Midnight's Children (48 page)

My father, alone of all the residents, refused to sell; they offered him vast sums, but he shook his head. They explained their dream—a dream of razing the buildings to the ground and erecting on the two-storey hillock a mansion which would soar thirty stories into the skies, a triumphant pink obelisk, a signpost of their future; Ahmed Sinai, lost in abstractions, would have none of it. They told him, “When you’re surrounded by rubble you’ll have to sell for a song”; he (remembering their tetrapodal perfidy) was unmoved.

Nussie-the-duck said, as she left, “I told you so, Amina sister—the end! The end of the world!” This time she was right and wrong; after August 1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had, indeed, come to an end.

Padma—did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin orb, on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two cheap metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No, of course not; but I did. It was a world full of labels:
Atlantic Ocean
and
Amazon
and
Tropic of Capricorn
. And, at the North Pole, it bore the legend:
MADE AS ENGLAND
. By the August of the nodding signboards and the rapaciousness of the Narlikar women, this tin world had lost its stand; I found Scotch Tape and stuck the earth together at the Equator, and then, my urge for play overcoming my respect, began to use it as a football. In the aftermath of the Sabarmati affair, when the air was filled with the repentance of my mother and the private tragedies of Methwold’s heirs, I clanked my tin sphere around the Estate, secure in the knowledge that the world was still in one piece (although held together by adhesive tape) and also at my feet … until, on the day of Nussie-the-duck’s last eschatological lament—on the day Sonny Ibrahim ceased to be Sonny-next-door—my sister the Brass Monkey descended on me in an inexplicable rage, yelling, “O God, stop your kicking, brother; you don’t feel even a little
bad
today?” And jumping high in the air, she landed with both feet on the North Pole, and crushed the world into the dust of our driveway under her furious heels.

It seems the departure of Sonny Ibrahim, her reviled adorer, whom she had stripped naked in the middle of the road, had affected the Brass Monkey, after all, despite her lifelong denial of the possibility of love.

K
NOW, O UNBLEIVERS
,
THAT
in the dark Midnights of
CELESTIAL SPACE
in a time before Time lay the sphere of Blessed
KHUSROVAND!!!
Even
MODERN SCIENTISTS
now affirm that for
generations
they have
LIED
to conceal from the People whose
right it is to know
of the Unquestionabel
TRUE
existance of this
HOLY HOME OF TRUTH
!!! Leading Intellectuals the World Over, also in America, speak of the
ANTI-RELIGIOUS CONSPIRACY
of reds,
JEWS
, etc., to hide these
VITAL NEWS
! The Veil lifts now. Blessed
LORD KHUSRO
comes with Irrefutable Proofs. Read and believe!

Know that in
TRUE-EXISTING
Khusrovand lived Saints whose Spiritual Purity-Advancement was such that they had, through
MEDITATION &C
., gained powers
FOR THE GOOD OF ALL
, powers Beyond Imagining! They
SAW THROUGH
steel, and could
BEND GIRDERS
with
TEETH!!!

Hear of the Fall of Khusrovand: how the
RED DEVIL
Bhimutha
(
BLACK
be his name) unleashed a fearsome Hail of Meteorites (which has been well chronicled by
WORLD OBSERVATORIES
, but not Explained) … so horrible a
RAIN OF STONE
, that Fair Khusrovand was
RUINED
& its Saints
DESTROYD.

But noble
Furaell
and beauteous
Khalila
were wise.
SACRIFICING THEMSELVES
in an ecstasy of Kundalini Art, they saved the
SOUL
of their unborn son
LORD KHUSRO
. Entering True Oneness in a Supreme Yogic Trance (whose powers are now
ACCEPTED
in
WHOLE WORLD
!) they transformed their Noble Spirits into a Flashing
Beam
of
KUNDALINI LIFE FORCE ENERGY LIGHT
, of which today’s wellknown
LASER
is a common imitation &
Copy
. Along this
BEAM
, Soul of unborn Khusro flew, traversing the
BOTTOMLESS DEEPS
of Celestial Space-Eternity, until by
OUR LUCK!
it came to our own Duniya (World) & lodged in Womb of a humble Parsee matron of Good Family.

So the Child was born & was of true Goodness & Unparalleled
BRAIN
(giving the
LIE
to that
LIE
, that we are all Born Equal! Is a Crook the equal of Saint?
OF COURSE NOT
!!) But for some Time his true nature lay Hidden, until while portraying an Earth-Saint in a
DRAMA
production (of which
LEADING CRITICS
have said, The Purity of His Performance Defied The Blief), he
CAME AWAKE
& knew
WHO
he
WAS
. Now has he taken up his True Name,

& is Set Forth humbly with Ash on his Ascetic’s Brow to heal Disease and End Droughts &
FIGHT
the Legions of
Bhimutha
wherever they may Come. For
BE AFRAID
!
Bimutha’s
RAIN OF STONE
will come to us
ALSO!
Do not heed
LIES
of politicos poets Reds & cetera.
PUT YOUR TRUST
in Only True Lord

& send Donations to POBox 555, Head Post Office, Bombay—1.

Cyrus-the-great had a nuclear physicist for a father and, for a mother, a religious fanatic whose faith had gone sour inside her as a result of so many years of being suppressed by the domineering rationality of her Dubash; and when Cyrus’s father choked on an orange from which his mother had forgotten to remove the pips, Mrs. Dubash applied herself to the task of erasing her late husband from the personality of her son—of remaking Cyrus in her own strange image.
Cyrus-the-great, Born on a plate, In nineteen hundred and forty-eight
—Cyrus the school prodigy—Cyrus as St. Joan in Shaw’s play—all these Cyruses, to whom we had grown accustomed, with whom we had grown up, now disappeared; in their place there emerged the overblown, almost bovinely placid figure of Lord Khusro Khusrovand. At the age of ten, Cyrus vanished from the Cathedral School, and the meteoric rise of India’s richest guru began. (There are as many versions of India as Indians; and, when set beside Cyrus’s India, my own version seems almost mundane.)

Why did he let it happen? Why did posters cover the city, and advertisements fill the newspapers, without a peep out of the child genius? … Because Cyrus (although he used to lecture us, not unmischievously, on the Parts of a Wooman’s Body) was simply the most malleable of boys, and would not have dreamed of crossing his mother. For his mother, he put on a sort of brocade skirt and a turban; for the sake of filial duty, he permitted millions of devotees to kiss his little finger. In the name of maternal love, he truly became Lord Khusro, the most successful holy child in history; in no time at all he was being hailed by crowds half a million strong, and credited with miracles; American guitarists came to sit at his feet, and they all brought their check-books along. Lord Khusrovand acquired accountants, and tax havens, and a luxury liner called the
Khusrovand Starship
, and an aircraft—
Lord Khusro’s Astral Plane
. And somewhere inside the faintly-smiling, benediction-scattering boy … in a place which was forever hidden by his mother’s frighteningly efficient shadow (she had, after all, lived in the same house as the Narlikar women; how well did she know them? How much of their awesome competence leaked into her?), there lurked the ghost of a boy who had been my friend.

“That Lord Khusro?” Padma asks, amazed. “You mean that same mahaguru who drowned at sea last year?” Yes, Padma; he could not walk on water; and very few people who have come into contact with me have been vouchsafed a natural death … let me confess that I was somewhat resentful of Cyrus’s apotheosis. “It should have been me,” I even thought, “I am the magic child; not only my primacy at home, but even my true innermost nature, has now been purloined.”

Padma: I never became a “mahaguru”; millions have never seated themselves at my feet; and it was my own fault, because one day, many years ago, I had gone to hear Cyrus’s lecture on the Parts of a Wooman’s Body.

“What?” Padma shakes her head, puzzled. “What’s this now?”

The nuclear physicist Dubash possessed a beautiful marble statuette—a female nude—and with the help of this figurine, his son would give expert lectures on female anatomy to an audience of sniggering boys. Not free; Cyrus-the-great charged a fee. In exchange for anatomy, he demanded comic-books—and I, in all innocence, gave him a copy of that most precious of
Superman
comics, the one containing the frame-story, about the explosion of the planet Krypton and the rocket-ship in which Jor-El his father despatched him through space, to land on earth and be adopted by the good, mild Kents … did nobody else see it? In all those years, did no person understand that what Mrs. Dubash had done was to rework and reinvent the most potent of all modern myths—the legend of the coming of the superman? I saw the hoardings trumpeting the coming of Lord Khusro Khusrovand Bhagwan; and found myself obliged, yet again, to accept responsibility for the events of my turbulent, fabulous world.

How I admire the leg-muscles of my solicitous Padma! There she squats, a few feet from my table, her sari hitched up in fisherwoman-fashion. Calf-muscles show no sign of strain; thigh-muscles, rippling through sari-folds, display their commendable stamina. Strong enough to squat forever, simultaneously defying gravity and cramp, my Padma listens unhurriedly to my lengthy tale; O mighty pickle-woman! What reassuring solidity, how comforting an air of permanence, in her biceps and triceps … for my admiration extends also to her arms, which could wrestle mine down in a trice, and from which, when they enfold me nightly in futile embraces, there is no escape. Past our crisis now, we exist in perfect harmony: I recount, she is recounted to; she ministers, and I accept her ministrations with grace. I am, in fact, entirely content with the uncomplaining thews of Padma Mangroli, who is, unaccountably, more interested in me than my tales.

Why I have chosen to expound on Padma’s musculature: these days, it’s to those muscles, as much as to anything or -one (for instance, my son, who hasn’t even learned to read as yet), that I’m telling my story. Because I am rushing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible, and overstatements, and jarring alterations in tone; I’m racing the cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have already been made, and that, as my decay accelerates (my writing speed is having trouble keeping up), the risk of unreliability grows … in this condition, I am learning to use Padma’s muscles as my guides. When she’s bored, I can detect in her fibers the ripples of uninterest; when she’s unconvinced, there is a tic which gets going in her cheek. The dance of her musculature helps to keep me on the rails; because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe … Padma, having accepted the story of Cyrus-the-great, gives me the courage to speed on, into the worst time of my eleven-year-old life (there is, was, worse to come)—into the August-and-September when revelations flowed faster than blood.

Nodding signboards had scarcely been taken down when the demolition crews of the Narlikar women moved in; Buckingham Villa was enveloped in the tumultuous dust of the dying palaces of William Methwold. Concealed by dust from Warden Road below, we were nevertheless still vulnerable to telephones; and it was the telephone which informed us, in the tremulous voice of my aunt Pia, of the suicide of my beloved uncle Hanif. Deprived of the income he had received from Homi Catrack, my uncle had taken his booming voice and his obsessions with hearts and reality up to the roof of his Marine Drive apartment block; he had stepped out into the evening sea-breeze, frightening the beggars so much (when he fell) that they gave up pretending to be blind and ran away yelling … in death as in life, Hanif Aziz espoused the cause of truth and put illusion to flight. He was nearly thirty-four years old. Murder breeds death; by killing Homi Catrack, I had killed my uncle, too. It was my fault; and the dying wasn’t over yet.

The family gathered at Buckingham Villa: from Agra, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother; from Delhi, my uncle Mustapha, the Civil Servant who had polished the art of agreeing with his superiors to the point at which they had stopped hearing him, which is why he never got promoted; and his half-Irani wife Sonia and their children who had been so thoroughly beaten into insignificance that I can’t even remember how many of them there were; and from Pakistan, bitter Alia, and even General Zulfikar and my aunt Emerald, who brought twenty-seven pieces of luggage and two servants, and never stopped looking at their watches and inquiring about the date. Their son Zafar also came. And, to complete the circle, my mother brought Pia to stay in our house, “at least for the forty-day mourning period, my sister.”