Midnight's Children (62 page)

(Are you listening, children? Pass it on.)

'The people of India,' the Widow's Hand explained, 'worship our Lady like a god. Indians are only capable of worshipping one God.'

But I was brought up in Bombay, where Shiva Vishnu Ganesh Ahuramazda Allah and countless others had their flocks… 'What about the pantheon,' I argued, 'the three hundred and thirty million gods of Hinduism alone? And Islam, and Bodhisattvas…?' And now the answer: 'Oh yes! My God, millions of gods, you are right! But all manifestations of the same om. You are Muslim: you know what is om ? Very well. For the masses, our Lady is a manifestation of the om.'

There are four hundred and twenty of us; a mere 0.00007 per cent of the six-hundred-million strong population of India. Statistically insignificant; even if we were considered as a percentage of the arrested thirty (or two hundred and fifty) thousand, we formed a mere 1.4 (or 0.168) per cent! But what I learned from the Widow's Hand is that those who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities; and that, that and that only, is why we, the magical children of midnight, were hated feared destroyed by the Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of India but also aspired to be Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible-aspect, possessor of the shakti of the gods, a multi-limbed divinity with a centre-parting and schizophrenic hair… And that was how I learned my meaning in the crumbling palace of the bruised-breasted women.

Who am I? Who were we? We were are shall be the gods you never had. But also something else; and to explain that, I must tell the difficult part at last.

All in a rush, then, because otherwise it will never come out, I tell you that on New Year's Day, 1977, I was told by a gorgeous girl with rolling hips that yes, they would be satisfied with four hundred and twenty, they had verified one hundred and thirty-nine dead, only a handful had escaped, so now it would begin, snip snip, there would be anaesthetic and count-to-ten, the numbers marching one two three, and I, whispering to the wall, Let them let them, while we live and stay together who can stand against us?… And who led us, one-by-one, to the chamber in the cellar where, because we are not savages, sir, air-conditioning units had been installed, and a table with a hanging lamp, and doctors nurses green and black, their robes were green their eyes were black… who, with knobbly irresistible knees, escorted me to the chamber of my undoing? But you know, you can guess, there is only one war hero in this story, unable to argue with the venom of his knees I walked wherever he ordered… and then I was there, and a gorgeous girl with big rolling hips saying, 'After all, you can't complain, you won't deny that you once made assertions of Prophethood?', because they knew everything, Padma, everything everything, they put me down on the table and the mask coming down over my face and count-to-ten and numbers pounding seven eight nine…

Ten.

And 'Good God he's still conscious, be a good fellow, go on to twenty…'

… Eighteen nineteen twen

They were good doctors: they left nothing to chance. Not for us the simple vas-and tubectomies performed on the teeming nasses; because there was a chance, just a chance that such operations could be reversed… ectomies were performed, but irreversibly: testicles were removed from sacs, and wombs vanished for ever.

Test-and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves… but that was only a side-effect, because they were truly extraordinary doctors, and they drained us of more than that: hope, too, was excised, and I don't know how it was done, because the numbers had marched over me, I was out for the count, and all I can tell you is that at the end of eighteen days on which the stupefying operations were carried out at a mean rate of 23.33 per day, we were not only missing little balls and inner sacs, but other things as well: in this respect, I came off better than most, because drainage-above had robbed me of my midnight-given telepathy, I had nothing to lose, the sensitivity of a nose cannot be drained away… but as for the rest of them, for all those who had come to the palace of the wailing widows with their magical gifts intact, the awakening from anaesthesia was cruel indeed, and whispering through the wall came the tale of their undoing, the tormented cry of children who had lost their magic: she had cut it out of us, gorgeously with wide rolling hips she had devised the operation of our annihilation, and now we were nothing, who were we, a mere 0.00007 per cent, now fishes could not be multiplied nor base metals transmuted; gone forever, the possibilities of flight and lycanthropy and the originally-one-thousand-and-one marvellous promises of a numinous midnight.

Drainage below: it was not a reversible operation.

Who were we? Broken promises; made to be broken.

And now I must tell you about the smell.

Yes, you must have all of it: however overblown, however Bombay-talkie-melodramatic, you must let it sink in, you must see! What Saleem smelled in the evening of January 18th, 1977: something frying in an iron skillet, soft unspeakable somethings spiced with turmeric coriander cumin and fenugreek… the pungent inescapable fumes of what-had-been-excised, cooking over a low, slow fire.

When four-hundred-and-twenty suffered ectomies, an avenging Goddess ensured that certain ectomized parts were curried with onions and green chillies, and fed to the pie-dogs of Benares. (There were four hundred and twenty-one ectomies performed: because one of us, whom we called Narada or Markandaya, had the ability of changing sex; he, or she, had to be operated on twice.)

No, I can't prove it, not any of it. Evidence went up in smoke: some was fed to pie-dogs; and later, on March 20th, files were burned by a mother with particoloured hair and her beloved son.

But Padma knows what I can no longer do; Padma, who once, in her anger, cried out: 'But what use you, my God, as a lover?' That part, at least, can be verified: in the hovel of Picture Singh, I cursed myself with the lie of impotence; I cannot say I was not warned, because he told me: 'Anything could happen, captain.' It did.

Sometimes I feel a thousand years old: or (because I cannot, even now, abandon form), to be exact, a thousand and one.

The Widow's Hand had rolling hips and once owned a jewellery boutique. I began among jewels: in Kashmir, in 1915, there were rubies and diamonds. My great-grandparents ran a gemstone store. Form-once again, recurrence and shape!-no escape from it.

In the walls, the hopeless whispers of the stunned four-hundred-and-nineteen; while the four-hundred-and-twentieth gives vent-just once; one moment of ranting is permissible-to the following petulant question… at the top of my voice, I shriek: 'What about him? Major Shiva, the traitor? Don't you care about him?' And the reply, from gorgeous-with-big-rolling-hips: 'The Major has undergone voluntary vasectomy.'

And now, in his sightless cell, Saleem begins to laugh, wholeheartedly, without stinting: no, I was not laughing cruelly at my arch-rival, nor was I cynically translating the word 'voluntary' into another word; no, I was remembering stories told me by Parvati or Laylah, the legendary tales of the war hero's philandering, of the legions of bastards swelling in the unectomied bellies of great ladies and whores; I laughed because Shiva, destroyer of the midnight children, had also fulfilled the other role lurking in his name, the function of Shiva-lingam, of Shiva-the-procreator, so that at this very moment, in the boudoirs and hovels of the nation, a new generation of children, begotten by midnight's darkest child, was being raised towards the future. Every Widow manages to forget something important.

Late in March 1977, I was unexpectedly released from the palace of the howling widows, and stood blinking like an owl in the sunlight, not knowing how what why. Afterwards, when I had remembered how to ask questions, I discovered that on January 18th (the very day of the end of snip-snip, and of substances fried in an iron skillet: what further proof would you like that we, the four hundred and twenty, were what the Widow feared most of all?) the Prime Minister had, to the astonishment of all, called a general election. (But now that you know about us, you may find it easier to understand her over-confidence.) But on that day, I knew nothing about her crushing defeat, nor about burning files; it was only later that I learned how the tattered hopes of the nation had been placed in the custody of an ancient dotard who ate pistachios and cashews and daily took a glass of 'his own water'. Urine-drinkers had come to power. The Janata Party, with one of its leaders trapped in a kidney-machine, did not seem to me (when I heard about it) to represent a new dawn; but maybe I'd managed to cure myself of the optimism virus at last-maybe others, with the disease still in their blood, felt otherwise. At any rate, I've had-I had had, on that March day-enough, more than enough of politics.

Four hundred and twenty stood blinking in the sunlight and tumult of the gullies of Benares; four hundred and twenty looked at one another and saw in each other's eyes the memory of their gelding, and then, unable to bear the sight, mumbled farewells and dispersed, for the last time, into the healing privacy of the crowds.

What of Shiva? Major Shiva was placed under military detention by the new regime; but he did not remain there long, because he was permitted to receive one visit: Roshanara Shetty bribed coquetted wormed her way into his cell, the same Roshanara who had poured poison into his ears at Mahalaxmi Racecourse and who had since been driven crazy by a bastard son who refused to speak and did nothing he did not wish to do. The steel magnate's wife drew from her handbag the enormous German pistol owned by her husband, and shot the war hero through the heart. Death, as they say, was instantaneous.

The Major died without knowing that once, in a saffron-and-green nursing home amid the mythological chaos of an unforgettable midnight, a tiny distraught woman had changed baby-tags and denied him his birth-right, which was that hillock-top world cocooned in money and starched white clothes and things things things-a world he would dearly have loved to possess.

And Saleem? No longer connected to history, drained above-and-below, I made my way back to the capital, conscious that an age, which had begun on that long-ago midnight, had come to a sort of end. How I travelled: I waited beyond the platform at Benares or Varanaji station with nothing but a platform-ticket in my hand, and leaped on to the step of a first-class compartment as the mail-train pulled out heading west. And now, at last, I knew how it felt to clutch on for dead life, while particles of soot dust ash gritted in your eyes, and you were obliged to bang on the door and yell, 'Ohe, maharaj! Open up! Let me in, great sir, maharaj!' While inside, a voice uttered familiar words 'On' no account is anyone to open. Just fare-dodgers, that's all.'

In Delhi: Saleem asks questions. Have you seen where? Do you know if the magicians? Are you acquainted with Picture Singh? A postman with the memory of snake-charmers fading in his eyes points north. And, later, a black-tongued paan-wallah sends me back the way I came. Then, at last, the trail ceases meandering; street-entertainers put me on the scent. A Dilli-dekho man with a peepshow machine, a mongoose-and-cobra trainer wearing a paper hat like a child's sailboat, a girl in a cinema box-office who retains her nostalgia for her childhood as a sorcerer's apprentice… like fishermen, they point with fingers. West west west, until at last Saleem arrives at the Shadipur bus depot on the western outskirts of the city. Hungry thirsty enfeebled sick, skipping weakly out of the paths of buses roaring in and out of the depot-gaily-painted buses, bearing inscriptions on their bonnets such as God Willing! and other mottoes, for instance Thank God! on their backsides-he comes to a huddle of ragged tents clustered under a concrete railway bridge, and sees, in the shadow of concrete, a snake-charming giant breaking into an enormous rotten-toothed smile, and, in his arms, wearing a tee-shirt decorated with pink guitars, a small boy of some twenty-one months, whose ears are the ears of elephants, whose eyes are wide as saucers and whose face is as serious as the grave.

To tell the truth, I lied about Shiva's death. My first out-and-out lie-although my presentation of the Emergency in the guise of a six-hundred-and-thirty-five-day-long midnight was perhaps excessively romantic, and certainly contradicted by the available meteorological data. Still and all, whatever anyone may think, lying doesn't come easily to Saleem, and I'm hanging my head in shame as I confess… Why, then, this single barefaced lie? (Because, in actuality, I've no idea where my changeling-rival went after the Widows' Hostel; he could be in hell or the brothel down the road and I wouldn't know the difference.) Padma, try and understand: I'm still terrified of him. There is unfinished business between us, and I spend my days quivering at the thought that the war hero might somehow have discovered the secret of his birth-was he ever shown a file bearing three tell-tale initials?-and that, roused to wrath by the irrecoverable loss of his past, he might come looking for me to exact a stifling revenge… is that how it will end, with the life being crushed out of me by a pair of superhuman, merciless knees?

That's why I fibbed, anyway; for the first time, I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred. My present fear put a gun into Roshanara Shetty's hand; with the ghost of Commander Sabarmati looking over my shoulder, I enabled her to bribe coquette worm her way into his cell… in short, the memory of one of my earliest crimes created the (fictitious) circumstances of my last.

End of confession: and now I'm getting perilously close to the end of my reminiscences. It's night; Padma is in position; on the wall above my head, a lizard has just gobbled up a fly; the festering heat of August, which is enough to pickle one's brains, bubbles merrily between my ears; and five minutes ago the last local train yellow-and-browned its way south to Churchgate Station, so that I did not hear what Padma said with a shyness cloaking a determination as powerful as oil. I had to ask her to repeat herself, and the muscles of disbelief began to nictate in her calves. I must at once record that our dung-lotus has proposed marriage, 'so that I can look after you without going to shame in the eyes of the world.'

Just as I feared! But it's out in the open now, and Padma (I can tell) will not take no for an answer. I have been protesting like a blushing virgin: 'So unexpected!-and what about ectomy, and what was fed to pie-dogs: don't you mind?-and Padma, Padma, there is still what-chews-on-bones, it will turn you into a widow!-and just think one moment, there is the curse of violent death, think of Parvati-are you sure, are you sure you're sure… ?' But Padma, her jaw set in the concrete of a majestically unshakeable resolve, replied: 'You listen to me, mister-but me no buts! Never mind all that fancy talk any more. There is the future to think of.' The honeymoon is to be in Kashmir.

In the burning heat of Padma's determination, I am assailed by the demented notion that it might be possible, after all, that she may be capable of altering the ending of my story by the phenomenal force of her will, that cracks-and death itself-might yield to the power of her unquenchable solicitude… 'There is the future to think of,' she warned me-and maybe (I permit myself to think for the first time since I began this narrative)-maybe there is! An infinity of new endings clusters around my head, buzzing like heat-insects… 'Let us be married, mister,' she proposed, and moths of excitement stirred in my guts, as if she had spoken some cabbalistic formula, some awesome abracadabra, and released me from my fate-but reality is nagging at me. Love does not conquer all, except in the Bombay talkies; rip tear crunch will not be defeated by a mere ceremony; and optimism is a disease.

'On your birthday, how about?' she is suggesting. 'At thirty-one, a man is a man, and is supposed to have a wife.'

How am I to tell her? How can I say, there are other plans for that day, I am have always been in the grip of a form-crazy destiny which enjoys wreaking its havoc on numinous days… in short, how am I to tell her about death? I cannot; instead, meekly and with every appearance of gratitude, I accept her proposal. I am, this evening, a man newly affianced; let no one think harshly of me for permitting myself-and my betrothed lotus-this last, vain, inconsequential pleasure.

Padma, by proposing a marriage, revealed her willingness to dismiss everything I've told her about my past as just so much 'fancy talk'; and when I returned to find Picture Singh beaming in the shadow of a railway bridge, it rapidly became clear that the magicians, too, were losing their memories. Somewhere in the many moves of the peripatetic slum, they had mislaid their powers of retention, so that now they had become incapable of judgment, having forgotten everything to which they could compare anything that happened. Even the Emergency was rapidly being consigned to the oblivion of the past, and the magicians concentrated upon the present with the monomania of snails. Nor did they notice that they had changed; they had forgotten that they had ever been otherwise, Communism had seeped out of them and been gulped down by the thirsty, lizard-quick earth; they were beginning to forget their skills in the confusion of hunger, disease, thirst and police harassment which constituted (as usual) the present. To me, however, this change in my old companions seemed nothing short of obscene. Saleem had come through amnesia and been shown the extent of its immorality; in his mind, the past grew daily more vivid while the present (from which knives had disconnected him for ever) seemed colourless, confused, a thing of no consequence; I, who could remember every hair on the heads of jailers and surgeons, was deeply shocked by the magicians' unwillingness to look behind them. 'People are like cats,' I told my son, 'you can't teach them anything.' He looked suitably grave, but held his tongue.

My son Aadam Sinai had, when I rediscovered the phantom colony of the illusionists, lost all traces of the tuberculosis which had afflicted his earliest days. I, naturally, was certain that the disease had vanished with the fall of the Widow; Picture Singh, however, told me that credit for the cure must be given to a certain washerwoman, Durga by name, who had wet-nursed him through his sickness, giving him the daily benefit of her inexhaustibly colossal breasts. 'That Durga, captain,' the old snake-charmer said, his voice betraying the fact that, in his old age, he had fallen victim to the dhoban's serpentine charms, 'What a woman!'

She was a woman whose biceps bulged; whose preternatural breasts unleashed a torrent of milk capable of nourishing regiments; and who, it was rumoured darkly (although I suspect the rumour of being started by herself) had two wombs. She was as full of gossip and tittle-tattle as she was of milk: every day a dozen new stories gushed from her lips. She possessed the boundless energy common to all practitioners of her trade; as she thrashed the life out of shirts and saris on her stone, she seemed to grow in power, as if she were sucking the vigour out of the clothes, which ended up fiat, buttonless and beaten to death. She was a monster who forgot each day the moment it ended. It was with the greatest reluctance that I agreed to make her acquaintance; it is with the greatest reluctance that I admit her into these pages. Her name, even before I met her, had the smell of new things; she represented novelty, beginnings, the advent of new stories events complexities, and I was no longer interested in anything new. However, once Pictureji informed me that he intended to marry her, I had no option; I shall deal with her, however, as briefly as accuracy permits.

Briefly, then: Durga the washerwoman was a succubus! A bloodsucker lizard in human form! And her effect on Picture Singh was comparable only to her power over her stone-smashed shirts: in a word, she flattened him. Having once met her, I understood why Picture Singh looked old and forlorn; deprived now of the umbrella of harmony beneath which men and women would gather for advice and shade, he seemed to be shrinking daily; the possibility of his becoming a second Hummingbird was vanishing before my very eyes. Durga, however, flourished: her gossip grew more scatological, her voice louder and more raucous, until at last she reminded me of Reverend Mother in her later years, when she expanded and my grandfather shrank. This nostalgic echo of my grandparents was the only thing of interest to me in the personality of the hoydenish washerwoman.

But there is no denying the bounty of her mammary glands: Aadam, at twenty-one months, was still suckling contentedly at her nipples. At first I thought of insisting that he be weaned, but then remembered that my son did exactly and only what he wished, and decided not to press the point. (And, as it transpired, I was right not to do so.) As for her supposed double womb, I had no desire to know the truth or otherwise of the story, and made no inquiries.

I mention Durga the dhoban chiefly because it was she who, one evening when we were eating a meal composed of twenty-seven grains of rice apiece, first foretold my death. I, exasperated by her constant stream of news and chit-chat, had exclaimed, 'Durga Bibi, nobody is interested in your stories!' To which she, unperturbed, 'Saleem Baba, I have been good with you because Pictureji says you must be in many pieces after your arrest; but, to speak frankly, you do not appear to be concerned with anything except lounging about nowadays. You should understand that when a man loses interest in new matters, he is opening the door for the Black Angel.'

And although Picture Singh said, mildly, 'Come now, capteena, don't be rough on the boy,' the arrow of Durga the dhoban found its mark.

In the exhaustion of my drained return, I felt the emptiness of the days coating me in a thick gelatinous film; and although Durga offered, the next morning, and perhaps in a spirit of genuine remorse for her harsh words, to restore my strength by letting me suckle her left breast while my son pulled on the right, 'and afterwards maybe you'll start thinking straight again', intimations of mortality began to occupy most of my thoughts; and then I discovered the mirror of humility at the Shadipur bus depot, and became convinced of my approaching demise.

It was an angled mirror above the entrance to the bus garage; I, wandering aimlessly in the forecourt of the depot, found my attention caught by its winking reflections of the sun. I realized that I had not seen myself in a mirror for months, perhaps years, and walked across to stand beneath it. Looking upwards into the mirror, I saw myself transformed into a big-headed, top-heavy dwarf; in the humblingly foreshortened reflection of myself I saw that the hair on my head was now as grey as rainclouds; the dwarf in the mirror, with his lined face and tired eyes, reminded me vividly of my grandfather Aadam Aziz on the day he told us about seeing God. In those days the afflictions cured by Parvati-the-witch had all (in the aftermath of drainage) returned to plague me; nine-fingered, horn-templed, monk's-tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber-nosed, castrated, and now prematurely aged, I saw in the mirror of humility a human being to whom history could do no more, a grotesque creature who had been released from the pre-ordained destiny which had battered him until he was half-senseless; with one good ear and one bad ear I heard the soft footfalls of the Black Angel of death.

The young-old face of the dwarf in the mirror wore an expression of profound relief.

I'm becoming gloomy; let's change the subject… Exactly twenty-four hours before a paan-wallah's taunt provoked Picture Singh into travelling to Bombay, my son Aadam Sinai made the decision which permitted us to accompany the snake-charmer on his journey: overnight, without any warning, and to the consternation of his washerwoman wet-nurse, who was obliged to decant her remaining milk into five-litre vanaspati drums, flat-eared Aadam weaned himself, soundlessly refusing the nipple and demanding (without words) a diet of solid foods: pulped rice overboiled lentils biscuits. It was as though he had decided to permit me to reach my private, and now-very-near, finishing line.

Mute autocracy of a less-than-two-year-old infant: Aadam did not tell us when he was hungry or sleepy or anxious to perform his natural functions. He expected us to know. The perpetual attention he required may be one of the reasons why I managed, in spite of all indications to the contrary, to stay alive… incapable of anything else in those days after my release from captivity, I concentrated on watching my son. 'I tell you, captain, it's lucky you came back,' Picture Singh joked, 'otherwise this one would have turned us all into ayahs.' I understood once again that Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the eyes of the child who was simultaneously not-my-son and also more my heir than any child of my flesh could have been, I found in his empty, limpid pupils a second mirror of humility, which showed me that, from now on, mine would be as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster: the traditional function, perhaps, of reminiscer, of teller-of-tales… I wondered if all over the country the bastard sons of Shiva were exerting similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisaged for the second time that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything. (How these children may, in the future, be identified: their bimbis stick out instead of in.)

But it's time to get things moving: a taunt, a. last railway-train heading south south south, a final battle… on the day following the weaning of Aadam, Saleem accompanied Picture Singh to Connaught Place, to assist him in his snake-charming. Durga the dhoban agreed to take my son with her to the dhobi-ghat: Aadam spent the day observing how power was thrashed out of the clothes of the well-to-do and absorbed by the succubus-woman. On that fateful day, when the warm weather was returning to the city like a swarm of bees, I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed silver spittoon. Picture Singh had provided me with a spittoon-surrogate, an empty Dalda Vanaspati can, but although I used this to entertain my son with my expertise in the gentle art of spittoon-hittery, sending long jets of betel-juice across the grimy air of the magicians' colony, I was not consoled. A question: why such grief over a mere receptacle of juices? My reply is that you should never underestimate a spittoon. Elegant in the salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, it permitted intellectuals to practise the art-forms of the masses; gleaming in a cellar, it transformed Nadir Khan's underworld into a second Taj Mahal; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it was nevertheless present throughout my history, covertly assimilating incidents in washing-chests, ghost-visions, freeze-unfreeze, drainage, exiles; falling from the sky like a piece of the moon, it perpetrated a transformation. O talismanic spittoon! O beauteous lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice! What sensitive person could fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its loss?