Midnight's Children (45 page)

Evening approached at the palace; the convoy of cars bringing General and Begum Zulfikar, their son Zafar, and friends, approached, too. But now the wind changed, and began to blow from the north: a cold wind, and also an intoxicating one, because in the north of Kif were the best hashish fields in the land, and at this time of year the female plants were ripe and in heat. The air was filled with the perfume of the heady lust of the plants, and all who breathed it became doped to some extent. The vacuous beatitude of the plants affected the drivers in the convoy, which only reached the palace by great good fortune, having overturned a number of street-side barber-stalls and invaded at least one tea-shop, leaving the Kifis wondering whether the new horseless carriages, having stolen the streets, were now going to capture their homes as well.

The wind from the north entered the enormous and highly sensitive nose of Saleem, Jamila's brother, and made him so drowsy that he fell asleep in his room; so that he missed the events of an evening during which, he afterwards learned, the hashashin wind had transformed the behaviour of the guests at the engagement ceremony, making them giggle convulsively and gaze provocatively at one another through heavy-lidded eyes; braided Generals sat splay-legged on gilded chairs and dreamed of Paradise. The mehndi ceremony took place amid a sleepy contentment so profound that nobody noticed when the bridegroom relaxed so completely that he wet his pants; and even the quarrelling badmashes from the C.O.P. linked arms and sang a folk-song. And when Mutasim the Handsome, possessed by the lustiness of hashish-plants, attempted to plunge behind the great gold-and-silken sheet with its single hole, Major Alauddin Latif restrained him with beatific good humour, preventing him from seeing Jamila Singer's face without even bloodying his nose. The evening ended when all the guests fell asleep at their tables; but Jamila Singer was escorted to her rooms by a sleepily, beaming Latif.

At midnight, Saleem awoke to find that he still clutched the magical parchment of Mutasim the Handsome in his right hand; and since the wind from the north was still blowing gently through his room, he made up his mind to creep, in chappals and dressing-gown, through the darkened passages of the lovely palace, past all the accumulated debris of a decaying world, rusting suits of armour and ancient tapestries which provided centuries of food for the palace's one billion moths, giant mahaseer trout swimming in glass seas, and a profusion of hunting trophies including a tarnished golden teetar-bird on a teak plinth which commemorated the day on which an earlier Nawab, in the company of Lord Curzon and party, had shot III, III teetars in a single day; he crept past the statues of dead birds into the zenana chambers where the women of the palace slept, and then, sniffing the air, he selected one door, turned the handle and went inside.

There was a giant bed with a floating mosquito-net caught in a stream of colourless light from the maddening, midnight moon; Saleem moved towards it, and then stopped, because he had seen, at the window, the figure of a man trying to climb into the room. Mutasim the Handsome, made shameless by his infatuation and the hashashin wind, had resolved to look at Jamila's face, no matter what the cost .. .And Saleem, invisible in the shadows of the room cried out: 'Hands up! Or I shoot!' Saleem was bluffing; but Mutasim, whose hands were on the window sill, supporting his full weight, did not know that, and was placed in a quandary: to hang on and be shot, or let go and fall? He attempted to argue back, 'You shouldn't be here yourself,' he said, 'I'll tell Amina Begum.' He had recognized the voice of his oppressor; but Saleem pointed out the weakness of his position, and Mutasim, pleading, 'Okay, only don't fire,' was permitted to descend the way he'd come. After that day, Mutasim persuaded his father to make a formal proposal of marriage to Jamila's parents; but she, who had been born and raised without love, retained her old hatred of all who claimed to love her, and turned him down. He left Kif and came to Karachi, but she would not entertain his importunate proposals; and eventually he joined the Army and became a martyr in the war of 1965.

The tragedy of Mutasim the Handsome, however, is only a subplot in our story; because now Saleem and his sister were alone, and she awakened by the exchange between the two youths, asked, 'Saleem? What is happening?'

Saleem approached his sister's bed; his hand sought hers; and parchment was pressed against skin. Only now did Saleem, his tongue loosened by the moon and the lust-drenched breeze, abandon all notions of purity and confess his own love to his open-mouthed sister.

There was a silence; then she cried, 'Oh, no, how can you-', but the magic of the parchment was doing battle with the strength of her hatred of love; so although her body grew stiff and jerky as a wrestler's, she listened to him explaining that there was no sin, he had worked it all out, and after all, they were not truly brother and sister; the blood in his veins was not the blood in hers; in the breeze of that insane night he attempted to undo all the knots which not even Mary Pereira's confession had succeeded in untying; but even as he spoke he could hear his words sounding hollow, and realized that although what he was saying was the literal truth, there were other truths which had become more important because they had been sanctified by time; and although there was no need for shame or horror, he saw both emotions on her forehead, he smelt them on her skin, and, what was worse, he could feel and smell them in and upon himself. So, in the end, not even the magic parchment of Mutasim the Handsome was powerful enough to bring Saleem Sinai and Jamila Singer together; he left her room with bowed head, followed by her deer-startled eyes; and in time the effects of the spell faded altogether, and she took a dreadful revenge. As he left the room the corridors of the palace were suddenly filled with the shriek of a newly-affianced princess, who had awoken from a dream of her wedding-night in which her marital bed had suddenly and unaccountably become awash in rancid yellow liquid; afterwards, she made inquiries, and when she learned the prophetic truth of her dream, resolved never to reach puberty while Zafar was alive, so that she could stay in her palatial bedroom and avoid the foul-smelling horror of his weakness.

The next morning, the two badmashes of the Combined Opposition Party awoke to find themselves back in their own beds; but when they had dressed, they opened the door of their chamber to find two of the biggest soldiers in Pakistan outside it, standing peacefully with crossed rifles, barring the exit. The badmashes shouted and wheedled, but the soldiers stayed in position until the polls were closed; then they quietly disappeared. The badmashes sought out the Nawab, finding him in his exceptional rose-garden; they waved their arms and raised their voices; travesty-of-justice was mentioned, and electoral-jiggery-pokery; also chicanery; but the Nawab showed them thirteen new varieties of Kin rose, crossbred by himself. They ranted on-death-of-democracy, autocratic-tyranny-until he smiled gently, gently, and said, 'My friends, yesterday my daughter was betrothed to Zafar Zulfikar; soon, I hope, my other girl will wed our President's own dear son. Think, then-what dishonour for me, what scandal on my name, if even one vote were cast in Kif against my future relative! Friends, I am a man to whom honour is of concern; so stay in my house, eat, drink; only do not ask for what I cannot give.'

And we all lived happily… at any rate, even without the traditional last-sentence fiction of fairy-tales, my story does indeed end in fantasy; because when Basic Democrats had done their duty, the newspapers-Jang, Dawn, Pakistan Times-announced a crushing victory for the President's Muslim League over the Mader-i-Millat's Combined Opposition Party; thus proving to me that I have been only the humblest of jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence-that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

A little bird whispers in my ear: 'Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth.' I accept the criticism; I know, I know. And, years later, the Widow knew. And Jamila: for whom what-had-been-sanctified-as-truth (by Time, by habit, by a grandmother's pronouncement, by lack of imagination, by a father's acquiescence) proved more believable than what she knew to be so.

What is waiting to be told: the return of ticktock. But now time is counting down to an end, not a birth; there is, too, a weariness to be mentioned, a general fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will be the only solution, because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply run out of steam, and then there's nothing for it but to finish with them.

How a piece fell out of the moon, and Saleem achieved purity… the clock is ticking now; and because all countdowns require a zero, let me state that the end came on September 22nd, 1965; and that the precise instant of the arrival-at-zero was, inevitably, the stroke of midnight. Although the old grandfather clock in my aunt Alia's house, which kept accurate time but always chimed two minutes late, never had a chance to strike.

My grandmother Naseem Aziz arrived in Pakistan in mid-1964, leaving behind an India in which Nehru's death had precipitated a bitter power struggle. Morarji Desai, the Finance Minister, and Jagjivan Ram, most powerful of the untouchables, united in their determination to prevent the establishment of a Nehru dynasty; so Indira Gandhi was denied the leadership. The new Prime Minister was Lal Bahadur Shastri, another member of that generation of politicians who seemed to have been pickled in immortality; in the case of Shastri, however, this was only maya, illusion. Nehru and Shastri have both fully proved their mortality; but there are still plenty of the others left, clutching Time in their mummified fingers and refusing to let it move… in Pakistan, however, the clocks ticked and locked.

Reverend Mother did not overtly approve of my sister's career; it smacked too much of film-stardom. 'My family, whatsitsname,' she sighed to Pia mumani, 'is even less controllable than the price of gas.' Secretly, however, she may have been impressed, because she respected power and position and Jamila was now so exalted as to be welcome in the most powerful and best-placed houses in the land… my grandmother settled in Rawalpindi; however, with a strange show of independence, she chose not to live in the house of General Zulfikar. She and my aunt Pia moved into a modest bungalow in the old part of town; and by pooling their savings, purchased a concession on the long-dreamed-of petrol pump.

Naseem never mentioned Aadam Aziz, nor would she grieve over him; it was almost as though she were relieved that my querulous grandfather, who had in his youth despised the Pakistan movement, and who in all probability blamed the Muslim League for the death of his friend Mian Abdullah, had by dying permitted her to go alone into the Land of the Pure. Setting her face against the past, Reverend Mother concentrated on gasoline and oil. The pump was on a prime site, near the Rawalpindi-Lahore grand trunk road-it did very well. Pia and Naseem took it in turns to spend the day in the manager's glass booth while attendants filled up cars and Army trucks. They proved a magical combination. Pia attracted customers with the beacon of a beauty which obstinately refused to fade; while Reverend Mother, who had been transformed by bereave, ment into a woman who was more interested in other people's lives than her own, took to inviting the pump's customers into her glass booth for cups of pink Kashmiri tea; they would accept with some trepidation, but when they realized that the old lady did not propose to bore them with endless reminiscences, they relaxed, loosened collars and tongues, and Reverend Mother was able to bathe in the blessed oblivion of other people's lives. The pump rapidly became famous in those parts, drivers began to go out of their way to use it-often on two consecutive days, so that they could both feast their eyes on my divine aunt and tell their woes to my eternally patient grandmother, who had developed the absorbent properties of a sponge, and always waited until her guests had completely finished before squeezing out of her own lips a few drops of simple, firm advice-while their cars were filled up with petrol and polished by pump-attendants, my grandmother would re-charge and polish their lives. She sat in her glass confessional and solved the problems of the world; her own family, however, seemed to have lost importance in her eyes.

Moustachioed, matriarchal, proud: Naseem Aziz had found her own way of coping with tragedy; but in finding it had become the first victim of that spirit of detached fatigue which made the end the only possible solution. (Tick, tock.)… However, on the face of it, she appeared to have not the slightest intention of following her husband into the camphor garden reserved for the righteous; she seemed to have more in common with the methuselah leaders of her abandoned India. She grew, with alarming rapidity, wider and wider; until builders were summoned to expand her glassed-in booth. 'Make it big big,' she instructed them, with a rare flash of humour, 'Maybe I'll still be here after a century, whatsitsname, and Allah knows how big I'll have become; I don't want to be troubling you every ten-twelve years.'

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 cess-pit 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 languorous odour 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 behaviour 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 spectres 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.