Midnight's Children (59 page)

Influence of hair-styles on the course of history: there's another ticklish business. If William Methwold had lacked a centre-parting, I might not have been here today; and if the Mother of the Nation had had a coiffure of uniform pigment, the Emergency she spawned might easily have lacked a darker side. But she had white hair on one side and black on the other; the Emergency, too, had a white part-public, visible, documented, a matter for historians-and a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a matter for us.

Mrs Indira Gandhi was born in November 1917 to Kamala and Jawaharlal Nehru. Her middle name was Priyadarshini. She was not related to 'Mahatma' M. K. Gandhi; her surname was the legacy of. her marriage, in 1952, to one Feroze Gandhi, who became known as 'the nation's son-in-law'. They had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, but in 1949 she moved back into her father's home and became his 'official hostess'. Feroze made one attempt to live there, too, but it was not a success. He became a ferocious critic of the Nehru Government, exposing the Mundhra scandal and forcing the resignation of the then Finance Minister, T. T. Krishnamachari-T.T.K.' himself. Mr Feroze Gandhi died of a heart seizure in 1960, aged forty-seven. Sanjay Gandhi, and his ex-model wife Menaka, were prominent during the Emergency. The Sanjay Youth Movement was particularly effective in the sterilization campaign.

I have included this somewhat elementary summary just in case you had failed to realize that the Prime Minister of India was, in 1975, fifteen years a widow. Or (because the capital letter may be of use): a Widow.

Yes, Padma: Mother Indira really had it in for me.

No!-But I must.

I don't want to tell it!-But I swore to tell it all.-No, I renounce, not that, surely some things are better left…?-That won't wash; what can't be cured, must be endured!-But surely not the whispering walls, and treason, and snip snip, and the women with the bruised chests?-Especially those things.-But how can I, look at me, I'm tearing myself apart, can't even agree with myself, talking arguing like a wild fellow, cracking up, memory going, yes, memory plunging into chasms and being swallowed by the dark, only fragments remain, none of it makes sense any more!-But I mustn't presume to judge; must simply continue (having once begun) until the end; sense-and-nonsense is no longer (perhaps never was) for me to evaluate.-But the horror of it, I can't won't mustn't won't can't no!-Stop this; begin.-No!-Yes.

About the dream, then? I might be able to tell it as a dream. Yes, perhaps a nightmare: green and black the Widow's hair and clutching hand and children mmff and little balls and one-by-one and torn-in-half and little balls go flying flying green and black her hand is green her nails are black as black.-No dreams. Neither the time nor the place for. Facts, as remembered. To the best of one's ability. The way it was: Begin.-No choice?-None; when was there ever? There are imperatives, and logical-consequences, and inevitabilities, and recurrences; there are things-done-to, and accidents, and bludgeonings-of-fate; when was there ever a choice? When options? When a decision freely-made, to be this or that or the other? No choice; begin.-Yes.

Listen:

Endless night, days weeks months without the sun, or rather (because it's important to be precise) beneath a sun as cold as a stream-rinsed plate, a sun washing us in lunatic midnight light; I'm talking about the winter of 1975-6. In the winter, darkness; and also tuberculosis.

Once, in a blue room overlooking the sea, beneath the pointing finger of a fisherman, I fought typhoid and was rescued by snake-poison; now, trapped in the dynastic webs of recurrence by my recognition of his sonship, our Aadam Sinai was also obliged to spend his early months battling the invisible snakes of a disease. The serpents of tuberculosis wound themselves around his neck and made him gasp for air… but he was a child of ears and silence, and when he spluttered, there were no sounds; when he wheezed, no raspings issued from his throat. In short, my son fell ill, and although his mother, Parvati or Laylah, went in search of the herbs of her magical gift-although infusions of herbs in well-boiled water were constantly administered, the wraith-like worms of tuberculosis refused to be driven away. I suspected, from the first, something darkly metaphorical in this illness-believing that, in those midnight months when the age of my connection-to-history overlapped with his, our private emergency was not unconnected with the larger, macrocosmic disease, under whose influence the sun had become as pallid and diseased as our son. Parvati-then (like Padma-now) dismissed these abstract ruminations, attacking as mere folly my growing obsession with light, in whose grip I began lighting little dia-lamps in the shack of my son's illness, filling our hut with candle-flames at noon… but I insist on the accuracy of my diagnosis; 'I tell you,' I insisted then, 'while the Emergency lasts, he will never become well.'

Driven to distraction by her failure to cure that grave child who never cried, my Parvati-Laylah refused to believe my pessimistic theories; but she became vulnerable to every other cockeyed notion. When one of the older women in the colony of the magicians told her-as Resham Bibi might have-that the illness could not come out while the child remained dumb, Parvati seemed to find that plausible. 'Sickness is a grief of the body,' she lectured me, 'It must be shaken off in tears and groans.' That night, she returned to the hut clutching a little bundle of green powder, wrapped in newspaper and tied up with pale pink string, and told me that this was a preparation of such power that it would oblige even a stone to shriek. When she administered the medicine the child's cheeks began to bulge, as though his mouth were full of food; the long-suppressed sounds of his babyhood flooded up behind his lips, and he jammed his mouth shut in fury. It became clear that the infant was close to choking as he tried to swallow back the torrential vomit of pent-up sound which the green powder had stirred up; and this was when we realized that we were in the presence of one of the earth's most implacable wills. At the end of an hour during which my son turned first saffron, then saffron-and-green, and finally the colour of grass, I could not stand it any more and bellowed, 'Woman, if the little fellow wants so much to stay quiet, we mustn't kill him for it!' I picked up Aadam to rock him, and felt his little body becoming rigid, his knee-joints elbows neck were filling up with the held-back tumult of unexpressed sounds, and at last Parvati relented and prepared an antidote by mashing arrowroot and camomile in a tin bowl while muttering strange imprecations under her breath. After that, nobody ever tried to make Aadam Sinai do anything he did not wish to do; we watched him battling against tuberculosis and tried to find reassurance in the idea that a will so steely would surely refuse to be defeated by any mere disease.

In those last days my wife Laylah or Parvati was also being gnawed by the interior moths of despair, because when she came towards me for comfort or warmth in the isolation of our sleeping hours, I still saw superimposed upon her features the horribly eroded physiognomy of Jamila Singer; and although I confessed to Parvati the secret of the spectre, consoling her by pointing out that at its present rate of decay it would have crumbled away entirely before long, she told me dolorously that spittoons and war had softened my brain, and despaired of her marriage which would, as it transpired, never be consummated; slowly, slowly there appeared on her lips the ominous pout of her grief… but what could I do? What solace could I offer-I, Saleem Snotnose, who had been reduced to poverty by the withdrawal of my family's protection, who had chosen (if it was a choice) to live by my olfactory gifts, earning a few paisa a day by sniffing out what people had eaten for dinner the previous day and which of them were in love; what consolation could I bring her, when I was already in the clutches of the cold hand of that lingering midnight, and could sniff finality in the air?

Saleem's nose (you can't have forgotten) could smell stranger things than horse-dung. The perfumes of emotions and ideas, the odour of how-things-were: all these were and are nosed out by me with ease. When the Constitution was altered to give the Prime Minister well-nigh-absolute powers, I smelted the ghosts of ancient empires in the air… in that city which was littered with the phantoms of Slave Kings and Mughals, of Aurangzeb the merciless and the last, pink conquerors, I inhaled once again the sharp aroma of despotism. It smelled like burning oily rags.

But even the nasally incompetent could have worked out that, during the winter of 1975-6, something smelled rotten in the capital; what alarmed me was a stranger, more personal stink: the whiff of personal danger, in which I discerned the presence of a pair of treacherous, retributive knees… my first intimation that an ancient conflict, which began when a love-crazed virgin switched name-tags, was shortly to end in a frenzy of treason and snippings.

Perhaps, with such a warning pricking at my nostrils, I should have fled-tipped off by a nose, I could have taken to my heels. But there were practical objections: where would I have gone? And, burdened by wife and son, how fast could I have moved? Nor must it be forgotten that I did flee once, and look where I ended up: in the Sundarbans, the jungle of phantasms and retribution, from which I only escaped by the skin of my teeth!… At any rate, I did not run.

It probably didn't matter; Shiva-implacable, traitorous, my enemy from our birth-would have found me in the end. Because although a nose is uniquely equipped for the purpose of sniffing-things-out, when it comes to action there's no denying the advantages of a pair of grasping, choking knees.

I shall permit myself one last, paradoxical observation on this subject: if, as I believe, it was at the house of the wailing women that I learned the answer to the question of purpose which had plagued me all my life, then by saving myself from that palace of annihilations

I would also have denied myself this most precious of discoveries. To put it rather more philosophically: every cloud has a silver lining.

Saleem-and-Shiva, nose-and-knees… we shared just three things: the moment (and its consequences) of our birth; the guilt of treachery; and our son, Aadam, our synthesis, unsmiling, grave, with omni-audient ears. Aadam Sinai was in many respects the exact opposite of Saleem. I, at my beginning, grew with vertiginous speed; Aadam, wrestling with the serpents of disease, scarcely grew at all. Saleem wore an ingratiating smile from the start; Aadam had more dignity, and kept his grins to himself. Whereas Saleem had subjugated his will to the joint tyrannies of family and fate, Aadam fought ferociously, refusing to yield even to the coercion of green powder. And while Saleem had been so determined to absorb the universe that he had been, for a time, unable to blink, Aadam preferred to keep his eyes firmly closed… although when, every so often, he deigned to open them, I observed their colour, which was blue. Ice-blue, the blue of recurrence, the fateful blue of Kashmiri sky… but there is no need to elaborate further.

We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams. How much was heard by those flapping ears which seemed, on occasion, to be burning with the heat of their knowledge? If he could have talked, would he have cautioned me against treason and bulldozers? In a country dominated by the twin multitudes of noises and smells, we could have been the perfect team; but my baby son rejected speech, and I failed to obey the dictates of my nose.

'Arre baap,' Padma cries, 'Just tell what happened, mister! What is so surprising if a baby does not make conversations?'

And again the rifts inside me: I can't.-You must.-Yes.

April 1976 found me still living in the colony or ghetto of the magicians; my son Aadam was still in the grip of a slow tuberculosis that seemed unresponsive to any form of treatment. I was full of forebodings (and thoughts of flight); but if any one man was the reason for my remaining in the ghetto, that man was Picture Singh.

Padma; Saleem threw in his lot with the magicians of Delhi partly out of a sense of fitness-a self-flagellant belief in the rectitude of his belated descent into poverty (I took with me, from my uncle's house, no more than two shirts, white, two pairs trousers, also white, onetee-shirt, decorated with pink guitars, and shoes, one pair, black); ' partly, I came out of loyalty, having been bound by knots of gratitude to my rescuer, Parvati-the-witch; but I stayed-when, as a literate young man, I might at the very least have been a bank clerk or a night-school teacher of reading and writing-because, all my life, consciously or unconsciously, I have sought out fathers. Ahmed Sinai, Hanif Aziz, Sharpsticker sahib, General Zulfikar have all been pressed into service in the absence of William Methwold; Picture Singh was the last of this noble line. And perhaps, in my dual lust for fathers and saving-the-country, I exaggerated Picture Singh; the horrifying possibility exists that I distorted him (and have distorted him again in these pages) into a dream-figment of my own imagination… it is certainly true that whenever I inquired, 'When are you going to lead us, Pictureji-when will the great day come?', he, shuffling awkwardly, replied, 'Get such things out from your head, captain; I am a poor man from Rajasthan, and also the Most Charming Man In The World; don't make me anything else.' But I, urging him on, 'There is a precedent-there was Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird…' to which Picture, 'Captain, you got some crazy notions.'

During the early months of the Emergency, Picture Singh remained in the clutches of a gloomy silence reminiscent (once again!) of the great Boundlessness of Reverend Mother (which had also leaked into my son…), and neglected to lecture his audiences in the highways and back-streets of the Old and New cities as, in the past, he had insisted on doing; but although he, 'This is a time for silence, captain', I remained convinced that one day, one millennial dawn at midnight's end, somehow, at the head of a great jooloos or procession of the dispossessed, perhaps playing his flute and wreathed in deadly snakes, it would be Picture Singh who led us towards the light… but maybe he was never more than a snake-charmer; I do not deny the possibility. I say only that to me my last father, tall gaunt bearded, his hair swept back into a knot behind his neck, seemed the very avatar of Mian Abdullah; but perhaps it was all an illusion, born of my attempt to bind him to the threads of my history by an effort of sheer will. There have been illusions in my life; don't think I'm unaware of the fact. We are coming, however, to a time beyond illusions; having no option, I must at last set down, in black and white, the climax I have avoided all evening.

Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, and must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin. (Once, in a blue room, Ahmed Sinai improvised endings for fairy-tales whose original conclusions he had long ago forgotten; the Brass Monkey and I heard, down the years, all kinds of different versions of the journey of Sinbad, and of the adventures of Hatim Tai… if I began again, would I, too, end in a different place?) Well then: I must content myself with shreds and scraps: as I wrote centuries ago, the trick is to fill in the gaps, guided by the few clues one is given. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence; I must be guided by the memory of a once-glimpsed file with tell-tale initials; and by the other, remaining shards of the past, lingering in my ransacked memory-vaults like broken bottles on a beach… Like scraps of memory, sheets of newsprint used to bowl through the magicians' colony in the silent midnight wind.