Midnight's Children (25 page)

Why did my father agree to dream a gynecologist’s entrepreneurial dream? Why, little by little, did the vision of full-sized concrete tetrapods marching over sea walls, four-legged conquerors triumphing over the sea, capture him as surely as it had the gleaming doctor? Why, in the following years, did Ahmed dedicate himself to the fantasy of every island-dweller—the myth of conquering the waves? Perhaps because he was afraid of missing yet another turning; perhaps for the fellowship of games of shatranj; or maybe it was Narlikar’s plausibility—“Your capital and my contacts, Ahmed bhai, what problem can there be? Every great man in this city has a son brought into the world by me; no doors will close. You manufacture; I will get the contract! Fifty-fifty; fair is fair!” But, in my view, there is a simpler explanation. My father, deprived of wifely attention, supplanted by his son, blurred by whisky and djinn, was trying to restore his position in the world; and the dream of tetrapods offered him the chance. Whole-heartedly, he threw himself into the great folly; letters were written, doors knocked upon, black money changed hands; all of which served to make Ahmed Sinai a name known in the corridors of the Sachivalaya—in the passageways of the State Secretariat they got the whiff of a Muslim who was throwing his rupees around like water. And Ahmed Sinai, drinking himself to sleep, was unaware of the danger he was in.

*   *   *

Our lives, at this period, were shaped by correspondence. The Prime Minister wrote to me when I was just seven days old—before I could even wipe my own nose I was receiving fan letters from
Times of India
readers; and one morning in January Ahmed Sinai, too, received a letter he would never forget.

Red eyes at breakfast were followed by the shaven chin of the working day; footsteps down the stairs; alarmed giggles of Coca-Cola girl. The squeak of a chair drawn up to a desk topped with green leathercloth. Metallic noise of a metal paper-cutter being lifted, colliding momentarily with telephone. The brief rasp of metal slicing envelope; and one minute later, Ahmed was running back up the stairs, yelling for my mother, shouting:

“Amina! Come here, wife! The bastards have shoved my balls in an ice-bucket!”

In the days after Ahmed received the formal letter informing him of the freezing of all his assets, the whole world was talking at once … “For pity’s sake, janum, such language!” Amina is saying—and is it my imagination, or does a baby blush in a sky-blue crib?

And Narlikar, arriving in a lather of perspiration, “I blame myself entirely; we made ourselves too public. These are bad times, Sinai bhai—freeze a Muslim’s assets, they say, and you make him run to Pakistan, leaving all his wealth behind him. Catch the lizard’s tail and he’ll snap it off! This so-called secular state gets some damn clever ideas.”

“Everything,” Ahmed Sinai is saying, “bank account; savings bonds; the rents from the Kurla properties—all blocked, frozen. By order, the letter says. By order they will not let me have four annas, wife—not a chavanni to see the peepshow!”

“It’s those photos in the paper,” Amina decides. “Otherwise how could those jumped-up clever dicks know whom to prosecute? My God, janum, it’s my fault …”

“Not ten pice for a twist of channa,” Ahmed Sinai adds, “not one anna to give alms to a beggar. Frozen—like in the fridge!”

“It’s my fault,” Ismail Ibrahim is saying, “I should have warned you, Sinai bhai. I have heard about these freezings—only well-off Muslims are selected, naturally. You must fight.:.”

“… Tooth and nail!” Homi Catrack insists, “Like a lion! Like Aurangzeb—your ancestor, isn’t it?—like the Rani of Jhansi! Then let’s see what kind of country we’ve ended up in!”

“There are lawcourts in this State,” Ismail Ibrahim adds; Nussie-the-duck smiles a bovine smile as she suckles Sonny; her fingers move, absently stroking his hollows, up and around, down and about, in a steady, unchanging rhythm … “You must accept my legal services,” Ismail tells Ahmed, “absolutely free, my good friend. No, no I won’t hear of it. How can it be? We are neighbors.”

“Broke,” Ahmed is saying, “Frozen, like water.”

“Come on now,” Amina interrupts him; her dedication rising to new heights, she leads him towards her bedroom … “Janum, you need to lie for some time.” And Ahmed: “What’s this, wife? A time like this—cleaned out; finished; crushed like ice—and you think about …” But she has closed the door; slippers have been kicked off; arms are reaching towards him; and some moments later her hands are stretching down down down; and then, “Oh my goodness, janum, I thought you were just talking dirty but it’s true! So cold, Allah, so coooold, like little round cubes of ice!”

Such things happen; after the State froze my father’s assets, my mother began to feel them growing colder and colder. On the first day, the Brass Monkey was conceived—just in time, because after that, although Amina lay every night with her husband to warm him, although she snuggled up tightly when she felt him shiver as the icy fingers of rage and powerlessness spread upwards from his loins, she could no longer bear to stretch out her hand and touch because his little cubes of ice had become too frigid to hold.

They—we—should have known something bad would happen. That January, Chowpatty Beach, and Juhu and Trombay, too, were littered with the ominous corpses of dead pomfret, which floated, without the ghost of an explanation, belly-side-up, like scaly fingers in to shore.

A
ND OTHER OMENS:
comets were seen exploding above the Back Bay; it was reported that flowers had been seen bleeding real blood; and in February the snakes escaped from the Schaapsteker Institute. The rumor spread that a mad Bengali snake-charmer, a Tubriwallah, was travelling the country, charming reptiles from captivity, leading them out of snake farms (such as the Schaapsteker, where snake venom’s medicinal functions were studied, and antivenenes devised) by the Pied Piper fascination of his flute, in retribution for the partition of his beloved Golden Bengal. After a while the rumors added that the Tubriwallah was seven feet tall, with bright blue skin. He was Krishna come to chastise his people; he was the sky-hued Jesus of the missionaries.

It seems that, in the aftermath of my changeling birth, while I enlarged myself at breakneck speed, everything that could possibly go wrong began to do so. In the snake winter of early 1948, and in the succeeding hot and rainy seasons, events piled upon events, so that by the time the Brass Monkey was born in September we were all exhausted, and ready for a few years’ rest.

Escaped cobras vanished into the sewers of the city; banded kraits were seen on buses. Religious leaders described the snake escape as a warning—the good Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation’s official renunciation of its deities. (“We are a secular State,” Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary had been asking, “How are we going to live now, Madam?” Homi Catrack introduced us to Doctor Schaapsteker himself. He was eighty-one years old; his tongue flicked constantly in and out between his papery lips; and he was prepared to pay cash rent for a top-floor apartment overlooking the Arabian Sea. Ahmed Sinai, in those days, had taken to his bed; the icy cold of the freeze impregnated his bedsheets; he downed vast quantities of whisky for medicinal purposes, but it failed to warm him up … so it was Amina who agreed to let the upper storey of Buckingham Villa to the old snake-doctor. At the end of February, snake poison entered our lives.

Doctor Schaapsteker was a man who engendered wild stories. The more superstitious orderlies at his Institute swore that he had the capacity of dreaming every night about being bitten by snakes, and thus remained immune to their bites. Others whispered that he was half-snake himself, the child of an unnatural union between a woman and a cobra. His obsession with the venom of the banded krait—
bungarus fasciatus
—was becoming legendary. There is no known antivenene to the bite of
bungarus;
but Schaapsteker had devoted his life to finding one. Buying broken-down horses from the Catrack stables (among others) he injected them with small doses of the poison; but the horses, unhelpfully, failed to develop antibodies, frothed at the mouth, died standing up and had to be transformed into glue. It was said that Doctor Schaapsteker—“Sharpsticker Sahib”—had now acquired the power of killing horses simply by approaching them with a hypodermic syringe … but Amina paid no attention to these tall stories. “He is an old gentleman,” she told Mary Pereira; “What should we care about people who black-tongue him? He pays his rent, and permits us to live.” Amina was grateful to the European snake-doctor, particularly in those days of the freeze when Ahmed did not seem to have the nerve to fight.

“My beloved father and mother,” Amina wrote, “By my eyes and head I swear I do not know why such things are happening to us … Ahmed is a good man, but this business has hit him hard. If you have advice for your daughter, she is greatly in need of it.” Three days after they received this letter, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother arrived at Bombay Central Station by Frontier Mail; and Amina, driving them home in our 1946 Rover, looked out of a side window and saw the Mahalaxmi Racecourse; and had the first germ of her reckless idea.

“This modern decoration is all right for you young people, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother said. “But give me one old-fashioned takht to sit on. These chairs are so soft, whatsitsname, they make me feel like I’m falling.”

“Is he ill?” Aadam Aziz asked. “Should I examine him and prescribe medicines?”

“This is no time to hide in bed,” Reverend Mother pronounced. “Now he must be a man, whatsitsname, and do a man’s business.”

“How well you both look, my parents,” Amina cried, thinking that her father was turning into an old man who seemed to be getting shorter with the passing years; while Reverend Mother had grown so wide that armchairs, though soft, groaned beneath her weight … and sometimes, through a trick of the light, Amina thought she saw, in the center of her father’s body, a dark shadow like a hole.

“What is left in this India?” Reverend Mother asked, hand slicing air. “Go, leave it all, go to Pakistan. See how well that Zulfikar is doing—he will give you a start. Be a man, my son—get up and start again!”

“He doesn’t want to speak now,” Amina said, “he must rest.”

“Rest?” Aadam Aziz roared. “The man is a jelly!”

“Even Alia, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother said, “all on her own, gone to Pakistan—even she is making a decent life, teaching in a fine school. They say she will be headmistress soon.”

“Shhh, mother, he wants to sleep … let’s go next door …”

“There is a time to sleep, whatsitsname, and a time to wake! Listen: Mustapha is making many hundreds of rupees a month, whatsitsname, in the Civil Service. What is your husband. Too good to work?”

“Mother, he is upset. His temperature is so low …”

“What food are you giving? From today, whatsitsname, I will run your kitchen. Young people today—like babies, whatsitsname!”

“Just as you like, mother.”

“I tell you whatsitsname, it’s those photos in the paper. I wrote—didn’t I write?—no good would come of that. Photos take away pieces of you. My God, whatsitsname, when I saw your picture, you had become so transparent I could see the writing from the other side coming right through your face!”

“But that’s only …”

“Don’t tell me your stories, whatsitsname! I give thanks to God you have recovered from that photography!”

After that day, Amina was freed from the exigencies of running her home. Reverend Mother sat at the head of the dining-table, doling out food (Amina took plates to Ahmed, who stayed in bed, moaning from time to time, “Smashed, wife! Snapped—like an icicle!”); while, in the kitchens, Mary Pereira took the time to prepare, for the benefit of their visitors, some of the finest and most delicate mango pickles, lime chutneys and cucumber kasaundies in the world. And now, restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people’s food seeping into her—because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes imbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination. And, although Mary’s pickles had a partially counteractive effect—since she had stirred into them the guilt of her heart, and the fear of discovery, so that, good as they tasted, they had the power of making those who ate them subject to nameless uncertainties and dreams of accusing fingers—the diet provided by Reverend Mother filled Amina with a kind of rage, and even produced slight signs of improvements in her defeated husband. So that finally the day came when Amina, who had been watching me play incompetently with toy horses of sandalwood in the bath, inhaling the sweet odors of sandalwood which the bathwater released, suddenly rediscovered within herself the adventurous streak which was her inheritance from her fading father, the streak which had brought Aadam Aziz down from his mountain valley; Amina turned to Mary Pereira and said, “I’m fed up. If nobody in this house is going to put things right, then it’s just going to be up to me!”

Toy horses galloped behind Amina’s eyes as she left Mary to dry me and marched into her bedroom. Remembered glimpses of Mahalaxmi Racecourse cantered in her head as she pushed aside saris and petticoats. The fever of a reckless scheme flushed her cheeks as she opened the lid of an old tin trunk … filling her purse with the coins and rupee notes of grateful patients and wedding-guests, my mother went to the races.

With the Brass Monkey growing inside her, my mother stalked the paddocks of the racecourse named after the goddess of wealth; braving early-morning sickness and varicose veins, she stood in line at the Tote window, putting money on three-horse accumulators and long-odds outsiders. Ignorant of the first thing about horses, she backed mares known not to be stayers to win long races; she put her money on jockeys because she liked their smiles. Clutching a purse full of the dowry which had lain untouched in its trunk since her own mother had packed it away, she took wild flutters on stallions who looked fit for the Schaapsteker Institute … and won, and won, and won.