from turd to steaming turd, celebrated and cross-pollinated these freely-given offerings. The city swarmed about, too, mirroring the motion of the flies. Doctor Aziz looked down from his hotel window on to this scene as a Jain in a face-mask walked past, brushing the pavement before him with a twig-broom, to avoid stepping on an ant, or even a fly. Spicy sweet fumes rose from a street-snack barrow. “Hot pakoras, pakoras hot!” A white woman was buying silks from a shop across the street and men in turbans were ogling her. Naseem—now Naseem Aziz—had a sharp headache; it was the first time she’d ever repeated an illness, but life outside her quiet valley had come as something of a shock to her. There was a jug of fresh lime water by her bed, emptying rapidly. Aziz stood at the window, inhaling the city. The spire of the Golden Temple gleamed in the sun. But his nose itched: something was not right here.

Close-up of my grandfather’s right hand: nails knuckles fingers all somehow bigger than you’d expect. Clumps of red hair on the outside edges. Thumb and forefinger pressed together, separated only by a thickness of paper. In short: my grandfather was holding a pamphlet. It had been inserted into his hand (we cut to a long-shot—nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary) as he entered the hotel foyer. Scurrying of urchin through revolving door, leaflets falling in his wake, as the chaprassi gives chase. Mad revolutions in the doorway, roundandround; until chaprassi-hand demands a close-up, too, because it is pressing thumb to forefinger, the two separated only by the thickness of urchin-ear. Ejection of juvenile disseminator of gutter-tracts; but still my grandfather retained the message. Now, looking out of his window, he sees it echoed on a wall opposite; and there, on the minaret of a mosque; and in the large black type of newsprint under a hawker’s arm. Leaflet newspaper mosque and wall are crying:
Hartal!
Which is to say, literally speaking, a day of mourning, of stillness, of silence. But this is India in the heyday of the Mahatma, when even language obeys the instructions of Gandhiji, and the word has acquired, under his influence, new resonances.
Hartal—April 7
, agree mosque newspaper wall and pamphlet, because Gandhi has decreed that the whole of India shall, on that day, come to a halt. To mourn, in peace, the continuing presence of the British.

“I do not understand this hartal when nobody is dead,” Naseem is crying softly. “Why will the train not run? How long are we stuck for?”

Doctor Aziz notices a soldierly young man in the street, and thinks—the Indians have fought for the British; so many of them have seen the world by now, and been tainted by Abroad. They will not easily go back to the old world. The British are wrong to try and turn back the clock. “It was a mistake to pass the Rowlatt Act,” he murmurs.

“What rowlatt?” wails Naseem. “This is nonsense where I’m concerned!”

“Against political agitation,” Aziz explains, and returns to his thoughts. Tai once said: “Kashmiris are different. Cowards, for instance. Put a gun in a Kashmiri’s hand and it will have to go off by itself—he’ll never dare to pull the trigger. We are not like Indians, always making battles.” Aziz, with Tai in his head, does not feel Indian. Kashmir, after all, is not strictly speaking a part of the Empire, but an independent princely state. He is not sure if the hartal of pamphlet mosque wall newspaper is his fight, even though he is in occupied territory now. He turns from the window …

… To see Naseem weeping into a pillow. She has been weeping ever since he asked her, on their second night, to move a little. “Move where?” she asked. “Move how?” He became awkward and said, “Only move, I mean, like a woman …” She shrieked in horror. “My God, what have I married? I know you Europe-returned men. You find terrible women and then you try to make us girls be like them! Listen, Doctor Sahib, husband or no husband, I am not any … bad word woman.” This was a battle my grandfather never won; and it set the tone for their marriage, which rapidly developed into a place of frequent and devastating warfare, under whose depredations the young girl behind the sheet and the gauche young Doctor turned rapidly into different, stranger beings … “What now, wife?” Aziz asks. Naseem buries her face in the pillow. “What else?” she says in muffled tones. “You, or what? You want me to walk naked in front of strange men.” (He has told her to come out of purdah.)

He says, “Your shirt covers you from neck to wrist to knee. Your loose-pajamas hide you down to and including your ankles. What we have left are your feet and face. Wife, are your face and feet obscene?” But she wails, “They will see more than that! They will see my deep-deep shame!”

And now an accident, which launches us into the world of Mercurochrome … Aziz, finding his temper slipping from him, drags all his wife’s purdah-veils from her suitcase, flings them into a wastepaper basket made of tin with a painting of Guru Nanak on the side, and sets fire to them. Flames leap up, taking him by surprise, licking at curtains. Aadam rushes to the door and yells for help as the cheap curtains begin to blaze … and bearers guests washerwomen stream into the room and flap at the burning fabric with dusters towels and other people’s laundry. Buckets are brought; the fire goes out; and Naseem cowers on the bed as about thirty-five Sikhs, Hindus and untouchables throng in the smoke-filled room. Finally they leave, and Naseem unleashes two sentences before clamping her lips obstinately shut.