Salmon Rusdie is the author of seven novels: Grimus, Midnight's Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Prize), Shame (winner of the French Prix du Meillear Livre Etranger), The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for the Best Novel), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers' Guild Award), The Moor's Last Sigh (winner of the European Aristeion Prize for Literature) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. He has also published a collection of short stories, East, West; a book of reportage, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan journey; a volume of essays, Imaginary Homelands, and a work of film criticism, 'The Wizard of Oz'.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:11
Salman Rusdie was awarded Germany's Author of the Year Award for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989. In 1993, Midnight's Children was adjudged the 'Booker of Bookers' the best novel to have won the 'Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In the same year he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.
He is also an Honorary Professor in Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have been published in more than two dozen languages.
for Zafar Rushdie who, contrary to all expectations, was born in the afternoon
Contents
Book One
The perforated sheet
Mercurochrome
Hit-the-spittoon
Under the carpet
A public announcement
Many-headed monsters
Methwold
Tick, tock
Book Two
The fisherman's pointing finger
Snakes and ladders
Accident in a washing-chest
All-India radio
Love in Bombay
My tenth birthday
At the Pioneer Cafe
Alpha and Omega
The Kolynos Kid
Commander Sabarmati's baton
Revelations
Movements performed by pepperpots
Drainage and the desert
Jamila Singer
How Saleem achieved purity
Book Three
The buddha
In the Sundarbans
Sam and the Tiger
The shadow of the Mosque
A wedd ing
Midnight
Abracadabra作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:11
I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but Ms accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:11
Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning - yes, meaning -something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
And there are so many stories to tell,-too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence the Business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.
(The sheet, incidentally, is stained too, with three drops of old, faded redness. As the Quran tells us: Recite, in the name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.)
One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray.
Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies.
Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history.
Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes.
The world was new again. After a winter's gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow. The new grass bided its time underground; the mountains were retreating to their hill-stations for the warm season. (In the winter, when the valley shrank under the ice, the mountains closed in and snarled like angry jaws around the city on the lake.)
In those days the radio mast had not been built and the temple of Sankara Acharya, a little black blister on a khaki hill, still dominated the streeets and lake of Srinagar. In those days there was no army camp at the lakeside, no endless snakes of camouflaged trucks and jeeps clogged the narrow mountain roads, no soldiers hid behind the crests of the mountains past Baramulla and Gulmarg. In those days travellers were not shot as spies if they took photographs of bridges, and apart from the Englishmen's houseboats on the lake, the valley had hardly changed since the Mughal Empire, for all its springtime renewals; but my grandfather's eyes - which were, like the rest of him, twenty-five years old - saw things differently ... and his nose had started to itch.
To reveal the secret of my grandfather's altered vision: he had spent five years, five springs, away from Home. (The tussock of earth, crucial though its presence was as it crouched under a chance wrinkle of the prayer-mat, was at bottom no more than a catalyst.) Now, returning, he saw through travelled eyes.
Instead of the beauty of the tiny valley circled by giant teeth, he noticed the narrowness, the proximity of the horizon; and felt sad, to be at Home and feel so utterly enclosed. He also felt - inexplicably - as though the old place resented his educated, stethoscoped return. Beneath the winter ice, it had been coldly neutral, but now there was no doubt; the years in Germany had returned him to a hostile environment. Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up with hate, and he came to sacrifice himself at the shrine of the black stone god in the temple on the hill, he would try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise, the way it was before travel and tussocks and army tanks messed everything up.
On the morning when the valley, gloved in a prayer-mat, punched him on the nose, he had been trying, absurdly, to pretend that nothing had changed. So he had risen in the bitter cold of four-fifteen, washed himself in the prescribed fashion, dressed and put on his father's astrakhan cap; after which he had carried the rolled cheroot of the prayer-mat into the small lakeside garden in front of their old dark house and unrolled it over the waiting tussock. The ground felt deceptively soft under his feet and made him simultaneously uncertain and unwary. 'In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful ...'
- the exordium, spoken with hands joined before him like a book, comforted a part of him, made another, larger part feel uneasy - "... Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Creation ..." - but now Heidelberg invaded his head; here was Ingrid, briefly his Ingrid, her face scorning him for this Mecca-turned parroting; here, their friends Oskar and Ilse Lubin the anarchists, mocking his prayer with their anti-ideologies -'... The Compassionate, the Merciful, King of the Last Judgment!...' - Heidelberg, in which, along with Medicine and politics, he learned that India - like radium - had been 'discovered' by the Europeans; even Oskar was filled with admiration for Vasco da Gama, and this was what finally separated Aadam Aziz from his friends, this belief of theirs that he was somehow the invention of their ancestors - "... You alone we worship, and to You alone we pray for help ..." - so here he was, despite their presence in his head, attempting to re-unite himself with an earlier self which ignored their influence but knew everything it ought to have known, about submission for example, about what he was doing now, as his hands, guided by old memories, fluttered upwards, thumbs pressed to ears, fingers spread, as he sank to his knees - '... Guide us to the straight path, The path of those whom You have favoured ...' But it was no good, he was caught in a strange middle ground, trapped between belief and disbelief, and this was only a charade after all - '... Not of those who have incurred Your wrath, Nor of those who have gone astray.' My grandfather bent his forehead towards the earth. Forward he bent, and the earth, prayer-mat-covered, curved up towards him. And now it was the tussock's time. At one and the same time a rebuke from Ilse-Oskar-Ingrid-Heidelberg as well as valley-and-God, it smote him upon the point of the nose. Three drops fell. There were rubies and diamonds. And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood. Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.
The young, newly-qualified Doctor Aadam Aziz stood facing the springtime lake, sniffing the whiffs of change; while his back (which was extremely straight) was turned upon yet more changes. His father had had a stroke in his absence abroad, and his mother had kept it a secret. His mother's voice, whispering stoically: '... Because your studies were too important, son.' This mother, who had spent her life housebound, in purdah, had suddenly found enormous strength and gone out to run the small gemstone Business (turquoises, rubies, diamonds) which had put Aadam through medical college, with the help of a scholarship; so he returned to find the seemingly immutable order of his family turned upside down, his mother going out to work while his father sat hidden behind the veil which the stroke had dropped over his brain ... in a wooden chair, in a darkened room, he sat and made bird-noises. Thirty different species of birds visited him and sat on the sill outside his shuttered window conversing about this and that. He seemed happy enough.
(... And already I can see the repetitions beginning; because didn't my grandmother also find enormous ... and the stroke, too, was not the only ... and the Brass Monkey had her birds ... the curse begins already, and we haven't even got to the noses yet!)
The lake was no longer frozen over. The thaw had come rapidly, as usual; many of the small boats, the shikaras, had been caught napping, which was also normal.
But while these sluggards slept on, on dry land, snoring peacefully beside their owners, the oldest boat was up at the crack as old folk often are, and was therefore the first craft to move across the unfrozen lake. Tai's shikara ...this, too, was customary.
Watch how the old boatman, Tai, makes good time through the misty water, standing stooped over at the back of his craft! How his oar, a wooden heart on a yellow stick, drives jerkily through the weeds! In these parts he's considered very odd because he rows standing up... among other reasons. Tai, bringing an urgent summons to Doctor Aziz, is about to set history in motion... while Aadam, looking down into the water, recalls what Tai taught him years ago: "The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba, just under the water's skin.' Aadam's eyes are a clear blue, the astonishing blue of mountain sky, which has a habit of dripping into the pupils of Kashmir! men; they have not forgotten how to look. They see - there! like the skeleton of a ghost, just beneath the surface of Lake Dali - the delicate tracery, the intricate crisscross of colourless lines, the cold waiting veins of the future. His German years, which have blurred so much else, haven't deprived him of the gift of seeing. Tai's gift. He looks up, sees the approaching V of Tai's boat, waves a greeting. Tai's arm rises - but this is a command. 'Wait!' My grandfather waits; and during this hiatus, as he experiences the last peace of his life, a muddy, ominous sort of peace, I had better get round to describing him.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:11
Keeping out of my voice the natural envy of the ugly man for the strikingly impressive, I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. Pressed flat against a wall of his family Home, he measured twenty-five bricks (a brick for each year of his life), or just over six foot two. A strong man also. His beard was thick and red - and annoyed his mother, who said only Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had said, They went mad with the colours when they made your face.' But the central feature of my grandfather's anatomy was neither colour nor height, neither strength of arm nor straightness of back. There it was, reflected in the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face... Aadam Aziz, waiting for Tai, watches his rippling nose. It would have dominated less dramatic faces than his easily; even on him, it is what one sees first and remembers longest. 'A cyranose,' Ilse Lubin said, and Oskar added, 'A proboscissimus.' Ingrid announced, 'You could cross a river on that nose.' (Its bridge was wide.)
My grandfather's nose: nostrils flaring, curvaceous as dancers. Between them swells the nose's triumphal arch, first up and out, then down and under, sweeping in to his upper lip with a superb and at present red-tipped flick. An easy nose to hit a tussock with. I wish to place on record my gratitude to this mighty organ - if not for it, who would ever have believed me to be truly my mother's son, my grandfather's grandson? - this colossal apparatus which was to be my birthright, too. Doctor Aziz's nose - comparable only to the trunk of the elephant-headed god Ganesh - established incontrovertibly his right to be a patriarch. It was Tai who taught him that, too. When young Aadam was barely past puberty the dilapidated boatman said, That's a nose to start a family on, my princeling. There'd be no mistaking whose brood they were. Mughal Emperors would have given their right hands for noses like that one. There are dynasties waiting inside it,' - and here Tai lapsed into coarseness - 'like snot.'
On Aadam Aziz, the nose assumed a patriarchal aspect. On my mother, it looked noble and a little long-suffering; on my aunt Emerald, snobbish; on my aunt Alia, intellectual; on my uncle Hanif it was the organ of an unsuccessful genius; my uncle Mustapha made it a second-rater's sniffer; the Brass Monkey escaped it completely; but on me - on me, it was something else again. But I mustn't reveal all my secrets at once.
(Tai is getting nearer. He, who revealed the power of the nose, and who is now bringing my grandfather the message which will catapult him into his future, is stroking his shikara through the early morning lake ...)
Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been plying this same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen Lakes ...forever. As far as anyone knew. He lived somewhere in the insanitary bowels of the old wooden-house quarter and his wife grew lotus roots and other curious vegetables on one of the many 'floating gardens' lilting on the surface of the spring and summer water. Tai himself cheerily admitted he had no idea of his age. Neither did his wife - he was, she said, already leathery when they married. His face was a sculpture of wind on water: ripples made of hide. He had two golden teeth and no others. In the town, he had few friends. Few boatmen or traders invited him to share a hookah when he floated past the shikara moorings or one of the lakes' many ramshackle, waterside provision-stores and tea-shops.
The general opinion of Tai had been voiced long ago by Aadam Aziz's father the gemstone merchant: 'His brain fell out with his teeth.' (But now old Aziz sahib sat lost in bird tweets while Tai simply, grandly, continued.) It was an impression the boatman fostered by his chatter, which was fantastic, grandiloquent and ceaseless, and as often as not addressed only to himself.
Sound carries over water, and the lake people giggled at his monologues; but with undertones of awe, and even fear. Awe, because the old halfwit knew the lakes and hills better than any of his detractors; fear, because of his claim to an antiquity so immense it defied numbering, and moreover hung so lightly round his chicken's neck that it hadn't prevented him from winning a highly desirable wife and fathering four sons upon her... and a few more, the story went, on other lakeside wives. The young bucks at the shikara moorings were convinced he had a pile of money hidden away somewhere - a hoard, perhaps, of priceless golden teeth, rattling in a sack like walnuts. Years later, when Uncle Puffs tried to sell me his daughter by offering to have her teeth drawn and replaced in gold, I thought of Tai's forgotten treasure... and, as a child, Aadam Aziz had loved him.
He made his living as a simple ferryman, despite all the rumours of wealth, taking hay and goats and vegetables and wood across the lakes for cash; people, too. When he was running his taxi-service he erected a pavilion in the centre of the shikara, a gay affair of flowered-patterned curtains and canopy, with cushions to match; and deodorised his boat with incense. The sight of Tai's shikara approaching, curtains flying, had always been for Doctor Aziz one of the defining images of the coming of spring. Soon the English sahibs would arrive and Tai would ferry them to the Shalimar gardens and the King's Spring, chattering and pointy and stooped. He was the living antithesis of Oskar-Ilse-Ingrid's belief in the inevitability of change... a quirky, enduring familiar spirit of the valley. A watery Caliban, rather too fond of cheap Kashmiri brandy.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:12
Memory of my blue bedroom wall: on which, next to the P.M.'s letter, the Boy Raleigh hung for many years, gazing rapturously at an old fisherman in what looked like a red dhoti, who sat on - what? -driftwood? - and pointed out to sea as he told his fishy tales... and the Boy Aadam, my grandfather-to-be, fell in love with the boatman Tai precisely because of the endless verbiage which made others think him cracked. It was magical talk, words pouring from him like fools' money, past Ms two gold teeth, laced with hiccups and brandy, soaring up to the most remote Himalayas of the past, then swooping shrewdly on some present detail, Aadam's nose for instance, to vivisect its meaning like a mouse. TMs friendship had plunged Aadam into hot water with great regularity. (Boiling water. Literally. While his mother said, 'We'll kill that boatman's bugs if it kills you.') But still the old soliloquist would dawdle in Ms boat at the garden's lakeside toes and Aziz would sit at Ms feet until voices summoned Mm indoors to be lectured on Tai's filthiness and warned about the pillaging armies of germs Ms mother envisaged leaping from that hospitably ancient body on to her son's starched white loose-pajamas. But always Aadam returned to the water's edge to scan the mists for the ragged reprobate's hunched-up frame steering its magical boat through the enchanted waters of the morning.
'But how old are you really, Taiji?' (Doctor Aziz, adult, redbearded, slanting towards the future, remembers the day he asked the unaskable question.) For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall. The monologue, interrupted. Slap of oar in water. He was riding in the shikara with Tai, squatting amongst goats, on a pile of straw, in full knowledge of the stick and bathtub waiting for him at Home. He had come for stories - and with one question had silenced the storyteller.
'No, tell, Taiji, how old, truly? And now a brandy bottle, materialising from nowhere: cheap liquor from the folds of the great warm chugha-coat. Then a shudder, a belch, a glare. Glint of gold. And - at last! - speech. 'How old? You ask how old, you little wet-head, you nosey ...' Tai, forecasting the fisherman on my wall, pointed at the mountains. 'So old, nakkoo!' Aadam, the nakkoo, the nosey one, followed his pointing finger. 'I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die. Listen. Listen, nakkoo ...' - the brandy bottle again, followed by brandy-voice, and words more intoxicating than booze -'... I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. Once I knew where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year. Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can't read.' Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping hand. Which sweeps again to chugha-pocket, to brandy bottle, to lips chapped with cold. Tai always had woman's lips. 'Nakkoo, listen, listen. I have seen plenty. Yara, you should've seen that Isa when he came, beard down to his balls, bald as an egg on his head. He was old and fagged-out but he knew his manners. "You first, Taiji," he'd say, and "Please to sit"; always a respectful tongue, he never called me crackpot, never called me tu either. Always aap. Polite, see? And what an appetite! Such a hunger, I would catch my ears in fright. Saint or devil, I swear he could eat a whole kid in one go. And so what? I told him, eat, fill your hole, a man comes to Kashmir to enjoy life, or to end it, or both. His work was finished. He just came up here to live it up a little.' Mesmerized by this brandied portrait of a bald, gluttonous Christ, Aziz listened, later repeating every word to the consternation of his parents, who dealt in stones and had no time for 'gas'.
'Oh, you don't believe?' - licking his sore lips with a grin, knowing it to be the reverse of the truth; 'Your attention is wandering?' - again, he knew how furiously Aziz was hanging on his words. 'Maybe the straw is pricking your behind, hey? Oh, I'm so sorry, babaji, not to provide for you silk cushions with gold brocade-work - cushions such as the Emperor Jehangir sat upon! You think of the Emperor Jehangir as a gardener only, no doubt,' Tai accused my grandfather, 'because he built Shalimar. Stupid! What do you know? His name meant Encompasser of the Earth. Is that a gardener's name? God knows what they teach you boys these days. Whereas I' ... puffing up a little here ..'I knew his precise weight, to the tola! Ask me how many maunds, how many seers! When he was happy he got heavier and in Kashmir he was heaviest of all. I used to carry his litter... no, no, look, you don't believe again, that big cucumber in your face is waggling like the little one in your pajamas! So, come on, come on, ask me questions! Give examination! Ask how many times the leather thongs wound round the handles of the litter - the answer is thirty-one. Ask me what was the Emperor's dying word - I tell you it was "Kashmir". He had bad breath and a good heart. Who do you think I am? Some common ignorant lying pie-dog? Go, get out of the boat now, your nose makes it too heavy to row; also your father is waiting to beat my gas out of you, and your mother to boil off your skin.'
In the brandy bottle of the boatman Tai I see, foretold, my own father's possession by djinns ... and there will be another bald foreigner ... and Tai's gas prophesies another kind, which was the consolation of my grandmother's old age, and taught her stories, too ... and pie-dogs aren't far away ... Enough.
I'm frightening myself. Despite beating and boiling, Aadam Aziz floated with Tai in his shikara, again and again, amid goats hay flowers furniture lotus-roots, though never with the English sahibs, and heard again and again the miraculous answers to that single terrifying question: 'But Taiji, how old are you, honestly?
From Tai, Aadam learned the secrets of the lake - where you could swim without being pulled down by weeds; the eleven varieties of water-snake; where the frogs spawned; how to cook a lotus-root; and where the three English women had drowned a few years back. There is a tribe of feringhee women who come to this water to drown,' Tai said. 'Sometimes they know it, sometimes they don't, but I know the minute I smell them. They hide under the water from God knows what or who - but they can't hide from me, baba!' Tai's laugh, emerging to infect Aadam - a huge, booming laugh that seemed macabre when it crashed out of that old, withered body, but which was so natural in my giant grandfather that nobody knew, in later times, that it wasn't really his (my uncle Hanif inherited this laugh; so until he died, a piece of Tai lived in Bombay). And, also from Tai, my grandfather heard about noses.
Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you. If they don't get on, you feel it here. Then you rub your nose with embarrassment to make the itch go away. A nose like that, little idiot, is a great gift. I say: trust it. When it warns you, look out or you'll be finished. Follow your nose and you'll go far.' He cleared his throat; his eyes rolled away into the mountains of the past. Aziz settled back on the straw. 'I knew one officer once - in the army of that Iskandar the Great. Never mind his name. He had a vegetable just like yours hanging between his eyes. When the army halted near Gandhara, he fell in love with some local floozy. At once his nose itched like crazy. He scratched it, but that was useless. He inhaled vapours from crushed boiled eucalyptus leaves. Still no good, baba! The itching sent him wild; but the damn fool dug in his heels and stayed with his little witch when the army went Home. He became - what? - a stupid thing, neither this nor that, a half-and-halfer with a nagging wife and an itch in the nose, and in the end he pushed his sword into his stomach. What do you think of that?'
...Doctor Aziz in 1915, whom rubies and diamonds have turned into a half-and-halfer, remembers this story as Tai enters hailing distance. His nose is itching still. He scratches, shrugs, tosses his head; and then Tai shouts.
'Ohe! Doctor Sahib! Ghani the landowner's daughter is sick.'
The message, delivered curtly, shouted unceremoniously across the surface of the lake although boatman and pupil have not met for half a decade, mouthed by woman's lips that are not smiling in long-time-no-see greeting, sends time into a speeding, whirligig, blurry fluster of excitement...
...'Just think, son,' Aadam's mother is saying as she sips fresh lime water, reclining on a takht in an attitude of resigned exhaustion, 'how life does turn out. For so many years even my ankles were a secret, and now I must be stared at by strange persons who are not even family members.'
...While Ghani the landowner stands beneath a large oil painting of Diana the Huntress, framed in squiggly gold. He wears thick dark glasses and his famous poisonous smile, and discussed art. 'I purchased it from an Englishman down on his luck, Doctor Sahib. Five hundred rupees only - and I did not trouble to beat him down. What are five hundred chips? You see, I am a lover of culture.'
... 'See, my son,' Aadam's mother is saying as he begins to examine her, 'what a mother will not do for her child. Look how I suffer. You are a doctor... feel these rashes, these blotchy bits, understand that my head aches morning noon and night. Refill my glass, child.'
... But the young Doctor has entered the throes of a most un-hippocratic excitement at the boatman's cry, and shouts, 'I'm coming just now! Just let me bring my things!' The shikara's prow touches the garden's hem. Aadam is rushing indoors, prayer-mat rolled like cheroot under one arm, blue eyes blinking in the sudden interior gloom; he has placed the cheroot on a high shelf on top of stacked copies of Vorwarts and Lenin's What Is To Be Done? and other pamphlets, dusty echoes of his half-faded German life; he is pulling out, from under his bed, a second-hand leather case which his mother called his 'doctori-attache', and as he swings it and himself upwards and runs from the room, the word HEIDELBERG is briefly visible, burned into the leather on the bottom of the bag.
A landowner's daughter is good news indeed to a doctor with a career to make, even if she is ill. No: because she is ill.
... While I sit like an empty pickle jar in a pool of Anglepoised light, visited by this vision of my grandfather sixty-three years ago, which demands to be recorded, filling my nostrils with the acrid stench of his mother's embarrassment which has brought her out in boils, with the . vinegary force of Aadam Aziz's determination to establish a practice so successful that she'll never have to return to the gemstone-shop, with the blind mustiness of a big shadowy house in which the young Doctor stands, ill-at-ease, before a painting of a plain girl with lively eyes and a stag transfixed behind her on the horizon, speared by a dart from her bow. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air ... everything, and not just the few clues one stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed.
... Aadam refills his mother's glass and continues, worriedly, to examine her.
Tut some cream on these rashes and blotches, Amma. .. For the headache, there are pills. The boils must be lanced. But maybe if you wore purdah when you sat in the store... so that no disrespectful eyes could ... such complaints often begin in the mind ...'
... Slap of oar in water. Plop of spittle in lake. Tai clears his throat and mutters angrily, 'A fine business. A wet-head nakkoo child goes away before he's learned one damn thing and he comes back a big doctor sahib with a big bag full of foreign machines, and he's still as silly as an owl. I swear: a too bad Business.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:12
... Doctor Aziz is shifting uneasily, from foot to foot, under the influence of the landowner's smile, in whose presence it is not possible to feel relaxed; and is waiting for some tic of reaction to his own extraordinary appearance. He has grown accustomed to these involuntary twitches of surprise at his size, his face of many colours, his nose ... but Ghani makes no sign, and the young Doctor resolves, in return, not to let his uneasiness show. He stops shifting his weight. They face each other, each suppressing (or so it seems) his view of the other, establishing the basis of their future relationship. And now Ghani alters, changing from an art-lover to tough-guy. 'This is a big chance for you, young man,' he says. Aziz's eyes have strayed to Diana. Wide expanses of her blemished pink skin are visible.
... His mother is moaning, shaking her head. 'No, what do you know, child, you have become a big-shot doctor but the gemstone Business is different. Who would buy a turquoise from a woman hidden inside a black hood? It is a question of establishing trust. So they must look at me; and I must get pains and boils. Go, go, don't worry your head about your poor mother.'
... 'Big shot,' Tai is spitting into the lake, 'big bag, big shot. Pah! We haven't got enough bags at Home that you must bring back that thing made of a pig's skin that makes one unclean just by looking at it? And inside, God knows what all.' Doctor Aziz, seated amongst flowery curtains and the smell of incense, has his thoughts wrenched away from the patient waiting across the lake. Tai's bitter monologue breaks into his consciousness, creating a sense of dull shock, a smell like a casualty ward overpowering the incense... the old man is clearly furious about something, possessed by an incomprehensible rage that appears to be directed at his erstwhile acolyte, or, more precisely and oddly,
at his bag. Doctor Aziz attempts to make small talk... 'Your wife is well? Do they still talk about your bag of golden teeth?'... tries to remake an old friendship; but Tai is in full flight now, a stream of invective pouring out of him. The Heidelberg bag quakes under the torrent of abuse. 'Sistersleeping pigskin bag from Abroad full of foreigners' tricks. Big-shot bag. Now if a man breaks an arm that bag will not let the bone-setter bind it in leaves. Now a man must let his wife lie beside that bag and watch knives come and cut her open. A fine Business, what these foreigners put in our young men's heads. I swear: it is a too-bad thing. That bag should fry in Hell with the testicles of the ungodly.'
... Ghani the landowner snaps his braces with his thumbs. 'A big chance, yes indeed. They are saying good things about you in town. Good medical training.
Good... good enough... family. And now our own lady doctor is sick so you get your opportunity. That woman, always sick these days, too old, I am thinking, and not up in the latest developments also, what-what? I say: physician heal thyself. And I tell you this: I am wholly objective in my Business relations.
Feelings, love, I keep for my family only. If a person is not doing a first-class job for me, out she goes! You understand me? So: my daughter Naseem is not well. You will treat her excellently. Remember I have friends; and ill-health strikes high and low alike.'
... 'Do you still pickle water-snakes in brandy to give you virility, Taiji? Do you still like to eat lotus-root without any spices?' Hesitant questions, brushed aside by the torrent of Tai's fury. Doctor Aziz begins to diagnose. To the ferryman, the bag represents Abroad; it is the alien thing, the invader, progress. And yes, it has indeed taken possession of the young Doctor's mind; and yes, it contains knives, and cures for cholera and malaria and smallpox; and yes, it sits between doctor and boatman, and has made them antagonists. Doctor Aziz begins to fight, against sadness, and against Tai's anger, which is beginning to infect him, to become his own, which erupts only rarely, but comes, when it does come, unheralded in a roar from bis deepest places, laying waste everything in sight; and then vanishes, leaving him wondering why everyone is so upset ... They are approaching Ghani's house. A bearer awaits the shikara, standing with clasped hands on a little wooden jetty. Aziz fixes his mind on the job in hand.
... 'Has your usual doctor agreed to my visit, Ghani Sahib?' ... Again, a hesitant question is brushed lightly aside. The landowner says, 'Oh, she will agree. Now follow me, please.'
... The bearer is waiting on the jetty. Holding the shikara steady as Aadam Aziz climbs out, bag in hand. And now, at last, Tai speaks directly to my grandfather. Scorn in his face, Tai asks, 'Tell me this, Doctor Sahib: have you got in that bag made of dead pigs one of those machines that foreign doctors use to smell with?' Aadam shakes his head, not understanding. Tai's voice gathers new layers of disgust. 'You know, sir, a thing like an elephant's trunk.' Aziz, seeing what he means, replies: 'A stethoscope? Naturaly.' Tai pushes the shikara off from the jetty. Spits. Begins to row away. 'I knew it,' he says. 'You will use such a machine now, instead of your own big nose.'
My grandfather does not trouble to explain that a stethoscope is more like a pair of ears than & nose. He is stifling his own irritation, the resentful anger of a cast-off child; and besides, there is a patient waiting. Time settles down and concentrates on the importance of the moment.
The house was opulent but badly lit. Ghani was a widower and the servants clearly took advantage. There were cobwebs in corners and layers of dust on ledges. They walked down a long corridor; one of the doors was ajar and through it Aziz saw a room in a state of violent disorder. This glimpse, connected with a glint of light in Ghani's dark glasses, suddenly informed Aziz that the landowner was blind. This aggravated his sense of unease: a blind man who claimed to appreciate European paintings? He was, also, impressed, because Ghani hadn't bumped into anything... they halted outside a thick teak door. Ghani said, 'Wait here two moments,' and went into the room behind the door.
In later years, Doctor Aadam Aziz swore that during those two moments of solitude in the gloomy spidery corridors of the landowner's mansion he was gripped by an almost uncontrollable desire to turn and run away as fast as his legs would carry him. Unnerved by the enigma of the blind art-lover, his insides filled with tiny scrabbling insects as a result of the insidious venom of Tai's mutterings, his nostrils itching to the point of convincing him that he had somehow contracted venereal disease, he felt his feet begin slowly, as though encased in boots of lead, to turn; felt blood pounding in his temples; and was seized by so powerful a sensation of standing upon a point of no return that he very nearly wet his German woollen trousers. He began, without knowing it, to blush furiously; and at this point his mother appeared before him, seated on the floor before a low desk, a rash spreading like a blush across her face as she held a turquoise up to the light. His mother's face had acquired all the scorn of the boatman Tai. 'Go, go, run,' she told him in Tai's voice, 'Don't worry about your poor old mother.' Doctor Aziz found himself stammering, 'What a useless son you've got, Amma; can't you see there's a hole in the middle of me the size of a melon?' His mother smiled a pained smile. 'You always were a heartless boy,' she sighed, and then turned into a lizard on the wall of the corridor and stuck her tongue out at him. Doctor Aziz stopped feeling dizzy, became unsure that he'd actually spoken aloud, wondered what he'd meant by that Business about the hole, found that his feet were no longer trying to escape, and realized that he was being watched. A woman with the biceps of a wrestler was staring at him, beckoning him to follow her into the room. The state of her sari told him that she was a servant; but she was not servile. 'You look green as a fish,' she said. 'You young doctors. You come into a strange house and your liver turns tojelly. Come, Doctor Sahib, they are waiting for you.' Clutching his bag a fraction too tightly, he followed her through the dark teak door.
... Into a spacious bedchamber that was as ill-lit as the rest of the house; although here there were shafts of dusty sunlight seeping in through a fanlight high on one wall. These fusty rays illuminated a scene as remarkable as anything the Doctor had ever witnessed: a tableau of such surpassing strangeness that his feet began to twitch towards the door once again. Two more women, also built like professional wrestlers, stood stiffly in the light, each holding one corner of an enormous white bedsheet, their arms raised high above their heads so that the sheet hung between them like a curtain. Mr Ghani welled up out of the murk surrounding the sunlit sheet and permitted the nonplussed Aadam to stare stupidly at the peculiar tableau for perhaps half a minute, at the end of which, and before a word had been spoken, the Doctor made a discovery: In the very centre of the sheet, a hole had been cut, a crude circle about seven inches in diameter.
'Close the door, ayah,' Ghani instructed the first of the lady wrestlers, and then, turning to Aziz, became confidential. This town contains many good-for-nothings who have on occasion tried to climb into my daughter's room.
She needs,' he nodded at the three musclebound women, 'protectors.'
Aziz was still looking at the perforated sheet. Ghani said, 'All right, come on, you will examine my Naseem right now. Pronto.'
My grandfather peered around the room. 'But where is she, Ghani Sahib?' he blurted out finally. The lady wrestlers adopted supercilious expressions and, it seemed to him, tightened their musculatures, just in case he intended to try something fancy.
'Ah, I see your confusion,' Ghani said, his poisonous smile broadening, 'You Europe-returned chappies forget certain things. Doctor Sahib, my daughter is a decent girl, it goes without saying. She does not flaunt her body under the noses of strange men. You will understand that you cannot be permitted to see her, no, not in any circumstances; accordingly I have required her to be positioned behind that sheet. She stands there, like a good girl.'
A frantic note had crept into Doctor Aziz's voice. 'Ghani Sahib, tell me how I am to examine her without looking at her?' Ghani smiled on.
'You will kindly specify which portion of my daughter it is necessary to inspect. I will then issue her with my instructions to place the required segment against that hole which you see there. And so, in this fashion the thing may be achieved.'
'But what, in any event, does the lady complain of?' - my grandfather, despairingly. To which Mr Ghani, his eyes rising upwards in their sockets, his smile twisting into a grimace of grief, replied: 'The poor child! She has a terrible, a too dreadful stomachache.'
'In that case,' Doctor Aziz said with some restraint, 'will she show me her stomach, please.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:12
Padma - our plump Padma - is sulking magnificently. (She can't read and, like all fish-lovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she doesn't. Padma: strong, jolly, a consolation for my last days. But definitely a bitch-in-the-manger.) She attempts to cajole me from my desk: 'Eat, na, food is spoiling.' I remain stubbornly hunched over paper. 'But what is so precious,'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:12
Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air updownup in exasperation, 'to need all this writing-shiting?' I reply: now that I've let out the details of my birth, now that the perforated sheet stands between doctor and patient, there's no going back. Padma snorts. Wrist smacks against forehead. 'Okay, starve starve, who cares two pice?' Another louder, conclusive snort... but I take no exception to her attitude. She stirs a bubbling vat all day for a living; something hot and vinegary has steamed her up tonight. Thick of waist, somewhat hairy of forearm, she flounces, gesticulates, exits. Poor Padma. Things are always getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told her, when she was only small, that she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is 'The One Who Possesses Dung'.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:13
In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a little of turmeric, ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air - just as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten up by curiosity, used to do night after night! I'll begin at once: by revealing that my grandfather's premonitions in the corridor were not without foundation. In the succeeding months and years, he fell under what I can only describe as the sorcerer's spell of that enormous - and as yet unstained - perforated cloth.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:13
'Again?' Aadam's mother said, rolling her eyes. 'I tell you, my child, that girl is so sickly from too much soft living only. Too much sweetmeats and spoiling, because of the absence of a mother's firm hand. But go, take care of your invisible patient, your mother is all right with her little nothing of a headache.'
In those years, you see, the landowner's daughter Naseem Ghani contracted a quite extraordinary number of minor illnesses, and each time a shikara wallah was despatched to summon the tall young Doctor sahib with the big nose who was making such a reputation for himself in the valley. Aadam Aziz's visits to the bedroom with the shaft of sunlight and the three lady wrestlers became weekly events; and on each occasion he was vouchsafed a glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of the young woman's body. Her initial stomach-ache was succeeded by a very slightly twisted right ankle, an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of the left foot, a tiny cut on the lower left calf.
Tetanus is'a killer, Doctor Sahib,' the landowner said, 'My Naseem must not die for a scratch.') There was the matter of her stiff right knee, which the Doctor was obliged to manipulate through the hole in the sheet ... and after a time the illnesses leapt upwards, avoiding certain unmentionable zones, and began to proliferate around her upper half. She suffered from something mysterious which her father called Finger Rot, which made the skin flake off her hands; from weakness of the wrist-bones, for which Aadam prescribed calcium tablets; and from attacks of constipation, for which he gave her a course of laxatives, since there was no question of being permitted to administer an enema. She had fevers and she also had subnormal temperatures. At these times his thermometer would be placed under her armpit and he would hum and haw about the relative inefficiency of the method. In the opposite armpit she once developed a slight case of tineachloris and he dusted her with yellow powder; after this treatment - which required him to rub the powder in, gently but firmly, although the soft secret body began to shake and quiver and he heard helpless laughter coming through the sheet, because Naseem Ghani was very ticklish - the itching went away, but Naseem soon I found a new set of complaints. She waxed anaemic in the summer and bronchial in the winter. ('Her tubes are most delicate,' Ghani explained, 'like little flutes.') Far away the Great War moved from crisis to crisis, while in the cobwebbed house Doctor Aziz was also engaged in a total war against his sectioned patient's inexhaustible complaints. And, in all those war years, Naseem never repeated an illness. 'Which only shows,' Ghani told Mm, 'that you are a good doctor. When you cure, she is cured for good. But alas!' - he struck his forehead - 'She pines for her late mother, poor baby, and her body suffers.
She is a too loving child.'
So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination, she accompanied him on all his rounds, she moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of the ankles; he could smell her scent of lavender and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little girl; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face.
His mother by on her bed, spreadeagled on her stomach. 'Come, come and press me,' she said, 'my doctor son whose fingers can soothe his old mother's muscles.
Press, press, my child with his expression of a constipated goose.' He kneaded her shoulders. She grunted, twitched, relaxed. 'Lower now,' she said, 'now higher. To the right. Good. My brilliant son who cannot see what that Ghani landowner is doing. So clever, my child, but he doesn't guess why that girl is forever ill with her piffling disorders. Listen, my boy: see the nose on your face for once: that Ghani thinks you are a good catch for her. Foreign-educated and all. I have worked in shops and been undressed by the eyes of strangers so that you should marry that Naseem! Of course I am right; otherwise why would he look twice at our family?' Aziz pressed his mother. 'O God, stop now, no need to kill me because I tell you the truth!'
By 1918, Aadam Aziz had come to live for his regular trips across the lake. And now his eagerness became even more intense, because it became clear that, after three years, the landowner and his daughter had become willing to lower certain barriers. Now, for the first time, Ghani said, 'A lump in the right chest. Is it worrying, Doctor? Look. Look well.' And there, framed in the hole, was a perfectly-formed and lyrically lovely ... 'I must touch it,' Aziz said, fighting with his voice. Ghani slapped him on the back. 'Touch, touch!' he cried, 'The hands of the healer! The curing touch, eh, Doctor?' And Aziz reached out a hand ... 'Forgive me for asking; but is it the lady's time of the month?' ... Little secret smiles appearing on the faces of the lady wrestlers. Ghani, nodding affably: 'Yes. Don't be so embarrassed, old chap. We are family and doctor now.'
And Aziz, 'Then don't worry. The lumps will go when the time ends.'... And the next time, 'A pulled muscle in the back of her thigh, Doctor Sahib. Such pain!'
And there, in the sheet, weakening the eyes of Aadam Aziz, hung a superbly rounded and impossible buttock ... And now Aziz: 'Is it permitted that ...'
'Whereupon a word from Ghani; an obedient reply from behind the sheet; a drawstring pulled; and pajamas fall from the celestial rump, which swells wondrously through the hole. Aadam Aziz forces himself into a medical frame of mind ... reaches out... feels. And swears to himself, in amazement, that he sees the bottom reddening in a shy, but compliant blush.
That evening, Aadam contemplated the blush. Did the magic of the sheet work on both sides of the hole? Excitedly, he envisaged his headless Naseem tingling beneath the scrutiny of his eyes, his thermometer, his stethoscope, his fingers, and trying to build a picture in her mind of him. She was at a disadvantage, of course, having seen nothing but his hands ... Aadam began to hope with an illicit desperation for Naseem Ghani to develop a migraine or graze her unseen chin, so they could look each other in the face. He knew how unprofessional his feelings were; but did nothing to stifle them. There was not much he could do.
They had acquired a life of their own. In short: my grandfather had fallen in love, and had come to think of the perforated sheet as something sacred and magical, because through it he had seen the things which had filled up the hole inside him which had been created when he had been hit on the nose by a tussock and insulted by the boatman Tai.
On the day the World War ended, Naseem developed the longed-for headache. Such historical coincidences have littered, and pejrhaps befouled, my family's existence in the world.
He hardly dared to look at what was framed in the hole in the sheet. Maybe she was hideous; perhaps that explained all this performance ... he looked. And saw a soft face that was not at all ugly, a cushioned setting for her glittering, gemstone eyes, which were brown with flecks of gold: tiger's-eyes. Doctor Aziz's fall was complete. And Naseem burst out, 'But Doctor, my God, what a nose?
Ghani, angrily, 'Daughter, mind your ...' But patient and doctor were laughing together, and Aziz was saying, 'Yes, yes, it is a remarkable specimen. They tell me there are dynasties waiting in it...' And he bit his tongue because he had been about to add, '... like snot.'
And Ghani, who had stood blindly beside the sheet for three long years, smiling and smiling and smiling, began once again to smile his secret smile, which was mirrored in the lips of the wrestlers.
Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai chose to stink. For three years now, he had neither bathed nor washed himself after answering calls of nature. He wore the same clothes, unwashed, year in, year out; his one concession to winter was to put his chugha-coat over his putrescent pajamas. The little basket of hot coals which he carried inside the chugha, in the Kashmiri fashion, to keep him warm in the bitter cold, only animated and accentuated his evil odours. He took to drifting slowly past the Aziz household,
releasing the dreadful fumes of his body across the small garden and into the house. Flowers died; birds fled from the ledge outside old Father Aziz's window.
Naturally, Tai lost work; the English in particular were reluctant to be ferried by a human cesspit. The story went around the lake that Tai's wife, driven to distraction by the old man's sudden filthiness, pleaded for a reason. He had answered: 'Ask our foreign-returned doctor, ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz,'
Was it, then, an attempt to offend the Doctor's hypersensitive nostrils (in which the itch of danger had subsided somewhat under the anaesthetizing ministrations of love)? Or a gesture of unchangingness in defiance of the invasion of the doctori-attache from Heidelberg? Once Aziz asked the ancient, straight out, what it was all for; but Tai only breathed on him and rowed away.
The breath nearly felled Aziz; it was sharp as an axe.
In 1918, Doctor Aziz's father, deprived of his birds, died in his sleep; and at once his mother, who had been able to sell the gemstone Business thanks to the success of Aziz's practice, and who now saw her husband's death as a merciful release for her from a life filled with responsibilities, took to her own deathbed and followed her man before the end of his own forty-day mourning period. By the time the Indian regiments returned at the end of the war, Doctor Aziz was an orphan, and a free man - except that his heart had fallen through a hole some seven inches across.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:13
That afternoon, the streets are suddenly full of people, all moving in the same direction, defying Dyer's new Martial Law regulations. Aadam tells Naseem, 'There must be a meeting planned - there will be trouble from the military. They have banned meetings.'
'Why do you have to go? Why not wait to be called?'
... A compound can be anything from a wasteland to a park. The largest compound in Amritsar is called Jallianwala Bagh. It is not grassy. Stones cans glass and other things are everywhere. To get into it, you must walk down a very narrow alleyway between two buildings. On April 13th, many thousands of Indians are crowding through this alleyway. 'It is peaceful protest,' someone tells Doctor Aziz. Swept along by the crowds, he arrives at the mouth of the alley. A bag from Heidelberg is in his right hand. (No close-up is necessary.) He is, I know, feeling very scared, because his nose is itching worse than it ever has; but he is a trained doctor, he puts it out of his mind, he enters the compound.
Somebody is making a passionate speech. Hawkers move through the crowd selling channa and sweetmeats. The air is filled with dust. There do not seem to be any goondas, any trouble- makers, as far as my grandfather can see. A group of Sikhs has spread a cloth on the ground and is eating, seated around it. There is still a smell of ordure in the air. Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. ? Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack troops. He is the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar - an important man, after all; the waxed tips of his moustache are rigid with importance. As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather's nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer's right and twenty-five to his left; and Aadam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. 'Yaaaakh-th铑铑!' he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life. His 'doctori-attache'
flies open; bottles, liniment and syringes scatter in the dust. He is scrabbling furiously at people's feet, trying to save his equipment before it is crushed.
There is a noise like teeth chattering in winter and someone falls on him. Red stuffstains his shirt. There are screams now and sobs and the strange chattering continues. More and more people seem to have stumbled and fallen on top of my grandfather. He becomes afraid for his back. The clasp of his bag is digging into his chest, inflicting upon it a bruise so severe and mysterious that it will not fade until after his death, years later, on the hill of Sankara Acharya or Takht-e-Sulaiman. His nose is jammed against a bottle of red pills. The chattering stops and is replaced by the noises of people and birds. There seems to be no traffic noise whatsoever. Brigadier Dyer's fifty men put down their machine-guns and go away. They have fired a total of one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into the unarmed crowd. Of these, one thousand five hundred and sixteen have found their mark, killing or wounding some person. 'Good shooting,'
Dyer tells his men, 'We have done a jolly good thing.'
When my grandfather got Home that night, my grandmother was trying hard to be a modern woman, to please him, and so she did not turn a hair at his appearance.
'I see you've been spilling the Mercurochrome again, clumsy,' she said, appeasingly.
'It's blood,' he replied, and she fainted. When he brought her round with the help of a little sal volatile, she said, 'Are you hurt?'
'No,' he said.
'But where have you been, my God?'
'Nowhere on earth,' he said, and began to shake in her arms.
My own hand, I confess, has begun to wobble; not entirely because of its theme, but because I have noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing in my wrist, beneath the skin ... No matter. We all owe death a life. So let me conclude with the uncorroborated rumour that the boatman Tai, who recovered from his scrofulous infection soon after my grandfather left Kashmir, did not die until 1947, when (the story goes) he was infuriated by India and Pakistan's struggle over his valley, and walked to Chhamb with the express purpose of standing between the opposing forces and giving them a piece of his mind. Kashmiri for the Kashmiris: that was his line. Naturally, they shot him. Oskar Lubin would probably have approved of his rhetorical gesture; R. E. Dyer might have commended his murderers' rifle skills. I must go to bed. Padma is waiting; and I need a little warmth.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:13
Hit-the-spittoon
Please believe that I am falling apart.
I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug - that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams.
In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust. This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:14
There are moments of terror, but they go away. Panic like a bubbling sea-beast conies up for air, boils on the surface, but eventually returns to the deep. It is important for me to remain calm. I chew betel-nut and expectorate in the direction of a cheap brassy bowl, playing the ancient game of hit-the-spittoon: Nadir Khan's game, which he learned from the old men in Agra... and these days you can buy 'rocket paans' in which, as well as the gum-reddening paste of the betel, the comfort of cocaine lies folded in a leaf. But that would be cheating.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:14
... Rising from my pages comes the unmistakable whiff of chutney. So let me obfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately-gifted olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments. But now, 'A cook?' you gasp in horror, 'A khansama merely? How is it possible?' And, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings - by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:14
But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next: 'At this rate,' Padma complains, 'you'll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.'
She is affecting nonchalance, jutting a careless hip in my general direction, but doesn't fool me. I know now that she is, despite all her protestations, hooked. No doubt about it: my story has her by the throat, so that all at once she's stopped nagging me to go Home, to take more baths, to change my vinegar-stained clothes, to abandon even for a moment this darkling pickle-factory where the smells of spices are forever frothing in the air... now my dung goddess simply makes up a cot in the corner of this office and prepares my food on two blackened gas-rings, only interrupting my Anglepoise-lit writing to expostulate, 'You better get a move on or you'll die before you get yourself born.' Fighting down the proper pride of the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her. 'Things - even people - have a way of leaking into each other,'
I explain, 'like flavours when you cook. Ilse Lubin's suicide, for example, leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise,' I intone earnestly, 'the past has dripped into me .'.. so we can't ignore it...'
Her shrug, which does pleasantly wavy things to her chest, cuts me off. 'To me it's a crazy way of telling your life story,' she cries, 'if you can't even get to where your father met your mother.'
... And certainly Padma is leaking into me. As history pours out of my fissured body, my lotus is quietly dripping in, with her down-to-earthery, and her paradoxical superstition, her contradictory love of the fabulous - so it's appropriate that I'm about to tell the story of the death of Mian Abdullah. The doomed Hummingbird: a legend of our times.
... And Padma is a generous woman, because she stays by me in these last days, although I can't do much for her. That's right - and once again, it's a fitting thing to mention before I launch into the tale of Nadir Khan - I am unmanned.
Despite Padma's many and varied gifts and ministrations, I can't leak into her, not even when she puts her left foot on my right, winds her right leg around my waist, inclines her head up toward mine and makes cooing noises; not even when she whispers in my ear, 'So now that the writery is done, let's see if we can make your other pencil work!'; despite everything she tries, I cannot hit her spittoon.
Enough confessions. Bowing to the ineluctable Padma-pressures of what-happened-nextism, and remembering the finite quantity of time at my disposal, I leap forwards from Mercurochrome and land in 1942. (I'm keen to get my parents together, too.)
It seems that in the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism. Bicycling around Agra, he whistled piercingly, badly, but very happily. He was by no means alone, because, despite strenuous efforts by the authorities to stamp it out, this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year, and drastic steps were to be taken before it was brought under control. The old men at the paan-shop at the top of Cornwallis Road chewed betel and suspected a trick. 'I have lived twice as long as I should have,' the oldest one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing up against each other around his vocal chords, 'and I've never seen so many people so cheerful in such a bad time. It is the devil's work.' It was, indeed, a resilient virus - the weather alone should have discouraged such germs from breeding, since it had become clear that the rains had failed. The earth was cracking. Dust ate the edges of roads, and on some days huge gaping fissures appeared in the midst of macadamed intersections. The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might now issue from the Assuring earth.
Apparently a Sikh from the bicycle-repair shop had had his turban pushed off his head in the heat of one afternoon, when his hair, without any reason, had suddenly stood on end. And, more prosaically, the water shortage had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with which to adulterate the milk :.. Far away, there was a World War in progress once again. In Agra, the heat mounted. But still my grandfather whistled. The old men at the paan-shop found Ms whistling in rather poor taste, given the circumstances.
(And I, like them, expectorate and rise above fissures.)
Astride his bicycle, leather attache attached to carrier, my grandfather wMstled. Despite irritations of the nose, his lips pursed. Despite a bruise on his chest which had refused to fade for twenty-three years, his good humour was unimpaired. Air passed his lips and was transmuted into sound. He whistled an old German tune: Tannenbaum.
The optimism epidemic had been caused by one single human being, whose name, Mian Abdullah, was only used by newspapermen. To everyone else, he was the Hummingbird, a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist. 'Magician turned conjurer,' the newspapermen wrote, 'Mian Abdullah rose from the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi to become the hope of India's hundred million Muslims.' The Hummingbird was the founder, chairman, unifier and moving spirit of the Free Islam Convocation; and in 1942, marquees and rostrums were being erected on the Agra maidan, where the Convocation's second annual assembly was about to take place. My grandfather, fifty-two years old, his hair turned white by the years and other afflictions, had begun whistling as he passed the maidan.
Now he leaned round corners on his bicycle, taking them at a jaunty angle, threading his way between cowpats and children ... and, in another time and place, told Ms friend the Rani of Cooch Naheen: 'I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian. I'm still not much of a Muslim, but I'm all for Abdullah. He's fighting my fight.' His eyes were still the blue of Kashmiri sky... he arrived Home, and although Ms eyes retained a glimmer of contentment, the whistling stopped; because waiting for him in the courtyard filled with malevolent geese were the disapproving features of my grandmama, Naseem Aziz, whom he had made the mistake of loving in fragments, and who was now unified and transmuted into the formidable figure she would always remain, and who was always known by the curious title of Reverend Mother.
She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch's nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties. Earlier that year Aadam Aziz had commissioned life-size blow-up photographs of his family to hang on the living-room wall; the three girls and two boys had posed dutifully enough, but Reverend Mother had rebelled when her turn came. Eventually, the photographer had tried to catch her unawares, but she seized Ms camera and broke it over his skull. Fortunately, he lived; but there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone's little black box. It was enough for her that she must live in unveiled, barefaced shamelessness - there was no question of allowing the fact to be recorded.
It was perhaps the obligation of facial nudity, coupled with Aziz's constant requests for her to move beneath Mm, that had driven her to the barricades; and the domestic rules she established were a system of self-defence so impregnable that Aziz, after many fruitless attempts, had more or less given up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain. (Perhaps, too, it wasn't a system of self-defence at all, but a means of defence against her self.)
Among the things to which she denied entry were all political matters. When Doctor Aziz wished to talk about such things, he visited his friend the Rani, and Reverend Mother sulked; but not very hard, because she knew Ms visits represented a victory for her.
The twin hearts of her kingdom were her kitchen and her pantry. I never entered the former, but remembered staring through the pantry's locked screen-doors at the enigmatic world within, a world of hanging wire baskets covered with linen cloths to keep out the flies, of tins wMch I knew to be full of gur and other sweets, of locked chests with neat square labels, of nuts and turnips and sacks of grain, of goose-eggs and wooden brooms. Pantry and kitchen were her inalienable territory; and she defended them ferociously. When she was carrying her last child, my aunt Emerald, her husband offered to relieve her of the chore of supervising the cook. She did not reply; but the next day, when Aziz approached the kitchen, she emerged from it with a metal pot in her hands and barred the doorway. She was fat and also pregnant, so there was not much room left in the doorway. Aadam Aziz frowned. 'What is this, wife?' To which my grandmother answered, 'This, whatsitsname, is a very heavy pot; and if just once I catch you in here, whatsitsname, I'll push your head into it, add some dahi, and make, whatsitsname, a korma.' I don't know how my grandmother came to adopt the term whatsitsname as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry for help ... as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe. She didn't know, you see, what it was called.
... And at the dinner-table, imperiously, she continued to rule. No food was set upon the table, no plates were laid. Curry and crockery were marshalled upon a low side-table by her right hand, and Aziz and the cMldren ate what she dished out. It is a sign of the power of this custom that, even when her husband was afflicted by constipation, she never once permitted Mm to choose Ms food, and listened to no requests or words of advice. A fortress may not move. Not even when its dependants' movements become irregular.
During the long concealment of Nadir Khan, during the visits to the house on Cornwallis Road of young Zulfikar who fell in love with Emerald and of the prosperous reccine-and-leathercloth merchant named Ahmed Sinai who hurt my aunt Alia so badly that she bore a grudge for twenty-five years before discharging it cruelly upon my mother, Reverend Mother's iron grip upon her household never faltered; and even before Nadir's arrival precipitated the great silence, Aadam Aziz had tried to break this grip, and been obliged to go to war with his wife.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:14
(All this helps to show how remarkable his affliction by optimism actually was.)
... In 1932, ten years earlier, he had taken control of his children's education. Reverend Mother was dismayed; but it was a father's traditional role, so she could not object. Alia was eleven; the second daughter, Mumtaz, was almost nine. The two boys, Hanif and Mustapha, were eight and six, and young Emerald was not yet five. Reverend Mother took to confiding her fears to the family cook, Daoud. 'He fills their heads with I don't know what foreign languages, whatsitsname, and other rubbish also, no doubt.' Daoud stirred pots and Reverend Mother cried, 'Do you wonder, whatsitsname, that the little one calls herself Emerald? In English, whatsitsname? That man will ruin my children for me. Put less cumin in that, whatsitsname, you should pay more attention to your cooking and less to minding other people's Business.'
She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction. Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. 'You have your Hummingbird,' she told him, 'but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man's hum.' It was one of her rare political comments ... and then the day arrived when Aziz Arew out the religious tutor.
Thumb and forefinger closed around the maulvi's ear. Naseem Aziz saw her husband leading the stragglebearded wretch to the door in the garden wall; gasped; then cried out as her husband's foot was applied to the divine's fleshy parts.
Unleashing thunderbolts, Reverend Mother sailed into battle.
'Man without dignity!' she cursed her husband, and, 'Man without, whatsitsname, shame!' Children watched from the safety of the back verandah. And Aziz, 'Do you know what that man was teaching your children?' And Reverend Mother hurling question against question, 'What will you not do to bring disaster, whatsitsname, on our heads?' -But now Aziz, 'You think it was Nastaliq script?
Eh?' - to which his wife, warming up: 'Would you eat pig? Whatsitsname? Would you spit on the Quran?' And, voice rising, the doctor ripostes, 'Or was it some verses of "The Cow"? You think that?' ... Paying no attention, Reverend Mother arrives at her climax: 'Would you marry your daughters to Germans!?' And pauses, fighting for breath, letting my grandfather reveal, 'He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs and who knows what other vegetarians. Will you have hateful children, woman?'
'Will you have godless ones?' Reverend Mother envisages the legions of the Archangel Gabriel descending at night to carry her heathen brood to hell. She has vivid pictures of hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages... 'I take this oath, whatsitsname,' my grandmother said, 'I swear no food will come from my kitchen to your lips! No, not one chapati, until you bring the maulvi sahib back and kiss his, whatsitsname, feet!'
The war of starvation which began that day very nearly became a duel to the death. True to her word, Reverend Mother did not hand her husband, at mealtimes, so much as an empty plate. Doctor Aziz took immediate reprisals, by refusing to feed himself when he was out. Day by day the five children watched their father disappearing, while their mother grimly guarded the dishes of food. 'Will you be able to vanish completely?' Emerald asked with interest, adding solicitously, 'Don't do it unless you know how to come back again.' Aziz's face acquired craters; even his nose appeared to be getting thinner. His body had become a battlefield and each day a piece of it was blasted away. He told Alia, his eldest, the wise child: 'In any war, the field of battle suffers worse devastation than either army. This is natural.' He began to take rickshaws when he did his rounds. Hamdard the rickshaw-wallah began to worry about him.
The Rani of Cooch Naheen sent emissaries to plead with Reverend Mother. 'India isn't full enough of starving people?' the emissaries asked Naseem, and she unleashed a basilisk glare which was already becoming a legend. Hands clasped in her lap, a muslin dupatta wound miser-tight around her head, she pierced her visitors with lidless eyes and stared them down. Their voices turned to stone; their hearts froze; and alone in a room with strange men, my grandmother sat in triumph, surrounded by downcast eyes. 'Full enough, whatsitsname?' she crowed.
'Well, perhaps. But also, perhaps not.'
But the truth was that Naseem Aziz was very anxious; because while Aziz's death by starvation would be a clear demonstration of the superiority of her idea of the world over his, she was unwilling to be widowed for a mere principle; yet she could see no way out of the situation which did not involve her in backing down and losing face, and having learned to bare her face, my grandmother was most reluctant to lose any of it.
'Fall ill, why don't you?' - Alia, the wise child, found the solution. Reverend Mother beat a tactical retreat, announced a pain, a killing pain absolutely, whatsitsname, and took to her bed. In her absence Alia extended the olive branch to her father, in the shape of a bowl of chicken soup. Two days later, Reverend Mother rose (having refused to be examined by her husband for the first time in her life), reassumed her powers, and with a shrug of acquiescence in her daughter's decision, passed Aziz his food as though it were a mere trifle of a Business.
That was ten years earlier; but still, in 1942, the old men at the paan-shop are stirred by the sight of the whistling doctor into giggling memories of the time when his wife had nearly made him do a disappearing trick, even though he didn't know how to come back. Late into the evening they nudge each other with, 'Do you remember when -' and 'Dried up like a skeleton on a washing line! He couldn't even ride his -' and '- I tell you, baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream her daughters' dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!' But as evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest. Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a pursing of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but instead a long red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in unerring accuracy towards an old brass spittoon. There is much slapping of thighs and self-admiring utterance of 'Wah, wah, sir!' and, 'Absolute master shot!' ... Around the oldsters, the town fades into desultory evening pastimes.
Children play hoop and kabaddi and draw beards on posters of Mian Abdullah. And now the old men place the spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting-place, and aim longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. 'Oh too good, yara!' The street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams, superimposing this game of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon ... But here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes ... here, Brigadier Dodson, the town's military commander, stifling with heat... and here, his A.D.C., Major Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of the Raj.
Memory of a mildewing photograph (perhaps the work of the same poor brained photographer whose life-size blow-ups so nearly cost him his life): Aadam Aziz, aglow with optimism-fever, shakes hands with a man of sixty or so, an impatient, sprightly type with a lock of white hair falling across his brow like a kindly scar. It is Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird. ('You see, Doctor Sahib, I keep myself fit. You wish to hit me in the stomach? Try, try. I'm in tiptop shape.'... In the photograph, folds of a loose white shirt conceal the stomach, and my grandfather's fist is not clenched, but swallowed up by the hand of the ex-conjurer.) And behind them, looking benignly on, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, who was going white in blotches, a disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous scale shortly after Independence ... 'I am the victim,' the Rani whispers, through photographed lips that never move, 'the hapless victim of my cross-cultural concerns. My skin is the outward expression of the internationalism of my spirit.' Yes, there is a conversation going on in this photograph, as like expert ventriloquists the optimists meet their leader.
Beside the Rani - listen carefully now; history and ancestry are about to meet! - stands a peculiar fellow, soft and paunchy, his eyes like stagnant ponds, his hair long like a poet's. Nadir Khan, the Hummingbird's personal secretary. His feet, if they were not frozen by the snapshot, would be shuffling in embarrassment. He mouths through his foolish, rigid smile, 'It's true; I have written verses ...' Whereupon Mian Abdullah interrupts, booming through his open mouth with glints of pointy teeth: 'But what verses! Not one rhyme in page after page!...' And the Rani, gently: 'A modernist, then?' And Nadir, shyly: 'Yes.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:14
What tensions there are now in the still, immobile scene! What edgy banter, as the Hummingbird speaks: 'Never mind about that; art should uplift; it should remind us of our glorious literary heritage!' ... And is that a shadow, or a frown on his secretary's brow? ... Nadir's voice, issuing lowaslow from the fading picture: 'I do not believe in high art, Mian Sahib. Now art must be beyond categories; my poetry and - oh - the game of hit-the-spittoon are equals.'... So now the Rani, kind woman that she is, jokes, 'Well, I shall set aside a room, perhaps; for paan-eating and spittoon-hittery. I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, and you must all come and practise.
Let the walls be splashed with our inaccurate expectorating! They will be honest stains, at least.' And now the photograph has run out of words; now I notice, with my mind's eye, that all the while the Hummingbird has been staring towards the door, which is past my grandfather's shoulder at the very edge of the picture. Beyond the door, history calls. The Hummingbird is impatient to get away... but he has been with us, and his presence has brought us two threads which will pursue me through all my days: the thread that leads to the ghetto of the magicians; and the thread that tells the story of Nadir the rhymeless, verbless poet and a priceless silver spittoon.
'What nonsense,' our Padma says. 'How can a picture talk? Stop now; you must be too tired to think.' But when I say to her that Mian Abdullah had the strange trait of humming without pause, humming in a strange way, neither musical nor unmusical, but somehow mechanical, the hum of an engine or dynamo, she swallows it easily enough, saying judiciously, 'Well, if he was such an energetic man, it's no surprise to me.' She's all ears again; so I warm to my theme and report that Mian Abdullah's hum rose and fell in direct relationship to his work rate.
It was a hum that could fall low enough to give you toothache, and when it rose to its highest, most feverish pitch, it had the ability of inducing erections in anyone within its vicinity. ('Arre baap,' Padma laughs, 'no wonder he was so popular with the men!') Nadir Khan, as his secretary, was attacked constantly by his master's vibratory quirk, and his ears jaw penis were forever behaving according to the dictates of the Hummingbird. Why, then, did Nadir stay, despite erections which embarrassed him in the company of strangers, despite aching molars and a work schedule which often occupied twenty-two hours in every twenty-four? Not - I believe - because he saw it as his poetic duty to get close to the centre of events and transmute them into literature. Nor because he wanted fame for himself. No: but Nadir had one thing in common with my grandfather, and it was enough. He, too, suffered from the optimism disease.
Like Aadam Aziz, like the Rani of Cooch Naheen, Nadir Khan loathed the Muslim League ('That bunch of toadies!' the Rani cried in her silvery voice, swooping around the octaves like a skier. 'Landowners with vested interests to protect! What do they have to do with Muslims? They go like toads to the British and form governments for them, now mat the Congress refuses to do it!' It was the year of the 'Quit India' resolution. 'And what's more,' the Rani said with finality, 'they are mad. Otherwise why would they want to partition India?')
Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird, had created the Free Islam Convocation almost single-handedly. He invited the leaders of the dozens of Muslim splinter groups to form a loosely federated alternative to the dogmatism and vested interests of the Leaguers. It had been a great conjuring trick, because they had all come.
That was the first Convocation, in Lahore; Agra would see the second. The marquees would be filled with members of agrarian movements, urban labourers'
syndicates, religious divines and regional groupings. It would see confirmed what the first assembly had intimated: that the League, with its demand for a partitioned India, spoke on nobody's behalf but its own. They have turned their backs on us,' said the Convocation's posters, 'and now they claim we're standing behind them!' Mian Abdullah opposed the partition.
In the throes of the optimism epidemic, the Hummingbird's patron, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, never mentioned the clouds on the horizon. She never pointed out that Agra was a Muslim League stronghold, saying only, 'Aadam my boy, if the Hummingbird wants to hold Convocation here, I'm not about to suggest he goes to Allahabad.' She was bearing the entire expense of the event without complaint or interference; not, let it be said, without making enemies in the town. The Rani did not live like other Indian princes. Instead of teetar-hunts, she endowed scholarships. Instead of hotel scandals, she had politics. And so the rumours began. 'These scholars of hers, man, everyone knows they have to perform extra-curricular duties. They go to her bedroom in the dark, and she never lets them see her blotchy face, but bewitches them into bed with her voice of a singing witch!' Aadam Aziz had never believed in witches. He enjoyed her brilliant circle of friends who were as much at Home in Persian as they were in German. But Naseem Aziz, who half-believed the stories about the Rani, never accompanied him to the princess's house. 'If God meant people to speak many tongues,' she argued, 'why did he put only one in our heads?'
And so it was that none of the Hummingbird's optimists were prepared for what happened. They played hit-the-spittoon, and ignored the cracks in the earth.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. According to legend, then - according to the polished gossip of the ancients at the paan-shop - Mian Abdullah owed his downfall to his purchase, at Agra railway station, of a peacock-feather fan, despite Nadir Khan's warning about bad luck.
What is more, on that night of crescent moons, Abdullah had been working with Nadir, so that when the new moon rose they both saw it through glass. 'These things matter,' the betel-chewers say. 'We have been alive too long, and we know.' (Padma is nodding her head in agreement.)
The Convocation offices were on the ground floor of the historical faculty building at the University campus. Abdullah and Nadir were coming to the end of their night's work; the Hummingbird's hum was low-pitched and Nadir's teeth were on edge. There was a poster on the office wall, expressing Abdullah's favourite anti-Partition sentiment, a quote from the poet Iqbal: 'Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?' And now the assassins reached the campus.
Facts: Abdullah had plenty of enemies. The British attitude to him was always ambiguous. Brigadier Dodson hadn't wanted him in town. There was a knock on the door and Nadir answered it. Six new moons came into the room, six crescent knives held by men dressed all in black, with covered faces. Two men held Nadir while the others moved towards the Hummingbird.
'At this point,' the betel-chewers say, 'the Hummingbird's hum became higher.
Higher and higher, yara, and the assassins' eyes became wide as their members made tents under their robes. Then -Allah, then! - the knives began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he'd never hummed before. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with red. But now - listen! - Abdullah's humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were eating, others dying; there were some who fornicated and others who did not hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that left six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these turned and ran for the University, many of them rushing across the railway tracks from the wrong side of town. It is well known that this is true. Everyone in town saw it, except those who were asleep. They went noisily, like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair ... and all the time Abdullahji was humming, humming-humming, and the knives were singing. And know this: suddenly one of the killers' eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!'
They say, 'When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives were blunt... they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which had no glass because Abdullah's hum had shattered it ... they thudded against the door until the wood broke ... and then they were everywhere, baba!... some without legs, others lacking hair, but most of them had some teeth at least, and some of these were sharp ... And now see this: the assassins cannot have feared interruption, because they had posted no guards; so the dogs got them by surprise... the two men holding Nadir Khan, that spineless one, fell beneath the weight of the beasts, with maybe sixty-eight dogs on their necks ... afterwards the killers were so badly damaged that nobody could say who they were.'
'At some point,' they say, 'Nadir dived out of the window and ran. The dogs and assassins were too busy to follow him.'
Dogs? Assassins? ... If you don't believe me, check. Find out about Mian Abdullah and his Convocations. Discover how we've swept his story under the carpet ... then let me tell how Nadir Khan, his lieutenant, spent three years under my family's rugs.
As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art. 'Look at me,' he said before he killed himself, 'I wanted to be a miniaturist and I've got elephantiasis instead!' The swollen events of the night of the crescent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room-mate, because life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.
How did Nadir Khan run across the night town without being noticed? I put it down to his being a bad poet, and as such, a born survivor. As he ran, there was a self-consciousness about him, his body appearing to apologize for behaving as if it were in a cheap thriller, of the sort hawkers sell on railway stations, or give away free with bottles of green Medicine that can cure colds, typhoid, impotence, Homesickness and poverty... On Cornwallis Road, it was a warm night.
A coal-brazier stood empty by the deserted rickshaw rank. The paan-shop was closed and the old men were asleep on the roof, dreaming of tomorrow's game. An insomniac cow, idly chewing a Red and White cigarette packet, strolled by a bundled street-sleeper, which meant he would wake in the morning, because a cow will ignore a sleeping man unless he's about to die. Then it nuzzles at him thoughtfully. Sacred cows eat anything.
My grandfather's large old stone house, bought from the proceeds of the gemstone shops and blind Ghani's dowry settlement, stood in the darkness, set back a dignified distance from the road. There was a walled-in garden at the rear and by the garden door was the low outhouse rented cheaply to the family of old Hamdard and his son Rashid the rickshaw boy. In front of the outhouse was the well with its cow-driven waterwheel, from which irrigation channels ran down to the small cornfield which lined the house all way to the gate in the perimeter wall along Cornwallis Road. Between house and field ran a small gully for pedestrians and rickshaws. In Agra the cycle-rickshaw had recently replaced the kind where a man stood between wooden shafts. There was still trade for the horse-drawn tongas, but it was dwindling ... Nadir Khan ducked in through the gate, squatted for a moment with his back to the perimeter wall, reddening as he passed his water. Then, seemingly upset by the vulgarity of his decision, he fled to the cornfield and plunged in. Partially concealed by the sun-withered stalks, he lay down in the foetal position.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:15
That was the end of the optimism epidemic. In the morning a sweeper-woman entered the offices of the Free Islam Convocation and found the Hummingbird, silenced, on the floor, surrounded by paw-prints and the shreds of his murderers. She screamed; but later, when the authorities had been and gone, she was told to clean up the room. After clearing away innumerable dog-hairs, swatting countless fleas and extracting from the carpet the remnants of a shattered glass eye, she protested to the University's comptroller of works that, if this sort of thing was going to keep happening, she deserved a small pay rise. She was possibly the last victim of the optimism bug, and in her case the illness didn't last long, because the comptroller was a hard man, and gave her the boot.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:15
The assassins were never identified, nor were their paymasters named. My grandfather was called to the campus by Major Zulfikar, Brigadier Dodson's A.D.C., to write his friend's death certificate. Major Zulfikar promised to call on Doctor Aziz to tie up a few loose ends; my grandfather blew his nose and left. At the maidan, tents were coming down like punctured hopes; the Convocation would never be held again. The Rani of Cooch Naheen took to her bed.
After a lifetime of making light of her illnesses she allowed them to claim her, and lay still for years, watching herself turn the colour of her bedsheets.
Meanwhile, in the old house on Cornwallis Road, the days were full of potential mothers and possible fathers. You see, Padma: you're going to find out now.
Using my nose (because, although it has lost the powers which enabled it, so recently, to make history, it has acquired other, compensatory gifts) - turning it inwards, I've been sniffing out the atmosphere in my grandfather's house in those days after the death of India's humming hope; and wafting down to me through the years comes a curious melange of odours, filled with unease, the whiff of things concealed mingling with the odours of burgeoning romance and the sharp stink of my grandmother's curiosity and strength ... while the Muslim League rejoiced, secretly of course, at the fall of its opponent, my grandfather could be found (my nose finds him) seated every morning on what he called his 'thunderbox', tears standing in his eyes. But these are not tears of grief; Aadam Aziz has simply paid the price of being Indianized, and suffers terribly from constipation. Balefully, he eyes the enema contraption hanging on the toilet wall.
Why have I invaded my grandfather's privacy? Why, when I might have described how, after Mian Abdullah's death, Aadam buried himself in his work, taking upon himself the care of the sick in the shanty-towns by the railway tracks - rescuing them from quacks who injected them with pepperwater and thought that fried spiders could cure blindness - while continuing to fulfil his dudes as university physician; when I might have elaborated on the great love that had begun to grow between my grandfather and his second daughter, Mumtaz, whose dark skin stood between her and the affections of her mother, but whose gifts of gentleness, care and fragility endeared her to her father with his inner torments which cried out for her form of unquestioning tenderness; why, when I might have chosen to describe the by-now-constant itch in his nose, do I choose to wallow in excrement? Because this is where Aadam Aziz was, on the afternoon after his signing of a death certificate, when all of a sudden a voice -soft, cowardly, embarrassed, the voice of a rhymeless poet - spoke to him from the depths of the large old laundry-chest standing in the corner of the room, giving him a shock so profound that it proved laxative, and the enema contraption did not have to be unhooked from its perch. Rashid the rickshaw boy had let Nadir Khan into the thunderbox-room by way of the sweeper's entrance, and he had taken refuge in the washing-chest. While my grandfather's astonished sphincter relaxed, his ears heard a request for sanctuary, a request muffled by linen, dirty underwear, old shirts and the embarrassment of the speaker. And so it was that Aadam Aziz resolved to hide Nadir Khan.
Now comes the scent of a quarrel, because Reverend Mother Naseem is thinking about her daughters, twenty-one-year-old Alia, black Mumtaz, who is nineteen, and pretty, nighty Emerald, who isn't fifteen yet but has a look in her eyes that's older than anything her sisters possess. In the town, among spittoon-hitters and rickshaw-wallahs, among film-poster-trolley pushers and college students alike, the three sisters are known as the Teen Batti', the three bright lights ...and how can Reverend Mother permit a strange man to dwell in the same house as Alia's gravity, Mumtaz's black, luminous skin and Emerald's eyes?... 'You are out of your mind, husband; that death has hurt your brain.'
But Aziz, determinedly: 'He is staying.' In the cellars ... because concealment has always been a crucial architectural consideration in India, so that Aziz's house has extensive underground chambers, which can be reached only through trap-doors in the floors, which are covered by carpets and mats... Nadir Khan hears the dull rumble of the quarrel and fears for his fate. My God (I sniff the thoughts of the clammy-palmed poet), the world is gone insane... are we men in this country? Are we beasts? And if I must go, when will the knives come for me?... And through his mind pass images of peacock-feather fans and the new moon seen through glass and transformed into a stabbing, red-stained blade...
Upstairs, Reverend Mother says, 'The house is full of young unmarried girls, whatsitsname; is this how you show your daughters respect?' And now the aroma of a temper lost; the great destroying rage of Aadam Aziz is unleashed, and instead of pointing out that Nadir Khan will be under ground, swept under the carpet where he will scarcely be able to defile daughters; instead of paying due testimony to the verbless bard's sense of propriety, which is so advanced that he could not even dream of making improper advances without blushing in his sleep; instead of these avenues of reason, my grandfather bellows, 'Be silent, woman! The man needs our shelter; he will stay.' Whereupon an implacable perfume, a hard cloud of determination settles upon my grandmother, who says, 'Very well. You ask me, whatsitsname, for silence. So not one word, whatsitsname, will pass my lips from now on.' And Aziz, groaning, 'Oh, damnation, woman, spare us your crazy oaths!'
But Reverend Mother's lips were sealed, and silence descended. The smell of silence, like a rotting goose-egg, fills my nostrils; overpowering everything else, it possesses the earth ... While Nadir Khan hid in his half-lit underworld, his hostess hid, too, behind a deafening wall of soundlessness. At first my grandfather probed the wall, looking for chinks; he found none. At last he gave up, and waited for her sentences to offer up their glimpses of her self, just as once he had lusted after the brief fragments of her body he had seen through a perforated sheet; and the silence filled the house, from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, so that the flies seemed to give up buzzing, and mosquitoes refrained from humming before they bit; silence stilling the hissing of geese in the courtyard. The children spoke in whispers at first, and then fell quiet: while in the cornfield, Rashid the rickshaw boy yelled his silent 'yell of hate', and kept his own vow of silence, which he had sworn upon his mother's hairs.
Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice, as a result, was thin and sharp - it had to be, to squeeze through the narrow gap between his breathing apparatus and his jaw ... a man whose short sight obliged him to take life one step at a time, which gained him a reputation for thoroughness and dullness, and endeared him to his superiors by enabling them to feel well-served without feeling threatened; a man whose starched, pressed uniform reeked of Blanco and rectitude, and about whom, despite his appearance of a character out of a puppet-show, there hung the unmistakable scent of success: Major Zulfikar, a man with a future, came to call, as he had promised, to tie up a few loose ends. Abdullah's murder, and Nadir Khan's suspicious disappearance, were much on his mind, and since he knew about Aadam Aziz's infection by the optimism bug, he mistook the silence in the house for a hush of mourning, and did not stay for long. (In the cellar, Nadir huddled with cockroaches.) Sitting quietly in the drawing-room with the five children, his hat and stick beside him on the Telefunken radiogram, the life-size images of the young Azizes staring at him from the walls, Major Zulfikar fell in love. He was short-sighted, but he wasn't blind, and in the impossibly adult gaze of young Emerald, the brightest of the 'three bright lights', he saw that she had understood his future, and forgiven him, because of it, for his appearance; and before he left, he had decided to marry her after a decent interval. ('Her?' Padma guesses. 'That hussy is your mother?' But there are other mothers-to-be, other future fathers, wafting in and out through the silence.)
In that marshy time without words the emotional life of grave Alia, the eldest, was also developing; and Reverend Mother, locked up in the pantry and kitchen, sealed behind her lips, was incapable -because of her vow - of expressing her distrust of the young merchant in reccine and leathercloth who came to visit her daughter. (Aadam Aziz had always insisted that his daughters be permitted to have male friends.) Ahmed Sinai - 'Ahaa!' yells Padma in triumphant recognition - had met Alia at the University, and seemed intelligent enough for the bookish, brainy girl on whose face my grandfather's nose had acquired an air of overweight wisdom; but Naseem Aziz felt uneasy about him, because he had been divorced at twenty. ('Anyone can make one mistake,' Aadam had told her, and that nearly began a fight, because she thought for a moment that there had been something overly personal in his tone of voice. But then Aadam had added, 'Just let this divorce of his fade away for a year or two; then we'll give this house its first wedding, with a big marquee in the garden, and singers and sweetmeats and all.' Which, despite everything, was an idea that appealed to Naseem.) Now, wandering through the walled-jn gardens of silence, Ahmed Sinai and Alia communed without speech; but although everyone expected him to propose, the silence seemed to have got through to him, too, and the question remained unasked. Alia's face acquired a weigh tiness at this time, a jowly pessimistic quality which she was never entirely to lose. ('Now then,' Padma reproves me, 'that's no way to describe your respected motherji.')
One more thing: Alia had inherited her mother's tendency to put on fat. She would balloon outwards with the passing years.
And Mumtaz, who had come out of her mother's womb black as midnight? Mumtaz was never brilliant; not as beautiful as Emerald; but she was good, and dutiful, and alone. She spent more time with her father than any of her sisters, fortifying him against the bad temper which was being exaggerated nowadays by the constant itch in his nose; and she took upon herself the duties of caring for the needs of Nadir Khan, descending daily into his underworld bearing trays of food, and brooms, and even emptying his personal thunderbox, so that not even a latrine cleaner could guess at his presence. When she descended, he lowered his eyes; and no words, in that dumb house, were exchanged between them.
What was it the spittoon hitters said about Naseem Aziz? 'She eavesdropped on her daughters' dreams, just to know what they were up to.' Yes, there's no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen in this country of ours, just pick up any newspaper and see the daily titbits recounting miracles in this village or that -Reverend Mother began to dream her daughters' dreams. (Padma accepts this without blinking; but what others will swallow as effortlessly as a laddoo, Padma may just as easily reject. No audience is without its idiosyncrasies of belief.) So, then: asleep in her bed at night, Reverend Mother visited Emerald's dreams, and found another dream within them - Major Zulfikar's private fantasy, of owning a large modern house with a bath beside his bed. This was the zenith of the Major's ambitions; and in this way Reverend Mother discovered, not only that her daughter had been meeting her Zulfy in secret, in places where speech was possible, but also that Emerald's ambitions were greater than her man's. And (why not?) in Aadam Aziz's dreams she saw her husband walking mournfully up a mountain in Kashmir with a hole in his stomach the size of a fist, and guessed that he was falling out of love with her, and also foresaw his death; so that years later, when she heard, she said only. 'Oh, I knew it, after all.'
... It could not be long now, Reverend Mother thought, before our Emerald tells her Major about the guest in the cellar; and then I shall be able to speak again. But then, one night, she entered the dreams of her daughter Mumtaz, the blackie whom she had never been able to love because of her skin of a South Indian fisherwoman, and realized the trouble would not stop there; because Mumtaz Aziz - like her admirer under the carpets - was also falling in love.
There was no proof. The invasion of dreams - or a mother's knowledge, or a woman's intuition, call it what you like - is not something that will stand up in court, and Reverend Mother knew that it was a serious Business to accuse a daughter of getting up to hanky-panky under her father's roof. In addition to which, something steely had entered Reverend Mother; and she resolved to do nothing, to keep her silence intact, and let Aadam Aziz discover just how badly his modern ideas were ruining his children - let Mm find out for himself, after Ms lifetime of telling her to be quiet with her decent old-fashioned notions. 'A bitter woman,' Padma says; and I agree.
'Well?' Padma demands. 'Was it true?'
Yes: after a fashion: true.
'There was hankying and pankying? In the cellars? Without even chaperones?'
Consider the circumstances - extenuating, if ever circumstances were. Things seem permissible underground that would seem absurd or even wrong in the clear light of day. 'That fat poet did it to the poor blackie? He did?' He was down there a long time, too - long enough to start talking to flying cockroaches and fearing that one day someone would ask Mm to leave and dreaming of crescent knives and howling dogs and wishing and wishing that the Hummingbird were alive to tell Mm what to do and to discover that you could not write poetry underground; and then this girl comes with food and she doesn't mind cleaning away your pots and you lower your eyes but you see an ankle that seems to glow with graciousness, a black ankle like the black of the underground nights ...作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:15
'I'd never have thought he was up to it.' Padma sounds admiring. 'The fat old good-for-notMng!'
And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive Mding in the cellar from Ms faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (HaniFs dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel Business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then 'And then? Come on, baba, what then?'
shyly, she smiles at him.
'What?'
And after that, there are smiles in the underworld, and something has begun.
'Oh, so what? You're telling me that's all?'
That's all: until the day Nadir Khan asked to see my grandfather -his sentences barely audible in the fog of silence - and asked for Ms daughter's hand in marriage.
'Poor girl,' Padma concludes, 'Kashmiri girls are normally fair like mountain snow, but she turned out black. Well, well, her skin would have stopped her making a good match, probably; and that Nadir's no fool. Now they'll have to let Mm stay, and get fed, and get a roof over Ms head, and all he has to do is hide like a fat earthworm under the ground. Yes, maybe he's not such a fool.'
My grandfather tried hard to persuade Nadir Khan that he was no longer in danger; the assassins were dead, and Mian Abdullah had been their real target; but Nadir Khan still dreamed about the singing knives, and begged, 'Not yet, Doctor Sahib; please, some more time.' So that one night in -the late summer of 1943 - the rains had failed again - my grandfather, Ms voice sounding distant and eerie in that house in which so few words were spoken, assembled Ms children in the drawing-room where their portraits hung. When they entered they discovered that their mother was absent, having chosen to remain immured in her room with her web of silence; but present were a lawyer and (despite Aziz's reluctance, he had complied with Mumtaz's wishes) a mullah, both provided by the ailing Rani of Cooch Naheen, both 'utterly discreet'. And their sister Mumtaz was there in bridal finery, and beside her in a chair set in front of the radiogram was the lank-haired, overweight, embarrassed figure of Nadir Khan. So it was that the first wedding in the house was one at which there were no tents, no singers, no sweetmeats and only a minimum of guests; and after the rites were over and Nadir Khan lifted his bride's veil - giving Aziz a sudden shock, making Mm young for a moment, and in Kashmir again, sitting on a dais while people put rupees in his lap - my grandfather made them all swear an oath not to reveal the presence in their cellar of their new brother-in-law. Emerald, reluctantly, gave her promise last of all.
After that Aadam Aziz made his sons help him carry all manner of furnishings down through the trap-door in the drawing-room floor: draperies and cushions and lamps and a big comfortable bed. And at last Nadir and Mumtaz stepped down into the vaults; the trap-door was shut and the carpet rolled into place and Nadir Khan, who loved his wife as delicately as a man ever had, had taken her into his underworld.
Mumtaz Aziz began to lead a double life. By day she was a single girl, living chastely with her parents, studying mediocrely at the university, cultivating those gifts of assiduity, nobility and forbearance which were to be her hallmarks throughout her life, up to and including the time when she was assailed by the talking washing-chests of her past and then squashed flat as a rice pancake; but at night, descending through a trap-door, she entered a lamplit, secluded marriage chamber which her secret husband had taken to calling the Taj Mahal, because Taj Bibi was the name by which people had called an earlier Mumtaz - Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Emperor Shah Jehan, whose name meant 'king of the world'. When she died he built her that mausoleum which has been immortalized on postcards and chocolate boxes and whose outdoor corridors stink of urine and whose walls are covered in graffiti and whose echoes are tested for visitors by guides although there are signs in three languages pleading for silence. Like Shah Jehan and his Mumtaz, Nadir and his dark lady lay side by side, and lapis lazuli inlay work was their companion because the bedridden, dying Rani of Cooch Naheen had sent them, as a wedding gift, a wondrously-carved, lapis-inlaid, gemstone-crusted silver spittoon. In their comfortable lamplit seclusion, husband and wife played the old men's game.
Mumtaz made the paans for Nadir but did not like the taste herself. She spat streams of nibu-pani. His jets were red and hers were lime. It was the happiest time of her life. And she said afterwards, at the ending of the long silence, 'We would have had children in the end; only then it wasn't right, that's all.'
Mumtaz Aziz loved children all her life.
Meanwhile, Reverend Mother moved sluggishly through the months in the grip of a silence which had become so absolute that even the servants received their instructions in sign language, and once the cook Daoud had been staring at her, trying to understand her somnolently frantic signalling, and as a result had not been looking in the direction of the boiling pot of gravy which fell upon his foot and fried it like a five-toed egg; he opened-his mouth to scream but no sound emerged, and after that he became convinced that the old hag had the power of witchery, and became too scared to leave her service. He stayed until his death, hobbling around the courtyard and being attacked by the geese.
They were not easy years. The drought led to rationing, and what with the proliferation of meatless days and riceless days it was hard to feed an extra, hidden mouth. Reverend Mother was forced to dig deep into her pantry, which thickened her rage like heat under a sauce. Hairs began to grow out of the moles on her face. Mumtaz noticed with concern that her mother was swelling, month by month. The unspoken words inside her were blowing her up ... Mumtaz had the impression that her mother's skin was becoming dangerously stretched.
And Doctor Aziz spent his days out of the house, away from the deadening silence, so Mumtaz, who spent her nights underground, saw very little in those days of the father whom she loved; and Emerald kept her promise, telling the Major nothing about the family secret; but conversely, she told her family nothing about her relationship with him, which was fair, she thought; and in the cornfield Mustapha and Hanif and Rashid the rickshaw boy became infected with the listlessness of the times; and finally the house on Cornwallis Road drifted as far as August 9th, 1945, and things changed.
Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.
What happened in August 1945? The Rani of Cooch Naheen died, but that's not what I'm after, although when she went she had become so sheetly-white that it was difficult to see her against the bed-clothes; having fulfilled her function by bequeathing my story a silver spittoon, she had the grace to exit quickly...
also in 1945, the monsoons did not fail. In the Burmese jungle, Orde Wingate and his Chindits, as well as the army of Subhas Chandra Bose, which was fighting on the Japanese side, were drenched by the returning rains. Satyagraha demonstrators in Jullundur, lying non-violently across railway lines, were soaked to the skin. The cracks in the long-parched earth began to close; there were towels wedged against the doors and windows of the house on Cornwallis Road, and they had to be wrung out and replaced constandy. Mosquitoes sprouted in the pools of water standing by every roadside. And the cellar - Mumtaz's Taj Mahal grew damp, until at last she fell ill. For some days she told nobody, but when her eyes became red-rimmed and she began to shake with fever, Nadir, fearing pneumonia, begged her to go to her father for treatment. She spent the next many weeks back in her maiden's bed, and Aadam Aziz sat by his daughter's bedside, putting cooling flannels on her forehead while she shook. On August 6th the illness broke. On the morning of the 9th Mumtaz was well enough to take a little solid food.
And now my grandfather fetched an old leather bag with the word HEIDELBERG burned into the leather at the base, because he had decided that, as she was very run-down, he had better give her a thorough physical check-up. As he unclasped the bag, his daughter began to cry.
(And now we're here. Padma: this is it.)
Ten minutes later the long time of silence was ended for ever as my grandfather emerged roaring from the sick-room. He bellowed for his wife, his daughters, his sons. His lungs were strong and the noise reached Nadir Khan in the cellar. It would not have been difficult for him to guess what the fuss was about.
The family assembled in the drawing-room around the radiogram, beneath the ageless photographs. Aziz carried Mumtaz into the room and set her down on a couch. His face looked terrible. Can you imagine how the insides of his nose must have felt? Because he had this bombshell to drop: that, after two years of marriage, his daughter was still a virgin.
It had been three years since Reverend Mother had spoken. 'Daughter, is this thing true?' The silence, which had been hanging in the corners of the house like a torn cobweb, was finally blown away; but Mumtaz just nodded: Yes. True.
Then she spoke. She said she loved her husband and the other thing would come right in the end. He was a good man and when it was possible to have children he would surely find it possible to do the thing. She said a marriage should not depend on the thing, she had thought, so she had not liked to mention it, and her father was not right to tell everyone out loud like he had. She would have said more; but now Reverend Mother burst.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:15
Three years of words poured out of her (but her body, stretched by the exigencies of storing them, did not diminish). My grandfather stood very still by the Telefunken as the storm broke over him. Whose idea had it been? Whose crazy fool scheme, whatsitsname, to let this coward who wasn't even a man into the house? To stay here, whatsitsname, free as a bird, food and shelter for three years, what did you care about meatless days, whatsitsname, what did you know about the cost of rice? Who was the weakling, whatsitsname, yes, the white-haired weakling who had permitted this iniquitous marriage? Who had put his daughter into that scoundrel's, whatsitsname, bed? Whose head was full of every damn fool incomprehensible thing, whatsitsname, whose brain was so softened by fancy foreign ideas that he could send his child into such an unnatural marriage? Who had spent his life offending God, whatsitsname, and on whose head was this a judgment? Who had brought disaster down upon his house ...作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:15
she spoke against my grandfather for an hour and nineteen minutes and by the time she had finished the clouds had run out of water and the house was full of puddles. And, before she ended, her youngest daughter Emerald did a very curious thing.
Emerald's hands rose up beside her face, bunched into fists, but with index fingers extended. Index fingers entered ear-holes and seemed to life Emerald out of her chair until she was running, fingers plugging ears, running - FULL-TILT! - without her dupatta on, out into the street, through the puddles of water, past the rickshaw-stand, past the paan-shop where the old men were just emerging cautiously into the clean fresh air of after-the-rain, and her speed amazed the urchins who were on their marks, waiting to begin their game of dodging in and out between the betel-jets, because nobody was used to seeing a young lady, much less one of the Teen Batti, running alone and distraught through the rain-soaked streets with her fingers in her ears and no dupatta around her shoulders.
Nowadays, the cities are full of modern, fashionable, dupatta-less misses; but back then the old men clicked their tongues in sorrow, because a woman without a dupatta was a woman without honour, and why had Emerald Bibi chosen to leave her honour at Home? The old ones were baffled, but Emerald knew. She saw, clearly, freshly in the after-rain air, that the fountain-head of her family's troubles was that cowardly plumpie (yes, Padma) who lived underground. If she could get rid of him everyone would be happy again ... Emerald ran without pausing to the Cantonment district. The Cantt, where the army was based; where Major Zulfikar would be! Breaking her oath, my aunt arrived at his office.
Zulfikar is a famous name amongst Muslims. It was the name of the two-pronged sword carried by Ali, the nephew of the prophet Muhammad. It was a weapon such as the world had never seen.
Oh, yes: something else was happening in the world that day. A weapon such as the world had never seen was being dropped on yellow people in Japan. But in Agra, Emerald was using a secret weapon of her own. It was bandylegged, short, flat-headed; its nose almost touched its chin; it dreamed of a big modern house with a plumbed-in bath right beside the bed.
Major Zulfikar had never been absolutely sure whether or not he believed Nadir Khan to have been behind the Hummingbird's murder; but he itched for the chance to find out. When Emerald told him about Agra's subterranean Taj, he became so excited that he forgot to be angry, and rushed to Cornwallis Road with a force of fifteen men. They arrived in the drawing-room with Emerald at their head. My aunt: treason with a beautiful face, no dupatta and pink loose-pajamas. Aziz watched dumbly as the soldiers rolled back the drawing-room carpet and opened the big trap-door as my grandmother attempted to console Mumtaz. 'Women must marry men,' she said. 'Not mice, whatsitsname! There is no shame in leaving that, whatsitsname, worm.' But her daughter continued to cry.
Absence of Nadir in his underworld! Warned by Aziz's first roar, overcome by the embarrassment which flooded over him more easily than monsoon rain, he vanished.
A trap-door flung open in one of the toilets - yes, the very one, why not, in which he had spoken to Doctor Aziz from the sanctuary of a washing-chest. A wooden 'thunderbox' -a 'throne' - lay on one side, empty enamel pot rolling on coir matting. The toilet had an outside door giving out on to the gully by the cornfield; the door was open. It had been locked from the outside, but only with an Indian-made lock, so it had been easy to force ... and in the soft lamplit seclusion of the Taj Mahal, a shining spittoon, and a note, addressed to Mumtaz, signed by her husband, three words long, six syllables, three exclamation marks: Talaaq! Talaaq! Talaaq! The English lacks the thunderclap sound of the Urdu, and anyway you know what it means. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. Nadir Khan had done the decent thing.
?awesome rage of Major Zulfy when he found the bird had flown! This was the colour he saw: red. ?anger fully comparable to my grandfather's fury, though expressed in petty gestures! Major Zulfy, at first, hopped up and down in helpless fits of temper; controlled himself at last; and- rushed out through bathroom, past throne, alongside cornfield, through perimeter gate. No sign of a running, plump, longhair, rhymeless poet. Looking left: nothing. And right: zero. Enraged Zulfy made his choice, pelted past the cycle-rickshaw rank. Old men were playing hit-the-spittoon and the spittoon was out in the street.
Urchins, dodging in and out of the streams of betel-juice. Major Zulfy ran, ononon. Between the old men and their target, but he lacked the urchins' skill.
What an unfortunate moment: a low hard jet of red fluid caught him squarely in the crotch. A stain like a hand clutched at the groin of his battledress; squeezed; arrested his progress. Major Zulfy stopped in almighty wrath. ?even more unfortunate; because a second player, assuming the mad soldier would keep on running' had unleashed a second jet. A second red hand clasped the first and completed Major Zulfy's day... slowly, with deliberation, he went to the spittoon and kicked it over, into the dust. He jumped on it -once! twice! again! - flattening it, and refusing to show that it had hurt his foot. Then, with some dignity, he limped away, back to the car parked outside my grandfather's house.
The old ones retrieved their brutalized receptacle and began to knock it back into shape.
'Now that I'm getting married,' Emerald told Mumtaz, 'it'll be very rude of you if you don't even try to have a good time. And you should be giving me advice and everything.' At the time, although Mumtaz smiled at her younger sister, she had thought it a great cheek on Emerald's part to say this; and, unintentionally perhaps, had increased the pressure of the pencil with which she was applying henna tracery to the soles of her sister's feet. 'Hey!' Emerald squealed, 'No need to get mad! I just thought we should try to be friends.'
Relations between the sisters had been somewhat strained since Nadir Khan's disappearance; and Mumtaz hadn't liked it when Major Zulfikar (who had chosen not to charge my grandfather with harbouring a wanted man, and squared it with Brigadier Dodson) asked for, and received, permission to marry Emerald. 'It's like blackmail,' she thought. 'And anyway, what about Alia? The eldest shouldn't be married last, and look how patient she's been with her merchant fellow.' But she said nothing, and smiled her forebearing smile, and devoted her gift of assiduity to the wedding preparations, and agreed to try and have a good time; while Alia went on waiting for Ahmed Sinai. ('She'll wait forever,' Padma guesses: correctly.)
January 1946. Marquees, sweetmeats, guests, songs, fainting bride, stiff-at-attention groom: a beautiful wedding... at which the leather-cloth merchant, Ahmed Sinai, found himself deep in conversation with the newly-divorced Mumtaz. 'You love-children? - what a coincidence, so do I..." 'And you didn't have any, poor girl? Well, matter of fact, my wife couldn't ...'
'Oh, no; how sad for you; and she must have been bad-tempered like anything!''... Oh, like hell... excuse me. Strength of emotions carried me away.''- Quite all right; don't think about it. Did she throw dishes and all?'
'Did she throw? In one month we had to eat out of newspaper!' 'No, my goodness, what whoppers you tell!' 'Oh, it's no good, you're too clever for me. But she did throw dishes all the same.' 'You poor, poor man.' 'No - you. Poor, poor you.' And thinking: 'Such a charming chap, with Alia he always looked so bored ...' And,'... This girl, I never looked at her, but my goodness me...' And,'...
You can tell he loves children; and for that I could...' And,'... Well, never mind about the skin...' It was noticeable that, when it was time to sing, Mumtaz found the spirit to join in all the songs; but Alia remained silent. She had been bruised even more badly than her father in Jallianwala Bagh; and you couldn't see a mark on her.
'So, gloomy sis, you managed to enjoy yourself after all.'
In June that year, Mumtaz re-married. Her sister - taking her cue from their mother- would not speak to her until, just before they both died, she saw her chance of revenge. Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Alia that these things happen, it was better to find out now than later, and Mumtaz had been badly hurt and needed a man to help her recover...
besides, Alia had brains, she would be all right. 'But, but,' Alia said, 'nobody ever married a book.' 'Change your name,' Ahmed Sinai said. 'Time for a fresh start. Throw Mumtaz and her Nadir Khan out of the window, I'll choose you a new name. Amina. Amina Sinai: you'd like that?' 'Whatever you say, husband,' my mother said. 'Anyway,' Alia, the wise child, wrote in her diary, 'who wants to get landed with this marrying Business? Not me; never; no.'
Mian Abdullah was a false start for a lot of optimistic people; his assistant (whose name could not be spoken in my father's house) was my mother's wrong turning. But those were the years of the drought; many crops planted at that time ended up by coming to nothing.
'What happened to the plumpie?' Padma asks, crossly, 'You don't mean you aren't going to tell?'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:16
There followed an illusionist January, a time so still on its surface that 1947 seemed not to have begun at all. (While, of course, in fact...) In which the Cabinet Mission - old Pethick-Lawrence, clever Cripps, military A. V. Alexander - saw their scheme for the transfer of power fail. (But of course, in fact it would only be six months until...) In which the viceroy, Wavell, understood that he was finished, washed-up, or in our own expressive word, funtoosh, (Which, of course, in fact only speeded things up, because it let in the last of the viceroys, who ...) In which Mr Attlee seemed too busy deciding the future of Burma with Mr Aung Sam. (While, of course, in fact he was briefing the last viceroy, before announcing his appointment; the last-viceroy-to-be was visiting the King and being granted plenipotentiary powers; so that soon, soon ...) In which the Constituent Assembly stood self-adjourned, without having settled on a Constitution. (But, of course, in fact Earl Mountbatten, the last viceroy, would be with us any day, with his inexorable ticktock, his soldier's knife that could cut subcontinents in three, and his wife who ate chicken breasts secretly behind a locked lavatory door.) And in the midst of the mirror-like stillness through which it was impossible to see the great machineries grinding, my mother, the brand-new Amina Sinai, who also looked still and unchanging although great things were happening beneath her skin, woke up one morning with a head buzzing with insomnia and a tongue thickly coated with unslept sleep and found herself saying aloud, without meaning to at all, 'What's the sun doing here, Allah? It's come up in the wrong place.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:16
... I must interrupt myself. I wasn't going to today, because Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings; but I simply must register a protest. So, breaking into a chapter which, by a happy chance, I have named 'A Public Announcement', I issue (in the strongest possible terms)作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:16
the following general medical alert: 'A certain Doctor N. Q. Baligga,' I wish to proclaim - from the rooftops! Through the loudhailers of minarets! - 'is a quack. Ought to be locked up, struck off, defenestrated. Or worse: subjected to his own quackery, brought out in leprous boils by a mis-prescribed pill. Damn fool,' I underline my point, 'can't see what's under his nose!'
Having let off steam, I must leave my mother to worry for a further moment about the curious behaviour of the sun, to explain that our Padma, alarmed by my references to cracking up, has confided covertly in this Baligga - this ju-ju man! this green-Medicine wallah! -and as a result, the charlatan, whom I will not deign to glorify with a description, came to call. I, in all innocence and for Padma's sake, permitted him to examine me. I should have feared the worst; the worst is what he did. Believe this if you can: the fraud has pronounced me whole! 'I see no cracks,' he intoned mournfully, differing from Nelson at Copenhagen in that he possessed no good eye, his blindness not the choice of stubborn genius but the inevitable curse of his folly! Blindly, he impugned my state of mind, cast doubts on my reliability as a witness, and Godknowswhatelse: 'I see no cracks.'
In the end it was Padma who shooed him away. 'Never mind, Doctor Sahib,' Padma said, 'we will look after him ourselves.' On her face I saw a kind of recognition of her own dull guilt... exit Baligga, never to return to these pages. But good God! Has the medical profession - the calling of Aadam Aziz - sunk so low? To this cess-pool of Baliggas? In the end, if this be true, everyone will do without doctors ... which brings me back to the reason why Amina Sinai awoke one morning with the sun on her lips.
'It's come up in the wrong place!' she yelped, by accident; and then, through the fading buzzing of her bad night's sleep, understood how in this month of illusion she had fallen victim to a trick, because all that had happened was that she had woken up in Delhi, in the Home of her new husband, which faced east towards the sun; so the truth of the matter was that the sun was in the right place, and it was her position which had changed ... but even after she grasped this elementary thought, and stored it away with the many similar mistakes she had made since coming here (because her confusion about the sun had been a regular occurrence, as if her mind were refusing to accept the alteration in her circumstances, the new, above-ground position of her bed), something of its jumbling influence remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease.
'In the end, everyone can do without fathers,' Doctor Aziz told his daughter when he said goodbye; and Reverend Mother added, 'Another orphan in the family, whatsitsname, but never mind, Muhammad was an orphan too; and you can say this for your Ahmed Sinai, whatsitsname, at least he is half Kashmiri.' Then, with his own hands, Doctor Aziz had passed a green tin trunk into the railway compartment where Ahmed Sinai awaited his bride. 'The dowry is neither small nor vast as these things go,' my grandfather said. 'We are not crorepatis, you understand. But we have given you enough; Amina will give you more.' Inside the green tin trunk: silver samovars, brocade saris, gold coins given to Doctor Aziz by grateful patients, a museum in which the exhibits represented illnesses cured and lives saved. And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up after the dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so re-invented her, thus becoming in a sense her father as well as her new husband ... he walked (with his own feet) along the platform as the train began to move.
A relay runner at the end of his lap, he stood wreathed in smoke and comic-book vendors and the confusion of peacock-feather fans and hot snacks and the whole lethargic hullabaloo of squatting porters and plaster animals on trolleys as the train picked up speed and headed for the capital city, accelerating into the next lap of the race. In the compartment the new Amina Sinai sat (in mint condition) with her feet on the green tin trunk which had been an inch too high to fit under the seat. With her sandals bearing down on the locked museum of her father's achievements she sped away into her new life, leaving Aadam Aziz behind to dedicate himself to an attempt to fuse the skills of Western and hakimi Medicine, attempt which would gradually wear him down, convincing him that the hegemony of superstition, mumbo-jumbo and all things magical would never be broken in India, because the hakims refused to co-operate; and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to do so.
As the train pulled out of the station Ahmed Sinai jumped up and bolted the compartment door and pulled down the shutters, much to Amina's amazement; but then suddenly there were thumps outside and hands moving the doorknobs and voices saying 'Let us in, maharaj! Maharajin, are you there, ask your husband to open.' And always, in all the trains in this story, there were these voices and these fists banging and pleading; in the Frontier Mail to Bombay and in all the expresses of the years; and it was always frightening, until at last I was the one on the outside, hanging on for dear life, and begging, 'Hey, maharaj! Let me in, great sir.'
'Fare dodgers,' Ahmed Sinai said, but they were more than that. They were a prophecy. There were to be others soon.
... And now the sun was in the wrong place. She, my mother, lay in bed and felt ill-at-ease; but also excited by the thing that had happened inside her and which, for the moment, was her secret. At her side, Ahmed Sinai snored richly.
No insomnia for him; none, despite the troubles which had made him bring a grey bag full of money and hide it under his bed when he thought Amina wasn't looking. My father slept soundly, wrapped in the soothing envelope of my mother's greatest gift, which turned out to be worth a good deal more than the contents of the green tin trunk: Amir, a Sinai gave Ahmed the gift of her inexhaustible assiduity.
Nobody ever took pains the way Amina did. Dark of skin, glowing of eye, my mother was by nature the most meticulous person on earth. Assiduously, she arranged flowers in the corridors and rooms of the Old Delhi house; carpets were selected with infinite care. She could spend twenty-five minutes worrying at the positioning of a chair. By the time she'd finished with her Home-making, adding tiny touches bere, making fractional alterations there, Ahmed Sinai found his orphan's dwelling transformed into something gentle and loving. Amina would rise before he did, her assiduity driving her to dust everything, even the cane chick-blinds (until he agreed to employ a hamal for the purpose); but what Ahmed never knew was that his wife's talents were most dedicatedly, most determinedly applied not to the externals of their lives, but to the matter of Ahmed Sinai himself.
Why had she married him? - For solace, for children. But at first the insomnia coating her brain got in the way of her first aim; and children don't always come at once. So Amina had found herself dreaming about an undreamable poet's face and waking with an unspeakable name on her lips. You ask: what did she do about it? I answer: she gritted her teeth and set about putting herself straight. This is what she told herself: 'You big ungrateful goof, can't you see who is your husband now? Don't you know what a husband deserves?' To avoid fruitless controversy about the correct answers to these questions, let me say that, in my mother's opinion, a husband deserved unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. But there was a difficulty: Amina, her mind clogged up with Nadir Khan and insomnia, found she couldn't naturally provide Ahmed Sinai with these things. And so, bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioural, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes ... in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit.
Each day she selected one fragment of Ahmed Sinai, and concentrated her entire being upon it until it became wholly familiar; until she felt fondness rising up within her and becoming affection and, finally, love. In this way she came to adore his over-loud voice and the way it assaulted her eardrums and made her tremble; and his peculiarity of always being in a good mood until after he had shaved -after which, each morning, his manner became stern, gruff, Businesslike and distant; and his vulture-hooded eyes which concealed what she was sure was his inner goodness behind a bleakly ambiguous gaze; and the way his lower lip jutted out beyond his upper one; and his shortness which led him to forbid her ever to wear high heels ... 'My God,' she told herself, 'it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man!' But she was undismayed.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:16
'Who, after all,' she reasoned privately, 'ever truly knows another human being completely?' and continued to learn to love and admire his appetite for fried foods, his ability to quote Persian poetry, the furrow of anger between his eyebrows... 'At this rate,' she thought, 'there will always be something fresh about him to love; so our marriage just can't go stale.' In this way, assiduously, my mother settled down to life in the old city. The tin trunk sat unopened in an old almirah.
And Ahmed, without knowing or suspecting, found himself and his life worked upon by his wife until, little by little, he came to resemble -and to live in a place that resembled - a man he had never known and an underground chamber he had never seen. Under the influence of a painstaking magic so obscure that Amina was probably unaware of working it, Ahmed Sinai found Ms hair thinning, and what was left becoming lank and greasy; he discovered that he was willing to let it grow until it began to worm over the tops of his ears. Also, his stomach began to spread, until it became the yielding, squashy belly in which I would so often be smothered and which none of us, consciously at any rate, compared to the pudginess of Nadir Khan. His distant cousin Zobra told him, coquettishly, 'You must diet, cousinji, or we won't be able to reach you to kiss!' But it did no good ... and little by little Amina constructed in Old Delhi a world of soft cushions and draperies over the windows which let in as little light as possible... she lined the chick-blinds with black cloths; and all these minute transformations helped her in her Herculean task, the task of accepting, bit by bit, that she must love a new man. (But she remained susceptible to the forbidden dream-images of... and was always drawn to men with soft stomachs and longish, lankish hair.)
You could not see the new city from the old one. In the new city, a race of pink conquerors had built palaces in pink stone; but the houses in the narrow lanes of the old city leaned over, jostled, shuffled, blocked each other's view of the roseate edifices of power. Not that anyone ever looked in that direction, anyway. In the Muslim muhallas or neighbourhoods which clustered around Chandni Chowk, people were content to look inwards into the screened-off courtyards of their lives; to roll chick-blinds down over their windows and verandahs. In the narrow lanes, young loafers held hands and linked arms and kissed when they met and stood in hip-jutting circles, facing inwards. There was no greenery and the cows kept away, knowing they weren't sacred here. Bicycle bells rang constantly.
And above their cacophony sounded the cries of itinerant fruit-sellers: Come all you greats-O, eat a few dates-O! To all of which was added, on that January morning when my mother and father were each concealing secrets from the other, the nervous clatter of the footsteps of Mr Mustapha Kemal and Mr S. P. Butt; and also the insistent rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum.
When the clattering footsteps were first heard in the gullies of the muhalla, Lifafa Das and his peepshow and drum were still some distance away. Clatter-feet descended from a taxi and rushed into the narrow lanes; meanwhile, in their corner house, my mother stood in her kitchen stirring khichri for breakfast overhearing my father conversing with his distant cousin Zohra. Feet clacked past fruit salesmen and hand-holding loafers; my mother overheard:'... You newlyweds, I can't stop coming to see, cho chweet I can't tell you!' While feet approached, my father actually coloured. In those days he was in the high summer of his charm; his lower lip really didn't jut so much, the line between his eyebrows was still only faint... and Amina, stirring khichri, heard Zohra squeal, 'Oh look, pink! But then you are so fair, cousinji! ...' And he was letting her listen to All-India Radio at the table, which Amina was not allowed to do; Lata Mangeshkar was singing a waily love-song as 'Just like me, don'tyouthink,' Zohra went on. 'Lovely pink babies we'll have, a perfect match, no, cousinji, pretty white couples?' And the feet clattering and the pan being stirred while 'How awful to be black, cousinji, to wake every morning and see it staring at you, in the mirror to be shown proof of your inferiority! Of course they know; even blackies know white is nicer, don'tyouthinkso?' The feet very close now and Amina stamping into the dining-room pot in hand, concentrating hard at restraining herself, thinking Why must she come today when I have news to tell and also I'll have to ask for money in front of her. Ahmed Sinai liked to be asked nicely for money, to have it wheedled out of him with caresses and sweet words until his table napkin began to rise in his lap as something moved in his pajamas; and she didn't mind, with her assiduity she learned to love this also, and when she needed money there were strokes and 'Janum, my life, please...' and'.. .Just a little so that I can make nice food and pay the bills ...' and 'Such a generous man, give me what you like, I know it will be enough'... the techniques of street beggars and she'd have to do it in front of that one with her saucer eyes and giggly voice and loud chat about blackies.
Feet at the door almost and Amina in the dining-room with hot khichri at the ready, so very near to Zohra's silly head, whereupon Zohra cries, 'Oh, present company excluded, of course!' just in case, not being sure whether she's been overheard or not, and 'Oh, Ahmed, cousinji, you are really too dreadful to think I meant our lovely Amina who really isn't so black but only like a white lady standing in the shade!' While Amina with her pot in hand looks at the pretty head and thinks Should I? And, Do I dare? And calms herself down with: 'It's a big day for me; and at least she raised the subject of children; so now it'll be easy for me to...' But it's too late, the wailing of Lata on the radio has drowned the sound of the doorbell so they haven't heard old Musa the bearer going to answer the door; Lata has obscured the sound of anxious feet clattering upstairs; but all of a sudden here they are, the feet of Mr Mustapha Kemal and Mr S. P. Butt, coming to a shuffling halt.
'The rapscallions have perpetrated an outrage!' Mr Kemal, who is the thinnest man Amina Sinai has ever seen, sets off with his curiously archaic phraseology (derived from his fondness for litigation, as a result of which he has become infected with the cadences of the lawcourts) a kind of chain reaction of farcical panic, to which little, eaky, spineless S. P. Butt, who has something wild dancing like a monkey in the eyes, adds considerably, by getting out these three words: 'Yes, the firebugs!' And now Zohra in an odd reflex action clutches the radio to her: bosom, muffing Lata between her breasts, screaming, 'O God, ? God, what firebugs, where? This house? ?God I can feel the heat!' Amina stands frozen khichri-in-hand staring at the two men in their Business suits as her husband, secrecy thrown to the winds now, rises shaven but as-yet-unsuited to his feet and asks, 'The godown?'
Godown, gudam, warehouse, call it what you like; but no sooner had Ahmed Sinai asked his question than a hush fell upon the room, except of course that Lata Mangeshkar's voice still issued from Zohra's cleavage; because these three men shared one such large edifice, located on the industrial estate at the outskirts of the city. 'Not the godown, God forfend," Amina prayed silently, because the reccine and leathercloth Business was doing well - through Major Zulfikar, who was now an aide at Military G.H.Q, in Delhi, Ahmed Sinai had landed a contract to supply leathercloth jackets and waterproof table coverings to the Army itself- and large stocks of the material on which their lives depended were stored in that warehouse. 'But who would do such a thing?' Zohra wailed in harmony with her singing breasts, 'What mad people are loose in the world these days?'... and that was how Amina heard, for the first time, the name which her husband had hidden from her, and which was, in those times, striking terror into many hearts. 'It is Havana,' said S. P. Butt... but Ravana is the name of a many-headed demon; are demons, then, abroad in the land? 'What rubbish is this?'
Amina, speaking with her father's hatred of superstition, demanded an answer; and Mr Kemal provided it. 'It is the name of a dastardly crew, Madam; a band of incendiary rogues. These are troubled days; troubled days.'
In the godown;roll upon roll of leathercloth; and the commodities dealt in by Mr Kemal, rice tea lentfls - he hoards them all over the1 country in vast quantities, as a form of protection against the many-headed many-mouthed rapacious monster that is the public, which, if given its heads, would force prices so low in a time of abundance that godfearing entrepreneurs would starve while the monster grew fat... 'Economics is scarcity,' Mr Kemal argues, 'therefore my hoards not only keep prices at a decent level but underpin the very structure of the economy.' - And then there is, in the godown, Mr Butt's stockpile, boxed in cartons bearing the words AAG BRAND. I do not need to tell you that aag means fire. S. P. Butt was a manufacturer of matches.
'Our informations,' Mr Kemal says, 'reveal only the fact of a fire at the estate. The precise godown is not specified.'
'But why should it be ours?' Ahmed Sinai asks. 'Why, since we still have time to pay?'
'Pay?' Amina interrupts. 'Pay whom? Pay what? Husband, janum, life of mine, what is happening here?'... But 'We must go,' S. P. Butt says, and Ahmed Sinai is leaving, crumpled night-pajamas and all, rushing clatterfooted out of the house with the thin one and the spineless one, leaving behind him uneaten khichri, wide-eyed women, muffled Lata, and hanging in the air the name of Ravana... 'a gang of ne'er-do-wells, Madam; unscrupulous cut-throats and bounders to a man!'
And S. P. Butt's last quavering words: 'Damnfool Hindu firebugs, Begum Sahiba.
But what can we Muslims do?'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:16
What is known about the Ravana gang? That it posed as a fanatical anti-Muslim movement, which, in those days before the Partition riots, in those days when pigs' heads could be left with impunity in the courtyards of Friday mosques, was nothing unusual. That it sent men out, at dead of night, to paint slogans on the walls of both old and new cities: NO PARTITION OR ELSE PERDITION! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA! and so forth. And that it burned down Muslim-owned factories, shops, godowns. But there's more, and this is not commonly known: behind this facade of racial hatred, the Ravana gang was a brilliantly-conceived commercial enterprise. Anonymous phone calls, letters written with words cut out of newspapers were issued to Muslim Businessmen, who were offered the choice between paying a single, once-only cash sum and having their world burned down.
Interestingly, the gang proved itself to be ethical. There were no second demands. And they meant business: in the absence of grey bags full of pay-off money, fire would lick at shopfronts factories warehouses. Most people paid, preferring that to the risky alternative of trusting to the police. The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. And it is said (though I can't be sure of this) that , when the blackmail letters arrived, they contained a list of 'satisfied customers' who had paid up and stayed in Business. The Ravana gang - like all professionals - gave references.
Two men in Business suits, one in pajamas, ran through the narrow gullies of the Muslim muhalla to the taxi waiting on Chandni Chowk. They attracted curious glances: not only because of their varied attire, but because they were trying not to run. 'Don't show panic,' Mr Kemal said, 'Look calm.' But their feet kept getting out of control and rushing on. Jerkily, in little rushes of speed followed by a few badly-disciplined steps at walking pace, they left the muhalla; and passed, on their way, a young man with a black metal peepshow box on wheels, a man holding a dugdugee drum: Lifafa Das, on his way to the scene of the important annunciation which gives this episode its name. Lifafa Pas was rattling his drum and calling: 'Come see everything, come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi, come see India, come see! Come see, come see!'
But Ahmed Sinai had other things to look at.
The children of the muhalla had their own names for most of the local inhabitants. One group of three neighbours was known as the 'fighting-cock people', because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose Homes were separated by one of the muhalla's few Hindu residences. The Sindhi and the Bengali had very little in common - they didn't speak the same language or cook the same food; but they were both Muslims, and they both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from their rooftops. They hurled multilingual abuse at him from their windows. They flung scraps of meat at his door... while he, in turn, paid urchins to throw stones at their windows, stones with messages wrapped round them: 'Wait,' the messages said, 'Your turn will come'... the children of the muhalla did not call my father by his right name. They knew him as 'the man who can't follow his nose'.
Ahmed Sinai was the possessor of a sense of direction so inept that, left to his own devices, he could even get lost in the winding gullies of his own neighbourhood. Many times the street-arabs in the lanes had come across him, wandering forlornly, and been offered a four-anna chavanni piece to escort him Home. I mention this because I believe that my father's gift for taking wrong turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it was also a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir Khan, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what's more, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road... But that's enough for now, because I've given the three Businessmen enough time to get to the industrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct consequence of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future failure, the odour of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths. Mr Kemal, who smelled it, would say privately to S. P. Butt, "These Kashmiri types, old boy: well-known fact they never wash.' This slander connects my father to the boatman Tai... to Tai in the grip of the self-destructive rage which made him give up being clean.
At the industrial estate, night-watchmen were sleeping peacefully through the noise of the fire-engines. Why? How? Because they had made a deal with the Ravana mob, and, when tipped off about the gang's impending arrival, would take sleeping draughts and pull their charpoy beds away from the buildings of the estate. In this way the gang avoided violence, and the nightwatchmen augmented their meagre wages. It was an amicable and not unintelligent arrangement.
Amid sleeping night-watchmen, Mr Kemal, my father and S. P. Butt watched cremated bicycles rise up into the sky in thick black clouds. Butt father Kemal stood alongside fire engines, as relief flooded through them, because it was the Arjuna Indiabike godown that was burning - the Arjuna brand-name, taken from a hero of Hindu mythology, had failed to disguise the fact that the company was Muslim-owned. Washed by relief, father Kemal Butt breathed air filled with incendiarized bicycles, coughing and spluttering as the fumes of incinerated wheels, the vaporized ghosts of chains bells saddlebags handlebars, the transubstantiated frames of Arjuna Indiabikes moved in and out of their lungs. A crude cardboard mask had been nailed to a telegraph pole in front of the flaming godown - a mask of many faces - a devil's mask of snarling faces with broad curling lips and bright red nostrils. The faces of the many-headed monster, Ravana the demon king, looking angrily down at the bodies of the night-watchmen who were sleeping so soundly that no one, neither the firemen, nor Kemal, nor Butt, nor my father, had the heart to disturb them; while the ashes of pedals and inner tubes fell upon them from the skies.
'Damn bad Business,' Mr Kemal said. He was not being sympathetic. He was criticizing the owners of the Arjuna Indiabike Company.
Look: the cloud of the disaster (which is also a relief) rises and gathers like a ball in the discoloured morning sky. See how it thrusts itself westward into the heart of the old city; how it is pointing, good lord, like a finger, pointing down at the Muslim muhalla near Chandni Chowk! ... Where, right now, Lifafa Das is crying his wares in the Sinais' very own gully.
'Come see everything, see the whole world, come see!'
It's almost time for the public announcement. I won't deny I'm excited: I've been hanging around in the background of my own story for too long, and although it's still a little while before I can take over, it's nice to get a look in.
So, with a sense of high expectation, I follow the pointing finger in the sky and look down on my parents' neighbourhood, upon bicycles, upon street-vendors touting roasted gram in twists of paper, upon the hip-jutting, hand-holding street loafers, upon flying scraps of paper and little clustered whirlwinds of flies around the sweetmeat stalls... all of it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view. And there are children, swarms of them, too, attracted into the street by the magical rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum and his voice, 'Dunya dekho', see the whole world! Boys without shorts on, girls without vests, and other, smarter infants in school whites, their shorts held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped snake-buckles, fat little boys with podgy fingers; all flocking to the black box on wheels, including this one particular girl, a girl with one long hairy continuous eyebrow shading both eyes, the eight-year-old daughter of that same discourteous Sindhi who is even now raising the flag of the still-fictional country, of Pakistan on his roof, who is even now hurling abuse at his neighbour, while his daughter rushes into the street with her chavanni in her hand, her expression of a midget queen, and murder lurking just behind her lips. What's her name? I don't know; but I know those eyebrows.
Lifafa Das: who has by an unfortunate chance set up Ms black peepshow against a wall on which someone has daubed a swastika (in those days you saw them everywhere; the extremist R.S.S.S. party got them on every wall; not the Nazi swastika which was the wrong way round, but the ancient Hindu symbol of power.
Svasti is Sanskrit for good) ... this Lifafa Das whose arrival Pve been trumpeting was a young fellow who was invisible until he smiled, when he became beautiful, or rattled his drum, whereupon he became irresistible to children.
Dugdugee-men: all over India, they shout, 'Dilli dekho', 'come see Delhi!' But this was Delhi, and Lifafa Das had altered his cry accordingly. 'See the whole world, come see everything!' The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to, prey upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put everything into his box.
(I am suddenly reminded of Nadir Khan's friend the painter: is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?)
Inside the peepshow of Lifafa Das were pictures of the Taj Mahal, and MeenaksM Temple, and the holy Ganges; but as well as these famous sights the peepshow-man had felt the urge to include more contemporary images - Stafford Cripps leaving Nehru's residence; untouchables being touched; educated persons sleeping in large numbers on railway lines; a publicity still of a European actress with a mountain of fruit on her head - Lifafa called her Carmen Verandah; even a newspaper photograph, mounted on card, of a fire at the industrial estate.
Lifafa Das did not believe in shielding his audiences from the not-always-pleasant features of the age... and often, when he came into these gullies, grown-ups as well as children came to see what was new inside his box on wheels, and among his most frequent customers was Begum Amina Sinai.
But today there is something hysterical in the air; something brittle and menacing has settled on the muhalla as the cloud of cremated Indiabikes hangs overhead... and now it slips its leash, as this girl with her one continuous eyebrow squeals, her voice lisping with an innocence it does not possess, 'Me firth t! Out of my way... let me thee! I can't thee!' Because there are already eyes at the holes in the box, there are already children absorbed in the progression of postcards, and Ldfafa Das says (without pausing in his work - he goes right on turning the knob which keeps the postcards moving inside the box), 'A few minutes, bibi; everyone will have his turn; wait only.' To which the one-eyebrowed midget queen replies, 'No! No! I want to be firtht!' Lifafa stops smiling - becomes invisible - shrugs. Unbridled fury appears on the face of the midget queen. And now an insult rises; a deadly barb trembles on her lips.
'You've got a nerve, coming into thith muhalla! I know you: my father knows you: everyone knows you're a Hindu!!'
Lifafa Das stands silently, turning the handles of his box; but now the ponytailed one-eyebrowed valkyrie is chanting, pointing with pudgy fingers, and the boys in their school whites and snake-buckles are joining in, 'Hindu! Hindu! Hindu!' And chick-blinds are flying up; and from his window the girl's father leans out and joins in, hurling abuse at a new target, and the Bengali joins in in Bengali... 'Mother raper! Violator of our daughters!' ... and remember the papers have been talking of assaults on Muslim children, so suddenly a voice screams out - a woman's voice, maybe even silly Zohra's, 'Rapist! Arre my God they found the badmaash! There he u!' And now the insanity of the cloud like a pointing finger and the whole disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant, 'Ra-pist! Ra-pist! Ray-ray-ray-pist!' without really knowing what they're saying; the children have edged away from Lifafa Das and he's moved, too, dragging his box on wheels, trying to get away, but now he is surrounded by voices filled with blood, and the street loafers are moving towards him, men are getting off bicycles, a pot flies through the air and shatters on a wall beside him; he has his back against a doorway as a fellow with a quiff of oily hair grins sweetly at him and says, 'So, mister: it is you?
Mister Hindu, who denies our daughters? Mister idolater, who sleeps with his sister?' And Lifafa Das, 'No, for the love of...', smiling like a fool ... and then the door behind him opens and he falls backwards, landing in a dark cool corridor beside my mother Amina Sinai.
She had spent the morning alone with giggling Zohra and the echoes of the name Ravana, not knowing what was happening out there at the industrial estate, letting her mind linger upon the way the whole world seemed to be going mad; and when the screaming started and Zohra - before she could be stopped - joined in, something hardened inside her some realization that she was her father's daughter, some ghost-memory of Nadir Khan hiding from crescent knives in a cornfield, some irritation of her nasal passages, and she went downstairs to the rescue, although Zohra screeched, 'What you doing, sisterji, that mad beast, for God, don't let him in here, have your brains gone raw?'... My mother opened the door and Lifafa Das fell in.
Picture her that morning, a dark shadow between the mob and its prey, her womb bursting with its invisible untold secret: 'Wah, wah,' she applauded the crowd.
'What heroes! Heroes, I swear, absolutely! Only fifty of you against this terrible monster of a fellow! Allah, you make my eyes shine with pride.'
... And Zohra, 'Come back, sisterji!' And the oily quiff, 'Why speak for this goonda, Begum Sahiba? This is not right acting.' And Amina, 'I know this man. He is a decent type. Go, get out, none of you have anything to do? In a Muslim muhalla you would tear a man to pieces? Go, remove yourselves.' But the mob has stopped being surprised, and is moving forward again ... and now. Now it comes.
'Listen,' my mother shouted, 'Listen well. I am with child. I am a mother who will have a child, and I am giving this man my shelter. Come on now, if you want to kill, kill a mother also and show the world what men you are!'
That was how it came about that my arrival - the coming of Saleem Sinai - was announced to the assembled masses of the people before my father had heard about it. From the moment of my conception, it seems, I have been public property.
But although my mother was right when she made her public announcement, she was also wrong. This is why: the baby she was carrying did not turn out to be her son.
My mother came to Delhi; worked assiduously at loving her husband; was prevented by Zohra and khichri and clattering feet from telling her husband her news; heard screams; made a public announcement. And it worked. My annunciation saved a life.
After the crowd dispersed, old Musa the bearer went into the street and rescued Lifafa Das's pecpshow, while Amina gave the young man with the beautiful smile glass after glass of fresh lime water. It seemed that his experience had drained him not only of liquid but also sweetness, because he put four spoonfuls of raw sugar into every glass, while Zohra cowered in pretty terror on a sofa. And, at length, Lifafa Das (rehydrated by lime water, sweetened by sugar) said: 'Begum Sahiba, you are a great lady. If you allow, I bless your house; also your unborn child. But also - please permit - I will do one thing more for you.'
'Thank you,' my mother said, 'but you must do nothing at all.'
But he continued (the sweetness of sugar coating las tongue). 'My cousin, Shri Ramram Seth, is a great seer, Begum Sahiba. Palmist, astrologer, fortune-teller.
You will please come to him, and he will reveal to you the future of your son.'
Soothsayers prophesied me ... in January 1947, my mother Amina Sinai was offered the gift of a prophecy in return for her gift of a life. And despite Zohra's 'It is madness to go with this one, Amina sister, do not even think of it for one sec, these are times to be careful'; despite her memories of her father's scepticism and of his thumbandforefinger closing around a maulvi's ear, the offer touched my mother in a place which answered Yes. Caught up in the illogical wonderment of her brand-new motherhood of which she had only just become certain, 'Yes,' she said, 'Lifafa Das, you will please meet me after some days at the gate to the Red Fort. Then you will take me to your cousin.'
'I shall be waiting every day,' he joined his palms; and left.
Zohra was so stunned that, when Ahmed Sinai came Home, she could only shake her head and say, 'You newlyweds; crazy as owls; I must leave you to each other!'
Musa, the old bearer, kept his mouth shut, too. He kept himself in the background of our lives, always, except twice ... once when he left us; once when he returned to destroy the world by accident.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:17
What is known about the Ravana gang? That it posed as a fanatical anti-Muslim movement, which, in those days before the Partition riots, in those days when pigs' heads could be left with impunity in the courtyards of Friday mosques, was nothing unusual. That it sent men out, at dead of night, to paint slogans on the walls of both old and new cities: NO PARTITION OR ELSE PERDITION! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA! and so forth. And that it burned down Muslim-owned factories, shops, godowns. But there's more, and this is not commonly known: behind this facade of racial hatred, the Ravana gang was a brilliantly-conceived commercial enterprise. Anonymous phone calls, letters written with words cut out of newspapers were issued to Muslim Businessmen, who were offered the choice between paying a single, once-only cash sum and having their world burned down.
Interestingly, the gang proved itself to be ethical. There were no second demands. And they meant business: in the absence of grey bags full of pay-off money, fire would lick at shopfronts factories warehouses. Most people paid, preferring that to the risky alternative of trusting to the police. The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. And it is said (though I can't be sure of this) that , when the blackmail letters arrived, they contained a list of 'satisfied customers' who had paid up and stayed in Business. The Ravana gang - like all professionals - gave references.
Two men in Business suits, one in pajamas, ran through the narrow gullies of the Muslim muhalla to the taxi waiting on Chandni Chowk. They attracted curious glances: not only because of their varied attire, but because they were trying not to run. 'Don't show panic,' Mr Kemal said, 'Look calm.' But their feet kept getting out of control and rushing on. Jerkily, in little rushes of speed followed by a few badly-disciplined steps at walking pace, they left the muhalla; and passed, on their way, a young man with a black metal peepshow box on wheels, a man holding a dugdugee drum: Lifafa Das, on his way to the scene of the important annunciation which gives this episode its name. Lifafa Pas was rattling his drum and calling: 'Come see everything, come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi, come see India, come see! Come see, come see!'
But Ahmed Sinai had other things to look at.
The children of the muhalla had their own names for most of the local inhabitants. One group of three neighbours was known as the 'fighting-cock people', because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose Homes were separated by one of the muhalla's few Hindu residences. The Sindhi and the Bengali had very little in common - they didn't speak the same language or cook the same food; but they were both Muslims, and they both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from their rooftops. They hurled multilingual abuse at him from their windows. They flung scraps of meat at his door... while he, in turn, paid urchins to throw stones at their windows, stones with messages wrapped round them: 'Wait,' the messages said, 'Your turn will come'... the children of the muhalla did not call my father by his right name. They knew him as 'the man who can't follow his nose'.
Ahmed Sinai was the possessor of a sense of direction so inept that, left to his own devices, he could even get lost in the winding gullies of his own neighbourhood. Many times the street-arabs in the lanes had come across him, wandering forlornly, and been offered a four-anna chavanni piece to escort him Home. I mention this because I believe that my father's gift for taking wrong turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it was also a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir Khan, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what's more, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road... But that's enough for now, because I've given the three Businessmen enough time to get to the industrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct consequence of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future failure, the odour of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths. Mr Kemal, who smelled it, would say privately to S. P. Butt, "These Kashmiri types, old boy: well-known fact they never wash.' This slander connects my father to the boatman Tai... to Tai in the grip of the self-destructive rage which made him give up being clean.
At the industrial estate, night-watchmen were sleeping peacefully through the noise of the fire-engines. Why? How? Because they had made a deal with the Ravana mob, and, when tipped off about the gang's impending arrival, would take sleeping draughts and pull their charpoy beds away from the buildings of the estate. In this way the gang avoided violence, and the nightwatchmen augmented their meagre wages. It was an amicable and not unintelligent arrangement.
Amid sleeping night-watchmen, Mr Kemal, my father and S. P. Butt watched cremated bicycles rise up into the sky in thick black clouds. Butt father Kemal stood alongside fire engines, as relief flooded through them, because it was the Arjuna Indiabike godown that was burning - the Arjuna brand-name, taken from a hero of Hindu mythology, had failed to disguise the fact that the company was Muslim-owned. Washed by relief, father Kemal Butt breathed air filled with incendiarized bicycles, coughing and spluttering as the fumes of incinerated wheels, the vaporized ghosts of chains bells saddlebags handlebars, the transubstantiated frames of Arjuna Indiabikes moved in and out of their lungs. A crude cardboard mask had been nailed to a telegraph pole in front of the flaming godown - a mask of many faces - a devil's mask of snarling faces with broad curling lips and bright red nostrils. The faces of the many-headed monster, Ravana the demon king, looking angrily down at the bodies of the night-watchmen who were sleeping so soundly that no one, neither the firemen, nor Kemal, nor Butt, nor my father, had the heart to disturb them; while the ashes of pedals and inner tubes fell upon them from the skies.
'Damn bad Business,' Mr Kemal said. He was not being sympathetic. He was criticizing the owners of the Arjuna Indiabike Company.
Look: the cloud of the disaster (which is also a relief) rises and gathers like a ball in the discoloured morning sky. See how it thrusts itself westward into the heart of the old city; how it is pointing, good lord, like a finger, pointing down at the Muslim muhalla near Chandni Chowk! ... Where, right now, Lifafa Das is crying his wares in the Sinais' very own gully.
'Come see everything, see the whole world, come see!'
It's almost time for the public announcement. I won't deny I'm excited: I've been hanging around in the background of my own story for too long, and although it's still a little while before I can take over, it's nice to get a look in.
So, with a sense of high expectation, I follow the pointing finger in the sky and look down on my parents' neighbourhood, upon bicycles, upon street-vendors touting roasted gram in twists of paper, upon the hip-jutting, hand-holding street loafers, upon flying scraps of paper and little clustered whirlwinds of flies around the sweetmeat stalls... all of it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view. And there are children, swarms of them, too, attracted into the street by the magical rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum and his voice, 'Dunya dekho', see the whole world! Boys without shorts on, girls without vests, and other, smarter infants in school whites, their shorts held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped snake-buckles, fat little boys with podgy fingers; all flocking to the black box on wheels, including this one particular girl, a girl with one long hairy continuous eyebrow shading both eyes, the eight-year-old daughter of that same discourteous Sindhi who is even now raising the flag of the still-fictional country, of Pakistan on his roof, who is even now hurling abuse at his neighbour, while his daughter rushes into the street with her chavanni in her hand, her expression of a midget queen, and murder lurking just behind her lips. What's her name? I don't know; but I know those eyebrows.
Lifafa Das: who has by an unfortunate chance set up Ms black peepshow against a wall on which someone has daubed a swastika (in those days you saw them everywhere; the extremist R.S.S.S. party got them on every wall; not the Nazi swastika which was the wrong way round, but the ancient Hindu symbol of power.
Svasti is Sanskrit for good) ... this Lifafa Das whose arrival Pve been trumpeting was a young fellow who was invisible until he smiled, when he became beautiful, or rattled his drum, whereupon he became irresistible to children.
Dugdugee-men: all over India, they shout, 'Dilli dekho', 'come see Delhi!' But this was Delhi, and Lifafa Das had altered his cry accordingly. 'See the whole world, come see everything!' The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to, prey upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put everything into his box.
(I am suddenly reminded of Nadir Khan's friend the painter: is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?)
Inside the peepshow of Lifafa Das were pictures of the Taj Mahal, and MeenaksM Temple, and the holy Ganges; but as well as these famous sights the peepshow-man had felt the urge to include more contemporary images - Stafford Cripps leaving Nehru's residence; untouchables being touched; educated persons sleeping in large numbers on railway lines; a publicity still of a European actress with a mountain of fruit on her head - Lifafa called her Carmen Verandah; even a newspaper photograph, mounted on card, of a fire at the industrial estate.
Lifafa Das did not believe in shielding his audiences from the not-always-pleasant features of the age... and often, when he came into these gullies, grown-ups as well as children came to see what was new inside his box on wheels, and among his most frequent customers was Begum Amina Sinai.
But today there is something hysterical in the air; something brittle and menacing has settled on the muhalla as the cloud of cremated Indiabikes hangs overhead... and now it slips its leash, as this girl with her one continuous eyebrow squeals, her voice lisping with an innocence it does not possess, 'Me firth t! Out of my way... let me thee! I can't thee!' Because there are already eyes at the holes in the box, there are already children absorbed in the progression of postcards, and Ldfafa Das says (without pausing in his work - he goes right on turning the knob which keeps the postcards moving inside the box), 'A few minutes, bibi; everyone will have his turn; wait only.' To which the one-eyebrowed midget queen replies, 'No! No! I want to be firtht!' Lifafa stops smiling - becomes invisible - shrugs. Unbridled fury appears on the face of the midget queen. And now an insult rises; a deadly barb trembles on her lips.
'You've got a nerve, coming into thith muhalla! I know you: my father knows you: everyone knows you're a Hindu!!'
Lifafa Das stands silently, turning the handles of his box; but now the ponytailed one-eyebrowed valkyrie is chanting, pointing with pudgy fingers, and the boys in their school whites and snake-buckles are joining in, 'Hindu! Hindu! Hindu!' And chick-blinds are flying up; and from his window the girl's father leans out and joins in, hurling abuse at a new target, and the Bengali joins in in Bengali... 'Mother raper! Violator of our daughters!' ... and remember the papers have been talking of assaults on Muslim children, so suddenly a voice screams out - a woman's voice, maybe even silly Zohra's, 'Rapist! Arre my God they found the badmaash! There he u!' And now the insanity of the cloud like a pointing finger and the whole disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant, 'Ra-pist! Ra-pist! Ray-ray-ray-pist!' without really knowing what they're saying; the children have edged away from Lifafa Das and he's moved, too, dragging his box on wheels, trying to get away, but now he is surrounded by voices filled with blood, and the street loafers are moving towards him, men are getting off bicycles, a pot flies through the air and shatters on a wall beside him; he has his back against a doorway as a fellow with a quiff of oily hair grins sweetly at him and says, 'So, mister: it is you?
Mister Hindu, who denies our daughters? Mister idolater, who sleeps with his sister?' And Lifafa Das, 'No, for the love of...', smiling like a fool ... and then the door behind him opens and he falls backwards, landing in a dark cool corridor beside my mother Amina Sinai.
She had spent the morning alone with giggling Zohra and the echoes of the name Ravana, not knowing what was happening out there at the industrial estate, letting her mind linger upon the way the whole world seemed to be going mad; and when the screaming started and Zohra - before she could be stopped - joined in, something hardened inside her some realization that she was her father's daughter, some ghost-memory of Nadir Khan hiding from crescent knives in a cornfield, some irritation of her nasal passages, and she went downstairs to the rescue, although Zohra screeched, 'What you doing, sisterji, that mad beast, for God, don't let him in here, have your brains gone raw?'... My mother opened the door and Lifafa Das fell in.
Picture her that morning, a dark shadow between the mob and its prey, her womb bursting with its invisible untold secret: 'Wah, wah,' she applauded the crowd.
'What heroes! Heroes, I swear, absolutely! Only fifty of you against this terrible monster of a fellow! Allah, you make my eyes shine with pride.'
... And Zohra, 'Come back, sisterji!' And the oily quiff, 'Why speak for this goonda, Begum Sahiba? This is not right acting.' And Amina, 'I know this man. He is a decent type. Go, get out, none of you have anything to do? In a Muslim muhalla you would tear a man to pieces? Go, remove yourselves.' But the mob has stopped being surprised, and is moving forward again ... and now. Now it comes.
'Listen,' my mother shouted, 'Listen well. I am with child. I am a mother who will have a child, and I am giving this man my shelter. Come on now, if you want to kill, kill a mother also and show the world what men you are!'
That was how it came about that my arrival - the coming of Saleem Sinai - was announced to the assembled masses of the people before my father had heard about it. From the moment of my conception, it seems, I have been public property.
But although my mother was right when she made her public announcement, she was also wrong. This is why: the baby she was carrying did not turn out to be her son.
My mother came to Delhi; worked assiduously at loving her husband; was prevented by Zohra and khichri and clattering feet from telling her husband her news; heard screams; made a public announcement. And it worked. My annunciation saved a life.
After the crowd dispersed, old Musa the bearer went into the street and rescued Lifafa Das's pecpshow, while Amina gave the young man with the beautiful smile glass after glass of fresh lime water. It seemed that his experience had drained him not only of liquid but also sweetness, because he put four spoonfuls of raw sugar into every glass, while Zohra cowered in pretty terror on a sofa. And, at length, Lifafa Das (rehydrated by lime water, sweetened by sugar) said: 'Begum Sahiba, you are a great lady. If you allow, I bless your house; also your unborn child. But also - please permit - I will do one thing more for you.'
'Thank you,' my mother said, 'but you must do nothing at all.'
But he continued (the sweetness of sugar coating las tongue). 'My cousin, Shri Ramram Seth, is a great seer, Begum Sahiba. Palmist, astrologer, fortune-teller.
You will please come to him, and he will reveal to you the future of your son.'
Soothsayers prophesied me ... in January 1947, my mother Amina Sinai was offered the gift of a prophecy in return for her gift of a life. And despite Zohra's 'It is madness to go with this one, Amina sister, do not even think of it for one sec, these are times to be careful'; despite her memories of her father's scepticism and of his thumbandforefinger closing around a maulvi's ear, the offer touched my mother in a place which answered Yes. Caught up in the illogical wonderment of her brand-new motherhood of which she had only just become certain, 'Yes,' she said, 'Lifafa Das, you will please meet me after some days at the gate to the Red Fort. Then you will take me to your cousin.'
'I shall be waiting every day,' he joined his palms; and left.
Zohra was so stunned that, when Ahmed Sinai came Home, she could only shake her head and say, 'You newlyweds; crazy as owls; I must leave you to each other!'
Musa, the old bearer, kept his mouth shut, too. He kept himself in the background of our lives, always, except twice ... once when he left us; once when he returned to destroy the world by accident.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:17
Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance; in which case Musa -for all his age and servility - was nothing less than a time-bomb, ticking softly away until his appointed time; in which case, we should either -optimistically - get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or ebe, of course, we might - as pessimists - give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway; things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos? Was my father being opti- or pessimistic when my mother told him her news (after everyone in the neighbourhood had heard it), and he replied with, 'I told you so; it was only a matter of time? My mother's Pregnancy, it seems, was fated; my birth, however, owed a good deal to accident.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:17
'It was only a matter of time,' my father said, with every appearance of pleasure; but time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in Pakistan would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts... Mr Kemal, who wanted nothing to do with Partition, was fond of saying, 'Here's proof of the folly of the scheme! Those Leaguers plan to abscond with a whole thirty minutes! Time Without Partitions,' Mr Kemal cried, That's the ticket!' And S. P. Butt said, 'If they can change the time just like that, what's real any more? I ask you? What's true?'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:17
It seems like a day for big questions. I reply across the unreliable years to S.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:17
P. Butt, who got his throat slit in the Partition riots and lost interest in time: 'What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.' True, for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories Mary Pereira told me: Mary my ayah who was both more and less than a mother; Mary who knew everything about all of us. True was a thing concealed just over the horizon towards which the fisherman's finger pointed in the picture on my wall, while the young Raleigh listened to his tales. Now, writing this in my Anglepoised pool of light, I measure truth against those early things: Is this how Mary would have told it? I ask. Is this what that fisherman would have said? ... And by those standards it is undeniably true that, one day in January 1947, my mother heard all about me six months before I turned up, while my father came up against a demon king.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:18
Amina Sinai had been waiting for a suitable moment to accept Lifafa Das's offer; but for two days after the burning of the Indiabike factory Ahmed Sinai stayed at Home, never visiting his office at Connaught Place, as if he were steeling himself for some unpleasant encounter. For two days the grey moneybag lay supposedly secret in its place under his side of their bed. My father showed no desire to talk about the reasons for the grey bag's presence; so Amina said to herself, 'Let him be like that; who cares?' because she had her secret, too, waiting patiently for her by the gates of the Red Fort at the top of Chandni Chowk. Pouting in secret petulance, my mother kept Lifafa Das to herself. 'Unless-and-until he tells me what he's up to, why should I tell him?'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:18
she argued.
And then a cold January evening, on which 'I've got to go out tonight' said Ahmed Sinai; and despite her pleas of 'It's cold - you'll get sick...' he put on his Business suit and coat under which the mysterious grey bag made a ridiculously obvious lump; so finally she said, 'Wrap up warm,' and sent him off wherever he was going, asking, 'Will you be late?' To which he replied, 'Yes, certainly.' Five minutes after he left, Amina Sinai set off for the Red Fort, into the heart of her adventure.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:18
One journey began at a fort; one should have ended at a fort, and did not. One foretold the future; the other settled its geographical location. During one journey, monkeys danced entertainingly; while, in the other place, a monkey was also dancing, but with disastrous results. In both adventures, a part was played by vultures. And many-headed monsters lurked at the end of both roads.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:18
One at a time, then ... and here is Amina Sinai beneath the high" walls of the Red Fort, where Mughals ruled, from whose heights the new nation will be proclaimed ... neither monarch nor herald, my mother is nevertheless greeted with warmth (despite the weather). In the last light of the day, Lifafa Das exclaims, 'Begum Sahiba! Oh, that is excellent that you came!' Dark-skinned in a white sari, she beckons him towards the taxi; he reaches for the back door; but the driver snaps, 'What do you think? Who do you think you are? Come on now, get in the front seat damn smart, leave the lady to sit in the back!' So Amina shares her seat with a black peepshow on wheels, while Lifafa Das apologizes: 'Sorry, hey, Begum Sahiba? Good intents are no offence.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:18
But here, refusing to wait its turn, is another taxi, pausing outside another fort unloading its cargo of three men in Business suits, each carrying a bulky grey bag under his coat... one man long as a life and thin as a lie, a second who seems to lack a spine, and a third whose lower lip juts, whose belly tends to squashiness, whose hair is thinning and greasy and worming over the tops of his ears, and between whose eyebrows is the telltale furrow that will, as he ages, deepen into the scar of a bitter, angry man. The taxi-driver is ebullient despite the cold. 'Purana Qila!' he calls out, 'Everybody out, please! Old Fort, here we are!'... There have been many, many cities of Delhi, and the Old Fort, that blackened ruin, is a Delhi so ancient that beside it our own Old City is merely a babe in arms. It is to this ruin of an impossibly antique time that Kemal, Butt and Ahmed Sinai have been brought by an anonymous telephone call which ordered, 'Tonight. Old Fort. Just after sunset. But no police ... or godown funtoosh!' Clutching their grey bags, they move into the ancient, crumbling world.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:18
... Clutching at her handbag, my mother sits beside a peepshow, while Lifafa Das rides in front with the puzzled, irascible driver, and directs the cab into the streets on the wrong side of the General Post Office; and as she enters these causeways where poverty eats away at the tarmac like a drought, where people lead their invisible lives (because they share Lifafa Das's curse of invisibility, and not all of them have beautiful smiles), something new begins to assail her. Under the pressure of these streets which are growing narrower by the minute, more crowded by the inch, she has lost her 'city eyes'. When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don't impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don't look like dormitories. My mother lost her city eyes and the newness of what she was seeing made her flush, newness like a hailstorm pricking her cheeks. Look, my God, those beautiful children have black teeth! Would you believe ... girl children baring their nipples! How terrible, truly! And, Allah-tobah, heaven forfend, sweeper women with - no! - how dreadful!. - collapsed spines, and bunches of twigs, and no caste marks; untouchables, sweet Allah!... and cripples everywhere, mutilated by loving parents to ensure them of a lifelong income from begging... yes, beggars in boxcars, grown men with babies' legs, in crates on wheels, made out of discarded roller-skates and old mango boxes; my mother cries out, 'Lifafa Das, turn back!'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:18
Seeing that there is no going back, she tells the taxi to wait, and the bad-tempered driver says, 'Yes, of course, for a great lady what is there to do but wait, and when you come I must drive my car in reverse all the way back to main-road, because here is no room to turn!'... Children tugging at the pallu of her sari, heads everywhere staring at my mother, who thinks, It's like being surrounded by some terrible monster, a creature with heads and heads and heads; but she corrects herself, no, of course not a monster, these poor poor people - what then? A power of some sort, a force which does not know its strength, which has perhaps decayed into impotence through never having been used ... No, these are not decayed people, despite everything. 'I'm frightened,' my mother finds herself thinking, just as a hand touches her arm. Turning, she finds herself looking into the face of - impossible! - a white man, who stretches out a raggedy hand and says in a voice like a high foreign song, 'Give something, Begum Sahiba...' and repeats and repeats like a stuck record while she looks with embarrassment into a white face with long eyelashes and a curved patrician nose - embarrassment, because he was white, and begging was not for white people.'... All the way from Calcutta, on foot,' he was saying, 'and covered in ashes, as you see, Begum Sahiba, because of my shame at having been there for the Killing - last August you remember, Begum Sahiba, thousands knifed in four days of screaming ...' Lifafa Das is standing helplessly by, not knowing how to behave with a white man, even a beggar, and '... Did you hear about the European?' the beggar asks, '... Yes, among the killers, Begum Sahiba, walking through the town at night with blood on his shirt, a white man deranged by the coming futility of his kind; did you hear?'... And now a pause in that perplexing song of a voice, and then: 'He was my husband.' Only now did my mother see the stifled breasts beneath the rags ... 'Give something for my shame.' Tugging at her arm. Lifafa Das tugging at the other, whispering Hijra, transvestite, come away, Begum Sahiba; and Amina standing still as she is tugged in opposite directions wants to say Wait, white woman, just let me finish my Business, I will take you Home, feed you clothe you, send you back into your own world; but just then the woman shrugs and walks off empty-handed down the narrowing street, shrinking to a point until she vanishes - now! - into the distant meanness of the lane. And now Lifafa Das, with a curious expression on his face, says, 'They're funtoosh! All finished! Soon they will all go; and then we'll be free to kill each other.' Touching her belly with one light hand, she follows him into a darkened doorway while her face bursts into flames.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:19
... While at the Old Fort, Ahmed Sinai waits for Ravana. My father in the sunset: standing in the darkened doorway of what was once a room in the ruined walls of the fort, lower lip protruding fleshily, hands clasped behind his back, head full of money worries. He was never a happy man. He smelled faintly of future failure; he mistreated servants; perhaps he wished that, instead of following his late father into the leathercloth Business, he had had the strength to pursue his original ambition, the re-arrangement of the Quran in accurately chronological order. (He once told me: 'When Muhammed prophesied, people wrote down what he said on palm leaves, which were kept any old how in a box. After he died, Abubakr and the others tried to remember the correct sequence; but they didn't have very good memories.' Another wrong turning: instead of rewriting a sacred book, my father lurked in a ruin, awaiting demons.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:19
About his wife, who wheedles rupees out of him and picks his pockets at night.
And his ex-wife (who eventually died in an accident, when she argued with a camel-cart driver and was bitten in the neck by the camel), who writes him endless begging letters, despite the divorce settlement. And his distant cousin Zohra, who needs dowry money from him, so that she can raise children to marry his and so get her hooks into even more of his cash. And then there are Major Zulfikar's promises of money (at this stage, Major Zulfy and my father got on very well). The Major had been writing letters saying, 'You must decide for Pakistan when it comes, as it surely will. It's certain to be a goldmine for men like us. Please let me introduce you to M. A. J. himself.. ? but Ahmed Sinai distrusted Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and never accepted Zulfy's offer; so when Jinnah became President of Pakistan, there would be another wrong turning to think about. And, finally, there were letters from my father's old friend, the gynaecologist Doctor Narlikar, in Bombay. 'The British are leaving in droves, Sinai bhai.. Property is dirt cheap! Sell up; come here; buy; live the rest of your life in luxury!' Verses of the Quran had no place in a head so full of cash... and, in the meantime, here he is, alongside S. P. Butt who will die in a train to Pakistan, and Mustapha Kemal who will be murdered by goondas in his grand Flagstaff Road house and have the words 'mother-sleeping hoarder' written on his chest in his own blood ... alongside these two doomed men, waiting in the secret shadow of a ruin to spy on a blackmailer coming for his money.
'South-west corner,' the phone call said, 'Turret. Stone staircase inside.
Climb. Topmost landing. Leave money there. Go. Understood?' Defying orders, they hide in the ruined room; somewhere above them, on the topmost landing of the turret tower, three grey bags wait in the gathering dark.
... In the gathering dark of an airless stairwell, Amina Sinai is climbing towards a prophecy. Lifafa Das is comforting her; because now that she has come by taxi into the narrow bottle of his mercy, he has sensed an alteration in her, a regret at her decision; he reassures her as they climb. The darkened stairwell is full of eyes, eyes glinting through shuttered doors at the spectacle of the climbing dark lady, eyes lapping her up like bright rough cats' tongues; and as Lifafa talks, soothingly, my mother feels her will ebbing away, What will be, will be, her strength of mind and her hold on the world seeping out of her into the dark sponge of the staircase air. Sluggishly her feet follow his, up into the upper reaches of the huge gloomy chawl, the broken-down tenement building in which Lifafa Das and his cousins have a small corner, at the very top... here, near the top, she sees dark light filtering down on to the heads of queueing cripples. 'My number two cousin,' Lifafa Das says, 'is bone-setter.' She climbs past men with broken arms, women with feet twisted backwards at impossible angles, past fallen window-cleaners and splintered bricklayers, a doctor's daughter entering a world older then syringes and hospitals; until, at last, Lifafa Das says, 'Here we are, Begum,' and leads her through a room in which the bone-setter is fastening twigs and leaves to shattered limbs, wrapping cracked heads in palm-fronds, until his patients begin to resemble artificial trees, sprouting vegetation from their injuries ... then out on to a flat expanse of cemented roof. Amina, blinking in the dark at the brightness of lanterns, makes out insane shapes on the roof: monkeys dancing; mongeese leaping; snakes swaying in baskets; and on the parapet, the silhouettes of large birds, whose bodies are as hooked and cruel as their beaks: vultures.
'Arre baap,' she cries, 'where are you bringing me?'
'Nothing to worry, Begum, please,' Lifafa Das says. 'These are my cousins here.
My number-three-and-four cousins. That one is monkey-dancer ...'
'Just practising, Begum!' a voice calls. 'See: monkey goes to war and dies for his country!'
'... and there, snake-and-mongoose man.'
'See mongoose jump, Sahiba! See cobra dance!'
'... But the birds? ...'
'Nothing, Madam: only there is Parsee Tower of Silence just near here; and when there are no dead ones there, the vultures come. Now they are asleep; in the days, I think, they like to watch my cousins practising.'
A small room, on the far side of the roof. Light streams through the door as Amina enters ... to find, inside, a man the same age as her husband, a heavy man with several chins, wearing white stained trousers and a red check shirt and no shoes, munching aniseed and drinking from a bottle of Vimto, sitting cross-legged in a room on whose walls are pictures of Vishnu in each of his avatars, and notices reading, writing TAUGHT, and SPITTING DURING VISIT IS QUITE A BAD HABIT. There is no furniture ... and Shri Ramram Seth is sitting cross-legged, six inches above the ground.
I must admit it: to her shame, my mother screamed ...
... While, at the Old Fort, monkeys scream among ramparts. The ruined city, having been deserted by people, is now the abode of langoors. Long-tailed and black-faced, the monkeys are possessed of an overriding sense of mission. Upupup they clamber, leaping to the topmost heights of the ruin, staking out territories, and thereafter dedicating themselves to the dismemberment, stone by stone, of the entire fortress. Padma, it's true: you've never been there, never stood in the twilight watching straining, resolute, furry creatures working at the stones, pulling and rocking, rocking and pulling, working the stones loose one at a time... every day the monkeys send stones rolling down the walls, bouncing off angles and outcrops, crashing down into the ditches below. One day there will be no Old Fort; in the end, nothing but a pile of rubble surmounted by monkeys screaming in triumph ... and here is one monkey, scurrying along the ramparts - I shall call him Hanuman, after the monkey god who helped Prince Rama defeat the original Ravana, Hanuman of the flying chariots... Watch him now as he arrives at this turret - his territory; as he hops chatters runs from corner to corner of his kingdom, rubbing his rear on the stones; and then pauses, sniffs something that should not be here... Hanuman races to the alcove here, on the topmost landing, in which the three men have left three soft grey alien things. And, while monkeys dance on a roof behind the post office, Hanuman the monkey dances with rage. Pounces on the grey things. Yes, they are loose enough, won't take much rocking and pulling, pulling and rocking... watch Hanuman now, dragging the soft grey stones to the edge of the long drop of the outside wall of the Fort. See him tear at them: rip! rap! 泐? ... Look how deftly he scoops paper from the insides of the grey things, sending it down like floating rain to bathe the fallen stones in the ditch! ... Paper falling with lazy, reluctant grace, sinking like a beautiful memory into the maw of the darkness; and now, kick! thump! and again kick! the three soft grey stones go over the edge, downdown into the dark, and at last there comes a soft disconsolate plop.
Hanuman, his work done, loses interest, scurries away to some distant pinnacle of his kingdom, begins to rock on a stone.
... While, down below, my father has seen a grotesque figure emerging from the gloom. Not knowing a thing about the disaster which has taken place above, he observes the monster from the shadow of his ruined room: a ragged-pajama'd creature in the head-dress of a demon, a papier-mache devil-top which has faces grinning on every side of it ... the appointed representative of the Ravana gang. The collector. Hearts thumping, the three Businessmen watch this spectre out of a peasant's nightmare vanish into the stairwell leading to the landing; and after a moment, in the stillness of the empty night, hear the devil's perfectly human oaths. 'Mother-sleepers! Eunuchs from somewhere!' ...
Uncomprehending, they see their bizarre tormentor emerge, rush away into the darkness, vanish. His imprecations ... 'Sodomizers of asses! Sons of pigs! Eaters of their own excrement!'... linger on the breeze. And up they go now, confusion addling their spirits; Butt finds a torn fragment of grey cloth; Mustapha Kemal stoops over a crumpled rupee; and maybe, yes, why not, my father sees a dark flurry of monkey out of the corner of an eye... and they guess.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:19
And now their groans and Mr Butt's shrill curses, which are echoes of the devil's oaths; and there's a battle raging, unspoken, in all their heads: money or godown or godown or money? Businessmen ponder, in mute panic, this central riddle - but then, even if they abandon the cash to the depredations of scavenging dogs and humans, how to stop the fire-raisers? - and at last, without a word having been spoken, the inexorable law of cash-in-hand wins them over; they rush down stone stairs, along grassed lawns, through ruined gates, and arrive - PELL-MELL! - at the ditch, to begin scooping rupees into their pockets, shovelling grabbing scrabbling, ignoring pools of urine and rotting fruit, trusting against all likelihood that tonight - by the grace of-just tonight for once, the gang will fail to wreak its promised revenge. But, of course ...作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:19
... But, of course, Ramram the seer was not really floating in midair, six inches above the ground. My mother's scream faded; her eyes focused; and she noticed the little shelf, protruding from the wall. 'Cheap trick,' she told herself, and, 'What am I doing here in this godforsaken place of sleeping vultures and monkey-dancers, waiting to be told who knows what foolishness by a guru who levitates by sitting on a shelf?'
What Amina Sinai did not know was that, for the second time in history, I was about to make my presence felt. (No: not that fraudulent tadpole in her stomach: I mean myself, in my historical role, of which prime ministers have written '...
it is, in a sense, the mirror of us all.' Great forces were working that night; and all present were about to feel their power, and be afraid.)
Cousins - one to four - gathering in the doorway through which the dark lady has passed, drawn like moths to the candle of her screech... watching her quietly as she advanced, guided by Lifafa Das, towards the unlikely sooth-sayer, were bone-setter cobra-wallah and monkey-man. Whispers of encouragement now (and were there also giggles behind rough hands?): 'O such a too fine fortune he will tell, Sahiba!' and, 'Come, cousinji, lady is waiting!'... But what was this Ramram? A huckster, a two-chip palmist, a giver of cute forecasts to silly women - or the genuine article, the holder of the keys? And Lifafa Das: did he see, in my mother, a woman who could be satisfied by a two-rupee fake, or did he see deeper, into the underground heart of her weakness? - And when the prophecy came, were cousins astonished too? - And the frothing at the mouth? What of that? And was it true that my mother, under the dislocating influence of that hysterical evening, relinquished her hold on her habitual self- which she had felt slipping away from her into the absorbing sponge of the lightless air in the stairwell - and entered a state of mind in which anything might happen and be believed? And there is another, more horrible possibility, too; but before I voice my suspicion, I must describe, as nearly as possible in spite of this filmy curtain of ambiguities, what actually happened: I must describe my mother, her palm slanted outwards towards the advancing palmist, her eyes wide and unblinking as a pomfret's - and the cousins (giggling?), 'What a reading you are coming to get, Sahiba!' and, 'Tell, cousinji, tell!' - but the curtain descends again, so I cannot be sure - did he begin like a cheap circus-tent man and go through the banal conjugations of life-line heart-line and children who would be multi-millionaires, while cousins cheered, 'Wah wah!' and, 'Absolute master reading, yara!' - and then, did he change? - did Ramram become stiff- eyes rolling upwards until they were white as eggs - did he, in a voice as strange as a mirror, ask, 'You permit, Madam, that I touch the place?' - while cousins fell as silent as sleeping vultures - and did my mother, just as strangely, reply, 'Yes, I permit,' so that the seer became only the third man to touch her in her life, apart from her family members? - and was it then, at that instant, that a brief sharp jolt of electricity passed between pudgy fingers and maternal skin?
And my mother's face, rabbit-startled, watching the prophet in the check shirt as he began to circle, his eyes still egg-like in the softness of his face; and suddenly a shudder passing through him and again that strange high voice as the words issued through his lips (I must describe those lips, too - but later, because now ...) 'A son.'
Silent cousins - monkeys on leashes, ceasing their chatter - cobras coiled in baskets - and the circling fortune-teller, finding history speaking through his lips. (Was that how?) Beginning, 'A son... such a son!' And then it comes, 'A son, Sahiba, who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger.' And now, real fear amongst snake-charmer mongoose-dancer bone-setter and peepshow-wallah, because they have never heard Ramram like this, as he continues, singsong, high-pitched: 'There will be two heads - but you shall see only one - there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees.' Nose and knees and knees and nose ... listen carefully, Padma; the fellow got nothing wrong! 'Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicyclists love him - but, crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep; cobra will creep ...' Ramram, circling fasterfaster, while four cousins murmur, 'What is this, baba?' and, 'Deo, Shiva, guard us!' While Ramram, 'Washing will hide him - voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him - blood will betray him!' And Amina Sinai, 'What does he mean? I don't understand - Lifafa Das - what has got into him?' But, inexorably, whirling egg-eyed around her statue-still presence, goes Ramram Seth: 'Spittoons will brain him - doctors will drain him - jungle will claim him - wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him -tyrants will fry him ...' While Amina begs for explanations and the cousins fall into a hand-flapping frenzy of helpless alarm because something has taken over and nobody dares touch Ramram Seth as he whirls to his climax: 'He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die ... before he is dead.'
Is that how it was? Is that when Ramram Seth, annihilated by the sage through him of a power greater than his own, fell suddenly to the floor and frothed at the mouth? Was mongoose-man's stick inserted between his twitching teeth? Did Lafafa Das say, 'Begum Sahiba you must leave, please: our cousinji has become sick'?
And finally the cobra-wallah - or monkey-man, or bone-setter, or even Lifafa Das of the peepshow on wheels - saying, 'Too much prophecy, man. Our Ramram made too much damn prophecy tonight.'
Many years later, at the time of her premature dotage, when all k'nds of ghosts welled out of her past to dance before her eyes, my mother saw once again the peepshow man whom she saved by announcing my coming and who repaid her by leading her to too much prophecy, and spoke to him evenly, without rancour. 'So you're back ' she said, 'Well, let me tell you this: I wish I'd understood what your cousinji meant - about blood, about knees and nose. Because who knows? I might have had a different son.'
Like my grandfather at the beginning, in a webbed corridor in a blind man's house, and again at the end; like Mary Pereira after she lost her Joseph, and like me, my mother was good at seeing ghosts.
But now, because there are yet more questions and ambiguities, I am obliged to voice certain suspicions. Suspicion, too, is a monster with too many heads; why, then, can't I stop myself unleashing it at my own mother? ... What, I ask, would be a fair description of the seer's mach? And memory - my new, all-knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother father grandfather grandmother and everyone else - answers: soft; squashy as cornflour pudding.
Again, reluctantly, I ask: What was the condition of his lips? And the inevitable response: full; overfleshed; poetic. A third time I interrogate this memory of mine: what of Ms hair? The reply: thinning; dark; lank; worming over his ears. And now my unreasonable suspicions ask the ultimate question ... did Amina, pure-as-pure, actually ... because of her weakness for men who resembled Nadir Khan, could she have... in her odd frame of mind, and moved by the seer's illness, might she not ... 'No!' Padma shouts, furiously. 'How dare you suggest?
About that good woman - your own mother? That she would? You do not know one thing and still you say it?' And, of course, she is right, as always. If she knew, she would say I was only getting my revenge, for what I certainly did see Amina doing, years through the grimy windows of the Pioneer Cafe; and maybe that's where my irrational notion was born, to grow illogically backwards in time, and arrive fully mature at this earlier - and yes, almost certainly innocent - adventure. Yes, that must be it. But the monster won't lie down...
'Ah,' it says, 'but what about the matter of her tantrum - the one she threw the day Ahmed announced they were moving to Bombay?' Now it mimics her: 'You - always you decide. What about me? Suppose I don't want... I've only now got this house straight and already...!' So, Padma: was that housewifely zeal - or a masquerade?
Yes - a doubt lingers. The monster asks, 'Why did she fail, somehow or other, to tell her husband about her visit?' Reply of the accused (voiced by our Padma in my mother's absence): 'But think how angry he'd've got, my God! Even if there hadn't been all that firebug Business to worry him! Strange men; a woman on her own; he'd've gone wild! Wild, completely!'
Unworthy suspicions ... I must dismiss them; must save my strictures for later, when, in the absence of ambiguity, without the clouding curtain, she gave me hard, clear, irrefutable proofs.
... But, of course, when my father came Home late that night, with a ditchy smell on him which overpowered his customary reek of future failure, his eyes and cheeks were streaked with ashy tears; there was sulphur in his nostrils and the grey dust of smoked leathercloth on Ms head ... because of course they had burned the godown.
'But the night-watchmen?' - asleep, Padma, asleep. Warned in advance to take their sleeping draughts just in case ... Those brave lalas, warrior Pathans who, city-born, had never seen the Khyber, unwrapped little paper packets, poured rust-coloured powders into their bubbling cauldron of tea. They pulled their charpoys well away from my father's godown to avoid falling beams and showering sparks; and lying on their rope-beds they sipped their tea and entered the bittersweet declensions of the drug. At first they became raucous, shouting the praises of their favourite whores in Pushtu; then they fell into wild giggling as the soft fluttering fingers of the drug tickled their ribs... until the giggling gave way to dreams and they roamed in the frontier passes of the drug, riding the horses of the drug, and finally reached a dreamless oblivion from which nothing on earth could awaken them until the drug had run its course.
Ahmed, Butt and Kemal arrived by taxi - the taxi-driver, unnerved by the three men who clutched wads of crumpled banknotes which smelled worse than hell on account of the unpleasant substances they had encountered in the ditch, would not have waited, except that they refused to pay him. 'Let me go, big sirs,' he pleaded, 'I am a little man; do not keep me here ...' but by then their backs were moving away from him, towards the fire. He watched them as they ran, clutching their rupees that were stained by tomatoes and dogshit; open-mouthed he stared at the burning godown, at the clouds in the night sky, and like everyone else on the scene he was obliged to breathe air filled with leathercloth and matchsticks and burning rice. With his hands over his eyes, watching through his fingers, the little taxi-driver with his incompetent moustache saw Mr Kemal, thin as a demented pencil, lashing and lucking at the sleeping bodies of night-watchmen; and he almost gave up his fare and drove off in terror at the instant when my father shouted, 'Look out!' ... but, staying despite it all, he saw the godown as it burst apart under the force of the licking red tongues, he saw pouring out of the godown an improbable lava flow of molten rice lentils chick-peas waterproof jackets matchboxes and pickle, he saw the hot red flowers of the fire bursting skywards as the contents of the warehouse spilled on to the hard yellow ground like a black charred hand of despair. Yes, of course the godown was burned, it fell on their heads from the sky in cinders, it plunged into the open mouths of the bruised, but still snoring, watchmen ... 'God save us,' said Mr Butt, but Mustapha Kemal, more pragmatically, answered: 'Thank God we are well insured.'
'It was right then,' Ahmed Sinai told his wife later, 'right at that moment that I decided to get out of the leathercloth business. Sell the office, the goodwill, and forget everything I know about the reccine trade. Then - not before, not afterwards - I made up my mind, also, to think no more about this Pakistan claptrap of your Emerald's Zulfy. In the heat of that fire,' my father revealed - unleashing a wifely tantrum - 'I decided to go to Bombay, and enter the property Business. Property is dirt cheap there now,' he told her before her protests could begin, 'Narlikar knows.'
(But in time, he would call Narlikar a traitor.)
In my family, we always go when we're pushed - the freeze of '48 being the only exception to this rule. The boatman Tai drove my grandfather from Kashmir; Mercurochrome chased him out of Amritsar; the collapse of her life under the carpets led directly to my mother's departure from Agra; and many-headed monsters sent my father to Bombay, so that I could be born there. At the end of that January, history had finally, by a series of shoves, brought itself to the point at which it was almost ready for me to make my entrance. There were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I stepped on to the scene ... the mystery, for example, of Shri Ramram's most enigmatic remark: 'There will be a nose and knees: knees, and a nose.'
襤e insurance money came; January ended; and in the time it took to close down their affairs in Delhi and move to the city in which - as Dr Narlikar the gynaecologist knew - property was temporarily as cheap as dirt, my mother concentrated on her segmented scheme for learning to love her husband. She came to feel a deep affection for the question marks of his ears; for the remarkable depth of his navel, into which her finger could go right up to the first joint, without even pushing; she grew to love the knobbliness of his knees; but, try as she might (and as I'm giving her the benefit of my doubts I shall offer no possible reasons here), there was one part of him which she never managed to love, although it was the one thing he possessed, in full working order, which Nadir Khan had certainly lacked; on those nights when he heaved himself up on top of her - when the baby in her womb was no bigger than a frog - it was just no good at all.
... 'No, not so quick, janum, my life, a little longer, please,' she is saying; and Ahmed, to spin things out, tries to think back to the fire, to the last thing that happened on that blazing night, when just as he was turning to go he heard a dirty screech in the sky, and, looking up, had time to register that a vulture- at night! - a vulture from the Towers of Silence was flying overhead, and that it had dropped a barely-chewed Parsee hand, a right hand, the same hand which - now! - slapped him full in the face as it fell; while Amina, beneath him in bed, ticks herself off: Why can't you enjoy, you stupid woman, from now on you must really try.
On June 4th, my ill-matched parents left for Bombay by Frontier Mail. (There were hangings, voices hanging on for dear life, fists crying out, 'Maharaj! Open, for one tick only! Ohe, from the milk of your kindness, great sir, do us favour!' And there was also - hidden beneath dowry in a green tin trunk - a forbidden, lapis-lazuli-encrusted, delicately-wrought silver spittoon.) On the same day, Earl Mountbatten of Burma held a press conference at which he announced the Partition of India, and hung his countdown calendar on the wall: seventy days to go to the transfer of power... sixty-nine ... sixty-eight ...tick, tock.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:19
The fishermen were here first. Before Mountbatten's ticktock, before monsters and public announcements; when underworld marriages were still unimagined and spittoons were unknown; earlier than Mercurochrome; longer ago than lady wrestlers who held up perfor-ated sheets; and back and back, beyond Dalhousie and Elphinstone, before the East India Company built its Fort, before the first William Methwold; at the dawn of time, when Bombay was a dumbbell-shaped island tapering, at the centre, to a narrow shining strand beyond which could be seen the finest and largest natural harbour in Asia, when Mazagaon and Worli, Matunga and Mahim, Salsette and Colaba were islands, too - in short, before reclamation, before tetrapods and sunken piles turned the Seven Isles into a long peninsula like an outstretched, grasping hand, reaching westward into the Arabian Sea; in this primeval world before clocktowers, the fishermen - who were called Kolis - sailed in Arab dhows, spreading red sails against the setting sun. They caught pomfret and crabs, and made fish-lovers of us all. (Or most of us. Padma has succumbed to their piscine sorceries; but in our house, we were infected with the alienness of Kashmiri blood, with the icy reserve of Kashmiri sky, and remained meateaters to a man.)作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:19
There were also coconuts and rice. And, above it all, the benign presiding influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, whose name -Mumbadevi, Mumbabai, Mumbai - may well have become the city's. But then, the Portuguese named the place Bom Bahia for its harbour, and not for the goddess of the pomfret folk ... the Portuguese were the first invaders, using the harbour to shelter their merchant ships and their men-of-war; but then, one day in 1633, and East Indian Company Officer named Methwold saw a vision. This vision - a dream of a British Bombay, fortified, defending India's West against all comers -was a notion of such force that it set time in motion. History churned ahead; Methwold died; and in 1660, Charles II of England was betrothed to Catharine of the Portuguese House of Braganza - that same Catharine who would, all her life, play second fiddle to orange-selling Nell. But she has this consolation - that it was her marriage dowry which brought Bombay into British hands, perhaps in a green tin trunk, and brought Methwold's vision a step closer to reality. After that, it wasn't long until September 21st, 1668, when the Company at last got its hands on the island ... and then off they went, with their Fort and land-reclamation, and before you could blink there was a city here, Bombay, of which the old tune sang: Prima in Indis, Gateway to India, Star of the East With her face to the West.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:20
Our Bombay, Padma! It was very different then, there were no night-clubs or pickle factories or Oberoi-Sheraton Hotels or movie studios; but the city grew at breakneck speed, acquiring a cathedral and an equestrian statue of the Mahratta warrior-king Sivaji which (we used to think) came to life at night and galloped awesomely through the city streets - right along Marine Drive! On Chowpatty sands! Past the great houses on Malabar Hill, round Kemp's Corner, giddily along the sea to Scandal Point! And yes, why not, on and on, down my very own Warden Road, right alongside the segregated swimming pools of Breach Candy, right up to huge Mahalaxmi Temple and the old Willingd on Club ...作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:20
Throughout my childhood, whenever bad times came to Bombay, some insomniac nightwalker would report that he had seen the statue moving; disasters, in the city of my youth, danced to the occult music of a horse's grey, stone hooves.
And where are they now, the first inhabitants? Coconuts have done best of all.
Coconuts are still' beheaded daily on Chowpatty beach; while on Juhu beach, under the languid gaze of film stars at the Sun'n'Sand hotel, small boys still shin up coconut palms and bring down the bearded fruit. Coconuts even have their own festival, Coconut Day, which was celebrated a few days before my synchronistic birth. You may feel reassured about coconuts. Rice has not been so lucky; rice-paddies lie under concrete now; tenements tower where once rice wallowed within sight of the sea. But still, in the city, we are great rice-eaters. Patna rice, Basmati, Kashmiri rice travels to the metropolis daily; so the original, ur-rice has left its mark upon us all, and cannot be said to have died in vain. AS for Mumbadevi - she's not so popular these days, having been replaced by elephant-headed Ganesh in the people's affections. The calendar of festivals reveals her decline: Ganesh - 'Ganpati Baba' - has his day of Ganesh Chaturthi, when huge processions are 'taken out' and march to Chowpatty bearing plaster effigies of the god, which they hurl into the sea. Ganesh's day is a rain-making ceremony, it makes the monsoon possible, and it, too, was celebrated in the days before my arrival at the end of the ticktock countdown - but where is Mumbadevi's day? It is not on the calendar. Where the prayers of pomfret folk, the devotions of crab-catchers? ... Of all the first inhabitants, the Koli fishermen have come off worst of all. Squashed now into a tiny village in the thumb of the handlike peninsula, they have admittedly given their name to a district - Colaba. But follow Colaba Causeway to its tip - past cheap clothes shops and Irani restaurants and the second-rate flats of teachers journalists and clerks - and you'll find them, trapped between the naval base and the sea.
And sometimes Koli women, their hands stinking of pomfret guts and crabmeat, jostle arrogantly to the head of a Colaba bus-queue, with their crimson (or purple) saris hitched brazenly up between their legs, and a smarting glint of old defeats and dispossessions in their bulging and somewhat fishy eyes. A fort, and afterwards a city, took their land; pile-drivers stole (tetrapods would steal) pieces of their sea. But there are still Arab dhows, every evening, spreading their sails against the sunset... in August 1947, the British, having ended the dominion of Fishing-nets, coconuts, rice and Mumbadevi, were about to depart themselves; no dominion is everlasting.
And on June 19th, two weeks after their arrival by Frontier Mail, my parents entered into a curious bargain with one such departing Englishman. His name was William Methwold.
The road to Methwold's Estate (we are entering my kingdom now, coming into the heart of my childhood; a little lump has appeared in my throat) turns off Warden Road between a bus-stop and a little row of shops. Chimalker's Toyshop; Reader's Paradise; the Chimanbhoy Fatbhoy jewellery store; and, above all, Bombelli's the Confectioners, with their Marquis cake, their One Yard of Chocolates! Names to conjure with; but there's no time now. Past the saluting cardboard bellboy of the Band Box Laundry, the road leads us Home. In those days the pink skyscraper of the Narlikar women (hideous echo of Srinagar's radio mast!) had not even been thought of; the road mounted a low hillock, no higher than a two-storey building; it curved round to face the sea, to look down on Breach Candy Swimming Club, where pink people could swim in a pool the shape of British India without fear of rubbing up against a black skin; and there, arranged nobly around a little roundabout, were the palaces of William Methwold, on which hung signs that would - thanks to me - reappear many years later, signs bearing two words; just two, but they lured my unwitting parents into Methwold's peculiar game: FOR SALE.
Methwold's Estate: four identical houses built in a style befitting their original residents (conquerors' houses! Roman mansions; three-storey Homes of gods standing on a two-storey Olympus, a stunted Kailash!) -large, durable mansions with red gabled roofs and turret towers in each corner, ivory-white corner towers wearing pointy red-tiled hats (towers, fit to lock princesses in!)
- houses with verandahs, with servants' quarters reached by spiral iron staircases hidden at the back - houses which their owner, William Methwold, had named majestically after the palaces of Europe: Versailles Villa, Buckingham Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci. Bougainvillaea crept across them; goldfish swam in pale blue pools; cacti grew in rock-gardens; tiny touch-me-not plants huddled beneath tamarind trees; there were butterflies and roses and cane chairs on the lawns. And on that day in the middle of June, Mr Methwold sold his empty palaces for ridiculously little - but there were conditions. So now, without more ado, I present him to you, complete with the centre-parting in Ms hair ...
a six-foot Titan, this Methwold, his face the pink of roses and eternal youth.
He had a head of thick black brilliantined hair, parted in the centre. We shall speak again of this centre-parting, whose ramrod precision made Methwold irresistible to women, who felt unable to prevent themselves wanting to rumple it up ... Methwold's hair, parted in the middle, has a lot to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history and Sexuality moved. Like tightrope-walkers. (But despite everything, not even I, who never saw him, never laid eyes on languid gleaming teeth or devastatingly combed hair, am incapable of bearing him any grudge.)
And his nose? What did that look like? Prominent? Yes, it must have been, the legacy of a patrician French grandmother - from Bergerac! - whose blood ran aquamarinely in his veins and darkened his courtly charm with something crueller, some sweet murderous shade of absinthe.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:20
Methwold's Estate was sold on two conditions: that the houses be bought complete with every last thing in them, that the entire contents be retained by the new owners; and that the actual transfer should not take place until midnight on August I5th.
'Everything?' Amina Sinai asked. 'I can't even throw away a spoon? Allah, that lampshade ... I can't get rid of one comb?'
'Lock, stock and barrel,' Methwold said, 'Those are my terms. A whim, Mr Sinai ... you'll permit a departing colonial his little game? We don't have much left to do, we British, except to play our games.'
'Listen now, listen, Amina,' Ahmed is saying later on, 'You want to stay in this hotel room for ever? It's a fantastic price; fantastic, absolutely. And what can he do after he's transferred the deeds? Then you can throw out any lampshade you like. It's less than two months ...'
'You'll take a cocktail in the garden?' Methwold is saying, 'Six o'clock every evening. Cocktail hour. Never varied in twenty years.'
'But my God, the paint... and the cupboards are full of old clothes, janum...
we'll have to live out of suitcases, there's nowhere to put one suit!'
'Bad Business, Mr Sinai,' Methwold sips his Scotch amid cacti and roses, 'Never seen the like. Hundreds of years of decent government, then suddenly, up and off. You'll admit we weren't all bad: built your roads. Schools, railway trains, parliamentary system, all worthwhile things. Taj Mahal was falling down until an Englishman bothered to see to it. And now, suddenly, independence. Seventy days to get out. I'm dead against it myself, but what's to be done?'
'... And look at the stains on the carpets, janum; for two months we must live like those Britishers? You've looked in the bathrooms? No water near the pot. I never believed, but it's true, my God, they wipe their bottoms with paper only! ...'
'Tell me, Mr Methwold,' Ahmed Sinai's voice has changed, in the presence of an Englishman it has become a hideous mockery of an Oxford drawl, 'why insist on the delay? Quick sale is best Business, after all. Get the thing buttoned up.'
'... And pictures of old Englishwomen everywhere, baba! No place to hang my own father's photo on the wall! ...'
'It seems, Mr Sinai,' Mr Methwold is refilling the glasses as the sun dives towards the Arabian Sea behind the Breach Candy pool, 'that beneath this stiff English exterior lurks a mind with a very Indian lust for allegory.'
'And drinking so much, janum ... that's not good.'
'I'm not sure - Mr Methwold, ah - what exactly you mean by ...'
'... Oh, you know: after a fashion, I'm transferring power, too. Got a sort of itch to do it at the same time the Raj does. As I said: a game. Humour me, won't you, Sinai? After all: the price, you've admitted, isn't bad.'
'Has his brain gone raw, janum? What do you think: is it safe to do bargains if he's loony?'
'Now listen, wife,' Ahmed Sinai is saying, 'this has gone on long enough. Mr Methwold is a fine man; a person of breeding; a man of honour; I will not have his name... And besides, the other purchasers aren't making so much noise, I'm sure... Anyway, I have told him yes, so there's an end to it.'
'Have a cracker,' Mr Methwold is saying, proffering a plate, 'Go on, Mr S., do.
Yes, a curious affair. Never seen anything like it. My old tenants - old India hands, the lot - suddenly, up and off. Bad show. Lost their stomachs for India.
Overnight. Puzzling to a simple fellow like me. Seemed like they washed their hands - didn't want to take a scrap with them. "Let it go," they said. Fresh start back Home. Not short of a shilling, none of them, you understand, but still, Rum. Leaving me holding the baby. Then I had my notion.'
'... Yes, decide, decide,' Amina is saying spiritedly, 'I am sitting here like a lump with a baby, what have I to do with it? I must live in a stranger's house with this child growing, so what? ... Oh, what things you make me do ...'
'Don't cry,' Ahmed is saying now, flapping about the hotel room, 'It's a good house. You know you like the house. And two months... less than two... what, is it kicking? Let me feel... Where? Here?'
'There,' Amina says, wiping her nose, 'Such a good big kick.'
'My notion,' Mr Methwold explains, staring at the setting sun, 'is to stage my own transfer of assets. Leave behind everything you see? Select suitable persons - such as yourself, Mr Sinai! - hand everything over absolutely intact: in tiptop working order. Look around you: everything's in fine fettle, don't you agree? Tickety-boo, we used to say. Or, as you say in Hindustani: Sabkuch ticktock hai. Everything's just fine.'
'Nice people are buying the houses,' Ahmed offers Amina his handkerchief, 'nice new neighbours ... that Mr Homi Catrack in Versailles Villa, Parsee chap, but a racehorse-owner. Produces films and all. And the Ibrahims in Sans Souci, Nussie Ibrahim is having a baby, too, you can be friends... and the old man Ibrahim, with so-big sisal farms in Africa. Good family.'
'... And afterwards I can do what I like with the house ... ?'
'Yes, afterwards, naturally, he'll be gone ...'
'... It's all worked out excellently,' William Methwold says. 'Did you know my ancestor was the chap who had the idea of building this whole city? Sort of Raffles of Bombay. As his descendant, at this important juncture, I feel the, I don't know, need to play my part. Yes, excellently... when d'you move in? Say the word and I'll move off to the Taj Hotel. Tomorrow? Excellent. Sabkuch ticktock hai.'
These were the people amongst whom I spent my childhood: Mr Homi Catrack, film magnate and racehorse-owner, with his idiot daughter Toxy who had to be locked up with her nurse, Bi-Appah, the most fearsome woman I ever knew; also the Ibrahims in Sans Souci, old man Ibrahim Ibrahim with his goatee and sisal, his sons Ismail and Ishaq, and IsmaiPs tiny flustery hapless wife Nussie, whom we always called Nussie-the-duck on account of her waddling gait, and in whose womb my friend Sonny was growing, even now, getting closer and closer to his misadventure with a pair of gynaecological forceps ... Escorial Villa was divided into flats. On the ground floor lived the Dubashes, he a physicist who would become a leading light at the Trombay nuclear research base, she a cipher beneath whose blankness a true religious fanaticism lay concealed - but I'll let it lie, mentioning only that they were the parents of Cyrus (who would not be conceived for a few months yet), my first mentor, who played girls' parts in school plays and was known as Cyrus-the-great. Above them was my father's friend Dr Narlikar, who had bought a flat here too ... he was as black as my mother; had the ability of glowing brightly whenever he became excited or aroused; hated children, even though he brought us into the world; and would unleash upon the city, when he died, that tribe of women who could do anything and in whose path no obstacle could stand. And, finally, on the top floor, were Commander Sabarmati and Lila - Sabarmati who was one of the highest flyers in the Navy, and his wife with her expensive tastes; he hadn't been able to believe his luck in getting her a Home so cheaply. They had two sons, aged eighteen months and four months, who would grow up to be slow and boisterous and to be nicknamed Eyeslice and Hairoil; and they didn't know (how could they?) that I would destroy their lives ... Selected by William Methwold, these people who would form the centre of my world moved into the Estate and tolerated the curious whims of the Englishman - because the price, after all, was right.
... There are thirty days to go to the transfer of power and Lila Sabarmati is on the telephone, 'How can you stand it, Nussie? In every room here there are talking budgies, and in the almirahs I find moth-eaten dresses and used brassieres!' ... And Nussie is telling Amina, 'Goldfish, Allah, I can't stand the creatures, but Methwold sahib comes himself to feed... and there are half-empty pots of Bovril he says I can't throw... it's mad, Amina sister, what are we doing like this?'... And old man Ibrahim is refusing to switch on the ceiling fan in his bedroom, muttering, 'That machine will fall - it will slice my head off in the night - how long can something so heavy stick on a ceiling?'... and Homi Catrack who is something of an ascetic is obliged to lie on a large soft mattress, he is suffering from backache and sleeplessness and the dark rings of inbreeding around his eyes are being circled by the whorls of insomnia, and his bearer tells him, 'No wonder the foreign sahibs have all gone away, sahib, they must by dying to get some sleep.' But they are all sticking it out; and there are advantages as well as problems. Listen to Lila Sabarmati ('That one - too beautiful to be good,' my mother said)... 'A pianola, Amina sister! And it works! All day I'm sitting sitting, playing God knows what-all! "Pale Hands I Loved Beside The Shalimar"... such fun, too much, you just push the pedals!'... And Ahmed Sinai finds a cocktail cabinet in Buckingham Villa (which was Methwold's own house before it was ours); he is discovering the delights of fine Scotch whisky and cries, 'So what? Mr Methwold is a little eccentric, that's all - can we not humour him? With our ancient civilization, can we not be as civilized as he?'... and he drains his glass at one go.
Advantages and disadvantages: 'All these dogs to look after, Nussie sister,'
Lila Sabarmati complains. 'I hate dogs, completely. And my little choochie cat, cho chweet she is I swear, terrified absolutely!' ... And Dr Narlikar, glowing with pique, 'Above my bed! Pictures of children, Sinai brother! I am telling you: fat! Pink! Three! Is that fair?'... But now there are twenty days to go, things are settling down, the sharp edges of things are getting blurred, so they have all failed to notice what is happening: the Estate, Methwold's Estate, is changing them. Every evening at six they are out in their gardens, celebrating the cocktail hour, and when William Methwold comes to call they slip effortlessly into their imitation Oxford drawls; and they are learning, about ceiling fans and gas cookers and the correct diet for budgerigars, and Methwold, supervising their transformation, is mumbling under his breath. Listen carefully: what's he saying? Yes, that's it. 'Sabkuch ticktock hai,' mumbles William Methwold. All is well.
When the Bombay edition of the Times of India, searching for a catchy human-interest angle to the forthcoming Independence celebrations, announced that it would award a prize to any Bombay mother who could arrange to give birth to a child at the precise instant of the birth of the new nation, Amina Sinai, who had just awoken from a mysterious dream of flypaper, became glued to newsprint. Newsprint was thrust beneath Ahmed Sinai's nose; and Amina's finger, jabbing triumphantly at the page, punctuated the utter certainty of her voice.
'See, janum?' Amina announced. 'That's going to be me.'
There rose, before their eyes, a vision of bold headlines declaring 'A Charming Pose of Baby Sinai - the Child of this Glorious Hour!' - a vision of A-1 top-quality front-page jumbo-sized baby-snaps; but Ahmed began to argue, 'Think of the odds against it, Begum,' until she set her mouth into a clamp of obstinacy and reiterated, 'But me no buts; it's me all right; I just know it for sure. Don't ask me how.'
And although Ahmed repeated his wife's prophecy to William Methwold, as a cocktail-hour joke, Amina remained unshaken, even when Methwold laughed, 'Woman's intuition - splendid thing, Mrs S.! But really, you can scarcely expect us to...' Even under the pressure of the peeved gaze of her neighbour Nussie-the-duck, who was also pregnant, and had also read the Times of India, Amina stuck to her guns, because Ramram's prediction had sunk deep into her heart.
To tell the truth, as Amina's Pregnancy progressed, she had found the words of the fortune-teller pressing more and more heavily down upon her. shoulders, her head, her swelling balloon, so that as she became trapped in a web of worries about giving birth to a child with two heads she somehow escaped the subtle magic of Methwold's Estate, remaining uninfected by cocktail-hours, budgerigars, pianolas and English accents ... At first, then, there was something equivocal about her certainty that she would win the Time's prize, because she had convinced herself that if this part of the fortune-teller's prognostications were fulfilled, it proved that the rest would be just as accurate, whatever their meaning might be. So it was not in tones of unadulterated pride and anticipation that my mother said, 'Never mind intuition, Mr Methwold. This is guaranteed fact.'
To herself she added: 'And this, too: I'm going to have a son. But he'll need plenty of looking after, or else.'
It seems to me that, running deep in the veins of my mother, perhaps deeper than she knew, the supernatural conceits of Naseem Aziz had begun to influence her thoughts and behaviour - those conceits which persuaded Reverend Mother that aeroplanes were inventions of the devil, and that cameras could steal your soul, and that ghosts were as obvious a part of reality as Paradise, and that it was nothing less than a sin to place certain sanctified ears between one's thumb and forefinger, were now whispering in her daughter's darkling head. 'Even if we're sitting in the middle of all this English garbage,' my mother was beginning to think, 'this is still India, and people like Ramram Seth know what they know.'
In this way the scepticism of her beloved father was replaced by the credulity of my grandmother; and, at the same time, the adventurous spark which Amina had inherited from Doctor Aziz was being snuffed out by another, and equally heavy, weight.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:20
By the time the rains came at the end of June, the foetus was fully formed inside her womb. Knees and nose were present; and as many heads as would grow were already in position. What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book -perhaps an encyclopaedia - even a whole language ... which is to say that the lump in the middle of my mother grew so large, and became so heavy, that while Warden Road at the foot of our two-storey hillock became flooded with dirty yellow rainwater and stranded buses began to rust and children swam in the liquid road and newspapers sank soggily beneath the surface, Amina found herself in a circular first-floor tower room, scarcely able to move beneath the weight of her leaden balloon.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:20
Endless rain. Water seeping in under windows in which stained-glass tulips danced along leaded panes. Towels, jammed against window-frames, soaked up water until they became heavy, saturated, useless. The sea: grey and ponderous and stretching out to meet the rainclouds at a narrowed horizon. Rain drumming against my mother's ears, adding to the confusion of fortune-teller and maternal credulity and the dislocating presence of strangers' possessions, making her imagine all manner of strange things. Trapped beneath her growing child, Amina pictured herself as a convicted murderer in Mughal times, when death by crushing beneath a boulder had been a common punishment ... and in the years to come, whenever she looked back at that time which was the end of the time before she became a mother, that time in which the ticktock of countdown calendars was rushing everyone towards August 15th, she would say: 'I don't know about any of that. To me, it was like time had come to a complete stop. The baby in my stomach stopped the clocks. I'm sure of that. Don't laugh: you remember the clocktower at the end of the hill? I'm telling you, after that monsoon it never worked again.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:20
... And Musa, my father's old servant, who had accompanied the couple to Bombay, went off to tell the other servants, in the kitchens of the red-tiled palaces, in the servants' quarters at the backs of Versailles and Escorial and Sans Souci: 'It's going to be a real ten-rupee baby; yes, sir! A whopper of a ten-chip pomfret, wait and see!' The servants were pleased; because a birth is a fine thing and a good big baby is best of all ...
... And Amina whose belly had stopped the clocks sat immobilized in a room in a tower and told her husband, 'Put your hand there and feel him ... there, did you feel? ... such a big strong boy; our little piece-of-the-moon.'
Not until the rains ended, and Amina became so heavy that two manservants had to make a chair with their hands to lift her, did Wee Willie Winkie return to sing in the circus-ring between the four houses; and only then did Amina realize that she had not one, but two serious rivals (two that she knew of) for the Times of India's prize, and that, prophecy or no prophecy, it was going to be a vey close-run finish.
'Wee Willie Winkie is my name; to sing for my supper is my fame!' Ex-conjurers and peepshow-men and singers ... even before I was born, the mould was set.
Entertainers would orchestrate my life.
'I hope you are com-for-table! ... Or are you come-for-tea? Oh, joke-joke, ladies and ladahs, let me see you laugh now!'
Talldarkhandsome, a clown with an accordion, he stood in the circus-ring. In the gardens of Buckingham Villa, my father's big toe strolled (with its nine colleagues) beside and beneath the centre-parting of William Methwold...
sandalled, bulbous, a toe unaware of its coming doom. And Wee Willie Winkie (whose real name we never knew) cracked jokes and sang. From a first-floor verandah, Amina watched and listened; and from the neighbouring verandah, felt the prick of the envious competitive gaze of Nussie-the-duck.
... While I, at my desk, feel the sting of Padma's impatience. (I wish, at times, for a more discerning audience, someone who would understand the need for rhythm, pacing, the subtle introduction of minor chords which will later rise, swell, seize the melody; who would know, for instance, that although baby-weight and monsoons have silenced the clock on the Estate clocktower, the steady beat of Mountbatten's ticktock is still there, soft but inexorable, and that it's only a matter of time before it fills our ears with its metronomic, drumming music.) Padma says: 'I don't want to know about this Winkie now; days and nights I've waited and still you won't get to being born!' But I counsel patience; everything in its proper place, I admonish my dung-lotus, because Winkie, too, has his purpose and his place, here he is now teasing the pregnant ladies on their verandahs, pausing from singing to say, 'You've heard about the prize, ladies? Me, too. My Vanita will have her time soon, soon-soon; maybe she and not you will have her picture in the paper!'... and Amina is frowning, and Methwold is smiling (is that a forced smile? Why?) beneath his centre-parting, and my father's lip is jutting judiciously as his big toe strolls and he says, 'That's a cheeky fellow; he goes too far.' But now Methwold in what looks very like embarrassment - even guilt! -reproves Ahmed Sinai, 'Nonsense, old chap. The tradition of the fool, you know. Licensed to provoke and tease. Important social safety-valve.' And my father, shrugging, 'Hm.' But he's a clever type, this Winkie, because he's pouring oil on the waters now, saying, 'A birth is a fine thing; two births are two fine! Too fine, madams, joke, you see?' And a switch of mood as he introduces a dramatic notion, an overpowering, crucial thought: 'Ladies, gentlemen, how can you feel comfortable here, in the middle of Mr Methwold sahib's long past? I tell you: it must be strange; not real; but now it is a new place here, ladies, ladahs, and no new place is real until it has seen a birth. The first birth will make you feel at Home.' After which, a song: 'Daisy, Daisy ...' And Mr Methwold, joining in, but still there's something dark staining his brow ...
... And here's the point: yes, it is guilt, because our Winkie may be clever and funny but he's not clever enough, and now it's time to reveal the first secret of the centre-parting of William Methwold, because it has dripped down to stain his face: one day, long before ticktock and lockstockandbarrel sales, Mr Methwold invited Winkie and his Vanita to sing for him, privately, in what is now my parents' main reception room; and after a while he said, 'Look here, Wee Willie, do me a favour, man: I need this prescription filling, terrible headaches, take it to Kemp's Corner and get the chemist to give you the pills, the servants are all down with colds.' Winkie, being a poor man, said Yes sahib at once sahib and left; and then Vanita was alone with the centre-parting, feeling it exert a pull on her fingers that was impossible to resist, and as Methwold sat immobile in a cane chair, wearing a lightweight cream suit with a single rose in the lapel, she found herself approaching him, fingers outstretched, felt fingers touching hair; found centre-parting; and began to rumple it up.
So that now, nine months later, Wee Willie Winkie joked about his wife's imminent baby and a stain appeared on an Englishman's forehead.
'So?' Padma says. 'So what do I care about this Winkie and his.wife whom you haven't even told me about?'
Some people are never satisfied; but Padma will be, soon.
And now she's about to get even more frustrated; because, pulling away in a long rising spiral from the events at Methwold's Estate -away from goldfish and dogs and baby contests and centre-partings, away from big toes and tiled roofs - I am flying across the city which is fresh and clean in the aftermath of the rains; leaving Ahmed and Amina to the songs of Wee Willie Winkie, I'm winging towards the Old Fort district, past Flora Fountain, and arriving at a large building filled with dim fustian light and the perfume of swinging censers because here, in St Thomas's Cathedral, Miss Mary Pereira is learning about the colour of God.
'Blue,' the young priest said earnestly. 'All available evidence, my daughter, suggests that Our Lord Christ Jesus was the most beauteous crystal shade of pale sky blue.'
The little woman behind the wooden latticed window of the confessional fell silent for a moment. An anxious, cogitating silence. Then: 'But how, Father?
People are not blue. No people are blue in the whole big world!'
Bewilderment of little woman, matched by perplexity of the priest ... because this is not how she's supposed to react. The Bishop had said, 'Problems with recent converts ... when they ask about colour they're almost always that ...
important to build bridges, my son. Remember,' thus spake the Bishop, 'God is love; and the Hindu love-god, Krishna, is always depicted with blue skin. Tell them blue; it will be a sort of bridge between the faiths; gently does it, you follow; and besides blue is a neutral sort of colour, avoids the usual Colour problems, gets you away from black and white: yes, on the whole I'm sure it's the one to choose.' Even bishops can be wrong, the young father is thinking, but meanwhile he's in quite a spot, because the little woman is clearly getting into a state, has begun issuing a severe reprimand through the wooden grille: 'What type of answer is blue, Father, how to believe such a thing? You should write to Holy Father Pope in Rome, he will surely put you straight; but one does not have to be Pope to know that the mens are not ever blue!' The young father closes his eyes; breathes deeply; counter-attacks. 'Skins have been dyed blue,' he stumbles. 'The Picts; the blue Arab nomads; with the benefits of education, my daughter, you would see...' But now a violent snort echoes in the confessional.
'What, Father? You are comparing Our Lord to junglee wild men? ?Lord, I must catch my ears for shame!'... And there is more, much more, while the young father whose stomach is giving him hell suddenly has the inspiration that there is something more important lurking behind this blue Business, and asks the question; whereupon tirade gives way to tears, and the young father says panickily, 'Come, come, surely the Divine Radiance of Our Lord is not a matter of mere pigment?' ... And a voice through the flooding salt water: 'Yes, Father, you're not so bad after all; I told him just that, exactly that very thing only, but he said many rude words and would not listen ...' So there it is, him has entered the story, and now it all tumbles out, and Miss Mary Pereira, tiny virginal distraught, makes a confession which gives us a crucial clue about her motives when, on the night of my birth, she made the last and most important contribution to the entire history of twentieth-century India from the time of my grandfather's nose-bump until the time of my adulthood.
Mary Pereira's confession: like every Mary she had her Joseph. Joseph D'Costa, an orderly at a Pedder Road clinic called Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home ('Oho!'
Padma sees a connection at last), where she worked as a midwife. Things had been very good at first; he had taken her for cups of tea or lassi or falooda and told her sweet things. He had eyes like road-drills, hard and full of ratatat, but he spoke softly and well. Mary, tiny, plump, virginal, had revelled in his attentions; but now everything had changed.
'Suddenly suddenly he's sniffing the air all the time. In a funny way, nose high up. I ask, "You got a cold or what, Joe?" But he says no; no, he says, he's sniffing the wind from the north. But I tell him, Joe, in Bombay the wind comes off the sea, from the west, Joe...' In a fragile voice Mary Pereira describes the ensuing rage of Joseph D'Costa, who told her, 'You don't know nothing, Mary, the air comes from the north now, and it's full of dying. This independence is for the rich only; the poor are being made to kill each other like flies. In Punjab, in Bengal. Riots riots, poor against poor. It's in the wind.'
And Mary: 'You talking crazy, Joe, why you worrying with those so-bad things? We can live quietly still, no?'
'Never mind, you don't know one thing.'
'But Joseph, even if it's true about the killing, they're Hindu and Muslim people only; why get good Christian folk mixed up in their fight? Those ones have killed each other for ever and ever.'
'You and your Christ. You can't get it into your head that that's the white people's religion? Leave white gods for white men. Just now our own people are dying. We got to fight back; show the people who to fight instead of each other, you see?'
And Mary, 'That's why I asked about colour, Father ... and I told Joseph, I told and told, fighting is bad, leave off these wild ideas; but then he stops talking with me, and starts hanging about with dangerous types, and there are rumours starting up about him, Father, how he's throwing bricks at big cars apparently, and burning bottles also, he's going crazy, Father, they say he helps to burn buses and blow up trams, and I don't know what. What to do, Father, I tell my sister about it all. My sister Alice, a good girl really, Father. I said: "That Joe, he lives near a slaughterhouse, maybe that's the smell that got into his nose and muddled him all up." So Alice went to find him, "I will talk for you," she says; but then, ?God what is happening to the world ... I tell you truly, Father... ?baba...' And the floods are drowning her words, her secrets are leaking saltily out of her eyes, because Alice came back to say that in her opinion Mary was the one to blame, for haranguing Joseph until he wanted no more of her, instead of giving him support in his patriotic cause of awakening the people. Alice was younger than Mary; and prettier; and after that there were more rumours, Alice-and-Joseph stories, and Mary came to her wits' end.
That one,' Mary said, 'What does she know about this politics-politics? Only to get her nails into my Joseph she will repeat any rubbish he talks, like one stupid mynah bird. I swear, Father ...'
'Careful, daughter. You are close to blasphemy ..." 'No, Father, I swear to God, I don't know what I won't do to get me back that man. Yes: in spite of... never mind what he... ai-o-ai-ooo!'
Salt water washes the confessional floor.,. and now, is there a new dilemma for the young father? Is he, despite the agonies of an unsettled stomach, weighing in invisible scales the sanctity of the confessional against the danger to civilized society of a man like Joseph D'Costa? Will he, in fact, ask Mary for her Joseph's address, and then reveal ... In short, would this bishop-ridden, stomach-churned young father have behaved like, or unlike, Montgomery Clift in I Confess? (Watching it some years ago at the New Empire cinema, I couldn't decide.) - But no; once again, I must stifle my baseless suspicions.
What happened to Joseph would probably have happened anyway And in all likelihood the young father's only relevance to my history is that he was the first outsider to hear about Joseph D'Costa's virulent hatred of the rich, and of Mary Pereira's desperate grief.
Tomorrow I'll have a bath and shave; I am going to put on a brand new kurta, shining and starched, and pajamas to match. I'll wear mirrorworked slippers curling up at the toes, my hair will be neatly brushed (though not parted in the centre), my teeth gleaming... in a phrase, I'll look my best. ('Thank God' from pouting Padma.)
Tomorrow, at last, there will be an end to stories which I (not having been present at their birth) have to drag out of the whirling recesses of my mind; because the metronome musk of Mountbatten's countdown calendar can be ignored no longer. At Methwold's Estate, old Musa is still ticking like a time-bomb; but he can't be heard, because another sound is swelling now, deafening, insistent; the sound of seconds passing, of an approaching, inevitable midnight.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:21
Padma can hear it: there's nothing like a countdown for building suspense. I watched my dung-flower at work today, stirring vats like a whirlwind, as if that would make the time go faster. (And perhaps it did; time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay's electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don't believe me - tied to electricity, it's usually a few hours wrong. Unless we're the ones who are wrong ... no people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for' tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.)作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:21
But today, Padma heard Mountbatten's ticktock... English-made, it beats with relentless accuracy. And now the factory is empty; fumes linger, but the vats are still; and I've kept my word. Dressed up to the nines, I greet Padma as she rushes to my desk, flounces down on the floor beside me, commands: 'Begin.' I give a little satisfied smile; feel the children of midnight queueing up in my head, pushing and jostling like Koli fishwives; I tell them to wait, it won't be long now; I clear my throat, give my pen a little shake; and start.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:21
Thirty-two years before the transfer of power, my grandfather bumped his nose against Kashmir! earth. There were rubies and diamonds. There was the ice of the future, waiting beneath the water's skin There was an oath: not to bow down before god or man. The oath created a hole, which would temporarily be filled by a woman behind a perforated sheet. A boatman who had once prophesied dynasties lurking in my grandfather's nose ferried him angrily across a lake. There were blind landowners and lady wrestlers. And there was a sheet in a gloomy room. On that day, my inheritance began to form - the blue of Kashmiri sky which dripped into my grandfather's eyes; the long sufferings of my great-grandmother which would become the forebearance of my own mother and the late steeliness of Naseem Aziz; my great-grandfather's gift of conversing with birds whkh would descend through meandering bloodlines into the veins of my sister the Brass Monkey; the conflict between grandpaternal scepticism and grandmaternal credulity; and above all the ghostly essence of that perforated sheet, which doomed my mother to learn to love a man in segments, and which condemned me to see my own life - its meanings, its structures - in fragments also; so that by the time I understood it, it was far too late.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:21
Years ticking away - and my inheritance grows, because now I have the mythical golden teeth of the boatman Tai, and his brandy bottle which foretold my father's alcoholic djinns; I have Ilse Lubin for suicide and pickled snakes for virility; I have Tai-for-changelessness opposed to Aadam-for-progress; and I have, too, the odours of the unwashed boatman which drove my grandparents south, and made Bombay a possibility.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:21
... And now, driven by Padma and ticktock, I move on, acquiring Mahatma Gandhi and his hartal, ingesting thumb-and-forefinger, swallowing the moment at which Aadam Aziz did not know whether he was Kashmir! or Indian; now I'm drinking Mercurochrome and stains the shape of hands which will recur in spilt betel-juice, and I'm gulping down Dyer, moustache and all; my grandfather is saved by his nose and a bruise appears on his chest, never to fade, so that he and I find in its ceaseless throbbing the answer to the question, Indian or Kashmiri? Stained by the bruise of a Heidelberg bag's clasp, we throw our lot in with India; but the alienness of blue eyes remains. Tai dies, but his magic hangs over us still, and makes us men apart.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:21
... Hurtling on, I pause to pick up the game of hit-the-spittoon. Five years before the birth of a nation, my inheritance grows, to include an optimism disease which would flare up again in my own time, and cracks in the earth which will-be-have-been reborn in my skin, and ex-conjurer Hummingbirds who began the long line of street-entertainers which has run in parallel with my life, and my grandmother's moles like witchnipples and hatred of photographs, and whatsitsname, and wars of starvation and silence, and the wisdom of my aunt Alia which turned into spinsterhood and bitterness and finally burst out in deadly revenge, and the love of Emerald and Zulfikar which would enable me to start a revolution, and crescent knives, fatal moons echoed by my mother's love-name for me, her innocent chand-ka-tukra, her affectionate piece-of-the- ... growing larger now, floating in the amniotic fluid of the past, I feed on a hum that rose higherhigher until dogs came to the rescue, on an escape into a cornfield and a rescue by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah with his Gai-Wallah antics as he ran -FULL-TILT!- screaming silently, as he revealed the secrets of locks made in India and brought Nadir Khan into a toilet containing a washing-chest; yes, I'm getting heavier by the second, fattening up on washing-chests and the under-the-carpet love of Mumtaz and the rhymeless bard, plumping out as I swallow Zulnkar's dream of a bath by his bedside and an underground Taj Mahal and a silver spittoon encrusted with lapis lazuli; a marriage disintegrates, and feeds me; an aunt runs traitorously through Agra streets, without her honour, and that feeds me too; and now false starts are over, and Amina has stopped being Mumtaz, and Ahmed Sinai has become, in a sense, her father as well as her husband ... my inheritance includes this gift, the gift of inventing new parents for myself whenever necessary. The power of giving birth to fathers and mothers: which Ahmed wanted and never had.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:21
Through my umbilical cord, I'm taking in fare dodgers and the dangers of purchasing peacock-feather fans; Amina's assiduity seeps into me, and more ominous things - clattering footsteps, my mother's need to plead for money until the napkin in my father's lap began to quiver and make a little tent - and the cremated ashes of Arjuna Indiabikes, and a peepshow into which Lifafa Das tried to put everything in the world, and rapscallions perpetrating outrages; many-headed monsters swell inside me - masked Ravanas, eight-year-old girls with lisps and one continuous eyebrow, mobs crying Rapist. Public announcements nurture me as I grow towards my time, and there are only seven months left to go.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:21
How many things people notions we bring with us into the world, how many possibilities and also restrictions of possibility! - Because all of these were the parents of the child born that midnight, and for every one of the midnight children there were as many more. Among the parents of midnight: the failure of the Cabinet Mission scheme; the determination of M. A. Jinnah, who was dying and wanted to see Pakistan formed in his lifetime, and would have done anything to ensure it - that same Jinnah whom my father, missing a turn as usual, refused to meet; and Mountbatten with his extraordinary haste and his chicken-breast-eater of a wife; and more and more - Red Fort and Old fort, monkeys and vultures dropping hands, and white transvestites, and bone-setters and mongoose-trainers and Shri Ramram Seth who made too much prophecy. And my father's dream of rearranging the Quran has its place; and the burning of a godown which turned him into a man of property and not leathercloth; and the piece of Ahmed which Amina could not love. To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:22
And fishermen, and Catharine of Braganza, and Mumbadevi coconuts rice; Sivaji's statue and Methwold's Estate; a swimming pool in the shape of British India and a two-storey hillock; a centre-parting and a nose from Bergerac; an inoperative clocktower and a little circus-ring; an Englishman's lust for an Indian allegory and the seduction of an accordionist's wife. Budgerigars, ceiling fans, the Times of India are all part of the luggage I brought into the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child? Blue Jesus leaked into me; and Mary's desperation, and Joseph's revolutionary wildness, and the flightiness of Alice Pereira ... all these made me, too.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:22
If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance ...
perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
'At last,' Padma says with satisfaction, 'you've learned how to tell things really fast.'
August I3th, 1947: discontent in the heavens. Jupiter, Saturn and Venus are in quarrelsome vein; moreover, the three crossed stars are moving into the most ill-favoured house of all. Benarsi astrologers name it fearfully: 'Karamstan! They enter Karamstan!'
While astrologers make frantic representations to Congress Party bosses, my mother lies down for her afternoon nap. While Earl Mountbatten deplores the lack of trained occultists on his General Staff, the slowly turning shadows of a ceiling fan caress Amina into sleep. While M. A. Jinnah, secure in the knowledge that his Pakistan will be born in just eleven hours, a full day before independent India, for which there are still thirty-five hours to go, is scoffing at the protestations of horoscope-mongers, shaking his head in amusement, Amina's head, too, is moving from side to side.
But she is asleep. And in these days of her boulder-like Pregnancy, an enigmatic dream of flypaper has been plaguing her sleeping hours ... in which she wanders now, as before, in a crystal sphere filled with dangling strips of the sticky brown material, which adhere to her clothing and rip it off as she stumbles through the impenetrable papery forest; and now she struggles, tears at paper, but it grabs at her, until she is naked, with the baby kicking inside her, and long tendrils of flypaper stream out to seize her by her undulating womb, paper glues itself to her hair nose teeth breasts thighs, and as she opens her mouth to shout a brown adhesive gag falls across her parting lips ...
'Amina Begum!' Musa is saying. 'Wake up! Bad dream, Begum Sahiba!'
Incidents of those last few hours - the last dregs of my inheritance: when there were thirty-five hours to go, my mother dreamed of being glued to brown paper like a fly. And at the cocktail hour (thirty hours to go) William Methwold visited my father in the garden of Buckingham Villa. Centre-parting strolling beside and above big toe, Mr Methwold reminisced. Tales of the first Methwold, who had dreamed the city into existence, filled the evening air in that penultimate sunset. And my father - apeing Oxford drawl, anxious to impress the departing Englishman - responded with, 'Actually, old chap, ours is a pretty distinguished family, too.' Methwold listening: head cocked, red rose in cream lapel, wide-brimmed hat concealing parted hair, a veiled hint of amusement in his eyes ... Ahmed Sinai, lubricated by whisky, driven on by self-importance, warms to his theme. 'Mughal blood, as a matter of fact.' To which Methwold, 'No! Really? You're pulling my leg.' And Ahmed, beyond the point of no return, is obliged to press on. 'Wrong side of the blanket, of course; but Mughal, certainly.'
That was how, thirty hours before my birth, my father de-monstrated that he, too, longed for fictional ancestors... how he came to invent a family pedigree that, in later years, when whisky had blurred the edges of his memory and djinn-bottles came to confuse him, would obliterate all traces of reality ...
and how, to hammer his point Home, he introduced into our lives the idea of the family curse.
'Oh yes.' my father said as Methwold cocked a grave unsmiling head, 'many old families possessed such curses. In our line, it is handed down from eldest son to eldest son - in writing only, because merely to speak it is to unleash its power, you know.' Now Methwold: 'Amazing! And you know the words?' My father nods, lip jutting, toe still as he taps his forehead for emphasis. 'All in here; all memorized. Hasn't been used since an ancestor quarrelled with the Emperor Babar and put the curse on his son Humayun ... terrible story, that - every schoolboy knows.'
And the time would come when my father, in the throes of his utter retreat from reality, would lock himself in a blue room and try to remember a curse which he had dreamed up one evening in the gardens of his house while he stood tapping his temple beside the descendant of William Methwold.
Saddled now with flypaper-dreams and imaginary ancestors, I am still over a day away from being born ... but now the remorseless ticktock reasserts itself: twenty-nine hours to go, twenty-eight, twenty-seven ...
What other dreams were dreamed on that last night? Was it then -yes, why not - that Dr Narlikar, ignorant of the drama that was about to unfold at his Nursing Home, first dreamed of tetrapods? Was it on that last night - while Pakistan was being born to the north and west of Bombay - that my uncle Hanif, who had come (like his sister) to Bombay, and who had fallen in love with an actress, the divine Pia ('Her face is her fortune!' the Illustrated Weekly once said), first imagined the cinematic device which would soon give him the first of his three hit pictures? ... It seems likely; myths, nightmares, fantasies were in the air.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:22
This much is certain: on that last night, my grandfather Aadam Aziz, alone now in the big old house in Cornwallis Road -except for a wife whose strength of will seemed to increase as Aziz was ground down by age, and for a daughter, Alia, whose embittered virginity would last until a bomb split her in two over eighteen years later - was suddenly imprisoned by great metal hoops of nostalgia, and lay awake as they pressed down upon his chest; until finally, at five o'clock in the morning of August I4th - nineteen hours to go - he was pushed out of bed by an invisible force and drawn towards an old tin trunk.
Opening it, he found: old copies of German magazines; Lenin's What Is To Be Done?; a folded prayer-mat; and at last the thing which he had felt an irresistible urge to see once more - white and folded and glowing faintly in the dawn - my grandfather drew out, from the tin trunk of his past, a stained and perforated sheet, and discovered that the hole had grown; that there were other, smaller holes in the surrounding fabric; and in the grip of a wild nostalgic rage he shook his wife awake and astounded her by yelling, as he waved her history under her nose: 'Moth-eaten! Look, Begum: moth-eaten! You forgot to put in any naphthalene balk!'
But now the countdown will not be denied ... eighteen hours; seventeen; sixteen... and already, at Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, it is possible to hear the shrieks of a woman in labour. Wee Willie Winkie is here; and his wife Vanita; she has been in a protracted, unproductive labour for eight hours now.
The first pangs hit her just as, hundreds of miles away, M. A. Jinnah announced the midnight birth of a Muslim nation... but still she writhes on a bed in the Narlikar Home's 'charity ward' (reserved for the babies of the poor) ... her eyes are standing halfway out of her head; her body glistens with sweat, but the baby shows no signs of coming, nor is its father present; it is eight o'clock in the morning, but there is still the possibility that, given the circumstances, the baby could be waiting for midnight.
Rumours in the city: The statue galloped last night!'... 'And the stars are unfavourable!'... But despite these signs of ill-omen, the city was poised, with a new myth glinting in the corners of its eyes. August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna's birthday and Coconut Day; and this year - fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve -there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will - except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth - a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
I have been, in my time, the living proof of the fabulous nature of this collective dream; but for the moment, I shall turn away from these generalized, macrocosmic notions to concentrate upon a more private ritual; I shall not describe the mass blood-letting in progress on the frontiers of the divided Punjab (where the partitioned nations are washing themselves in one another's blood, and a certain punchinello-faced Major Zulfikar is buying refugee property at absurdly low prices, laying the foundations of a fortune that will rival the Nizam of Hyderabad's); I shall avert my eyes from the violence in Bengal and the long pacifying walk of Mahatma Gandhi. Selfish? Narrow-minded? Well, perhaps; but excusably so, in my opinion. After all, one is not born every day.
Twelve hours to go. Amina Sinai, having awakened from her flypaper nightmare, will not sleep again until after... Ramram Seth is filling her head, she is adrift in a turbulent sea jn which waves of excitement alternate with deep, giddying, dark, watery hollows of fear. But something else is in operation, too, Watch her hands - as, without any conscious instructions, they press down, hard, upon her womb; watch her lips, muttering without her knowledge: 'Come on, slowpoke, you don't want to be late for the newspapers!'
Eight hours to go ... at four o'clock that afternoon, William Methwold drives up the two-storey hillock in his black 1946 Rover. He parks in the circus-ring between the four noble villas; but today he visits neither goldfish-pond nor cactus-garden; he does not greet Lila Sabarmati with his customary, 'How goes the pianola? Everything tickety-boo?' - nor does he salute old man Ibrahim who sits in the shade of a ground-floor verandah, rocking in a rocking-chair and musing about sisal; looking neither towards Catrack nor Sinai, he takes up his position in the exact centre of the circus-ring. Rose in lapel, cream hat held stiffly against his chest, centre-parting glinting in afternoon light, William Methwold stares straight ahead, past clock-tower and Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy's map-shaped pool, across the golden four o'clock waves, and salutes; while out there, above the horizon, the sun begins its long dive towards the sea.
Six hours to go. The cocktail hour. The successors of William Methwold are in their gardens - except that Amina sits in her tower-room, avoiding the mildly competitive glances being flung in her direction by Nussie-next-door, who is also, perhaps, urging her Sonny down and out between her legs; curiously they watch the Englishman, who stands as still and stiff as the ramrod to which we have previously compared his centre-parting; until they are distracted by a new arrival. A long, stringy man, wearing three rows of beads around his neck, and a belt of chicken-bones around his waist; his dark skin stained with ashes, his hair loose and long - naked except for beads and ashes, the sadhu strides up amongst the red-tiled mansions. Musa, the old bearer, descends upon him to shoo him away; but hangs back, not knowing how to command a holy man. Cleaving through the veils of Musa's indecision, the sadhu enters the garden of Buckingham Villa; walks straight past my astonished father; seats himself, cross-legged, beneath the dripping garden tap.
'What do you want here, sadhuji?' - Musa, unable to avoid deference; to which the sadhu, calm as a lake: 'I have come to await the coming of the One. The Mubarak - He who is Blessed. It will happen very soon.'
Believe it or not: I was prophesied twice! And on that day on which everything was so remarkably well-timed, my mother's sense of timing did not fail her; no sooner had the sadhu's last word left his lips than there issued, from a first-floor tower-room with glass tulips dancing in the windows, a piercing yell, a cocktail containing equal proportions of panic, excitement and triumph... 'Arre Ahmed!' Amina Sinai yelled, 'Janum, the baby! It's coming - bang on time!'
Ripples of electricity through Methwold's Estate... and here comes Homi Catrack, at a brisk emaciated sunken-eyed trot, offering: 'My Studebaker is at your disposal, Sinai Sahib; take it now - go at once!'... and when there are still five hours and thirty minutes left, the Sinais, husband and wife, drive away down the two-storey hillock in the borrowed car; there is my father's big toe pressing down on the accelerator; there are my mother's hands pressing down on her moon-belly; and they are out of sight now, around the bend, past Band Box Laundry and Reader's Paradise, past Fatbhoy jewels and Chimalker toys, past One Yard of Chocolates and Breach Candy gates, driving towards Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home where, in a charity ward, Wee Willie's Vanita still heaves and strains, spine curving, eyes popping, and a midwife called Mary Pereira is waiting for her time, too ... so that neither Ahmed of the jutting lip and squashy belly and fictional ancestors, nor dark-skinned prophecy-ridden Amina were present when the sun finally set over Methwold's Estate, and at the precise instant of its last disappearance - five hours and two minutes to go -William Methwold raised a long white arm above his head. White hand dangled above brilliantined black hair; long tapering white fingers twitched towards centre-parting, and the second and final secret was revealed, because fingers curled, and seized hair; drawing away from his head, they failed to release their prey; and in the moment after the disappearance of the sun Mr Methwold stood in the afterglow of his Estate with his hairpiece in his hand.
'A baldie!' Padma exclaims. 'That slicked-up hair of his ... I knew it; too good to be true!'
Bald, bald; shiny-pated! Revealed: the deception which had tricked an accordionist's wife. Samson-like, William Methwold's power had resided in his hair; but now, bald patch glowing in the dusk, he flings his thatch through the window of his motor-car; distributes, with what looks like carelessness, the signed title-deeds to his palaces; and drives away. Nobody at Methwold's Estate ever saw him again; but I, who never saw him once, find him impossible to forget.
Suddenly everything is saffron and green. Amina Sinai in a room with saffron walls and green woodwork. In a neighbouring room, Wee Willie Winkie's Vanita, green-skinned, the whites of her eyes shot with saffron, the baby finally beginning its descent through inner passages that are also, no doubt, similarly colourful. Saffron minutes and green seconds tick away on the clocks on the walls. Outside Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, there are fireworks and crowds, also conforming to the colours of the night - saffron rockets, green sparkling rain; the men in shirts of zafaran hue, the women in saris of lime. On a saffron-and-green carpet, Dr Narlikar talks to Ahmed Sinai. 'I shall see to your Begum personally,' he says, in gentle tones the colour of the evening, 'Nothing to worry about. You wait here; plenty of room to pace.' Dr Narlikar, who dislikes babies, is nevertheless an expert gynaecologist. In his spare time he lectures writes pamphlets berates the nation on the subject of contraception.
'Birth Control,' he says, 'is Public Priority Number One. The day will come when I get that through people's thick heads, and then I'll be out of a job.' Ahmed Sinai smiles, awkward, nervous. 'Just for tonight,' my father says, 'forget lectures -deliver my child.'
It is twenty-nine minutes to midnight. Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home is running on a skeleton staff; there are many absentees, many employees who have preferred to celebrate the imminent birth of the nation, and will not assist tonight at the births of children. Saffron-shirted, green-skirted, they throng in the illuminated streets, beneath the infinite balconies of the city on which little dia-lamps of earthenware have been filled with mysterious oik; wicks float in the lamps which line every balcony and rooftop, and these wicks, too, conform to our two-tone colour scheme: half the lamps burn saffron, the others flame with green.
Threading its way through the many-headed monster of the crowd is a police car, the yellow and blue of its occupants' uniforms transformed by the unearthly lamplight into saffron and green. (We are on Colaba Causeway now, just for a moment, to reveal that at twenty-seven minutes to midnight, the police are hunting for a dangerous criminal. His name: Joseph D'Costa. The orderly is absent, has been absent for several days, from his work at the Nursing Home, from his room near the slaughterhouse, and from the life of a distraught virginal Mary.)
Twenty minutes pass, with aaahs from Amina Sinai, coming harder and faster by the minute, and weak tiring aaahs from Vanita in the next room. The monster in the streets has already begun to celebrate; the new myth courses through its veins, replacing its blood with corpuscles of saffron and green. And in Delhi, a wiry serious man sits in the Assembly Hall and prepares to make a speech. At Methwold's Estate goldfish hang stilly in ponds while the residents go from house to house bearing pistachio sweetmeats, embracing and kissing one another - green pistachio is eaten, and saffron laddoo-balls. Two children move down secret passages while in Agra an ageing doctor sits with his wife, who has two moles on her face like witchnipples, and in the midst of sleeping geese and moth-eaten memories they are somehow struck silent, and can find nothing to say.
And in all the cities all the towns all the villages the little dia-lamps burn on window-sills porches verandahs, while trains burn in the Punjab, with the green flames of blistering paint and the glaring saffron of fired fuel, like the biggest dias in the world.
And the city of Lahore, too, is burning.
The wiry serious man is getting to his feet. Anointed with holy water from the Tanjore River, he rises; his forehead smeared with sanctified ash, he clears his throat. Without written speech in hand, without having memorized any prepared words, Jawaharlal Nehru begins:'... Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge - not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially ...'
It is two minutes to twelve. At Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, the dark glowing doctor, accompanied by a midwife called Flory, a thin kind lady of no importance, encourages Amina Sinai: 'Push! Harder! ... I can see the head!...'
while in the neighbouring room one Dr Bose - with Miss Mary Pereira by his side - presides over the terminal stages of Vanita's twenty-four-hour labour ...
'Yes; now; just one last try, come on; at last, and then it will be over!...'
Women wail and shriek while in another room men are silent. Wee Willie Winkie - incapable of song - squats in a corner, rocking back and forth, back and forth... and Ahmed Sinai is looking for a chair. But there are no chairs in this room; it is a room designated for pacing; so Ahmed Sinai opens a door, finds a chair at a deserted receptionist's desk, lifts it, carries it back into the pacing room, where Wee Willie Winkie rocks, rocks, his eyes as empty as a blind man's... will she live? won't she? ... and.now, at last, it is midnight.
The monster in the streets has begun to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man is saying,'... At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India awakens to life and freedom ...' And beneath the roar of the monster there are two more yells, cries, bellows, the howls of children arriving in the world, their unavailing protests mingling with the din of independence which hangs saffron-and-green in the night sky - 'A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance ...' while in a room with saffron-and-green carpet Ahmed Sinai is still clutching a chair when Dr Narlikar enters to inform him: 'On the stroke of midnight, Sinai brother, your Begum Sahiba gave birth to a large, healthy child: a son!' Now my father began to think about me (not knowing...); with the image of my face filling his thoughts he forgot about the chair; possessed by the love of me (even though...), filled with it from top of head to fingertips, he let the chair fall.
Yes, it was my fault (despite everything) ... it was the power of my face, mine and nobody else's, which caused Ahmed Sinai's hands to release the chair; which caused the chair to drop, accelerating at thirty-two feet per second, and as Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly Hall, 'We end today a period of ill-fortune,'
as conch-sheik blared out the news of freedom, it was on my account that my father cried out too, because the falling chair shattered his toe.
And now we come to it: the noise brought everyone running; my father and his injury grabbed a brief moment of limelight from the two aching mothers, the two, synchronous midnight births - because Vanita had finally been delivered of a baby of remarkable size: 'You wouldn't have believed it,' Dr Bose said, 'It just kept on coming, more and more of the boy forcing its way out, it's a real ten-chip whopper all right!' And Narlikar, washing himself: 'Mine, too.' But that was a little later - just now Narlikar and Bose were tending to Ahmed Sinai's toe; midwives had been instructed to wash and swaddle the new-born pair; and now Miss Mary Pereira made her contribution.
'Go, go,' she said to poor Flory, 'see if you can help. I can do all right here.'
And when she was alone - two babies in her hands - two lives in her power - she did it for Joseph, her own private revolutionary act, thinking He will certainly love me for this, as she changed name-tags on the two huge infants, giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich-born child to accordions and poverty ... 'Love me, Joseph!' was in Mary Pereira's mind, and then it was done. On the ankle of a ten-chip whopper with eyes as blue as Kashmiri sky - which were also eyes as blue as Methwold's - and a nose as dramatic as a Kashmiri grandfather's - which was also the nose of a grandmother from France - she placed this name: Sinai.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:22
Saffron swaddled me as, thanks to the crime of Mary Pereira, I became the chosen child of midnight, whose parents were not his parents, whose son would not be his own... Mary took the child of my mother's womb, who was not to be her son, another ten-chip pomfret, but with eyes which were already turning brown, and knees as knobbly as Ahmed Sinai's, wrapped it in green, and brought it to Wee Willie Winkie - who was staring at her blind-eyed, who hardly saw his new son, who never knew about centre-partings ... Wee Willie Winkie, who had just learned that Vanita had not managed to survive her childbearing. At three minutes past midnight, while doctors fussed over broken toe, Vanita had haemorrhaged and died.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:22
So I was brought to my mother; and she never doubted my authenticity for an instant. Ahmed Sinai, toe in splint, sat on her bed as she said: 'Look, janum, the poor fellow, he's got his grandfather's nose.' He watched mystified as she made sure there was only one head; and then she relaxed completely, understanding that even fortune-tellers have only limited gifts.
'Janum,' my mother said excitedly, 'you must call the papers. Call them at the Times of India. What did I tell you? I won.'
'... This is no time for petty or destructive criticism,' Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly. 'No time for ill-will. We have to build the noble mansion of free India, where all her children may dwell.' A flag unfurls: it is saffron, white and green.
'An Anglo?' Padma exclaims in horror. 'What are you telling me? You are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?'
'I am Saleem Sinai,' I told her, 'Snotnose, Stainface, Sniffer, Baldy, Piece-of-the-Moon. Whatever do you mean - not my own?'
'All the time,' Padma wails angrily, 'you tricked me. Your mother, you called her; your father, your grandfather, your aunts. What thing are you that you don't even care to tell the truth about who your parents were? You don't care that your mother died giving you life? That your father is maybe still alive somewhere, penniless, poor? You are a monster or what?'
No: I'm no monster. Nor have I been guilty of trickery. I provided clues ... but there's something more important than that. It's this: when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference!.
I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts... if you had asked my father (even him, despite all that happened!) who his son was, nothing on earth would have induced him to point in the direction of the accordionist's knock-kneed, unwashed boy. Even though he would grow up, this Shiva, to be something of a hero.
So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents - the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.
'Enough,' Padma sulks. 'I don't want to listen.' Expecting one type of two-headed child, she is peeved at being offered another. Nevertheless, whether she is listening or not, I have tilings to record.
Three days after my birth, Mary Pereira was consumed by remorse. Joseph D'Costa, on the run from the searching police cars, had clearly abandoned her sister Alice as well as Mary; and the little plump woman - unable, in her fright, to confess her crime - realized that she had been a fool. 'Donkey from somewhere!'
she cursed herself; but she kept her secret. She decided, however, to make amends of a kind. She gave up her job at the Nursing Home and approached Amina Sinai with, 'Madam, I saw your baby just one time and fell in love. Are you needing an ayah?' And Amina, her eyes shining with motherhood, 'Yes.' Mary Pereira ('You might as well call her your mother,' Padma interjects, proving she is still interested, 'She made you, you know'), from that moment on, devoted her life to bringing me up, thus binding the rest of her days to the memory of her crime.
On August 20th, Nussie Ibrahim followed my mother into the Pedder Road clinic, and little Sonny followed me into the world - but he was reluctant to emerge; forceps were obliged to reach in and extract him; Dr Bose, in the heat of the moment, pressed a little too hard, and Sonny arrived with little dents beside each of his temples, shallow forcep-hollows which would make him as irresistibly attractive as the hairpiece of William Methwold had made the Englishman. Girls (Evie, the Brass Monkey, others) reached out to stroke his little valleys ... it would lead to difficulties between us.
But I've saved the most interesting snippet for the last. So let me reveal now that, on the day after I was born, my mother and I were visited in a saffron and green bedroom by two persons from the Times of India (Bombay edition). I lay in a green crib, swaddled in saffron, and looked up at them. There was a reporter, who spent his time interviewing my mother; and a tall, aquiline photographer who devoted his attentions to me. The next day, words as well as pictures appeared in newsprint ...
Quite recently, I visited a cactus-garden where once, many years back, I buried a toy tin globe, which was badly dented and stuck together with Scotch Tape; and extracted from its insides the things I had placed there all those years ago.
Holding them in my left hand now, as I write, I can still see - despite yellowing and mildew - that one is a letter, a personal letter to myself, signed by the Prime Minister of India; but the other is a newspaper cutting.
It has a headline: MIDNIGHT'S CHILD.
And a text: 'A charming pose of Baby Saleem Sinai, who was born last night at the exact moment of our Nation's independence - the happy Child of that glorious Hour!'
And a large photograph: an A-1 top-quality front-page jumbo-sized baby-snap, in which it is still possible to make out a child with birthmarks staining his cheeks and a runny and glistening nose. (The picture is captioned: Photo by Kalidas Gupta.)
Despite headline, text and photograph, I must accuse our visitors of the crime of trivialization; mere journalists, looking no further than the next day's paper, they had no idea of the importance of the event they were covering. To them, it was no more than a human-interest drama.
How do I know this? Because, at the end of the interview, the photographer presented my mother with a cheque - for one hundred rupees.
One hundred rupees! Is it possible to imagine a more piffling, derisory sum? It is a sum by which one could, were one of a mind to do so, feel insulted. I shall, however, merely thank them for celebrating my arrival, and forgive them for their lack of a genuine historical sense.
'Don't be vain,' Padma says grumpily. 'One hundred rupees is not so little; after all, everybody gets born, it's not such a big big thing.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:23
Is it possible to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival? I can think of no other reason for Padma's bizarre behaviour; and this explanation at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading aloud) a word which should not have been spoken ... ever since the episode of the quack doctor's visit, I have sniffed out a strange discontent in Padma, exuding its enigmatic spoor from her eccrine (or apocrine) glands. Distressed, perhaps, by the futility of her midnight attempts at resuscitating my 'other pencil', the useless cucumber hidden in my pants, she has been waxing grouchy. (And then there was her ill-tempered reaction, last night, to my revelation of the secrets of my birth, and her irritation at my low opinion of the sum of one hundred rupees.) I blame myself: immersed in my autobiographical enterprise, I failed to consider her feelings, and began tonight on the most unfortunate of false notes.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:23
'Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,' I wrote and read aloud, 'I have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because while Aadam Aziz remained the sheet's victim, I have become its master - and Padma is the one who is now under its spell. Sitting in my enchanted shadows, I vouchsafe daily glimpses of myself- while she, my squatting glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose frozen into immobility by the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralysed - yes! - by love.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:23
That was the word: love. Written-and-spoken, it raised her voice to an unusually shrill pitch; it unleashed from her lips a violence which would have wounded me, were I still vulnerable to words. 'Love you?' our Padma piped scornfully, 'What for, my God? What use are you, little princeling,' - and now came her attempted coup de grace - 'as a lover?' Arm extended, its hairs glowing in the lamplight, she jabbed a contemptuous index finger in the direction of my admittedly nonfunctional loins; a long, thick digit, rigid with jealousy, which unfortunately served only to remind me of another, long-lost finger...作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:23
so that she, seeing her arrow miss its mark, shrieked, 'Madman from somewhere! That doctor was right!' and rushed distractedly from the room. I heard footsteps clattering down the metal stairs to the factory floor; feet rushing between the dark-shrouded pickle vats; and a door, first unbolted and then slammed.
Thus abandoned, I have returned, having no option, to my work.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:23
The fisherman's pointing finger: unforgettable focal point of the picture which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above the sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight's child, I spent my earliest days. The young Raleigh - and who else? - sat, framed in teak, at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor - did he have a walrus moustache? - whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh - and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic ... and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child with a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor sat in a sky-blue room, beneath the pointing finger, and copied the attire of the English milords ...作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:23
'Look, how chweet! Lila Sabarmati exclaimed to my eternal mortification, 'It's like he's just stepped out of the picture?
In a picture hanging on a bedroom wall, I sat beside Walter Raleigh and followed a fisherman's pointing finger with my eyes; eyes straining at the horizon, beyond which lay - what? - my future, perhaps; my special doom, of which I was aware from the beginning, as a shimmering grey presence in that sky-blue room, indistinct at first, but impossible to ignore ... because the finger pointed even further than that shimmering horizon, it pointed beyond teak frame, across a brief expanse of sky-blue wall, driving my eyes towards another frame, in which my inescapable destiny hung, forever fixed under glass: here was a jumbo-sized baby-snap with its prophetic captions, and here, beside it, a letter on high-quality vellum, embossed with the seal of state - the lions of Sarnath stood above the dharma-chakra on the Prime Minister's missive, which arrived, via Vishwanath the post-boy, one week after my photograph appeared on the front page of the Times of India.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:23
Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: 'Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:23
And Mary Pereira, awestruck, 'The Government, Madam? It will be keeping one eye on the boy? But why, Madam? What's wrong with him?' -And Amina, not understanding the note of panic in her ayah's voice: 'It's just a way of putting things, Mary; it doesn't really mean what it says.' But Mary does not relax; and always, whenever she enters the baby's room, her eyes flick wildly towards the letter in its frame; her eyes look around her, trying to see whether the Government is watching; wondering eyes: what do they know? Did somebody see? ...作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:24
As for me, as I grew up, I didn't quite accept my mother's explanation, either; but it lulled me into a sense of false security; so that, even though something of Mary's suspicions had leaked into me, I was still taken by surprise when ...
Perhaps the fisherman's finger was not pointing at the letter in the frame; because if one followed it even further, it led one out through the window, down the two-storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy Pools, and out to another sea which was not the sea in the picture; a sea on which the sails of Koli dhows glowed scarlet in the setting sun... an accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at the city's dispossessed.
Or maybe - and this idea makes me feel a little shivery despite the heat - it was a finger of warning, its purpose to draw attention to itself; yes, it could have been, why not, a prophecy of another finger, a finger not dissimilar from itself, whose entry into my story would release the dreadful logic of Alpha and Omega ... my God, what a notion! How much of my future hung above my crib, just waiting for me to understand it? How many warnings was I given - how many did I ignore? ... But no. I will not be a 'madman from somewhere', to use Padma's eloquent phrase. I will not succumb to cracked digressions; not while I have the strength to resist the cracks.
When Amina Sinai and Baby Saleem arrived home in a borrowed Studebaker, Ahmed Sinai brought a manila envelope along for the ride. Inside the envelope: a pickle-jar, emptied of lime kasaundy, washed, boiled, purified - and now, refilled. A well-sealed jar, with a rubber diaphragm stretched over its tin lid and held in place by a twisted rubber band. What was sealed beneath rubber, preserved in glass, concealed in manila? This: travelling Home with father, mother and baby was a quantity of briny water in which, floating gently, hung an umbilical cord. (But was it mine or the Other's? That's something I can't tell you.) While the newly-hired ayah, Mary Pereira, made her way to Methwold's Estate by bus, an umbilical cord travelled in state in the glove compartment of a film magnate's Studey. While Baby Saleem grew towards manhood, umbilical tissue hung unchanging in bottled brine, at the back of a teak almirah. And when, years later, our family entered its exile in the Land of the Pure, when I was struggling towards purity, umbilical cords would briefly have their day.
Nothing was thrown away; baby and afterbirth were both retained; both arrived at Methwold's Estate; both awaited their time.
I was not a beautiful baby. Baby-snaps reveal that my large moon-face was too large; too perfectly round. Something lacking in the region of the chin. Fair skin curved across my features - but birthmarks disfigured it; dark stains spread down my western hairline, a dark patch coloured my eastern ear. And my temples: too prominent: bulbous Byzantine domes. (Sonny Ibrahim and I were born to be friends - when we bumped our foreheads, Sonny's forcep-hollows permitted my bulby temples to nestle within them, as snugly as carpenter's joints.) Amina Sinai, immeasurably relieved by my single head, gazed upon it with redoubled maternal fondness, seeing it through a beautifying mist, ignoring the ice-like eccentricity of my sky-blue eyes, the temples like stunted horns, even the rampant cucumber of the nose.
Baby Saleem's nose: it was monstrous; and it ran.
Intriguing features of my early life: large and unbeautiful as I was, it appears I was not content. From my very first days I embarked upon an heroic programme of self-enlargement. (As though I knew that, to carry the burdens of my future life, I'd need to be pretty big.) By mid-September I had drained my mother's not inconsiderable breasts of milk. A wet-nurse was briefly employed but she retreated, dried-out as a desert after only a fortnight, accusing Baby Saleem of trying to bite off her nipples with his toothless gums. I moved on to the bottle and downed vast quantities of compound: the bottle's nipples suffered, too, vindicating the complaining wet-nurse. Baby-book records were meticulously kept; they reveal that I expanded almost visibly, enlarging day by day; but unfortunately no nasal measurements were taken so I cannot say whether my breathing apparatus grew in strict proportion, or faster than the rest. I must say that I had a healthy metabolism. Waste matter was evacuated copiously from the appropriate orifices; from my nose there flowed a shining cascade of goo.
Armies of handkerchiefs, regiments of nappies found their way into the large washing-chest in my mother's bathroom ... shedding rubbish from various apertures, I kept my eyes quite dry. 'Such a good baby, Madam,' Mary Pereira said, 'Never takes out one tear.'
Good baby Saleem was a quiet child; I laughed often, but soundlessly. (Like my own son, I began by taking stock, listening before I rushed into gurgles and, later, into speech.) For a time Amina and Mary became afraid that the boy was dumb; but, just when they were on the verge of telling his father (from whom they had kept their worries secret - no father wants a damaged child), he burst into sound, and became, in that respect at any rate, utterly normal, 'It's as if,' Amina whispered to Mary, 'he's decided to put our minds at rest.'
There was one more serious problem. Amina and Mary took a few days to notice it.
Busy with the mighty, complex processes of turning themselves into a two-headed mother, their vision clouded by a fog of stenchy underwear, they failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids. Amina, remembering how, during her Pregnancy, the weight of her unborn child had held time as still as a dead green pond, began to wonder whether the reverse might not be taking place now - whether the baby had some magical power over all the time in his immediate vicinity, and was speeding it up, so that mother-and-ayah never had enough time to do everything that needed doing, so that the baby could grow at an apparently fantastic rate; lost in such chronological daydreams, she didn't notice my problem. Only when she shrugged the idea off, and told herself I was just a good strapping boy with a big appetite, an early developer, did the veils of maternal love part sufficiently for her and Mary to yelp, in unison: 'Look, baap-re-baap! Look, Madam! See, Mary! The little chap never blinks!'
The eyes were too blue: Kashmiri-blue, changeling-blue, blue with the weight of unspilled tears, too blue to blink. When I was fed, my eyes did not flutter; when virginal Mary set me across her shoulder, crying, 'Oof, so heavy, sweet Jesus!' I burped without nictating. When Ahmed Sinai limped splint-toed to my crib, I yielded to jutting lips with keen and batless gaze ... 'Maybe a mistake, Madam,' Mary suggested. 'Maybe the little sahib is copying us - blinking when we blink.' And Amina: 'We'll blink in turn and watch.' Their eyelids opening-and-closing alternately, they observed my icy blueness; but there was not the slightest tremor; until Amina took matters into her own hands and reached into the cradle to stroke my eyelids downwards. They closed: my breathing altered, instantly, to the contented rhythms of sleep. After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids.
'He'll learn, Madam,' Mary comforted Amina, 'He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure.' I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
Now, looking back through baby eyes, I can see it all perfectly - it's amazing how much you can remember when you try. What I can see: the city, basking like a bloodsucker lizard in the summer heat. Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it's really a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India. A glamorous leech, producing nothing except films bush-shirts fish ... in the aftermath of Partition, I see Vishwanath the postboy bicycling towards our two-storey hillock, vellum envelope in his saddlebag, riding his aged Arjuna Indiabike past a rotting bus -abandoned although it isn't the monsoon season, because its driver suddenly decided to leave for Pakistan, switched off the engine and departed, leaving a full busload of stranded passengers, hanging off the windows, clinging to the roof-rack, bulging through the doorway... I can hear their oaths, son-of-a-pig, brother-of-a-jackass; but they will cling to their hard-won places for two hours before they leave the bus to its fate. And, and: here is India's first swimmer of the English Channel, Mr Pushpa Roy, arriving at the gates of the Breach Candy Pools. Saffron bathing-cap on his head, green trunks wrapped in flag-hued towel, this Pushpa has declared war on the whites-only policy of the baths. He holds a cake of Mysore sandalwood soap; draws himself up; marches through the gate ... whereupon hired Pathans seize him, Indians save Europeans from an Indian mutiny as usual, and out he goes, struggling valiantly, frogmarched into Warden Road and flung into the dust. Channel swimmer dives into the street, narrowly missing camels taxis bicycles (Vishwanath swerves to avoid his cake of soap) ... but he is not deterred; picks himself up; dusts himself down; and promises to be back tomorrow. Throughout my childhood years, the days were punctuated by the sight of Pushpa the swimmer, in saffron cap and flag-tinted towel, diving unwillingly into Warden Road. And in the end his indomitable campaign won a victory, because today the Pools permit certain Indians - 'the better sort' - to step into their map-shaped waters. But Pushpa does not belong to the better sort; old now and forgotten, he watches the Pools from afar ... and now more and more of the multitudes are flooding into me - such as Bano Devi, the famous lady wrestler of those days, who would only wrestle men and threatened to marry anyone who beat her, as a result of which vow she never lost a bout; and (closer to Home now)
the sadhu under our garden tap, whose name was Purushottam and whom we (Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus and I) would always call Puru-the-guru - believing me to be the Mubarak, the Blessed One, he devoted his life to keeping an eye on me, and filled his days teaching my father palmistry and witching away my mother's verrucas; and then there is the rivalry of the old bearer Musa and the new ayah Mary, which will grow until it explodes; in short, at the end of 1947, life in Bombay was as teeming, as manifold, as multitudinously shapeless as ever...
except that I had arrived; I was already beginning to take my place at the centre of the universe; and by the time I had finished, I would give meaning to it all. You don't believe me? Listen: at my cradle-side, Mary Pereira is singing a little song: Anything you want to be, you can be: You can be just what-all you want.
By the time of my circumcision by a barber with a cleft palate from the Royal Barber House on Gowalia Tank Road (I was just over two months old), I was already much in demand at Methwold's Estate. (Incidentally, on the subject of the circumcision: I still swear that I can remember the grinning barber, who held me by the foreskin while my member waggled frantically like a slithering snake; and the razor descending, and the pain; but I'm told that, at the time, I didn't even blink.)
Yes, I was a popular little fellow: my two mothers, Amina and Mary, couldn't get enough of me. In all practical matters, they were the most intimate of allies.
After my circumcision, they bathed me together; and giggled together as my mutilated organ waggled angrily in the bathwater. 'We better watch this boy, Madam,' Mary said naughtily, 'His thing has a life of its own!' And Amina, 'Tch, tch, Mary, you're terrible, really ...' But then amid sobs of helpless laughter, 'Just see, Madam, his poor little soo-soo!' Because it was wiggling again, thrashing about, like a chicken with a slitted gullet... Together, they cared for me beautifully; but in the matter of emotion, they were deadly rivals. Once, when they took me for a pram-ride through the Hanging gardens on Malabar Hill, Amina overheard Mary telling the other ayahs, 'Look: here's my own big son' - and felt oddly threatened. Baby Saleem became, after that, the battleground of their loves; they strove to outdo one another in demonstrations of affection; while he, blinking by now, gurgling aloud, fed on their emotions, using it to accelerate his growth, expanding and swallowing infinite hugs kisses chucks-under-the-chin, charging towards the moment when he would acquire the essential characteristic of human beings: every day, and only in those rare moments when I was left alone with the fisherman's pointing finger, I tried to heave myself erect in my cot.
(And while I made unavailing efforts to get to my feet, Amina, too, was in the grip of a useless resolve - she was trying to expel from her mind the dream of her unnameable husband, which had replaced the dream of flypaper on the night after I was born; a dream of such overwhelming reality that it stayed with her throughout her waking hours. In it, Nadir Khan came to her bed and impregnated her; such was the mischievous perversity of the dream that it confused Amina about the parentage of her child, and provided me, the child of midnight, with a fourth father to set beside Winkie and Methwold and Ahmed Sinai. Agitated but helpless in the clutches of the dream, my mother Amina began at that time to form the fog of guilt which would, in later years, surround her head like a dark black wreath.)
I never heard Wee Willie Winkie in his prime. After his blind-eyed bereavement, his sight gradually returned; but something harsh and bitter crept into his voice. He told us it was asthma, and continued to arrive at Methwold's Estate once a week to sing songs which were, like himself, relics of the Methwold era.
'Good Night, Ladies,' he sang; and, keeping up to date, added 'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By' to his repertoire, and, a little later, 'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' Placing a sizeable infant with menacingly knocking knees on a small mat beside him in the circus-ring, he sang songs filled with nostalgia, and nobody had the heart to turn him away. Winkie and the fisherman's finger were two of the few survivals of the days of William Methwold, because after the Englishman's disappearance his successors emptied his palaces of their abandoned contents. Lila Sabarmati preserved her pianola; Ahmed Sinai kept his whisky-cabinet; old man Ibrahim came to terms with ceiling-fans; but the goldfish died, some from starvation, others as a result of being so colossally overfed that they exploded in little clouds of scales and undigested fish-food; the dogs ran wild, and eventually ceased to roam the Estate; and the fading clothes in the old almirahs were distributed amongst the sweeper-women and other servants on the Estate, so that for years afterwards the heirs of William Methwold were cared for by men and women wearing the increasingly ragged shirts and cotton print dresses of their erstwhile masters. But Winkie and the picture on my wall survived; singer and fisherman became institutions of our lives, like the cocktail hour, which was already a habit too powerful to be broken. 'Each little tear and sorrow,' Winkie sang, 'only brings you closer to me...' And his voice grew worse and worse, until it sounded like a sitar whose resonating drum, made out of lacquered pumpkin, had been eaten away by mice; 'It's asthma,' he insisted stubbornly. Before he died he lost his voice completely; doctors revised his diagnosis to throat cancer; but they were wrong, too, because Winkie died of no disease but of the bitterness of losing a wife whose infidelity he never suspected. His son, named Shiva after the god of procreation and destruction, sat at his feet in those early days, silently bearing the burden of being the cause (or so he thought) of his father's slow decline; and gradually, down the years, we watched his eyes filling with an anger which could not be spoken; we watched his fists close around pebbles and hurl them, ineffectually at first, more dangerously as he grew, into the surrounding emptiness. When Lila Sabarmati's elder son was eight, he took it upon himself to tease young Shiva about his surliness, his unstarched shorts, his knobbly knees; whereupon the boy whom Mary's crime had doomed to poverty and accordions hurled a sharp flat stone, with a cutting edge like a razor, and blinded his tormentor in the right eye. After Eyeslice's accident, Wee Willie Winkie came to Methwold's Estate alone, leaving his son to enter the dark labyrinths from which only a war would save him.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:24
Why Methwold's Estate continued to tolerate Wee Willie Winkie despite the decay of his voice and the violence of his son: he had, once, given them an important clue about their lives. 'The first birth,' he had said, 'will make you real.'
As a direct result of Winkie's clue, I was, in my early days, highly in demand.
Amina and Mary vied for my attention; but in every house on the Estate, there were people who wanted to know me; and eventually Amina, allowing her pride in my popularity to overcome her reluctance to let me out of her sight, agreed to lend me, on a kind of rota basis, to the various families on the hill. Pushed by Mary Pereira in a sky-blue pram, I began a triumphal progress around the red-tiled palaces, gracing each in turn with my presence, and making them seem real to their owners. And so, looking back now through the eyes of Baby Saleem, I can reveal most of the secrets of my neighbourhood, because the grown-ups lived their lives in my presence without fear of being observed, not knowing that, years later, someone would look back through baby-eyes and decide to let the cats out of their bags.
So here is old man Ibrahim, dying with worry because, back in Africa, governments are nationalizing his sisal plantations; here is his elder son Ishaq fretting over Ms hotel Business, which is running into debt, so that he is obliged to borrow money from local gangsters; here are Ishaq's eyes, coveting his brother's wife, though why Nussie-the-duck should have aroused sexual interest in anyone is a mystery to me; and here is Nussie's husband, Ismail the lawyer, who has learned an important lesson from Ms son's forcep-birth: 'Nothing comes out right in life,' he tells his duck of a wife, 'unless it's forced out.'
Applying this philosophy to his legal career, he embarks on a career of bribing judges and fixing juries; all children have the power to change their parents, and Sonny turned Ms father into a highly successful crook. And, moving across to Versailles Villa, here is Mrs Dubash with her shrine to the god Ganesh, stuck in the corner of an apartment of such supernatural untidiness that, in our house, the word 'dubash' became a verb meaning 'to make a mess' ... 'Oh, Saleem, you've dubashed your room again, you black man!' Mary would cry. And now the cause of the mess, leaning over the hood of my pram to chuck me under the chin: Adi Dubash, the physicist, genius of atoms and litter. His wife, who is already carrying Cyrus-the-great within her, hangs back, growing her child, with something fanatical gleaming in the inner corners of her eyes, biding its time; it will not emerge until Mr Dubash, whose daily life was spent working with the most dangerous substances in the world, dies by choking on an orange from which his wife forgot to remove the pips. I was never invited into the flat of Dr Narlikar, the child-hating gynaecologist; but in the Homes of Lila Sabarmati and Homi Catrack I became a voyeur, a tiny party to Lila's thousand and one infidelities, and eventually a witness to the beginnings of the liaison between the naval officer's wife and the film-magnate-and-racehorse-owner; which, all in good time, would serve me well when I planned a certain act of revenge.
Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I'm bound to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views on the subject, being a Blessed One to a guru under a tap, a voyeur to Lola Sabarmati; in the eyes of Nussie-the-duck I was a rival, and a more successful rival, to her own Sonny (although, to her credit, she never showed her resentment, and asked to borrow me just like everyone else); to my two-headed mother I was all kinds of babyish things - they called me joonoo-moonoo, and putch-putch, and little-piece-of-the-moon.
But what, after all, can a baby do except swallow all of it and hope to make sense of it later? Patiently, dry-eyed, I imbibed Nehru-letter and Winkle's prophecy; but the deepest impression of all was made on the day when Homi Catrack's idiot daughter sent her thoughts across the circus-ring and into my infant head.
Toxy Catrack, of the outsize head and dribbling mouth; Toxy, who stood at a barred top-floor window, stark naked, masturbating with motions of consummate self-disgust; who spat hard and often through her bars, and sometimes hit us on the head ... she was twenty-one years old, a gibbering half-wit, the product of years of inbreeding; but inside my head she was beautiful, because she had not lost the gifts with which every baby is born and which life proceeds to erode. I can't remember anything Toxy said when she sent her thoughts to whisper to me; probably nothing except gurgles and spittings; but she gave a door in my mind a little nudge, so that when an accident took place in a washing-chest it was probably Toxy who made it possible.
That's enough for the moment, about the first days of Baby Saleem -already my very presence is having an effect on history; already Baby Saleem is working changes on the people around him; and, in the case of my father, I am convinced that it was I who pushed him into the excesses which led, perhaps inevitably, to the terrifying time of the freeze.
Ahmed Sinai never forgave his son for breaking his toe. Even after the splint was removed, a tiny limp remained. My father leaned over my crib and said, 'So, my son: you're starting as you mean to go on. Already you've started bashing your poor old father!' In my opinion, this was only half a joke. Because, with my birth, everything changed for Ahmed Sinai. His position in the household was undermined by my coming. Suddenly Amina's assiduity had acquired different goals; she never wheedled money out of him any more, and the napkin in his lap at the breakfast-table felt sad pangs of nostalgia for the old days. Now it was, 'Your son needs so-and-so,' or 'Janum, you must give money for such-and-such.'
Bad show, Ahmed Sinai thought. My father was a self-important man.
And so it was my doing that Ahmed Sinai fell, in those days after my birth, into the twin fantasies which were to be his undoing, into the unreal worlds of the djinns and of the land beneath the sea.
A memory of my father in a cool-season evening, sitting on my bed (I was seven years old) and telling me, in a slightly thickened voice, the story of the fisherman who found the djinn in a bottle washed up on the beach... 'Never believe in a djinn's promises, my son! Let them out of the bottle and they'll eat you up!' And I, timidly - because I could smell danger on my father's breath: 'But, Abba, can a djinn really live inside a bottle?' Whereupon my father, in a mercurial change of mood, roared with laughter and left the room, returning with a dark green bottle with a white label. 'Look,' he said sonorously, 'Do you want to see the djinn in here?' 'No!' I squealed in fright; but 'Yes!' yelled my sister the Brass Monkey from the neighbouring bed ... and cowering together in excited terror we watched him unscrew the cap and dramatically cover the bottleneck with the palm of his hand; and now, in the other hand, a cigarette-lighter materialized. 'So perish all evil djinns!' my father cried; and, removing his palm, applied the flame to the neck of the bottle. Awestruck, the Monkey and I watched an eerie flame, blue-green-yellow, move in a slow circle down the interior walls of the bottle; until, reaching the bottom, it flared briefly and died. The next day I provoked gales of laughter when I told Sonny, Eyeslice and Hairoil, 'My father fights with djinns; he beats them; it's true!... And it was true. Ahmed Sinai, deprived of wheedles and attention, began, soon after my birth, a life-long struggle with djinn-bottles.
But I was mistaken about one thing: he didn't win.
Cocktail-cabinets had whetted his appetite; but it was my arrival that drove him to it... In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry stare. The only way to get a drink was to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up, djinn-doctors, one of whom, Dr Sharabi, was introduced to my father by Homi Catrack next door. After that, on the first of every month, my father and Mr Catrack and many of the city's most respectable men queued up outside Dr Sharabi's mottled-glass surgery door, went in, and emerged with the little pink chitties of alcoholism. But the permitted ration was too small for my father's needs; and so he began to send his servants along, too, and gardeners, bearers, drivers (we had a motor-car now, a 1946 Rover with running-boards, just like William Methwold's), even old Musa and Mary Pereira, brought my father back more and more pink chitties, which he took to Vijay Stores opposite the circumcising barbershop .in Gowalia Tank Road and exchanged for the brown paper bags of alcoholism, inside which were the chinking green bottles, full of djinn. And whisky, too: Ahmed Sinai blurred the edges of himself by drinking the green bottles and red labels of his servants. The poor, having little else to peddle, sold their identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father turned them into liquid and drank them down.
At six o'clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.
After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever, and he didn't relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother's preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door - Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries. After nights in which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language - 'What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse - what difference?" And then tears, and Amina, 'Oh, janum - don't torture me!' which, in turn, provoked, 'Torture my foot! You think it's torture for a man to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!' - my father limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while Amina began to notice how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left suddenly, flouncing down our drive without any notice; and you must judge whether she chose to be blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but she did nothing about it, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act of recognition was to give the girls a collective name. 'Those Anglos,' she said to Mary, revealing a touch of snobbery, 'with their funny names, Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I don't know what. What should I care about them? Cheap type females. I call them all his Coca-Cola girls - that's what they all sound like.'
While Ahmed pinched bottoms, Amina became long-suffering; but he might have been glad if she had appeared to care.
Mary Pereira said, 'They aren't so funny names, Madam; beg your pardon, but they are good Christian words.' And Amina remembered Ahmed's cousin Zohra making fun of dark skin - and, falling over herself to apologize, tumbled into Zohra's mistake: 'Oh, notion, Mary, how could you think I was making fun of you?'
Horn-templed, cucumber-nosed, I lay in my crib and listened; and everything that happened, happened because of me ... One day in January 1948, at five in the afternoon, my father was visited by Dr Narlikar. There were embraces as usual, and slaps on the back. 'A little chess?' my father asked, ritually, because these visits were getting to be a habit. They would play chess in the old Indian way, the game of shatranj, and, freed by the simplicities of the chess-board from the convolutions of his life, Ahmed would daydream for an hour about the re-shaping of the Quran; and then it would be six o'clock, cocktail hour, time for the djinns ... but this evening Narlikar said, 'No.' And Ahmed, 'No? What's this no? Come, sit, play, gossip ...' Narlikar, interrupting: 'Tonight, brother Sinai, there is something I must show you.' They are in a 1946 Rover now, Narlikar working the crankshaft and jumping in; they are driving north along Warden Road, past Mahalaxmi Temple on the left and Willingdon Club golf-course on the right, leaving the race-track behind them, cruising along Hornby Vellard beside the sea wall; Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium is in sight, with its giant cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, Bano Devi the Invincible Woman and Dara Singh, mightiest of all... there are channa-vendors and dog-walkers promenading by the sea. 'Stop,' Narlikar commands, and they get out. They stand facing the sea; sea-breeze cools their faces; and out there, at the end of a narrow cement path in the midst of the waves, is the island on which stands the tomb of Haji Ali the mystic. Pilgrims are strolling between Vellard and tomb.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:24
'There,' Narlikar points, 'What do you see?' And Ahmed, mystified, 'Nothing. The tomb. People. What's this about, old chap?' And Narlikar, 'None of that. There!'
And now Ahmed sees that Narlikar's pointing finger is aimed at the cement path ... 'The promenade?' he asks, 'What's that to you? In some minutes the tide will come and cover it up; everybody knows ...' Narlikar, his skin glowing like a beacon, becomes philosophical. 'Just so, brother Ahmed; just so. Land and sea; sea and land; the eternal struggle, not so?' Ahmed, puzzled, remains silent.
'Once there were seven islands,' Narlikar reminds Mm, 'Worli, Mahim, Salsette, Matunga, Colaba, Mazagaon, Bombay. The British joined them up. Sea, brother Ahmed, became land. Land arose, and did not sink beneath the tides!' Ahmed is anxious for his whisky; his lip begins to jut while pilgrims scurry off the narrowing path. 'The point,' he demands. And Narlikar, dazzling with effulgence: 'The point, Ahmed bhai, is this!'
It comes out of his pocket: a little plaster-of-paris model two inches high: the tetrapod! Like a three-dimensional Mercedes-Benz sign, three legs standing on his palm, a fourth rearing lingam-fashion into the evening air, it transfixes my father. 'What is it?' he asks; and now Narlikar tells him: 'This is the baby that will make us richer than Hyderabad, bhai! The little gimmick that will make you, you and me, the masters of that! He points outwards to where sea is rushing over deserted cement pathway... 'The land beneath the sea, my friend! We must manufacture these by the thousand - by tens of thousands! We must tender for reclamation contracts; a fortune is waiting; don't miss it, brother, this is the chance of a lifetime!'
Why did my father agree to dream a gynaecologist's entrepreneurial dream? Why, little by little, did the vision of full-sized concrete tetrapods marching over sea walk, 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 bis 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 law courts in this State,' Ismail Ibrahim adds; Nussie-the-duck smiles a bovine smile as she suckles Sonny; her fingers move, absently stroking Ms 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 neighbours.'
'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.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:24
And 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 rumour 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 rumours 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.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:24
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.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:25
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 god 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 Dr 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.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:25
Dr 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 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 Dr 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, whatsits-name,'
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 centre 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, althiough 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 improvement in her defeated husband.
So that finally the day came when Amina, who had been watching me play incompetently with toy horses of sandal wood in the bath, inhaling the sweet odours 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 bis 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.
'Good news,' Ismail Ibrahim is saying, 'I always thought you should fight the bastards. I'll begin proceedings at once ... but it will take cash, Amina. Have you got cash?'
'The money will be there.'
'Not for myself,' Ismail explains, 'My services are, as I said, free, gratis absolutely. But, forgive me, you must know how things are, one must give little presents to people to smooth one's way ...'
'Here,' Amina hands him an envelope, 'Will this do for now?'
'My God,' Ismail Ibrahim drops the packet in surprise and rupee notes in large denominations scatter all over his sitting-room floor, 'Where did you lay your hands on ...' And Amina, 'Better you don't ask - and I won't ask how you spend it.'
Schaapsteker money paid for our food bills; but horses fought our war. The streak of luck of my mother at the race-track was so long, a seam so rich, that if it hadn't happened it wouldn't have been credible ... for month after month, she put her money on a jockey's nice tidy hair-style or a horse's pretty piebald colouring; and she never left the track without a large envelope stuffed with notes.
'Things are going well,' Ismail Ibrahim told her, 'But Amina sister, God knows what you are up to. Is it decent? Is it legal?' And Amina: 'Don't worry your head. What can't be cured must be endured. I am doing what must be done.'
Never once in all that time did my mother take pleasure in her mighty victories; because she was weighed down by more than a baby - eating Reverend Mother's curries filled with ancient prejudices, she had become convinced that gambling was the next worst thing on earth, next to alcohol; so, although she was not a criminal, she felt consumed by sin.
Verrucas plagued her feet, although Purushottam the sadhu, who sat under our garden tap until dripping water created a bald patch amid the luxuriantly matted hair on his head, was a marvel at charming them away; but throughout the snake winter and the hot season, my mother fought her husband's fight.
You ask: how is it possible? How could a housewife, however assiduous, however determined, win fortunes on the horses, day after racing day, month after month?
You think to yourself: aha, that Homi Catrack, he's a horse-owner; and everyone knows that most of the races are fixed; Amina was asking her neighbour for hot tips! A plausible notion; but Mr Catrack himself lost as often as he won; he saw my mother at the race-track and was astounded by her success. ('Please,' Amina asked him, 'Catrack Sahib, let this be our secret. Gambling is a terrible thing; it would be so shaming if my mother found out.' And Catrack, nodding dazedly, said, 'Just as you wish.') So it was not the Parsee who was behind it - but perhaps I can offer another explanation. Here it is, in a sky-blue crib in a sky-blue room with a fisherman's pointing finger on the wall: here, whenever his mother goes away clutching a purse full of secrets, is Baby Saleem, who has acquired an expression of the most intense concentration, whose eyes have been seized by a singleness of purpose of such enormous power that it has darkened them to deep navy blue, and whose nose is twitching strangely while he appears to be watching some distant event, to be guiding it from a distance, just as the moon controls the tides.
'Coming to court very soon,' Ismail Ibrahim said, 'I think you can be fairly confident ... my God, Amina, have you found King Solomon's Mines?'
The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. ?perfect balance of rewards and penalties! ?seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:25
All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose ... but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity -beca use, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake ... Keeping things simple for the moment, however, I record that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes.
Amina's brother Hanif had not gone to Pakistan. Following the childhood dream which he had whispered to Rashid the rickshaw-boy in an Agra cornfield, he had arrived in Bombay and sought employ, ment in the great film studios.
Precociously confident, he had not only succeeded in becoming the youngest man ever to be given a film to direct in the history of the Indian cinema; he had also wooed and married one of the brightest stars of that celluloid heaven, the divine Pia, whose face was her fortune, and whose saris were made of fabrics whose designers had clearly set out to prove that it was possible to incorporate every colour known to man in a single pattern. Reverend Mother did not approve of the divine Pia, but Hanif of all my family was the one who was free of her confining influence; a jolly, burly man with the booming laugh of the boatman Tai and the explosive, innocent anger of his father Aadam Aziz, he took her to live simply in a small, un-filmi apartment on Marine Drive, telling her, 'Plenty of time to live like Emperors after I've made my name.' She acquiesced; she starred in his first feature, which was partly financed by Homi Catrack and partly by D. W. Rama Studios (Pvt.) Ltd - it was called The Lovers of Kashmir, and one evening in the midst of her racing days Amina Sinai went to the premiere. Her parents did not come, thanks to Reverend Mother's loathing of the cinema, against which Aadam Aziz no longer had the strength to struggle - just as he, who had fought with Mian Abdullah against Pakistan, no longer argued with her when she praised the country, retaining just enough strength to dig in his heels and refuse to emigrate; but Ahmed Sinai, revived by his mother-in-law's cookery, but resentful of her continued presence, got to his feet and accompanied his wife. They took their seats, next to Hanif and. Pia and the male star of the film, one of India's most successful 'lover-boys', I. S. Nayyar.
And, although they didn't know it, a serpent waited in the wings... but in the meanwhile, let us permit Hanif Aziz to have his moment; because The Lovers of Kashmir contained a notion which was to provide my uncle with a spectacular, though brief, period of triumph. In those days it was not permitted for lover-boys and their leading ladies to touch one another on screen, for fear that their osculations might corrupt the nation's youth ... but thirty-three minutes after the beginning of The Lovers the premiere audience began to give off a low buzz of shock, because Pia and Nayyar had begun to kiss - not one another - but things.
Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with all the rich fullness of her painted lips; then passed it to Nayyar; who planted, upon its opposite face, a virilely passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as the indirect kiss - and how much more sophisticated a notion it was than anything in our current cinema; how pregnant with longing and eroticism! The cinema audience (which would, nowadays, cheer raucously at the sight of a young couple diving behind ?bush, which would then begin to shake ridiculously - so low have we sunk in our ability to suggest) watched, riveted to the screen, as the love of Pia and Nayyar, against a background of Dal Lake and ice-blue Kashmiri sky, expressed itself in kisses applied to cups of pink Kashmiri tea; by the fountains of Shalimar they pressed their lips to a sword ... but now, at the height of Hanif Aziz's triumph, the serpent refused to wait; under its influence, the house-lights came up. Against the larger-than-life figures of Pia and Nayyar, kissing mangoes as they mouthed to playback music, the figure of a timorous, inadequately bearded man was seen, marching on to the stage beneath the screen, microphone in hand. The Serpent can take most unexpected forms; now, in the guise of this ineffectual house-manager, it unleashed its venom. Pia and Nayyar faded and died; and the amplified voice of the bearded man said: 'Ladies and gents, your pardon; but there is terrible news.' His voice broke - a sob from the Serpent, to lend power to its teeth! - and then continued, 'This afternoon, at Birla House in Delhi, our beloved Mahatma was killed. Some madman shot him in the stomach, ladies and gentlemen - our Bapu is gone!'
The audience had begun to scream before he finished; the poison of his words entered their veins - there were grown men rolling in the aisles clutching their bellies, not laughing but crying, Hai Ram! Hai Ram! - and women tearing their hair: the city's finest coiffures tumbling around the ears of the poisoned ladies - there were film-stars yelling like fishwives and something terrible to smell in the air - and Hanif whispered, 'Get out of here, big sister - if a Muslim did this thing there will be hell to pay.'
For every ladder, there is a snake ... and for forty-eight hours after the abortive end of The Lovers of Kashmir, our family remained within the walls of Buckingham Villa ('Put furniture against the doors, whatsitsname!' Reverend Mother ordered. 'If there are Hindu servants, let them go Home!'); and Amina did not dare to visit the racetrack.
But for every snake, there is a ladder: and finally the radio gave us a name.
Nathuram Godse. 'Thank God,' Amina burst out, 'It's not a Muslim name!'
And Aadam, upon whom the news of Gandhi's death had placed a new burden of age: 'This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!'
Amina, however, was full of the light-headedness of relief, she was rushing dizzily up the long ladder of relief... 'Why not, after all? By being Godse he has saved our lives!'
Ahmed Sinai, after rising from his supposed sickbed, continued to behave like an invalid. In a voice like cloudy glass he told Amina, 'So, you have told Ismail to go to court; very well, good; but we will lose. In these courts you have to buy judges...' And Amina, rushing to Ismail, 'Never - never under any circumstances - must you tell Ahmed about the money. A man must keep his pride.'
And, later on, 'No, janum, I'm not going anywhere; no, the baby is not being tiring at all; you rest, I must just go to shop - maybe I will visit Hanif- we women, you know, must fill up our days!'
And coming Home with envelopes brimming with rupee-notes ... 'Take, Ismail, now that he's up we have to be quick and careful!' And sitting dutifully beside her mother in the evenings, 'Yes, of course you're right, and Ahmed will be getting so rich soon, you'll just see!'
And endless delays in court; and envelopes, emptying; and the growing baby, nearing the point at which Amina will not be able to insert herself behind the driving-wheel of the 1946 Rover; and can her luck hold?; and Musa and Mary, quarrelling like aged tigers.
What starts fights?
What remnants of guilt fear shame, pickled by time in Mary's intestines, led her willingly? unwillingly? to provoke the aged bearer in a dozen different ways - by a tilt of the nose to indicate her superior status; by aggressive counting of rosary beads under the nose of the devout Muslim; by acceptance of the title mausi, little mother, bestowed upon her by the other Estate servants, which Musa saw as a threat to his status; by excessive familiarity with the Begum Sahiba -little giggled whispers in corners, just loud enough for formal, stiff, correct Musa to hear and feel somehow cheated?
What tiny grain of grit, in the sea of old age now washing over the old bearer, lodged between bis lips to fatten into the dark pearl of hatred - into what unaccustomed torpors did Musa fall, becoming leaden of hand and foot, so that vases were broken, ashtrays spilled, and a veiled hint of forthcoming dismissal - from Mary's conscious or unconscious lips? - grew into an obsessive fear, which rebounded upon the person who started it off?
And (not to omit social factors) what was the brutalizing effect of servant status, of a servants' room behind a blackstoved kitchen, in which Musa was obliged to sleep along with gardener, odd-job boy, and hamal - while Mary slept in style on a rush mat beside a new-born child?
And was Mary blameless or not? Did her inability to go to church -because in churches you found confessionals, and in confessionals secrets could not be kept - turn sour inside her and make her a little sharp, a little hurtful?
Or must we look beyond psychology - seeking our answer in statements such as, there was a snake lying in wait for Mary, and Musa was doomed to learn about the ambiguity of ladders? Or further still, beyond snake-and-ladder, should we see the Hand of Fate in the quarrel - and say, in order for Musa to return as explosive ghost, in order for him to adopt the role of Bomb-in-Bombay, it was necessary to engineer a departure ... or, descending from such sublimities to the ridiculous, could it be that Ahmed Sinai - whom whisky provoked, whom djinns goaded into excesses of rudeness - had so incensed the aged bearer that his crime, with which he equalled Mary's record, was committed out of the injured pride of an abused old servitor - and was nothing to do with Mary at all?
Ending questions, I confine myself to facts: Musa and Mary were perpetually at daggers drawn. And yes: Ahmed insulted him, and Amina's pacifying efforts may not have been successful; and yes: the fuddling shadows of age had convinced him he would be dismissed, without warning, at any moment; and so it was that Amina came to discover, one August morning, that the house had been burgled.
The police came. Amina reported what was missing: a silver spittoon encrusted with lapis lazuli; gold coins; bejewelled samovars and silver tea-services; the contents of a green tin trunk. Servants were lined up in the hall and subjected to the threats of Inspector Johnny Vakeel. 'Come on, own up now' - lathi-stick tapping against his leg -'or you'll see what we can't do to you. You want to stand on one leg all day and night? You want water thrown over you, sometimes boiling hot, sometimes freezing cold? We have many methods in the Police Force ..." And now a cacophony of noise from servants, Not me, Inspector Sahib, I am honest boy; for pity's sake, search my things, sahib! And Amina: 'This is too much, sir, you go too far. My Mary I know, anyway, is innocent. I will not have her questioned.' Suppressed irritation of police officer. A search of belongings is instituted - 'Just in case, Madam. These fellows have limited intelligence - and maybe you discovered the theft too soon for the felon to abscond with the booty!'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:25
The search succeeds. In the bedroll of Musa the old bearer: a silver spittoon.
Wrapped in his puny bundle of clothes: gold coins, a silver samovar. Secreted under his charpoy bed: a missing tea-service. And now Musa has thrown himself at Ahmed Sinai's feet; Musa is begging, 'Forgive, sahib! I was mad; I thought you were going to throw me into the street!' but Ahmed Sinai will not listen; the freeze is upon him; 'I feel so weak,' he says, and leaves the room; and Amina, aghast, asks: 'But, Musa, why did you make that terrible oath?'
... Because, in the interim between line-up in passageway and discoveries in servants' quarters, Musa had said to his master: 'It was not me, sahib. If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper! May my old skin run with sores!'
Amina, with horror on her face, awaits Musa's reply. The bearer's old face twists into a mask of anger; words are spat out. 'Begum Sahiba, I only took your precious possessions, but you, and your sahib, and his father, have taken my whole life; and in my old age you have humiliated me with Christian ayahs.'
There is silence in Buckingham Villa - Amina has refused to press charges, but Musa is leaving. Bedroll on his back, he descends a spiral iron staircase, discovering that ladders can go down as well as up; he walks away down hillock, leaving a curse upon the house.
And (was it the curse that did it?) Mary Pereira is about to discover that even when you win a battle; even when staircases operate in your favour, you can't avoid a snake.
Amina says, 'I can't get you any more money, Ismail; have you had enough?' And Ismail, 'I hope so - but you never know - is there any chance of... ?' But Amina: 'The trouble is, I've got so big and all, I can't get in the car any more. It will just have to do.'
... Time is slowing down for Amina once more; once again, her eyes look through leaded glass, in which red tulips, green-stemmed, dance in unison; for a second time, her gaze lingers on a clocktower which has not worked since the rains of 1947; once again, it is raining. The racing season is over.
A pale blue clocktower: squat, peeling, inoperational. It stood on black-tarred concrete at the end of the circus-ring - the flat roof of the upper storey of the buildings along Warden Road, which abutted our two-storey hillock, so that if you climbed over Buckingham Villa's boundary wall, flat black tar would be under your feet. And beneath black tar, Breach Candy Kindergarten School, from which, every afternoon during term, there rose the tinkling music of Miss Harrison's piano playing the unchanging tunes of childhood; and below that, the shops, Reader's Paradise, Fatbhoy Jewellery, Chimalker's Toys and Bombelli's, with its windows filled with One Yards of Chocolates. The door to the clocktower was supposed to be locked, but it was a cheap lock of a kind Nadir Khan would have recognized: made in India. And on three successive evenings immediately before my first birthday, Mary Pereira, standing by my window at night, noticed a shadowy figure floating across the roof, his hands full of shapeless objects, a shadow which filled her with an unidentifiable dread. After the third night, she told my mother; the police were summoned; and Inspector Vakeel returned to Methwold's Estate, accompanied by a special squad of crack officers - 'all deadeye shots. Begum Sahiba; just you leave it all to us!' - who, disguised as sweepers, with guns concealed under their rags, kept the clocktower under surveillance while sweeping up the dust in the circus-ring.
Night fell. Behind curtains and chick-blinds, the inhabitants of Methwold's Estate peered fearfully in the direction of the clocktower. Sweepers, absurdly, went about their duties in the dark. Johnny Vakeel took up a position on our verandah, rifle just out of sight... and, at midnight, a shadow came over the side wall of the Breach Candy school and made its way towards the tower, with a sack slung over one shoulder ... 'He must enter,' Vakeel had told Amina; 'Must be sure we get the proper johnny.' The johnny, padding across flat tarred roof, arrived at the tower; entered.
'Inspector Sahib, what are you waiting for?'
'Shhh, Begum, this is police Business; please go inside some way. We shall take him when he comes out; you mark my words. Caught,' Vakeel said with satisfaction, 'like a rat in a trap.'
'But who is he?'
'Who knows?' Vakeel shrugged. 'Some badmaash for sure. There are bad eggs everywhere these days.'
... And then the silence of the night is split like milk by a single, sawn-off shriek; somebody lurches against the inside of the clocktower door; it is wrenched open; there is a crash; and something streaks out on to black tarmac.
Inspector Vakeel leaps into action, swinging up his rifle, shooting from the hip like John Wayne; sweepers extract marksmen's weapons from their brushes and blaze away ... shrieks of excited women, yells of servants ... silence.
What lies, brown and black, banded and serpentine on the black tarmac? What, leaking black blood, provokes Dr Schaapsteker to screech from his top-floor vantage-point: 'You complete fools! Brothers of cockroaches! Sons of transvestites!' ... what, flick-tongued, dies while Vakeel races on to tarred roof?
And inside the clocktower door? What weight, falling, created such an almighty crash? Whose hand wrenched a door open; in whose heel are visible the two red, flowing holes, filled with a venom for which there is no known antivenene, a poison which has killed stablefuls of worn-out horses? Whose body is carried out of the tower by plain-clothes men, in a dead march, coffinless, with imitation sweepers for pallbearers? Why, when the moonlight falls upon the dead face, does Mary Pereira fall like a sack of potatoes to the floor, eyes rolling upwards in their sockets, in a sudden and dramatic faint?
And lining the interior walls of the clocktower: what are these strange mechanisms, attached to cheap time-pieces - why are there so many bottles with rags stuffed into their necks?
'Damn lucky you called my boys out, Begum Sahiba,' Inspector Vakeel is saying.
'That was Joseph D'Costa - on our Most Wanted list. Been after him for a year or thereabouts. Absolute black-hearted badmaash. You should see the walls inside that clocktower! Shelves, filled from floor to ceiling with Home-made bombs.
Enough explosive power to blow this hill into the sea!'
Melodrama piling upon melodrama; life acquiring the colouring of a Bombay talkie; snakes following ladders, ladders succeeding snakes; in the midst of too much incident, Baby Saleem fell ill. As if incapable of assimilating so many goings-on, he closed his eyes and became red and flushed. While Amina awaited the results of Ismail's case against the State authorities; while the Brass Monkey grew in her womb; while Mary entered a state of shock from which she would fully emerge only when Joseph's ghost returned to haunt her; while umbilical cord hung in pickle-jar and Mary's chutneys filled our dreams with pointing fingers; while Reverend Mother ran the kitchens, my grandfather examined me and said, 'I'm afraid there is no doubt; the poor lad has typhoid.'
'O God in heaven,' Reverend Mother cried out, 'What dark devil has come, whatsitsname, to sit upon this house?'
This is how I have heard the story of the illness which nearly stopped me before I'd started: day and night, at the end of August 1948, mother and grandfather looked after me; Mary dragged herself out of her guilt and pressed cold flannels to my forehead; Reverend Mother sang lullabies and spooned food into my mouth; even my father, forgetting momentarily his own disorders, stood flapping helplessly in the doorway. But the night came when Doctor Aziz, looking as broken as an old horse, said, 'There is nothing more I can do. He will be dead by morning.' And in the midst of wailing women and the incipient labour of my mother who had been pushed into it by grief and the tearing of Mary Pereira's hair there was a knock; a servant announced Dr Schaapsteker; who handed my grandfather a little bottle and said, 'I make no bones about it: this is kill or cure. Two drops exactly; then wait and see.'
My grandfather, sitting head in hands in the rubble of his medical learning, asked, 'What is it?' And Dr Schaapsteker, nearly eighty-two, tongue flicking at the corners of his mouth: 'Diluted venene of the king cobra. It has been known to work.'
Snakes can lead to triumph, just as ladders can be descended: my grandfather, knowing I would die anyway, administered the cobra poison. The family stood and watched while poison spread through the child's body ... and six hours later, my temperature had returned to normal. After that, my growth-rate lost its phenomenal aspects; but something was given in exchange for what was lost: life, and an early awareness of the ambiguity of snakes.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:30
In the afternoons of that summer, afternoons as hot as towels, the telephone would ring. When Ahmed Sinai was asleep in his room, with his keys under his pillow and umbilical cords in his almirah, telephonic shrilling penetrated the buzzing of the heat insects; and my mother, verruca-hobbled, came into the hall to answer. And now, what expression is this, staining her face the colour of drying blood? ... Not knowing that she's being observed, what fish-like flutterings of lips are these, what strangulated mouthings? ... And why, after listening for a full five minutes, does my mother say, in a voice like broken glass, 'Sorry: wrong number'? Why are diamonds glistening on her eyelids? ...
The Brass Monkey whispered to me, 'Next time it rings, let's find out.'
Five days later. Once more it is afternoon; but today Amina is away, visiting Nussie-the-duck, when the telephone demands attention. 'Quick! Quick or it'll wake him!' The Monkey, agile as her name, picks up the receiver before Ahmed Sinai has even changed the pattern of his snoring ... 'Hullo? Yaas? This is seven zero five six one; hullo?' We listen, every nerve on edge; but for a moment there is nothing at all. Then, when we're about to give up, the voice comes. '... Oh ... yes ... hullo ..." And the Monkey, shouting almost, 'Hullo?
Who is it, please?' Silence again; the voice, which has not been able to prevent itself from speaking, considers its answer; and then, '... Hullo... This is Shanti Prasad Truck Hire Company, please?...' And the Monkey, quick as a flash: 'Yes, what d'you want?' Another pause; the voice, sounding embarrassed, apologetic almost, says, 'I want to rent a truck.'
?feeble excuse of telephonic voice! ?transparent flummery of ghosts! The voice on the phone was no truck-renter's voice; it was soft, a little fleshy, the voice of a poet... but after that, the telephone rang regularly; sometimes my mother answered it, listened in silence while her mouth made fish-motions, and finally, much too late, said, 'Sorry, wrong number'; at other times the Monkey and I clustered around it, two ears to earpiece, while the Monkey took orders for trucks. I wondered: 'Hey, Monkey, what d'you think? Doesn't the guy ever wonder why the trucks don't arrive?' And she, wide-eyed, flutter-voiced: 'Man, do you suppose ... maybe they do!'
But I couldn't see how; and a tiny seed of suspicion was planted in me, a tiny glimmering of a notion that our mother might have a secret - our Amma! Who always said, 'Keep secrets and they'll go bad inside you; don't tell things and they'll give you stomach-ache!' - a minute spark which my experience in the washing-chest would fan into a forest fire. (Because this time, you see, she gave me proof.)
And now, at last, it is time for dirty laundry. Mary Pereira was fond of telling me, 'If you want to be a big man, baba, you must be very clean. Change clothes,'
she advised, 'take regular baths. Go, baba, or I'll send you to the washerman, and he'll wallop you on his stone.' She also threatened me with bugs: 'All right, stay filthy, you will be nobody's darling except the flies'. They will sit on you while you sleep; eggs they'll lay under your skin!' In part, my choice of hiding-place was an act of defiance. Braving dhobis and houseflies, I concealed myself in the unclean place; I drew strength and comfort from sheets and towels; my nose ran freely into the stone-doomed linens; and always, when I emerged into the world from my wooden whale, the sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.
One afternoon in June, I tiptoed down the corridors of the sleeping house towards my chosen refuge; sneaked past my sleeping mother into the white-tiled silence of her bathroom; lifted the lid off my goal; and plunged into its soft continuum of (predominantly white) textiles, whose only memories were of my earlier visits. Sighing softly, I pulled down the lid, and allowed pants and vests to massage away the pains of being alive, purposeless and nearly nine years old.
Electricity in the air. Heat, buzzing like bees. A mantle, hanging somewhere in the sky, waiting to fall gently around my shoulders ... somewhere, a finger reaches towards a dial; a dial whirs around and around, electrical pulses dart along cable, seven, zero, five, six, one, The telephone rings. Muffled shrilling of a bell penetrates the washing-chest, in which a nearlynineyearold boy lies uncomfortably concealed ... I, Saleem, became stiff with the fear of discovery, because now more noises entered the chest: squeak of bedsprings; soft clatter of slippers along corridor; the telephone, silenced in mid-shrill; and - or is this imagination? Was her voice too soft to hear? - the words, spoken too late as usual: 'Sorry. Wrong number.'
And now, hobbling footsteps returning to the bedroom; and the worst fears of the hiding boy are fulfilled. Doorknobs, turning, scream warnings at him; razor-sharp steps cut him deeply as they move across cool white dies. He stays frozen as ice, still as a stick; his nose drips silently into dirty clothes. A pajama-cord - snake-like harbinger of doom! - inserts itself into his left nostril. To sniff would be to die: he refuses to think about it.
... Clamped tight in the grip of terror, he finds his eye looking through a chink in dirty washing ... and sees a woman crying in a bathroom. Rain dropping from a thick black cloud. And now more sound, more motion: his mother's voice has begun to speak, two syllables, over and over again; and her hands have begun to move. Ears muffled by underwear strain to catch the sounds - that one: dir?
Bir? Dil? - and the other: Ha? Ra? No - Na. Ha and Ra are banished; Dil and Bir vanish forever; and the boy hears, in his ears, a name which has not been spoken since Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai: Nadir. Nadir. Na. Dir. Na.
And her hands are moving. Lost in their memory of other days, of what happened after games of hit-the-spittoon in an Agra cellar, they flutter gladly at her cheeks; they hold her bosom tighter than any brassieres; and now they caress her bare midriff, they stray below decks ... yes, this is what we used to do, my love, it was enough, enough for me, even though my father made us, and you ran, and now the telephone, Nadirnadirnadirnadirnadirnadir... hands which held telephone now hold flesh, while in another place what does another hand do? To what, after replacing receiver, is another hand getting up? ... No matter; because here, in her spied-out privacy, Amina Sinai repeats an ancient name, again and again, until finally she bursts out with, 'Arre Nadir Khan, where have you come from now?'
Secrets. A man's name. Never-before-glimpsed motions of the hands. A boy's mind filled with thoughts which have no shape, tormented by ideas which refuse to settle into words; and in a left nostril, a pajama-cord is snaking up up up, refusing to be ignored ... And now - ?shameless mother! Revealer of duplicity, of emotions which have no place in family life; and more: ?brazen unveiler of Black Mango! - Amina Sinai, drying her eyes, is summoned by a more trivial necessity; and as her son's right eye peers out through the wooden slats at the top of the washing-chest, my mother unwinds her sari! While I, silently in the washing-chest: 'Don't do it don't do it don't do!' ... but I cannot close my eye. Unblinking pupil takes in upside-down image of sari falling to the floor, an image which is, as usual, inverted by the mind; through ice-blue eyes I see a slip follow the sari; and then - ?horrible! - my mother, framed in laundry and slatted wood, bends over to pick up her clothes! And there it is, searing my retina - the vision of my mother's rump, black as night, rounded and curved, resembling nothing on earth so much as a gigantic, black Alfonso mango! In the washing-chest, unnerved by the vision, I wrestle with myself... self-control becomes simultaneously imperative and impossible ... under the thunderclap influence of the Black Mango, my nerve cracks; pajama-cord wins its victory; and while Amina Sinai seats herself on a commode, I ... what? Not sneeze; it was less than a sneeze. Not a twitch, either; it was more than that. It's time to talk plainly: shattered by two-syllabic voice and fluttering hands, devastated by Black Mango, the nose of Saleem Sinai, responding to the evidence of maternal
duplicity, quivering at the presence of maternal rump, gave way to a pajama-cord, and was possessed by a cataclysmic - a world-altering - an irreversible sniff. Pajama-cord rises painfully half an inch further up the nostril. But other things are rising, too: hauled by that feverish inhalation, nasal liquids are being sucked relentlessly up up up, nose-goo flowing upwards, against gravity, against nature. Sinuses are subjected to unbearable pressure ... until, inside the nearlynineyearold head, something bursts. Snot rockets through a breached dam into dark new channels. Mucus, rising higher than mucus was ever intended to rise. Waste fluid, reaching as far, perhaps, as the frontiers of the brain ... there is a shock. Something electrical has been moistened.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:30
Pain.
And then noise, deafening manytongued terrifying, inside his head!. ... Inside a white wooden washing-chest, within the darkened auditorium of my skull, my nose began to sing.
But just now there isn't time to listen; because one voice is very close indeed.
Amina Sinai has opened the lower door of the washing-chest; I am tumbling downdown with laundry wrapped around my head like a caul. Pajama-cord jerks out of my nose; and now there is lightning flashing through the dark clouds around my mother - and a refuge has been lost forever.
'I didn't look!' I squealed up through socks and sheets. I didn't see one thing, Ammi, I swear!!'
And years later, in a cane chair among reject towels and a radio announcing exaggerated war victories, .Amina would remember how with thumb and forefinger around the ear of her lying son she led him to Mary Pereira, who was sleeping as usual on a cane mat in a sky-blue room; how she said, 'This young donkey; this good-for-nothing from nowhere is not to speak for one whole day.'... And, just before the roof fell in on her, she said aloud: 'It was my fault. I brought him up too badly.' As the explosion of the bomb ripped through the air, she added, mildly but firmly, addressing her last words on earth to the ghost of a washing-chest: 'Go away now, I've seen enough On Mount Sinai, the prophet Musa or Moses heard disembodied commandments; on Mount Hira, the prophet Muhammad (also known as Mohammed, MaHomet, the Last-But-One, and Mahound) spoke to the Archangel. (Gabriel or Jibreel, as you please.) And on the stage of the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School, run 'under the auspices' of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society, my friend Cyrus-the-great, playing a female part as usual, heard the voices of St Joan speaking the sentences of Bernard Shaw. But Cyrus is the odd one out: unlike Joan, whose voices were heard in a field, but like Musa or Moses, like Muhammad the Penultimate, I heard voices on a hill.
Muhammad (on whose name be peace, let me add; I don't want to offend anyone)
heard a voice saying, 'Recite!' and thought he was going mad; I heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio; and with lips sealed by maternal command, I was unable to ask for comfort. Muhammad, at forty, sought and received reassurance from wife and friends: 'Verily,' they told him, 'you are the Messenger of God'; I, suffering my punishment at nearlynine, could neither seek Brass Monkey's assistance nor solicit softening words from Mary Pereira. Muted for an evening and a night and a morning, I struggled, alone, to understand what had happened to me; until at last I saw the shawl of genius fluttering down, like an embroidered butterfly, the mantle of greatness settling upon my shoulders.
In the heat of that silent night (I was silent; outside me, the sea rustled like distant paper; crows squawked in the throes of their feathery nightmares; the puttering noises of tardy taxi-cabs wafted up from Warden Road; the Brass Monkey, before she fell asleep with her face frozen into a mask of curiosity, begged, 'Come on, Saleem; nobody's listening; what did you do? Tell tell tell!'
... while, inside me, the voices rebounded against the walls of my skull) I was gripped by hot fingers of excitement - the agitated insects of excitement danced in my stomach - because finally, in some way I did not then fully understand, the door which Toxy Catrack had once nudged in my head had been forced open; and through it I could glimpse -shadowy still, undefined, enigmatic - my reason for having been born.
Gabriel or Jibreel told Muhammad: 'Recite!' And then began The Recitation, known in Arabic as Al-Quran: 'Recite: In the Name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood ..." That was on Mount Hira outside Mecca Sharif; on a two-storey hillock opposite Breach Candy Pools, voices also instructed me to recite: Tomorrow!' I thought excitedly. 'Tomorrow!'
By sunrise, I had discovered that the voices could be controlled - I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will; switch off my newly-discovered inner ear. It was astonishing how soon fear left me; by morning, I was thinking, 'Man, this is better than All-India Radio, man; better than Radio Ceylon!'
To demonstrate the loyalty of sisters: when the twenty-four hours were up, on the dot, the Brass Monkey ran into my mother's bedroom. (It was, I think, a Sunday: no school. Or perhaps not - that was the summer of the language marches, and the schools were often shut, because of the danger of violence on the bus-routes.)
'The time's up!' she exclaimed, shaking my mother out of sleep. 'Amma, wake up: it's time: can he talk now?'
'All right,' my mother said, coming into a sky-blue room to embrace me, 'you're forgiven now. But never hide in there again ...'
'Amma,' I said eagerly, 'my Ammi, please listen. I must tell you something.
Something big. But please, please first of all, wake Abba.'
And after a period of 'What?' 'Why?' and 'Certainly not,' my mother saw something extraordinary sitting in my eyes and went to wake Ahmed Sinai anxiously, with 'Janum, please come. I don't know what's got into Saleem.'
Family and ayah assembled in the sitting-room. Amid cut-glass vases and plump cushions, standing on a Persian rug beneath the swirling shadows of ceiling-fans, I smiled into their anxious eyes and prepared my revelation. This was it; the beginning of the repayment of their investment; my first dividend - first, I was sure, of many ... my black mother, lip-jutting father, Monkey of a sister and crime-concealing ayah waited in hot confusion.
Get it out. Straight, without frills. 'You should be the first to know,' I said, trying to give my speech the cadences of adulthood. And then I told them. 'I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think - Ammi, Abboo, I really think - that Archangels have started to talk to me.'
There! I thought. There! It's said! Now there will be pats on the back, sweetmeats, public announcements, maybe more photographs; now their chests will puff up with pride. ?blind innocence of childhood! For my honesty - for my open-hearted desperation to please - I was set upon from all sides. Even the Monkey: 'O God, Saleem, all this tamasha, all this performance, for one of your stupid cracks?' And worse than the Monkey was Mary Pereira: 'Christ Jesus! Save, us, Lord! Holy Father in Rome, such blasphemy I've heard today!' And worse than Mary Pereira was my mother Amina Sinai: Black Mango concealed now, her own unnameable names still warm upon her lips, she cried, 'Heaven forfend! The child will bring down the roof upon our heads!' (Was that my fault, too?) And Amina continued: 'You black man! Goonda! ?Saleem, has your brain gone raw? What has happened to my darling baby boy - are you growing into a madman - a torturer!?'
And worse than Amina's shrieking was my father's silence; worse than her fear was the wild anger sitting on his forehead; and worst of all was my father's hand, which stretched out suddenly, thick-fingered, heavy-jointed,
strong-as-an-ox,to fetch me a mighty blow on the side of my head, so that I could never hear properly in my left ear after that day; so that I fell sideways across the startled room through the scandalized air and shattered a green tabletop of opaque glass; so that, having been certain of myself for the first time in my life, I was plunged into a green, glass-cloudy world filled with cutting edges, a world in which I could no longer tell the people who mattered most about the goings-on inside my head; green shards lacerated my hands as I entered that swirling universe in which I was doomed, until it was far too late, to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for.
In a white-tiled bathroom beside a washing-chest, my mother daubed me with Mercurochrome; gauze veiled my cuts, while through the door my father's voice commanded, 'Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me? Let him enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!'
That night, Amina Sinai would dream of Ramram Seth, who was floating six inches above the ground, his eye-sockets filled with egg-whites, intoning: 'Washing will hide him ... voices will guide him' ... but when, after several days in which the dream sat upon her shoulders wherever she went, she plucked up the courage to ask her disgraced son a little more about his outrageous claim, he replied in a voice as restrained as the unwept tears of his childhood: 'It was just fooling, Amma. A stupid joke, like you said.'
She died, nine years later, without discovering the truth.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:30
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars' faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves - or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality ... we have come from 1915 to 1956, so we're a good deal closer to the screen... abandoning my metaphor, then, I reiterate, entirely without a sense of shame, my unbelievable claim: after a curious accident in a washing-chest, I became a sort of radio.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:31
... But today, I feel confused. Padma has not returned - should I alert the police? Is she a Missing Person? - and in her absence, my certainties are falling apart. Even my nose has been playing tricks on me - by day, as I stroll between the pickle-vats tended by our army of strong, hairy-armed, formidably competent women, I have found myself failing to distinguish lemon-odours from lime. The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor sahib has been crossed in - what? - surely not love? ... Padma, and the cracks spreading all over me, radiating like a spider's web from my navel; and the heat... a little confusion is surely permissible in these circumstances. Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:31
Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything - to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?
Today, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began ...
Ye Akashvani hai. This is All-India Radio.
Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani cafe, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light with only a cheap transistor for company. A hot night; bubbling air filled with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle-vats; voices in the dark. Pickle-fumes, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then ... it was hot then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat... it was not the voices (then or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea - the idea that his parents' outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their love; that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deformity ... while I, now, Padma-less, send these words into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he ... I no longer have his gift; he never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost ... he had no cracks. No spiders' webs spread through him in the heat.
Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook.
And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive through the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize impotence - ever since the notorious free-transistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented what men could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied) ... then, the nearlynineyearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines.
Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat-haze, then and now, blurs his then-time into mine ... my confusion, travelling across the heat-waves, is also his.
What grows best in the heat: cane-sugar; the coconut palm; certain millets such as bajra, ragi and jowar; linseed, and (given water) tea and rice. Our hot land is also the world's second largest producer of cotton - at least, it was when I learned geography under the mad eye of Mr Emil Zagallo, and the steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador. But the tropical summer grows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom, to fill the close perspiring nights with odours as heavy as musk, which give men dark dreams of discontent... then as now, unease was in the air. Language marchers demanded the partition of the state of Bombay along linguistic boundaries - the dream of Maharashtra was at the head of some processions, the mirage of Gujarat led the others forward. Heat, gnawing at the mind's divisions between fantasy and reality, made anything seem possible; the half-waking chaos of afternoon siestas fogged men's brains, and the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires.
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.
In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through the daytime streets; by night, they rioted in my head. We shall be watching your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.
It's time to talk about the voices.
But if only our Padma were here ...
I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father's hand - walloping my ear in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another, bodiless hand, which once hit him full in the face - at least had one salutary effect: it obliged me to reconsider and finally to abandon my original, Prophet-apeing position. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I withdrew deep inside myself, despite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue room with her pesterings: 'But what did you do it for, Saleem? You who're always too good and all?' ... until she fell into dissatisfied sleep with her mouth still working silently, and I was alone with the echoes of my father's violence, which buzzed in my left ear, which whispered, 'Neither Michael nor Anael; not Gabriel; forget Cassiel, Sachiel and Samael! Archangels no longer speak to mortals; the Recitation was completed in Arabia long ago; the last prophet will come only to announce the End.' That night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not after all been chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far from being scared, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust.
Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you're always reading about in the sensational magazines. But I ask for patience - wait. Only wait. It was telepathy; but also more than telepathy. Don't write me off too easily.
Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience - before I began to act - there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Luck-now Urdu to the Southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surface transmissions - the front-of-mind stuff which is what I'd originally been picking up - language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words ... but that was after I heard, beneath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other precious signals, utterly different from everything else, most of them faint and distant, like far-off drums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke through the fish-market cacophony of my voices... those secret, nocturnal calk, like calling out to like ... the unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signalling nothing more than their existence, transmitting simply: 'I.' From far to the North, 'I.' And the South East West: 'I.' 'I.' 'And I.'
But I mustn't get ahead of myself. In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening; and soon I was able to 'tune' my inner ear to those voices which I could understand; nor was it long before I picked out, from the throng, the voices of my own family; and of Mary Pereira; and of friends, classmates, teachers. In the street, I learned how to identify the mind-stream of passing strangers - the laws of Doppler shift continued to operate in these paranormal realms, and the voices grew and diminished as the strangers passed.
All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father's wrath, and anxious to keep my right ear in good working order, I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy, the difficulties of concealing knowledge are almost insurmountable; but fortunately, my nearest and dearest were as anxious to forget my outburst as I was to conceal the truth.
'O, you Saleem! Such things you talked yesterday! Shame on you, boy: you better go wash out your mouth with soap!'... The morning after my disgrace, Mary Pereira, shaking with indignation like one of her jellies, suggested the perfect means of my rehabilitation. Bowing my head contritely, I went, without a word, into the bathroom, and there, beneath the amazed gaze of ayah and Monkey, scrubbed teeth tongue roofofmouth gums with a toothbrush covered in the sharp foul lather of Coal Tar Soap. The news of my dramatic atonement rushed rapidly around the house, borne by Mary and Monkey; and my mother embraced me, 'There, good boy; we'll say no more about it,' and Ahmed Sinai nodded gruffly at the breakfast table, 'At least the boy has the grace to admit when he's gone too far.'
As my glass-inflicted cuts faded, it was as though my announcement was also erased; and by the time of my ninth birthday, nobody besides myself remembered anything about the day when I had taken the name of Archangels in vain. The taste of detergent lingered on my tongue for many weeks, reminding me of the need for secrecy.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:31
Even the Brass Monkey was satisfied by my show of contrition - in her eyes, I had returned to form, and was once more the goody-two-shoes of the family. To demonstrate her willingness to re-establish the old order, she set fire to my mother's favourite slippers, and regained her rightful place in the family doghouse. Amongst outsiders, what's more - displaying a conservatism you'd never have suspected in such a tomboy - she closed ranks with my parents, and kept my one aberration a secret from her friends and mine.
In a country where any physical or mental peculiarity in a child is a source of deep family shame, my parents, who had become accustomed to facial birthmarks, cucumber-nose and bandy legs, simply refused to see any more embarrassing things in me; for my part, I did not once mention the buzzings in my ear, the occasional ringing bells of deafness, the intermittent pain. I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing.
But imagine the confusion inside my head! Where, behind the hideous face, above the tongue tasting of soap, hard by the perforated eardrum, lurked a not-very-tidy mind, as full of bric-a-brac as nine-year-old pockets ... imagine yourself inside me somehow, looking out through my eyes, hearing the noise, the voices, and now the obligation of not letting people know, the hardest part was acting surprised, such as when my mother said Hey Saleem guess what we're going for a picnic to the Aarey Milk Colony and I had to go Ooo, exciting!, when I had known all along because I had heard her unspoken inner voice And on my birthday seeing all the presents in the donors' minds before they were even unwrapped And the treasure hunt ruined because there in my father's head was the location of each clue every prize And much harder things such as going to see my father in his ground-floor office, here we are, and the moment I'm in there my head is full of godknowswhat rot because he's thinking about his secretary, Alice or Fernanda, his latest Coca-Cola girl, he's undressing her slowly in his head and it's in my head too, she's sitting stark naked on a cane-bottomed chair and now getting up, crisscross marks all across her rump, that's my father thinking, MY FATHER, now he's looking at me all funny What's the matter son don't you feel well Yes fine Abba fine, must go now GOT TO GET AWAY Homework to do, Abba, and out, run away before he sees the clue on your face (my father always said that when I was lying there was a red light flashing on my forehead)... You see how hard it is, my uncle Hanif comes to take me to the wrestling, and even before we've arrived at Vallabhbai Patel Stadium on Hornby Vellard I'm feeling sad
We're walking with the crowds past giant cardboard cut-outs of Dara Singh and Tagra Baba and the rest and his sadness, my favourite uncle's sadness is pouring into me, it lives like a lizard just beneath the hedge of his jollity, concealed by his booming laugh which was once the laugh of the boatman Tai, we're sitting in excellent seats as floodlights dance on the backs of the interlocked wrestlers and I am caught in the unbreakable grip of my uncle's grief, the grief of his failing film career, flop after flop, he'll probably never get a film again But I mustn't let the sadness leak out of my eyes He's butting into my thoughts, hey phaelwan, hey little wrestler, what's dragging your face down, it looks longer than a bad movie, you want channa? pakoras? what? And me shaking my head, No, nothing, Hanif mamu, so that he relaxes, turns away, starts yelling Ohe come on Dara, that's the ticket, give him hell, Dara yara! And back Home my mother squatting in the corridor with the ice-cream tub, saying with her real outside-voice, You want to help me make it, son, your favourite pistachio flavour, and I'm turning the handle, but her inside-voice is bouncing against the inside of my head, I can see how she's trying to fill up every nook and cranny of her thoughts with everyday things, the price of pom-fret, the roster of household chores, must call in the electrician to mend the ceiling-fan in the dining-room, how she's desperately concentrating on parts of her husband to love, but the unmentionable word keeps finding room, the two syllables which leaked out of her in the bathroom that day, Na Dir Na Dir Na, she's finding it harder and harder to put down the telephone when the wrong numbers come MY MOTHER I tell you when a boy gets inside grown-up thoughts they can really mess him up completely And even at night, no respite, I wake up at the stroke of midnight with Mary Pereira's dreams inside my head Night after night
Always at my personal witching-hour, which also has meaning for her Her dreams are plagued by the image of a man who has been dead for years, Joseph D'Costa, the dream tells me the name, it is coated with a guilt I cannot understand, the same guilt which seeps into us all every time we eat her chutneys, there is a mystery here but because the secret is not in the front of her mind I can't find it out, and meanwhile Joseph is there, each night, sometimes in human form, but not always, sometimes he's a wolf, or a snail, once a broomstick, but we (she-dreaming, I-looking in) know it's him, baleful implacable accusative, cursing her in the language of his incarnations, howling at her when he's wolf-Joseph, covering her in the slime-trails of Joseph-the-snail, beating her with the Business end of his broomstick incarnation ... and in the morning when she's telling me to bathe clean up get ready for school I have to bite back the questions, I am nine years old and lost in the confusion of other people's lives which are blurring together in the heat.
To end this account of the early days of my transformed life, I must add one painful confession: it occurred to me that I could improve my parents' opinion of me by using my new faculty to help out with my schoolwork - in short, I began to cheat in class. That is to say, I tuned in to the inner voices of my schoolteachers and also of my cleverer classmates, and picked information out of their minds. I found that very few of my masters could set a test without rehearsing the ideal answers in their minds - and I knew, too, that on those rare occasions when the teacher was preoccupied by other things, his private love-life or financial difficulties, the solutions could always be found in the precocious, prodigious mind of our class genius, Cyrus-the-great. My marks began to improve dramatically - but not overly so, because I took care to make my versions different from their stolen originals; even when I telepathi-cally cribbed an entire English essay from Cyrus, I added a number of mediocre touches of my own. My purpose was to avoid suspicion; I did not, but I escaped discovery. Under Emil Zagallo's furious, interrogating eyes I remained innocently seraphic; beneath the bemused, head-shaking perplexity of Mr Tandon the English master I worked my treachery in silence - knowing that they would not believe the truth even if, by chance or folly, I spilled the beans.
Let me sum up: at a crucial point in the history of our child-nation, at a time when Five Year Plans were being drawn up and elections were approaching and language marchers were fighting over Bombay, a nine-year-old boy named Saleem Sinai acquired a miraculous gift. Despite the many vital uses to which his abilities could have been put by his impoverished, underdeveloped country, he chose to conceal his talents, frittering them away on inconsequential voyeurism and petty cheating. This behaviour - not, I confess, the behaviour of a hero - was the direct result of a confusion in his mind, which invariably muddled up morality - the desire to do what is right - and popularity - the rather more dubious desire to do what is approved of. Fearing parental ostracism, he suppressed the news of his transformation; seeking parental congratulations, he abused his talents at school. This flaw in his character can partially be excused on the grounds of his tender years; but only partially. Confused thinking was to bedevil much of his career.
I can be quite tough in my self-judgements when I choose.
What stood on the flat roof of the Breach Candy Kindergarten - a roof, you will recall, which could be reached from the garden of Buckingham Villa, simply by climbing over a boundary wall? What, no longer capable of performing the function for which it was designed, watched over us that year when even the winter forgot to cool down - what observed Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice, Hairoil, and myself, as we played kabaddi, and French Cricket, and seven-tiles, with the occasional participation of Cyrus-the-great and of other, visiting friends: Fat Perce Fishwala and Glandy Keith Colaco? What was present on the frequent occasions when Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi-Appah yelled down from the top floor of Homi's Home: 'Brats! Rackety good-for-nothings! Shut your noise!' ... so that we all ran away, returning (when she vanished from our sight) to make mute faces at the window at which she'd stood? In short, what was it, tall and blue and flaking, which oversaw our lives, which seemed, for a while, to be marking time, waiting not only for the nearby time when we would put on long trousers, but also, perhaps, for the coming of Evie Burns? Perhaps you'd like clues: what had once hidden bombs? In what had Joseph D'Costa died of snake-bite? ...
When, after some months of inner torment, I at last sought refuge from grown-up voices, I found it in an old clocktower, which nobody bothered to lock; and here, in the solitude of rusting time, I paradoxically took my first tentative steps towards that involvement with mighty events and public lives from which I would never again be free ... never, until the Widow ...
Banned from washing-chests, I began, whenever possible, to creep unobserved into the tower of crippled hours. When the circus-ring was emptied by heat or chance or prying eyes; when Ahmed and Amina went off to the Willingdon Club for canasta evenings; when the Brass Monkey was away, hanging around her newly-acquired heroines, the Walsingham School for Girls' swimming and diving team ... that is to say, when circumstances permitted, I entered my secret hideout, stretched out on the straw mat I'd stolen from the servants' quarters, closed my eyes, and let my newly-awakened inner ear (connected, like all ears, to my nose) rove freely around the city - and further, north and south, east and west - listening in to all manner of things. To escape the intolerable pressures of eavesdropping on people I knew, I practised my art upon strangers. Thus my entry into public affairs of India occurred for entirely ignoble reasons - upset by too much intimacy, I used the world outside our hillock for light relief.
The world as discovered from a broken-down clocktower: at first, I was no more than a tourist, a child peeping through the miraculous peepholes of a private 'Dilli-dekho' machine. Dugdugee-drums rattled in my left (damaged) ear as I gained my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the eyes of a fat Englishwoman suffering from the tummy-runs; after which, to balance south against north, I hopped down to Madurai's Meenakshi temple and nestled amongst the woolly, mystical perceptions of a chanting priest. I toured Connaught Place in New Delhi in the guise of an auto-rickshaw driver, complaining bitterly to my fares about the rising price of gasoline; in Calcutta I slept rough in a section of drainpipe. By now thoroughly bitten by the travel bug, I zipped down to Cape Comorin and became a fisher-woman whose sari was as tight as her morals were loose ... standing on red sands washed by three seas, I flirted with Dravidian beachcombers in a language I couldn't understand; then up into the Himalayas, into the neanderthal moss-covered hut of a Goojar tribal, beneath the glory of a completely circular rainbow and the tumbling moraine of the Kolahoi glacier. At the golden fortress of Jaisalmer I sampled the inner life of a woman making mirrorwork dresses and at Khajuraho I was an adolescent village boy, deeply embarrassed by the erotic, Tahtric carvings on the Chandela temples standing in the fields, but unable to tear away my eyes ... in the exotic simplicities of travel I was able to find a modicum of peace. But, in the end, tourism ceased to satisfy; curiosity began to niggle; 'Let's find out,' I told myself, 'what really goes on around here.'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:31
With the eclectic spirit of my nine years spurring me on, I leaped into the heads of film stars and cricketers - I learned the truth behind the Filmfare gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala, and I was at the crease with Polly Umrigar at the Brabourne Stadium; I was Lata Mangeshkar the playback singer and Bubu the clown at the circus behind Civil Lines ... and inevitably, through the ramdom processes of my mind-hopping, I discovered politics.
At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my pajama-cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire ... at another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage as usual: I was two months old and my mother had run out of breast-milk. I occupied, briefly, the mind of a Congress Party worker, bribing a village schoolteacher to throw his weight behind the party of Gandhi and Nehru in the coming election campaign; also the thoughts of a Keralan peasant who had decided to vote Communist. My daring grew: one afternoon I deliberately invaded the head of our own State Chief Minister, which was how I discovered, over twenty years before it became a national joke, that Morarji Desai 'took his own water' daily ... I was inside him, tasting the warmth as he gurgled down a frothing glass of urine. And finally I hit my highest point: I became Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister and author of framed letters: I sat with the great man amongst a bunch of gaptoothed, stragglebeard astrologers and adjusted the Five Year Plan to bring it into harmonic alignment with the music of the spheres ... the high life is a heady thing. 'Look at me!' I exulted silently. 'I can go any place I want!'
In that tower which had once been filled choc-a-bloc with the explosive devices of Joseph D'Costa's hatred, this phrase (accompanied by appropriate ticktock sound effects) plopped fully-formed into my thoughts: 'I am the tomb in Bombay .. .watch me explode!'
Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen ...
which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift.
'I can find out any damn thing!' I triumphed, 'There isn't a thing I cannot know!'
Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the spirit of self-aggrandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an instinct for self-preservation. If I had not believed myself in control of the flooding multitudes, their massed identities would have annihilated mine ... but there in my clocktower, filled with the cockiness of my,glee, I became Sin, the ancient moon-god (no, not Indian: I've imported him from Hadhramaut of old), capable of acting-at-a-distance and shifting the tides of the world.
But death, when it visited Methwold's Estate, still managed to take me by surprise.
Even though the freezing of his assets had ended many years ago, the zone below Ahmed Sinai's waist had remained as cold as ice. Ever since the day he had cried out, 'The bastards are shoving my balls in an ice-bucket!', and Amina had taken them in her hands to warm them so that her fingers got glued to them by the cold, his sex had lain dormant, a woolly elephant in an iceberg, like the one they found in Russia in '56. My mother Amina, who had married for children, felt the uncreated lives rotting in her womb and blamed herself for becoming unattractive to him, what with her corns and all. She discussed her unhappiness with Mary Pereira, but the ayah only told her that there was no Happiness to be gained from 'the mens'; they made pickles together as they talked, and Amina stirred her disappointments into a hot lime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes.
Although Ahmed Sinai's office hours were filled with fantasies of secretaries taking dictation in the nude, visions of his Fernandas or Poppys strolling around the room in their birthday suits with crisscross cane-marks on their rumps, his apparatus refused to respond; and one day, when the real Fernanda or Poppy had gone Home, he was playing chess with Dr Narlikar, his tongue (as well as his game) made somewhat loose by djinns, and he confided awkwardly, 'Narlikar, I seem to have lost interest in you-know-what.'
A gleam of pleasure radiated from the luminous gynaecologist; the birth-control fanatic in the dark, glowing doctor leaped out through his eyes and made the following speech: 'Bravo!' Dr Narlikar cried, 'Brother Sinai, damn good show! You - and, may I add, myself - yes, you and I, Sinai bhai, are persons of rare spiritual worth! Not for us the panting humiliations of the flesh - is it not a finer thing, I ask you, to eschew procreation - to avoid adding one more miserable human life to the vast multitudes which are presently beggaring our country - and, instead, to bend our energies to the task of giving them more land to stand on? I tell you, my friend: you and I and our tetrapods: from the very oceans we shall bring forth soil!' To consecrate this oration, Ahmed Sinai poured drinks; my father and Dr Narlikar drank a toast to their four-legged concrete dream.
'Land, yes! Love, no!' Dr Narlikar said, a little unsteadily; my father refilled his glass.
By the last days of 1956, the dream of reclaiming land from the sea with the aid of thousands upon thousands of large concrete tetrapods - that same dream which had been the cause of the freeze -and which was now, for my father, a sort of surrogate for the sexual activity which the aftermath of the freeze denied him - actually seemed to be coming close to fruition. This time, however, Ahmed Sinai was spending his money cautiously; this time he remained hidden in the background, and his name appeared on no documents; this time, he had learned the lessons of the freeze and was determined to draw as little attention to himself as possible; so that when Dr Narlikar betrayed him by dying, leaving behind him no record of my father's involvement in the tetrapod scheme, Ahmed Sinai (who was prone, as we have seen, to react badly in the face of disaster) was swallowed up by the mouth of a long, snaking decline from which he would not emerge until, at the very end of his days, he at last fell in love with his wife.
This is the story that got back to Methwold's Estate: Dr Narlikar had been visiting friends near Marine Drive; at the end of the visit, he had resolved to stroll down to Chowpatty Beach and buy himself some bhel-puri and a little coconut milk. As he strolled briskly along the pavement by the sea-wall, he overtook the tail-end of a language march, which moved slowly along, chanting peacefully. Dr Narlikar neared the place where, with the Municipal Corporation's permission, he had arranged for a single, symbolic tetrapod to be placed upon the sea-wall, as a kind of icon pointing the way to the future; and here he noticed a thing which made him lose his reason. A group of beggar-women had clustered around the tetrapod and were performing the rite of puja. They had lighted oil-lamps at the base of the object; one of them had painted the 铎-symbol on its upraised tip; they were chanting prayers as they gave the tetrapod a thorough and worshipful wash. Technological miracle had been transformed into Shiva-lingam; Doctor Narlikar, the opponent of fertility, was driven wild at this vision, in which it seemed to him that all the old dark priapic forces of ancient, procreative India had been unleashed upon the beauty of sterile twentieth-century concrete ... sprinting along, he shouted his abuse at the worshipping women, gleaming fiercely in his rage; reaching them, he kicked away their little dia-lamps; it is said he even tried to push the women.
And he was seen by the eyes of the language marchers.
The ears of the language marchers heard the roughness of his tongue; the marchers' feet paused, their voices rose in rebuke. Fists were shaken; oaths were oathed. Whereupon the good doctor, made incautious by anger, turned upon the crowd and denigrated its cause, its breeding and its sisters. A silence fell and exerted its powers. Silence guided marcher-feet towards the gleaming gynaecologist, who stood between the tetrapod and the wailing women. In silence the marchers' hands reached out towards Narlikar and in a deep hush he clung to four-legged concrete as they attempted to pull him towards them. In absolute soundlessness, fear gave Dr Narlikar the strength of limpets; his arms stuck to the tetrapod and would not be detached. The marchers applied themselves to the tetrapod ... silently they began to rock it; mutely the force of their numbers overcame its weight. In an evening seized by a demonic quietness the tetrapod tilted, preparing to become the first of its kind to enter the waters and begin the great work of land reclamation. Dr Suresh Narlikar, his mouth opening in a voiceless A, clung to it like a phosphorescent mollusc ... man and four-legged concrete fell without a sound. The splash of the waters broke the spell.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:31
It was said that when Dr Narlikar fell and was crushed into death by the weight of his beloved obsession, nobody had any trouble locating the body because it sent light glowing upwards through the waters like a fire.
'Do you know what's happening?' 'Hey, man, what gives?' - children, myself included, clustered around the garden hedge of Escorial Villa, in which was Dr Narlikar's bachelor apartment; and a hamal of Lila Sabarmati's, taking on an air of grave dignity, informed us, 'They have brought his death Home, wrapped in silk.'
I was not allowed to see the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay wreathed in saffron flowers on his hard, single bed; but I got to know all about it anyway, because the news of it spread far beyond the confines of his room. Mostly, I heard about it from the Estate servants, who found it quite natural to speak openly of a death, but rarely said much about life, because in life everything was obvious.
From Dr Narlikar's own bearer I learned that the death had, by swallowing large quantities of the sea, taken on the qualities of water: it had become a fluid thing, and looked happy, sad or indifferent according to how the light hit it.
Homi Catrack's gardener interjected: 'It is dangerous to look too long at death; otherwise you come away with a little of it inside you, and there are effects.'
We asked: effects? what effects? which effects? how? And Purushottam the sadhu, who had left his place under the Buckingham Villa garden tap for the first time in years, said: 'A death makes the living see themselves too clearly; after they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated.' This extraordinary claim was, in fact, borne out by events, because afterwards Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi-Appah, who had helped to clean up the body, became shriller, more shrewish, more terrifying than ever; and it seemed that everyone who saw the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay in state was affected, Nussie Ibrahim became even sillier and more of a duck, and Lila Sabarmati, who lived upstairs from the death and had helped to arrange its room, afterwards gave in to a promiscuity which had always been lurking within her, and set herself on a road at whose end there would be bullets, and her husband Commander Sabarmati conducting the Colaba traffic with a most unusual baton ...
Our family, however, stayed away from the death. My father refused to go and pay his respects, and would never refer to his late friend by name, calling him simply: 'that traitor'.
Two days later, when the news had been in the papers, Dr Narlikar suddenly acquired an enormous family of female relations. Having been a bachelor and misogynist all his life, he was engulfed, in death, by a sea of giant, noisy, omnicompetent women, who came crawling out from strange corners of the city, from milking jobs at Amul Dairies and from the box-offices of cinemas, from street-side soda-fountains and unhappy marriages; in a year of processions the Narlikar women formed their own parade, an enormous stream of outsize womanhood flowing up our two-storey hillock to fill Dr Narlikar's apartment so full that from the road below you could see their elbows sticking out of the windows and their behinds overflowing on to the verandah. For a week nobody got any sleep because the wailing of the Narlikar women filled the air; but beneath their howls the women were proving as competent as they looked. They took over the running of the Nursing Home; they investigated all of Narlikar's Business deals; and they cut my father out of the tetrapod deal just as coolly as you please.
After all those years my father was left with nothing but a hole in his pocket, while the women took Narlikar's body to Benares to have it cremated, and the Estate servants whispered to me that they had heard how the Doctor's ashes were sprinkled on the waters of Holy Ganga at Manikarnika-ghat at dusk, and they did not sink, but floated on the surface of the water like tiny glowing firebugs, and were washed out to sea where their strange luminosity must have frightened the captains of ships.
As for Ahmed Sinai: I swear that it was after Narlikar's death and the arrival of the women that he began, literally, to fade... gradually his skin paled, his hair lost its colour, until within a few months he had become entirely white except for the darkness of his eyes. (Mary Pereira told Amina: 'That man is cold in the blood; so now his skin has made ice, white ice like a fridge.') I should say, in all honesty, that although he pretended to be worried by his transformation into a white man, and went to see doctors and so forth, he was secretly rather pleased when they failed to explain the problem or prescribe a cure, because he had long envied Europeans their pigmentation. One day, when it was permissible to make jokes again (a decent interval had been allowed to elapse after Dr Narlikar's death), he told Lila Sabarmati at the cocktail hour: 'All the best people are white under the skin; I have merely given up pretending.' His neighbours, all of whom were darker than he, laughed politely and felt curiously ashamed.
Circumstantial evidence indicates that the shock of Narlikar's death was responsible for giving me a snow-white father to set beside my ebony mother; but (although I don't know how much you're prepared to swallow) I shall risk giving an alternative explanation, a theory developed in the abstract privacy of my clocktower... because during my frequent psychic travels, I discovered something rather odd: during the first nine years after Independence, a similar pigmentation disorder (whose first recorded victim may well have been the Rani of Cooch Naheen) afflicted large numbers of the nation's business community. All over India, I stumbled across good Indian businessmen, their fortunes thriving thanks to the first Five Year Plan, which had concentrated on building up commerce... businessmen who had become or were becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destinies had drained the colour from their cheeks ... in which case, perhaps my father was a late victim of a widespread, though generally unremarked phenomenon. The Businessmen of India were turning white.
That's enough to chew on for one day. But Evelyn Lilith Burns is coming; the Pioneer Cafe is getting painfully close; and - more vitally - midnight's other children, including my alter ego Shiva, he of the deadly knees, are pressing extremely hard. Soon the cracks will be wide enough for them to escape ...
By the way: some time around the end of 1956, in all probability, the singer and cuckold Wee Willie Winkie also met his death.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:32
During Ramzan, the month of fasting, we went to the movies as often as we could.
After being shaken awake at five a.m. by my mother's assiduous hand; after pre-dawn breakfasts of melon and sugared lime-water, and especially on Sunday mornings, the Brass Monkey and I took it in turns (or sometimes called out in unison) to remind Amina: 'The ten-thirty-in-the-morning show! It's Metro Cub Club day, Amma, pleeeese!' Then the drive in the Rover to the cinema where we would taste neither Coca-Cola nor potato crisps, neither Kwality ice-cream nor samosas in greasy paper; but at least there was air-conditioning, and Cub Club badges pinned to our clothes, and competitions, and birthday-announcements made by a compere with an inadequate moustache; and finally, the film, after the trailers with their introductory titles, 'Next Attraction' and 'Coming Soon', and the cartoon ('In A Moment, The Big Film; But First ... !'): Quentin Durward, perhaps, or Scaramouche. 'Swashbuckling!' we'd say to one another afterwards, playing movie critic; and, 'A rumbustious, bawdy romp!' - although we were ignorant of swashbuckles and bawdiness. There was not much praying in our family (except on Eid-ul-Fitr, when my father took me to the Friday mosque to celebrate the holiday by tying a handkerchief around my head and pressing my forehead to the ground) ... but we were always willing to fast, because we liked the cinema.
Evie Burns and I agreed: the world's greatest movie star was Robert Taylor. I also liked Jay Silverheels as Tonto; but his kemo-sabay, Clayton Moore, was too fat for the Lone Ranger, in my view.
Evelyn Lilith Burns arrived on New Year's Day, 1957, to take up residence with her widower father in an apartment in one of the two squat, ugly concrete blocks which had grown up, almost without pur noticing them, on the lower reaches of our hillock, and which were oddly segregated: Americans and other foreigners lived (like Evie) in Noor Ville; arriviste Indian success-stories ended up in Laxmi Vilas. From the heights of Methwold's Estate, we looked down on them all, on white and brown alike; but nobody ever looked down on Evie Burns - except once. Only once did anyone get on top of her.
Before I climbed into my first pair of long pants, I fell in love with Evie; but love was a curious, chain-reactive thing that year. To save time, I shall place all of us in the same row at the Metro cinema; Robert Taylor is mirrored in our eyes as we sit in flickering trances -and also in symbolic sequence: Saleem Sinai is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Evie Burns who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Sonny Ibrahim who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with the Brass Monkey who is sitting next to the aisle and feeling starving hungry ... I loved Evie for perhaps six months of my life; two years later, she was back in America, knifing an old woman and being sent to reform school.
A brief expression of my gratitude is in order at this point: if Evie had not come to live amongst us, my story might never have progressed beyond tourism-in-a-clocktower and cheating in class ... and then there would have been no climax in a widows' hostel, no clear proof of my meaning, no coda in a fuming factory over which there presides the winking, saffron-and-green dancing figure of the neon goddess Mumbadevi. But Evie Burns (was she snake or ladder? The answer's obvious: both) did come, complete with the silver bicycle which enabled me not only to discover the midnight children, but also to ensure the partition of the state of Bombay.
To begin at the beginning: her hair was made of scarecrow straw, her skin was peppered with freckles and her teeth lived in a metal cage. These teeth were, it seemed, the only things on earth over which she was powerless - they grew wild, in malicious crazy-paving overlaps, and stung her dreadfully when she ate ice-cream. (I permit myself this one generalization: Americans have mastered the universe, but have no dominion over their mouths; whereas India is impotent, but her children tend to have excellent teeth.)
Racked by toothaches, my Evie rose magnificently above the pain. Refusing to be ruled by bone and gums, she ate cake and drank Coke whenever they were going; and never complained. A tough kid, Evie Burns: her conquest of suffering confirmed her sovereignty over us all. It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.
Once, I shyly gave her a necklace of flowers (queen-of-the-night for my lily-of-the-eve), bought with my own pocket-money from a hawker-woman at Scandal Point. 'I don't wear flowers,' Evelyn Lilith said, and tossed the unwanted chain into the air, spearing it before it fell with a pellet from her unerring Daisy air-pistol. Destroying flowers with a Daisy, she served notice that she was not to be manacled, not even by a necklace: she was our capricious, whirligig Lill-of-the-Hill. And also Eve. The Adam's-apple of my eye.
How she arrived: Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice and Hairoil Sabarmati, Cyrus Dubash, the Monkey and I were playing French cricket in the circus-ring between Methwold's four palaces. A New Year's Day game: Toxy clapping at her barred window; even Bi-Appah was in good humour and not, for once, abusing us. Cricket - even French cricket, and even when played by children - is a quiet game: peace anointed in linseed oil. The kissing of leather and willow; sprinkled applause; the occasional cry - 'Shot! Shot, sir!' - 'Owzatt??' but Evie on her bicycle was having none of that.
'Hey, you! Alia you! Hey, whassamatter? You all deaf or what?'
I was batting (elegantly as Ranji, powerfully as Vinoo Mankad) when she charged up the hill on her two-wheeler, straw hair flying, freckles ablaze, mouth-metal flashing semaphore messages in the sunlight, a scarecrow astride a silver bullet... 'Hey, you widda leaky nose! Stop watching the schoopid ball, ya crumb! I'll showya something worth watching!'
Impossible to picture Evie Burns without also conjuring up a bicycle; and not just any two-wheeler, but one of the last of the great old-timers, an Arjuna Indiabike in mint condition, with drop-handlebars wrapped in masking tape and five gears and a seat made of reccine cheetah-skin. And a silver frame (the colour, I don't need to tell you, of the Lone Ranger's horse) ... slobby Eyeslice and neat Hairoil, Cyrus the genius and the Monkey, and Sonny Ibrahim and myself - the best of friends, the true sons of the Estate, its heirs by right of birth - Sonny with the slow innocence he had had ever since the forceps dented his brain and me with my dangerous secret knowledge - yes, all of us, future bullfighters and Navy chiefs and all, stood frozen in open-mouthed attitudes as Evie Burns began to ride her bike, fasterfasterfaster, around and around the edges of the circus-ring. 'Lookit me now: watch me go, ya dummies!'
On and off the cheetah-seat, Evie performed. One foot on the seat, one leg stretched out behind her, she whirled around us; she built up speed and then did a headstand on the seat! She could straddle the front wheel, facing the rear, and work the pedals the wrong way round ... gravity was her slave, speed her element, and we knew that a power had come among us, a witch on wheels, and the flowers of the hedgerows threw her petals, the dust of the circus-ring stood up in clouds of ovation, because the circus-ring had found its mistress, too: it was the canvas beneath the brush of her whirling wheels.
Now we noticed that our heroine packed a Daisy air-pistol on her right hip ...
'More to come, ya zeroes!' she yelled, and drew the weapon. Her pellets gave stones the gift of flight; we threw annas into the air and she gunned them down, stone-dead. 'Targets! More targets!' - and Eyeslice surrendered his beloved pack of rummy cards without a murmur, so that she could shoot the heads off the kings. Annie Oakley in tooth-braces - nobody dared question her sharp-shooting, except once, and that was the end of her reign, during the great cat invasion; and there were extenuating circumstances.
Flushed, sweating, Evie Burns dismounted and announced: 'From now on, there's a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians? Any arguments?'
No arguments; I knew then that I had fallen in love.
At Juhu Beach with Evie: she won the camel-races, could drink more coconut milk than any of us, could open her eyes under the sharp salt water of the Arabian Sea.
Did six months make such a difference? (Evie was half a year older than me.) Did it entitle you to talk to grown-ups as an equal? Evie was seen gossiping with old man Ibrahim Ibrahim; she claimed Lila Sabarmati was teaching her to put on make-up; she visited Homi Catrack to gossip about guns. (It was the tragic irony of Homi Catrack's life that he, at whom a gun would one day be pointed, was a true aficionado of firearms ... in Evie he found a fellow-creature, a motherless child who was, unlike his own Toxy, as sharp as a knife and as bright as a bottle. Incidentally, Evie Burns wasted no sympathy on poor Toxy Catrack. 'Wrong inna head,' she opined carelessly to us all, 'Oughta be put down like rats.' But Evie: rats are not weak! There was more that was rodent-like in your face than in the whole body of your despised Tox.)
That was Evelyn Lilith; and within weeks of her arrival, I had set off the chain reaction from whose effects I would never fully recover.
It began with Sonny Ibrahim, Sonny-next-door, Sonny of the forcep-hollows, who has been sitting patiently in the wings of my story, awaiting his cue. In those days, Sonny was a badly bruised fellow: more than forceps had dented him. To love the Brass Monkey (even in the nine-year-old sense of the word) was no easy thing to do.
As I've said, my sister, born second and unheralded, had begun to react violently to any declarations of affection. Although she was believed to speak the languages of birds and cats, the soft words of lovers roused in her an almost animal rage; but Sonny was too simple to be warned off. For months now, he had been pestering her with statements such as, 'Saleem's sister, you're a pretty solid type!' or, 'Listen, you want to be my girl? We could go to the pictures with your ayah, maybe ...' And for an equal number of months, she had been making him suffer for his love - telling tales to his mother; pushing him into mud-puddles accidentally-on-purpose; once even assaulting him physically, leaving him with long raking claw-marks down his face and an expression of sad-dog injury in his eyes; but he would not learn. And so, at last, she had planned her most terrible revenge.
The Monkey attended Walsingham School for Girls on Nepean Sea Road; a school full of tall, superbly muscled Europeans, who swam like fish and dived like submarines. In their spare time, they could be seen from our bedroom window, cavorting in the map-shaped pool of the Breach Candy Club, from which we were, of course, barred ... and when I discovered that the Monkey had somehow attached herself to these segregated swimmers, as a sort of mascot, I felt genuinely aggrieved with her for perhaps the first time ... but there was no arguing with her; she went her own way. Beefy fifteen-year-old white girls let her sit with them on the Walsingham school bus. Three such females would wait with her every morning at the same place where Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus-the-great and I awaited the bus from the Cathedral School.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:32
One morning, for some forgotten reason, Sonny and I were the only boys at the stop. Maybe there was a bug going round or something. The Monkey waited until Mary Pereira had left us alone, in the care of the beefy swimmers; and then suddenly the truth of what she was planning flashed into my head as, for no particular reason, I tuned into her thoughts; and I yelled 'Hey!' - but too late. The Monkey screeched, 'You keep out of this!' and then she and the three beefy swimmers had jumped upon Sonny Ibrahim, street-sleepers and beggars and bicycling clerks were watching with open amusement, because they were ripping every scrap of clothing off his body ... 'Damn it man, are you going just to stand and watch?' -Sonny yelling for help, but I was immobilized, how could I take sides between my sister and my best friend, and he, 'I'll tell my daddy on you!', tearful now, while the Monkey, 'That'll teach you to talk shit - and that'll teach you', his shoes, off; no shirt any more; his vest, dragged off by a high-board diver, 'And that'll teach you to write your sissy love letters', no socks now, and plenty of tears, and 'There!' yelled the Monkey; the Walsingham bus arrived and the assailants and my sister jumped in and sped away, 'Ta-ta-ba-ta, lover-boy!' they yelled, and Sonny was left in the street, on the pavement opposite Chimalker's and Reader's Paradise, naked as the day he was born; his forcep-hollows glistened like rock-pools, because Vaseline had dripped into them from his hair; and his eyes were wet as well, as he, 'Why's she do it, man? Why, when I only told her I liked ...'
'Search me,' I said, not knowing where to look, 'She does things, that's all.'
Not knowing, either, that the time would come when she did something worse to me.
But that was nine years later ... meanwhile, early in 1957, election campaigns had begun: the Jan Sangh was campaigning for rest Homes for aged sacred cows; in Kerala, E. M. S. Namboodiripad was promising that Communism would give everyone food and jobs; in Madras, the Anna-D.M.K. party of C. N. Annadurai fanned the flames of regionalism; the Congress fought back with reforms such as the Hindu Succession Act, which gave Hindu women equal rights of inheritance ... in short, everybody was busy pleading his own cause; I, however, found myself tongue-tied in the face of Evie Burns, and approached Sonny Ibrahim to ask him to plead on my behalf.
In India, we've always been vulnerable to Europeans ... Evie had only been with us a matter of weeks, and already I was being sucked into a grotesque mimicry of European literature. (We had done Cyrano, in a simplified version, at school; I had also read the Classics Illustrated comic book.) Perhaps it would be fair to say that Europe repeats itself, in India, as farce ... Evie was American. Same thing.
'But hey, man, that's no-fair man, why don't you do it yourself?'
'Listen, Sonny,' I pleaded, 'you're my friend, right?'
'Yeah, but you didn't even help ...'
'That was my sister, Sonny, so how could I?'
'No, so you have to do your own dirty ...'
'Hey, Sonny, man, think. Think only. These girls need careful handling, man.
Look how the Monkey flies off the handle! You've got the experience, yaar, you've been through it. You'll know how to go gently this time. What do I know, man? Maybe she doesn't like me even. You want me to have my clothes torn off, too? That would make you feel better?'
And innocent, good-natured Sonny, '... Well, no ...'
'Okay, then. You go. Sing my praises a little. Say never mind about my nose.
Character is what counts. You can do that?'
'... Weeeelll ... I ... okay, but you talk to your sis also, yah?'
Til talk, Sonny. What can I promise? You know what she's like. But I'll talk to her for sure.'
You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke. For every victorious election campaign, there are twice as many that fail ... from the verandah of Buckingham Villa, through the slats of the chick-blind, I spied on Sonny Ibrahim as he canvassed my chosen constituency ...
and heard the voice of the electorate, the rising nasality of Evie Burns, splitting the air with scorn: 'Who? Him? Whynt'cha tell him to jus' go blow his nose? That sniffer? He can't even ride a bike!'
Which was true.
And there was worse to come; because now (although a chick-blind divided the scene into narrow slits) did I not see the expression on Evie's face begin to soften and change? - did Evie's hand (sliced lengthways by the chick) not reach out towards my electoral agent? -and weren't those Evie's fingers (the nails bitten down to the quick) touching Sonny's temple-hollows, the fingertips getting covered in dribbled Vaseline? - and did Evie say or did she not: 'Now you, Pr instance: you're cute'? Let me sadly affirm that I did; it did; they were; she did.
Saleem Sinai loves Evie Burns; Evie loves Sonny Ibrahim; Sonny is potty about the Brass Monkey; but what does the Monkey say?
'Don't make me sick, Allah,' my sister said when I tried - rather nobly, considering how he'd failed me - to argue Sonny's case. The voters had given the thumijs-down to us both.
I wasn't giving in just yet. The siren temptations of Evie Burns - who never cared about me, I'm bound to admit - led me inexorably towards my fall. (But I hold nothing against her; because my fall led to a rise.)
Privately, in my clocktower, I took time off my trans-subcontinental rambles to consider the wooing of my freckled Eve. 'Forget middlemen,' I advised myself, 'You'll have to do this personally.' Finally, I formed my scheme: I would have to share her interests, to make her passions mine ... guns have never appealed to me. I resolved to learn how to ride a bike.
Evie, in those days, had given in to the many demands of the hillock-top children that she teach them her bicycle-arts; so it was a simple matter for me to join the queue for lessons. We assembled in the circus-ring; Evie, ring-mistress supreme, stood in the centre of five wobbly, furiously concentrating cyclists ... while I stood beside her, bikeless. Until Evie's coming I'd shown no interest in wheels, so I'd never been given any ... humbly, I suffered the lash of Evie's tongue.
'Where've you been living, fat nose? I suppose you wanna borrow mine?'
'No,' I lied penitently, and she relented. 'Okay, okay,' Evieshrugged, 'Get in the saddle and lessee whatchou're made of.'
Let me reveal at once that, as I climbed on to the silver Arjuna Indiabike, I was filled with the purest elation; that, as Evie walked roundandround, holding the bike by the handlebars, exclaiming, 'Gotcha balance yet? Mo? Geez, nobody's got all year!' - as Evie and I perambulated, I felt ... what's the word? ...
happy.
Roundandroundand ... Finally, to please her, I stammered, 'Okay ... I think I'm ... let me,' and instantly I was on my own, she had given me a farewell shove, and the silver creature flew gleaming and uncontrollable across the circus-ring ... I heard her shouting: 'The brake! Use the goddamn brake, ya dummy!' - but my hands couldn't move, I had gone rigid as a plank, and there LOOK OUT in front of me was the blue two-wheeler of Sonny Ibrahim, collision course, OUTA THE WAY YA CRAZY, Sonny in the saddle, trying to swerve and miss, but still blue streaked towards silver, Sonny swung right but I went the same way EEYAH MY BIKE and silver wheel touched blue, frame kissed frame, I was flying up and over handlebars towards Sonny who had embarked on an identical parabola towards me CRASH bicycles fell to earth beneath us, locked in an intimate embrace CRASH suspended in mid-air Sonny and I met each other, Sonny's head greeted mine ...
Over nine years ago I had been born with bulging temples, and Sonny had been given hollows by forceps; everything is for a reason, it seems, because now my bulging temples found their way into Sonny's hollows. A perfect fit. Heads fitting together, we began our descent to earth, falling clear of the bikes, fortunately, WHUMMP and for a moment the world went away.
Then Evie with her freckles on fire, 'O ya little creep, ya pile of snot, ya wrecked my ...' But I wasn't listening, because circus-ring accident had completed what washing-chest calamity had begun, and they were there in my head, in the front now, no longer a muffled background noise I'd never noticed, all of them, sending their here-I-am signals, from north south east west... the other children born during that midnight hour, calling 'I,' 'I,' T and 'I.'
'Hey! Hey, snothead! You okay? ... Hey, where's his mother?'
Interruptions, nothing but interruptions! The different parts of my somewhat complicated life refuse, with a wholly unreasonable obstinacy, to stay neatly in their separate compartments. Voices spill out of their clocktower to invade the circus-ring, which is supposed to be Evie's domain ... and now, at the very moment when I should be describing the fabulous children of ticktock, I'm being whisked away by Frontier Mail - spirited off to the decaying world of my grandparents, so that Aadam Aziz is getting in the way of the natural unfolding of my tale. Ah well. What can't be cured must be endured.
That January, during my convalescence from the severe concussion I received in my bicycling accident, my parents took us off to Agra for a family reunion that turned out worse than the notorious (and arguably fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta. For two weeks we were obliged to listen to Emerald and Zulfikar (who was now a Major-General and insisted on being called a General) dropping names, and also hints of their fabulous wealth, which had by now grown into the seventh largest private fortune in Pakistan; their son Zafar tried (but only once!) to pull the Monkey's fading red pig-tails. And we were obliged to watch in silent horror while my Civil Servant uncle Mustapha and his half-Irani wife Sonia beat and bludgeoned their litter of nameless, genderless brats into utter anonymity; and the bitter aroma of Alia's spinsterhood filled the air and ruined our food; and my father would retire early to begin his secret nightly war against the djinns; and worse, and worse, and worse.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:32
One night I awoke on the stroke of twelve to find my grandfather's dream inside my head, and was therefore unable to avoid seeing him as he saw himself - as a crumbling old man in whose centre, when the light was right, it was possible to discern a gigantic shadow. As the convictions which had given strength to his youth withered away under the combined influence of old age, Reverend Mother and the absence of like-minded friends, an old hole was reappearing in the middle of his body, turning him into just another shrivelled, empty old man, over whom the God (and other superstitions) against which he'd fought for so long was beginning to reassert His dominion ... meanwhile, Reverend Mother spent the entire fortnight finding little ways of insulting my uncle Hanif's despised film-actress wife. And that was also the time when I was cast as a ghost in a children's play, and found, in an old leather attache-case on top of my grandfather's almirah, a sheet which had been chewed by moths, but whose largest hole was man-made: for which discovery I was repaid (you will recall) in roars of grandparental rage.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:32
But there was one achievement. I was befriended by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah (the same fellow who had, in his youth, screamed silently in a cornfield and helped Nadir Khan into Aadam Aziz's toilet): taking me under his wing - and without telling my parents, who would have forbidden it so soon after my accident - he taught me how to ride a bicycle. By the time we left, I had this secret tucked away with all my others: only I didn't intend this one to stay secret for very long.
... And on the train home, there were voices hanging on to the outside of the compartment: 'Ohe, maharaj! Open up, great sir!' -fare-dodgers' voices fighting with the ones I wanted to listen to, the new ones inside my head - and then back to Bombay Central Station, and the drive Home past racecourse and temple, and now Evelyn Lilith Burns is demanding that I finish her part first before concentrating on higher things.
'Home again!' the Monkey shouts. 'Hurray ... Back-to-Bom!' (She is in disgrace.
In Agra, she incinerated the General's boots.)
It is a matter of record that the States Reorganization Committee had submitted its report to Mr Nehru as long ago as October 1955; a year later, its recommendations had been implemented. India had been divided anew, into fourteen states and six centrally-administered 'territories'. But the boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any natural features of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words. Language divided us: Kerala was for speakers of Malayalam, the only palindromically-named tongue on earth; in Karnataka you were supposed to speak Kanarese; and the amputated state of Madras - known today as Tamil Nadu - enclosed the aficionados of Tamil. Owing to some oversight, however, nothing was done with the state of Bombay; and in the city of Mumbadevi, the language marches grew longer and noisier and finally metamorphosed into political parties, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti ('United Maharashtra Party') which stood for the Marathi language and demanded the creation of the Deccan state of Maharashtra, and the Maha Gujarat Parishad ('Great Gujarat Party') which marched beneath the banner of the Gujarati language and dreamed of a state to the north of Bombay City, stretching all the way to the Kathiawar peninsula and the Rann of Kutch ... I am warming over all this cold history, these old dead struggles between the barren angularity of Marathi which was born in the arid heat of the Deccan and Gujarati's boggy, Kathiawari softness, to explain why, on the day in February 1957 immediately following our return from Agra, Methwold's Estate was cut off from the city by a stream of chanting humanity which flooded Warden Road more completely than monsoon water, a parade so long that it took two days to pass, and of which it was said that the statue of Sivaji had come to life to ride stonily at its head.
The demonstrators carried black flags; many of them were shopkeepers on hartal; many were striking textile-workers from Mazagaon and Matunga; but on our hillock, we knew nothing about their jobs; to us children, the endless ant-trail of language in Warden Road seemed as magnetically fascinating as a light-bulb to a moth. It was a demonstration so immense, so intense in its passions, that it made all previous marches vanish from the mind as if they had never occurred - and we had all been banned from going down the hill for even the tiniest of looks. So who was the boldest of us all? Who urged us to creep at least half-way down, to the point where the hillock-road swung round to face Warden Road in a steep U-bend? Who said, 'What's to be scared of? We're only going half-way for a peek'? ... Wide-eyed, disobedient Indians followed their freckled American chief. (They lulled Dr Narlikar - marchers did,' Hairoil warned us in a shivery voice. Evie spat on his shoes.)
But I, Saleem Sinai, had other fish to fry. 'Evie,' I said with quiet offhandedness, 'how'd you like to see me bicycling?' No response. Evie was immersed in the-spectacle ... and was that her fingerprint in Sonny Ibrahim's left forcep-hollow, embedded in Vaseline for all the world to see? A second time, and with slightly more emphasis, I said, 'I can do it, Evie. I'll do it on the Monkey's cycle. You want to watch?' And now Evie, cruelly, 'I'm watching this. This is good. Why'd I wanna watch you? And me, a little snivelly now, 'But I learned, Evie, you've got to ...' Roars from Warden Road below us drown my words. Her back is to me; and Sonny's back, the backs of Eyeslice and Hairoil, the intellectual rear of Cyrus-the-great... my sister, who has seen the fingerprint too, and looks displeased, eggs me on: 'Go on. Go on, show her.
Who's she think she is?' And up on her bike ... 'I'm doing it, Evie, look!'
Bicycling in circles, round and round the little cluster of children, 'See? You see?' A moment of exultation; and then Evie, deflating impatient couldn't-care-less; 'Willya get outa my way, fer Petesake? I wanna see lhat!'
Finger, chewed-off nail and all, jabs down in the direction of the language march; I am dismissed in favour of the parade of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti! And despite the Monkey, who loyally, 'That's not fair! He's doing it really good? - and in spite of the exhilaration of the thing-in-itself- something goes haywire inside me; and I'm riding round Evie, fasterfasterfaster, crying sniffing out of control, 'So what is it with you, anyway? What do I have to do to ...' And then something else takes over, because I realize I don't have to ask her, I can just get inside that freckled mouth-metalled head and find out, for once I can really get to know what's going on... and in I go, still bicycling, but the front of her mind is all full up with Marathi language-marchers, there are American pop songs stuck in the corners of her thoughts, but nothing I'm interested in; and now, only now, now for the very first time, now driven on by the tears of unrequited love, I begin to probe ...
I find myself pushing, diving, forcing my way behind her defences ... into the secret place where there's a picture of her mother who wears a pink smock and holds up a tiny fish by the tail, and I'm ferreting deeperdeeperdeeper, where is it, what makes her tick, when she gives a sort of jerk and swings round to stare at me as I bicycle roundandroundandround-androundand ...
'Get out!' screams Evie Burns. Hands lifted to forehead. I bicycling, wet-eyed, diving ininin: to where Evie stands in the doorway of a clapboard bedroom holding a, holding a something sharp and glinty with red dripping off it, in the doorway of a, my God and on the bed a woman, who, in a pink, my God, and Evie with the, and red staining the pink, and a man coming, my God, and no no no no no ...
'GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!' Bewildered children watch as Evie screams, language march forgotten, but suddenly remembered again, because Evie has grabbed the back of the Monkey's bike WHAT'RE YOU DOING EVIE as she pushes it THERE GET OUT YA BUM THERE GET OUT TO HELL!- She's pushed me hard-as-hard, and I losing control hurtling down the slope round the end of the U-bend downdown, MY GOD THE MARCH past Band Box laundry, past Noor Ville and Laxmi Vilas, AAAAA and down into the mouth of the march, heads feet bodies, the waves of the march parting as I arrive, yelling blue murder, crashing into history on a runaway, young-girl's bike.
Hands grabbing handlebars as I slow down in the impassioned throng. Smiles filled with good teeth surround me. They are not friendly smiles. 'Look look, a little laad-sahib comes down to join us from the big rich hill!' In Marathi which I hardly understand, it's my worst subject at school, and the smiles asking, 'You want to join S.M.S., little princeling?' And I, just about knowing what's being said, but dazed into telling the truth, shake my head No. And the smiles, 'Oho! The young nawab does not like our tongue! What does he like?' And another smile, 'Maybe Gujarati! You speak Gujarati, my lord?' But my Gujarati was as bad as my Marathi; I only knew one thing in the marshy tongue of Kathiawar; and the smiles, urging, and the fingers, prodding, 'Speak, little master! Speak some Gujarati!' - so I told them what I knew, a rhyme I'd learned from Glandy Keith Colaco at school, which he used when he was bullying Gujarati boys, a rhyme designed to make fun of the speech rhythms of the language: Soo che? Saru che! Danda le ke maru che! How are you? - I am well! - 肐I take a stick and thrash you to hell! A nonsense; a nothing; nine words of emptiness... but when I'd retited them, the smiles began to laugh; and then voices near me and then further and further away began to take up my chant, HOW ARE YOU? I AM WELL!, and they lost interest in me, 'Go go with your bicycle, masterji,' they scoffed, I'LL TAKE A STICK AND THRASH YOU 蝾 HELL, I fled away up the hillock as my chant rushed forward and back, up to the front .and down to the back of the two-day-long procession, becoming, as it went, a song of war.
That afternoon, the head of the procession of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti collided at Kemp's Corner, with the head of a Maha Gujarat Parishad demonstration; S.M.S. voices chanted 'Soo che? Saru che!' and M.G.P. throats were opened in fury; under the posters of the Air-India rajah and of the Kolynos Kid, the two parties fell upon one another with no little zeal, and to the tune of my little rhyme the first of the language riots got under way, fifteen killed, over three hundred wounded.
In this way I became directly responsible for triggering off the violence which ended with the partition of the state of Bombay, as a result of which the city became the capital of Maharashtra - so at least I was on the winning side.
What was it in Evie's head? Crime or dream? I never found out; but I had learned something else: when you go deep inside someone's head, they can feel you in there.
Evelyn Lilith Burns didn't want much to do with me after that day; but, strangely enough, I was cured of her. (Women have always been the ones to change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch must answer for who I am; and the Widow, who I'm keeping for the end; and after the end, Padma, my goddess of dung. Women have fixed me all right, but perhaps they were never central - perhaps the place which they should have filled, the hole in the centre of me which was my inheritance from my grandfather Aadam Aziz, was occupied for too long by my voices. Or perhaps -one must consider all possibilities - they always made me a little afraid.)作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:32
My tenth birthday
'Oh mister, what to say? Everything is my own poor fault!'
Padma is back. And, now that I have recovered from the poison and am at my desk again, is too overwrought to be silent. Over and over, my returned lotus castigates herself, beats her heavy breasts, wails at the top of her voice. (In my fragile condition, this is fairly distressing; but I don't blame her for anything.)
'Only believe, mister, how much I have your well-being at heart! What creatures we are, we women, never for one moment at peace when our men lie sick and low ... I am so happy you are well, you don't know!'
Padma's story (given in her own words, and read back to her for ' eye-rolling, high-wailing, mammary-thumping confirmation): 'It was my own foolish pride and vanity, Saleem baba, from which cause I did run from you, although the job here is good, and you so much needing a looker-after! But in a short time only I was dying to return.
'So then I thought, how to go back to this man who will not love me and only does some foolish writery? (Forgive, Saleem baba, but I must tell it truly. And love, to us women, is the greatest thing of all.)
'So I have been to a holy man, who taught me what I must do. Then with my few pice I have taken a bus into the country to dig for herbs, with which your manhood could be awakened from its sleep ... imagine, mister, I have spoken magic with these words: "Herb thou hast been uprooted by Bulls!" Then I have ground herbs in water and milk and said, "Thou potent and lusty herb! Plant which Varuna had dug up for him by Gandharva! Give my Mr Saleem thy power. Give heat like that of Fire of Indra. Like the male antelope, ?herb, thou hast all the force that Is, thou hast powers of Indra, and the lusty force of beasts." 'With this preparation I returned to find you alone as always and as always with your nose in paper. But jealousy, I swear, I have put behind me; it sits on the face and makes it old. ?God forgive me, quietly I put the preparation in your food!... And then, hai-hai, may Heaven forgive me, but I am a simple woman, if holy men tell me, how should I argue? ... But now at least you are better, thanks be to God, and maybe you will not be angry.'
Under the influence of Padma's potion, I became delirious for a week. My dung-lotus swears (through much-gnashed teeth) that I was stiff as a board, with bubbles around my mouth. There was also a fever. In my delirium I babbled about snakes; but I know that Padma is no serpent, and never meant me harm.
'This love, mister,' Padma is wailing, 'It will drive a woman to craziness.'
I repeat: I don't blame Padma. At the feet of the Western Ghats, she searched for the herbs of virility, mucuna pruritus and the root of feronia elephantum; who knows what she found? Who knows what, mashed with milk and mingled with my food, flung my innards into that state of'churning' from which, as all students of Hindu cosmology will know, Indra created matter, by stirring the primal soup in his own great milk-churn? Never mind. It was a noble attempt; but I am beyond regeneration - the Widow has done for me. Not even the real mucuna could have put an end to my incapacity; feronia would never have engendered in me the 'lusty force of beasts'.
Still, I am at my table once again; once again Padma sits at my feet, urging me on. I am balanced once more - the base of my isosceles triangle is secure. I hover at the apex, above present and past, and feel fluency returning to my pen.
A kind of magic has been worked, then; and Padma's excursion in search of love-potions has connected me briefly with that world of ancient learning and sorcerers' lore so despised by most of us nowadays; but (despite stomach-cramps and fever and frothings at the mouth) I'm glad of its irruption into my last days, because to contemplate it is to regain a little, lost sense of proportion.
Think of this: history, in my version, entered a new phase on August 15th, 1947 - but in another version, that inescapable date is no more than one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga, in which the cow of morality has been reduced to standing, teeter-ingly, on a single leg! Kali-Yuga - the losing throw in our national dice-game; the worst of everything; the age when property gives a man rank, when wealth is equated with virtue, when passion becomes the sole bond between men and women, when falsehood brings success (is it any wonder, in such a time, that I too have been confused about good and evil?) ... began on Friday, February 18th, 3102 B.C.; and will last a mere 432,000 years! Already feeling somewhat dwarfed, I should add nevertheless that the Age of Darkness is only the fourth phase of the present Maha-Yuga cycle which is, in total, ten times as long; and when you consider that it takes a thousand Maha-Yugas to make just one Day of Brahma, you'll see what I mean about proportion.
A little humility at this point (when I'm trembling on the brink of introducing the Children) does not, I feel, come amiss.
Padma shifts her weight, embarrassed. 'What are you talking?' she asks, reddening a little. 'That is brahmin's talk; what's it to do with me?'
... Born and raised in the Muslim tradition, I find myself overwhelmed all of a sudden by an older learning; while here beside me is my Padma, whose return I had so earnestly desired... my Padma! The Lotus Goddess; the One Who Possesses Dung; who is Honey-Like, and Made of Gold; whose sons are Moisture and Mud ...
'You must be fevered still,' she expostulates, giggling. 'How made of gold, mister? And you know I have no chil ...'
... Padma, who along with the yaksa genii, who represent the sacred treasure of the earth, and the sacred rivers, Ganga Yamuna Sarasvati, and the tree goddesses, is one of the Guardians of life, beguiling and comforting mortal men while they pass through the dream-web of Maya .. Padma, the Lotus calyx, which grew out of Vishnu's navel, and from which Brahma himself was born; Padma the Source, the mother of Time! ...
'Hey,' she is sounding worried now, 'let me feel your forehead!'
... And where, in this scheme of things, am I? Am I (beguiled and comforted by her return) merely mortal - or something more? Such as - yes, why not - mammoth-trunked, Ganesh-nosed as I am -perhaps, the Elephant. Who, like Sin the moon, controls the waters, bringing the gift of rain ... whose mother was Ira, queen consort of Kashyap, the Old Tortoise Man, lord and progenitor of all creatures on the earth ... the Elephant who is also the rainbow, and lightning, and whose symbolic value, it must be added, is highly problematic and unclear.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:33
Well, then: elusive as rainbows, unpredictable as lightning, garrulous as Ganesh, it seems I have my own place in the ancient wisdom, after all.
'My God.' Padma is rushing for a towel to wet in cold water, 'your forehead is on fire! Better you lie down now; too soon for all this writing! The sickness is talking; not you.'
But I've already lost a week; so, fever or no fever, I must press on; because, having (for the moment) exhausted this strain of old-time fabulism, I am coming to the fantastic heart of my own story, and must write in plain unveiled fashion, about the midnight children.
Understand what I'm saying: during the first hour of August 15th, 1947 - between midnight and one a.m. - no less than one thousand and one children were born within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India. In itself, that is not an unusual fact (although the resonances of the number are strangely literary) - at the time, births in our part of the world exceeded deaths by approximately six hundred and eighty-seven an hour. What made the event noteworthy (noteworthy! There's a dispassionate word, if you like!) was the nature of these children, every one of whom was, through some freak of biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the moment, or just conceivably by sheer coincidence (although synchronicity on such a scale would stagger even C. G. Jung), endowed with features, talents or faculties which can only be described as miraculous. It was as though - if you will permit me one moment of fancy in what will otherwise be, I promise, the most, sober account I can manage - as though history, arriving at a point of the highest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time.
If a similar miracle was worked across the border, in the newly-partitioned-off Pakistan, I have no knowledge of it; my perceptions were, while they lasted, bounded by the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Himalaya mountains, but also by the artificial frontiers which pierced Punjab and Bengal.
Inevitably, a number of these children failed to survive. Malnutrition, disease and the misfortunes of everyday life had accounted for no less than four hundred and twenty of them by the time I became conscious of their existence; although it is possible to hypothesize that these deaths, too, had their purpose, since 420 has been, since time immemorial, the number associated with fraud, deception and trickery. Can it be, then, that the missing infants were eliminated because they had turned out to be somehow inadequate, and were not the true children of that midnight hour? Well, in the first place, that's another excursion into fantasy; in the second, it depends on a view of life which is both excessively theological and barbarically cruel. It is also an unanswerable question; any further examination of it is therefore profitless.
By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all nearing
their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant, for the most part, of one another's existence - although there were certainly exceptions. In the town of Baud, on the Mahanadi river in Orissa, there was a pair of twin sisters who were already a legend in the region, because despite their impressive plainness they both possessed the ability of making every man who saw them fall hopelessly and often suicidally in love with them, so that their bemused parents were endlessly pestered by a stream of men offering their hands in marriage to either or even both of the bewildering children; old men who had forsaken the wisdom of their beards and youths who ought to have been becoming besotted with the actresses in the travelling picture-show which visited Baud once a month; and there was another, more disturbing procession of bereaved families cursing the twin girls for having bewitched their sons into committing acts of violence against themselves, fatal mutilations and scourgings and even (in one case)
self-immolation. With the exception of such rare instances, however, the children of midnight had grown up quite unaware of their true siblings, their fellow-chosen-ones across the length and breadth of India's rough and badly-proportioned diamond.
And then, as a result of a jolt received in a bicycle-accident, I, Saleem Sinai, became aware of them all.
To anyone whose personal cast of mind is too inflexible to accept these facts, I have this to say: That's how it was; there can be no retreat from the truth. I shall just have to shoulder the burden of the doubter's disbelief. But no literate person in this India of ours can be wholly immune from the type of information I am in the process of unveiling - no reader of our national press can have failed to come across a series of - admittedly lesser - magic children and assorted freaks. Only last week there was that Bengali boy who announced himself as the reincarnation of Rabindranath Tagore and began to extemporize verses of remarkable quality, to the amazement of his parents; and I can myself remember children with two heads (sometimes one human, one animal), and other curious features such as bullock's horns.
I should say at once that not all the children's gifts were desirable, or even desired by the children themselves; and, in some cases, the children had survived but been deprived of their midnight-given qualities. For example (as a companion piece to the story of the Baudi twins) let me mention a Delhi beggar-girl called Sundari, who was born in a street behind the General Post Office, not far from the rooftop on which Amina Sinai had listened to Ramram Seth, and whose beauty was so intense that within moments of her birth it succeeded in blinding her mother and the neighbouring women who had been assisting at her delivery; her father, rushing into the room when he heard the women's screams, had been warned by them just in time; but his one fleeting glimpse of his daughter so badly impaired his vision that he was unable, afterwards, to distinguish between Indians and foreign tourists, a handicap which greatly affected his earning power as a beggar. For some time after that Sundari was obliged to have a rag placed across her face; until an old and ruthless great-aunt took her into her bony arms and slashed her face nine times with a kitchen knife. At the time when I became aware of her, Sundari was earning a healthy living, because nobody who looked at her could fail to pity a girl who had clearly once been too beautiful to look at and was now so cruelly disfigured; she received more alms than any other member of her family.
Because none of the children suspected that their time of birth had anything to do with what they were, it took me a while to find it out. At first, after the bicycle accident (and particularly once language marchers had purged me of Evie Burns), I contented myself with discovering, one by one, the secrets of the fabulous beings who had suddenly arrived in my mental field of vision, collecting them ravenously, the way some boys collect insects, and others spot railway trains; losing interest in autograph books and all other manifestations of the gathering instinct, I plunged whenever possible into the separate, and altogether brighter reality of the five hundred and eighty-one. (Two hundred and sixty-six of us were boys; and we were outnumbered by our female counterparts - three hundred and fifteen of them, including Parvati. Parvati-the-witch.)
Midnight's children! ... From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any reflective surface in the land - through lakes and (with greater difficulty) the polished metal bodies of automobiles ...
and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish... and children with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri Hills, and from the great watershed of the Vindhyas, a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will, and had already (mischievously) been the cause of wild panic and rumours of the return of Giants ... from Kashmir, there was a blue-eyed child of whose original sex I was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased. Some of us called this child Narada, others Markandaya, depending on which old fairy story of sexual change we had heard ...
near Jalna in the heart of the parched Deccan I found a water-divining youth, and at Budge-Budge outside Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting physical wounds, so that after a few adults had found themselves bleeding freely as a result of some barb flung casually from her lips, they had decided to lock her in a bamboo cage and float her off down the Ganges to the Sundarbans jungles (which are the rightful Home of monsters and phantasms); but nobody dared approach her, and she moved through the town surrounded by a vacuum of fear; nobody had the courage to deny her food. There was a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert; and more and more and more ...
overwhelmed by their numbers, and by the exotic multiplicity of their gifts, I paid little attention, in those early days, to their ordinary selves; but inevitably our problems, when they arose, were the everyday, human problems which arise from character-and-environment; in our quarrels, we were just a bunch of kids.
One remarkable fact: the closer to midnight our birth-times were, the greater were our gifts. Those children born in the last seconds of the hour were (to be frank) little more than circus freaks: bearded girls, a boy with the fully-operative gills of a freshwater mahaseer trout, Siamese twins with two bodies dangling off a single head and neck -the head could speak in two voices, one male, one female, and every language and dialect spoken in the subcontinent; but for all their mar-vellousness, these were the unfortunates, the living casualties of that numinous hour. Towards the half-hour came more interesting and useful faculties - in the Gir Forest lived a witch-girl with the power of healing by the laying-on of hands, and there was a wealthy tea-planter's son in Shillong who had the blessing (or possibly the curse) of being incapable of forgetting anything he ever saw or heard. But the children born in the first minute of all - for these children the hour had reserved the highest talents of which men had ever dreamed. If you, Padma, happened to possess a register of births in which times were noted down to the exact second, you, too, would know what scion of a great Lucknow family (born at twenty-one seconds past midnight)
had completely mastered, by the age of ten, the lost arts of alchemy, with which he regenerated the fortunes of his ancient but dissipated house; and which dhobi's daughter from Madras (seventeen seconds past) could fly higher than any bird simply by closing her eyes; and to which Benarsi silversmith's son (twelve seconds after midnight) was given the gift of travelling in time and thus prophesying the future as well as clarifying the past ... a gift which, children that we were, we trusted implicitly when it dealt with things gone and forgotten, but derided when he warned us of our own ends... fortunately, no such records exist; and, for my part, I shall not reveal - or else, in appearing to reveal, shall falsify - their names and even their locations; because, although such evidence would provide absolute proof of my claims, still the children of midnight deserve, now, after everything, to be left alone; perhaps to forget; but I hope (against hope) to remember ...
Parvati-the-witch was born in Old Delhi in a slum which clustered around the steps of the Friday mosque. No ordinary slum, this, although the huts built out of old packing cases and pieces of corrugated tin and shreds of jute sacking which stood higgledy-piggledy in the shadow of the mosque looked no different from any other shanty-town ... because this was the ghetto of the magicians, yes, the very same place which had once spawned a Hummingbird whom knives had pierced and pie-dogs had failed to save ... the conjurers' slum, to which the greatest fakirs and prestidigitators and illusionists in the land continually flocked, to seek their fortune in the capital city. They found tin huts, and police harassment, and rats ... Parvati's father had once been the greatest conjurer in Oudh; she had grown up amid ventriloquists who could make stones tell jokes and contortionists who could swallow their own legs and fire-eaters who exhaled flames from their arseholes and tragic clowns who could extract glass tears from the corners of their eyes; she had stood mildly amid gasping crowds while her father drove spikes through her neck; and all the time she had guarded her own secret, which was greater than any of the illusionist flummeries surrounding her; because to Parvati-the-witch, born a mere seven seconds after midnight on August 15th, had been given the powers of the true adept, the illuminatus, the genuine gifts of conjuration and sorcery, the art which required no artifice.
So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry ... but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose ... to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could draw the undrawable.bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!)... and to me, the greatest talent of all -the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.
But it is Kali-Yuga; the children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.
There; now I've said it. That is who I was - who we were.
Padma is looking as if her mother had died - her face, with its opening-shutting mouth, is the face of a beached pomfret. 'O baba!' she says at last. 'O baba! You are sick; what have you said?'
No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don't make the mistake of dismissing what I've unveiled as mere delirium; or even as the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated before that I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and read aloud to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother's-head truth.
Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. A thousand and one children were born; there were a thousand and one possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time before; and there were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children can be made to represent many things, according to your point of view: they can be seen as the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing, twentieth-century economy; or as the true hope of freedom, which is now forever extinguished; but what they must not become is the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind.
No: illness is neither here nor there.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:33
'All right, all right, baba,' Padma attempts to placate me. 'Why become so cross? Rest now, rest some while, that is all I am asking.'
Certainly it was a hallucinatory time in the days leading up to my tenth birthday; but the hallucinations were not in my head. My father, Ahmed Sinai, driven by the traitorous death of Dr Narlikar and by the increasingly powerful effect of djinns-and-tonics, had taken flight into a dream-world of disturbing unreality; and the most insidious aspect of his slow decline was that, for a very long time, people mistook it for the very opposite of what it was ... Here is Sonny's mother, Nussie-the-duck, telling Amina one evening in our garden: 'What great days for you all, Amina sister, now that your Ahmed is in his prime! Such a fine man, and so much he is prospering for his family's sake!' She says it loud enough for him to hear; and although he pretends to be telling the gardener what to do about the ailing bougainvillaea, although he assumes an expression of humble self-deprecation, it's utterly unconvincing, because his bloated body has begun, without his knowing it, to puff up and strut about. Even Purushottam, the dejected sadhu under the garden tap, looks embarrassed.
My fading father ... for almost ten years he had always been in a good mood at the breakfast table, before he shaved his chin; but as his facial hairs whitened along with his fading skin, this fixed point of Happiness ceased to be a certainty; and the day came when he lost his temper at breakfast for the first time. That was the day on which taxes were raised and tax thresholds simultaneously lowered; my father flung down the Times of India with a violent gesture and glared around him with the red eyes I knew he only wore in his tempers. 'It's like going to the bathroom!' he exploded, cryptically; egg toast tea shuddered in the blast of his wrath. 'You raise your shirt and lower your trousers! Wife, this government is going to the bathroom all over us!' And my mother, blushing pink through the black, 'Janum, the children, please,' but he had stomped off, leaving me with a clear understanding of what people meant when they said the country was going to pot.
In the following weeks my father's morning chin continued to fade, and something more than the peace of the breakfast table was lost: he began to forget what sort of man he'd been in the old days before Narlikar's treason. The rituals of our Home life began to decay. He began to stay away from the breakfast table, so that Amina could not wheedle money out of him; but, to compensate, he became careless with his cash, and his discarded clothes were full of rupee notes and coins, so that by picking his pockets she could make ends meet. But a more depressing indication of his withdrawal from family life was that he rarely told us bedtime stories any more, and when he did we didn't enjoy them, because they had become ill-imagined and unconvincing. Their subject-matter was still the same, princes goblins flying horses and adventures in magic lands, but in his perfunctory voice we could hear the creaks and groans of a rustling, decayed imagination.
My father had succumbed to abstraction. It seems that Narlikar's death and the end of his tetrapod dream had shown Ahmed Sinai the unreliable nature of human relationships; he had decided to divest himself of all such ties. He took to rising before dawn and locking himself with his current Fernanda or Flory in his downstairs office, outside whose windows the two evergreen trees he planted to commemorate my birth and the Monkey's had already grown tall enough to keep out most of the daylight when it arrived. Since we hardly ever dared disturb him, my father entered a deep solitude, a condition so unusual in our overcrowded country as to border on abnormality; he began to refuse food from our kitchen and to live on cheap rubbish brought daily by his girl in a tiffin-carrier, lukewarm parathas and soggy vegetable samosas and bottles of fizzy drinks. A strange perfume wafted out from under his office door; Amina took it for the odour of stale air and second-rate food; but it's my belief that an old scent had returned in a stronger form, the old aroma of failure which had hung about him from the earliest days.
He sold off the many tenements or chawls which he'd bought cheaply on his arrival in Bombay, and on which our family's fortunes had been based. Freeing himself from all Business connections with human beings - even his anonymous tenants in Kurla and Worli, in Matunga and Mazagaon and Mahim - he liquefied his assets, and entered the rarefied and abstract air of financial speculation.
Locked in his office, in those days, his one contact with the outside world (apart from his poor Fernandas) was his telephone. He spent his day deep in conference with this instrument, as it put his money into such-andsuch shares or soandso stocks, as it invested in government bonds or bear market equities, selling long or short as he commanded ... and invariably getting the best price of the day. In a streak of good fortune comparable only to my mother's success on the horses all those years previously, my father and his telephone took the stock exchange by storm, a feat made more remarkable by Ahmed Sinai's constantly-worsening drinking habits. Djinn-sodden, he nevertheless managed to ride high on the abstract undulations of the money market, reacting to its emotional, unpredictable shifts and changes the way a lover does to his beloved's slightest whim ... he could sense when a share would rise, when the peak would come; and he always got out before the fall. This was how his plunge into the abstract solitude of his telephonic days was disguised, how his financial coups obscured his steady divorce from reality; but under cover of his growing riches, his condition was getting steadily worse.
Eventually the last of his calico-skirted secretaries quit, being unable to tolerate life in an atmosphere so thin and abstract as to make breathing difficult; and now my father sent for Mary Pereira and coaxed her with, 'We're friends, Mary, aren't we, you and I?', to which the poor woman replied, 'Yes, sahib, I know; you will look after me when I'm old,' and promised to find him a replacement. The next day she brought him her sister, Alice Pereira, who had worked for all kinds of bosses and had an almost infinite tolerance of men.
Alice and Mary had long since made up their quarrel over Joe D'Costa; the younger woman was often upstairs with us at the end of the day, bringing her qualities of sparkle and sauciness into the somewhat oppressive air of our Home.
I was fond of her, and it was through her that we learned of my father's greatest excesses, whose victims were a budgerigar and a mongrel dog.
By July Ahmed Sinai had entered an almost permanent state of intoxication; one day, Alice reported, he had suddenly gone off for a drive, making her fear for his life, and returned somehow or other with a shrouded bird-cage in which, he said, was his new acquisition, a bulbul or Indian nightingale. 'For God knows how long,' Alice confided, 'he tells me all about bulbuls; all fairy stories of its singing and what-all; how this Calipha was captivated by its song, how the singing could make longer the beauty of the night; God knows what the poor man was babbling, quoting Persian and Arabic, I couldn't make top or bottom of it.
But then he took off the cover, and in the cage is nothing but a talking budgie, some crook in Chor Bazaar must have painted the feathers! Now how could I tell the poor man, him so excited with his bird and all, sitting there calling out, "Sing, little bulbul! Sing!" ... and it's so funny, just before it died from the paint it just repeated his line back at him, straight out like that -not squawky like a bird, you know, but in his own self-same voice: Sing! Little bulbul, sing!'
But there was worse on the way. A few days later I was sitting with Alice on the servants' spiral iron staircase when she said, 'Baba, I don't know what got into your daddy now. All day sitting down there cursing curses at the dog!'
The mongrel bitch we named Sherri had strolled up to the two-storey hillock earlier that year and simply adopted us, not knowing that life was a dangerous Business for animals on Methwold's Estate; and in his cups Ahmed Sinai made her the guinea-pig for his experiments with the family curse.
This was that same fictional curse which he'd dreamed up to impress William Methwold, but now in the liquescent chambers of his mind the djinns persuaded him that it was no fiction, that he'd just forgotten the words; so he spent long hours in his insanely solitary office experimenting with formulae ... 'Such things he is cursing the poor creature with!' Alice said, 'I wonder she don't drop down dead straight off!'
But Sherri just sat there in a corner and grinned stupidly back at him, refusing to turn purple or break out in boils, until one evening he erupted from his office and ordered Amina to drive us all to Hornby Vellard. Sherri came too. We promenaded, wearing puzzled expressions, up and down the Vellard, and then he said, 'Get in the car, all of you.' Only he wouldn't let Sherri in... as the Rover accelerated away with my father at the wheel she began to chase after us, while the Monkey yelled Daddydaddy and Amina pleaded Janumplease and I sat in mute horror, we had to drive for miles, almost all the way to Santa Cruz airport, before he had his revenge on the bitch for refusing to succumb to his sorceries... she burst an artery as she ran and died spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of a hungry cow.
The Brass Monkey (who didn't even like dogs) cried for a week; my mother became worried about dehydration and made her drink gallons of water, pouring it into her as if she were a lawn, Mary said; but I liked the new puppy my father bought me for my tenth birthday, out of some flicker of guilt perhaps: her name was the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, and she had a pedigree chock-full of champion Alsatians, although in time my mother discovered that that was as false as the mock-bulbul, as imaginary as my father's forgotten curse and Mughal ancestry; and after six months she died of venereal disease. We had no pets after that.
My father was not the only one to approach my tenth birthday with his head lost in the clouds of his private dreams; because here is Mary Pereira, indulging in her fondness for making chutneys, kasaundies and pickles of all descriptions, and despite the cheery presence of her sister Alice there is something haunted in her face.
'Hullo, Mary!' Padma - who seems to have developed a soft spot for my criminal ayah - greets her return to centre-stage. 'So what's eating her?'
This, Padma: plagued by her nightmares of assaults by Joseph D'Costa, Mary was finding it harder and harder to get sleep. Knowing what dreams had in store for her, she forced herself to stay awake; dark rings appeared under her eyes, which were covered in a thin, filmy glaze; and gradually the blurriness of her perceptions merged waking and dreaming into something very like each other ... a dangerous condition to get into, Padma. Not only does your work suffer but things start escaping from your dreams.. .Joseph D'Costa had, in fact, managed to cross the blurred frontier, and now appeared in Buckingham Villa not as a nightmare, but as a full-fledged ghost. Visible (at this time) only to Mary Pereira, he began haunting her in all the rooms of our Home, which, to her horror and shame, he treated as casually as if it were his own. She saw him in the drawing-room amongst cut-glass vases and Dresden figurines and the rotating shadows of ceiling fans, lounging in soft armchairs with his long raggedy legs sprawling over the arms; his eyes were filled up with egg-whites and there were holes in his feet where the snake had bitten him. Once she saw him in Amina Begum's bed in the afternoon, lying down cool as cucumber right next to my sleeping mother, and she burst out, 'Hey, you! Go on out from there! What do you think, you're some sort of lord?' - but she only succeeded in awaking my puzzled mother. Joseph's ghost plagued Mary wordlessly; and the worst of it was that she found herself growing accustomed to him, she found forgotten sensations of fondness nudging at her insides, and although she told herself it was a crazy thing to do she began to be filled with a kind of nostalgic love for the spirit of the dead hospital porter.
But the love was not returned; Joseph's egg-white eyes remained expressionless; his lips remained set in an accusing, sardonic grin; and at last she realized that this new manifestation was no different from her old dream-Joseph (although it never assaulted her), and that if she was ever to be free of him she would have to do the unthinkable thing and confess her crime to the world. But she didn't confess, which was probably my fault - because Mary loved me like her own unconceived and inconceivable son, and to make her confession would have hurt me badly, so for my sake she suffered the ghost of her conscience and stood haunted in the kitchen (my father had sacked the cook one djinn-soaked evening) cooking our dinner and becoming, accidentally, the embodiment of the opening line of my Latin textbook, Ora Maritima: 'By the side of the sea, the ayah cooked the meal.' Ora maritima, ancilla cenam parat. Look into the eyes of a cooking ayah, and you will see more than textbooks ever know.
On my tenth birthday, many chickens were coming Home to roost. On my tenth birthday, it was clear that the freak weather -storms, floods, hailstones from a cloudless sky - which had succeeded the intolerable heat of 1956, had managed to wreck the second Five Year Plan. The government had been forced - although the elections were just around the corner - to announce to the world that it could accept no more development loans unless the lenders were willing to wait indefinitely for repayment. (But let me not overstate the case: although the production of finished steel reached only 2.4 million tons by the Plan's end in 1961, and although, during those five years, the number of landless and unemployed masses actually increased, so that it was greater than it had ever been under the British Raj, there were also substantial gains. The production of iron ore was almost doubled; power capacity did double; coal production leaped from thirty-eight million to fifty-four million tons. Five billion yards of cotton textiles were produced each year. Also large numbers of bicycles, machine tools, diesel engines, power pumps and ceiling fans. But I can't help ending on a downbeat: illiteracy survived unscathed; the population continued to mushroom.)
On my tenth birthday, we were visited by my uncle Hanif, who made himself excessively unpopular at Methwold's Estate by booming cheerily, 'Elections coming! Watch out for the Communists!'
On my tenth birthday, when my uncle Hanif made his gaffe, my mother (who had begun disappearing on mysterious 'shopping trips') dramatically and unaccountably blushed.
On my tenth birthday, I was given an Alsatian puppy with a false pedigree who would shortly die of syphilis.
On my tenth birthday, everyone at Methwold's Estate tried hard to be cheerful, but beneath this thin veneer everyone was possessed by the same thought: 'Ten years, my God! Where have they gone? What have we done?'
On my tenth birthday, old man Ibrahim announced his support for the Maha Gujarat Parishad; as far as possession of the city of Bombay was concerned, he nailed his colours to the losing side.
On my tenth birthday, my suspicions aroused by a blush, I spied on my mother's thoughts; and what I saw there led to my beginning to follow her, to my becoming a private eye as daring as Bombay's legendary Dom Minto, and to important discoveries at and in the vicinity of the Pioneer Cafe.
On my tenth birthday, I had a party, which was attended by my family, which had forgotten how to be gay, by classmates from the Cathedral School, who had been sent by their parents, and by a number of mildly bored girl swimmers from the Breach Candy Pools, who permitted the Brass Monkey to fool around with them and pinch their bulging musculatures; as for adults, there were Mary and Alice Pereira, and the Ibrahims and Homi Catrack and Uncle Hanif and Pia Aunty, and Lila Sabarmati to whom the eyes of every schoolboy (and also Homi Catrack) remained firmly glued, to the considerable irritation of Pia.
But the only member of the hilltop gang to attend was loyal Sonny Ibrahim, who had defied an embargo placed upon the festivities by an embittered Evie Burns.
He gave me a message: 'Evie says to tell you you're out of the gang.'
On my tenth birthday, Evie, Eyeslice, Hairoil and even Cyrus-the-great stormed my private hiding-place; they occupied the clock-tower, and deprived me of its shelter.
On my tenth birthday, Sonny looked upset, and the Brass Monkey detached herself from her swimmers and became utterly furious with Evie Burns. Til teach her,'
she told me. 'Don't you worry, big brother; I'll show that one, all right.'
On my tenth birthday, abandoned by one set of children, I learned that five hundred and eighty-one others were celebrating their birthdays, too; which was how I understood the secret of my original hour of birth; and, having been expelled from one gang, I decided to form my own, a gang which was spread over the length and breadth of the country, and whose headquarters were behind my eyebrows.
And on my tenth birthday, I stole the initials of the Metro Cub Club - which were also the initials of the touring English cricket team - and gave them to the new Midnight Children's Conference, my very own M.C.C.
That's how it was when I was ten: nothing but trouble outside my head, nothing but miracles inside it.作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:34
At the Pioneer Cafe
No colours except green and black the walls are green the sky is black (there is no roof) the stars are green the Widow is green but her hair is black as black.
The Widow sits on a high high chair the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's hair has a centre-parting it is green on the left and on the right black. High as the sky the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's arm is long as death its skin is green the fingernails are long and sharp and black.
Between the walls the children green the walls are green the Widow's arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow's arm is hunting see the children run and scream the Widow's hand curls round them green and black. Now one by one the children mmff are stifled quiet the Widow's hand is lifting one by one the children green their blood is black unloosed by cutting fingernails it splashes black on walls (of green) as one by one the curling hand lifts children high as sky the sky is black there are no stars the Widow laughs her tongue is green but her teeth are black. And children torn in two in Widow hands which rolling rolling halves of children roll them into little balls the balls are green the night is black. And little balls fly into night between the walls the children shriek as one by one the Widow's hand. And in a corner the Monkey and I (the walls are green the shadows black) cowering crawling wide high walls green fading into black there is no roof and Widow's hand comes onebyone the children scream and mmff and little balls and hand and scream and mmff and splashing stains of black. Now only she and I and no more screams the Widow's hand comes hunting hunting the skin is green the nails are black towards the corner hunting hunting while we shrink closer into the corner our skin is green our fear is black and now the Hand comes reaching reaching and she my sister pushes me out out of the corner while she stays cowering staring the hand the nails are curling scream and mmff and splash of black and up into the high as sky and laughing Widow tearing I am rolling into little balls the balls are green and out into the night the night is black ...
The fever broke today. For two days (I'm told) Padma has been sitting up all night, placing cold wet flannels on my forehead, holding me through my shivers and dreams of Widow's hands; for two days she has been blaming herself for her potion of unknown herbs. 'But,' I reassure her, 'this time, it wasn't anything to do with that.' I recognize this fever; it's come up from inside me and from nowhere else; like a bad stink, it's oozed through my cracks. I caught exactly such a fever on my tenth birthday, and spent two days in bed; now, as my memories return to leak out of me, this old fever has come back, too. 'Don't worry,' I say, 'I caught these germs almost twenty-one years ago.'
We are not alone. It is morning at the pickle-factory; they have brought my son to see me. Someone (never mind who) stands beside Padma at my bedside, holding him in her arms. 'Baba, thank God you are better, you don't know what you were talking in your sickness.' Someone speaks anxiously, trying to force her way into my story ahead of time; but it won't work... someone, who founded this pickle-factory and its ancillary bottling works, who has been looking after my impenetrable child, just as once ... wait on! She nearly wormed it out of me then, but fortunately I've still got my wits about me, fever or no fever! Someone will just have to step back and remain cloaked in anonymity until it's her turn; and that won't be until the very end. I turn my eyes away from her to look at Padma. 'Do not think,' I admonish her, 'that because I had a fever, the things I told you were not completely true. Everything happened just as I described.'
'O God, you and your stories,' she cries, 'all day, all night -you have made yourself sick! Stop some time, na, what will it hurt?' I set my lips obstinately; and now she, with a sudden change of mood: 'So, tell me now, mister: is there anything you want7'
'Green chutney,' I request, 'Bright green - green as grasshoppers.' And someone who cannot be named remembers and tells Padma (speaking in the soft voice which is only used at sickbeds and funerals), 'I know what he means.'
... Why, at this crucial instant, when all manner of things were . waiting to be described - when the Pioneer Cafe was so close, and the rivalry of knees and nose - did I introduce a mere condiment into the conversation? (Why do I waste time, in this account, on a humble preserve, when I could be describing the elections of 1957 -when all India is waiting, twenty-one years ago, to vote?)
Because I sniffed the air; and scented, behind the solicitous expressions of my visitors, a sharp whiff of danger. I intended to defend myself; but I required the assistance of chutney ...
I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what has remained undescribed: through green-tinged glass windows, my room looks out on to an iron catwalk and then down to the cooking-floor, where copper vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps, working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle fumes; while (looking the other way, through a green-tinged window on the world) railway tracks shine dully in morning sun, bridged over at regular intervals by the messy gantries of the electrification system. In daylight, our saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance above the factory doors; we switch her off to save power. But electric trains are using power: yellow-and-brown local trains clatter south towards Churchgate Station from Dadar and Borivli, from Kurla and Bassein Road. Human flies hang in thick white-trousered dusters from the trains; I do not deny that, within the factory walls, you may also see some flies. But there are also compensating lizards, hanging stilly upside-down on the ceiling, their jowls reminiscent of the Kathiawar peninsula ... sounds, too, have been waiting to be heard: bubbling of vats, loud singing, coarse imprecations, bawdy humour of fuzz-armed women; the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped admonitions of overseers; the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the adjacent bottling-works; and rush of trains, and the buzzing (infrequent, but inevitable) of flies ... while grasshopper-green chutney is being extracted from its vat, to be brought on a wiped-clean plate with saffron and green stripes around the rim, along with another plate piled high with snacks from the local Irani shop; while what-has-now-been-shown goes on as usual, and what-can-now-be-heard fills the air (to say nothing of what can be smelled), I, alone in bed in my office realize with a start of alarm that outings are being suggested.
'... When you are stronger,' someone who cannot be named is saying, 'a day at Elephanta, why not, a nice ride in a motor-launch, and all those caves with so-beautiful carvings; or Juhu Beach, for swimming and coconut-milk and camel-races; or Aarey Milk Colony, even! ...' And Padma: 'Fresh air, yes, and the little one will like to be with his father.' And someone, patting my son on his head: 'There, of course, we will all go. Nice picnic; nice day out. Baba, it will do you good ...'
As chutney arrives, bearer-borne, in my room, I hasten to put a stop to these suggestions. 'No,' I refuse. 'I have work to do.' And I see a look pass between Padma and someone; and I see that I've been right to be suspicious. Because I've been tricked by offers of picnics once before! Once before, false smiles and offers of Aarey Milk Colony have fooled me into going out of doors and into a motor car; and then before I knew it there were hands seizing me, there were hospital corridors and doctors and nurses holding me in place while over my nose a mask poured anaesthetic over me and a voice said, Count now, count to ten ...
I know what they are planning. 'Listen,' I tell them, 'I don't need doctors.'
And Padma, 'Doctors? Who is talking about...' But she is fooling nobody; and with a little smile I say, 'Here: everybody: take some chutney. I must tell you some important things.'
And while chutney - the same chutney which, back in 1957, my ayah Mary Pereira had made so perfectly; the grasshopper-green chutney which is forever associated with those days - carried them back into the world of my past, while chutney mellowed them and made them receptive, I spoke to them, gently, persuasively, and by a mixture of condiment and oratory kept myself out of the hands of the pernicious green-Medicine men. I said: 'My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I'm telling my story for him, so that afterwards, when I've lost my struggle against cracks, he will know. Morality, judgment, character ... it all starts with memory ... and I am keeping carbons.'
Green chutney on chilli-pakoras, disappearing down someone's gullet; grasshopper-green on tepid chapatis, vanishing behind Padma's lips. I see them begin to weaken, and press on. 'I told you the truth,' I say yet again, 'Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.'
Yes: I said 'sane'. I knew what they were thinking: 'Plenty of children invent imaginary friends; but one thousand and one! That's just crazy!' The midnight children shook even Padma's faith in my narrative; but I brought her round, and now there's no more talk of outings.
How I persuaded them: by talking about my son, who needed to know my story; by shedding light on the workings of memory; and by other devices, some naively honest, others wily as foxes. 'Even Muhammad,' I said, 'at first believed himself insane: do you think the notion never crossed my mind? But the Prophet had his Khadija, his Abu-Bakr, to reassure him of the genuineness of his Calling; nobody betrayed him into the hands of asylum-doctors.' By now, the green chutney was filling them with thoughts of years ago; I saw guilt appear on their faces, and shame. 'What is truth?' I waxed rhetorical, 'What is sanity?
Did Jesus rise up from the grave? Do Hindus not accept - Padma - that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma dreamed, is dreaming the universe; that we only see dimly through that dream-web, which is Maya. Maya,' I adopted a haughty, lecturing tone, 'may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit. Apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya. If I say that certain things took place which you, lost in Brahma's dream, find hard to believe, then which of us is right? Have some more chutney,' I added graciously, taking a generous helping myself. 'It tastes very good.'
Padma began to cry. 'I never said I didn't believe, she wept. 'Of course, every man must tell his story in his own true way; but...'
'But,' I interrupted conclusively, 'you also - don't you - want to know what happens? About the hands that danced without touching, and the knees? And later, the curious baton of Commander Sabarmati, and of course the Widow? And the Children - what became of them?'作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:34
Faced with a picture of such grotesque proportions, I allowed the smile on my own beaming image to wither a little; my outstretched hand began to falter and twitch. And Shiva, feeling my presence, reacted at first with utter rage; great boiling waves of anger scalded the inside of my head; but then, 'Hey - look - I know you! You're the rich kid from Methwold's Estate, isn't it?' And I, equally astonished, 'Winkle's son - the one who blinded Eyeslice!' His self-image puffed up with pride. 'Yah, yaar, that's me. Nobody messes with me, man!' Recognition reduced me to banalities: 'So! How's your father, anyway? He doesn't come round ...' And he, with what felt very like relief: 'Him, man? My father's dead.'
A momentary pause; then puzzlement - no anger now - and Shiva, 'Lissen, yaar, this is damn good - how you doin' it?' I launched into my standard explanation, but after a few instants he interrupted, 'So! Lissen, my father said I got born at exactly midnight also - so don't you see, that makes us joint bosses of this gang of yours! Midnight is best, agreed? So - those other kids gotta do like we tell them!' There rose before my eyes the image of a second, and more potent, Evelyn Lilith Burns ... dismissing this unkind notion, I explained, "That wasn't exactly my idea for the Conference; I had in mind something more like a, you know, sort of loose federation of equals, all points of view given free expression..." Something resembling a violent snort echoed around the walls of my head. 'That, man, that's only rubbish. What we ever goin' to do with a gang like that? Gangs gotta have gang bosses. You take me -' (the puff of pride again) 'I been running a gang up here in Matunga for two years now. Since I was eight. Older kids and all. What d'you think of that?' And I, without meaning to, 'What's it do, your gang - does it have rules and all?' Shiva-laughter in my ears ... 'Yah, little rich boy: one rule. Everybody does what I say or I squeeze the shit outa them with my knees!' Desperately, I continued to try and win Shiva round to my point of view: 'The thing is, we must be here for a purpose, don't you think? I mean, there has to be a reason, you must agree? So what I thought, we should try and work out what it is, and then, you know, sort of dedicate our lives to...' 'Rich kid,' Shiva yelled, 'you don't know one damn thing! What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara?
For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man?
God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you - you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy.
Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind!'
And now I, in my midnight bed, begin to shake ... 'But history,' I say, 'and the Prime Minister wrote me a letter... and don't you even believe in ... who knows what we might...' He, my alter ego, Shiva, butted in: 'Lissen, little boy - you're so full of crazy stuff, I can see I'm going to have to take this thing over. You tell that to all these other freak kids!'
Nose and knees and knees and nose ... the rivalry that began that night would never be ended, until two knives slashed, downdown-down ... whether the spirits of Mian Abdullah, whom knives killed years before, had leaked into me, imbuing me with the notion of loose federalism and making me vulnerable to knives, I cannot say; but at that point I found a measure of courage and told Shiva, 'You can't run the Conference; without me, they won't even be able to listen to you!'
And he, confirming the declaration of war: 'Rich kid, they'll want to know about me; you just try and stop me!'
'Yes,' I told him, I'll try.'
Shiva, the god of destruction, who is also most potent of deities; Shiva, greatest of dancers; who rides on a bull; whom no force can resist... the boy Shiva, he told us, had to fight for survival from his earliest days. And when his father had, about a year previously, completely lost his singing voice, Shiva had had to defend himself against Wee Willie Winkie's parental zeal. 'He blindfolded me, man! He wrapped a rag around my eyes an' took me to the roof of the chawl, man! You know what was in his hand? A sister-sleeping hammer, man! A hammer! Bastard was going to smash my legs up, man - it happens, you know, rich boy, they do it to kids so they can always earn money begging - you get more if you're all broken up, man! So I'm pushed over till I'm lying down on the roof, man; and then -' And then hammer swinging down towards knees larger and knobblier than any policeman's, an easy target, but now the knees went into action, faster than lightning the knees parted - felt the breath of the down-rushing hammer and spread wide apart; and then hammer plunging between knees, still held in his father's hand; and then, the knees rushing together like fists. The hammer, clattering harmlessly on concrete. The wrist of Wee Willie Winkie, clamped between the knees of his blindfolded son. Hoarse breaths escaping from the lips of the anguished father. And still the knees, closing ininin, tighter and tighter, until there is a snap. 'Broke his goddamn wrist, man! That showed him - damn fine, no? I swear!'
Shiva and I were born under Capricorn rising; the constellation left me alone, but it gave Shiva its gift. Capricorn, as any astrologer will tell you, is the heavenly body with power over the knees.
On election day, 1957, the All-India Congress was badly shocked. Although it won the election, twelve million votes made the Communists the largest single opposition party; and in Bombay, despite the efforts of Boss Patil, large numbers of electors failed to place their crosses against the Congress symbol of sacred-cow-and-suckling-calf, preferring the less emotive pictograms of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti and Maha Gujarat Parishad. When the Communist peril was discussed on our hillock, my mother continued to blush; and we resigned ourselves to the partition of the state of Bombay.
One member of the Midnight Children's Conference played a minor role in the elections. Winkle's supposed son Shiva was recruited by - well, perhaps I will not name the party; but only one party had really large sums to spend - and on polling day, he and his gang, who called themselves Cowboys, were to be seen standing outside a polling station in the north of the city, some holding long stout sucks, others juggling with stones, still others picking their teeth with knives, all of them encouraging the electorate to use its vote with wisdom and care ... and after the polls closed, were seals broken on ballot-boxes? Did ballot-stuffing occur? At any rate, when the votes were counted, it was discovered that Qasim the Red had narrowly failed to win the seat; and my rival's paymasters were well pleased.
... But now Padma says, mildly, 'What date was it?' And, without thinking, I answer: 'Some time in the spring.' And then it occurs to me that I have made another error - that the election of 1957 took place before, and not after, my tenth birthday; but although I have racked my brains, my memory refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events. This is worrying. I don't know what's gone wrong.
She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!'
But if small things go, will large things be close behind?作者: 狗蛋 时间: 2009-1-10 00:35
So we come to the events of the Cathedral School Social. At which bullies became instruments of destiny, and fingers were transmuted into fountains, and Masha Miovic, the legendary breast-stroker, fell into a dead faint... I arrived at the Social with the nurse's bandage still on my head. I was late, because it hadn't been easy to persuade my mother to let me come; so by the time I stepped into the Assembly Hall, beneath streamers and balloons and the professionally suspicious gazes of bony female chaperones, all the best girls were already box-stepping and Mexican-Hatting with absurdly smug partners. Naturally, the prefects had the pick of the ladies; I watched them with passionate envy, Guzder and Joshi and Stevenson and Rushdie and Talyarkhan and Tayabali and Jussawalla and Wagle and King; I tried butting in on them during excuse-mes but when they saw my bandage and my cucumber of a nose and the stains on my face they just laughed and turned their backs ... hatred burgeoning in my bosom, I ate potato chips and drank Bubble-Up and Vimto and told myself, 'Those jerks; if they knew who I was they'd get out of my way pretty damn quick!' But still the fear of revealing my true nature was stronger than my somewhat abstract desire for the whirling European girls.
