Midnight's Children (46 page)

Even now, I find it hard to write about those days of the end of possibility, when my father found his towel factory crumbling in his hands. The effects of Alia's culinary witchcraft (which operated both through his stomach, when he ate, and his eyes, when he saw his wife) were now all too apparent in him: he became slack at factory management, and irritable with his work-force.

To sum up the ruination of Amina Brand Towels: Ahmed Sinai began treating his workers as peremptorily as once, in Bombay, he had mis-treated servants, and sought to inculcate, in master weavers and assistant packers alike, the eternal verities of the master-servant relationship. As a result his work-force walked out on him in droves, explaining, for instance, 'I am not your latrine-cleaner, sahib; I am qualified Grade One weaver,' and in general refusing to show proper gratitude for his beneficence in having employed them. In the grip of the befuddling wrath of my aunt's packed lunches, he let them all go, and hired a bunch of ill-favoured slackers who pilfered cotton spools and machine parts but were willing to bow and scrape whenever required to do so; and the percentage of defective towels rocketed alarmingly, contracts were not fulfilled, re-orders shrank alarmingly. Ahmed Sinai began bringing home mountains-Himalayas!-of reject towelling, because the factory warehouse was full to overflowing of the sub-standard product of his mismanagement; he took to drink again, and by the summer of that year the house in Guru Mandir was awash in the old obscenities of his battle against the djinns, and we had to squeeze sideways past the Everests and Nanga-Parbats of badly-made terrycloth which lined the passages and hall.

We had delivered ourselves into the lap of my fat aunt's long-simmered wrath; with the single exception of Jamila, who was least affected owing to her long absences, we all ended up with our geese well and truly cooked. It was a painful and bewildering time, in which the love of my parents disintegrated under the joint weight of their new baby and of my aunt's age-old grievances; and gradually the confusion and ruin seeped out through the windows of the house and took over the hearts and minds of the nation, so that war, when it came, was wrapped in the same fuddled haze of unreality in which we had begun to live.

My father was heading steadily towards his stroke; but before the bomb went off in his brain, another fuse was lit: in April 1965, we heard about the peculiar incidents in the Rann of Kutch.

While we thrashed like flies in the webs of my aunt's revenge, the mill of history continued to grind. President Ayub's reputation was in decline: rumours of malpractice in the 1964 election buzzed about, refusing to be swatted. There was, too, the matter of the President's son: Gauhar Ayub, whose enigmatic Gandhara Industries made him a 'multi-multi' overnight. O endless sequence of nefarious sons-of-the-great! Gauhar, with his bullyings and ran tings; and later, in India, Sanjay Gandhi and his Maruti Car Company and his Congress Youth; and most recently of all, Kami Lal Desai… the sons of the great unmake their parents. But I, too, have a son; Aadam Sinai, flying in the face of precedent, will reverse the trend. Sons can be better than their fathers, as well as worse… in April 1965, however, the air buzzed with the fallibility of sons. And whose son was it who scaled the walls of President House on April 1st-what unknown father spawned the foul-smelling fellow who ran up to the President and fired a pistol at his stomach? Some fathers remain mercifully unknown to history; at any rate, the assassin failed, because his gun miraculously jammed. Somebody's son was taken away by police to have his teeth pulled out one by one, to have his nails set on fire; burning cigarette-ends were no doubt pressed against the tip of his penis, so it would probably not be much consolation for that nameless, would-be assassin to know that he had simply been carried away by a tide of history in which sons (high and low) were frequently observed to behave exceptionally badly. (No: I do not exempt myself.)

Divorce between news and reality: newspapers quoted foreign economists-PAKISTAN A MODEL FOR EMERGING NATIONS– while peasants (unreported) cursed the so-called 'green revolution', claiming that most of the newly-drilled water-wells had been useless, poisoned, and in the wrong places anyway; while editorials praised the probity of the nation's leadership, rumours, thick as flies, mentioned Swiss bank accounts and the new American motor-cars of the President's son. The Karachi Dawn spoke of another dawn– good INDO-PAK RELATIONS JUST AROUND THE CORNER?-but, in the Rann of Kutch, yet another inadequate son was discovering a different story.

In the cities, mirages and lies; to the north, in the high mountains, the Chinese were building roads and planning nuclear blasts; but it is time to revert from the general to the particular; or, to be more exact, to the General's son, my cousin, the enuretic Zafar Zulfikar. Who became, between April and July, the archetype of all the many disappointing sons in the land; history, working through him, was also pointing its finger at Gauhar, at future-Sanjay and Kanti-Lal-to-come; and, naturally, at me.

So-cousin Zafar. With whom I had much in common at that time… my heart was full of forbidden love; his trousers, despite all his efforts, filled continually with something rather more tangible, but equally forbidden. I dreamed of mythical lovers, both happy and star-crossed-Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal, but also Montague-and-Capulet; he dreamed of his Kifi fiancee, whose failure to arrive at puberty even after her sixteenth birthday must have made her seem, in his thoughts, a fantasy of an unattainable future… in April 1965, Zafar was sent on manoeuvres to the Pakistan-controlled zone of the Rann of Kutch.

Cruelty of the continent towards the loose-bladdered: Zafar, although a Lieutenant, was the laughing-stock of the Abbottabad military base. There was a story that he had been instructed to wear a rubber undergarment like a balloon around his genitals, so that the glorious uniform of the Pak Army should not be desecrated; mere jawans, when he passed, would make a blowing movement of their cheeks, as if they were puffing up the balloon. (All this became public later, in the statement he made, in floods of tears, after his arrest for murder.) It is possible that Zafar's assignment to the Rann of Kutch was thought up by a tactful superior, who was only trying to get him out of the firing-line of Abbottabad humour… Incontinence doomed Zafar Zulfikar to a crime as heinous as my own. I loved my sister; while he… but let me tell the story the right way up.

Ever since Partition, the Rann had been 'disputed territory.'; although, in practice, neither side had much heart for the dispute. On the hillocks along the 23rd parallel, the unofficial frontier, the Pakistan Government had built a string of border posts, each with its lonely garrison of six men and one beacon-light. Several of these posts were occupied on April 9th, 1965, by troops of the Indian Army; a Pakistani force, including my cousin Zafar, which had been in the area on manoeuvres, engaged in an eighty-two-day struggle for the frontier. The war in the Rann lasted until July 1st. That much is fact; but everything else lies concealed beneath the doubly hazy air of unreality and make-believe which affected all goings-on in those days, and especially all events in the phantasmagoric Rann… so that the story I am going to tell, which is substantially that told by my cousin Zafar, is as likely to be true as anything; as anything, that is to say, except what we were officially told.

… As the young Pakistani soldiers entered the marshy terrain of the Rann, a cold clammy perspiration broke out on their foreheads, and they were unnerved by the greeny sea-bed quality of the light; they recounted stories which frightened them even more, legends of terrible things which happened in this amphibious zone, of demonic sea-beasts with glowing eyes, of fish-women who lay with their fishy heads underwater, breathing, while their perfectly-formed and naked human lower halves lay on the shore, tempting the unwary into fatal sexual acts, because it is well known that nobody may love a fish-woman and live… so that by the time they reached the border posts and went to war, they were a scared rabble of seventeen-year-old boys, and would certainly have been annihilated, except that the opposing Indians had been subjected to the green air of the Rann even longer than they; so in that sorcerers' world a crazy war was fought in which each side thought it saw apparitions of devils fighting alongside its foes; but in the end the Indian forces yielded; many of them collapsed in floods of tears and wept, Thank God, it's over; they told about the great blubbery things which slithered around the border posts at night, and the floating-in-air spirits of drowned men with seaweed wreaths and seashells in their navels. What the surrendering Indian soldiers said, within my cousin's hearing: 'Anyway, these border posts were unmanned; we just saw them empty and came inside.'

The mystery of the deserted border posts did not, at first, seem like a puzzle to the young Pakistani soldiers who were required to occupy them until new border guards were sent; my cousin Lieutenant Zafar found his bladder and bowels voiding themselves with hysterical frequency for the seven nights he spent occupying one of the posts with only five jawans for company. During nights filled with the shrieks of witches and the nameless slithery shufflings of the dark, the six youngsters were reduced to so abject a state that nobody laughed at my cousin any more, they were all too busy wetting their own pants. One of the jawans whispered in terror during the ghostly evil of their last-but-one night: 'Listen, boys, if I had to sit here for a living, I'd bloody well run away, too!'

In a state of utter jelly-like breakdown the soldiers sweated in the Rann; and then on the last night their worst fears came true, they saw an army of ghosts coming out of the darkness towards them; they were in the border post nearest the sea-shore, and in the greeny moonlight they could see the sails of ghost-ships, of phantom dhows; and the ghost-army approached, relentlessly, despite the screams of the soldiers, spectres bearing moss-covered chests and strange shrouded litters piled high with unseen things; and when the ghost-army came in through the door, my cousin Zafar fell at their feet and began to gibber horribly.

The first phantom to enter the outpost had several missing teeth and a curved knife stuck in his belt; when he saw the soldiers in the hut his eyes blazed with a vermilion fury. 'God's pity!' the ghost chieftain said, 'What are you mother-sleepers here for? Didn't you all get properly paid off?'

Not ghosts; smugglers. The six young soldiers found themselves in absurd postures of abject terror, and although they tried to redeem themselves, their shame was engulfingly complete… and now we come to it. In whose name were the smugglers operating? Whose name fell from the lips of the smuggler-chief, and made my cousin's eyes open in horror? Whose fortune, built originally on the miseries of fleeing Hindu families in 1947, was now augmented by these spring-and-summer smugglers' convoys through the unguarded Rann and thence into the cities of Pakistan? Which Punch-faced General, with a voice as thin as a razor-blade, commanded the phantom troops?… But I shall concentrate on facts. In July 1965, my cousin Zafar returned on leave to his father's house in Rawalpindi; and one morning he began to walk slowly towards his father's bedroom, bearing on his shoulders not only the memory of a thousand childhood humiliations and blows; not only the shame of his lifelong enuresis; but also the knowledge that his own father had been responsible for what-happened-at-the-Rann, when Zafar Zulfikar was reduced to gibbering on a floor. My cousin found his father in his bedside bath, and slit his' throat with a long, curved smuggler's knife.

Hidden behind newspaper reports-dastardly indian invasion repelled by our gallant boys-the truth about General Zulfikar became a ghostly, uncertain thing; the paying-off of border guards became, in the papers, innocent soldiers massacred by indian fauj; and who would spread the story of my uncle's vast smuggling activities? What General, what politician did not possess the transistor radios of my uncle's illegality, the air-conditioning units and the imported watches of his sins? General Zulfikar died; cousin Zafar went to prison and was spared marriage to a Kifi princess who obstinately refused to menstruate precisely in order to be spared marriage to him; and the incidents in the Rann of Kutch became the tinder, so to speak, of the larger fire that broke out in August, the fire of the end, in which Saleem finally, and in spite of himself, achieved his elusive purity.

As for my aunt Emerald: she was given permission to emigrate; she had made preparations to do so, intending to leave for Suffolk in England, where she was to stay with her husband's old commanding officer, Brigadier Dodson, who had begun, in his dotage, to spend his time in the company of equally old India hands, watching old films of the Delhi Durbar and the arrival of George V at the Gateway of India… she was looking forward to the empty oblivion of nostalgia and the English winter when the war came and settled all our problems.

On the first day of the 'false peace' which would last a mere thirty-seven days, the stroke hit Ahmed Sinai. It left him paralysed all the way down his left side, and restored him to the dribbles and giggles of his infancy; he, too, mouthed nonsense-words, showing a marked preference for the naughty childhood names of excreta. Giggling 'Caeca!' and 'Soo-soo!' my father came to the end of his chequered career, having once more, and for the last time, lost his way, and also his battle with the djinns. He sat, stunned and cackling, amid the faulty towels of his life; amid faulty towels, my mother, crushed beneath the weight of her monstrous pregnancy, inclined her head gravely as she was visited by Lila Sabarmati's pianola, or the ghost of her brother Hanif, or a pair of hands which danced, moths-around-a-flame, around and around her own… Commander Sabarmati came to see her with his curious baton in his hand, and Nussie-the-duck whispered, 'The end, Amina sister! The end of the world!' in my mother's withering ear… and now, having fought my way through the diseased reality of my Pakistan years, having struggled to make a little sense out of what seemed (through the mist of my aunt Alia's revenge) like a terrible, occult series of reprisals for tearing up our Bombay roots, I have reached the point at which I must tell you about ends.