Midnight's Children (72 page)

“Poor girl,” Padma sighs, and I agree; but until the Widow drained me of past present future, I remained under the Monkey’s spell.

When Parvati-the-witch finally admitted failure, her face developed, overnight, an alarming and pronounced pout. She fell asleep in the hut of the contortionist orphans and awoke with her full lips stuck in a protruding attitude of unutterably sensuous pique. Orphaned triplets told her, giggling worriedly, what had happened to her face; she tried spiritedly to pull her features back into position, but neither muscles nor wizardry managed to restore her to her former self; at last, resigning herself to her tragedy, Parvati gave in, so that Resham Bibi told anyone who would listen: “That poor girl—a god must have blown on her when she was making a face.”

(That year, incidentally, the chic ladies of the cities were all wearing just such an expression with erotic deliberation; the haughty mannequins in the Eleganza-’73 fashion show all pouted as they walked their catwalks. In the awful poverty of the magicians’ slum, pouting Parvati-the-witch was in the height of facial fashion.)

The magicians devoted much of their energies to the problem of making Parvati smile again. Taking time off from their work, and also from the more mundane chores of reconstructing tin-and-cardboard huts which had fallen down in a high wind, or killing rats, they performed their most difficult tricks for her pleasure; but the pout remained in place. Resham Bibi made a green tea which smelled of camphor and forced it down Parvati’s gullet. The tea had the effect of constipating her so thoroughly that she was not seen defecating behind her hovel for nine weeks. Two young jugglers conceived the notion that she might have begun grieving for her deceased father all over again, and applied themselves to the task of drawing his portrait on a shred of old tarpaulin, which they hung above her sackcloth mat. Triplets made jokes, and Picture Singh, greatly distressed, made cobras tie themselves in knots; but none of it worked, because if Parvati’s thwarted love was beyond her own powers to cure, what hope could the others have had? The power of Parvati’s pout created, in the ghetto, a nameless sense of unease, which all the magicians’ animosity towards the unknown could not entirely dispel.

And then Resham Bibi hit upon an idea. “Fools that we are,” she told Picture Singh, “we don’t see what is under our noses. The poor girl is twenty-five, baba—almost an old woman! She is pining for a husband!” Picture Singh was impressed. “Resham Bibi,” he told her approvingly, “your brain is not yet dead.”

After that, Picture Singh applied himself to the task of finding Parvati a suitable young man; many of the younger men in the ghetto were coaxed bullied threatened. A number of candidates were produced; but Parvati rejected them all. On the night when she told Bismillah Khan, the most promising fire-eater in the colony, to go somewhere else with his breath of hot chillies, even Picture Singh despaired. That night, he said to me, “Captain, that girl is a trial and a grief to me; she is your good friend, you got any ideas?” Then an idea occurred to him, an idea which had had to wait until he became desperate because even Picture Singh was affected by considerations of class—automatically thinking of me as “too good” for Parvati, because of my supposedly “higher” birth, the ageing Communist had not thought until now that I might be … “Tell me one thing, captain,” Picture Singh asked shyly, “you are planning to be married some day?”

Saleem Sinai felt panic rising up inside himself.

“Hey, listen, captain, you like the girl, hey?”—And I, unable to deny it, “Of course.” And now Picture Singh, grinning from ear to ear, while snakes hissed in baskets: “Like her a lot, captain? A
lot
lot?” But I was thinking of Jamila’s face in the night; and made a desperate decision: “Pictureji, I can’t marry her.” And now he, frowning: “Are you maybe married already, captain? Got wife-children waiting somewhere?” Nothing for it now; I, quietly, shamefully, said: “I can’t marry anyone, Pictureji. I can’t have children.”

The silence in the shack was punctuated by sibilant snakes and the calls of wild dogs in the night.

“You’re telling truth, captain? Is a medical fact?”

“Yes.”

“Because one must not lie about such things, captain. To lie about one’s manhood is bad, bad luck. Anything could happen, captain.”

And I, wishing upon myself the curse of Nadir Khan, which was also the curse of my uncle Hanif Aziz and, during the freeze and its long aftermath, of my father Ahmed Sinai, was goaded into lying even more angrily: “I tell you,” Saleem cried, “it is true, and that’s that!”

“Then, captain,” Pictureji said tragically, smacking wrist against forehead, “God knows what to do with that poor girl.”

I
MARRIED PARVATI-THE-WITCH
on February 23rd, 1975, the second anniversary of my outcast’s return to the magicians’ ghetto.

Stiffening of Padma: taut as a washing-line, my dung-lotus inquires: “Married? But last night only you said you wouldn’t—and why you haven’t told me all these days, weeks, months … ?” I look at her sadly, and remind her that I have already mentioned the death of my poor Parvati, which was not a natural death … slowly Padma uncoils, as I continue: “Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, there’s no escape from her.”

There have been thirty-two years, in this story, during which I remained unborn; soon, I may complete thirty-one years of my own. For sixty-three years, before and after midnight, women have done their best; and also, I’m bound to say, their worst.

In a blind landowner’s house on the shores of a Kashmiri lake, Naseem Aziz doomed me to the inevitability of perforated sheets; and in the waters of that same lake, Ilse Lubin leaked into history, and I have not forgotten her deathwish;

Before Nadir Khan hid in his underworld, my grandmother had, by becoming Reverend Mother, begun a sequence of women who changed their names, a sequence which continues even today—and which even leaked into Nadir, who became Qasim, and sat with dancing hands in the Pioneer Café; and after Nadir’s departure, my mother Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai;

And Alia, with the bitterness of ages, who clothed me in the baby-things impregnated with her old-maid fury; and Emerald, who laid a table on which I made pepperpots march;

There was the Rani of Cooch Naheen, whose money, placed at the disposal of a humming man, gave birth to the optimism disease, which has recurred, at intervals, ever since; and, in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi, a distant relative called Zohra whose flirtations gave birth, in my father, to that later weakness for Fernandas and Florys;

So to Bombay. Where Winkie’s Vanita could not resist the center-parting of William Methwold, and Nussie-the-duck lost a baby-race; while Mary Pereira, in the name of love, changed the baby-tags of history and became a second mother to me …

Women and women and women: Toxy Catrack, nudging open the door which would later let in the children of midnight; the terrors of her nurse Bi-Appah; the competitive love of Amina and Mary, and what my mother showed me while I lay concealed in a washing-chest; yes, the Black Mango, which forced me to sniff, and unleashed what-were-not-Archangels! … And Evelyn Lilith Burns, cause of a bicycle-accident, who pushed me down a two-storey hillock into the midst of history.

And the Monkey. I mustn’t forget the Monkey.

But also, also, there was Masha Miovic, goading me into finger-loss, and my aunty Pia, filling my heart with revenge-lust, and Lila Sabarmati, whose indiscretions made possible my terrible, manipulating, newspaper-cut-out revenge;

And Mrs. Dubash, who found my gift of a Superman comic and built it, with the help of her son, into Lord Khusro Khusrovand;

And Mary, seeing a ghost.

In Pakistan, the land of submission, the home of purity, I watched the transformation of Monkey-into-Singer, and fetched bread, and fell in love; it was a woman, Tai Bibi, who told me the truth about myself. And in the heart of my inner darkness, I turned to the Puffias, and was only narrowly saved from the threat of a golden-dentured bride.

Beginning again, as the buddha, I lay with a latrine-cleaner and was subjected to electrified urinals as a result; in the East, a farmer’s wife tempted me, and Time was assassinated in consequence; and there were houris in a temple, and we only just escaped in time.

In the shadow of a mosque, Resham Bibi issued a warning.

And I married Parvati-the-Witch.

“Oof, mister,” Padma exclaims, “that’s too much women!”

I do not disagree; because I have not even included her, whose dreams of marriage and Kashmir have inevitably been leaking into me, making me wish, if-only, if-only, so that, having once resigned myself to the cracks, I am not assailed by pangs of discontent, anger, fear and regret.

But above all, the Widow.

“I swear!” Padma slaps her knee, “Too much, mister; too much.”

How are we to understand my too-many women? As the multiple faces of Bharat-Mata? Or as even more … as the dynamic aspect of maya, as cosmic energy, which is represented as the female organ?

Maya, in its dynamic aspect, is called Shakti; perhaps it is no accident that, in the Hindu pantheon, the active power of a deity is contained within his queen! Maya-Shakti mothers, but also “muffles consciousness in its dream-web.” Too-many-women: are they all aspects of Devi, the goddess—who is Shakti, who slew the buffalo-demon, who defeated the ogre Mahisha, who is Kali Durga Chandi Chamunda Uma Sati and Parvati … and who, when active, is colored red?

“I don’t know about that,” Padma brings me down to earth, “They are just women, that’s all.”

Descending from my flight of fancy, I am reminded of the importance of speed; driven on by the imperatives of rip tear crack, I abandon reflections; and begin.

This is how it came about; how Parvati took her destiny into her own hands; how a lie, issuing from my lips, brought her to the desperate condition in which, one night, she extracted from her shabby garments a lock of hero’s hair, and began to speak sonorous words.

Spurned by Saleem, Parvati remembered who had once been his arch-enemy; and, taking a bamboo stick with seven knots in it, and an improvised metal hook attached to one end, she squatted in her shack and recited; with the Hook of Indra in her right hand, and a lock of hair in her left, she summoned him to her. Parvati called to Shiva; believe don’t believe, but Shiva came.

From the beginning there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees; but throughout this narrative I’ve been pushing him, the other, into the background (just as once, I banned him from the councils of the Children). He can be concealed no longer, however; because one morning in May 1974—is it just my cracking memory, or am I right in thinking it was the 18th, perhaps at the very moment at which the deserts of Rajasthan were being shaken by India’s first nuclear explosion? Was Shiva’s explosion into my life truly synchronous with India’s arrival, without prior warning, at the nuclear age?—he came to the magicians’ slum. Uniformed, gonged-and-pipped, and a Major now, Shiva alighted from an Army motorcycle; and even through the modest khaki of his Army pants it was easy to make out the phenomenal twin bulges of his lethal knees … India’s most decorated war hero, but once he led a gang of apaches in the back-streets of Bombay; once, before he discovered the legitimized violence of war, prostitutes were found throttled in gutters (I know, I know—no proof); Major Shiva now, but also Wee Willie Winkie’s boy, who still remembered the words of long-silenced songs: “Good Night, Ladies” still echoed on occasion in his ears.

There are ironies here, which must not pass unnoticed; for had not Shiva risen as Saleem fell? Who was the slum-dweller now, and who looked down from commanding heights? There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives … On what may well have been May 18th, at any rate, Major Shiva came to the magicians’ ghetto, and strode through the cruel streets of the slum with a strange expression on his face, which combined the infinite disdain for poverty of the recently-exalted with something more mysterious: because Major Shiva, drawn to our humble abode by the incantations of Parvati-the-witch, cannot have known what force impelled him to come.

What follows is a reconstruction of the recent career of Major Shiva; I pieced the story together from Parvati’s accounts, which I got out of her after our marriage. It seems my arch-rival was fond of boasting to her about his exploits, so you may wish to make allowances for the distortions of truth which such chest-beating creates; however, there seems no reason to believe that what he told Parvati and she repeated to me was very far removed from what-was-the-case.

At the end of the war in the East, the legends of Shiva’s awful exploits buzzed through the streets of the cities, leaped on to newspaper and into magazines, and thus insinuated themselves into the salons of the well-to-do, settling in clouds as thick as flies upon the eardrums of the country’s hostesses, so that Shiva found himself elevated in social status as well as military rank, and was invited to a thousand and one different gatherings—banquets, musical soirees, bridge parties, diplomatic receptions, party political conferences, great melas and also smaller, local fêtes, school sports days and fashionable balls—to be applauded and monopolized by the noblest and fairest in the land, to all of whom the legends of his exploits clung like flies, walking over their eyeballs so that they saw the young man through the mist of his legend, coating their fingertips so that they touched him through the magical film of his myth, settling on their tongues so that they could not speak to him as they would to an ordinary human being. The Indian Army, which was at that time fighting a political battle against proposed expenditure cuts, understood the value of so charismatic an ambassador, and permitted the hero to circulate amongst his influential admirers; Shiva espoused his new life with a will.