Midnight's Children (19 page)

At six o'clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.

After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever, and he didn't relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother's preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door-Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries. After nights in which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language-'What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse-what difference?' And then tears, and Amina, 'Oh, janum-don't torture me!' which, in turn, provoked, 'Torture my foot! You think it's torture for a man to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!'-my father limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while Amina began to notice how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left suddenly, flouncing down our drive without any notice; and you must judge whether she chose to be blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but she did nothing about it, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act of recognition was to give the girls a collective name. 'Those Anglos,' she said to Mary, revealing a touch of snobbery, 'with their funny names, Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I don't know what. What should I care about them? Cheap type females. I call them all his Coca-Cola girls-that's what they all sound like.'

While Ahmed pinched bottoms, Amina became long-suffering; but he might have been glad if she had appeared to care.

Mary Pereira said, 'They aren't so funny names, Madam; beg your pardon, but they are good Christian words.' And Amina remembered Ahmed's cousin Zohra making fun of dark skin-and, falling over herself to apologize, tumbled into Zohra's mistake: 'Oh, notion, Mary, how could you think I was making fun of you?'

Horn-templed, cucumber-nosed, I lay in my crib and listened; and everything that happened, happened because of me… One day in January 1948, at five in the afternoon, my father was visited by Dr Narlikar. There were embraces as usual, and slaps on the back. 'A little chess?' my father asked, ritually, because these visits were getting to be a habit. They would play chess in the old Indian way, the game of shatranj, and, freed by the simplicities of the chess-board from the convolutions of his life, Ahmed would daydream for an hour about the re-shaping of the Quran; and then it would be six o'clock, cocktail hour, time for the djinns… but this evening Narlikar said, 'No.' And Ahmed, 'No? What's this no? Come, sit, play, gossip…' Narlikar, interrupting: 'Tonight, brother Sinai, there is something I must show you.' They are in a 1946 Rover now, Narlikar working the crankshaft and jumping in; they are driving north along Warden Road, past Mahalaxmi Temple on the left and Willingdon Club golf-course on the right, leaving the race-track behind them, cruising along Hornby Vellard beside the sea wall; Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium is in sight, with its giant cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, Bano Devi the Invincible Woman and Dara Singh, mightiest of all… there are channa-vendors and dog-walkers promenading by the sea. 'Stop,' Narlikar commands, and they get out. They stand facing the sea; sea-breeze cools their faces; and out there, at the end of a narrow cement path in the midst of the waves, is the island on which stands the tomb of Haji Ali the mystic. Pilgrims are strolling between Vellard and tomb.

'There,' Narlikar points, 'What do you see?' And Ahmed, mystified, 'Nothing. The tomb. People. What's this about, old chap?' And Narlikar, 'None of that. There!' And now Ahmed sees that Narlikar's pointing finger is aimed at the cement path… 'The promenade?' he asks, 'What's that to you? In some minutes the tide will come and cover it up; everybody knows…' Narlikar, his skin glowing like a beacon, becomes philosophical. 'Just so, brother Ahmed; just so. Land and sea; sea and land; the eternal struggle, not so?' Ahmed, puzzled, remains silent. 'Once there were seven islands,' Narlikar reminds Mm, 'Worli, Mahim, Salsette, Matunga, Colaba, Mazagaon, Bombay. The British joined them up. Sea, brother Ahmed, became land. Land arose, and did not sink beneath the tides!' Ahmed is anxious for his whisky; his lip begins to jut while pilgrims scurry off the narrowing path. 'The point,' he demands. And Narlikar, dazzling with effulgence: 'The point, Ahmed bhai, is this!'

It comes out of his pocket: a little plaster-of-paris model two inches high: the tetrapod! Like a three-dimensional Mercedes-Benz sign, three legs standing on his palm, a fourth rearing lingam-fashion into the evening air, it transfixes my father. 'What is it?' he asks; and now Narlikar tells him: 'This is the baby that will make us richer than Hyderabad, bhai! The little gimmick that will make you, you and me, the masters of that! He points outwards to where sea is rushing over deserted cement pathway… 'The land beneath the sea, my friend! We must manufacture these by the thousand-by tens of thousands! We must tender for reclamation contracts; a fortune is waiting; don't miss it, brother, this is the chance of a lifetime!'

Why did my father agree to dream a gynaecologist's entrepreneurial dream? Why, little by little, did the vision of full-sized concrete tetrapods marching over sea walk, four-legged conquerors triumphing over the sea, capture him as surely as it had the gleaming doctor? Why, in the following years, did Ahmed dedicate himself to the fantasy of every island-dweller-the myth of conquering the waves? Perhaps because he was afraid of missing yet another turning; perhaps for the fellowship of games of shatranj; or maybe it was Narlikar's plausibility-'Your capital and my contacts, Ahmed bhai, what problem can there be? Every great man in this city has a son brought into the world by me; no doors will close. You manufacture; I will get the contract! Fifty-fifty; fair is fair!' But, in my view, there is a simpler explanation. My father, deprived of wifely attention, supplanted by bis son, blurred by whisky and djinn, was trying to restore his position in the world; and the dream of tetrapods offered him the chance. Whole-heartedly, he threw himself into the great folly; letters were written, doors knocked upon, black money changed hands; all of which served to make Ahmed Sinai a name known in the corridors of the Sachivalaya-in the passageways of the State Secretariat they got the whiff of a Muslim who was throwing his rupees around like water. And Ahmed Sinai, drinking himself to sleep, was unaware of the danger he was in.

Our lives, at this period, were shaped by correspondence. The Prime Minister wrote to me when I was just seven days old-before I could even wipe my own nose I was receiving fan letters from Times of India readers; and one morning in January Ahmed Sinai, too, received a letter he would never forget.

Red eyes at breakfast were followed by the shaven chin of the working day; footsteps down the stairs; alarmed giggles of Coca-Cola girl. The squeak of a chair drawn up to a desk topped with green leathercloth. Metallic noise of a metal paper-cutter being lifted, colliding momentarily with telephone. The brief rasp of metal slicing envelope; and one minute later, Ahmed was running back up the stairs, yelling for my mother, shouting:

'Amina! Come here, wife! The bastards have shoved my balls in an ice-bucket!'

In the days after Ahmed received the formal letter informing him of the freezing of all his assets, the whole world was talking at once… 'For pity's sake, janum, such language!' Amina is saying-and is it my imagination, or does a baby blush in a sky-blue crib?

And Narlikar, arriving in a lather of perspiration, 'I blame myself entirely; we made ourselves too public. These are bad times, Sinai bhai-freeze a Muslim's assets, they say, and you make him run to Pakistan, leaving all his wealth behind him. Catch the lizard's tail and he'll snap it off! This so-called secular state gets some damn clever ideas.'

'Everything,' Ahmed Sinai is saying, 'bank account; savings bonds; the rents from the Kurla properties-all blocked, frozen. By order, the letter says. By order they will not let me have four annas, wife-not a chavanni to see the peepshow!'

'It's those photos in the paper,' Amina decides. 'Otherwise how could those jumped-up clever dicks know whom to prosecute? My God, janum, it's my fault…'

'Not ten pice for a twist of channa,' Ahmed Sinai adds, 'not one anna to give alms to a beggar. Frozen-like in the fridge!'

'It's my fault,' Ismail Ibrahim is saying, 'I should have warned you, Sinai bhai. I have heard about these freezings-only well-off Muslims are selected, naturally. You must fight…'

'… Tooth and nail!' Homi Catrack insists, 'Like a lion! Like Aurangzeb-your ancestor, isn't it?-like the Rani of Jhansi! Then let's see what kind of country we've ended up in!'

'There are law courts in this State,' Ismail Ibrahim adds; Nussie-the-duck smiles a bovine smile as she suckles Sonny; her fingers move, absently stroking Ms hollows, up and around, down and about, in a steady, unchanging rhythm… 'You must accept my legal services,' Ismail tells Ahmed, 'Absolutely free, my good friend. No, no I won't hear of it. How can it be? We are neighbours.'

'Broke,' Ahmed is saying, 'Frozen, like water.'

'Come on now,' Amina interrupts him; her dedication rising to new heights, she leads him towards her bedroom… 'Janum, you need to lie for some time.' And Ahmed: 'What's this, wife? A time like this-cleaned out; finished; crushed like ice-and you think about…' But she has closed the door; slippers have been kicked off; arms are reaching towards him; and some moments later her hands are stretching down down down; and then, 'Oh my goodness, janum, I thought you were just talking dirty but it's true! So cold, Allah, so coooold, like little round cubes of ice!'

Such things happen; after the State froze my father's assets, my mother began to feel them growing colder and colder. On the first day, the Brass Monkey was conceived-just in time, because after that, although Amina lay every night with her husband to warm him, although she snuggled up tightly when she felt him shiver as the icy fingers of rage and powerlessness spread upwards from his loins, she could no longer bear to stretch out her hand and touch because his little cubes of ice had become too frigid to hold.

They-we-should have known something bad would happen. That January, Chowpatty Beach, and Juhu and Trombay, too, were littered with the ominous corpses of dead pomfret, which floated, without the ghost of an explanation, belly-side-up, like scaly fingers in to shore.

And other omens: comets were seen exploding above the Back Bay; it was reported that flowers had been seen bleeding real blood; and in February the snakes escaped from the Schaapsteker Institute. The rumour spread that a mad Bengali snake-charmer, a Tubriwallah, was travelling the country, charming reptiles from captivity, leading them out of snake farms (such as the Schaapsteker, where snake venom's medicinal functions were studied, and antivenenes devised) by the Pied Piper fascination of his flute, in retribution for the partition of his beloved Golden Bengal. After a while the rumours added that the Tubriwallah was seven feet tall, with bright blue skin. He was Krishna come to chastise his people; he was the sky-hued Jesus of the missionaries.

It seems that, in the aftermath of my changeling birth, while I enlarged myself at breakneck speed, everything that could possibly go wrong began to do so. In the snake winter of early 1948, and in the succeeding hot and rainy seasons, events piled upon events, so that by the time the Brass Monkey was born in September we were all exhausted, and ready for a few years' rest.

Escaped cobras vanished into the sewers of the city; banded kraits were seen on buses. Religious leaders described the' snake escape as a warning-the god Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation's official renunciation of its deities. ('We are a secular State,' Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary had been asking, 'How are we going to live now, Madam?' Homi Catrack introduced us to Dr Schaapsteker himself. He was eighty-one years old; his tongue flicked constantly in and out between his papery lips; and he was prepared to pay cash rent for a top-floor apartment overlooking the Arabian Sea. Ahmed Sinai, in those days, had taken to his bed; the icy cold of the freeze impregnated his bedsheets; he downed vast quantities of whisky for medicinal purposes, but it failed to warm him up… so it was Amina who agreed to let the upper storey of Buckingham Villa to the old snake-doctor. At the end of February, snake poison entered our lives.

Dr Schaapsteker was a man who engendered wild stories. The more superstitious orderlies at his Institute swore that he had the capacity of dreaming every night about being bitten by snakes, and thus remained immune to their bites. Others whispered that he was half-snake himself, the child of an unnatural union between a woman and a cobra. His obsession with the venom of the banded krait-bungarus fasciatus-was becoming legendary. There is no known antivenene to the bite of bungarus: but Schaapsteker had devoted his life to finding one. Buying broken-down horses from the Catrack stables (among others) he injected them with small doses of poison; but the horses, unhelpfully, failed to develop antibodies, frothed at the mouth, died standing up and had to be transformed into glue. It was said that Dr Schaapsteker-'Sharpsticker sahib'-had now acquired the power of killing horses simply by approaching them with a hypodermic syringe… but Amina paid no attention to these tall stories. 'He is an old gentleman,' she told Mary Pereira; 'What should we care about people who black-tongue him? He pays his rent, and permits us to live.' Amina was grateful to the European snake-doctor, particularly in those days of the freeze when Ahmed did not seem to have the nerve to fight.

'My beloved father and mother,' Amina wrote, 'By my eyes and head I swear I do not know why such things are happening to us… Ahmed is a good man, but this business has hit him hard. If you have advice for your daughter, she is greatly in need of it.' Three days after they received this letter, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother arrived at Bombay Central Station by Frontier Mail; and Amina, driving them home in our 1946 Rover, looked out of a side window and saw the Mahalaxmi Racecourse; and had the first germ of her reckless idea.

'This modern decoration is all right for you young people, whatsits-name,' Reverend Mother said. 'But give me one old-fashioned takht to sit on. These chairs are so soft, whatsitsname, they make me feel like I'm falling.'

'Is he ill?' Aadam Aziz asked. 'Should I examine him and prescribe medicines?'

'This is no time to hide in bed,' Reverend Mother pronounced. 'Now he must be a man, whatsitsname, and do a man's business.'

'How well you both look, my parents,' Amina cried, thinking that her father was turning into an old man who seemed to be getting shorter with the passing years; while Reverend Mother had grown so wide that armchairs, though soft, groaned beneath her weight… and sometimes, through a trick-of the light, Amina thought she saw, in the centre of her father's body, a dark shadow like a hole.

'What is left in this India?' Reverend Mother asked, hand slicing air. 'Go, leave it all, go to Pakistan. See how well that Zulfikar is doing-he will give you a start. Be a man, my son-get up and start again!'

'He doesn't want to speak now,' Amina said, 'he must rest.'

'Rest?' Aadam Aziz roared. 'The man is a jelly!'

'Even Alia, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother said, 'all on her own, gone to Pakistan-even she is making a decent life, teaching in a fine school. They say she will be headmistress soon.'

'Shhh, mother, he wants to sleep… let's go next door…'

'There is a time to sleep, whatsitsname, and a time to wake! Listen: Mustapha is making many hundreds of rupees a month, whatsitsname, in the Civil Service. What is your husband? Too good to work?'

'Mother, he is upset. His temperature is so low…'

'What food are you giving? From today, whatsitsname, I will run your kitchen. Young people today-like babies, whatsitsname!'

'Just as you like, mother.'

'I tell you whatsitsname, it's those photos in the paper. I wrote-didn't I write?-no good would come of that. Photos take away pieces of you. My God, whatsitsname, when I saw your picture, you had become so transparent I could see the writing from the other side coming right through your face!'

'But that's only…'

'Don't tell me your stories, whatsitsname! I give thanks to God you have recovered from that photography!'

After that day, Amina was freed from the exigencies of running her home. Reverend Mother sat at the head of the dining-table, doling out food (Amina took plates to Ahmed, who stayed in bed, moaning from time to time, 'Smashed, wife! Snapped-like an icicle!'); while, in the kitchens, Mary Pereira took the time to prepare, for the benefit of their visitors, some of the finest and most delicate mango pickles, lime chutneys and cucumber kasaundies in the world. And now, restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people's food seeping into her-because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes imbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination. And, althiough Mary's pickles had a partially counteractive effect-since she had stirred into them the guilt of her heart, and the fear of discovery, so that, good as they tasted, they had the power of making those who ate them subject to nameless uncertainties and dreams of accusing fingers-the diet provided by Reverend Mother filled Amina with a kind of rage, and even produced slight signs of improvement in her defeated husband. So that finally the day came when Amina, who had been watching me play incompetently with toy horses of sandal wood in the bath, inhaling the sweet odours of sandalwood which the bathwater released, suddenly rediscovered within herself the adventurous streak which was her inheritance from her fading father, the streak which had brought Aadam Aziz down from bis mountain valley; Amina turned to Mary Pereira and said, 'I'm fed up. If nobody in this house is going to put things right, then it's just going to be up to me!'

Toy horses galloped behind Amina's eyes as she left Mary to dry me and marched into her bedroom. Remembered glimpses of Mahalaxmi Racecourse cantered in her head as she pushed aside saris and petticoats. The fever of a reckless scheme flushed her cheeks as she opened the lid of an old tin trunk… filling her purse with the coins and rupee notes of grateful patients and wedding-guests, my mother went to the races.

With the Brass Monkey growing inside her, my mother stalked the paddocks of the racecourse named after the goddess of wealth; braving early-morning sickness and varicose veins, she stood in line at the Tote window, putting money on three-horse accumulators and long-odds outsiders. Ignorant of the first thing about horses, she backed mares known not to be stayers to win long races; she put her money on jockeys because she liked their smiles. Clutching a purse full of the dowry which had lain untouched in its trunk since her own mother had packed it away, she took wild flutters on stallions who looked fit for the Schaapsteker Institute… and won, and won, and won.

'Good news,' Ismail Ibrahim is saying, 'I always thought you should fight the bastards. I'll begin proceedings at once… but it will take cash, Amina. Have you got cash?'

'The money will be there.'

'Not for myself,' Ismail explains, 'My services are, as I said, free, gratis absolutely. But, forgive me, you must know how things are, one must give little presents to people to smooth one's way…'

'Here,' Amina hands him an envelope, 'Will this do for now?'

'My God,' Ismail Ibrahim drops the packet in surprise and rupee notes in large denominations scatter all over his sitting-room floor, 'Where did you lay your hands on…' And Amina, 'Better you don't ask-and I won't ask how you spend it.'

Schaapsteker money paid for our food bills; but horses fought our war. The streak of luck of my mother at the race-track was so long, a seam so rich, that if it hadn't happened it wouldn't have been credible… for month after month, she put her money on a jockey's nice tidy hair-style or a horse's pretty piebald colouring; and she never left the track without a large envelope stuffed with notes.

'Things are going well,' Ismail Ibrahim told her, 'But Amina sister, God knows what you are up to. Is it decent? Is it legal?' And Amina: 'Don't worry your head. What can't be cured must be endured. I am doing what must be done.'

Never once in all that time did my mother take pleasure in her mighty victories; because she was weighed down by more than a baby-eating Reverend Mother's curries filled with ancient prejudices, she had become convinced that gambling was the next worst thing on earth, next to alcohol; so, although she was not a criminal, she felt consumed by sin.

Verrucas plagued her feet, although Purushottam the sadhu, who sat under our garden tap until dripping water created a bald patch amid the luxuriantly matted hair on his head, was a marvel at charming them away; but throughout the snake winter and the hot season, my mother fought her husband's fight.

You ask: how is it possible? How could a housewife, however assiduous, however determined, win fortunes on the horses, day after racing day, month after month? You think to yourself: aha, that Homi Catrack, he's a horse-owner; and everyone knows that most of the races are fixed; Amina was asking her neighbour for hot tips! A plausible notion; but Mr Catrack himself lost as often as he won; he saw my mother at the race-track and was astounded by her success. ('Please,' Amina asked him, 'Catrack Sahib, let this be our secret. Gambling is a terrible thing; it would be so shaming if my mother found out.' And Catrack, nodding dazedly, said, 'Just as you wish.') So it was not the Parsee who was behind it-but perhaps I can offer another explanation. Here it is, in a sky-blue crib in a sky-blue room with a fisherman's pointing finger on the wall: here, whenever his mother goes away clutching a purse full of secrets, is Baby Saleem, who has acquired an expression of the most intense concentration, whose eyes have been seized by a singleness of purpose of such enormous power that it has darkened them to deep navy blue, and whose nose is twitching strangely while he appears to be watching some distant event, to be guiding it from a distance, just as the moon controls the tides.

'Coming to court very soon,' Ismail Ibrahim said, 'I think you can be fairly confident… my God, Amina, have you found King Solomon's Mines?'

The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. О perfect balance of rewards and penalties! О seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes.

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose… but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity-beca use, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake… Keeping things simple for the moment, however, I record that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes.

Amina's brother Hanif had not gone to Pakistan. Following the childhood dream which he had whispered to Rashid the rickshaw-boy in an Agra cornfield, he had arrived in Bombay and sought employ, ment in the great film studios. Precociously confident, he had not only succeeded in becoming the youngest man ever to be given a film to direct in the history of the Indian cinema; he had also wooed and married one of the brightest stars of that celluloid heaven, the divine Pia, whose face was her fortune, and whose saris were made of fabrics whose designers had clearly set out to prove that it was possible to incorporate every colour known to man in a single pattern. Reverend Mother did not approve of the divine Pia, but Hanif of all my family was the one who was free of her confining influence; a jolly, burly man with the booming laugh of the boatman Tai and the explosive, innocent anger of his father Aadam Aziz, he took her to live simply in a small, un-filmi apartment on Marine Drive, telling her, 'Plenty of time to live like Emperors after I've made my name.' She acquiesced; she starred in his first feature, which was partly financed by Homi Catrack and partly by D. W. Rama Studios (Pvt.) Ltd-it was called The Lovers of Kashmir, and one evening in the midst of her racing days Amina Sinai went to the premiere. Her parents did not come, thanks to Reverend Mother's loathing of the cinema, against which Aadam Aziz no longer had the strength to struggle-just as he, who had fought with Mian Abdullah against Pakistan, no longer argued with her when she praised the country, retaining just enough strength to dig in his heels and refuse to emigrate; but Ahmed Sinai, revived by his mother-in-law's cookery, but resentful of her continued presence, got to his feet and accompanied his wife. They took their seats, next to Hanif and. Pia and the male star of the film, one of India's most successful 'lover-boys', I. S. Nayyar. And, although they didn't know it, a serpent waited in the wings… but in the meanwhile, let us permit Hanif Aziz to have his moment; because The Lovers of Kashmir contained a notion which was to provide my uncle with a spectacular, though brief, period of triumph. In those days it was not permitted for lover-boys and their leading ladies to touch one another on screen, for fear that their osculations might corrupt the nation's youth… but thirty-three minutes after the beginning of The Lovers the premiere audience began to give off a low buzz of shock, because Pia and Nayyar had begun to kiss-not one another-but things.