Midnight's Children (69 page)

Today, the papers are talking about the supposed political rebirth of Mrs. Indira Gandhi; but when I returned to India, concealed in a wicker basket, “The Madam” was basking in the fullness of her glory. Today, perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly into the insidious clouds of amnesia; but I remember, and will set down, how I—how she—how it happened that—no, I can’t say it, I must tell it in the proper order, until there is no option but to reveal … On December 16th, 1971,1 tumbled out of a basket into an India in which Mrs. Gandhi’s New Congress Party held a more-than-two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.

In the basket of invisibility, a sense of unfairness turned into anger; and something else besides—transformed by rage, I had also been overwhelmed by an agonizing feeling of sympathy for the country which was not only my twin-in-birth but also joined to me (so to speak) at the hip, so that what happened to either of us, happened to us both. If I, snot-nosed stain-faced etcetera, had had a hard time of it, then so had she, my subcontinental twin sister; and now that I had given myself the right to choose a better future, I was resolved that the nation should share it, too. I think that when I tumbled out into dust, shadow and amused cheers, I had already decided to save the country.

(But there are cracks and gaps … had I, by then, begun to see that my love for Jamila Singer had been, in a sense, a mistake? Had I already understood how I had simply transferred on to her shoulders the adoration which I now perceived to be a vaulting, all-encompassing love of country? When was it that I realized that my truly-incestuous feelings were for my true birth-sister, India herself, and not for that trollop of a crooner who had so callously shed me, like a used snake-skin, and dropped me into the metaphorical waste-basket of Army life? When when when? … Admitting defeat, I am forced to record that I cannot remember for sure.)

… Saleem sat blinking in the dust in the shadow of the mosque. A giant was standing over him, grinning hugely, asking, “Achha, captain, have a good trip?” And Parvati, with huge excited eyes, pouring water from a lotah into his cracked, salty mouth … Feeling! The icy touch of water kept cool in earthenware surahis, the cracked soreness of parched-raw lips, silver-and-lapis clenched in a fist … “I can feel!” Saleem cried to the good-natured crowd.

It was the time of afternoon called the chaya, when the shadow of the tall red-brick-and-marble Friday Mosque fell across the higgledy shacks of the slum clustered at its feet, that slum whose ramshackle tin roofs created such a swelter of heat that it was insupportable to be inside the fragile shacks except during the chaya and at night … but now conjurers and contortionists and jugglers and fakirs had gathered in the shade around the solitary stand-pipe to greet the new arrival. “I can feel!” I cried, and then Picture Singh, “Okay, captain—tell us, how it feels?—to be born again, falling like baby out of Parvati’s basket?” I could smell amazement on Picture Singh; he was clearly astounded by Parvati’s trick, but, like a true professional, would not dream of asking her how she had achieved it. In this way Parvati-the-witch, who had used her limitless powers to spirit me to safety, escaped discovery; and also because, as I later discovered, the ghetto of the magicians disbelieved, with the absolute certainty of illusionists-by-trade, in the possibility of magic. So Picture Singh told me, with amazement, “I swear, captain—you were so light in there, like a baby!”—But he never dreamed that my weightlessness had been anything more than a trick.

“Listen, baby sahib,” Picture Singh was crying, “What do you say, baby-captain? Must I put you over my shoulder and make you belch?”—And now Parvati, tolerantly: “That one, baba, always making joke shoke.” She was smiling radiantly at everyone in sight … but there followed an inauspicious event. A woman’s voice began to wail at the back of the cluster of magicians: “Ai-o-ai-o! Ai-o-o!” The crowd parted in surprise and an old woman burst through it and rushed at Saleem; I was required to defend myself against a brandished frying pan, until Picture Singh, alarmed, seized her by pan-waving arm and bellowed, “Hey, capteena, why so much noise?” And the old woman, obstinately: “Ai-o-ai-o!”

“Resham Bibi,” Parvati said, crossly, “You got ants in your brain?” And Picture Singh, “We got a guest, capteena—what’ll he do with your shouting? Arré, be quiet, Resham, this captain is known to our Parvati personal! Don’t be coming crying in front of him!”

“Ai-o-ai-o! Bad luck is come! You go to foreign places and bring it here! Ai-oooo!”

Disturbed visages of magicians stared from Resham Bibi to me—because although they were a people who denied the supernatural, they were artistes, and like all performers had an implicit faith in luck, good-luck-and-bad-luck, luck … “Yourself you said,” Resham Bibi wailed, “this man is born twice, and not even from woman! Now comes desolation, pestilence and death. I am old and so I know. Arré baba,” she turned plaintively to face me, “Have pity only; go now—go go quick!” There was a murmur—“It is true, Resham Bibi knows the old stories”—but then Picture Singh became angry. “The captain is my honored guest,” he said, “He stays in my hut as long as he wishes, for short or for long. What are you all talking? This is no place for fables.”

Saleem Sinai’s first sojourn at the magicians’ ghetto lasted only a matter of days; but during that short time, a number of things happened to allay the fears which had been raised by ai-o-ai-o. The plain, unadorned truth is that, in those days, the ghetto illusionists and other artistes began to hit new peaks of achievement—jugglers managed to keep one thousand and one balls in the air at a time, and a fakir’s as-yet-untrained protegée strayed on to a bed of hot coals, only to stroll across it unconcerned, as though she had acquired her mentor’s gifts by osmosis; I was told that the rope-trick had been successfully performed. Also, the police failed to make their monthly raid on the ghetto, which had not happened within living memory; and the camp received a constant stream of visitors, the servants of the rich, requesting the professional services of one or more of the colony at this or that gala evening’s entertainment … it seemed, in fact, as though Resham Bibi had got things the wrong way round, and I rapidly became very popular in the ghetto. I was dubbed Saleem Kismeti, Lucky Saleem; Parvati was congratulated on having brought me to the slum. And finally Picture Singh brought Resham Bibi to apologize.

“Pol’gize,” Resham said toothlessly and fled; Picture Singh added, “It is hard for the old ones; their brains go raw and remember upside down. Captain, here everyone is saying you are our luck; but will you go from us soon?”—And Parvati, staring dumbly with saucer eyes which begged no no no; but I was obliged to answer in the affirmative.

Saleem, today, is certain that he answered, “Yes”; that on the selfsame morning, still dressed in shapeless robe, still inseparable from a silver spittoon, he walked away, without looking back at a girl who followed him with eyes moistened with accusations; that, strolling hastily past practising jugglers and sweetmeat-stalls which filled his nostrils with the temptations of rasgullas, past barbers offering shaves for ten paisa, past the derelict maunderings of crones and the American-accented caterwauls of shoe-shine boys who importuned bus-loads of Japanese tourists in identical blue suits and incongruous saffron turbans which had been tied around their heads by obsequiously mischievous guides, past the towering flight of stairs to the Friday Mosque, past vendors of notions and itr-essences and plaster-of-Paris replicas of the Qutb Minar and painted toy horses and fluttering unslaughtered chickens, past invitations to cockfights and empty-eyed games of cards, he emerged from the ghetto of the illusionists and found himself on Faiz Bazar, facing the infinitely-extending walls of a Red Fort from whose ramparts a prime minister had once announced independence, and in whose shadow a woman had been met by a peepshow-merchant, a Dilli-dekho man who had taken her into narrowing lanes to hear her son’s future foretold amongst mongeese and vultures and broken men with leaves bandaged around their arms; that, to be brief, he turned to his right and walked away from the Old City towards the roseate palaces built by pink-skinned conquerors long ago: abandoning my saviors, I went into New Delhi on foot.

Why? Why, ungratefully spurning the nostalgic grief of Parvati-the-witch, did I set my face against the old and journey into newness? Why, when for so many years I had found her my staunchest ally in the nocturnal congresses of my mind, did I leave her so lightly in the morning? Fighting past fissured blanks, I am able to remember two reasons; but am unable to say which was paramount, or if a third … firstly, at any rate, I had been taking stock. Saleem, analysing his prospects, had had no option but to admit to himself that they were not good. I was passport-less; in law an illegal immigrant (having once been a legal emigrant); P.O.W. camps were waiting for me everywhere. And even after setting aside my status as defeated-soldier-on-the-run, the list of my disadvantages remained formidable: I had neither funds nor a change of clothes; nor qualifications—having neither completed my education nor distinguished myself in that part of it which I had undergone; how was I to embark on my ambitious project of nation-saving without a roof over my head or a family to protect support assist … it struck me like a thunderclap that I was wrong; that here, in this very city, I had relatives—and not only relatives, but influential ones! My uncle Mustapha Aziz, a senior Civil Servant, who when last heard of had been number two in his Department; what better patron than he for my Messianic ambitions? Under his roof, I could acquire contacts as well as new clothes; under his auspices, I would seek preferment in the Administration, and, as I studied the realities of government, would certainly find the keys of national salvation; and I would have the ears of Ministers, I would perhaps be on first-name terms with the great …! It was in the clutches of this magnificent fantasy that I told Parvati-the-witch, “I must be off; great matters are afoot!” And, seeing the hurt in her suddenly-inflamed cheeks, consoled her: “I will come and see you often. Often often.” But she was not consoled … high-mindedness, then, was one motive for abandoning those who had helped me; but was there not something meaner, lowlier, more personal? There was. Parvati had drawn me secretly aside behind a tin-and-cratewood shack; where cockroaches spawned, where rats made love, where flies gorged themselves on pie-dog dung, she clutched me by the wrist and became incandescent of eye and sibilant of tongue; hidden in the putrid underbelly of the ghetto, she confessed that I was not the first of the midnight children to have crossed her path! And now there was a story of a Dacca procession, and magicians marching alongside heroes; there was Parvati looking up at a tank, and there were Parvati-eyes alighting on a pair of gigantic, prehensile knees … knees bulging proudly through starched-pressed uniform; there was Parvati crying, “O you! O you …” and then the unspeakable name, the name of my guilt, of someone who should have led my life but for a crime in a nursing home; Parvati and Shiva, Shiva and Parvati, fated to meet by the divine destiny of their names, were united in the moment of victory. “A hero, man!” she hissed proudly behind the shack. “They will make him a big officer and all!” And now what was produced from a fold of her ragged attire? What once grew proudly on a hero’s head and now nestled against a sorceress’s breasts? “I asked and he gave,” said Parvati-the-witch, and showed me a lock of his hair.

Did I run from that lock of fateful hair? Did Saleem, fearing a reunion with his alter ego, whom he had so-long-ago banned from the councils of the night, flee back into the bosom of that family whose comforts had been denied the war-hero? Was it high-mindedness or guilt? I can no longer say; I set down only what I remember, namely that Parvati-the-witch whispered, “Maybe he will come when he has time; and then we will be three!” And another, repeated phrase: “Midnight’s children, yaar … that’s something, no?” Parvati-the-witch reminded me of things I had tried to put out of my mind; and I walked away from her, to the home of Mustapha Aziz.

Of my last miserable contact with the brutal intimacies of family life, only fragments remain; however, since it must all be set down and subsequently pickled, I shall attempt to piece together an account … to begin with, then, let me report that my Uncle Mustapha lived in a commodiously anonymous Civil Service bungalow set in a tidy Civil Service garden just off Rajpath in the heart of Lutyens’s city; I walked along what-had-once-been-Kingsway, breathing in the numberless perfumes of the street, which blew out of State Handicraft Emporia and the exhaust-pipes of auto-rickshaws; the aromas of banyan and deodar mingled with the ghostly scents of long-gone viceroys and memsahibs in gloves, and also with the rather more strident bodily odors of gaudy rich begums and tramps. Here was the giant election scoreboard around which (during the first battle-for-power between Indira and Morarji Desai) crowds had thronged, awaiting the results, asking eagerly: “Is it a boy or a girl?” … amid ancient and modern, between India Gate and the Secretariat buildings, my thoughts teeming with vanished (Mughal and British) empires and also with my own history—because this was the city of the public announcement, of many-headed monsters and a hand, falling from the sky—I marched resolutely onwards, smelling, like everything else in sight, to high heaven. And at last, having turned left towards Dupleix Road, I arrived at an anonymous garden with a low wall and a hedge; in a corner of which I saw a signboard waving in the breeze, just as once signboards had flowered in the gardens of Methwold’s Estate; but this echo of the past told a different story. Not
FOR SALE
, with its three ominous vowels and four fateful consonants; the wooden flower of my uncle’s garden proclaimed strangely:
Mr. Mustapha Aziz and Fly.

Not knowing that the last word was my uncle’s habitual, desiccated abbreviation of the throbbingly emotional noun “family,” I was thrown into confusion by the nodding signboard; after I had stayed in his household for a very short time, however, it began to seem entirely fitting, because the family of Mustapha Aziz was indeed as crushed, as insect-like, as insignificant as the mythically truncated Fly.