Midnight's Children (47 page)

In the secrecy of a bathroom, I glued my completed note—my first attempt at rearranging history—on to a sheet of paper; snake-like, I inserted the document in my pocket, like poison in a sac. Subtly, I arranged to spend an evening with Eyeslice and Hairoil. We played a game: “Murder in the Dark” …. During a game of murder, I slipped inside Commander Sabarmati’s almirah and inserted my lethal missive into the inside pocket of his spare uniform. At that moment (no point hiding it) I felt the delight of the snake who hits its target, and feels its fangs pierce its victim’s heel …

No, I am no longer proud of what I did; but remember that my demon of revenge had two heads. By unmasking the perfidy of Lila Sabarmati, I hoped also to administer a salutary shock to my own mother. Two birds with one stone; there were to be two punished women, one impaled on each fang of my forked snake’s tongue. It is not untrue to say that what came to be known as the Sabarmati affair had its real beginnings at a dingy café in the north of the city, when a stowaway watched a ballet of circling hands.

I was secret; I struck from the cover of a bush. What drove me? Hands at the Pioneer Café; wrong-number telephone calls; notes slipped to me on balconies, and passed under cover of bedsheets; my mother’s hypocrisy and Pia’s inconsolable grief: “Hai!
Ai
-hai! Ai-hai-
hai!
” … Mine was a slow poison; but three weeks later, it had its effect.

It emerged, afterwards, that after receiving my anonymous note Commander Sabarmati had engaged the services of the illustrious Dom Minto, Bombay’s best-known private detective. (Minto, old and almost lame, had lowered his rates by then.) He waited until he received Minto’s report. And then:

That Sunday morning, six children sat in a row at the Metro Cub Club, watching
Francis The Talking Mule And The Haunted House
. You see, I had my alibi; I was nowhere near the scene of the crime. Like Sin, the crescent moon, I acted from a distance upon the tides of the world … while a mule talked on a screen, Commander Sabarmati visited the naval arsenal. He signed out a good, long-nosed revolver; also ammunition. He held, in his left hand, a piece of paper on which an address had been written in a private detective’s tidy hand; in his right hand, he grasped the unholstered gun. By taxi, the Commander arrived at Colaba Causeway. He paid off the cab, walked gun-in-hand down a narrow gully past shirt-stalls and toyshops, and ascended the staircase of an apartment block set back from the gully at the rear of a concrete courtyard. He rang the doorbell of apartment 18C; it was heard in 18B by an Anglo-Indian teacher giving private Latin tuition. When Commander Sabarmati’s wife Lila answered the door, he shot her twice in the stomach at point-blank range. She fell backwards; he marched past her, and found Mr. Homi Catrack rising from the toilet, his bottom unwiped, pulling frantically at his trousers. Commander Vinoo Sabarmati shot him once in the genitals, once in the heart and once through the right eye. The gun was not silenced; but when it had finished speaking, there was an enormous silence in the apartment. Mr. Catrack sat down on the toilet after he was shot and seemed to be smiling.

Commander Sabarmati walked out of the apartment block with the smoking gun in his hand (he was seen, through the crack of a door, by a terrified Latin tutor); he strolled along Colaba Causeway until he saw a traffic policeman on his little podium. Commander Sabarmati told the policeman, “I have only now killed my wife and her lover with this gun; I surrender myself into your …” But he had been waving the gun under the policeman’s nose; the officer was so scared that he dropped his traffic-conducting baton and fled. Commander Sabarmati, left alone on the policeman’s pedestal amid the sudden confusion of the traffic, began to direct the cars, using the smoking gun as a baton. This is how he was found by the posse of twelve policemen who arrived ten minutes later, who sprang courageously upon him and seized him hand and foot, and who removed from him the unusual baton with which, for ten minutes, he had expertly conducted the traffic.

A newspaper said of the Sabarmati affair: “It is a theater in which India will discover who she was, what she is, and what she might become.” … But Commander Sabarmati was only a puppet; I was the puppet-master, and the nation performed my play—only I hadn’t meant it! I didn’t think he’d … I only wanted to … a scandal, yes, a scare, a lesson to all unfaithful wives and mothers, but not that, never, no.

Aghast at the result of my actions, I rode the turbulent thought-waves of the city … at the Parsee General Hospital, a doctor said, “Begum Sabarmati will live; but she will have to watch what she eats.” … But Homi Catrack was dead … And who was engaged as the lawyer for the defence?—Who said, “I will defend him free gratis and for nothing?”—Who, once the victor of the Freeze Case, was now the Commander’s champion? Sonny Ibrahim said, “My father will get him off if anyone can.”

Commander Sabarmati was the most popular murderer in the history of Indian jurisprudence. Husbands acclaimed his punishment of an errant wife; faithful women felt justified in their fidelity. Inside Lila’s own sons, I found these thoughts: “We knew she was like that. We knew a Navy man wouldn’t stand for it.” A columnist in the
Illustrated Weekly of India
, writing a pen-portrait to go alongside the “Personality of the Week” full-color caricature of the Commander, said: “In the Sabarmati Case, the noble sentiments of the Ramayana combine with the cheap melodrama of the Bombay talkie; but as for the chief protagonist, all agree on his upstandingness; and he is undeniably an attractive chap.”

My revenge on my mother and Homi Catrack had precipitated a national crisis … because Naval regulations decreed that no man who had been in a civil jail could aspire to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. So Admirals, and city politicians, and of course Ismail Ibrahim, demanded: “Commander Sabarmati must stay in a Navy jail. He is innocent until proven guilty. His career must not be ruined if it can possibly be avoided.” And the authorities: “Yes.” And Commander Sabarmati, safe in the Navy’s own lock-up, discovered the penalties of fame—deluged with telegrams of support, he awaited trial; flowers filled his cell, and although he asked to be placed on an ascetic’s diet of rice and water, well-wishers inundated him with tiffin-carriers filled with birianis and pista-ki-lauz and other rich foods. And, jumping the queue in the Criminal Court, the case began in double-quick time … The prosecution said, “The charge is murder in the first degree.”

Stern-jawed, strong-eyed, Commander Sabarmati replied: “Not guilty.”

My mother said, “O my God, the poor man, so sad, isn’t it?”

I said, “But an unfaithful wife is a terrible thing, Amma …” and she turned away her head.

The prosecution said, “Here is an open and shut case. Here is motive, opportunity, confession, corpse and premeditation: the gun signed out, the children sent to the cinema, the detective’s report. What else to say? The state rests.”

And public opinion: “Such a good man, Allah!”

Ismail Ibrahim said: “This is a case of attempted suicide.”

To which, public opinion: “?????????”

Ismail Ibrahim expounded: “When the Commander received Dom Minto’s report, he wanted to see for himself if it was true; and if so, to kill himself. He signed out the gun; it was for himself. He went to the Colaba address in a spirit of despair only; not as killer, but as dead man! But there—seeing his wife there, jury members!—seeing her half-clothed with her shameless lover!—jury members, this good man, this great man saw red. Red, absolutely, and while seeing red he did his deeds. Thus there is no premeditation, and so no murder in the first degree. Killing yes, but not cold-blooded. Jury members, you must find him not guilty as charged.”

And buzzing around the city was, “No, too much … Ismail Ibrahim has gone too far this time … but, but … he has got a jury composed mostly of women … and not rich ones … therefore doubly susceptible, to the Commander’s charm and the lawyer’s wallet … who knows? Who can tell?”

The jury said, “Not guilty.”

My mother cried, “Oh wonderful! … But, but: is it
justice?
” And the judge, answering her: “Using the powers vested in me, I reverse this absurd verdict. Guilty as charged.”

O, the wild furor of those days! When Naval dignitaries and bishops and other politicians demanded, “Sabarmati must stay in the Navy jail pending High Court appeal. The bigotry of one judge must not ruin this great man!” And police authorities, capitulating, “Very well.” The Sabarmati Case goes rushing upwards, hurtling towards High Court hearing at unprecedented speed … and the Commander tells his lawyer, “I feel as though destiny is no longer in my control; as though something has taken over … let us call it Fate.”

I say: “Call it Saleem, or Snotnose, or Sniffer, or Stainface; call it little-piece-of-the-moon.”

The High Court verdict: “Guilty as charged.” The press headlines:
SABARMATI FOR CIVIL JAIL AT LAST?
Ismail Ibrahim’s statement: “We are going all the way! To the Supreme Court!” And now, the bombshell. A pronouncement from the State Chief Minister himself: “It is a heavy thing to make an exception to the law; but in view of Commander Sabarmati’s services to his country, I am permitting him to remain in Naval confinement pending the Supreme Court decision.”

And more press headlines, stinging as mosquitoes:
STATE GOVERNMENT FLOUTS LAW! SABARMATI SCANDAL NOW A PUBLIC DISGRACE!
… When I realized that the press had turned against the Commander, I knew he was done for.

The Supreme Court verdict: “Guilty.”

Ismail Ibrahim said: “Pardon! We appeal for pardon to the President of India!”

And now great matters are to be weighed in Rashtrapati Bhavan—behind the gates of President House, a man must decide if any man can be set above the law; whether the assassination of a wife’s fancy-man should be set aside for the sake of a Naval career; and still higher things—is India to give her approval to the rule of law, or to the ancient principle of the overriding primacy of heroes? If Rama himself were alive, would we send him to prison for slaying the abductor of Sita? Great matters; my vengeful irruption into the history of my age was certainly no trivial affair.

The President of India said, “I shall not pardon this man.”

Nussie Ibrahim (whose husband had lost his biggest case) wailed, “Hai! Ai-hai!” And repeated an earlier observation: “Amina sister, that good man going to prison—I tell you, it is the end of the world!”

A confession, trembling just beyond my lips: “It was all my doing, Amma; I wanted to teach you a lesson. Amma, do not go to see other men, with Lucknow-work on their shirt; enough, my mother, of teacup-kissery! I am in long trousers now, and may speak to you as a man.” But it never spilled out of me; there was no need, because I heard my mother answering a wrong-number telephone call—and with a strange, subdued voice, speak into the mouthpiece as follows: “No, nobody by that name here; please believe what I am telling you, and never call me again.”

Yes, I had taught my mother a lesson; and after the Sabarmati affair she never saw her Nadir-Qasim in the flesh, never again, not as long as she lived; but, deprived of him, she fell victim to the fate of all women in our family, namely the curse of growing old before her time; she began to shrink, and her hobble became more pronounced, and there was the emptiness of age in her eyes.

My revenge brought in its wake a number of unlooked-for developments; perhaps the most dramatic of these was the appearance in the gardens of Methwold’s Estate of curious flowers, made out of wood and tin, and hand-painted with bright red lettering … the fatal signboards erected in all the gardens except our own, evidence that my powers exceeded even my own understanding, and that, having once been exiled from my two-storey hillock, I had now managed to send everyone else away instead.

Signboards in the gardens of Versailles Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci; signboards nodding to each other in the sea-breeze of the cocktail hour. On each signboard could be discerned the same seven letters, all bright red, all twelve inches high:
FOR SALE
. That was the signboards’ message.

FOR SALE
—Versailles Villa, its owner dead on a toilet seat; the sale was handled by the ferocious nurse Bi-Appah on behalf of poor idiot Toxy; once the sale was complete, nurse and nursed vanished forever, and Bi-Appah held, on her lap, a bulging suitcase filled with banknotes … I don’t know what happened to Toxy, but considering the avarice of her nurse, I’m sure it was nothing good …
FOR SALE
, the Sabarmati apartment in Escorial Villa; Lila Sabarmati was denied custody of her children and faded out of our lives, while Eyeslice and Hairoil packed their bags and departed into the care of the Indian Navy, which had placed itself
in loco parentis
until their father completed his thirty years in jail …
FOR SALE
, too, the Ibrahims’ Sans Souci, because Ishaq Ibrahim’s Embassy Hotel had been burned down by gangsters on the day of Commander Sabarmati’s final defeat, as though the criminal classes of the city were punishing the lawyer’s family for his failure; and then Ismail Ibrahim was suspended from practice,
owing to certain proofs of professional misconduct
(to quote the Bombay Bar Commission’s report); financially “embarrassed,” the Ibrahims also passed out of our lives; and, finally
FOR SALE
, the apartment of Cyrus Dubash and his mother, because during the hue and cry of the Sabarmati affair, and almost entirely unnoticed, the nuclear physicist had died his orange-pip-choking death, thus unleashing upon Cyrus the religious fanaticism of his mother and setting in motion the wheels of the period of revelations which will be the subject of my next little piece.

The signboards nodded in the gardens, which were losing their memories of goldfish and cocktail-hours and invading cats; and who took them down? Who were the heirs of the heirs of William Methwold? … They came swarming out of what had once been the residence of Doctor Narlikar: fat-bellied and grossly competent women, grown fatter and more competent than ever on their tetrapod-given wealth (because those were the years of the great land reclamations). The Narlikar women—from the Navy they bought Commander Sabarmati’s flat, and from the departing Mrs. Dubash her Cyrus’s home; they paid Bi-Appah in used banknotes, and the Ibrahims’ creditors were appeased by Narlikar cash.