Midnight's Children (22 page)

Purpose-obsessed, I worried about my nose. Dressed in the bitter garments which arrived regularly from my headmistress aunt Alia, I went to school, played French cricket, fought, entered fairy-tales… and worried. (In those days, my aunt Alia had begun to send us an unending stream of children's clothes, into whose seams she had sewn her old maid's bile; the Brass Monkey and I were clothed in her gifts, wearing at first the baby-things of bitterness, then the rompers of resentment; I grew up in white shorts starched with the starch of jealousy, while the Monkey wore the pretty flowered frocks of Alia's undimmed envy… unaware that our wardrobe was binding us in the webs of her revenge, we led our well-dressed lives.) My nose: elephantine as the trunk of Ganesh, it should, I thought, have been a superlative breather; a smeller without an answer, as we say; instead, it was permanently bunged-up, and as useless as a wooden sikh-kabab.

Enough. I sat in the washing-chest and forgot my nose; forgot about the climbing of Mount Everest in 1953-when grubby Eyeslice giggled, 'Hey, men! You think that Tenzing could climb up Sniffer's face?'-and about the quarrels between my parents over my nose, for which Ahmed Sinai never tired of blaming Amina's father: 'Never before in my family has there been a nose like it! We have excellent noses; proud noses; royal noses, wife!' Ahmed Sinai had already begun, at that time, to believe in the fictional ancestry he had created for the benefit of William Methwold; djinn-sodden, he saw Mughal blood running in his veins… Forgotten, too, the night when I was eight and a half, and my father, djinns on his breath, came into my bedroom to rip the sheets off me and demand: 'What are you up to? Pig! Pig from somewhere?' I looked sleepy; innocent; puzzled. He roared on. 'Chhi-chhi! Filthy! God punishes boys who do that! Already he's made your nose as big as poplars. He'll stunt your growth; he'll make your soo-soo shrivel up!' And my mother, arriving nightdressed in the startled room, 'Janum, for pity's sake; the boy was only sleeping.' The djinn roared through my father's lips, possessing him completely: 'Look on his face! Whoever got a nose like that from sleeping?'

There are no mirrors in a washing-chest; rude jokes do not enter it, nor pointing fingers. The rage of fathers is muffled by used sheets and discarded brassieres. A washing-chest is a hole in the world, a place which civilization has put outside itself, beyond the pale; this makes it the finest of hiding-places. In the washing-chest, I was like Nadir Khan in his underworld, safe from all pressures, concealed from the demands of parents and history…

… My father, pulling me into his squashy belly, speaking in a voice choked with instant emotion: 'All right, all right, there, there, you're a good boy; you can be anything you want; you just have to want it enough! Sleep now…' And Mary Pereira, echoing him in her little rhyme: 'Anything you want to be, you can be; You can be just what-all you want!' It had already occurred to me that our family believed implicitly in good business principles; they expected a handsome return for their investment in me. Children get food shelter pocket-money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' they sing; but I, Pin( cchio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive-nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness. Don't misunderstand m;:. I didn't mind. I was, at that time, a dutiful child. I longed to give them what they wanted, what soothsayers and framed letters had promised them; I simply did not know how. Where did greatness come from? How did you get some? When?… When I was seven years old, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother came to visit us. On my seventh birthday, dutifully, I permitted myself to be dressed up like the boys in the fisherman picture; hot and constricted in the outlandish garb, I smiled and smiled. 'See, my little piece-of-the-moon!' Amina cried cutting a cake covered with candied farmyard animals, 'So chweet! Never takes out one tear!' Sandbagging down the floods of tears lurking just beneath my eyes, the tears of heat discomfort and the absence of One Yard Of Chocolates in my pile of presents, I took a slice of cake to Reverend Mother, who was ill in bed. I had been given a doctor's stethoscope; it was around my neck. She gave me permission to examine her; I prescribed more exercise. 'You must walk across the room, to the almirah and back, once a day. You may lean on me; I am the doctor.' Stethoscoped English milord guided witchmoled grandmother across the room; hobblingly, creakingly, she obeyed.

After three months of this treatment, she made a full recovery. The neighbours came to celebrate, bearing rasgullas and gulab-jamans and other sweets. Reverend Mother, seated regally on a takht in the living-room, announced: 'See my grandson? He cured me, whatsits-name. Genius! Genius, whatsitsname: it is a gift from God.' Was that it, then? Should I stop worrying? Was genius something utterly unconnected with wanting, or learning how, or knowing about, or being able to? Something which, at the appointed hour, would float down around my shoulders like an immaculate, delicately worked pashmina shawl? Greatness as a falling mantle: which never needed to be sent to the dhobi. One does not beat genius upon a stone… That one clue, my grandmother's one chance sentence, was my only hope; and, as it turned out, she wasn't very far wrong. (The accident is almost upon me; and the children of midnight are waiting.)

Years later, in Pakistan, on the very night when the roof was to fall in on her head and squash her flatter than a rice-pancake, Amina Sinai saw the old washing-chest in a vision. When it popped up inside her eyelids, she greeted it like a not-particularly-welcome cousin. 'So it's you again,' she told it, 'Well, why not? Things keep coming back to me these days. Seems you just can't leave anything behind.' She had grown prematurely old like all the women in our family; the chest reminded her of the year in which old age had first begun creeping up on her. The great heat of 1956-which Mary Pereira told me was caused by little blazing invisible insects-buzzed in her ears once again. 'My corns began killing me then,' she said aloud, and the Civil Defence official who had called to enforce the blackout smiled sadly to himself and thought, Old people shroud themselves in the past during a war; that way they're ready to die whenever required. He crept awaу past the mountains of defective terry towels which filled most of the house, and left Amina to discuss her dirty laundry in private… Nussie Ibrahim-Nussie-the-duck-used to admire Amina: 'Such posture, my dear, that you've got! Such tone! I swear it's a wonder to me: you glide about like you're on an invisible trolley!' But in the summer of the heat insects, my elegant mother finally lost her battle against verrucas, because the sadhu Purushottam suddenly lost his magic. Water had worn a bald patch in his hair; the steady dripping of the years had worn him down. Was he disillusioned with his blessed child, his Mubarak? Was it my fault that his mantras lost their power? With an air of great trouble, he told my mother, 'Never mind; wait only; I'll fix your feet for sure.' But Amina's corns grew worse; she went to doctors who froze them with carbon dioxide at absolute zero; but that only brought them back with redoubled vigour, so that she began to hobble, her gliding days done for ever; and she recognized the unmistakable greeting of old age. (Chock-f of fantasy, I transformed her into a silkie-'Amma, maybe you're a mermaid really, taking human form for the love of a man-so every step is like walking on razor blades!' My mother smiled, but did not laugh.)

1956. Ahmed Sinai and Dr Narlikar played chess and argued-my father was a bitter opponent of Nasser, while Narlikar admired him openly. 'The man is bad for business,' Ahmed said; 'But he's got style,' Narlikar responded, glowing passionately, 'Nobody pushes him around.' At the same time, Jawaharlal Nehru was consulting astrologers about the country's Five Year Plan, in order to avoid another Karamstan; and while the world combined aggression and the occult, I lay concealed in a washing-chest which wasn't really big enough for comfort any more; and Amina Sinai became filled with guilt.

She was already trying to put out of her mind her adventure at the race-track; but the sense of sin which her mother's cooking had given her could not be escaped; so it was not difficult for her to think of the verrucas as a punishment… not only for the years-ago escapade at Mahalaxmi, but for failing to save her husband from the pink chitties of alcoholism; for the Brass Monkey's untamed, unfeminine ways; and for the size of her only son's nose. Looking back at her now, it seems to me that a fog of guilt had begun to form around her head-her black skin exuding black cloud which hung before her eyes. (Padma would believe it; Padma would know what I mean!) And as her guilt grew, the fog thickened-yes, why not?-there were days when you could hardly see her head above her neck!… Amina had become one of those rare people who take the burdens of the world upon their own backs; she began to exude the magnetism of the willingly guilty; and from then on everyone who came into contact with her felt the most powerful of urges to confess their own, private guilts. When they succumbed to my mother's powers, she would smile at them with a sweet sad foggy smile and they would go away, lightened, leaving their burdens on her shoulders; and the fog of guilt thickened. Amina heard about servants being beaten and officials being bribed; when my uncle Hanif and his wife the divine Pia came to call they related their quarrels in minute detail; Lila Sabarmati confided her infidelities to my mother's graceful, inclined, long-suffering ear; and Mary Pereira had to fight constantly against the almost-irresistible temptation to confess her crime.

Faced with the guilts of the world, my mother smiled foggily and shut her eyes tight; and by the time the roof fell in on her head her eyesight was badly impaired; but she could still see the washing-chest.

What was really at the bottom of my mother's guilt? I mean really, beneath verrucas and djinns and confessions? It was an unspeakable malaise, an affliction which could not even be named, and which no longer confined itself to dreams of an underworld husband… my mother had fallen (as my father would soon fall) under the spell of the telephone.

In the afternoons of that summer, afternoons as hot as towels, the telephone would ring. When Ahmed Sinai was asleep in his room, with his keys under his pillow and umbilical cords in his almirah, telephonic shrilling penetrated the buzzing of the heat insects; and my mother, verruca-hobbled, came into the hall to answer. And now, what expression is this, staining her face the colour of drying blood?… Not knowing that she's being observed, what fish-like flutterings of lips are these, what strangulated mouthings?… And why, after listening for a full five minutes, does my mother say, in a voice like broken glass, 'Sorry: wrong number'? Why are diamonds glistening on her eyelids?… The Brass Monkey whispered to me, 'Next time it rings, let's find out.'

Five days later. Once more it is afternoon; but today Amina is away, visiting Nussie-the-duck, when the telephone demands attention. 'Quick! Quick or it'll wake him!' The Monkey, agile as her name, picks up the receiver before Ahmed Sinai has even changed the pattern of his snoring… 'Hullo? Yaas? This is seven zero five six one; hullo?' We listen, every nerve on edge; but for a moment there is nothing at all. Then, when we're about to give up, the voice comes. '… Oh… yes… hullo…' And the Monkey, shouting almost, 'Hullo? Who is it, please?' Silence again; the voice, which has not been able to prevent itself from speaking, considers its answer; and then, '… Hullo… This is Shanti Prasad Truck Hire Company, please?…' And the Monkey, quick as a flash: 'Yes, what d'you want?' Another pause; the voice, sounding embarrassed, apologetic almost, says, 'I want to rent a truck.'

О feeble excuse of telephonic voice! О transparent flummery of ghosts! The voice on the phone was no truck-renter's voice; it was soft, a little fleshy, the voice of a poet… but after that, the telephone rang regularly; sometimes my mother answered it, listened in silence while her mouth made fish-motions, and finally, much too late, said, 'Sorry, wrong number'; at other times the Monkey and I clustered around it, two ears to earpiece, while the Monkey took orders for trucks. I wondered: 'Hey, Monkey, what d'you think? Doesn't the guy ever wonder why the trucks don't arrive?' And she, wide-eyed, flutter-voiced: 'Man, do you suppose… maybe they do!'

But I couldn't see how; and a tiny seed of suspicion was planted in me, a tiny glimmering of a notion that our mother might have a secret-our Amma! Who always said, 'Keep secrets and they'll go bad inside you; don't tell things and they'll give you stomach-ache!'-a minute spark which my experience in the washing-chest would fan into a forest fire. (Because this time, you see, she gave me proof.)

And now, at last, it is time for dirty laundry. Mary Pereira was fond of telling me, 'If you want to be a big man, baba, you must be very clean. Change clothes,' she advised, 'take regular baths. Go, baba, or I'll send you to the washerman, and he'll wallop you on his stone.' She also threatened me with bugs: 'All right, stay filthy, you will be nobody's darling except the flies'. They will sit on you while you sleep; eggs they'll lay under your skin!' In part, my choice of hiding-place was an act of defiance. Braving dhobis and houseflies, I concealed myself in the unclean place; I drew strength and comfort from sheets and towels; my nose ran freely into the stone-doomed linens; and always, when I emerged into the world from my wooden whale, the sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.

One afternoon in June, I tiptoed down the corridors of the sleeping house towards my chosen refuge; sneaked past my sleeping mother into the white-tiled silence of her bathroom; lifted the lid off my goal; and plunged into its soft continuum of (predominantly white) textiles, whose only memories were of my earlier visits. Sighing softly, I pulled down the lid, and allowed pants and vests to massage away the pains of being alive, purposeless and nearly nine years old.