Midnight's Children (70 page)

With what words was I greeted when, a little nervously, I rang a doorbell, filled with hopes of beginning a new career? What face appeared behind the wire-netted outer door and scowled in angry surprise? Padma: I was greeted by Uncle Mustapha’s wife, by my mad aunt Sonia, with the exclamation: “
Ptui
! Allah! How the fellow stinks!”

And although I, ingratiatingly, “Hullo, Sonia Aunty darling,” grinned sheepishly at this wire-netting-shaded vision of my aunt’s wrinkling Irani beauty, she went on, “Saleem, is it? Yes, I remember you. Nasty little brat you were. Always thought you were growing up to be God or what. And why? Some stupid letter the P.M.’s fifteenth assistant under-secretary must have sent you.” In that first meeting I should have been able to foresee the destruction of my plans; I should have smelled, on my mad aunt, the implacable odors of Civil Service jealousy, which would thwart all my attempts to gain a place in the world. I had been sent a letter, and she never had; it made us enemies for life. But there was a door, opening; there were whiffs of clean clothes and shower-baths; and I, grateful for small mercies, failed to examine the deadly perfumes of my aunt.

My uncle Mustapha Aziz, whose once-proudly-waxed moustache had never recovered from the paralyzing dust-storm of the destruction of Methwold’s Estate, had been passed over for the headship of his Department no less than forty-seven times, and had at last found consolation for his inadequacies in thrashing his children, in ranting nightly about how he was clearly the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice, in a contradictory but absolute loyalty to the government of the day, and in an obsession with genealogies which was his only hobby and whose intensity was greater even than my father Ahmed Sinai’s long-ago desire to prove himself descended from Mughal emperors. In the first of these consolations he was willingly joined by his wife, the half-Irani would-be-socialite Sonia (née Khosrovani), who had been driven certifiably insane by a life in which she had been required to begin “being a chamcha” (literally a spoon, but idiomatically a flatterer) to forty-seven separate and successive wives of number-ones whom she had previously alienated by her manner of colossal condescension when they had been the wives of number-threes; under the joint batterings of my uncle and aunt, my cousins had by now been beaten into so thorough a pulp that I am unable to recall their number, sexes, proportions or features; their personalities, of course, had long since ceased to exist. In the home of Uncle Mustapha, I sat silently amongst my pulverized cousins listening to his nightly soliloquies which contradicted themselves constantly, veering wildly between his resentment of not having been promoted and his blind lap-dog devotion to every one of the Prime Minister’s acts. If Indira Gandhi had asked him to commit suicide, Mustapha Aziz would have ascribed it to anti-Muslim bigotry but also defended the statesmanship of the request, and, naturally, performed the task without daring (or even wishing) to demur.

As for genealogies: Uncle Mustapha spent all his spare time filling giant log-books with spider-like family trees, eternally researching into and immortalizing the bizarre lineages of the greatest families in the land; but one day during my stay my aunt Sonia heard about a rishi from Hardwar who was reputedly three hundred and ninety-five years old and had memorized the genealogies of every single Brahmin clan in the country. “Even in that,” she screeched at my uncle, “you end up being number two!” The existence of the Hardwar rishi completed her descent into insanity, so that her violence towards her children increased to the point at which we lived in daily expectation of murder, and in the end my uncle Mustapha was forced to have her locked away, because her excesses were embarrassing him in his work.

This, then, was the family to which I had come. Their presence in Delhi came to seem, in my eyes, like a desecration of my own past; in a city which, for me, was forever possessed by the ghosts of the young Ahmed and Amina, this terrible Fly was crawling upon sacred soil.

But what can never be proved for certain is that, in the years ahead, my uncle’s genealogical obsession would be placed at the service of a government which was falling increasingly beneath the twin spells of power and astrology; so that what happened at the Widows’ Hostel might never have happened without his help … but no, I have been a traitor, too; I do not condemn; all I am saying is that I once saw, amongst his genealogical log-books, a black leather folder labelled
TOP SECRET
, and titled
PROJECT M.C.C.

The end is near, and cannot be escaped much longer; but while the Indira sarkar, like her father’s administration, consults daily with purveyors of occult lore; while Benarsi seers help to shape the history of India, I must digress into painful, personal recollections; because it was at Uncle Mustapha’s that I learned, for certain, about the deaths of my family in the war of ’65; and also about the disappearance, just a few days before my arrival, of the famous Pakistani singer Jamila Singer.

… When mad aunt Sonia heard that I had fought on the wrong side in the war, she refused to feed me (we were at dinner), and screeched, “God, you have a cheek, you know that? Don’t you have a brain to think with? You come to a Senior
Civil
Servant’s house—an escaped war criminal, Allah! You want to lose your uncle his job? You want to put us all out on the street? Catch your ears for shame, boy! Go—go, get out, or better, we should call the police and hand you over just now! Go, be a prisoner of war, why should we care, you are not even our departed sister’s true-born son …”

Thunderbolts, one after the other: Saleem fears for his safety, and simultaneously learns the inescapable truth about his mother’s death, and also that his position is weaker than he thought, because in this part of his family the act of acceptance has not been made; Sonia, knowing what Mary Pereira confessed, is capable of anything! … And I, feebly, “My mother? Departed?” And now Uncle Mustapha, perhaps feeling that his wife has gone too far, says reluctantly, “Never mind, Saleem, of course you must stay—he must, wife, what else to do?—and poor fellow doesn’t even know …”

Then they told me.

It occurred to me, in the heart of that crazy Fly, that I owed the dead a number of mourning periods; after I learned of the demise of my mother and father and aunts Alia and Pia and Emerald, of cousin Zafar and his Kifi princess, of Reverend Mother and my distant relative Zohra and her husband, I resolved to spend the next four hundred days in mourning, as was right and proper: ten mourning periods, of forty days each. And then, and then, there was the matter of Jamila Singer …

She had heard about my disappearance in the turmoil of the war in Bangladesh; she, who always showed her love when it was too late, had perhaps been driven a little crazy by the news. Jamila, the Voice of Pakistan, Bulbul-of-the-Faith, had spoken out against the new rulers of truncated, moth-eaten, war-divided Pakistan; while Mr. Bhutto was telling the U.N. Security Council, “We will build a new Pakistan! A better Pakistan! My country hearkens for me!”, my sister was reviling him in public; she, purest of the pure, most patriotic of patriots, turned rebel when she heard about my death. (That, at least, is how I see it; all I heard from my uncle were the bald facts; he had heard them through diplomatic channels, which do not go in for psychological theorizing.) Two days after her tirade against the perpetrators of the war, my sister had vanished off the face of the earth. Uncle Mustapha tried to speak gently: “Very bad things are happening over there, Saleem; people disappearing all the time; we must fear the worst.”

No! No no no! Padma: he was wrong! Jamila did not disappear into the clutches of the State; because that same night, I dreamed that she, in the shadows of darkness and the secrecy of a simple veil, not the instantly recognizable gold-brocade tent of Uncle Puffs but a common black burqa, fled by air from the capital city; and here she is, arriving in Karachi, unquestioned unarrested free, she is taking a taxi into the depths of the city, and now there is a high wall with bolted doors and a hatch through which, once, long ago, I received bread, the leavened bread of my sister’s weakness, she is asking to be let in, nuns are opening doors as she cries sanctuary, yes, there she is, safely inside, doors being bolted behind her, exchanging one kind of invisibility for another, there is another Reverend Mother now, as Jamila Singer who once, as the Brass Monkey, flirted with Christianity, finds safety shelter peace in the midst of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia … yes, she is there, safe, not vanished, not in the grip of police who kick beat starve, but at rest, not in an unmarked grave by the side of the Indus, but alive, baking bread, singing sweetly to the secret nuns; I know, I know, I know. How do I know? A brother knows; that’s all.

Responsibility, assaulting me yet again: because there is no way out of it—Jamila’s fall was, as usual, all my fault.

I lived in the home of Mr. Mustapha Aziz for four hundred and twenty days … Saleem was in belated mourning for his dead; but do not think for one moment that my ears were closed! Don’t assume I didn’t hear what was being said around me, the repeated quarrels between uncle and aunt (which may have helped him decide to consign her to the insane asylum): Sonia Aziz yelling, “That bhangi—that dirtyfilthy fellow, not even your nephew, I don’t know what’s got into you, we should throw him out on his ear!” And Mustapha, quietly, replying: “Poor chap is stricken with grief, so how can we, you just have to look to see, he is not quite right in the head, has suffered many bad things.” Not quite right in the head! That was tremendous, coming from them—from that family beside which a tribe of gibbering cannibals would have seemed calm and civilized! Why did I put up with it? Because I was a man with a dream. But for four hundred and twenty days, it was a dream which failed to come true.

Droopy-moustachioed, tall-but-stooped, an eternal number-two: my uncle Mustapha was not my uncle Hanif. He was the head of the family now, the only one of his generation to survive the holocaust of 1965; but he gave me no help at all … I bearded him in his genealogy-filled study one bitter evening and explained—with proper solemnity and humble but resolute gestures—my historic mission to rescue the nation from her fate; but he sighed deeply and said, “Listen, Saleem, what would you have me do? I keep you in my house; you eat my bread and do nothing—but that is all right, you are from my dead sister’s house, and I must look after—so stay, rest, get well in yourself; then let us see. You want a clerkship or so, maybe it can be fixed; but leave these dreams of God-knows-what. Our country is in safe hands. Already Indiraji is making radical reforms—land reforms, tax structures, education, birth control—you can leave it to her and her sarkar.” Patronizing me, Padma! As if I were a foolish child! O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts!

At every turn I am thwarted; a prophet in the wilderness, like Maslama, like ibn Sinan! No matter how I try, the desert is my lot. O vile unhelpfulness of lickspittle uncles! O fettering of ambitions by second-best toadying relatives! My uncle’s rejection of my pleas for preferment had one grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested her. He was, in fact, preparing me for my return to the magicians’ ghetto, and for … for
her
… the Widow.

Jealousy: that was it. The green jealousy of my mad aunt Sonia, dripping like poison into my uncle’s ears, prevented him from doing a single thing to get me started on my chosen career. The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also: tiny madwomen.

On the four hundred and eighteenth day of my stay, there was a change in the atmosphere of the madhouse. Someone came to dinner: someone with a plump stomach, a tapering head covered with oily curls and a mouth as fleshy as a woman’s labia. I thought I recognized him from newspaper photographs. Turning to one of my sexless ageless faceless cousins, I inquired with interest, “Isn’t it, you know, San-jay Gandhi?” But the pulverized creature was too annihilated to be capable of replying … was it wasn’t it? I did not, at that time, know what I now set down: that certain high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons of prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves … a few years later, there would be gangs of Sanjays all over India! No wonder that incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth control on the rest of us … so maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; but someone disappeared into my uncle’s study with Mustapha Aziz; and that night—I sneaked a look—there was a locked black leather folder saying
TOP SECRET
and also
PROJECT M.C.C.;
and the next morning my uncle was looking at me differently, with fear almost, or with that special look of loathing which Civil Servants reserve for those who fall into official disfavor. I should have known then what was in store for me; but everything is simple with hindsight. Hindsight comes to me now, too late, now that I am finally consigned to the peripheries of history, now that the connections between my life and the nation’s have broken for good and all … to avoid my uncle’s inexplicable gaze, I went out into the garden; and saw Parvati-the-witch.

She was squatting on the pavement with the basket of invisibility by her side; when she saw me her eyes brightened with reproach. “You said you’d come, but you never, so I,” she stuttered. I bowed my head. “I have been in mourning,” I said, lamely, and she, “But still you could have—my God, Saleem, you don’t know, in our colony I can’t tell anyone about my real magic, never, not even Picture Singh who is like a father, I must bottle it and bottle it, because they don’t believe in such things, and I thought, Here is Saleem come, now at last I will have one friend, we can talk, we can be together, we have both been, and known, and arré how to say it, Saleem, you don’t care, you got what you wanted and went off just like that, I am nothing to you, I know …”

That night my mad aunt Sonia, herself only days away from confinement in a strait-jacket (it got into the papers, a small piece on the inside page; my uncle’s Department must have been annoyed), had one of the fierce inspirations of the profoundly insane and burst into the bedroom into which, half an hour earlier, someone-with-saucer-eyes had climbed through a ground-floor window; she found me in bed with Parvati-the-witch, and after that my Uncle Mustapha lost interest in sheltering me, saying, “You were born from bhangis, you will remain a dirty type all your life”; on the four hundred and twentieth day after my arrival, I left my uncle’s house, deprived of family ties, returned at last to that true inheritance of poverty and destitution of which I had been cheated for so long by the crime of Mary Pereira. Parvati-the-witch was waiting for me on the pavement; I did not tell her that there was a sense in which I’d been glad of the interruption, because as I kissed her in the dark of that illicit midnight I had seen her face changing, becoming the face of a forbidden love; the ghostly features of Jamila Singer replaced those of the witch-girl; Jamila who was (I know it!) safely hidden in a Karachi nunnery was suddenly also here, except that she had undergone a dark transformation. She had begun to rot, the dreadful pustules and cankers of forbidden love were spreading across her face; just as once the ghost of Joe D’Costa had rotted in the grip of the occult leprosy of guilt, so now the rancid flowers of incest blossomed on my sister’s phantasmal features, and I couldn’t do it, couldn’t kiss touch look upon that intolerable spectral face, I had been on the verge of jerking away with a cry of desperate nostalgia and shame when Sonia Aziz burst in upon us with electric light and screams.