Midnight's Children (56 page)

There were, of course, a few exceptions to the ghetto's rules: one or two conjurers retained their Hindu faith and, in politics, espoused the Hindusectarian Jana Sangh party or the notorious Ananda Marg extremists; there were even Swatantra voters amongst the jugglers. Non-politically speaking, the old lady Resham Bibi was one of the few members of the community who remained an incurable fantasist, believing (for instance) in the superstition which forbade women to climb mango trees, because a mango tree which had once borne the weight of a woman would bear sour fruit for ever more… and there was the strange fakir named Chishti Khan, whose face was so smooth and lustrous that nobody knew whether he was nineteen or ninety, and who had surrounded his shack with a fabulous creation of bamboo-sticks and scraps of brightly-coloured paper, so that his home looked like a miniature, multi-coloured replica of the nearby Red Fort. Only when you passed through its castellated gateway did you realize that behind the meticulously hyperbolic fa9ade of bamboo-and-paper crenellations and ravelins hid a tin-and-card board hovel like all the rest. Chishti Khan had committed the ultimate solecism of permitting his illusionist expertise to infect his real life; he was not popular in the ghetto. The magicians kept their distance, lest they become diseased by his dreams.

So you will understand why Parvati-the-witch, the possessor of truly wondrous powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her midnight-given gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community which had constantly denied such possibilities.

On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of sight, and the only danger was from scavengers-after-scrap, from searchers-for-abandoned crates or hunters-for-corrugated-tin… that was where Parvati-the-witch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a humble shalwar-kameez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others, midnight's sorceress performed for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a child. Saucer-eye, rope-like pony-tail, fine full red lips… I would never have resisted her for so long if not for the face, the sick decaying eyes nose lips of… There seemed at first to be no limits to Parvati's abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were demons conjured? Did djinns appear, offering riches and overseas travel on levitating rugs? Were frogs turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose into jewels? Was there selling-of-souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit of it; the magic which Parvati-the-witch performed for me-the only magic she was ever willing to perform-was of the type known as 'white'. It was as though the Brahmins' 'Secret Book', the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her; she could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she permitted snakes to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, involving praying to the snake-god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the goodness of the Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reciting a spell: Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless; in a like manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected)-she could cure sores and consecrate talismans-she knew the sraktya charm and the Rite of the Tree. And all this, in a series of extraordinary night-time displays, she revealed to me beneath the walls of the Mosque-but still she was not happy.

As ever, I am obliged to accept responsibility; the scent of mourn-fulness which hung around Parvati-the-witch was my creation. Because she was twenty-five years old, and wanted more from me than my willingness to be her audience; God knows why, but she wanted me in her bed-or, to be precise, to lie with her on the lengdi of sackcloth which served her for a bed in the hovel she shared with a family of contortionist triplets from Kerala, three girls who were orphans just like her-just like myself.

What she did for me: under the power of her magic, hair began to grow where none had grown since Mr Zagallo pulled too hard; her wizardry caused the birthmarks on my face to fade under the healing applications of herbal poultices; it seemed that even the bandiness of my legs was diminishing under her care. (She could do nothing, however, for my one bad ear; there is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.) But no matter how much she did for me, I was unable to do for her the thing she desired most; because although we lay down together beneath the walk on the blind side of the Mosque, the moonlight showed me her night-time face turning, always turning into that of my distant, vanished sister… no, not my sister… into the putrid, vilely disfigured face of Jamila Singer. Parvati anointed her body with unguent oils imbued with erotic charm; she combed her hair a thousand times with a comb made from aphrodisiac deer-bones; and (I do not doubt it) in my absence she must have tried all manner of lovers' sorceries; but I was in the grip of an older bewitchment, and could not, it seemed, be released; I was doomed to find the faces of women who loved me turning into the features of… but you know whose crumbling features appeared, filling my nostrils with their unholy stench.

'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, over-night, 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 smelted 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: 'Lake 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 ,s 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 Kashmir! 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 Cafe; 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 centre-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 musn'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 now 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 coloured 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 improvized 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 re-invention 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 fetes, 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.

He grew a luxuriant moustache to which his personal batman applied a daily pomade of linseed-oil spiced with coriander; always elegantly turned out in the drawing-rooms of the mighty, he engaged in political chit-chat, and declared himself a firm admirer of Mrs Gandhi, largely because of his hatred for her opponent Morarji Desai, who was intolerably ancient, drank his own urine, had skin which rustled like rice-paper, and, as Chief Minister of Bombay, had once been responsible for the banning of alcohol and the persecution of young goondas, that is to say hooligans or apaches, or, in other words, of the child Shiva himself… but such idle chatter occupied a mere fraction of his thoughts, the rest of which were entirely taken up with the ladies. Shiva, too, was besotted by too-much-women, and in those heady days after the military victory acquired a secret reputation which (he boasted to Parvati) rapidly grew to rival his official, public fame-a 'black' legend to set beside the 'white' one. What was whispered at the hen-parties and canasta-evenings of the land? What was hissed through giggles wherever two or three glittering ladies got together? This: Major Shiva was becoming a notorious seducer; a ladies'-man; a cuckolder of the rich; in short, a stud.

There were women-he told Parvati-wherever he went: their curving bird-soft bodies quaking beneath the weight of their jewellery and lust, their eyes misted over by his legend; it would have been difficult to refuse them even had he wanted to. But Major Shiva had no intention of refusing. He listened sympathetically to their little tragedies-impotent husbands, beatings, lack-of-attention-to whatever excuses the lovely creatures wished to offer. Like my grandmother at her petrol pump (but with more sinister motives) he gave patient audience to their woes; sipping whisky in the chandeliered splendour of ballrooms, he watched them batting their eyelids and breathing suggestively while they moaned; and always, at last, they contrived to drop a handbag, or spill a drink, or knock his swagger-stick from his grasp, so that he would have to stoop to the floor to retrieve whatever-had-fallen, and then he would see the notes tucked into their sandals, sticking daintily out from under painted toes. In those days (if the Major is to be believed) the lovely scandalous begums of India became awfully clumsy, and their chap-pals spoke of rendezvous-at-midnight, of trellises of bougainvillaea outside bedroom windows, of husbands conveniently away launching ships or exporting tea or buying ball-bearings from Swedes. While these unfortunates were away, the Major visited their homes to steal their most prized possessions: their women fell into his arms. It is possible (I have divided by half the Major's own figures) that at the height of his philanderings there were no less than ten thousand women in love with him.

And certainly there were children. The spawn of illicit midnights. Beautiful bouncing infants secure in the cradles of the rich. Strewing bastards across the map of India, the war hero went his way; but (and this, too, is what he told Parvati) he suffered from the curious fault of losing interest in anyone who became pregnant; no matter how beautiful sensuous loving they were, he deserted the bedrooms of all who bore his children; and lovely ladies with red-rimmed eyes were obliged to persuade their cuckolded husbands that yes, of course it's your baby, darling, life-of-mine, doesn't it look just like you, and of course I'm not sad, why should I be, these are tears of joy..

One such deserted mother was Roshanara, the child-wife of the steel magnate S. P. Shetty; and at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in Bombay, she punctured the mighty balloon of his pride. He had been promenading about the paddock, stooping every few yards to return ladies' shawls and parasols, which seemed to acquire a life of their own and spring out of their owners' hands as he passed; Roshanara Shetty confronted him here, standing squarely in his path and refusing to budge, her seventeen-year-old eyes filled with the ferocious pique of childhood. He greeted her coolly, touching his Army cap, and attempted to pass; but she dug her needle-sharp nails into his arm, smiling dangerously as ice, and strolled along beside him. As they walked she poured her infantile poison into his ear, and her hatred and resentment of her former lover gave her the skill to make him believe her. Callously she whispered that it was so funny, my God, the way he strutted around in high society like some kind of rooster, while all the time the ladies were laughing at him behind his back, O yes, Major Sahib, don't fool yourself, high-class women have always enjoyed sleeping with animals peasants brutes, but that's how we think of you, my God it's disgusting just to watch you eat, gravy down your chin, don't you think we see how you never hold teacups by their handles, do you imagine we can't hear your belches and breakings of wind, you're just our pet ape, Major Sahib, very useful, but basically a clown.