Midnight's Children (38 page)

But now we're back in 1958; because on the thirty-seventh day of the mourning period, the truth, which had been creeping up on Mary Pereira-and therefore on me-for over eleven years, finally came out into the open; truth, in the shape of an old, old man, whose stench of Hell penetrated even my clogged-up nostrils, and whose body lacked fingers and toes and was littered with boils and holes, walked up our two-storey hillock and appeared through the dust-cloud to be seen by Mary Pereira, who was cleaning the chick-blinds on the verandah.

Here, then, was Mary's nightmare come true; here, visible through the pall of dust, was the ghost of Joe D'Costa, walking towards the ground-floor office of Ahmed Sinai! As if it hadn't been enough to show himself to Aadam Aziz… 'Arre, Joseph,' Mary screamed, dropping her duster, 'you go away now! Don't come here now! Don't be bothering the sahibs with your troubles! О God, Joseph, go, go na, you will kill me today!' But the ghost walked on down the driveway.

Mary Pereira, abandoning chick-blinds, leaving them hanging askew, rushes into the heart of the house to throw herself at the feet of my mother-small fat hands joined in supplication-'Begum Sahiba! Begum Sahiba, forgive me!' And my mother astounded: 'What is this, Mary? What has got your goat?' But Mary is beyond dialogue, she is weeping uncontrollably, crying 'O God my hour has come, my darling Madam, only let me go peacefully, do not put me in the jailkhana!' And also, 'Eleven years, my Madam, see if I haven't loved you all, О Madam, and that boy with his face like the moon; but now I am killed, I am no-good woman, I shall burn in hell! Funtoosh!' cried Mary, and again, 'It's finished; funloosh!'

Still I did not guess what was coming; not even when Mary threw herself upon me (I was taller than her now; her tears wet my neck): 'O baba, baba; today you, must learn a thing, such a thing I have done; but come now…' and the little woman drew herself up with immense dignity, '… I will tell you all before that Joseph does. Begum, children, all you other great sirs and madams, come now to sahib's office, and I will tell.'

Public announcements have punctuated my life; Amina in a Delhi gully, and Mary in a sunless office… with my whole family trooping amazedly behind us, I went downstairs with Mary Pereira, who would not let go of my hand.

What was in the room with Ahmed Sinai? What had given my father a face from which djinns and money had been chased away and replaced by a look of utter desolation? What sat huddled up in the corner of the room, filling the air with a sulphurous stench? What, shaped like a man, lacked fingers and toes, whose face seemed to bubble like the hot springs of New Zealand (which I'd seen in the Wonder Book of Wonders)?… No time to explain, because Mary Pereira has begun to talk, gabbling out a secret which has been hidden for over eleven years, pulling us all out of the dream-world she invented when she changed name-tags, forcing us into the horror of the truth. And all the time she held on to me; like a mother protecting her child, she shielded me from my family. (Who were learning… as I was… that they were not…)

… It was just after midnight and in the streets there were fireworks and crowds, the many-headed monster roaring, I did it for my Joseph, sahib, but please don't send me to jail, look the boy is a good boy, sahib, I am a poor woman, sahib, one mistake, one minute in so many years, not jailkhana sahib, I will go, eleven years I gave but I will go now, sahib, only this is a good boy, sahib, you must not send him, sahib, after eleven years he is your son… O, you boy with your face like the sun coming out, О Saleem my piece-of-the-moon, you must know that your father was Winkie and your mother is also dead…

Mary Pereira ran out of the room.

Ahmed Sinai said, in a voice as faraway as a bird: 'That, in the corner, is my old servant Musa, who tried to rob me once.'

(Can any narrative stand so much so soon? I glance towards Padma; she appears to be stunned, like a fish.)

Once upon a time there was a servant who robbed my father; who swore he was innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should prove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I told you then he was a time-bomb, and he had returned to explode. Musa had, indeed, contracted leprosy; and had returned across the silence of the years to beg for my father's forgiveness, so that he could be released from his self-inflicted curse.

… Someone was called God who was not God; someone else was taken for a ghost, and was not a ghost; and a third person discovered that although his name was Saleem Sinai, he was not his parents' son…

'I forgive you,' Ahmed Sinai said to the leper. After that day, he was cured of one of his obsessions; he never tried again to discover his own (and wholly imaginary) family curse.

'I couldn't tell it any other way,' I say to Padma. Too painful; I had to just blurt it out, all crazy-sounding, just like that.'

'O, mister,' Padma blubbers helplessly, 'O, mister, mister!'

'Come on now,' I say, 'It's an old story.'

But her tears aren't for me; for the moment, she's forgotten about what-chews-at-bones-beneath-the-skin; she's crying over Mary Pereira, of whom, as I've said, she had become excessively fond.

'What happened to her?' she says with red eyes. 'That Mary?'

I am seized by an irrational anger. I shout: 'You ask her!'

Ask her how she went home to the city of Panjim in Goa, how she told her ancient mother the story of her shame! Ask how her mother went wild with the scandal (appropriately enough: it was a time for old folk to lose their wits)! Ask: did daughter and old mother go into the streets to seek forgiveness? Was that not the one time in each ten years when the mummified corpse of St Francis Xavier (as holy a relic as the Prophet's hair) is taken from its vault in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus and carried around the town? Did Mary and old distraught Mrs Pereira find themselves pressing up against the catafalque; was the old lady beside herself with grief for her daughter's crime? Did old Mrs Pereira, shouting, 'Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai!', clamber up on to the bier to kiss the foot of the Holy One? Amidst uncountable crowds, did Mrs Pereira enter a holy frenzy? Ask! Did she or didn't she, in the clutches of her wild spirit, place her lips around the big toe on St Francis's left foot? Ask for yourself: did Mary's mother bite the toe right off?

'How?' Padma wails, unnerved by my wrath. 'How, ask?'

… And is this also true: were the papers making it up when they wrote that the old lady had been miraculously punished; when they quoted Church sources and eye-witnesses, who described how the old woman was turned into solid stone? No? Ask her if it's true that the Church sent a stone-statue figure of an old woman around the towns and the villages of Goa, to show what happened to those who misbehave with 'the saints? 'Ask: was this statue not seen in several villages simultaneously-and does that prove fraud, or a further miracle? 'You know I can't ask anyone,' Padma howls… but I, feeling my fury subside, am making no more revelations tonight.

Baldly, then: Mary Pereira left us, and went to her mother in Goa. But Alice Pereira stayed; Alice remained in Ahmed Sinai's office, and typed, and fetched snacks and fizzy drinks.

As for me-at the end of the mourning period for my uncle Hanif, I entered my second exile.

I was obliged to come to the conclusion that Shiva, my rival, my changeling brother, could no longer be admitted into the forum of my mind; for reasons which were, I admit, ignoble. I was afraid he would discover what I was sure I could not conceal from him-the secrets of our birth. Shiva, for whom the world was things, for whom history could only be explained as the continuing struggle of oneself-against-the-crowd, would certainly insist on claiming his birthright; and, aghast at the very notion of my knock-kneed antagonist replacing me in the blue room of my childhood while I, perforce, walked morosely off the two-storey hillock to enter the northern slums; refusing to accept that the prophecy of Ramram Seth had been intended for Winkie's boy, that it was to Shiva that Prime Ministers had written, and for Shiva that fishermen pointed out to sea… placing, in short, a far higher value on my eleven-year-old sonship than on mere blood, I resolved that my destructive, violent alter ego should never again enter the increasingly fractious councils of the Midnight Children's Conference; that I would guard my secret-which had once been Mary's-with my very life.

There were nights, at this time, when I avoided convening the Conference at all-not because of the unsatisfactory turn it had taken, but simply because I knew it would take time, and cool blood, to erect a barrier around my new knowledge which could deny it to the Children; eventually, I was confident, I would manage this… but I was afraid of Shiva. Most ferocious and powerful of the Children, he would penetrate where others could not go… At any rate, I avoided my fellow-Children; and then suddenly it was too late, because, having exiled Shiva, I found myself hurled into an exile from which I was incapable of contacting my more-than-five-hundred colleagues: I was flung across the Partition-created frontier into Pakistan.

Late in September 1958, the mourning period for my uncle Hanif Aziz came to an end; and, miraculously, the dust-cloud which had enveloped us was settled by a merciful shower of rain. When we had bathed and put on newly-washed clothes and switched on the ceiling-fans, we emerged from bathrooms filled, briefly, with the illusory optimism of freshly-soaped cleanliness; to discover a dusty, unwashed Ahmed Sinai, whisky-bottle in his hand, his eyes rimmed with blood, swaying upstairs from his office in the manic grip of djinns. He had been wrestling, in his private world of abstraction, with the unthinkable realities which Mary's revelations had unleashed; and owing to some cockeyed functioning of the alcohol, had been seized by an indescribable rage which he directed, neither at Mary's departed back, not at the changeling in his midst, but at my mother-at, I should say, Amina Sinai. Perhaps because he knew he should beg her forgiveness, and would not, Ahmed ranted at her for hours within the shocked hearing of her family; I will not repeat the names he called her, nor the vile courses of action he recommended she should take with her life. But in the end it was Reverend Mother who intervened.

'Once before, my daughter,' she said, ignoring Ahmed's continuing ravings, 'your father and I, whatsitsname, said there was no shame in leaving an inadequate husband. Now I say again: you have, whatsitsname, a man of unspeakable vileness. Go from him; go today, and take your children, whatsitsname, away from these oaths which he spews from his lips like an animal, whatsitsname, of the gutter. Take your children, I say, whatsitsname-both your children,' she said, clutching me to her bosom. Once Reverend Mother had legitimized me, there was no one to oppose her; it seems to me now, across the years, that even my cursing father was affected by her support of the eleven-year-old snotnosed child.

Reverend Mother fixed everything; my mother was like putty-like potter's clay!-in her omnipotent hands. At that time, my grandmother (I must continue to call her that) still believed that she and Aadam Aziz would shortly be emigrating to Pakistan; so she instructed my aunt Emerald to take us all with her-Amina, the Monkey, myself, even my aunty Pia-and await her coming. 'Sisters must care for sisters, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother said, 'in times of trouble.' My aunt Emerald looked highly displeased; but both she and General Zulfikar acquiesced. And, since my father was in a lunatic temper which made us fear for our safety, and the Zulfikars had already booked themselves on a ship which was to sail that night, I left my lifelong home that very day, leaving Ahmed Sinai alone with Alice Pereira; because when my mother left her second husband, all the other servants walked out, too.

In Pakistan, my second period of hurtling growth came to an end. And, in Pakistan, I discovered that somehow the existence of a frontier 'jammed' my thought-transmissions to the more-than-five-hundred; so that, exiled once more from my home, I was also exiled from the gift which was my truest birthright: the gift of the midnight children.

We lay anchored off the Rann of Kutch on a heat-soaked afternoon. Heat buzzed in my bad left ear; but I chose to remain on deck, watching as small, vaguely ominous rowing boats and fishermen's dhows ran a ferry service between our ship and the Rann, transporting objects veiled in canvas back and forth, back and forth. Below decks, the adults were playing housie-housie; I had no idea where the Monkey was. It was the first time I had ever been on a real ship (occasional visits to American warships in Bombay harbour didn't count, being merely tourism; and there was always the embarrassment of being in the company of dozens of highly-pregnant ladies, who always came on these tour parties in the hope that they would enter labour and give birth to children who qualified, by virtue of their seaborne birth, for American citizenship). I stared through the heat-haze at the Rann. The Rann of Kutch… I'd always thought it a magical name, and half-feared-half-longed to visit the place, that chameleon area which was land for half the year and sea for the other half, and on which, it was said, the receding ocean would abandon all manner of fabulous debris, such as treasure-chests, white ghostly jellyfish, and even the occasional gasping, freak-legendary figure of a merman. Gazing for the first time upon this amphibian terrain, this bog of nightmare, I should have felt excited; but the heat and recent events were weighing me down; my upper lip was still childishly wet with nose-goo, but I felt oppressed by a feeling of having moved directly from an overlong and dribbling childhood into a premature (though still leaky) old age. My voice had deepened; I had been forced to start shaving, and my face was spotted with blood where the razor had sliced off the heads of pimples… The ship's purser passed me and said, 'Better get below, son. It's the hottest time just now.' I asked about the ferrying boats. 'Just supplies,' he said and moved away, leaving me to contemplate a future in which there was little to look forward to except the grudging hospitality of General Zulfikar, the self-satisfied preening of my aunt Emerald, who would no doubt enjoy showing off her worldly success and status to her unhappy sister and bereaved sister-in-law, and the muscle-headed cockiness of their son Zafar… 'Pakistan,' I said aloud, 'What a complete dump!' And we hadn't even arrived… I looked at the boats; they seemed to be swimming through a dizzying haze. The deck seemed to be swaying violently as well, although there was virtually no wind; and although I tried to grab the rails, the boards were too quick for me: they rushed up and hit me on the nose.

That was how I came to Pakistan, with a mild attack of sunstroke to add to the emptiness of my hands and the knowledge of my birth; and what was the name of the boat? What two sister-ships still plied between Bombay and Karachi in those days before politics ended their journeys? Our boat was the S.S. Sabarmati; its sister, which passed us just before we reached the Karachi harbour, was the Sarasvati. We steamed into exile aboard the Commander's namesake-ship, proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence.

We reached Rawalpindi by hot, dusty train. (The General and Emerald travelled in Air-Conditioned; they bought the rest of us ordinary first-class tickets.) But it was cool when we reached 'Pindi and I set foot, for the first time, in a northern city… I remember it as a low, anonymous town; army barracks, fruit-shops, a sports goods industry; tall military men in the streets; Jeeps; furniture carvers; polo. A town in which it was possible to be very, very cold. And in a new and expensive housing development, a vast house surrounded by a high wall which was topped by barbed wire and patrolled by sentries: General Zulfikar's home. There was a bath next to the double bed in which the General slept; there was a house catch-phrase: 'Let's get organized!'; the servants wore green military jerseys and berets; in the evenings the odours of bhang and charas floated up from their quarters. The furniture was expensive and surprisingly beautiful; Emerald could not be faulted on her taste. It was a dull, lifeless house, for all its military airs; even the goldfish in the tank set in the dining-room wall seemed to bubble listlessly; perhaps its most interesting inhabitant was not even human. You will permit me, for a moment, to describe the General's dog Bonzo. Excuse me: the General's old beagle bitch.

This goitred creature of papery antiquity had been supremely indolent and useless all her life; but while I was still recovering from sunstroke she created the first furore of our stay-a sort of trailer for the 'revolution of the pepperpots'. General Zulfikar had taken her one day to a military training-camp, where he was to watch a team of mine-detectors at work in a specially-prepared minefield. (The General was anxious to mine the entire Indo-Pak border. 'Let's get organized!' he would exclaim. 'Let's give those Hindus something to worry! We'll blow their invaders into so many pieces, there'll be no damn thing left to reincarnate.' He was not, however, overly concerned about the frontiers of East Pakistan, being of the view that 'those damn blackies can look after themselves'.)… And now Bonzo slipped her leash, and somehow evading the frantically clutching hands of young jawans, waddled out into the minefield.

Blind panic. Mine-detecting soldiers picking their way in frenzied slow-motion through the blasting zone. General Zulfikar and other Army brass diving for shelter behind their grandstand, awaiting the explosion… But there was none; and when the flower of the Pakistan Army peeped out from inside dustbins or behind benches, it saw Bonzo picking her way daintily through the field of the lethal seeds, nose to ground, Bonzo-the-insouciant, quite at her ease. General Zulfikar flung his peaked cap in the air. 'Damn marvellous!' he cried in the thin voice which squeezed between his nose and chin, 'The old lady can smell the mines!' Bonzo was drafted forthwith into the armed forces as a four-legged mine-detector with the courtesy rank of sergeant-major.

I mention Bonzo's achievement because it gave the General a stick with which to beat us. We Sinais-and Pia Aziz-were helpless, non-productive members of the Zulfikar household, and the General did not wish us to forget it: 'Even a damn hundred-year-old beagle bitch can earn her damn living,' he was heard to mutter, 'but my house is full of people who can't get organized into one damn thing.' But before the end of October he would be grateful for (at least) my presence… and the transformation of the Monkey was not far away.

We went to school with cousin Zafar, who seemed less anxious to marry my sister now that we were children of a broken home; but his worst deed came one weekend when we were taken to the General's mountain cottage in Nathia Gali, beyond Murree. I was in a state of high excitement (my illness had just been declared cured): mountains! The possibility of panthers! Cold, biting air!-so that I thought nothing of it when the General asked me if I'd mind sharing a bed with Zafar, and didn't even guess when they spread the rubber sheet over the mattress… I awoke in the small hours in a large rancid pool of lukewarm liquid and began to yell blue murder. The General appeared at our bedside and began to thrash the living daylights out of his son. 'You're a big man now! Damn it to hell! Still, and still you do it! Get yourself organized! Good for nothing! Who behaves in this damn way? Cowards, that's who! Damn me if I'll have a coward for a son…' The enuresis of my cousin Zafar continued, however, to be the shame of his family; despite thrashings, the liquid ran down his leg; and one day it happened when he was awake. But that was after certain movements had, with my assistance, been performed by pepperpots, proving to me that although the telepathic air-waves were jammed in this country, the modes of connection still seemed to function; active-literally as well as metaphorically, I helped change the fate of the Land of the Pure.

The Brass Monkey and I were helpless observers, in those days, of my wilting mother. She, who had always been assiduous in the heat, had begun to wither in the northern cold. Deprived of two husbands, she was also deprived (in her own eyes) of meaning; and there was also a relationship to rebuild, between mother and son. She held me tightly one night and said, 'Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.' But there was a distance behind her gentleness, as though she were trying to persuade herself… a distance, too, in the Monkey's midnight whispers of, 'Hey, brother, why don't we go and pour water over Zafar-they'll only think he's wet his bed?'-and it was my sense of this gap which showed me that, despite their use of son and brother, their imaginations were working hard to assimilate Mary's confession; not knowing then that they would be unable to succeed in their re-imaginings of brother and son, I remained terrified of Shiva; and was accordingly driven even deeper into the illusory heart of my desire to prove myself worthy of their kinship. Despite Reverend Mother's recognition of me, I was never at my ease until, on a more-than-three-years-distant verandah, my father said, 'Come, son; come here and let me love you.' Perhaps that is why I behaved as I did on the night of October yth, 1958.

… An eleven-year-old boy, Padma, knew very little about the internal affairs of Pakistan; but he could see, on that October day, that an unusual dinner-party was being planned. Saleem at eleven knew nothing about the Constitution of 1956 and its gradual erosion; but his eyes were keen enough to spot the Army security officers, the military police, who arrived that afternoon to lurk secretly behind every garden bush. Faction strife and the multiple incompetences of Mr Ghulam Mohammed were a mystery to him; but it was clear that his aunt Emerald was putting on her finest jewels. The farce of four-prime-ministers-in-two-years had never made him giggle; but he could sense, in the air of drama hanging over the General's house, that something like a final curtain was approaching. Ignorant of the emergence of the Republican party, he was nevertheless curious about the guest-list for the Zulfikar party; although he was in a country where names meant nothing-who was Chaudhuri Muhammad Ali? Or Suhrawardy? Or Chundrigar, or Noon?-the anonymity of the dinner-guests, which was carefully preserved by his uncle and aunt, was a puzzling thing. Even though he had once cut Pakistani headlines out of newspapers-furniture hurling slays deputye-pak speaker-he had no idea why, at six p.m., a long line of black limousines came through the sentried walls of-the Zulfikar Estate; why flags waved on their bonnets; why their occupants refused to smile; or why Emerald and Pia and my mother stood behind General Zulfikar with expressions on their faces which would have seemed more appropriate at a funeral than a social gathering. Who what was dying? Who why were the limousine arrivals?-I had no idea; but I was on my toes behind my mother, staring at the smoked-glass windows of the enigmatic cars.