Midnight's Children (58 page)

Despite the absence of Resham Bibi, the wedding went off well enough. Parvati's formal conversion to Islam (which irritated Picture Singh, but on which I found myself insisting, in another throwback to an earlier life) was performed by a red-bearded Haji who looked ill-at-ease in the presence of so many teasing, provocative members of the ungodly; under the shifting gaze of this fellow who resembled a large and bearded onion she intoned her belief that there was no God but God and that Muhammad was his prophet; she took a name which I chose for her out of the repository of my dreams, becoming Laylah, night, so that she too was caught up in the repetitive cycles of my history, becoming an echo of all the other people who have been obliged to change their names… like my own mother Amina Sinai, Parvati-the-witch became a new person in order to have a child.

At the henna ceremony, half the magicians adopted me, performing the functions of my 'family'; the other half took Parvati's side, and happy insults were sung late into the night while intricate traceries of henna dried into the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet; and if the absence of Resham Bibi deprived the insults of a certain cutting edge, we were not overly sorry about the fact. During the nikah, the wedding proper, the happy couple were seated on a dais hastily constructed out of the Dalda-boxes of Resham's demolished shack, and the magicians filed solemnly past us, dropping coins of small denominations into our laps; and when the new Laylah Sinai fainted everyone smiled contentedly, because every good bride should faint at her wedding, and nobody mentioned the embarrassing possibility that she might have passed out because of the nausea or perhaps the kicking-pains caused by the child inside her basket. That evening the magicians put on a show so wonderful that rumours of it spread throughout the Old City, and crowds gathered to watch, Muslim businessmen from a nearby muhalla in which once a public announcement had been made and silversmiths and milk-shake vendors from Chandni Chowk, evening strollers and Japanese tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs; and there were pink Europeans discussing camera lenses with the Japanese, there were shutters clicking and flash bulbs popping, and I was told by one of the tourists that India was indeed a truly wonderful country with many remarkable traditions, and would be just fine and perfect if one did not constantly have to eat Indian food. And at the valima, the consummation ceremony (at which, on this occasion, no bloodstained sheets were held up, with or without perforations, since I had spent our nuptial night with my eyes shut tight and my body averted from my wife's, lest the unbearable features of Jamila Singer come to haunt me. in the bewilderment of the dark), the magicians surpassed their efforts of the wedding-night.

But when all the excitement had died down, I heard (with one good and one bad ear) the inexorable sound of the future stealing up upon us: tick, tock, louder and louder, until the birth of Saleem Sinai-and also of the baby's father-found a mirror in the events of the night of the 25th of June.

While mysterious assassins killed government officials, and narrowly failed to get rid of Mrs Gandhi's personally-chosen Chief Justice, A. N. Ray, the magicians' ghetto concentrated on another mystery: the ballooning basket of Parvati-the-witch.

While the Janata Morcha grew in all kinds of bizarre directions, until it embraced Maoist Communists (such as our very own contortionists, including the rubber-limbed triplets with whom Parvati had lived before our marriage-since the nuptials, we had moved into a hut of our own, which the ghetto had built for us as a wedding present on the site of Resham's hovel) and extreme right-wing members of the Ananda Marg; until Left-Socialists and conservative Swatantra members joined its ranks… while the people's front expanded in this grotesque manner, I, Saleem, wondered incessantly about what might be growing behind the expanding frontage of my wife.

While public discontent with the Indira Congress threatened to crush the government like a fly, the brand-new Laylah Sinai, whose eyes had grown wider than ever, sat as still as a stone while the weight of the baby increased until it threatened to crush her bones to powder; and Picture Singh, in an innocent echo of an ancient remark, said, 'Hey, captain! It's going to be big big: a real ten-chip whopper for sure!'

And then it was the twelfth of June.

History-books newspapers radio-programmes tell us that at two p.m. on June I2th, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty, by Judge Jag Mohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court, of two counts of campaign malpractice during the election campaign of 1971; what has never previously been revealed is that it was at precisely two p.m. that Parvati-the-witch (now Laylah Sinai) became sure she had entered labour.

The labour of Parvati-Laylah lasted for thirteen days. On the first day, while the Prime Minister was refusing to resign, although her convictions carried with them a mandatory penalty barring her from public office for six years, the cervix of Parvati-the-witch, despite contractions as painful as mule-kicks, obstinately refused to dilate; Saleem Sinai and Picture Singh, barred from the hut of her torment by the contortionist triplets who had taken on the dudes of mid-wives, were obliged to listen to her useless shrieks until a steady stream of fire-eaters card-sharpers coal-walkers came up and slapped them on the back and made dirty jokes; and it was only in my ears that the ticking could be heard… a countdown to God-knows what, until I became possessed by fear, and told Picture Singh, 'I don't know what's going to come out of her, but it isn't going to be good…' And Pictureji, reassuringly: 'Don't you worry, captain! Everything will be fine! A ten-chip whopper, I swear!' And Parvati, screaming screaming, and night fading into day, and on the second day, when in Gujarat Mrs Gandhi's electoral candidates were routed by the Janata Morcha, my Parvati was in the grip of pains so intense that they made her as stiff as steel, and I refused to eat until the baby was born or whatever happened happened, I sat cross-legged outside the hovel of her agony, shaking with terror in the heat, begging don't let her die don't let her die, although I had never made love to her during all the months of our marriage; in spite of my fear of the spectre of Jamila Singer, I prayed and fasted, although Picture Singh, 'For pity's sake, captain,' I refused, and by the ninth day the ghetto had fallen into a terrible hush, a silence so absolute that not even the calls of the muezzin of the mosque could penetrate it, a soundlessness of such immense powers that it shut out the roars of the Janata Morcha demonstrations outside Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President's house, a horror-struck muteness of the same awful enveloping magic as the great silence which had once hung over my grandparents' house in Agra, so that on the ninth day we could not hear Morarji Desai calling on President Ahmad to sack the disgraced Prime Minister, and the only sounds in the entire world were the ruined whimperings of Parvati-Laylah, as the contractions piled upon her like mountains, and she sounded as though she were calling to us down a long hollow tunnel of pain, while I sat cross-legged being dismembered by her agony with the soundless sound of ticktock in my brain, and inside the hut there were the contortionist triplets pouring water over Parvati's body to replenish the moisture which was pouring out of her in fountains, forcing a stick between her teeth to prevent her from biting out her tongue, and trying to force down her eyelids over eyes which were bulging so frighteningly that the triplets were afraid they would fall out and get dirty on the floor, and then it was the twelfth day and I was half dead of starvation while elsewhere in the city the Supreme Court was informing Mrs Gandhi that she need not resign until her appeal, but must neither vote in the Lok Sabha nor draw a salary, and while the Prime Minister in her exultation at this partial victory began to abuse her opponents in language of which a Koli fishwife would have been proud, my Parvati's labour entered a phase in which despite her utter exhaustion she found the energy to issue a string of foul-smelling oaths from her colour-drained lips, so that the cesspit stink of her obscenities filled our nostrils and made us retch, and the three contortionists fled from the hut crying that she had become so stretched, so colourless that you could almost see through her, and she would surely die if the baby did not come now, and in my ears tick tock the pounding tick tock until I was sure, yes, soon soon soon, and when the triplets returned to her bedside in the evening of the thirteenth day they screamed Yes yes she has begun to push, come on Parvati, push push push, and while Parvati pushed in the ghetto, J. P. Narayan and Morarji Desai were also goading Indira Gandhi, while triplets yelled push push push the leaders of the Janata Morcha urged the police and Army to disobey the illegal orders of the disqualified Prime Minister, so in a sense they were forcing Mrs Gandhi to push, and as the night darkened towards the midnight hour, because nothing ever happens at any other time, triplets began to screech it's coming coming coming, and elsewhere the Prime Minister was giving birth to a child of her own… in the ghetto, in the hut beside which I sat cross-legged and starving to death, my son was coming coming coming, the head is out, the triplets screeched, while members of the Central Reserve Police arrested the heads of the Janata Morcha, including the impossibly ancient and almost mythological figures of Morarji Desai and J. P. Narayan, push push push, and in the heart of that terrible midnight while ticktock pounded in my ears a child was born, a ten-chip whopper all right, popping out so easily in the end that it was impossible to understand what all the trouble had been. Parvati gave a final pitiable little yelp and out he popped, while all over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches, and when the three contortionists had washed the baby and wrapped it in an old sari and brought it out for its father to see, at exactly the same moment, the word Emergency was being heard for the first time, and suspension-of-civil rights, and censorship-of-the-press, and armoured-units-on-special-alert, and arrest-of-subversive-elements; something was ending, something was being born, and at the precise instant of the birth of the new India and the beginning of a continuous midnight which would not end for two long years, my son, the child of the renewed ticktock, came out into the world.

And there is more: because when, in the murky half-light of that endlessly prolonged midnight, Saleem Sinai saw his son for the first time, he began to laugh helplessly, his brain ravaged by hunger, yes, but also by the knowledge that his relentless destiny had played yet another of its grotesque little jokes, and although Picture Singh, scandalized by my laughter which in my weakness was like the giggling of a schoolgirl, cried repeatedly, 'Come on, captain! Don't behave mad now! It is a son, captain, be happy!', Saleem Sinai continued to acknowledge the birth by tittering hysterically at fate, because the boy, the baby boy, the-boy-my-son Aadam, Aadam Sinai was perfectly formed-except, that is, for his ears. On either side of his head flapped audient protuberances like sails, ears so colossally huge that the triplets afterwards revealed that when his head popped out they had thought, for one bad moment, that it was the head of a tiny elephant.

… 'Captain, Saleem captain,' Picture Singh was begging, 'be nice now! Ears are not anything to go crazy for!'

He was born in Old Delhi… once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: Aadam Sinai arrived at a night-shadowed slum on June 25th, 1975. And the time? The time matters, too. As I said: at night. No, it's important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at Emergency, he emerged. There were gasps; and, across the country, silences and fears. And owing to the occult tyrannies of that benighted hour, he was mysteriously handcuffed to history, his destinies indissolubly chained to those of his country. Unprophesied, uncelebrated, he came; no prime ministers wrote him letters; but, just the same, as my time of connection neared its end, his began. He, of course, was left entirely without a say in the matter; after all, he couldn't even wipe his own nose at the time.

He was the child of a father who was not his father; but also the child of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again;

He was the true great-grandson of his great-grandfather, but elephantiasis attacked him in the ears instead of the nose-because he was also the true son of Shiva-and-Parvati; he was elephant-headed Ganesh;

He was born with ears which flapped so high and wide that they must have heard the shootings in Bihar and the screams of lathi-charged dock-workers in Bombay… a child who heard too much, and as a result never spoke, rendered dumb by a surfeit of sound, so that between then-and-now, from slum to pickle factory, I have never heard him utter a single word;

He was the possessor of a navel which chose to stick out instead of in, so that Picture Singh, aghast, cried, 'His bimbi, captain! His bimbi, look!', and he became, from the first days, the gracious recipient of our awe;

A child of such grave good nature that his absolute refusal to cry or whimper utterly won over his adoptive father, who gave up laughing hysterically at the grotesque ears and began to rock the silent infant gently in his arms;

A child who heard a song as he rocked in arms, a song sung in the historical accents of a disgraced ayah: 'Anything you want to be, you kin be; you kin be just what-all you want.'

But now that I've given birth to my flap-eared, silent son-there are questions to be answered about that other, synchronous birth. Unpalatable, awkward queries: did Saleem's dream of saving the nation leak, through the osmotic tissues of history, into the thoughts of the Prime Minister herself? Was my lifelong belief in the equation between the State and myself transmuted, in 'the Madam's' mind, into that in-those-days-famous phrase: India is Indira and Indira is India? Were we competitors for centrality-was she gripped by a lust for meaning as profound as my own-and was that, was that why… ?