Midnight's Children (42 page)

We left Bombay, finally, in February 1963; and on the day of our departure I took an old tin globe down to the garden and buried it amongst the cacti. Inside it: a Prime Minister's-letter, and a jumbo-sized front-page baby-snap, captioned 'Midnight's Child'… They may not be holy relics-I do not presume to compare the trivial memorabilia of my life with the Hazratbal hair of the Prophet, or the body of St Francis Xavier in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus-but they are all that has survived of my past: a squashed tin globe, a mildewed letter, a photograph. Nothing else, not even a silver spittoon. Apart from a Monkey-crushed planet, the only records are sealed in the closed books of heaven, Sidjeen and Illiyun, the Books of Evil and Good; at any rate, that's the story.

… Only when we were aboard S.S. Sabarmati, and anchored off the Rann of Kutch, did I remember old Schaapsteker; and wondered, suddenly, if anyone had told him we were going. I didn't dare to ask, for fear that the answer might be no; so as I thought of the demolition crew getting to work, and pictured the machines of destruction smashing into my father's office and my own blue room, pulling down the servants' spiral iron staircase and the kitchen in which Mary Pereira had stirred her fears into chutneys and pickles, massacring the verandah where my mother had sat with the child in her belly like a stone, I ako had an image of a mighty, swinging ball crashing into the domain of Sharpsticker sahib, and of the old crazy man himself, pale wasted flick-tongued, being exposed there on top of a crumbling house, amid falling towers and red-tiled roof, old Schaapsteker shrivelling ageing dying in the sunlight which he hadn't seen for so many years. But perhaps I'm dramatizing; I may have got all this from an old film called Lost Horizon, in which beautiful women shrivelled and died when they departed from Shangri-La.

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake. We arrived in Karachi on February 9th-and within months, my sister Jamila had been launched on the career which would earn her the names of 'Pakistan's Angel' and 'Bulbul-of-the-Faith'; we had left Bombay, but we gained reflected glory. And one more thing: although I had been drained-although no voices spoke in my head, and never would again-there was one compensation: namely that, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the astonishing delights of possessing a sense of smell.

It turned out to be a sense so acute as to be capable of distinguishing the glutinous reek of hypocrisy behind the welcoming smile with which my spinster aunt Alia greeted us at the Karachi docks. Irremediably embittered by my father's years-ago defection into the arms of her sister, my headmistress aunt had acquired the heavy-footed corpulence of undimmed jealousy; the thick dark hairs of her resentment sprouted through most of the pores of her skin. And perhaps she succeeded in deceiving my parents and Jamila with her spreading arms, her waddling run towards us, her cry of 'Ahmed bhai, at last! But better late than never!', her spider-like-and inevitably accepted-offers of hospitality; but I, who had spent much of my babyhood in the bitter mittens and soured pom-pom hats of her envy, who had been unknowingly infected with failure by the innocent-looking baby-things into which she had knitted her hatred, and who, moreover, could clearly remember what it was like to be possessed by revenge-lust, I, Saleem-the-drained, could smell the vengeful odours leaking out of her glands. I was, however, powerless to protest; we were swept into the Datsun of her vengeance and driven away down Bunder Road to her house at Guru Mandir-like flies, only more foolish, because we celebrated our captivity.

… But what a sense of smell it was! Most of us are conditioned, from the cradle onwards, into recognizing the narrowest possible spectrum of fragrances; I, however, had been incapable of smelling a thing all my life, and was accordingly ignorant of all olfactory taboos. As a result, I had a tendency not to feign innocence when someone broke wind-which landed me in a certain amount of parental trouble; more important, however, was my nasal freedom to inhale a very great deal more than the scents of purely physical origin with which the rest of the human race has chosen to be content. So, from the earliest days of my Pakistani adolescence, I began to learn the secret aromas of the world, the heady but quick-fading perfume of new love, and also the deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate. (It was not long after my arrival in the 'Land of the Pure' that I discovered within myself the ultimate impurity of sister-love; and the slow burning fires of my aunt filled my nostrils from the start.) A nose will give you knowledge, but not power-over-events; my invasion of Pakistan, armed (if that's the right word) only with a new manifestation of my nasal inheritance, gave me the powers of sniffing-out-the-truth, of smelling-what-was-in-the-air, of following trails; but not the only power an invader needs-the strength to conquer my foes.

I won't deny it: I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay. Set between the desert and bleakly saline creeks whose shores were littered with stunted mangroves, my new city seemed to possess an ugliness which eclipsed even my own; having grown too fast-its population had quadrupled since 1947-it had acquired the misshapen lumpiness of a gigantic dwarf. On my sixteenth birthday, I was given a Lambretta motor-scooter; riding the city streets on my windowless vehicle, I breathed in the fatalistic hopelessness of the slum dwellers and the smug defensiveness of the rich; I was sucked along the smell-trails of dispossession and also fanaticism, lured down a long underworld corridor at whose end was the door to Tai Bibi, the oldest whore in the world… but I'm running away with myself. At the heart of my Karachi was Alia Aziz's house, a large old building on Clayton Road (she must have wandered in it for years like a ghost with nobody to haunt), a place of shadows and yellowed paint, across which there fell, every afternoon, the long accusing shadow of the minaret of the local mosque. Even when, years later in the magicians' ghetto, I lived in another mosque's shade, a shade which was, at least for a time, a protective, unmenacing penumbra, I never lost my Karachi-born view of mosque-shadows, in which, it seemed to me, I could sniff the narrow, clutching, accusative odour of my aunt. Who bided her time; but whose vengeance, when it came, was crushing.

It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert's power. Oases shone in the tarmac of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst the hovels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city (whose only common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had started life as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient powers of apparition-mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by illusionary sand-dunes and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant 'submission', my new fellow-citizens exuded the flat boiled odours of acquiescence, which were depressing to a nose which had smelt-at the very last, and however briefly-the highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay.

Soon after our arrival-and, perhaps, oppressed by the mosque-shadowed air of the Clayton Road house-my father resolved to build us a new home. He bought a. plot of land in the smartest of the 'societies', the new housing development zones; and on my sixteenth birthday, Saleem acquired more than a Lambretta-I learned the occult powers of umbilical cords.

What, pickled in brine, sat for sixteen years in my father's almirah, awaiting just such a day? What, floating like a water-snake in an old pickle-jar, accompanied us on our sea-journey and ended up buried in hard, barren Karachi-earth? What had once nourished life in a womb-what now infused earth with miraculous life, and gave birth to a split-level, American-style modern bungalow?… Eschewing these cryptic questions, I explain that, on my sixteenth birthday, my family (including Alia aunty) assembled on our plot of Korangi Road earth; watched by the eyes of a team of labourers and the beard of a mullah, Ahmed handed Saleem a pickaxe; I drove it inaugurally into the ground. 'A new beginning,' Amina said, 'Inshallah, we shall all be new people now.' Spurred on by her noble and unattainable desire, a workman rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a pickle-jar was produced. Brine was discarded on the thirsty ground; and what-was-left-inside received the mullah's blessings. After which, an umbilical cord-was it mine? Or Shiva's?-was implanted in the earth; and at once, a house began to grow. There were sweetmeats and soft drinks; the mullah, displaying remarkable hunger, consumed thirty-nine laddoos; and Ahmed Sinai did not once complain of the expense. The spirit of the buried cord inspired the workmen; but although the foundations were dug very deep, they would not prevent the house from falling down before we ever lived in it.

What I surmised about umbilical cords: although they possessed the power of growing houses, some were evidently better at the job than others. The city of Karachi proved my point; clearly constructed on top of entirely unsuitable cords, it was full of deformed houses, the stunted hunchback children of deficient lifelines, houses growing mysteriously blind, with no visible windows, houses which looked like radios or air-conditioners or jail-cells, crazy top-heavy edifices which fell over with monotonous regularity, like drunks; a wild proliferation of mad houses, whose inadequacies as living quarters were exceeded only by their quite exceptional ugliness. The city obscured the desert; but either the cords, or the infertility of the soil, made it grow into something grotesque.

Capable of smelling sadness and joy, of sniffing out intelligence and stupidity with my eyes closed, I arrived at Karachi, and adolescence-understanding, of course, that the subcontinent's new nations and I had all left childhood behind; that growing pains and strange awkward alterations of voice were in store for us all. Drainage censored my inner life; my sense of connection remained undrained.

Saleem invaded Pakistan armed only with a hypersensitive nose; but, worst of all, he invaded from the wrong direction! All successful conquests of that part of the world have begun in the north; all conquerors have come by land. Sailing ignorantly against the winds of history, I reached Karachi from the south-east, and by sea. What followed should not, I suppose, have surprised me.

With hindsight, the advantages of sweeping down from the north are self-evident. From the north came the Umayyad generals, Hajjaj bin Yusuf and Muhammad bin Qasim; also the Ismailis. (Honeymoon Lodge, where it is said Aly Khan sojourned with Rita Hayworth, overlooked our plot of umbilicized earth; rumour has it that the film-star created much scandal by wandering in the grounds dressed in a series of fabulous, gauzy, Hollywood negligees.) O ineluctable superiority of northernness! From which direction did Mahmud of Ghazni descend upon these Indus plains, bringing with him a language boasting no fewer than three forms of the letter S? The inescapable answer: se, sin and swad were northern intruders. And Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, who overthrew the Ghaznavids and established the Delhi Caliphate? Sam Ghuri's son, too, moved southwards on his progress.

And Tughlaq, and the Mughal Emperors… but I've made my point. It remains only to add that ideas, as well as armies, swept south south south from the northern heights: the legend of Sikandar But-Shikan, the Iconoclast of Kashmir, who at the end of the fourteenth century destroyed every Hindu temple in the Valley (establishing a precedent for my grandfather), travelled down from the hills to the river-plains; and five hundred years later the mujahideen movement of Syed Ahmad Barilwi followed the well-trodden trail. Barilwi's ideas: self-denial, hatred-of-Hindus, holy war… philosophies as well as kings (to cut this short) came from the opposite direction to me.

Saleem's parents said, 'We must all become new people'; in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah's (like India's first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country whose population of deities rivalled the numbers of its people, so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body was to show a marked preference for the impure. Mopla-like, I was doomed to be a misfit; but, in the end, purity found me out, and even I, Saleem, was cleansed of my misdeeds.

After my sixteenth birthday, I studied history at my aunt Alia's college; but not even learning could make me feel a part of this country devoid of midnight children, in which my fellow-students took out processions to demand a stricter, more Islamic society-proving that they had contrived to become the antitheses of students everywhere else on earth, by demanding more-rules-not-less. My parents, however, were determined to put down roots; although Ayub Khan and Bhutto were forging an alliance with China (which had so recently been our enemy), Ahmed and Amina would listen to no criticisms of their new home; and my father bought a towel factory.

There was a new brilliance about my parents in those days; Amina had lost her guilt-fog, her verrucas seemed not to be playing up any more; while Ahmed, although still whitened, had felt the freeze of his loins thawing under the heat of his newfound love for his wife. On some mornings, Amina had toothmarks on her neck; she giggled uncontrollably at times, like a schoolgirl. 'You two, honestly,' her sister Alia said, 'Like honeymooners or I don't know what.' But I could smell what was hidden behind Alia's teeth; what stayed inside when the friendly words came out… Ahmed Sinai named his towels after his wife: Amina Brand.

'Who are these multi-multis? These Dawoods, Saigols, Haroons?' he cried gaily, dismissing the richest families in the land. 'Who are Valikas or Zulfikars? I could eat them ten at a time. You wait!', he promised, 'In two years the whole world will be wiping itself on an Amina Brand cloth. The finest terry-cloth! The most modern machines! We shall make the whole world clean and dry; Dawoods and Zulfikars will beg to know my secret; and I will say, yes, the towels are high-quality; but the secret is not in the manufacturing; it was love that conquered all.' (I discerned, in my father's speech, the lingering effects of the optimism virus.)

Did Amina Brand conquer the world in the name of cleanliness (which is next to…)? Did Valikas and Saigols come to ask Ahmed Sinai, 'God, we're stumped, yaar, how'd you do it?' Did high-quality terry-cloth, in patterns devised by Ahmed himself-a little gaudy, but never mind, they were born of love-wipe away the moist-ness of Pakistanis and export-markets alike? Did Russians Englishmen Americans wrap themselves in my mother's immortalized name?… The story of Amina Brand must wait awhile; because the career of Jamila Singer is about to take off; the mosque-shadowed house on Clayton Road has been visited by Uncle Puffs.

His real name was Major (Retired) Alauddin Latif; he had heard about my sister's voice from 'my darn good friend General Zulfikar; use to be with him in the Border Patrol Force back in '47.' He turned up at Alia Aziz's house shortly after Jamila's fifteenth birthday, beaming and bouncing, revealing a mouth filled with solid gold teeth. 'I'm a simple fellow,' he explained, 'like our illustrious President. I keep my cash where it's safe.' Like our illustrious President, the Major's head was perfectly spherical; unlike Ayub Khan, Latif had left the Army and entered show-business. 'Pakistan's absolute number-one impresario, old man,' he told my father. 'Nothing to it but organization; old Army habit, dies darn hard.' Major Latif had a proposition: he wanted to hear Jamila sing, 'And if she's two per cent as good as I'm told, my good sir, I'll make her famous! Oh, yes, overnight, certainly! Contacts: that's all it takes; contacts and organization; and yours truly Major (Retired) Latif has the lot. Alauddin Latif,' he stressed, flashing goldly at Ahmed Sinai, 'Know the story? I just rub my jolly old lamp and out pops the genie bringing fame and fortune. Your girl will be in darn good hands. Dam good.'

It is fortunate for Jamila Singer's legion of fans that Ahmed Sinai was a man in love with his wife; mellowed by his own happiness, he failed to eject Major Latif on the spot. I also believe today that my parents had already come to the conclusion that their daughter's gift was too extraordinary to keep to themselves; the sublime magic of her angel's voice had begun to teach them the inevitable imperatives of talent. But Ahmed and Amina had one concern. 'Our daughter,' Ahmed said-he was always the more old-fashioned of the two beneath the surface-'is from a good family; but you want to put her on a stage in front of God knows how many strange men… ?' The Major looked affronted. 'Sir,' he said stiffly, 'you think I am not a man of sensibility? Got daughters myself, old man. Seven, thank God. Set up a little travel agency business for them; strictly over the telephone, though. Wouldn't dream of sitting them in an office-window. It's the biggest telephonic travel agency in the place, actually. We send train-drivers to England, matter of fact; bus-wallahs, too. My point,' he added hastily, 'is that your daughter would be given as much respect as mine. More, actually; she's going to be a star!'