Midnight's Children (59 page)

Pia Aziz, however, was not content with “pumpery-shumpery.” She began a series of liaisons with colonels cricketers polo-players diplomats, which were easy to conceal from a Reverend Mother who had lost interest in the doings of everyone except strangers; but which were otherwise the talk of what was, after all, a small town. My aunt Emerald took Pia to task; she replied: “You want me to be forever howling and pulling hair? I’m still young; young folk should gad a little.” Emerald, thin-lipped: “But be a little respectable … the family name …” At which Pia tossed her head. “You be respectable, sister,” she said, “Me, I’ll be alive.”

But it seems to me that there was something hollow in Pia’s self-assertion; that she, too, felt her personality draining away with the years; that her feverish romancing was a last desperate attempt to behave “in character”—in the way a woman like her was supposed to do. Her heart wasn’t in it; somewhere inside, she, too, was waiting for an end … In my family, we have always been vulnerable to things which fall from the skies, ever since Ahmed Sinai was slapped by a vulture-dropped hand; and bolts from the blue were only a year away.

After the news of my grandfather’s death and the arrival of Reverend Mother in Pakistan, I began to dream repeatedly of Kashmir; although I had never walked in Shalimar-bagh, I did so at night; I floated in shikaras and climbed Sankara Acharya’s hill as my grandfather had; I saw lotus-roots and mountains like angry jaws. This, too, may be seen as an aspect of the detachment which came to afflict us all (except Jamila, who had God and country to keep her going)—a reminder of my family’s separateness from both India and Pakistan. In Rawalpindi, my grandmother drank pink Kashmiri tea; in Karachi, her grandson was washed by the waters of a lake he had never seen. It would not be long before the dream of Kashmir spilled over into the minds of the rest of the population of Pakistan; connection-to-history refused to abandon me, and I found my dream becoming, in 1965, the common property of the nation, and a factor of prime importance in the coming end, when all manner of things fell from the skies, and I was purified at last.

Saleem could sink no lower: I could smell, on myself, the cesspit stink of my iniquities. I had come to the Land of the Pure, and sought the company of whores—when I should have been forging a new, upright life for myself, I gave birth, instead, to an unspeakable (and also unrequited) love. Possessed by the beginnings of the great fatalism which was to overwhelm me, I rode the city streets on my Lambretta; Jamila and I avoided each other as much as possible, unable, for the first time in our lives, to say a word to one another.

Purity—that highest of ideals!—that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister’s songs!—seemed very far away; how could I have known that history—which has the power of pardoning sinners—was at that moment counting down towards a moment in which it would manage, at one stroke, to cleanse me from head to foot?

In the meantime, other forces were spending themselves; Alia Aziz had begun to wreak her awful spinster’s revenge.

Guru Mandir days: paan-smells, cooking-smells, the langorous odor of the shadow of the minaret, the mosque’s long pointing finger: while my aunt Alia’s hatred of the man who had abandoned her and of the sister who had married him grew into a tangible, visible thing, it sat on her living-room rug like a great gecko, reeking of vomit; but it seemed I was the only one to smell it, because Alia’s skill at dissimulation had grown as rapidly as the hairiness of her chin and her adeptness with the plasters with which, each evening, she ripped her beard out by the roots.

My aunt Alia’s contribution to the fate of nations—through her school and college—must not be minimized. Having allowed her old-maid frustrations to leak into the curricula, the bricks and also the students at her twin educational establishments, she had raised a tribe of children and young adults who felt themselves possessed by an ancient vengefulness, without fully knowing why. O omnipresent aridity of maiden aunts! It soured the paintwork of her home; her furniture was made lumpy by the harsh stuffing of bitterness; old-maid repressions were sewn into curtain-seams. As once long ago into baby-things of. Bitterness, issuing through the fissures of the earth.

What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the lonely madness of the years, raised to the level of an art-form: the impregnation of food with emotions. To whom she remained second in her achievements in this field: my old ayah, Mary Pereira. By whom, today, both old cooks have been outdone: Saleem Sinai, pickler-in-chief at the Braganza pickle works … nevertheless, while we lived in her Guru Mandir mansion, she fed us the birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord; and little by little, even the harmonies of my parents’ autumnal love went out of tune.

But good things must also be said about my aunt. In politics, she spoke out vociferously against government-by-military-say-so; if she had not had a General for a brother-in-law, her school and college might well have been taken out of her hands. Let me not show her entirely through the dark glass of my private despondency: she had given lecture-tours in the Soviet Union and America. Also, her food tasted good. (Despite its hidden content.)

But the air and the food in that mosque-shadowed house began to take its toll … Saleem, under the doubly dislocating influence of his awful love and Alia’s food, began to blush like a beetroot whenever his sister appeared in his thoughts; while Jamila, unconsciously seized by a longing for fresh air and food unseasoned by dark emotions, began to spend less and less time there, travelling instead up and down the country (but never to the East Wing) to give her concerts. On those increasingly rare occasions when brother and sister found themselves in the same room they would jump, startled, half an inch off the floor, and then, landing, stare furiously at the spot over which they had leaped, as if it had suddenly become as hot as a bread-oven. At other times, too, they indulged in behavior whose meaning would have been transparently obvious, were it not for the fact that each occupant of the house had other things on his or her mind: Jamila, for instance, took to keeping on her gold-and-white travelling veil indoors until she was sure her brother was out, even if she was dizzy with heat; while Saleem—who continued, slave-fashion, to fetch leavened bread from the nunnery of Santa Ignacia—avoided handing her the loaves himself; on occasion he asked his poisonous aunt to act as intermediary. Alia looked at him with amusement and asked, “What’s wrong with
you
, boy—you haven’t got an infectious disease?” Saleem blushed furiously, fearing that his aunt had guessed about his encounters with paid women; and maybe she had, but she was after bigger fish.

… He also developed a penchant for lapsing into long broody silences, which he interrupted by bursting out suddenly with a meaningless word: “No!” or, “But!” or even more arcane exclamations, such as “Bang!” or “Whaam!” Nonsense words amidst clouded silences: as if Saleem were conducting some inner dialogue of such intensity that fragments of it, or its pain, boiled up from time to time past the surface of his lips. This inner discord was undoubtedly worsened by the curries of disquiet which we were obliged to eat; and at the end, when Amina was reduced to talking to invisible washing-chests and Ahmed, in the desolation of his stroke, was capable of little more than dribbles and giggles, while I glowered silently in my own private withdrawal, my aunt must have been well-pleased with the effectiveness of her revenge upon the Sinai clan; unless she, too, was drained by the fulfilment of her long-nurtured ambition; in which case she, too, had run out of possibilities, and there were hollow overtones in her footsteps as she stalked through the insane asylum of her home with her chin covered in hair-plasters, while her niece jumped over suddenly-hot patches of floor and her nephew yelled “Yaa!” out of nowhere and her erstwhile suitor sent spittle down his chin and Amina greeted the resurgent ghosts of her past: “So it’s you again; well, why not? Nothing ever seems to go away.”

Tick, tock
… In January 1965, my mother Amina Sinai discovered that she was pregnant again, after a gap of seventeen years. When she was sure, she told her good news to her big sister Alia, giving my aunt the opportunity of perfecting her revenge. What Alia said to my mother is not known; what she stirred into her cooking must remain a matter for conjecture; but the effect on Amina was devastating. She was plagued by dreams of a monster child with a cauliflower instead of a brain; she was beset by phantoms of Ramram Seth, and the old prophecy of a child with two heads began to drive her wild all over again. My mother was forty-two years old; and the fears (both natural and Alia-induced) of bearing a child at such an age tarnished the brilliant aura which had hung around her ever since she nursed her husband into his loving autumn; under the influence of the kormas of my aunt’s vengeance—spiced with forebodings as well as cardamoms—my mother became afraid of her child. As the months passed, her forty-two years began to take a terrible toll; the weight of her four decades grew daily, crushing her beneath her age. In her second month, her hair went white. By the third, her face had shrivelled like a rotting mango. In her fourth month she was already an old woman, lined and thick, plagued by verrucas once again, with the inevitability of hair sprouting all over her face; she seemed shrouded once more in a fog of shame, as though the baby were a scandal in a lady of her evident antiquity. As the child of those confused days grew within her, the contrast between its youth and her age increased; it was at this point that she collapsed into an old cane chair and received visits from the specters of her past. The disintegration of my mother was appalling in its suddenness; Ahmed Sinai, observing helplessly, found himself, all of a sudden, unnerved, adrift, unmanned.

Even now, I find it hard to write about those days of the end of possibility, when my father found his towel factory crumbling in his hands. The effects of Alia’s culinary witchcraft (which operated both through his stomach, when he ate, and his eyes, when he saw his wife) were now all too apparent in him: he became slack at factory management, and irritable with his work-force.

To sum up the ruination of Amina Brand Towels: Ahmed Sinai began treating his workers as peremptorily as once, in Bombay, he had mistreated servants, and sought to inculcate, in master weavers and assistant packers alike, the eternal verities of the master-servant relationship. As a result his work-force walked out on him in droves, explaining, for instance, “I am not your latrine-cleaner, sahib; I am qualified Grade One weaver,” and in general refusing to show proper gratitude for his beneficence in having employed them. In the grip of the befuddling wrath of my aunt’s packed lunches, he let them all go, and hired a bunch of ill-favored slackers who pilfered cotton spools and machine parts but were willing to bow and scrape whenever required to do so; and the percentage of defective towels rocketed alarmingly, contracts were not fulfilled, re-orders shrank alarmingly. Ahmed Sinai began bringing home mountains—Himalayas!—of reject towelling, because the factory warehouse was full to overflowing of the sub-standard product of his mismanagement; he took to drink again; and by the summer of that year the house in Guru Mandir was awash in the old obscenities of his battle against the djinns, and we had to squeeze sideways past the Everest and Nanga-Parbats of badly-made terry-cloth which lined the passages and hall.

We had delivered ourselves into the lap of my fat aunt’s long-simmered wrath; with the single exception of Jamila, who was least affected owing to her long absences, we all ended up with our geese well and truly cooked. It was a painful and bewildering time, in which the love of my parents disintegrated under the joint weight of their new baby and of my aunt’s age-old grievances; and gradually the confusion and ruin seeped out through the windows of the house and took over the hearts and minds of the nation, so that war, when it came, was wrapped in the same fuddled haze of unreality in which we had begun to live.

My father was heading steadily towards his stroke; but before the bomb went off in his brain, another fuse was lit: in April 1965, we heard about the peculiar incidents in the Rann of Kutch.

While we thrashed like flies in the webs of my aunt’s revenge, the mill of history continued to grind. President Ayub’s reputation was in decline: rumors of malpractice in the 1964 election buzzed about, refusing to be swatted. There was, too, the matter of the President’s son: Gauhar Ayub, whose enigmatic Gandhara Industries made him a “multi-multi” overnight. O endless sequence of nefarious sons-of-the-great! Gauhar, with his bullyings and rantings; and later, in India, Sanjay Gandhi and his Maruti Car Company and his Congress Youth; and most recently of all, Kanti Lal Desai … the sons of the great unmake their parents. But I, too, have a son; Aadam Sinai, flying in the face of precedent, will reverse the trend. Sons can be better than their fathers, as well as worse … in April 1965, however, the air buzzed with the fallibility of sons. And whose son was it who scaled the walls of President House on April 1st—what unknown father spawned the foul-smelling fellow who ran up to the President and fired a pistol at his stomach? Some fathers remain mercifully unknown to history; at any rate, the assassin failed, because his gun miraculously jammed. Somebody’s son was taken away by police to have his teeth pulled out one by one, to have his nails set on fire; burning cigarette-ends were no doubt pressed against the tip of his penis, so it would probably not be much consolation for that nameless, would-be assassin to know that he had simply been carried away by a tide of history in which sons (high and low) were frequently observed to behave exceptionally badly. (No: I do not exempt myself.)

Divorce between news and reality: newspapers quoted foreign economists—
PAKISTAN A MODEL FOR EMERGING NATIONS
—while peasants (unreported) cursed the so-called “green revolution,” claiming that most of the newly-drilled water-wells had been useless, poisoned, and in the wrong places anyway; while editorials praised the probity of the nation’s leadership, rumors, thick as files, mentioned Swiss bank accounts and the new American motor-cars of the President’s son. The Karachi
Dawn
spoke of another dawn—
GOOD INDO-PAK RELATIONS JUST AROUND THE CORNER?
—but, in the Rann of Kutch, yet another inadequate son was discovering a different story.