Obviously enough (because otherwise I should have to introduce at this point some fantastic explanation of my continued presence in this 'mortal coil'), you may number me amongst those whom the war of '65 failed to obliterate. Spittoon-brained, Saleem suffered a merely partial erasure, and was only wiped clean whilst others, less fortunate, were wiped out; unconscious in the night-shadow of a mosque, I was saved by the exhaustion of ammunition dumps.
Tears-which, in the absence of the Kashmir! cold, have absolutely no chance of hardening into diamonds-slide down the bosomy contours of Padma's cheeks. 'O, mister, this war tamasha, kills the best and leaves the rest!' Looking as though hordes of snails have recently crawled down from her reddened eyes, leaving their glutinous shiny trails upon her face, Padma mourns my bomb-flattened clan. I remain dry-eyed as usual, graciously refusing to rise to the unintentional insult implied by Padma's lachrymose exclamation.
'Mourn for the living,' I rebuke her gently, 'The dead have their camphor gardens.' Grieve for Saleem! Who, barred from celestial lawns by the continued beating of his heart, awoke once again amid the clammy metallic fragrances of a hospital ward; for whom there were no houris, untouched by man or djinn, to provide the promised consolations of eternity-I was lucky to receive the grudging, bedpan-clattering ministrations of a bulky male nurse who, while bandaging my head, muttered sourly that, war or no war, the doctor sahibs liked going to their beach shacks on Sundays. 'Better you'd stayed knocked out one more day,' he mouthed, before moving further down the ward to spread more good cheer.
Grieve for Saleem-who, orphaned and purified, deprived of the hundred daily pin-pricks of family life, which alone could deflate the great ballooning fantasy of history and bring it down to a more manageably human scale, had been pulled up by his roots to be flung unceremoniously across the years, fated to plunge memoryless into an adulthood whose every aspect grew daily more grotesque.
Fresh snail-tracks on Padma's cheeks. Obliged to attempt some sort of 'There, there', I resort to movie-trailers. (How I loved them at the old Metro Cub Club! O smacking of lips at the sight of the title next attraction, superimposed on undulating blue velvet! O anticipatory salivation before screens trumpeting coming soon!-Because the promise of exotic futures has always seemed, to my mind, the perfect antidote to the disappointments of the present.) 'Stop, stop,' I exhort my mournfully squatting audience, I'm not finished yet! There is to be electrocution and a rain-forest; a pyramid of heads on a field impregnated by leaky marrowbones; narrow escapes are coming, and a minaret that screamed! Padma, there is still plenty worth telling: my further trials, in the basket of invisibility and in the shadow of another mosque; wait for the premonitions of Resham Bibi and the pout of Parvati-the-witch! Fatherhood and treason also, and of course that unavoidable Widow, who added to my history of drainage-above the final ignominy of voiding-below… in short, there are still next-attractions and coming-soons galore; a chapter ends when one's parents die, but a new kind of chapter also begins.'
Somewhat consoled by my offers of novelty, my Padma sniffs; wipes away mollusc-slime, dries eyes; breathes in deeply… and, for the spittoon-brained fellow we last met in his hospital bed, approximately five years pass before my dung-lotus exhales.
(While Padma, to calm herself, holds her breath, I permit myself to insert a Bombay-talkie-style close-up-a calendar ruffled by a breeze, its pages flying off in rapid succession to denote the passing of the years; I superimpose turbulent long-shots of street riots, medium shots of burning buses and blazing English-language libraries owned by the British Council and the United States Information Service; through the accelerated flickering of the calendar we glimpse the fall of Ayub Khan, the assumption of the presidency by General Yahya, the promise of elections… but now Padma's lips are parting, and there is no time to linger-on the angrily-opposed images of Mr Z. A. Bhutto and Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman; exhaled air begins to issue invisibly from her mouth, and the dream-faces of the leaders of the Pakistan People's Party and the Awami League shimmer and fade out; the gusting of her emptying lungs paradoxically stills the breeze blowing the pages of my calendar, which conies to rest upon a date late in 1970, before the election which split the country in two, before the war of West Wing against East Wing, P.P.P. against Awami League, Bhutto against Mujib… before the election of 1970, and far away from the public stage, three young soldiers are arriving at a mysterious camp in the Murree Hills.)
Padma has regained her self-control. 'Okay, okay,' she expostulates, waving an arm in dismissal of her tears, 'Why you're waiting? Begin,' the lotus instructs me loftily, 'Begin all over again.'
The camp in (he hills will be found on no maps; it is too far from the Murree road for the barking of its dogs to be heard, even by the sharpest-eared of motorists. Its wire perimeter fence is heavily camouflaged; the gate bears neither symbol nor name. Yet it does, did, exist; though its existence has been hotly denied-at the fall of Dacca, for instance, when Pakistan's vanquished Tiger Niazi was quizzed on this subject by his old chum, India's victorious General Sam Manekshaw, the Tiger scoffed: 'Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities? Never heard of it; you've been misled, old boy. Damn ridiculous idea, if you don't mind my saying.' Despite what the Tiger said to Sam, I insist: the camp was there all right…
…'Shape up!' Brigadier Iskandar is yelling at his newest recruits, Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar. 'You're a cutia unit now!' Slapping swagger-stick against thigh, he turns on his heels and leaves them standing on the parade-ground, simultaneously fried by mountain sun and frozen by mountain air. Chests out, shoulders back, rigid with obedience, the three youths hear the giggling voice of the Brigadier's batman, Lala Moin: So you're the poor suckers who get the man-dog!'
In their bunks that night: 'Tracking and intelligence!' whispers Ayooba Baloch, proudly. 'Spies, man! O.S.S. 117 types! Just let us at those Hindus-see what we don't do! Ka-dang! Ka-pow! What weaklings, yara, those Hindus! Vegetarians all! Vegetables,' Ayooba hisses, 'always lose to meat.' He is built like a tank. His crew-cut begins just above his eyebrows.
And Farooq, 'You think there'll be war?' Ayooba snorts. 'What else? How not a war? Hasn't Bhutto sahib promised every peasant one acre of land? So where it'll come from? For so much soil, we must conquer Punjab and Bengal! Just wait only; after the election, when People's Party has won-then Ka-pow! Ka-blooey!'
Farooq is troubled: 'Those Indians have Sikh troops, man. With so-long beards and hair, in the heat it pricks like crazy and they all go mad and fight like hell…!'
Ayooba gurgles with amusement. 'Vegetarians, I swear, yaar… how are they going to beat beefy types like us?' But Farooq is long and stringy.
Shaheed Dar whispers, 'But what did he mean: man-dog?'… Morning. In a hut with a blackboard, Brigadier Iskandar polishes knuckles on lapels while one Sgt-Mjr Najmuddin briefs new recruits. Question-and-answer format; Najmuddin provides both queries and replies. No interruptions are to be tolerated. While above the blackboard the garlanded portraits of President Yahya and Mutasim the Martyr stare sternly down. And through the (closed) windows, the persistent barking of dogs… Najmuddin's inquiries and responses are also barked. What are you here for?-Training. In what field?-Pursuit-and-capture. How will you work?-In canine units of three persons and one dog. What unusual features?-Absence of officer personnel, necessity of taking own decisions, concomitant requirement for high Islamic sense of self-discipline and responsibility. Purpose of units?-To root out undesirable elements. Nature of such elements?-Sneaky, well-disguised, could-be-anyone. Known intentions of same?-To be abhorred: destruction of family life, murder of God, expropriation of landowners, abolition of film-censorship. To what ends?-Annihilation of the State, anarchy, foreign domination. Accentuating causes of concern?-Forthcoming elections; and subsequently, civilian rule. (Political prisoners have been are being freed. All types of hooligans are abroad.) Precise duties of units?-To obey unquestioningly; to seek unflaggingly; to arrest remorselessly. Mode of procedure?-Covert; efficient; quick. Legal basis of such detentions?-Defence of Pakistan Rules, permitting the pick-up of undesirables, who may be held incommunicado for a period of six months. Footnote: a renewable period of six months. Any questions?-No. Good. You are cutia Unit 22. She-dog badges will be sewn to lapels. The acronym cutia, of course, means bitch.
And the man-dog?
Cross-legged, blue-eyed, staring into space, he sits beneath a tree. Bodhi trees do not grow at this altitude; he makes do with a chinar. His nose: bulbous, cucumbery, tip blue with cold. And on his head a monk's tonsure where once Mr Zagallo's hand. And a mutilated finger whose missing segment fell at Masha Miovic's feet after Glandy Keith had slammed. And stains on his face like a map… 'Ekkkhh-thoo!' (He spits.)
His teeth are stained; betel-juice reddens his gums. A red stream of expectorated paan-fluid leaves his lips, to hit, with commendable accuracy, a beautifully-wrought silver spittoon, which sits before him on the ground. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq are staring in amazement. 'Don't try to get it away from him,' Sgt-Mjr Najmuddin indicates the spittoon, 'It sends him wild.' Ayooba begins, 'Sir sir I thought you said three persons and a-', but Najmuddin barks, 'No questions! Obedience without queries! This is your tracker; that's that. Dismiss.'
At that time, Ayooba and Farooq were sixteen and a half years old. Shaheed (who had lied about his age) was perhaps a year younger. Because they were so young, and had not had time to acquire the type of memories which give men a firm hold on reality, such as memories of love or famine, the boy soldiers were highly susceptible to the influence of legends and gossip. Within twenty-four hours, in the course of mess-hall conversations with other cutia units, the man-dog had been fully mythologized… 'From a really important family, man!'-'The idiot child, they put him in the Army to make a man of him!'-'Had a war accident in '65, yaar, can't won't remember a thing about it!'-'Listen, I heard he was the brother of-'No, man, that's crazy, she is good, you know, so simple and holy, how would she leave her brother?'-'Anyway he refuses to talk about it.'-'I heard one terrible thing, she hated him, man, that's why she!'-'No memory, not interested in people, lives like a dog!'-'But the tracking business is true all right! You see that nose on him?'-'Yah, man, he can follow any trail on earth!'-'Through water, baba, across rocks! Such a tracker, you never saw!'-'And he can't feel a thing! That's right! Numb, I swear; head-to-foot numb! You touch him, he wouldn't know-only by smell he knows you're there!'-'Must be the war wound!'-'But that spittoon, man, who knows? Carries it everywhere like a love-token!'-'I tell you, I'm glad it's you three; he gives me the creeps, yaar, it's those blue eyes.'-'You know how they found out about his nose? He just wandered into a minefield, man, I swear, just picked his way through, like he could smell the damn mines!'-'O, no, man, what are you talking, that's an old story, that was that first dog in the whole cutia operation, that Bonzo, man, don't mix us up!'-Hey, you Ayooba, you better watch your step, they say V.I.P.s are keeping their eyes on him!'-'Yah, like I told you, Jamila Singer…»-'O, keep your mouth shut, we all heard enough of your fairy-tales!'
Once Ayooba, Farooq and Shaheed had become reconciled to their strange, impassive tracker (it was after the incident at the latrines), they gave him the nickname of buddha, 'old man'; not just because he must have been seven years their senior, and had actually taken part in the six-years-ago war of '65, when the three boy soldiers weren't even in long pants, but because there hung around him an air of great antiquity. The buddha was old before his time.
O fortunate ambiguity of transliteration! The Urdu word 'buddha', meaning old man, is pronounced with the Ds hard and plosive. But there is also Buddha, with soft-tongued Ds, meaning he-who-achieved-enlightenment-under-the-bodhi-tree… Once upon a time, a prince, unable to bear the suffering of the world, became capable of not-living-in-the-world as well as living in it; he was present, but also absent; his body was in one place, but his spirit was elsewhere. In ancient India, Gautama the Buddha sat enlightened under a tree at Gaya; in the deer park at Sarnath he taught others to abstract themselves from worldly sorrows and achieve inner peace; and centuries later, Saleem the buddha sat under a different tree, unable to remember grief, numb as ice, wiped clean as a slate… With some embarrassment, I am forced to admit that amnesia is the kind of gimmick regularly used by our lurid film-makers. Bowing my head slightly, I accept that my life has taken on, yet again, the tone of a Bombay talkie; but after all, leaving to one side the vexed issue of reincarnation, there is only a finite number of methods of achieving rebirth. So, apologizing for the melodrama, I must doggedly insist that I, he, had begun again; that after years of yearning for importance, he (or I) had been cleansed of the whole business; that after my vengeful abandonment by Jamila Singer, who wormed me into the Army to get me out her sight, I (or he) accepted the fate which was my repayment for love, and sat uncomplaining under a chinar tree; that, emptied of history, the buddha learned the arts of submission, and did only what was required of him. To sum up: I became a citizen of Pakistan.
It was arguably inevitable that, during the months of training, the buddha should begin to irritate Ayooba Baloch. Perhaps it was because he chose to live apart from the soldiers, in a straw-lined ascetic's stall at the far end of the kennel-barracks; or because he was so often to be found sitting cross-legged under his tree, silver spittoon clutched in hand, with unfocused eyes and a foolish smile on his lips-as if he were actually happy that he'd lost his brains! What's more, Ayooba, the apostle of meat, may have found his tracker insufficiently virile. 'Like a brinjal, man,' I permit Ayooba to complain, 'I swear-a vegetable!'
(We may also, taking the wider view, assert that irritation was in the air at the year's turn. Were not even General Yahya and Mr Bhutto getting hot and bothered about the petulant insistence of Sheikh Mujib on his right to form the new government? The wretched Bengali's Awami League had won 160 out of a possible 162 East Wing seats; Mr Bhutto's P.P.P. had merely taken 81 Western constituencies. Yes, an irritating election. It is easy to imagine how irked Yahya and Bhutto, West Wingers both, must have been! And when even the mighty wax peevish, how is one to blame the small man? The irritation of Ayooba Baloch, let us conclude, placed him in excellent, Dot to say exalted company.)
On training manoeuvres, when Ayooba Shaheed Farooq scrambled after the buddha as he followed the faintest of trails across bush rocks streams, the three boys were obliged to admit his skill; but still Ayooba, tank-like, demanded: 'Don't you remember really? Nothing? Allah, you don't feel bad? Somewhere you've maybe got mother father sister,' but the buddha interrupted him gently: 'Don't try and fill my head with that history. I am who I am, that's all there is.' His accent was so pure, 'Really classy Lucknow-type Urdu, wah-wah!' Farooq said admiringly, that Ayooba Baloch, who spoke coarsely, like a tribesman, fell silent; and the three boys began to believe the rumours even more fervently. They were unwillingly fascinated by this man with his nose like a cucumber and his head which rejected memories families histories, which contained absolutely nothing except smells… 'like a bad egg that somebody sucked dry,' Ayooba muttered to his companions, and then, returning to his central theme, added, 'Allah, even his nose looks like a vegetable.'
Their uneasiness lingered. Did they sense, in the buddha's numbed blankness, a trace of 'undesirability'?-For was not his rejection of past-and-family just the type of subversive behaviour they were dedicated to 'rooting out'? The camp's officers, however, were deaf to Ayooba's requests of 'Sir sir can't we just have a real dog sir?'… so that Farooq, a born follower who had already adopted Ayooba as his leader and hero, cried, 'What to do? With that guy's family contacts, some high-ups must've told the Brigadier to put up with him, that's all.'
And (although none of the trio would have been able to express the idea) I suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every Pakistani heart. In those days, the country's East and West Wings were separated by the unbridgeable land-mass of India; but past and present, too, are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now. Enough philosophizing: what I am saying is that by abandoning consciousness, seceding from history, the buddha was setting the worst of examples-and the example was followed by no less a personage than Sheikh Mujib, when he led the East Wing into secession and declared it independent as 'Bangladesh'! Yes, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were right to feel ill-at-ease-because even in those depths of my withdrawal from responsibility, I remained responsible, through the workings of the metaphorical modes of connection, for the belligerent events of 1971.
But I must go back to my new companions, so that I can relate the incident at the latrines: there was Ayooba, tank-like, who led the unit, and Farooq, who followed contentedly. The third youth, however, was a gloomier, more private type, and as such closest to my heart. On his fifteenth birthday Shaheed Dar had lied about his age and enlisted. That day, his Punjabi sharecropper father had taken Shaheed into a field and wept all over his new uniform. Old Dar told his son the meaning of his name, which was 'martyr', and expressed the hope that he would prove worthy of it, and perhaps become the first of their family members to enter the perfumed garden, leaving behind this pitiful world in which a father could not hope to pay his debts and also feed his nineteen children. The overwhelming power of names, and the resulting approach of martyrdom, had begun to prey heavily on Shaheed's mind; in his dreams, he began to see his death, which took the form of a bright pomegranate, and floated in mid-air behind him, following him everywhere, biding its time. The disturbing and somewhat unheroic vision of pomegranate death made Shaheed an inward, unsmiling fellow.
Inwardly, unsmilingly, Shaheed observed various cutia units being sent away from the camp, into action; and became convinced that his time, and the time of the pomegranate, was very near. From departures of three-men-and-a-dog units in camouflaged jeeps, he deduced a growing political crisis; it was February, and the irritations of the exalted were becoming daily more marked. Ayooba-the-tank, however, retained a local point of view. His irritation was also mounting, but its object was the buddha.
Ayooba had become infatuated with the only female in the camp, a skinny latrine cleaner who couldn't have been over fourteen and whose nipples were only just beginning to push against her tattered shirt: a low type, certainly, but she was all that there was, and for a latrine cleaner she had very nice teeth and a pleasant line in saucy over-the-shoulder glances… Ayooba began to follow her around, and that was how he spied her going into the buddha's straw-lined stall, and that was why he leaned a bicycle against the building and stood on the seat, and that was why he fell off, because he didn't like what he saw. Afterwards he spoke to the latrine girl, grabbing her roughly by the arm: 'Why do it with that crazy-why, when I, Ayooba, am, could be-?' and she replied that she liked the man-dog, he's funny, says he can't feel anything, he rubs his hosepipe inside me but can't even feel, but it's nice, and he tells that he likes my smell. The frankness of the urchin girl, the honesty of latrine cleaners, made Ayooba sick; he told her she had a soul composed of pig-droppings, and a tongue caked with excrement also; and in the throes of his jealousy he devised the prank of the jump-leads, the trick of the electrified urinal. The location appealed to him; it had a certain poetic justice.
'Can't feel, huh?' Ayooba sneered to Farooq and Shaheed, 'Just wait on: I'll make him jump for sure.'
On February loth (when Vahya, Bhutto and Mujib were refusing to engage in high-level talks), the buddha felt the call of nature. A somewhat concerned Shaheed and a gleeful Farooq loitered by the latrines; while Ayooba, who had used jump-leads to attach the metal footplates of the urinals to the battery of a jeep, stood out of sight behind the latrine hut, beside the jeep, whose motor was running. The buddha appeared, with his eyes as dilated as a charas-chewer's and his gait of walking-through-a-cloud, and as he floated into the latrine Farooq called out, 'Ohe! Ayooba, yara!' and began to giggle. The childsoldiers awaited the howl of mortified anguish which would be the sign that their vacuous tracker had begun to piss, allowing electricity to mount the golden stream and sting him in his numb and urchin-rubbing hosepipe.
But no shriek came; Farooq, feeling confused and cheated, began to frown; and as time went by Shaheed grew nervous and yelled over to Ayooba Baloch, 'You Ayooba! What you doing, man?' To which Ayooba-the-tank, 'What d'you think, yaar, I turned on the juice five minutes ago!'… And now Shaheed ran-full tilt!-into the latrine, to find the buddha urinating away with an expression of foggy pleasure, emptying a bladder which must have been filling up for a fortnight, while the current passed up into him through his nether cucumber, apparently unnoticed, so that he was filling up with electrkity and there was a blue crackle playing around the end of his gargantuan nose; and Shaheed who didn't have the courage to touch this impossible being who could absorb electricity through his hosepipe screamed, 'Disconnect, man, or he'll fry like an onion here!' The buddha emerged from the latrine, unconcerned, buttoning himself with his right hand while the left hand held his silver spittoon; and the three child-soldiers understood that it was really true, Allah, numb as ice, anaesthetized against feelings as well as memories… For a week after the incident, the buddha could not be touched without giving an electric shock, and not even the latrine girl could visit him in his stall.
Curiously, after the jump-lead business, Ayooba Baloch stopped resenting the buddha, and even began to treat him with respect; the canine unit was forged by that bizarre moment into a real team, and was ready to venture forth against the evildoers of the earth.
Ayooba-the-tank failed to give the buddha a shock; but where the small man fails, the mighty triumph. (When Yahya and Bhutto decided to make Sheikh Mujib jump, there were no mistakes.)
On March 15th, 1971, twenty units of the CUTIa agency assembled in a hut with a blackboard. The garlanded features of the President gazed down upon sixty-one men and nineteen dogs; Yahya Khan had just offered Mujib the olive branch of immediate talks with himself and Bhutto, to resolve all irritations; but his portrait maintained an impeccable poker-face, giving no clue to his true, shocking intentions… while Brigadier Iskandar rubbed knuckles on lapels, Sgt-Mjr Najmuddin issued orders: sixty-one men and nineteen dogs were instructed to shed their uniforms. A tumultuous rustling in the hut: obeying without query, nineteen individuals remove identifying collars from canine necks. The dogs, excellently trained, cock eyebrows but refrain from giving voice; and the buddha, dutifully, begins to undress. Five dozen fellow humans follow his lead; five dozen stand to attention in a trice, shivering in the cold, beside neat piles of military berets pants shoes shirts and green pullovers with leather patches at the elbows. Sixty-one men, naked except for imperfect underwear, are issued (by Lala Moin the batman) with Army-approved mufti. Najmuddin barks a command; and then there they all are, some in lungis and kurtas, some in Pathan turbans. There are men in cheap rayon pants and men in striped clerks' shirts. The buddha is in dhoti and kameez; he is comfortable, but around him are soldiers squirming in ill-fitting plain-clothes. This is, however, a military operation; no voice, human or canine, is raised in complaint.
On March 15th, after obeying sartorial instructions, twenty cutia units were flown to Dacca, via Ceylon; among them were Shaheed Dar, Farooq Rashid, Ayooba Baloch and their buddha. Also flying to the East Wing by this circuitous route were sixty thousand of the West Wing's toughest troops: sixty thousand, like sixty-one, were all in mufti. The General Officer Commanding (in a nattily blue double-breasted suit) was Tikka Khan; the officer responsible for Dacca, for its taming and eventual surrender, was called Tiger Niazi. He wore bush-shirt, slacks and a jaunty little trilby on his head.
Via Ceylon we flew, sixty thousand and sixty-one innocent airline passengers, avoiding overflying India, and thus losing our chance of watching, from twenty thousand feet, the celebrations of Indira Gandhi's New Congress Party, which had won a landslide victory-350 out of a possible 515 seats in the Lok Sabha-in another recent election. Indira-ignorant, unable to see her campaign slogan, garibi hatao, Get Rid of Poverty, blazoned on walls and banners across the great diamond of India, we landed in Dacca in the early spring, and were driven in specially-requisitioned civilian buses to a military camp. On this last stage of our journey, however, we were unable to avoid hearing a snatch of song, issuing from some unseen gramophone. The song was called 'Amar Sonar Bangla' ('Our Golden Bengal', author: R. Tagore) and ran, in part: 'During spring the fragrance of your mango-groves maddens my heart with delight.' However, none of us could understand Bengali, so we were protected against the insidious subversion of the lyric, although our feet did inadvertently tap (it must be admitted) to the tune.
At first, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha were not told the name of the city to which they had come. Ayooba, envisaging the destruction of vegetarians, whispered: 'Didn't I tell you? Now we'll show them! Spy stuff, man! Plain clothes and all! Up and at 'em, Number 22 Unit! Ka-bang! Ka-dang! Ka-pow!'
But we were not in India; vegetarians were not our targets; and after days of cooling our heels, uniforms were issued to us once again. This second transfiguration took place on March 25th.
On March 25th, Yahya and Bhutto abruptly broke off their talks with Mujib and returned to the West Wing. Night fell; Brigadier Iskandar, followed by Najmuddin and Lala Moin, who was staggering under the weight of sixty-one uniforms and nineteen dog-collars, burst into the cutia barracks. Now Najmuddin: 'Snap to it! Actions not words! One-two double-quick time!' Airline passengers donned uniforms and took up arms; while Brigadier Iskandar at last announced the purpose of our trip. 'That Mujib,' he revealed, 'We'll give him what-for all right. We'll make him jump for sure!'
(It was on March 25th, after the breakdown of the talks with Bhutto and Yahya, that Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman proclaimed the state of Bangladesh.) cutia units emerged from barracks, piled into waiting jeeps; while, over the loudspeakers of the military base, the recorded voice of Jamila Singer was raised in patriotic hymns. (And Ayooba, nudging the buddha: 'Listen, come on, don't you recognize-think, man, isn't that your own dear-Allah, this type is good for nothing but sniffing!')
At midnight-could it, after all, have been at any other time?-sixty thousand crack troops also left their barracks; passengers-who-had-flown-as-civilians now pressed the starter buttons of tanks. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha, however, were personally selected to accompany Brigadier Iskandar on the greatest adventure of the night. Yes, Padma: when Mujib was arrested, it was I who sniffed him out. (They had provided me with one of his old shirts; it's easy when you've got the smell.)
Padma is almost beside herself with anguish. 'But mister, you didn't, can't have, how would you do such a thing… ?' Padma: I did. I have sworn to tell everything; to conceal no shred of the truth. (But there are snail-tracks on her face, and she must have an explanation.)
So-believe me, don't believe, but this is what it was like!-I must reiterate that everything ended, everything began again, when a spittoon hit me on the back of the head. Saleem, with his desperation for meaning, for worthy purpose, for genius-like-a-shawl, had gone; would not return until a jungle snake-for the moment, anyway, there is was only the buddha; who recognizes no singing voice as his relative; who remembers neither fathers nor mothers; for whom midnight holds no importance; who, some time after a cleansing accident, awoke in a military hospital bed, and accepted the Army as his lot; who submits to the life in which he finds himself, and does his duty; who follows orders; who lives both in-the-world and not-in-the-world; who bows his head; who can track man or beast through streets or down rivers; who neither knows nor cares how, under whose auspices, as a favour to whom, at whose vengeful instigation he was put into uniform; who is, in short, no more and no less than the accredited tracker of cutia Unit 22.
But how convenient this amnesia is, how much it excuses! So permit me to criticize myself: the philosophy of acceptance to which the buddha adhered had consequences no more and no less unfortunate than his previous lust-for-centrality; and here, in Dacca, those consequences were being revealed.
'No, not true,' my Padma wails; the same denials have been made about most of what befell that night.
Midnight, March 25th, 1971: past the University, which was being shelled, the buddha led troops to Sheikh Mujib's lair. Students and lecturers came running out of hostels; they were greeted by bullets, and Mercurochrome stained the lawns. Sheikh Mujib, however, was not shot; manacled, manhandled, he was led by Ayooba Baloch to a waiting van. (As once before, after the revolution of the pepperpots… but Mujib was not naked; he had on a pair of green-and-yellow striped pajamas.) And while we drove through city streets, Shaheed looked out of windows and saw things that weren't-couldn't-have-been true: soldiers entering women's hostels without knocking; women, dragged into the street, were also entered, and again nobody troubled' to knock. And newspaper offices, burning with the dirty yellowblack smoke of cheap gutter newsprint, and the offices of trade unions, smashed to the ground, and roadside ditches filling up with people who were not merely asleep-bare chests were seen, and the hollow pimples of bullet-holes. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq watched in silence through moving windows as our boys, our soldiers-for-Allah, our worth-ten-babus jawans held Pakistan together by turning flamethrowers machine-guns hand-grenades on the city slums. By the time we brought Sheikh Mujib to the airport, where Ayooba stuck a pistol into his rump and pushed him on to an aircraft which flew him into West Wing captivity, the buddha had closed his eyes. ('Don't fill my head with all this history,' he had once told Ayooba-the-tank, 'I am what I am and that's all there is.')
And Brigadier Iskandar, rallying his troops: 'Even now there are subversive elements to be rooted out.'
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy… dog-soldiers strain at the leash, and then, released, leap joyously to their work. O wolfhound chases of undesirables! O prolific seizings of professors and poets! O unfortunate shot-while-resisting arrests of Awami Leaguers and fashion correspondents! Dogs of war cry havoc in the city; but although tracker-dogs are tireless, soldiers are weaker: Farooq Shaheed Ayooba take turns at vomiting as their nostrils are assailed by the stench of burning slums. The buddha, in whose nose the stench spawns images of searing vividness, continues merely to do his job. Nose them out: leave the rest to the soldier-boys. cutia units stalk the smouldering wreck of the city. No undesirable is safe tonight; no hiding-place impregnable. Bloodhounds track the fleeing enemies of national unity; wolfhounds, not to be outdone, sink fierce teeth into their prey.
How many arrests-ten, four-hundred-and-twenty, one-thousand-and-one?-did our own Number 22 Unit make that night? How many intellectual lily-livered Daccans hid behind women's saris and had to be yanked into the streets? How often did Brigadier Iskandar-'Smell this! That's the stink of subversion!'-unleash the war-hounds of unity? There are things which took place on the night of March 25th which must remain permanently in a state of confusion.
Futility of statistics: during 1971, ten million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan-Bangladesh into India-but ten million (like all numbers larger than one thousand and one) refuses to be understood. Comparisons do not help: 'the biggest migration in the history of the human race'-meaningless. Bigger than Exodus, larger than the Partition crowds, the many-headed monster poured into India. On the border, Indian soldiers trained the guerrillas known as Mukti Bahini; in Dacca, Tiger Niazi ruled the roost.
And Ayooba Shaheed Farooq? Our boys in green? How did they take to battling against fellow meat-eaters? Did they mutiny? Were officers-Iskandar, Najmuddin, even Lala Moin-riddled with nauseated bullets? They were not. Innocence had been lost; but despite a new grimness about the eyes, despite the irrevocable loss of certainty, despite the eroding of moral absolutes, the unit went on with its work. The buddha was not the only one who did as he was told… while somewhere high above the struggle, the voice of Jamila Singer fought anonymous voices singing the lyrics of R. Tagore: 'My life passes in the shady village homes filled with rice from your fields; they madden my heart with delight.'
Their hearts maddened, but not with delight, Ayooba and company followed orders; the buddha followed scent-trails. Into the heart of the city, which has turned violent maddened bloodsoaked as the West Wing soldiers react badly to their knowledge-of-wrongdoing, goes Number 22 Unit; through the blackened streets, the buddha concentrates on the ground, sniffing out trails, ignoring the ground-level chaos of cigarette-packs cow-dung fallen-bicycles abandoned-shoes; and then on other assignments, out into the countryside, where entire villages are being burned owing to their collective responsibility for harbouring Mukti Bahini, the buddha and three boys track down minor Awami League officials and well-known Communist types. Past migrating villagers with bundled possessions on their heads; past torn-up railway tracks and burnt-out trees; and always, as though some invisible force were directing their footsteps, drawing them into a darker heart of madness, their missions send them south south south, always nearer to the sea, to the mouths of the Ganges and the sea.
And at last-who were they following then? Did names matter any more?-they were given a quarry whose skills must have been the equal-and-opposite of the buddha's own, otherwise why did it take so long to catch him? At last-unable to escape their training, pursue-relentlessly-arrest-remorselessly, they are in the midst of a mission without an end, pursuing a foe who endlessly eludes them, but they cannot report back to base empty-handed, and on they go, south south south, drawn by the eternally-receding scent-trail; and perhaps by something more: because, in my life, fate has never been unwilling to lend a hand.
They have commandeered a boat, because the buddha said the trail led down the river; hungry unslept exhausted in a universe of abandoned rice-paddies, they row after their unseen prey; down the great brown river they go, until the war is too far away to remember, but still the scent leads them on. The river here has a familiar name: Padma. But the name is a local deception; in reality the river is still Her, the mother-water, goddess Ganga streaming down to earth through Shiva's hair. The buddha has not spoken for days; he just points, there, that way, and on they go, south south south to the sea.
A nameless morning. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq awaking in the boat of their absurd pursuit, moored by the bank of Padma-Ganga-to find him gone. 'Allah-Allah,' Farooq yelps, 'Grab your ears and pray for pity, he's brought us to this drowned place and run off, it's all your fault, you Ayooba, that trick with the jump-leads and this is his revenge!'… The sun, climbing. Strange alien birds in the sky. Hunger and fear like mice in their bellies: and whatif, whatif the Mukti Bahini… parents are invoked. Shaheed has dreamed his pomegranate dream. Despair, lapping at the edges of the boat. And in the distance, near the horizon, an impossible endless huge green wall, stretching right and left to the ends of the earth! Unspoken fear: how can it be, how can what we are seeing be true, who builds walls across the world?… And then Ayooba, 'Look-look, Allah!' Because coming towards them across the rice-paddies is a bizarre slow-motion chase: first the buddha with that cucumber-nose, you could spot it a mile off, and following him, splashing through paddies, a gesticulating peasant with a scythe, Father Time enraged, while running along a dyke a woman with her sari caught up between her legs, hair loose, voice pleading screaming, while the scythed avenger stumbles through drowned rice, covered from head to foot in water and mud. Ayooba roars with nervous relief: 'The old billy-goat! Couldn't keep his hands off the local women! Come on, buddha, don't let him catch you, he'll slice off both your cucumbers!' And Farooq, 'But then what? If the buddha is sliced, what then?' And now Ayooba-the-tank is pulling a pistol out of its holster. Ayooba aiming: both hands held out in front, trying not to shake, Ayooba squeezing: a scythe curves up into the air. And slowly slowly the arms of a peasant rise up as though in prayer; knees kneel in paddy-water; a face plunges below the water-level to touch its forehead to the earth. On the dyke a woman wailing. And Ayooba tells the buddha: 'Next time I'll shoot you instead.' Ayooba-the-tank shaking like a leaf. And Time lies dead in a rice-paddy.
But there is still the meaningless chase, the enemy who will never be seen, and the buddha, 'Go that way,' and the four of them row on, south south south, they have murdered the hours and forgotten the date, they no longer know if they are chasing after or running from, but whichever it is that pushes them is bringing them closer closer to the impossible green wall, 'That way,' the buddha insists, and then they are inside it, the jungle which is so thick that history has hardly ever found the way in. The Sundarbans: it swallows them up.
I'll own up: there was no last, elusive quarry, driving us south south south. To all my readers, I should like to make this naked-breasted admission: while Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were unable to distinguish between chasing-after and running-from, the buddha knew what he was doing. Although I'm well aware that I am providing any future commentators or venom-quilled critics (to whom I say: twice before, I've been subjected to snake-poison; on both occasions, I proved stronger than venenes) with yet more ammunition-through admission-of-guilt, revelation-of-moral-turpitude, proof-of-coward-ice-I'm-bound to say that he, the buddha, finally incapable of continuing in the submissive performance of his duty, took to his heels and fled. Infected by the soul-chewing maggots of pessimism futility shame, he deserted, into the historyless anonymity of rain-forests, dragging three children in his wake. What I hope to immortalize in pickles as well as words: that condition of the spirit in which the consequences of acceptance could not be denied, in which an overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for flight into the safety of dreams… But the jungle, like all refuges, was entirely other-was both less and more-than he had expected.
'I am glad,' my Padma says, 'I am happy you ran away.' But I insist: not I. He. He, the buddha. Who, until the snake, would remain not-Saleem; who, in spite of running-from, was still separated from his past; although he clutched, in his limpet fist, a certain silver spittoon.
The jungle closed behind them like a tomb, and after hours of increasingly weary but also frenzied rowing through incomprehensibly labyrinthine salt-water channels overtowered by the cathedral-arching trees, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were hopelessly lost; they turned time and again to the buddha, who pointed, 'That way', and then, 'Down there', but although they rowed feverishly, ignoring fatigue, it seems as if the possibility of ever leaving this place receded before them like the lantern of a ghost; until at length they rounded on their supposedly infallible tracker, and perhaps saw some small light of shame or relief glowing in his habitually milky-blue eyes; and now Farooq whispered in the sepulchral greenness of the forest: 'You don't know. You're just saying anything.' The buddha remained silent, but in his silence they read their fate, and now that he was convinced that the jungle had swallowed them the way a toad gulps down a mosquito, now that he was sure he would never see the sun again, Ayooba Baloch, Ayooba-the-tank himself, broke down utterly and wept like a monsoon. The incongruous spectacle of this huge figure with a crew-cut blubbering like a baby served to detach Farooq and Shaheed from their senses; so that Farooq almost upset the boat by attacking the buddha, who mildly bore all the fist-blows which rained down on his chest shoulders arms, until Shaheed pulled Farooq down for the sake of safety. Ayooba Baloch cried without stopping for three entire hours or days or weeks, until the rain began and made his tears unnecessary; and Shaheed Dar heard himself saying, 'Now look what you started, man, with your crying,' proving that they were already beginning to succumb to the logic of the jungle, and that was only the start of it, because as the mystery of evening compounded the unreality of the trees, the Sundarbans began to grow in the rain.
At first they were so busy baling out their boat that they did not notice; also, the water-level was rising, which may have confused them; but in the last light there could be no doubt that the jungle was gaining in size, power and ferocity; the huge stilt-roots of vast ancient mangrove trees could be seen snaking about thirstily in the dusk, sucking in the rain and becoming thicker than elephants' trunks, while the mangroves themselves were getting so tall that, as Shaheed Dar said afterwards, the birds at the top must have been able to sing to God. The leaves in the heights of the great nipa palms began to spread like immense green cupped hands, swelling in the nocturnal downpour until the entire forest seemed to be thatched; and then the nipa-fruits began to fall, they were larger than any coconuts on earth and gathered speed alarmingly as they fell from dizzying heights to explode like bombs in the water. Rainwater was filling their boat; they had only their soft green caps and an old ghee tin to bale with; and as night fell and the nipa-fruits bombed them from the air, Shaheed Dar said, 'Nothing else to do-we must land,' although his thoughts were full of his pomegranate-dream and it crossed his mind that this might be where it came true, even if the fruits were different here.
While Ayooba sat in a red-eyed funk and Farooq seemed destroyed by his hero's disintegration; while the buddha remained silent and bowed his head, Shaheed alone remained capable of thought, because although he was drenched and worn out and the night-jungle screeched around him, his head became partly clear whenever he thought about the pomegranate of his death; so it was Shaheed who ordered us, them, to row our, their, sinking boat to shore.
A nipa-fruit missed the boat by an inch and a half, creating such turbulence in the water that they capsized; they struggled ashore in the dark holding guns oilskins ghee-tin above their heads, pulled the boat up after themselves, and past caring about bombarding nipa palms and snaking mangroves, fell into their sodden craft and slept. When they awoke, soaking-shivering in spite of the heat, the rain had become a heavy drizzle. They found their bodies covered in three-inch-long leeches which were almost entirely colourless owing to the absence of direct sunlight, but which had now turned bright red because they were full of blood, and which, one by one, exploded on the bodies of the four human beings, being too greedy to stop sucking when they were full. Blood trickled down legs and on to the forest floor; the jungle sucked it in, and knew what they were like.
When the falling nipa-fruits smashed on the jungle floor, they, too, exuded a liquid the colour of blood, a red milk which was immediately covered in a million insects, including giant flies as transparent as the leeches. The flies, too, reddened as they filled up with the milk of the fruit… all through the night, it seemed, the Sundarbans had continued to grow. Tallest of all were the sundri trees which had given their name to the jungle; trees high enough to block out even the faintest hope of sun. The four of us, them, climbed out of the boat; and only when they set foot on a hard bare soil crawling with pale pink scorpions and a seething mass of dun-coloured earthworms did they remember their hunger and thirst. Rainwater poured off leaves all around them, and they turned their mouths up to the roof of the jungle and drank; but perhaps because the water came to them by way of sundri leaves and mangrove branches and nipa fronds, it acquired on its journey something of the insanity of the jungle, so that as they drank they fell deeper and deeper into the thraldom of that livid green world where the birds had voices like creaking wood and all the snakes were blind. In the turbid, miasmic state of mind which the jungle induced, they prepared their first meal, a combination of nipa-fruits and mashed earthworms, which inflicted on them all a diarrhoea so violent that they forced themselves to examine the excrement in case their intestines had fallen out in the mess.
Farooq said, 'We're going to die.' But Shaheed was possessed by a powerful lust for survival; because, having recovered from the doubts of the night, he had become convinced that this was not how he was supposed to go.
Lost in the rain-forest, and aware that the lessening of the monsoon was only a temporary respite, Shaheed decided that there was little point in attempting to find a way out when, at any moment, the returning monsoon might sink their inadequate craft; under his instructions, a shelter was constructed from oilskins and palm fronds; Shaheed said, 'As long as we stick to fruit, we can survive.' They bad all long ago forgotten the purpose of their journey; the chase, which had begun far away in the real world, acquired in the altered light of the Sundarbans a quality of absurd fantasy which enabled them to dismiss it once and for all.
So it was that Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha surrendered themselves to the terrible phantasms of the dream-forest. The days passed, dissolving into each other under the force of the returning rain, and despite chills fevers diarrhoea they stayed alive, improving their shelter by pulling down the lower branches of sundris and mangroves, drinking the red milk of nipa-fruits, acquiring the skills of survival, such as the power of strangling snakes and throwing sharpened sticks so accurately that they speared multicoloured birds through their gizzards. But one night Ayooba awoke in the dark to find the translucent figure of a peasant with a bullet-hole in his heart and a scythe in his hand staring mournfully down at him, and as he struggled to get out of the boat (which they had pulled in, under the cover of their primitive shelter) the peasant leaked a colourless fluid which flowed out of the hole in his heart and on to Ayooba's gun arm. The next morning Ayooba's right arm refused to move; it hung rigidly by his side as if it had been set in plaster. Although Farooq Rashid offered help and sympathy, it was no use; the arm was held immovably in the invisible fluid of the ghost.
After this first apparition, they fell into a state of mind in which they would have believed the forest capable of anything; each night it sent them new punishments, the accusing eyes of the wives of men they had tracked down and seized, the screaming and monkey-gibbering of children left fatherless by their work… and in this first time, the time of punishment, even the impassive buddha with his citified voice was obliged to confess that he, too, had taken to waking up at night to find the forest closing in upon him like a vice, so that he felt unable to breathe.
When it had punished them enough-when they were all trembling shadows of the people they had once been-the jungle permitted them the double-edged luxury of nostalgia. One night Ayooba, who was regressing towards infancy faster than any of them, and had begun to suck his one moveable thumb, saw his mother looking down at him, offering him the delicate rice-based sweets of her love; but at the same moment as he reached out for the laddoos, she scurried away, and he saw her climb a giant sundri-tree to sit swinging from a high branch by her tail: a white wraithlike monkey with the face of his mother visited Ayooba night after night, so that after a time he was obliged to remember more about her than her sweets: how she had liked to sit among the boxes of her dowry, as though she, too, were simply some sort of thing, simply one of the gifts her father gave to her husband; in the heart of the Sundarbans, Ayooba Baloch understood his mother for the first time, and stopped sucking his thumb. Farooq Rashid, too, was given a vision. At dusk one day he thought he saw his brother running wildly through the forest, and became convinced that his father had died. He remembered a forgotten day when his peasant father had told him and his fleet-footed brother that the local landlord, who lent money at 300 per cent, had agreed to buy his soul in return for the latest loan. 'When I die,' old Rashid told Farooq's brother, 'you must open your mouth and my spirit will fly inside it; then run run run, because the zamindar will be after you!' Farooq, who had also started regressing alarmingly, found in the knowledge of his father's death and the flight of his brother the strength to give up the childish habits which the jungle had at first re-created in him; he stopped crying when he was hungry and asking Why. Shaheed Dar, too, was visited by a monkey with the face of an ancestor; but all he saw was a father who had instructed him to earn his name. This, however, also helped to restore in him the sense of responsibility which the just-following-orders requirements of war had sapped; so it seemed that the magical jungle, having tormented them with their misdeeds, was leading them by the hand towards a new adulthood. And flitting through the night-forest went the wraiths of their hopes; these, however, they were unable to see clearly, or to grasp.
The buddha, however, was not granted nostalgia at first. He had taken to sitting cross-legged under a sundri-tree; his eyes and mind seemed empty, and at night, he no longer awoke. But finally the forest found a way through to him; one afternoon, when rain pounded down on the trees and boiled off them as steam, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq saw the buddha sitting under his tree while a blind, translucent serpent bit, and poured venom into, his heel. Shaheed Dar crushed the serpent's head with a stick; the buddha, who was head-to-foot numb, seemed not to have noticed. His eyes were closed. After this, the boy soldiers waited for the man-dog to die; but I was stronger than the snake-poison. For two days he became as rigid as a tree, and his eyes crossed, so that he saw the world in mirror-image, with the right side on the left; at last he relaxed, and the look of milky abstraction was no longer in his eyes. I was rejoined to the past, jolted into unity by snake-poison, and it began to pour out through the buddha's lips. As his eyes returned to normal, his words flowed so freely that they seemed to be an aspect of the monsoon. The child-soldiers listened, spellbound, to the stories issuing from his mouth, beginning with a birth at midnight, and continuing unstoppably, because he was reclaiming everything, all of it, all lost histories, all the myriad complex processes that go to make a man. Open-mouthed, unable to tear themselves away, the child-soldiers drank his life like leaf-tainted water, as he spoke of bed-wetting cousins, revolutionary pepperpots, the perfect voice of a sister… Ayooba Shaheed Farooq would have (once upon a time) given anything to know that those rumours had been true; but in the Sundarbans, they didn't even cry out.
And rushing on: to late-flowering love, and Jamila in a bedroom in a shaft of light. Now Shaheed did murmur, 'So that's why, when he confessed, after that she couldn't stand to be near…' But the buddha continues, and it becomes apparent that he is struggling to recall something particular, something which refuses to return, which obstinately eludes him, so that he gets to the end without finding it, and remains frowning and unsatisfied even after he has recounted a holy war, and revealed what fell from the sky.
There was a silence; and then Farooq Rashid said, 'So much, yaar, inside one person; so many bad things, no wonder he kept his mouth shut!'
You see, Padma: I have told this story before. But what refused to return? What, despite the liberating venene of a colourless serpent, failed to emerge from my lips? Padma: the buddha had forgotten his name. (To be precise: his first name.)
And still it went on raining. The water-level was rising daily, until it became clear that they would have to move deeper into the jungle, in search of higher ground. The rain was too heavy for the boat to be of use; so, still following Shaheed's instructions, Ayooba Farooq and the buddha pulled it far away from the encroaching bank, tied mooring-rope around sundri-trunk, and covered their craft with leaves; after which, having no option, they moved ever further into the dense uncertainty of the jungle.
Now, once again, the Sundarbans changed its nature; once again Ayooba Shaheed Farooq found their ears filled with the lamentations of families from whose bosom they had torn what once, centuries ago, they had termed 'undesirable elements'; they rushed wildly forward into the jungle to escape from the accusing, pain-filled voices of their victims; and at night the ghostly monkeys gathered in the trees and sang the words of 'Our Golden Bengal': '… O Mother, I am poor, but what little I have, I lay at thy feet. And it maddens my heart with delight.' Unable to escape from the unbearable torture of the unceasing voices, incapable of bearing for a moment longer the burden of shame, which was now greatly increased by their jungle-learned sense of responsibility, the three boy-soldiers were moved, at last, to take desperate measures. Shaheed Dar stooped down and pkked up two handfuls of rain-heavy jungle mud; in the throes of that awful hallucination, he thrust the treacherous mud of the rain-forest into his ears. And after him, Ayooba Baloch and Farooq Rashid stopped their ears also with mud. Only the buddha left his ears (one good, one already bad) unstopped; as though he alone were willing to bear the retribution of the jungle, as though he were bowing his head before the inevitability of his guilt… The mud of the dream-forest, which no doubt also contained the concealed translucency of jungle-insects and the devilry of bright orange bird-droppings, infected the ears of the three boy-soldiers and made them all as deaf as posts; so that although they were spared the singsong accusations of the jungle, they were now obliged to converse in a rudimentary form of sign-language. They seemed, however, to prefer their diseased deafness to the unpalatable secrets which the sundri-leaves had whispered in their ears.
At last, the voices stopped, though by now only the buddha (with his one good ear) could hear them; at last, when the four wanderers were near the point of panic, the jungle brought them through a curtain of tree-beards and showed them a sight so lovely that it brought lumps to their throats. Even the buddha seemed to tighten his grip on his spittoon. With one good ear between the four of them, they advanced into a glade filled with the gentle melodies of songbirds, in whose centre stood a monumental Hindu temple, carved in forgotten centuries out of a single immense crag of rock; its walls danced with friezes of men and women, who were depicted coupling in postures of unsurpassable athleticism and sometimes, of highly comic absurdity. The quartet moved towards this miracle with disbelieving steps. Inside, they found, at long last, some respite from the endless monsoon, and also the towering statue of a black dancing goddess, whom the boy-soldiers from Pakistan could not name; but the buddha knew she was Kali, fecund and awful, with the remnants of gold paint on her teeth. The four travellers lay down at her feet and fell into a rain-free sleep which ended at what could have been midnight, when they awoke simultaneously to find themselves being smiled upon by four young girls of a beauty which was beyond speech. Shaheed, who recalled the four houris awaiting him in the camphor garden, thought at first that he had died in the night; but the houris looked real enough, and their saris, under which they wore nothing at all, were torn and stained by the jungle. Now as eight eyes stared into eight, saris were unwound and placed, neatly folded, on the ground; after which the naked and identical daughters of the forest came to them, eight arms were twined with eight, eight legs were linked with eight legs more; below the statue of multi-limbed Kali, the travellers abandoned themselves to caresses which felt real enough, to kisses and love-bites which were soft and painful, to scratches which left marks, and they realized that this this this was what they had needed, what they had longed for without knowing it, that having passed through the childish regressions and childlike sorrows of their earliest jungle-days, having survived the onset of memory and responsibility and the greater pains of renewed accusations, they were leaving infancy behind for ever, and then forgetting reasons and implications and deafness, forgetting everything, they gave themselves to the four identical beauties without a single thought in their heads.
After that night, they were unable to tear themselves away from the temple, except to forage for food, and every night the soft women of their most contented dreams returned in silence, never speaking, always neat and tidy with their saris, and invariably bringing the lost quartet to an incredible united peak of delight. None of them knew how long this period lasted, because in the Sundarbans time followed unknown laws, but at last the day came when they looked at each other and realized they were becoming transparent, that it was possible to see through their bodies, not clearly as yet, but cloudily, like staring through mango-juice. In their alarm they understood that this was the last and worst of the jungle's tricks, that by giving them their heart's desire it was fooling them into using up their dreams, so that as their dream-life seeped out of them they became as hollow and translucent as glass. The buddha saw now that the colourlessness of insects and leeches and snakes might have more to do with the depredations worked on their insectly, leechy, snakish imaginations than with the absence of sunlight… awakened as if for the first time by the shock of translucency, they looked at the temple with new eyes, seeing the great gaping cracks in the solid rock, realizing that vast segments could come detached and crash down upon them at any moment; and then, in a murky corner of the abandoned shrine, they saw the remnants of what might have been four small fires-ancient ashes, scorch-marks on stone-or perhaps four funeral pyres; and in the centre of each of the four, a small, blackened, fire-eaten heap of uncrushed bones.
How the buddha left the Sundarbans: the forest of illusions unleashed upon them, as they fled from temple towards boat, its last and most terrifying trick; they had barely reached the boat when it came towards them, at first a rumble in the far distance, then a roar which could penetrate even mud-deafened ears, they had untied the boat and leapt wildly into it when the wave came, and now they were at the mercy of the waters, which could have crushed them effortlessly against sundri or mangrove or nipa, but instead the tidal wave bore them down turbulent brown channels as the forest of their torment blurred past them like a great green wall, it seemed as if the jungle, having tired of its playthings, were ejecting them unceremoniously from its territory; waterborne, impelled forwards and still forwards by the unimaginable power of the wave, they bobbed pitifully amongst fallen branches and the sloughed-off skins of water-snakes, until finally they were hurled from the boat as the ebbing wave broke it against a tree-stump, they were left sitting in a drowned rice-paddy as the wave receded, in water up to their waists, but alive, borne out of the heart of the jungle of dreams, into which I had fled in the hope of peace and found both less and more, and back once more in the world of armies and dates.
When they emerged from the jungle, it was October 1971. And I am bound to admit (but, in my opinion, the fact only reinforces my wonder at the time-shifting sorcery of the forest) that there was no tidal wave recorded that month, although, over a year previously, floods had indeed devastated the region.
In the aftermath of the Sundarbans, my old life was waiting to reclaim me. I should have known: no escape from past acquaintance. What you were is forever who you are.
For seven months during the course of the year 1971, three soldiers and their tracker vanished off the face of the war. In October, however, when the rains ended and the guerrilla units of the Mukti Bahini began terrorizing Pakistani military outposts; when Mukti Bahini snipers picked off soldiers and petty officials alike, our quartet emerged from invisibility and, having little option, attempted to rejoin the main body of the occupying West Wing forces. Later, when questioned, the buddha would always explain his disappearance with the help of a garbled story about being lost in a jungle amid trees whose roots grabbed at you like snakes. It was perhaps fortunate for him that he was never formally interrogated by officers in the army of which he was a member. Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar were not subjected to such interrogations, either; but in their case this was because they failed to stay alive long enough for any questions to be asked.
… In an entirely deserted village of thatched huts with dung-plastered mud walls-in an abandoned community from which even the chickens had fled-Ayooba Shaheed Farooq bemoaned their fate. Rendered deaf by the poisonous mud of the rain-forest, a disability which had begun to upset them a good deal now that the taunting voices of the jungle were no longer hanging in the air, they wailed their several wails, all talking at once, none hearing the other; the buddha, however, was obliged to listen to them all: to Ayooba, who stood facing a corner inside a naked room, his hair enmeshed in a spider's web, crying 'My ears my ears, like bees buzzing inside,' to Farooq who, petulantly, shouted, 'Whose fault, anyway?-Who, with his nose that could sniff out any bloody thing?-Who said That way, and that way?-And who, who will believe?-About jungles and temples and transparent serpents?-What a story, Allah, buddha, we should shoot you here-and-now!' While Shaheed, softly, 'I'm hungry.' Out once more in the real world, they were forgetting the lessons of the jungle, and Ayooba, 'My arm! Allah, man, my withered arm! The ghost, leaking fluid…!' And Shaheed, 'Deserters, they'll say-empty-handed, no prisoner, after so-many months!-Allah, a court-martial, maybe, what do you think, buddha?' And Farooq, 'You bastard, see what you made us do! O God, too much, our uniforms! See, our uniforms, buddha-rags-and-tatters like a beggar-boy's! Think of what the Brigadier-and that Najmuddin-on my mother's head I swear I didn't-I'm not a coward! Not!' And Shaheed, who is killing ants and licking them off his palm, 'How to rejoin, anyway? Who knows where they are or if? And haven't we seen and heard how Mukti Bahini-thai! thai! they shoot from their hiding-holes, and you're dead! Dead, like an ant!' But Farooq is also talking, 'And not just the uniforms, man, the hair! Is this military hair-cut? This, so-long, falling over ears like worms? This woman's hair? Allah, they'll kill us dead-up against the wall and thai! thai!-you see if they don't!' But now Ayooba-the-tank is calming down; Ayooba holding his face in his hand; Ayooba saying softly to himself, 'O man, O man. I came to fight those damn vegetarian Hindus, man. And here is something too different, man. Something too bad.'
It is somewhere in November; they have been making their way slowly, north north north, past fluttering newspapers in curious curlicued script, through empty fields and abandoned settlements, occasionally passing a crone with a bundle on a stick over her shoulder, or a group of eight-year-olds with shifty starvation in their eyes and the threat of knives in their pockets, hearing how the Mukti Bahini are moving invisibly through the smoking land, how bullets come buzzing like bees-from-nowhere… and now a breaking-point has been reached, and Farooq, 'If it wasn't for you, buddha-Allah, you freak with your blue eyes of a foreigner, O God, yaar, how you stink!'
We all stink: Shaheed, who is crushing (with tatter-booted heel) a scorpion on the dirty floor of the abandoned hut; Farooq, searching absurdly for a knife with which to cut his hair; Ayooba, leaning his head against a corner of the hut while a spider walks along the crown; and the buddha, too: the buddha, who stinks to heaven, clutches in his right hand a tarnished silver spittoon, and is trying to recall his name. And can summon up only nicknames: Snotnose, Stainface, Baidy, Sniffer, Piece-of-the-Moon.
… He sat cross-legged amid the wailing storm of his companions' fear, forcing himself to remember; but no, it would not come. And at last the buddha, hurling spittoon against earthen floor, exclaimed to stone-deaf ears: 'It's not-not-fair!'
In the midst of the rubble of war, I discovered fair-and-unfair. Unfairness smelled like onions; the sharpness of its perfume brought tears to my eyes. Seized by the bitter aroma of injustice, I remembered how Jamila Singer had leaned over a hospital bed-whose? What name?-how military gongs-and-pips were also present-how my sister-no, not my sister! how she-how she had said, 'Brother, I have to go away, to sing in service of the country; the Army will look after you now-for me, they will look after you so, so well.' She was veiled; behind white-and-gold brocade I smelled her traitress's smile; through soft veiling fabric she planted on my brow the kiss of her revenge; and then she, who always wrought a dreadful revenge upon those who loved her best, left me to the tender mercies of pips-and-gongs… and after Jamila's treachery I remembered the long-ago ostracism I suffered at the hands of Evie Burns; and exiles, and picnic-tricks; and all the vast mountain of unreasonable occurrences plaguing my life; and now, I lamented cucumber-nose, stain-face, bandy legs, horn-temples, monk's tonsure, finger-loss, one-bad-ear, and the numbing, braining spittoon; I wept copiously now, but still my name eluded me, and I repeated-'Not fair; not fair, not fair!' And, surprisingly, Ayooba-the-tank moved away from his corner; Ayooba, perhaps recalling his own breakdown in the Sundarbans, squatted down in front of me and wrapped his one good arm around my neck. I accepted his comfortings; I cried into his shirt; but then there was a bee, buzzing towards us; while he squatted, with his back to the glassless window of the hut, something came whining through the overheated air; while he said, 'Hey, buddha-come on, buddha-hey, hey!' and while other bees, the bees of deafness, buzzed in his ears, something stung him in the neck. He made a popping noise deep in his throat and fell forwards on top of me. The sniper's bullet which killed Ayooba Baloch would, but for his presence, have speared me through the head. In dying, he saved my life.
Forgetting past humiliations; putting aside fair-and-unfair, and what-can't-be-cured-must-be-endured, I crawled out from under the corpse of Ayooba-the-tank, while Farooq, 'O God O God O!' and Shaheed, 'Allah, I don't even know if my gun will-' And Farooq, again, 'O God O! O God, who knows where the bastard is-!' But Shaheed, like soldiers in films, is flat against the wall beside the window. In these positions: I on the floor, Farooq crouched in a corner, Shaheed pressed against dung-plaster: we waited, helplessly, to see what would transpire.
There was no second shot; perhaps the sniper, not knowing the size of the force hidden inside the mud-walled hut, had simply shot and run. The three of us remained inside the hut for a night and a day, until the body of Ayooba Baloch began to demand attention. Before we left, we found pickaxes, and buried him… And afterwards, when the Indian Army did come, there was no Ayooba Baloch to greet them with his theories of the superiority of meat over vegetables; no Ayooba went into action, yelling, 'Ka-dang! Ka-blam! Ka-pow!!'
Perhaps it was just as well.
… And sometime in December the three of us, riding on stolen bicycles, arrived at a field from which the city of Dacca could be seen against the horizon; a field in which grew crops so strange, with so-nauseous an aroma, that we found ourselves incapable of remaining on our bicycles. Dismounting before we fell off, we entered the terrible field.
There was a scavenging peasant moving about, whistling as he worked, with an outsize gunny sack on his back. The whitened knuckles of the hand which gripped the sack revealed his determined frame of mind; the whistling, which was piercing but tuneful, showed that he was keeping his spirits up. The whistle echoed around the field, bouncing off fallen helmets, resounding hollowly from the barrels of mud-blocked rifles, sinking without trace into the fallen boots of the strange, strange crops, whose smell, like the smell of unfairness, was capable of bringing tears to the buddha's eyes. The crops were dead, having been hit by some unknown blight… and most of them, but not all, wore the uniforms of the West Pakistani Army. Apart from the whistling, the only noises to be heard were the sounds of objects dropping into the peasant's treasure-sack: leather belts, watches, gold tooth-fillings, spectacle frames, tiffin-carriers, water flasks, boots. The peasant saw them and came running towards them, smiling ingratiatingly, talking rapidly in a wheedling voice that only the buddha was obliged to hear. Farooq and Shaheed stared glassily at the field while the peasant began his explanations.
'Plenty shooting! Thaii! Ttiaiii!' He made a pistol with his right hand. He was speaking bad, stilted Hindi. 'Ho sirs! India has come, my sirs! Ho yes! Ho yes.'-And all over the field, the crops were leaking nourishing bone-marrow into the soil while he, 'No shoot I, my sirs. Ho no. I have news-ho, such news! India comes! Jessore is fall, my sirs; in one-four days, Dacca, also, yes-no?' The buddha listened; the buddha's eyes looked beyond the peasant to the field. 'Such a things, my sir! India! They have one mighty soldier fellow, he can kill six persons at one time, break necks khrikk-khrikk between his knees, my sirs? Knees-is right words?' He tapped his own. 'I see, my sirs. With these eyes, ho yes! He fights with not guns, not swords. With knees, and six necks go khrikk-khrikk. Ho God.' Shaheed was vomiting in the field. Farooq Rashid had wandered to the far edge and stood staring into a copse of mango trees. 'In one-two weeks is over the war, my sirs! Everybody come back. Just now all gone, but I not, my sirs. Soldiers came looking for Bahini and killed many many, also my son. Ho yes, sirs, ho yes indeed.' The buddha's eyes had become clouded and dull. In the distance he could hear the crump of heavy artillery. Columns of smoke trailed up into the colourless December sky. The strange crops lay still, unruffled by the breeze… 'I stay, my sirs. Here I know names of birds and plants. Ho yes. I am Deshmukh by name; vendor of notions by trade. I sell many so-fine thing. You want? Medicine for constipation, damn good, ho yes. I have. Watch you want, glowing in the dark? I also have. And book ho yes, and joke trick, truly. I was famous in Dacca before. Ho yes, most truly. No shoot.'
The vendor of notions chattered on, offering for sale item after item, such as a magical belt which would enable the wearer to speak Hindi-'I am wearing now, my sir, speak damn good, yes no? Many India soldier are buy, they talk so-many different tongues, the belt is godsend from God!'-and then he noticed what the buddha held in his hand. 'Ho sir! Absolute master thing! Is silver? Is precious stone? You give; I give radio, camera, almost working order, my sir! Is a damn good deals, my friend. For one spittoon only, is damn fine. Ho yes. Ho yes, my sir, life must go on; trade must go on, my sir, not true?'
'Tell me more,' the buddha said, 'about the soldier with the knees.'
But now, once again, a bee buzzes; in the distance, at the far end of the field, somebody drops to his knees; somebody's forehead touches the ground as if in prayer; and in the field, one of the crops, which had been alive enough to shoot, also becomes very still. Shaheed Dar is shouting a name:
'Farooq! Farooq, man!'
But Farooq refuses to reply.
Afterwards, when the buddha reminisced about the war to his uncle Mustapha, he recounted how he had stumbled across the field of leaking bonemarrow towards his fallen companion; and how, long before he reached Farooq's praying corpse, he was brought up short by the field's greatest secret.
There was a small pyramid in the middle of the field. Ants were crawling over it, but it was not an anthill. The pyramid had six feet and three heads and, in between, a jumbled area composed of bits of torso, scraps of uniforms, lengths of intestine and glimpses of shattered bones. The pyramid was still alive. One of its three heads had a blind left eye, the legacy of a childhood argument. Another had hair that was thickly plastered down with hair oil. The third head was the oddest: it had deep hollows where the temples should have been, hollows that could have been made by a gynaecologist's forceps which had held it too tightly at birth… it was this third head which spoke to the buddha:
'Hullo, man,' it said, 'What the hell are you here for?'
Shaheed Dar saw the pyramid of enemy soldiers apparently conversing with the buddha; Shaheed, suddenly seized by an irrational energy, flung himself upon me and pushed me to the ground, with, 'Who are you?-Spy? Traitor? What?-Why do they know who you-?' While Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, flapped pitifully around us, 'Ho sirs! Enough fighting has been already. Be normal now, my sirs. I beg. Ho God.'
Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entire war had been to re-unite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet his old friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because on the field of leaking bone-marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and was greeted by a dying pyramid of heads: and in Dacca I was to meet Parvati-the-witch.
When Shaheed calmed down and got off me, the pyramid was no longer capable of speech. Later that afternoon, we resumed our journey towards the capital. Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, called cheerfully after us: 'Ho sirs! Ho my poor sirs! Who knows when a man will die? Who, my sirs, knows why?'
Sometimes, mountains must move before old comrades can be reunited. On December 15th, 1971, in the capital of the newly liberated state of Bangladesh, Tiger Niazi surrendered to his old chum Sam Manekshaw; while I, in my turn, surrendered to the embraces of a girl with eyes like saucers, a pony-tail like a long shiny black rope, and lips which had not at that time acquired what was to become their characteristic pout. These reunions were not achieved easily; and as a gesture of respect for all who made them possible, I shall pause briefly in my narrative to set out the whys and the wherefores.
Let me, then, be perfectly explicit: if Yahya Khan and Z. A. Bhutto had not colluded in the matter of the coup of March 25th, I would not have been flown to Dacca in civilian dress; nor, in all likelihood, would General Tiger Niazi have been in the city that December. To continue: the Indian intervention in the Bangladesh dispute was also the result of the interaction of great forces. Perhaps, if ten million had not walked across the frontiers into India, obliging the Delhi Government to spend $200,000,000 a month on refugee camps-the entire war of 1965, whose secret purpose had been the annihilation of my family, had cost them only $70,000,000!-Indian soldiers, led by General Sam, would never have crossed the frontiers in the opposite direction. But India came for other reasons, too: as I was to learn from the Communist magicians who lived in the shadow of the Delhi Friday Mosque, the Delhi sarkar had been highly concerned by the declining influence of Mujib's Awami League, and the growing popularity of the revolutionary Mukti Bahini; Sam and the Tiger met in Dacca to prevent the Bahini from gaining power. So if it were not for the Mukti Bahini, Parvati-the-witch might never have accompanied the Indian troops on their campaign of 'liberation'… But even that is not a full explanation. A third reason for Indian intervention was the fear that the disturbances in Bangladesh would, if they were not quickly curtailed, spread across the frontiers into West Bengal; so Sam and the Tiger, and also Parvati and I, owe our meeting at least in part to the more turbulent elements in West Bengali politics: the Tiger's defeat was only the beginning of a campaign against the Left in Calcutta and its environs.
At any rate, India came; and for the speed of her coming-because in a mere three weeks Pakistan had lost half her navy, a third of her army, a quarter of her air force, and finally, after the Tiger surrendered, more than half her population-thanks must be given to the Mukti Bahini once more; because, perhaps naively, failing to understand that the Indian advance was as much a tactical manoeuvre against them as a battle against the occupying West Wing forces, the Bahini advised General Manekshaw on Pakistani troop movements, on the Tiger's strengths and weaknesses; thanks, too, to Mr Chou En-Lai, who refused (despite Bhutto's entreaties) to give Pakistan any material aid in the war. Denied Chinese arms, Pakistan fought with American guns, American tanks and aircraft; the President of the United States, alone in the entire world, was resolved to 'tilt' towards Pakistan. While Henry A. Kissinger argued the cause of Yahya Khan, the same Yahya was secretly arranging the President's famous state visit to China… there were, therefore, great forces working against my reunion with Parvati and Sam's with the Tiger; but despite the tilting President, it was all over in three short weeks.
On the night of December 14th, Shaheed Dar and the buddha circled the fringes of the invested city of Dacca; but the buddha's nose (you will not have forgotten) was capable of sniffing out more than most. Following his nose, which could smell safety and danger, they found a way through the Indian lines, and entered the city under cover of night. While they moved stealthily through streets in which nobody except a few starving beggars could be seen, the Tiger was swearing to fight to the last man; but the next day, he surrendered instead. What is not known: whether the last man was grateful to be spared or peeved at missing his chance of entering the camphor garden.
And so I returned to that city in which, in those last hours before reunions, Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were not possible, because our boys would not could not have behaved so badly; we saw men in spectacles with heads like eggs being shot in side-streets, we saw the intelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but it was not true because it could not have been true, the Tiger was a decent chap, after all, and our jawans were worth ten babus, we moved through the impossible hallucination of the night, hiding in doorways while fires blossomed like flowers, reminding me of the way the Brass Monkey used to set fire to shoes to attract a little attention, there were slit throats being buried in unmarked graves, and Shaheed began his, 'No, buddha-what a thing, Allah, you can't believe your eyes-no, not true, how can it-buddha, tell, what's got into my eyes?' And at last the buddha spoke, knowing Shaheed could not hear: 'O, Shaheeda,' he said, revealing the depths of his fastidiousness, 'a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now.' But Shaheed was staring at a maidan in which lady doctors were being bayoneted before they were raped, and raped again before they were shot. Above them and behind them, the cool white minaret of a mosque stared blindly down upon the scene.
As though talking to himself, the buddha said, 'It is time to think about saving our skins; God knows why we came back.' The buddha entered the doorway of a deserted house, a broken, peeling shell of an edifice which had once housed a tea-shop, a bicycle-repair shop, a whorehouse and a tiny landing on which a notary public must once have sat, because there was the low desk on which he had left behind a pair of half-rimmed spectacles, there were the abandoned seals and stamps which had once enabled him to be more than an old nobody-stamps and seals which had made him an arbiter of what was true and what was not. The notary public was absent, so I could not ask him to verify what was happening, I could not give a deposition under oath; but lying on the mat behind his desk was a loose flowing garment like a djellabah, and without waiting any longer I removed my uniform, including the she-dog badge of the cutia units, and became anonymous, a deserter, in a city whose language I could not speak.
Shaheed Dar, however, remained in the street; in the first light of morning he watched soldiers scurrying away from what-had-not-been-done; and then the grenade came. I, the buddha, was still inside the empty house; but Shaheed was unprotected by walls.
Who can say why how who; but the grenade was certainly thrown. In that last instant of his un-bisected life, Shaheed was suddenly seized by an irresistible urge to look up… afterwards, in the muezzin's roost, he told the buddha, 'So strange, Allah-the pomegranate-in my head, just like that, bigger an' brighter than ever before-you know, buddha, like a light-bulb-Allah, what could I do, I looked!'-And yes, it was there, hanging above his head, the grenade of his dreams, hanging just above his head, falling falling, exploding at waist-level, blowing his legs away to some other part of the city.
When I reached him, Shaheed was conscious, despite bisection, and pointed up, 'Take me up there, buddha, I want to I want,' so I carried what was now only half a boy (and therefore reasonably light) up narrow spiral stairs to the heights of that cool white minaret, where Shaheed babbled of light-bulbs while red ants and black ants fought over a dead cockroach, battling away along the trowel-furrows in the crudely-laid concrete floor. Down below, amid charred houses, broken glass and smoke-haze, antlike people were emerging, preparing for peace; the ants, however, ignored the antlike, and fought on. And the buddha: he stood still, gazing milkily down and around, . having placed himself between the top half of Shaheed and eyrie's one piece of furniture, a low table on which stood a gramophone connected to a loudspeaker. The buddha, protecting his halved companion from the disillusioning sight of this mechanized muezzin, whose call to prayer would always be scratched in the same places, extracted from the folds of his shapeless robe a glinting object: and turned his milky gaze upon the silver spittoon. Lost in contemplation, he was taken by surprise when the screams began; and looked up to see an abandoned cockroach. (Blood had been seeping along trowel-furrows; ants, following this dark viscous trail, had arrived at the source of the leakage, and Shaheed expressed his fury at becoming the victim of not one, but two wars.)
Coming to the rescue, feet dancing on ants, the buddha bumped his elbow against a switch; the loudspeaker system was activated, and afterwards people would never forget how a mosque had screamed out the terrible agony of war.
After a few moments, silence. Shaheed's head slumped forward. And the buddha, fearing discovery, put away his spittoon and descended into the city as the Indian Army arrived; leaving Shaheed, who no longer minded, to assist at the peacemaking banquet of the ants, I went into the early morning streets to welcome General Sam.
In the minaret, I had gazed milkily at my spittoon; but the buddha's mind had not been empty. It contained three words, which Shaheed's top half had also kept repeating, until the ants: the same three which once, reeking of onions, had made me weep on the shoulder of Ayooba Baloch-until the bee, buzzing… 'It's not fair,' the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over, 'It's not fair,' and again, and again.
Shaheed, fulfilling his father's dearest wish, had finally earned his name; but the buddha could still not remember his own.
How the buddha regained his name: Once, long ago, on another independence day, the world had been saffron and green. This morning, the colours were green, red and gold. And in the cities, cries of 'Jai Bangla!' And voices of women singing 'Our Golden Bengal', maddening their hearts with delight… in the centre of the city, on the podium of his defeat, General Tiger Niazi awaited General Manekshaw. (Biographical details: Sam was a Parsee. He came from Bombay. Bombayites were in for happy times that day.) And amid green and red and gold, the buddha in his shapeless anonymous garment was jostled by crowds; and then India came. India, with Sam at her head.
Was it General Sam's idea? Or even Indira's?-Eschewing these fruitless questions, I record only that the Indian advance into Dacca was much more than a mere military parade; as befits a triumph, it was garlanded with side-shows. A special I.A.F. troop transport had flown to Dacca, carrying a hundred and one of the finest entertainers and conjurers India could provide. From the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi they came, many of them dressed for the occasion in the evocative uniforms of the Indian fauj, so that many Daccans got the idea that the Indians' victory had been inevitable from the start because even their uniformed jawans were sorcerers of the highest order. The conjurers and other artistes marched beside the troops, entertaining the crowds; there were acrobats forming human pyramids on moving carts drawn by white bullocks; there were extraordinary female contortionists who could swallow their legs up to their knees; there were jugglers who operated outside the laws of gravity, so that they could draw oohs and aahs from the delighted crowd as they juggled with toy grenades, keeping four hundred and twenty in the air at a time; there were card-tricksters who could pull the queen of chiriyas (the monarch of birds, the empress of clubs) out of women's ears; there was the great dancer Anarkali, whose name meant 'pomegranate-bud', doing leaps twists pirouettes on a donkey-cart while a giant piece of silver nose-jewellery jingled on her right nostril; there was Master Vikram the sitarist, whose sitar was capable of responding to, and exaggerating, the faintest emotions in the hearts of his audience, so that once (it was said) he had played before an audience so bad-tempered, and had so greatly enhanced their foul humour, that if his tabla-player hadn't made him stop his raga in mid-stream the power of his music would have had them all knifing each other and smashing up the auditorium… today, Master Vikram's music raised the celebratory goodwill of the people to fever-pitch; it maddened, let us say, their hearts with delight.
And there was Picture Singh himself, a seven-foot giant who weighed two hundred and forty pounds and was known as the Most Charming Man In The World because of his unsurpassable skills as a snake-charmer. Not even the legendary Tubriwallahs of Bengal could exceed his talents; he strode through the happily shrieking crowds, twined from head to foot with deadly cobras, mambas and kraits, all with their poison-sacs intact… Picture Singh, who would be the last in the line of men who have been willing to become my fathers… and immediately behind him came Parvati-the-witch.
Parvati-the-witch entertained the crowds with the help of a large wicker basket with a lid; happy volunteers entered the basket, and Parvati made them disappear so completely that they could not return until she wished them to; Parvati, to whom midnight had given the true gifts of sorcery, had placed them at the service of her humble illusionist's trade; so that she was asked, 'But how do you pull it off?'
And, 'Come on, pretty missy, tell the trick, why not?'-Parvati, smiling beaming rolling her magic basket, came towards me with the liberating troops.
The Indian Army marched into town, its heroes following the magicians; among them, I learned afterwards, was that colossus of the war, the rat-faced Major with the lethal knees… but now there were still more illusionists, because the surviving prestidigitators of the city came out of hiding and began a wonderful contest, seeking to outdo anything and everything the visiting magicians had to offer, and the pain of the city was washed and soothed in the great glad outpouring of their magic. Then Parvati-the-witch saw me, and gave me back my name.
'Saleem! O my god Saleem, you Saleem Sinai, is it you Saleem?'
The buddha jerks, puppet-fashion. Crowd-eyes staring. Parvati pushing towards him. 'Listen, it must be you!' She is gripping his elbow. Saucer eyes searching milky blue. 'My God, that nose, I'm not being rude, but of course! Look, it's me, Parvati! O Saleem, don't be stupid now, come on come on…!'
'That's it,' the buddha says. 'Saleem: that was it.'
'O God, too much excitement!' she cries. 'Arre baap, Saleem, you remember-the Children, yaar, O this is too good! So why are you looking so serious when I feel like to hug you to pieces? So many years I only saw you inside here,' she taps her forehead, 'and now you're here with a face like a fish. Hey, Saleem! Come on, say one hullo at least.'
On December 15th, 1971, Tiger Niazi surrendered to Sam Manek-shaw; the Tiger and ninety-three thousand Pakistani troops became prisoners of war. I, meanwhile, became the willing captive of the Indian magicians, because Parvati dragged me into the procession with, 'Now that I've found you I'm not letting you go.'
That night, Sam and the Tiger drank chota pegs and reminisced about the old days in the British Army. 'I say, Tiger,' Sam Manekshaw said, 'You behaved jolly decently by surrendering.' And the Tiger, 'Sam, you fought one hell of a war.' A tiny cloud passes across the face of General Sam, 'Listen, old sport: one hears such damn awful lies. Slaughters, old boy, mass graves, special units called cutia or some damn thing, developed for purposes of rooting out opposition… no truth in it, I suppose?' And the Tiger, 'Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities? Never heard of it. Must've been misled, old man. Some damn bad intelligence-wallahs on both sides. No, ridiculous, damn ridiculous, if you don't mind me saying.' 'Thought as much,' says General Sam, 'I say, bloody fine to see you, Tiger, you old devil!' And the Tiger, 'Been years, eh, Sam? Too damn long.'
… While old friends sang 'Auld Lang Syne' in officers' messes, I made my escape from Bangladesh, from my Pakistani years. 'I'll get you out,' Parvati said, after I explained. 'You want it secret secret?'
I nodded. 'Secret secret.'
Elsewhere in the city, ninety-three thousand soldiers were preparing to be carted off to P.O.W. camps; but Parvati-the-witch made me climb into a wicker basket with a close-fitting lid. Sam Manekshaw was obliged to place his old friend the Tiger under protective custody; but Parvati-the-witch assured me, 'This way they'll never catch.'
Behind an army barracks where the magicians were awaiting their transport back to Delhi, Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, stood guard when, that evening, I climbed into the basket of invisibility. We loitered casually, smoking bins, waiting until there were no soldiers in sight, while Picture Singh told me about his name. Twenty years ago, an Eastman-Kodak photographer had taken his portrait-which, wreathed in smiles and snakes, afterwards appeared on half the Kodak advertisements and in-store displays in India; ever since when the snake-charmer had adopted his present cognomen. 'What do you think, captain?' he bellowed amiably. 'A fine name, isn't it so? Captain, what to do, I can't even remember what name I used to have, from before, the name my mother-father gave me! Pretty stupid, hey, captain?' But Picture Singh was not stupid; and there was much more to him than charm. Suddenly his voice lost its casual, sleepy good-nature; he whispered, 'Now! Now, captain, ek dum, double-quick time!' Parvati whipped lid away from wicker; I dived head first into her cryptic basket. The lid, returning, blocked out the day's last light.
Picture Singh whispered, 'Okay, captain-damn good!' And Parvati bent down close to me; her lips must have been against the outside of the basket. What Parvati-the-witch whispered through wickerwork:
'Hey, you Saleem: just to think! You and me, mister-midnight's children, yaar! That's something, no?'
That's something… Saleem, shrouded in wickerwork darkness, was reminded of years-ago midnights, of childhood wrestling bouts with purpose and meaning; overwhelmed by nostalgia, I still did not understand what that something was. Then Parvati whispered some other words, and, inside the basket of invisibility, I, Saleem Sinai, complete with my loose anonymous garment, vanished instantly into thin air.
'Vanished? How vanished, what vanished?' Padma's head jerks up; Padma's eyes stare at me in bewilderment. I, shrugging, merely reiterate; Vanished, just like that. Disappeared. Dematerialized. Like a djinn: poof, like so.
'So,' Padma presses me, 'she really-truly was a witch?' Really-truly. I was in the basket, but also not in the basket; Picture Singh lifted it one-handed and tossed it into the back of the Army truck taking him and Parvati and ninety-nine others to the aircraft waiting at the military airfield; I was tossed with the basket, but also not tossed. Afterwards, Picture Singh said, 'No, captain, I couldn't feel your weight'; nor could I feel any bump thump bang. One hundred and one artistes had arrived, by I.A.F. troop transport, from the capital of India; one hundred and two persons returned, although one of them was both there and not there. Yes, magic spells can occasionally succeed. But also fail: my father, Ahmed Sinai, never succeeded in cursing Sherri, the mongrel bitch.
Without passport or permit, I returned, cloaked in invisibility, to the land of my birth; believe, don't believe, but even a sceptic will have to provide another explanation for my presence here. Did not the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid (in an earlier set of fabulous tales) also wander, unseen invisible anonymous, cloaked through the streets of Baghdad? What Haroun achieved in Baghdad streets, Parvati-the-witch made possible for me, as we flew through the air-lanes of the subcontinent. She did it; I was invisible; bas. Enough.
Memories of invisibility: in the basket, I learned what it was like, will be like, to be dead. I had acquired the characteristics of ghosts! Present, but insubstantial; actual, but without being or weight… I discovered, in the basket, how ghosts see the world. Dimly hazily faintly… it was around me, but only just; I hung in a sphere of absence at whose fringes, like faint reflections, could be seen the spectres of wickerwork. The dead die, and are gradually forgotten; time does its healing, and they fade-but in Parvati's basket I learned that the reverse is also true; that ghosts, too, begin to forget; that the dead lose their memories of the living, and at last, when they are detached from their lives, fade away-that dying, in short, continues for a long time after death. Afterwards, Parvati said, 'I didn't want to tell you-but nobody should be kept invisible that long-it was dangerous, but what else was there to do?'
In the grip of Parvati's sorcery, I felt my hold on the world slip away-and how easy, how peaceful not to never to return!-to float in this cloudy nowhere, wafting further further further, like a seed-spore blown on the breeze-in short, I was in mortal danger.
What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon. Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a reminder of the outside… clutching finely-wrought silver, which glittered even in that nameless dark, I survived. Despite head-to-toe numbness, I was saved, perhaps, by the glints of my precious souvenir.
No-there was more to it than spittoons: for, as we all know by now, our hero is greatly affected by being shut up in confined spaces. Transformations spring upon him in the enclosed dark. As a mere embryo in the secrecy of a womb (not his mother's), did he not grow into the incarnation of the new myth of August 15th, the child of ticktock-did he not emerge as the Mubarak, the Blessed Child? In a cramped wash-room, were name-tags not switched around? Alone in a washing-chest with a drawstring up one nostril, did he not glimpse a Black Mango and sniff too hard, turning himself and his upper cucumber into a kind of supernatural ham radio? Hemmed in by doctors, nurses and anaesthetic masks, did he not succumb to numbers and, having suffered drainage-above, move into a second phase, that of nasal philosopher and (later) tracker supreme? Squashed, in a small abandoned hut, beneath the body of Ayooba Baloch, did he not learn the meaning of fair-and-unfair? Well, then-trapped in the occult peril of the basket of invisibility, I was saved, not only by the glints of a spittoon, but also by another transformation: in the grip of that awful disembodied loneliness, whose smell was the smell of graveyards, I discovered anger.
Something was fading in Saleem and something was being born. Fading: an old pride in baby-snaps and framed Nehru-letter; an old determination to espouse, willingly, a prophesied historical role; and also a willingness to make allowances, to understand how parents and strangers might legitimately despise or exile him for his ugliness; mutilated fingers and monks' tonsures no longer seemed like good enough excuses for the way in which he, I, had been treated. The object of my wrath was, in fact, everything which I had, until then, blindly accepted: my parents' desire that I should repay their investment in me by becoming great; genius-Iike-a-shawl; the modes of connection themselves inspired in me a blind, lunging fury. Why me? Why, owing to accidents of birth prophecy etcetera, must I be responsible for language riots and after-Nehru-who, for pepperpot-revolutions and bombs which annihilated my family? Why should I, Saleem Snotnose, Sniffer, Mapface, Piece-of-the-Moon, accept the blame for what-was-not-done by Pakistani troops in Dacca?… Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?
What my discovery of unfairness (smelling of onions) had begun, my invisible rage completed. Wrath enabled me to survive the soft siren temptations of invisibility; anger made me determined, after I was released from vanishment in the shadow of a Friday Mosque, to 'begin, from that moment forth, to choose my own, undestined future. And there, in the silence of graveyard-reeking isolation, I heard the long-ago voice of the virginal Mary Pereira, singing:
@@@Anything you want to be, you kin be,
You kin be just what-all you want.
Tonight, as I recall my rage, I remain perfectly calm; the Widow drained anger out of me along with everything else. Remembering my basket-born rebellion against inevitability, I even permit myself a wry, understanding smile. 'Boys,' I mutter tolerantly across the years to Saleem-at-twenty-four, 'will be boys.' In the Widows' Hostel, I was taught, harshly, once-and-for-all, the lesson of No Escape; now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particulary exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.
Although now, as the pouring-out of what-was-inside-me nears an end; as cracks widen within-I can hear and feel the rip tear crunch-I begin to grow thinner, translucent almost; there isn't much of me left, and soon there will be nothing at all. Six hundred million specks of dust, and all transparent, invisible as glass…
But then I was angry. Glandular hyper-activity in a wicker amphora: eccrine and apocrine glands poured forth sweat and stink, as if I were trying to shed my fate through my pores; and, in fairness to my wrath, I must record that it claimed one instant achievement-that when I tumbled out of the basket of invisibility into the shadow of the mosque, I had been rescued by rebellion from the abstraction of numbness; as I bumped out on to the dirt of the magicians' ghetto, silver spittoon in hand, I realized that I had begun, once again, to feel.
Some afflictions, at least, are capable of being conquered.
No shadow of a doubt: an acceleration is taking place. Rip crunch crack-while road surfaces split in the awesome heat, I, too, am being hurried towards disintegration. What-gnaws-on-bones (which, as I have been regularly obliged to explain to the too many women around me, is far beyond the powers of medicine men to discern, much less to cure) will not be denied for long; and still so much remains to be told… Uncle Mustapha is growing inside me, and the pout of Parvati-the-witch; a certain lock of hero's hair is waiting in the wings; and also a labour of thirteen days, and history as an analogue of a prime minister's hair-style; there is to be treason, and fare-dodging, and the scent (wafting on breezes heavy with the ululations of widows) of something frying in an iron skillet… so that I, too, am forced to accelerate, to make a wild dash for the finishing line; before memory cracks beyond hope of re-assembly, I must breast the tape. (Although already, already there are fadings, and gaps; it will be necessary to improvise on occasion.)
Twenty-six pickle-jars stand gravely on a shelf; twenty-six special blends, each with its identifying label, neatly inscribed with familiar phrases: 'Movements Performed by Pepperpots', for instance, or 'Alpha and Omega', or 'Commander Sabarmati's Baton'. Twenty-six rattle eloquently when local trains go yellow-and-browning past; on my desk, five empty jars tinkle urgently, reminding me of my uncompleted task. But now I cannot linger over empty pickle-jars; the night is for words, and green chutney must wait its turn.
… Padma is wistful: 'O, mister, how lovely Kashmir must be in August, when here it is hot like a chilli!' I am obliged to reprove my plump-yet-muscled companion, whose attention has been wandering; and to observe that our Padma Bibi, long-suffering tolerant consoling, is beginning to behave exactly like a traditional Indian wife. (And I, with my distances and self-absorption, like a husband?) Of late, in spite of my stoic fatalism about the spreading cracks, I have smelled, on Padma's breath, the dream of an alternative (but impossible) future; ignoring the implacable finalities of inner fissures, she has begun to exude the bitter-sweet fragrance of hope-for-marriage. My dung-lotus, who remained impervious for so long to the sneer-lipped barbs hurled by our workforce of downy-forearmed women; who placed her cohabitation with me outside and above all codes of social propriety, has seemingly succumbed to a desire for legitimacy… in short, although she has not said a word on the subject, she is waiting for me to make an honest woman of her. The perfume of her sad hopefulness permeates her most innocently solicitous remarks-even at this very moment, as she, 'Hey, mister, why not-finish your writery and then take rest; go to Kashmir, sit quietly for some time-and maybe you will take your Padma also, and she can look after…?' Behind this burgeoning dream of a Kashmir! holiday (which was once also the dream of Jehangir, the Mughal Emperor; of poor forgotten Ilse Lubin; and, perhaps, of Christ himself), I nose out the presence of another dream; but neither this nor that can be fulfilled. Because now the cracks, the cracks and always the cracks are narrowing my future towards its single inescapable fullpoint; and even Padma must take a back seat if I'm to finish my tales.
Today, the papers are talking about the supposed political rebirth of Mrs. Indira Gandhi; but when I returned to India, concealed in a wicker basket, 'The Madam' was basking in the fullness of her glory. Today, perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly into the insidious clouds of amnesia; but I remember, and will set down, how I-how she-how it happened that-no, I can't say it, I must tell it in the proper order, until there is no option but to reveal… On December 16th, 1971, I tumbled out of a basket into an India in which Mrs. Gandhi's New Congress Party held a more-than-two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.
In the basket of invisibility, a sense of unfairness turned into anger; and something else besides-transformed by rage, I had also been overwhelmed by an agonizing feeling of sympathy for the country which was not only my twin-in-birth but also joined to me (so to speak) at the hip, so that what happened to either of us, happened to us both. If I, snot-nosed stain-faced etcetera, had had a hard time of it, then so had she, my subcontinental twin sister; and now that I had given myself the right to choose a better future, I was resolved that the nation should share it, too. I think that when I tumbled out into dust, shadow and amused cheers, I had already decided to save the country.
(But there are cracks and gaps… had I, by then, begun to see that my love for Jamila Singer had been, in a sense, a mistake? Had I already understood how I had simply transferred on to her shoulders the adoration which I now perceived to be a vaulting, all-encompassing love of country? When was it that I realized that my truly-incestuous feelings were for my true birth-sister, India herself, and not for that trollop of a crooner who had so callously shed me, like a used snake-skin, and dropped me into the metaphorical waste-basket of Army life? When when when?… Admitting defeat, I am forced to record that I cannot remember for sure.)
… Saleem sat blinking in the dust in the shadow of the mosque. A giant was standing over him, grinning hugely, asking, 'Achha, captain, have a good trip?' And Parvati, with huge excited eyes, pouring water from a lotah into his cracked, salty mouth… Feeling! The icy touch of water kept cool in earthenware surahis, the cracked soreness of parched-raw lips, silver-and-lapis clenched in a fist… 'I can feel!' Saleem cried to the good-natured crowd.
It was the time of afternoon called the chaya, when the shadow of the tall red-brick-and-marble Friday Mosque fell across the higgledy shacks of the slum clustered at its feet, that slum whose ramshackle tin roofs created such a swelter of heat that it was insupportable to be inside the fragile shacks except during the chaya and at night… but now conjurers and contortionists and jugglers and fakirs had gathered in the shade around the solitary stand-pipe to greet the new arrival. 'I can feel!' I cried, and then Picture Singh, 'Okay, captain-tell us, how it feels?-to be born again, falling like baby out of Parvati's basket?' I could smell amazement on Picture Singh; he was clearly astounded by Parvati's trick, but, like a true professional, would not dream of asking her how she had achieved it. In this way Parvati-the-witch, who had used her limitless powers to spirit me to safety, escaped discovery; and also because, as I later discovered, the ghetto of the magicians disbelieved, with the absolute certainty of illusionists-by-trade, in the possibility of magic. So Picture Singh told me, with amazement, 'I swear, captain-you were so light in there, like a baby!'-But he never dreamed that my weightlessness had been anything more than a trick.
'Listen, baby sahib,' Picture Singh was crying, 'What do you say, baby-captain? Must I put you over my shoulder and make you belch?'-And now Parvati, tolerantly: 'That one, baba, always making joke shoke.' She was smiling radiantly at everyone in sight… but there followed an inauspicious event. A woman's voice began to wail at the back of the cluster of magicians: 'Ai-o-ai-o! Ai-o-o!' The crowd parted in surprise and an old woman burst through it and rushed at Saleem; I was required to defend myself against a brandished frying pan, until Picture Singh, alarmed, seized her by pan-waving arm and bellowed, 'Hey, capteena, why so much noise?' And the old woman, obstinately: 'Ai-o-ai-o!'
'Resham Bibi,' Parvati said, crossly, 'You got ants in your brain?' And Picture Singh, 'We got a guest, capteena-what'll he do with your shouting? Arre, be quiet, Resham, this captain is known to our Parvati personal! Don't be coming crying in front of him!'
'Ai-o-ai-o! Bad luck is come! You go to foreign places and bring it here! Ai-oooo!'
Disturbed visages of magicians stared from Resham Bibi to me-because although they were a people who denied the supernatural, they were artistes, and like all performers had an implicit faith in luck, good-luck-and-bad-luck, luck… 'Yourself you said,' Resham Bibi wailed, 'this man is born twice, and not even from woman! Now comes desolation, pestilence and death. I am old and so I know. Arre baba,' she turned plaintively to face me, 'Have pity only; go now-go go quick!' There was a murmur-'It is true, Resham Bibi knows the old stories'-but then Picture Singh became angry. 'The captain is my honoured guest,' he said, 'He stays in my hut as long as he wishes, for short or for long. What are you all talking? This is no place for fables.'
Saleem Sinai's first sojourn at the magicians' ghetto lasted only a matter of days; but during that short time, a number of things happened to allay the fears which had been raised by ai-o-ai-o. The plain, unadorned truth is that, in those days, the ghetto illusionists and other artistes began to hit new peaks of achievement-jugglers managed to keep one thousand and one balls in the air at a time, and a fakir's as-yet-untrained protegee strayed on to a bed of hot coals, only to stroll across it unconcerned, as though she had acquired her mentor's gifts by osmosis; I was told that the rope-trick had been successfully performed. Also, the police failed to make their monthly raid on the ghetto, which had not happened within living memory; and the camp received a constant stream of visitors, the servants of the rich, requesting the professional services of one or more of the colony at this or that gala evening's entertainment… it seemed, in fact, as though Resham Bibi had got things the wrong way round, and I rapidly became very popular in the ghetto. I was dubbed Saleem Kismeti, Lucky Saleem; Parvati was congratulated on having brought me to the slum. And finally Picture Singh brought Resham Bibi to apologize.
'Pol'gize,' Resham said toothlessly and fled; Picture Singh added, 'It is hard for the old ones; their brains go raw and remember upside down. Captain, here everyone is saying you are our luck; but will you go from us soon?'-And Parvati, staring dumbly with saucer eyes which begged no no no; but I was obliged to answer in the affirmative.
Saleem, today, is certain that he answered, 'Yes'; that on the selfsame morning, still dressed in shapeless robe, still inseparable from a silver spittoon, he walked away, without looking back at a girl who followed him with eyes moistened with accusations; that, strolling hastily past practising jugglers and sweetmeat-stalls which filled his nostrils with the temptations of rasgullas, past barbers offering shaves for ten paisa, past the derelict maunderings of crones and the American-accented caterwauls of shoe-shine boys who importuned bus-loads of Japanese tourists in identical blue suits and incongruous saffron turbans which had been tied around their heads by obsequiously mischievous guides, past the towering flight of stairs to the Friday Mosque, past vendors of notions and itr-essences and plaster-of-Paris replicas of the Qutb Minar and painted toy horses and fluttering unslaughtered chickens, past invitations to cockfights and empty-eyed games of cards, he emerged from the ghetto of the illusionists and found himself on Faiz Bazar, facing the infinitely-extending walls of a Red Fort from whose ramparts a prime minister had once announced independence, and in whose shadow a woman had been met by a peepshow-merchant, a Dilli-dekho man who had taken her into narrowing lanes to hear her son's future foretold amongst mongeese and vultures and broken men with leaves bandaged around their arms; that, to be brief, he turned to his right and walked away from the Old City towards the roseate palaces built by pink-skinned conquerors long ago: abandoning my saviours, I went into New Delhi on foot.
Why? Why, ungratefully spurning the nostalgic grief of Parvati-the-witch, did I set my face against the old and journey into newness? Why, when for so many years I had found her my staunchest ally in the nocturnal congresses of my mind, did I leave her so lightly in the morning? Fighting past fissured blanks, I am able to remember two reasons; but am unable to say which was paramount, or if a third… firstly, at any rate, I had been taking stock. Saleem, analysing his prospects, had had no option but to admit to himself that they were not good. I was passport-less; in law an illegal immigrant (having once been a legal emigrant); P.O. W. camps were waiting for me everywhere. And even after setting aside my status as defeated-soldier-on-the-run, the list of my disadvantages remained formidable: I had neither funds nor a change of clothes; nor qualifications-having neither completed my education nor distinguished myself in that part of it which I had undergone; how was I to embark on my ambitious project of nation-saving without a roof over my head or a family to protect support assist… it struck me like a thunderclap that I was wrong; that here, in this very city, I had relatives-and not only relatives, but influential ones! My uncle Mustapha Aziz, a senior Civil Servant, who when last heard of had been number two in his Department; what better patron than he for my Messianic ambitions? Under his roof, I could acquire contacts as well as new clothes; under his auspices, I would seek preferment in the Administration, and, as I studied the realities of government, would certainly find the keys of national salvation; and I would have the ears of Ministers, I would perhaps be on first-name terms with the great…! It was in the clutches of this magnificent fantasy that I told Parvati-the-witch, 'I must be off; great matters are afoot!' And, seeing the hurt in her suddenly-inflamed cheeks, consoled her: 'I will come and see you often. Often often.' But she was not consoled… high-mindedness, then, was one motive for abandoning those who had helped me; but was there not something meaner, lowlier, more personal? There was. Parvati had drawn me secretly aside behind a tin-and-cratewood shack; where cockroaches spawned, where rats made love, where flies gorged themselves on pie-dog dung, she clutched me by the wrist and became incandescent of eye and sibilant of tongue; hidden in the putrid underbelly of the ghetto, she confessed that I was not the first of the midnight children to have crossed her path! And now there was a story of a Dacca procession, and magicians marching alongside heroes; there was Parvati looking up at a tank, and there were Parvati-eyes alighting on a pair of gigantic, prehensile knees… knees bulging proudly through starched-pressed uniform; there was Parvati crying, 'O you! O you…' and then the unspeakable name, the name of my guilt, of someone who should have led my life but for a crime in a nursing home; Parvati and Shiva, Shiva and Parvati, fated to meet by the divine destiny of their names, were united in the moment of victory. 'A hero, man!' she hissed proudly behind the shack. They will make him a big officer and all!' And now what was produced from a fold of her ragged attire? What once grew proudly on a hero's head and now nestled against a sorceress's breasts? 'I asked and he gave,' said Parvati-the-witch, and showed me a lock of his hair.
Did I run from that lock of fateful hair? Did Saleem, fearing a reunion with his alter ego, whom he had so-long-ago banned from the councils of the night, flee back into the bosom of that family whose comforts had been denied the war-hero? Was it high-mindedness or guilt? I can no longer say; I set down only what I remember, namely that Parvati-the-witch whispered, 'Maybe he will come when he has time; and then we will be three!' And another, repeated phrase: 'Midnight's children, yaar… that's something, no?' Parvati-the-witch reminded me of things I had tried to put out of my mind; and I walked away from her, to the home of Mustapha Aziz.
Of my last miserable contact with the brutal intimacies of family life, only fragments remain; however, since it must all be set down and subsequently pickled, I shall attempt to piece together an account… to begin with, then, let me report that my Uncle Mustapha lived in a commodiously anonymous Civil Service bungalow set in a tidy Civil Service garden just off Rajpath in the heart of Lutyens's city; I walked along what-had-once-been-Kingsway, breathing in the numberless perfumes of the street, which blew out of State Handicraft Emporia arid the exhaust-pipes of auto-rickshaws; the aromas of banyan and deodar mingled with the ghostly scents of long-gone viceroys and mem-sahibs in gloves, and also with the rather more strident bodily odours of gaudy rich begums and tramps. Here was the giant election scoreboard around which (during the first battle-for-power between Indira and Morarji Desai) crowds had thronged, awaiting the results, asking eagerly: 'Is it a boy or a girl?'… amid ancient and modern, between India Gate and the Secretariat buildings, my thoughts teeming with vanished (Mughal and British) empires and also with my own history-because this was the city of the public announcement, of many-headed monsters and a hand, falling from the sky-I marched resolutely onwards, smelling, like everything else in sight, to high heaven. And at last, having turned left towards Dupleix Road, I arrived at an anonymous garden with a low wall and a hedge; in a corner of which I saw a signboard waving in the breeze, just as once signboards had flowered in the gardens of Methwold's Estate; but this echo of the past told a different story. Not for sale, with its three ominous vowels and four fateful consonants; the wooden flower of my uncle's garden proclaimed strangely: Mr Mustapha Aziz and Fly.
Not knowing that the last word was my uncle's habitual, desiccated abbreviation of the throbbingly emotional noun 'family', I was thrown into confusion by the nodding signboard; after I had stayed in his household for a very short time, however, it began to seem entirely fitting, because the family of Mustapha Aziz was indeed as crushed, as insect-like, as insignificant as that mythically truncated Fly.
With what words was I greeted when, a little nervously, I rang a doorbell, filled with hopes of beginning a new career? What face appeared behind the wire-netted outer door and scowled in angry surprise? Padma: I was greeted by Uncle Mustapha's wife, by my mad aunt Sonia, with the exclamation; 'Ptui! Allah! How the fellow stinks!'
And although I, ingratiatingly, 'Hullo, Sonia Aunty darling,' grinned sheepishly at this wire-netting-shaded vision of my aunt's wrinkling Irani beauty, she went on, 'Saleem, is it? Yes, I remember you. Nasty little brat you were. Always thought you were growing up to be God or what. And why? Some stupid letter the P.M.'s fifteenth assistant under-secretary must have sent you.' In that first meeting I should have been able to foresee the destruction of my plans; I should have smelled, on my mad aunt, the implacable odours of Civil Service jealousy, which would thwart all my attempts to gain a place in the world. I had been sent a letter, and she never had; it made us enemies for life. But there was a door, opening; there were whiffs of clean clothes and shower-baths; and I, grateful for small mercies, failed to examine the deadly perfumes of my aunt.
My uncle Mustapha Aziz, whose once-proudly-waxed moustache had never recovered from the paralysing dust-storm of the destruction of Methwold's Estate, had been passed over for the headship of his Department no less than forty-seven times, and had at last found consolation for his inadequacies in thrashing his children, in ranting nightly about how he was clearly the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice, in a contradictory but absolute loyalty to the government of the day, and in an obsession with genealogies which was his only hobby and whose intensity was greater even than my father Ahmed Sinai's long-ago desire to prove himself descended from Mughal emperors. In the first of these consolations he was willingly joined by his wife, the half-Irani would-be-socialite Sonia (nee Khosrovani), who had been driven certifiably insane by a life in which she had been required to begin 'being a chamcha' (literally a spoon, but idiomatically a flatterer) to forty-seven separate and successive wives of number-ones whom she had previously alienated by her manner of colossal condescension when they had been the wives of number-threes; under the joint batterings of my uncle and aunt, my cousins had by now been beaten into so thorough a pulp that I am unable to recall their number, sexes, proportions or features; their personalities, of course, had long since ceased to exist. In the home of Uncle Mustapha, I sat silently amongst my pulverized cousins listening to his nightly soliloquies which contradicted themselves constantly, veering wildly between his resentment of not having been promoted and his blind lap-dog devotion to every one of the Prime Minister's acts. If Indira Gandhi had asked him to commit suicide, Mustapha Aziz would have ascribed it to anti-Muslim bigotry but also defended the statesmanship of the request, and, naturally, performed the task without daring (or even wishing) to demur.
As for genealogies: Uncle Mustapha spent all his spare time filling giant log-books with spider-like family trees, eternally researching into and immortalizing the bizarre lineages of the greatest families in the land; but one day during my stay my aunt Sonia heard about a rishi from Hardwar who was reputedly three hundred and ninety-five years old and had memorized the genealogies of every single Brahmin clan in the country. 'Even in that,' she screeched at my uncle, 'you end up being number two!' The existence of the Hardwar rishi completed her descent into insanity, so that her violence towards her children increased to the point at which we lived in daily expectation of murder, and in the end my uncle Mustapha was forced to have her locked away, because her excesses were embarrassing him in his work.
This, then, was the family to which I had come. Their presence in Delhi came to seem, in my eyes, like a desecration of my own past; in a city which, for me, was forever possessed by the ghosts of the young Ahmed and Amina, this terrible Fly was crawling upon sacred soil.
But what can never be proved for certain is that, in the years ahead, my uncle's genealogical obsession would be placed at the service of a government which was falling increasingly beneath the twin spells of power and astrology; so that what happened at the Widows' Hostel might never have happened without his help… but no, I have been a traitor, too; I do not condemn; all I am saying is that I once saw, amongst his genealogical log-books, a black leather folder labelled top secret, and titled project m.c.c.
The end is near, and cannot be escaped much longer; but while the Indira sarkar, like her father's administration, consults daily with purveyors of occult lore; while Benarsi seers help to shape the history of India, I must digress into painful, personal recollections; because it was at Uncle Mustapha's that I learned, for certain, about the deaths of my family in the war of '65; and also about the disappearance, just a few days before my arrival, of the famous Pakistani singer Jamila Singer.
… When mad aunt Sonia heard that I had fought on the wrong side in the war, she refused to feed me (we were at dinner), and screeched, 'God, you have a cheek, you know that? Don't you have a brain to think with? You come to a Senior Civil Servant's house-an escaped war criminal, Allah! You want to lose your uncle his job? You want to put us all out on the street? Catch your ears for shame, boy! Go-go, get out, or better, we should call the police and hand you over just now! Go, be a prisoner of war, why should we care, you are not even our departed sister's true-born son…'
Thunderbolts, one after the other: Saleem fears for his safety, and simultaneously learns the inescapable truth about his mother's death, and also that his position is weaker than he thought, because in this part of his family the act of acceptance has not been made; Sonia, knowing what Mary Pereira confessed, is capable of anything!…
And I, feebly, 'My mother? Departed?' And now Uncle Mustapha, perhaps feeling that his wife has gone too far, says reluctantly, 'Never mind, Saleem, of course you must stay-he must, wife, what else to do?-and poor fellow doesn't even know…'
Then they told me.
It occurred to me, in the heart of that crazy Fly, that I owed the dead a number of mourning periods; after I learned of the demise of my mother and father and aunts Alia and Pia and Emerald, of cousin Zafar and his Kifi princess, of Reverend Mother and my distant relative Zohra and her husband, I resolved to spend the next four hundred days in mourning, as was right and proper: ten mourning periods, of forty days each. And then, and then, there was the matter of Jamila Singer…
She had heard about my disappearance in the turmoil of the war in Bangladesh; she, who always showed her love when it was too late, had perhaps been driven a little crazy by the news. Jamila, the Voice of Pakistan, Bulbul-of-the-Faith, had spoken out against the new rulers of truncated, moth-eaten, war-divided Pakistan; while Mr Bhutto was telling the U.N. Security Council, 'We will build a new Pakistan! A better Pakistan! My country hearkens for me!', my sister was reviling him in public; she, purest of the pure, most patriotic of patriots, turned rebel when she heard about my death. (That, at least, is how I see it; all I heard from my uncle were the bald facts; he had heard them through diplomatic channels, which do not go in for psychological theorizing.) Two days after her tirade against the perpetrators of the war, my sister had vanished off the face of the earth. Uncle Mustapha tried to speak gently: 'Very bad things are happening over there, Saleem; people disappearing all the time; we must fear the worst.'
No! No no no! Padma: he was wrong! Jamila did not disappear into the clutches of the State; because that same night, I dreamed that she, in the shadows of darkness and the secrecy of a simple veil, not the instantly recognizable gold-brocade tent of Uncle Puffs but a common black burqa, fled by air from the capital city; and here she is, arriving in Karachi, unquestioned unarrested free, she is taking a taxi into the depths of the city, and now there is a high wall with bolted doors and a hatch through which, once, long ago, I received bread, the leavened bread of my sister's weakness, she is asking to be let in, nuns are opening doors as she cries sanctuary, yes, there she is, safely inside, doors being bolted behind her, exchanging one kind of invisibility for another, there is another Reverend Mother now, as Jamila Singer who once, as the Brass Monkey, flirted with Christianity, finds safety shelter peace in the midst of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia… yes, she is there, safe, not vanished, not in the grip of police who kick beat starve, but at rest, not in an unmarked grave by the side of the Indus, but alive, baking bread, singing sweetly to the secret nuns; I know, I know, I know. How do I know? A brother knows; that's all.
Responsibility, assaulting me yet again: because there is no way out of it-Jamila's fall was, as usual, all my fault.
I lived in the home of Mr Mustapha Aziz for four hundred and twenty days… Saleem was in belated mourning for his dead; but do not think for one moment that my ears were closed! Don't assume I didn't hear what was being said around me, the repeated quarrels between uncle and aunt (which may have helped him decide to consign her to the insane asylum): Sonia Aziz yelling, 'That bhangi-that dirty-filthy fellow, not even your nephew, I don't know what's got into you, we should throw him out on his ear!' And Mustapha, quietly, replying: 'Poor chap is stricken with grief, so how can we, you just have to look to see, he is not quite right in the head, has suffered many bad things.' Not quite right in the head! That was tremendous, coming from them-from that family beside which a tribe of gibbering cannibals would have seemed calm and civilized! Why did I put up with it? Because I was a man with a dream. But for four hundred and twenty days, it was a dream which failed to come true.
Droopy-moustachioed, tall-but-stooped, an eternal number-two: my Uncle Mustapha was not my Uncle Hanif. He was the head of the family now, the only one of his generation to survive the holocaust of 1965; but he gave me no help at all… I bearded him in his genealogy-filled study one bitter evening and explained-with proper solemnity and humble but resolute gestures-my historic mission to rescue the nation from her fate; but he sighed deeply and said, 'Listen, Saleem, what would you have me do? I keep you in my house; you eat my bread and do nothing-but that is all right, you are from my dead sister's house, and I must look after-so stay, rest, get well in yourself; then let us see. You want a clerkship or so, maybe it can be fixed; but leave these dreams of God-knows-what. Our country is in safe hands. Already Indiraji is making radical reforms-land reforms, tax structures, education, birth control-you can leave it to her and her sarkar.' Patronizing me, Padma! As if I were a foolish child! O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts!
At every turn I am thwarted; a prophet in the wilderness, like Maslama, like ibn Sinan! No matter how I try, the desert is my lot. O vile unhelpfulness of lickspittle uncles! O fettering of ambitions by second-best toadying relatives! My uncle's rejection of my pleas for preferment had one grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested her. He was, in fact, preparing me for my return to the magicians' ghetto, and for… for her… the Widow.
Jealousy: that was it. The great jealousy of my mad aunt Sonia, dripping like poison into my uncle's ears, prevented him from doing a single thing to get me started on my chosen career. The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also: tiny madwomen.
On the four hundred and eighteenth day of my stay, there was a change in the atmosphere of the madhouse. Someone came to dinner: someone with a plump stomach, a tapering head covered with oily .curls and a mouth as fleshy as a woman's labia. I thought I recognized him from newspaper photographs. Turning to one of my sexless ageless faceless cousins, I inquired with interest, 'Isn't it, you know, Sanjay Gandhi?' But the pulverized creature was too annihilated to be capable of replying… was it wasn't it? I did not, at that time, know what I now set down: that certain high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons of prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves… a few years later, there would be gangs of Sanjays all over India! No wonder that incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth control on the rest of us… so maybe it was, maybe it wasn't; but someone disappeared into my uncle's study with Mustapha Aziz; and that night-I sneaked a look-there was a locked black leather folder saying top secret and also project m.c.c.; and the next morning my uncle was looking at me differently, with fear almost, or with that special look of loathing which Civil Servants reserve for those who fall into official disfavour. I should have known then what was in store for me; but everything is simple with hindsight. Hindsight comes to me now, too late, now that I am finally consigned to the peripheries of history, now that the connections between my life and the nation's have broken for good and all… to avoid my uncle's inexplicable gaze, I went out into the garden; and saw Parvati-the-witch.
She was squatting on the pavement with the basket of invisibility by her side; when she saw me her eyes brightened with reproach. 'You said you'd come, but you never, so I,' she stuttered. I bowed my head. 'I have been in mourning,' I said, lamely, and she, 'But still you could have-my God, Saleem, you don't know, in our colony I can't tell anyone about my real magic, never, not even Picture Singh who is like a father, I must bottle it and bottle it, because they don't believe in such things, and I thought, Here is Saleem come, now at last I will have one friend, we can talk, we can be together, we have both been, and known, and arre how to say it, Saleem, you don't care, you got what you wanted and went off just like that, I am nothing to you, I know…'
That night my mad aunt Sonia, herself only days away from confinement in a strait-jacket (it got into the papers, a small piece on an inside page; my uncle's Department must have been annoyed), had one of the fierce inspirations of the profoundly insane and burst into the bedroom into which, half an hour earlier, someone-with-saucer-eyes had climbed through a ground-floor window; she found me in bed with Parvati-the-witch, and after that my Uncle Mustapha lost interest in sheltering me, saying, 'You were born from bhangis, you will remain a dirty type all your life'; on the four hundred and twentieth day after my arrival, I left my uncle's house, deprived of family ties, returned at last to that true inheritance of poverty and destitution of which I had been cheated for so long by the crime of Mary Pereira. Parvati-the-witch was waiting for me on the pavement; I did not tell her that there was a sense in which I'd been glad of the interruption, because as I kissed her in the dark of that illicit midnight I had seen her face changing, becoming the face of a forbidden love; the ghostly features of Jamila Singer replaced these of the witch-girl; Jamila who was (I know it!) safely hidden in a Karachi nunnery was suddenly also here, except that she had undergone a dark, transformation. She had begun to rot, the dread! . pustules and cankers of forbidden love were spreading across her face; just as once the ghost of Joe D'Costa had rotted in the grip of the occult leprosy of guilt, so now the rancid flowers of incest blossomed on my sister's phantasmal features, and I couldn't do it, couldn't kiss touch look upon that intolerable spectral face, I had been on the verge of jerking away with a cry of desperate nostalgia and shame when Sonia Aziz burst in upon us with electric light and screams.
And as for Mustapha, well, my indiscretion with Parvati may also have been, in his eyes, no more than a useful pretext for getting rid of me; but that must remain in doubt, because the black folder was locked-all I have to go on is a look in his eye, a smell of fear, three initials on a label-because afterwards, when everything was finished, a fallen lady and her labia-lipped son spent two days behind locked doors, burning files; and how can we know whether-or-not one of them was labelled m.C.C.?
I didn't want to stay, anyway. Family: an overrated idea. Don't think I was sad! Never for a moment imagine that lumps arose in my throat at my expulsion from the last gracious home open to me! I tell you-I was in fine spirits when I left… maybe there is something unnatural about me, some fundamental lack of emotional response; but my thoughts have always aspired to higher things. Hence my resilience. Hit me: I bounce back. (But no resistance is of any use against the cracks.)
To sum up: forsaking my earlier, naive hopes of preferment in public service, I returned to the magicians' slum and the chaya of the Friday Mosque. Like Gautama, the first and true Buddha, I left my life and comfort and went like a beggar into the world. The date was February 23rd, 1973; coal-mines and the wheat market were being nationalized, the price of oil had begun to spiral up up up, would quadruple in a year, and in the Communist Party of India, the split between Dange's Moscow faction and Namboodiripad's C.P.I.(M.) had become unbridgeable; and I, Saleem Sinai, like India, was twenty-five years, six months and eight days old.
The magicians were Communists, almost to a man. That's right: reds! Insurrectionists, public menaces, the scum of the earth-a community of the godless living blasphemously in the very shadow of the house of God! Shameless, what's more; innocently scarlet; born with the bloody taint upon their souk! And let me say at once that no sooner had I discovered this than I, who had been raised in India's other true faith, which we may term Businessism, and who had abandoned-been-abandoned-by its practitioners, felt instantly and comfortingly at home. A renegade Businessist, I began zealously to turn red and then redder, as surely and completely as my father had once turned white, so that now my mission of saving-the-country could be seen in a new light; more revolutionary methodologies suggested themselves. Down with the rule of unco-operative box-wallah uncles and their beloved leaders! Full of thoughts of direct-communication-with-the-masses, I settled into the magicians' colony, scraping a living by amusing foreign and native tourists with the marvellous perspicacities of my nose, which enabled me to smell out their simple, touristy secrets. Picture Singh asked me to share his shack. I slept on tattered sackcloth amongst baskets sibilant with snakes; but I did not mind, just as I found myself capable of tolerating hunger thirst mosquitoes and (in the beginning) the bitter cold of a Delhi winter. This Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, was also the ghetto's unquestioned chieftain; squabbles and problems were resolved beneath the shade of his ubiquitous and enormous black umbrella; and I, who could read and write as well as smell, became a sort of aide-de-camp to this monumental man who invariably added a lecture on socialism to his serpentine performances, and who was famous in the main streets and alleys of the city for more than his snake-charmer's skills. I can say, with utter certainty, that Picture Singh was the greatest man I ever met.
One afternoon during the chaya, the ghetto was visited by another copy of that labia-lipped youth whom I'd seen at my Uncle Mustapha's. Standing on the steps of the mosque, he unfurled a banner which was then held up by two assistants. It read: abolish poverty, and bore the cow-suckling-calf symbol of the Indira Congress. His face looked remarkably like a plump calf's face, and he unleashed a typhoon of halitosis when he spoke. 'Brothers-O! Sisters-O! What does Congress say to you? This: that all men are created equal!' He got no further; the crowd recoiled from his breath of bullock dung under a hot sun, and Picture Singh began to guffaw. 'O ha ha, captain, too good, sir!' And labia-lips, foolishly: 'Okay, you, brother, won't you share the joke?' Picture Singh shook his head, clutched his sides: 'O speech, captain! Absolute master speech!' His laughter rolled out from beneath his umbrella to infect the crowd until all of us were rolling on the ground, laughing, crushing ants, getting covered in dust, and the Congress mooncalf's voice rose in panic: 'What is this? This fellow doesn't think we are equals? What a low impression he must have-' but now Picture Singh, umbrella-over-head, was striding away towards his hut. Labia-lips, in relief, continued his speech… but not for long, because Picture returned, carrying under his left arm a small circular lidded basket and under his right armpit a wooden flute. He placed the basket on the step beside the Congress-wallah's feet; removed the lid; raised flute to lips. Amid renewed laughter, the young politico leaped nineteen inches into the air as a king cobra swayed sleepily up from its home… Labia-lips is crying: 'What are you doing? Trying to kill me to death?' And Picture Singh, ignoring him, his umbrella furled now, plays on, more and more furiously, and the snake uncoils, faster faster Picture Singh plays until the flute's music fills every cranny of the slum and threatens to scale the walls of the mosque, and at last the great snake, hanging in the air, supported only by the enchantment of the tune, stands nine feet long out of the basket and dances on its tail… Picture Singh relents. Nagaraj subsides into coils. The Most Charming Man In The World offers the flute to the Congress youth: 'Okay, captain,' Picture Singh says agreeably, 'you give it a try.' But labia-lips: 'Man, you know I couldn't do it!' Whereupon Picture Singh seizes the cobra just below the head, opens his own mouth wide wide wide, displaying an heroic wreckage of teeth and gums; winking left-eyed at the Congress youth, he inserts the snake's tongue-flicking head into his hideously yawning orifice! A full minute passes before Picture Singh returns the cobra to its basket. Very kindly, he tells the youth: 'You see, captain, here is the truth of the business: some persons are better, others are less. But it may be nice for you to think otherwise.'
Watching this scene, Saleem Sinai learned that Picture Singh and the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was.
The problems of the magicians' ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India; within the confines of the colony could be found, in miniature, the many divisions and dissensions which racked the Party in the country. Picture Singh, I hasten to add, was above it all; the patriarch of the ghetto, he was the possessor of an umbrella whose shade could restore harmony to the squabbling factions; but the disputes which were brought into the shelter of the snake-charmer's umbrella were becoming more and more bitter, as the prestidigitators, the pullers of rabbits from hats, aligned themselves firmly behind Mr Dange's Moscow-line official C.P.I., which supported Mrs Gandhi throughout the Emergency; the contortionists, however, began to lean more towards the left and the slanting intricacies of the Chinese-oriented wing. Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers applauded the guerrilla tactics of the Naxalite movement; while mesmerists and walkers-on-hot-coals espoused Namboodiripad's manifesto (neither Muscovite nor Pekinese) and deplored the Naxa-lites' violence. There were Trotskyist tendencies amongst card-sharpers, and even a Communism-through-the-ballot-box movement amongst the moderate members of the ventriloquist section. I had entered a milieu in which, while religious and regionalist bigotry were wholly absent, our ancient national gift for fissiparousness had found new outlets. Picture Singh told me, sorrowfully, that during the 1971 general election a bizarre murder had resulted from the quarrel between a Naxalite fire-eater and a Moscow-line conjurer who, incensed by the former's views, had attempted to draw a pistol from his magic hat; but no sooner had the weapon been produced than the supporter of Ho Chi Minh had scorched his opponent to death in a burst of terrifying flame.
Under his umbrella, Picture Singh spoke of a socialism which owed nothing to foreign influences. 'Listen, captains,' he told warring ventriloquists and puppeteers, 'will you go to your villages and talk about Stalins and Maos? Will Bihari or Tamil peasants care about the killing of Trotsky?' The chaya of his magical umbrella cooled the most intemperate of the wizards; and had the effect, on me, of convincing me that one day soon the snake-charmer Picture Singh would follow in the footsteps of Mian Abdullah so many years ago; that, like the legendary Hummingbird, he would leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will; and that, unlike my grandfather's hero, he would not be stopped until he, and his cause, had won the day… but, but. Always a but but. What happened, happened. We all know that.
Before I return to telling the story of my private life, I should like it to be known that it was Picture Singh who revealed to me that the country's corrupt, 'black' economy had grown as large as the official, 'white' variety, which he did by showing me a newspaper photograph of Mrs Gandhi. Her hair, parted in the centre, was snow-white on one side and blackasnight on the other, so that, depending on which profile she presented, she resembled either a stoat or an ermine. Recurrence of the centre-parting in history; and also, economy as an analogue of a Prime Ministerial hair-style… I owe these important perceptions to the Most Charming Man In The World. Picture Singh it was who told me that Mishra, the railway minister, was also the officially-appointed minister for bribery, through whom the biggest deals in the black economy were cleared, and who arranged for pay-offs to appropriate ministers and officials; without Picture Singh, I might never have known about the poll-fixing in the state elections in Kashmir. He was no lover of democracy, however: 'God damn this election business, captain,' he told me, 'Whenever they come, something bad happens; and our countrymen behave like clowns.' I, in the grip of my fever-for-revolution, failed to take issue with my mentor.
There were, of course, a few exceptions to the ghetto's rules: one or two conjurers retained their Hindu faith and, in politics, espoused the Hindusectarian Jana Sangh party or the notorious Ananda Marg extremists; there were even Swatantra voters amongst the jugglers. Non-politically speaking, the old lady Resham Bibi was one of the few members of the community who remained an incurable fantasist, believing (for instance) in the superstition which forbade women to climb mango trees, because a mango tree which had once borne the weight of a woman would bear sour fruit for ever more… and there was the strange fakir named Chishti Khan, whose face was so smooth and lustrous that nobody knew whether he was nineteen or ninety, and who had surrounded his shack with a fabulous creation of bamboo-sticks and scraps of brightly-coloured paper, so that his home looked like a miniature, multi-coloured replica of the nearby Red Fort. Only when you passed through its castellated gateway did you realize that behind the meticulously hyperbolic fa9ade of bamboo-and-paper crenellations and ravelins hid a tin-and-card board hovel like all the rest. Chishti Khan had committed the ultimate solecism of permitting his illusionist expertise to infect his real life; he was not popular in the ghetto. The magicians kept their distance, lest they become diseased by his dreams.
So you will understand why Parvati-the-witch, the possessor of truly wondrous powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her midnight-given gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community which had constantly denied such possibilities.
On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of sight, and the only danger was from scavengers-after-scrap, from searchers-for-abandoned crates or hunters-for-corrugated-tin… that was where Parvati-the-witch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a humble shalwar-kameez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others, midnight's sorceress performed for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a child. Saucer-eye, rope-like pony-tail, fine full red lips… I would never have resisted her for so long if not for the face, the sick decaying eyes nose lips of… There seemed at first to be no limits to Parvati's abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were demons conjured? Did djinns appear, offering riches and overseas travel on levitating rugs? Were frogs turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose into jewels? Was there selling-of-souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit of it; the magic which Parvati-the-witch performed for me-the only magic she was ever willing to perform-was of the type known as 'white'. It was as though the Brahmins' 'Secret Book', the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her; she could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she permitted snakes to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, involving praying to the snake-god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the goodness of the Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reciting a spell: Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless; in a like manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected)-she could cure sores and consecrate talismans-she knew the sraktya charm and the Rite of the Tree. And all this, in a series of extraordinary night-time displays, she revealed to me beneath the walls of the Mosque-but still she was not happy.
As ever, I am obliged to accept responsibility; the scent of mourn-fulness which hung around Parvati-the-witch was my creation. Because she was twenty-five years old, and wanted more from me than my willingness to be her audience; God knows why, but she wanted me in her bed-or, to be precise, to lie with her on the lengdi of sackcloth which served her for a bed in the hovel she shared with a family of contortionist triplets from Kerala, three girls who were orphans just like her-just like myself.
What she did for me: under the power of her magic, hair began to grow where none had grown since Mr Zagallo pulled too hard; her wizardry caused the birthmarks on my face to fade under the healing applications of herbal poultices; it seemed that even the bandiness of my legs was diminishing under her care. (She could do nothing, however, for my one bad ear; there is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.) But no matter how much she did for me, I was unable to do for her the thing she desired most; because although we lay down together beneath the walk on the blind side of the Mosque, the moonlight showed me her night-time face turning, always turning into that of my distant, vanished sister… no, not my sister… into the putrid, vilely disfigured face of Jamila Singer. Parvati anointed her body with unguent oils imbued with erotic charm; she combed her hair a thousand times with a comb made from aphrodisiac deer-bones; and (I do not doubt it) in my absence she must have tried all manner of lovers' sorceries; but I was in the grip of an older bewitchment, and could not, it seemed, be released; I was doomed to find the faces of women who loved me turning into the features of… but you know whose crumbling features appeared, filling my nostrils with their unholy stench.
'Poor girl,' Padma sighs, and I agree; but until the Widow drained me of past present future, I remained under the Monkey's spell.
When Parvati-the-witch finally admitted failure, her face developed, over-night, an alarming and pronounced pout. She fell asleep in the hut of the contortionist orphans and awoke with her full lips stuck in a protruding attitude of unutterably sensuous pique. Orphaned triplets told her, giggling worriedly, what had happened to her face; she tried spiritedly to pull her features back into position, but neither muscles nor wizardry managed to restore her to her former self; at last, resigning herself to her tragedy, Parvati gave in, so that Resham Bibi told anyone who would listen: 'That poor girl-a god must have blown on her when she was making a face.'
(That year, incidentally, the chic ladies of the cities were all wearing just such an expression with erotic deliberation; the haughty mannequins in the Eleganza-'73 fashion show all pouted as they walked their catwalks. In the awful poverty of the magicians' slum, pouting Parvati-the-witch was in the height of facial fashion.)
The magicians devoted much of their energies to the problem of making Parvati smile again. Taking time off from their work, and also from the more mundane chores of reconstructing tin-and-cardboard huts which had fallen down in a high wind, or killing rats, they performed their most difficult tricks for her pleasure; but the pout remained in place. Resham Bibi made a green tea which smelted of camphor and forced it down Parvati's gullet. The tea had the effect of constipating her so thoroughly that she was not seen defecating behind her hovel for nine weeks. Two young jugglers conceived the notion that she might have begun grieving for her deceased father all over again, and applied themselves to the task of drawing his portrait on a shred of old tarpaulin, which they hung above her sackcloth mat. Triplets made jokes, and Picture Singh, greatly distressed, made cobras tie themselves in knots; but none of it worked, because if Parvati's thwarted love was beyond her own powers to cure, what hope could the others have had? The power of Parvati's pout created, in the ghetto, a nameless sense of unease, which all the magicians' animosity towards the unknown could not entirely dispel.
And then Resham Bibi hit upon an idea. 'Fools that we are,' she told Picture Singh, 'we don't see what is under our noses. The poor girl is twenty-five, baba-almost an old woman! She is pining for a husband!' Picture Singh was impressed. 'Resham Bibi,' he told her approvingly, 'your brain is not yet dead.'
After that, Picture Singh applied himself to the task of finding Parvati a suitable young man; many of the younger men in the ghetto were coaxed bullied threatened. A number of candidates were produced; but Parvati rejected them all. On the night when she told Bismillah Khan, the most promising fire-eater in the colony, to go somewhere else with his breath of hot chillies, even Picture Singh despaired. That night, he said to me, 'Captain, that girl is a trial and a grief to me; she is your good friend, you got any ideas?' Then an idea occurred to him, an idea which had had to wait until he became desperate because even Picture Singh was affected by considerations of class-automatically thinking of me as 'too good' for Parvati, because of my supposedly 'higher' birth, the ageing Communist had not thought until now that I might be… 'Tell me one thing, captain,' Picture Singh asked shyly, 'you are planning to be married some day?'
Saleem Sinai felt panic rising up inside himself.
'Hey, listen, captain, you like the girl, hey?'-And I, unable to deny it, 'Of course.' And now Picture Singh, grinning from ear to ear, while snakes hissed in baskets: 'Lake her a lot, captain? A lot lot?' But I was thinking of Jamila's face in the night; and made a desperate decision: 'Pictureji, I can't marry her.' And now he, frowning: 'Are you maybe married already, captain? Got wife-children waiting somewhere?' Nothing for it now; I, quietly, shamefully, said: 'I can't marry anyone, Pictureji. I can't have children.'
The silence in the shack was punctuated by sibilant snakes and the calls of wild dogs in the night.
'You're telling truth, captain? Is a medical fact?'
'Yes'
'Because one must not lie about such things, captain. To lie about one's manhood is bad, bad luck. Anything could happen, captain.
And I, wishing upon myself the curse of Nadir Khan, which was also the curse of my uncle Hanif Aziz and, during the freeze and its long aftermath, of my father Ahmed Sinai, was goaded into lying even more angrily: 'I tell you,' Saleem cried, 'it ,s true, and that s that!'
Then, captain,' Pictureji said tragically, smacking wrist against forehead, 'God knows what to do with that poor girl.'
I married Parvati-the-witch on February 23rd, 1975, the second anniversary of my outcast's return to the magicians' ghetto.
Stiffening of Padma: taut as a washing-line, my dung-lotus inquires: 'Married? But last night only you said you wouldn't-and why you haven't told me all these days, weeks, months… ?' I look at her sadly, and remind her that I have already mentioned the death of my poor Parvati, which was not a natural death… slowly Padma uncoils, as I continue: 'Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, there's no escape from her.'
There have been thirty-two years, in this story, during which I remained unborn; soon, I may complete thirty-one years of my own. For sixty-three years, before and after midnight, women have done their best; and also, I'm bound to say, their worst.
In a blind landowner's house on the shores of a Kashmir! lake, Naseem Aziz doomed me to the inevitability of perforated sheets; and in the waters of that same lake, Ilse Lubin leaked into history, and I have not forgotten her deathwish;
Before Nadir Khan hid in his underworld, my grandmother had, by becoming Reverend Mother, begun a sequence of women who changed their names, a sequence which continues even today– and which even leaked into Nadir, who became Qasim, and sat with dancing hands in the Pioneer Cafe; and after Nadir's departure, my mother Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai;
And Alia, with the bitterness of ages, who clothed me in the baby-things impregnated with her old-maid fury; and Emerald, who laid a table on which I made pepperpots march;
There was the Rani of Cooch Naheen, whose money, placed at the disposal of a humming man, gave birth to the optimism disease, which has recurred, at intervals, ever since; and, in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi, a distant relative called Zohra whose flirtations gave birth, in my father, to that later weakness for Fernandas and Florys; So to Bombay. Where Winkie's Vanita could not resist the centre-parting of William Methwold, and Nussie-the-duck lost a baby-race; while Mary Pereira, in the name of love, changed the baby-tags of history and became a second mother to me…
Women and women and women: Toxy Catrack, nudging open the door which would later let in the children of midnight; the terrors of her nurse Bi-Appah; the competitive love of Amina and Mary, and what my mother showed me while I lay concealed in a washing-chest: yes, the Black Mango, which forced me to sniff, and unleashed what-were-not-Archangels!… And Evelyn Lilith Burns, cause of a bicycle-accident, who pushed me down a two-storey hillock into the midst of history.
And the Monkey. I musn't forget the Monkey.
But also, also, there was Masha Miovic, goading me into finger-loss, and my aunty Pia, filling my heart with revenge-lust, and Lila Sabarmati, whose indiscretions made possible my terrible, manipulating, newspaper-cut-out revenge;
And Mrs Dubash, who found my gift of a Superman comic and built it, with the help of her son, into Lord Khusro Khusrovand;
And Mary, seeing a ghost.
In Pakistan, the land of submission, the home of purity, I watched the transformation of Monkey-into-Singer, and fetched bread, and fell in love; it was a woman, Tai Bibi, who told me the truth about myself. And in the heart of my inner darkness, I turned to the Puffias, and was only narrowly saved from the threat of a golden-dentured bride.
Beginning again, as the buddha, I lay with a latrine-cleaner and was subjected to electrified urinals as a result; in the East, a farmer's wife tempted me, and Time was assassinated in consequence; and there were houris in a temple, and we only just escaped in time.
In the shadow of a mosque, Resham Bibi issued a warning.
And I married Parvati-the-witch.
'Oof, mister,' Padma exclaims, 'that's too much women!'
I do not disagree; because I have not even included her, whose dreams of marriage and Kashmir have inevitably been leaking into me, making me wish, if-only, if-only, so that, having once resigned myself to the cracks, I am now assailed by pangs of discontent, anger, fear and regret.
But above all, the Widow.
'I swear!' Padma slaps her knee, 'Too much, mister; too much.'
How are we to understand my too-many women? As the multiple faces of Bharat-Mata? Or as even more… as the dynamic aspect of maya, as cosmic energy, which is represented as the female organ?
Maya, in its dynamic aspect, is called Shakti; perhaps it is no accident that, in the Hindu pantheon, the active power of a deity is contained within his queen! Maya-Shakti mothers, but also 'muffles consciousness in its dream-web'. Too-many-women: are they all aspects of Devi, the goddess-who is Shakti, who slew the buffalo-demon, who defeated the ogre Mahisha, who is Kali Durga Chandi Chamunda Uma Sati and Parvati… and who, when active, is coloured red?
'I don't know about that,' Padma brings me down to earth, 'They are just women, that's all.'
Descending from my flight of fancy, I am reminded of the importance of speed; driven on by the imperatives of rip tear crack, I abandon reflections; and begin.
This is how it came about: how Parvati took her destiny into her own hands; how a lie, issuing from my lips, brought her to the desperate condition in which, one night, she extracted from her shabby garments a lock of hero's hair, and began to speak sonorous words.
Spurned by Saleem, Parvati remembered who had once been his arch-enemy; and, taking a bamboo stick with seven knots in it, and an improvized metal hook attached to one end, she squatted in her shack and recited; with the Hook of Indra in her right hand, and a lock of hair in her left, she summoned him to her. Parvati called to Shiva; believe don't believe, but Shiva came.
From the beginning there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees; but throughout this narrative I've been pushing him, the other, into the background (just as once, I banned him from the councils of the Children). He can be concealed no longer, however; because one morning in May 1974-is it just my cracking memory, or am I right in thinking it was the 18th, perhaps at the very moment at which the deserts of Rajasthan were being shaken by India's first nuclear explosion? Was Shiva's explosion into my life truly synchronous with
India's arrival, without prior warning, at the nuclear age?-he came to the magicians' slum. Uniformed, gonged-and-pipped, and a Major now, Shiva alighted from an Army motorcycle; and even through the modest khaki of his Army pants it was easy to make out the phenomenal twin bulges of his lethal knees… India's most decorated war hero, but once he led a gang of apaches in the back-streets of Bombay; once, before he discovered the legitimized violence of war, prostitutes were found throttled in gutters (I know, I know-no proof); Major Shiva now, but also Wee Willie Winkie's boy, who still remembered the words of long-silenced songs: 'Good Night, Ladies' still echoed on occasion in his ears.
There are ironies here, which must not pass unnoticed; for had not Shiva risen as Saleem fell? Who was the slum-dweller now, and who looked down from commanding heights? There is nothing like a war for the re-invention of lives… On what may well have been May 18th, at any rate, Major Shiva came to the magicians' ghetto, and strode through the cruel streets of the slum with a strange expression on his face, which combined the infinite disdain for poverty of the recently-exalted with something more mysterious: because Major Shiva, drawn to our humble abode by the incantations of Parvati-the-witch, cannot have known what force impelled him to come.
What follows is a reconstruction of the recent career of Major Shiva; I pieced the story together from Parvati's accounts, which I got out of her after our marriage. It seems my arch-rival was fond of boasting to her about his exploits, so you may wish to make allowances for the distortions of truth which such chest-beating creates; however, there seems no reason to believe that what he told Parvati and she repeated to me was very far removed from what-was-the-case.
At the end of the war in the East, the legends of Shiva's awful exploits buzzed through the streets of the cities, leaped on to newspaper and into magazines, and thus insinuated themselves into the salons of the well-to-do, settling in clouds as thick as flies upon the eardrums of the country's hostesses, so that Shiva found himself elevated in social status as well as military rank, and was invited to a thousand and one different gatherings-banquets, musical soirees, bridge parties, diplomatic receptions, party political conferences, great melas and also smaller, local fetes, school sports days and fashionable balls-to be applauded and monopolized by the noblest and fairest in the land, to all of whom the legends of his exploits clung like flies, walking over their eyeballs so that they saw the young man through the mist of his legend, coating their fingertips so that they touched him through the magical film of his myth, settling on their tongues so that they could not speak to him as they would to an ordinary human being. The Indian Army, which was at that time fighting a political battle against proposed expenditure cuts, understood the value of so charismatic an ambassador, and permitted the hero to circulate amongst his influential admirers; Shiva espoused his new life with a will.
He grew a luxuriant moustache to which his personal batman applied a daily pomade of linseed-oil spiced with coriander; always elegantly turned out in the drawing-rooms of the mighty, he engaged in political chit-chat, and declared himself a firm admirer of Mrs Gandhi, largely because of his hatred for her opponent Morarji Desai, who was intolerably ancient, drank his own urine, had skin which rustled like rice-paper, and, as Chief Minister of Bombay, had once been responsible for the banning of alcohol and the persecution of young goondas, that is to say hooligans or apaches, or, in other words, of the child Shiva himself… but such idle chatter occupied a mere fraction of his thoughts, the rest of which were entirely taken up with the ladies. Shiva, too, was besotted by too-much-women, and in those heady days after the military victory acquired a secret reputation which (he boasted to Parvati) rapidly grew to rival his official, public fame-a 'black' legend to set beside the 'white' one. What was whispered at the hen-parties and canasta-evenings of the land? What was hissed through giggles wherever two or three glittering ladies got together? This: Major Shiva was becoming a notorious seducer; a ladies'-man; a cuckolder of the rich; in short, a stud.
There were women-he told Parvati-wherever he went: their curving bird-soft bodies quaking beneath the weight of their jewellery and lust, their eyes misted over by his legend; it would have been difficult to refuse them even had he wanted to. But Major Shiva had no intention of refusing. He listened sympathetically to their little tragedies-impotent husbands, beatings, lack-of-attention-to whatever excuses the lovely creatures wished to offer. Like my grandmother at her petrol pump (but with more sinister motives) he gave patient audience to their woes; sipping whisky in the chandeliered splendour of ballrooms, he watched them batting their eyelids and breathing suggestively while they moaned; and always, at last, they contrived to drop a handbag, or spill a drink, or knock his swagger-stick from his grasp, so that he would have to stoop to the floor to retrieve whatever-had-fallen, and then he would see the notes tucked into their sandals, sticking daintily out from under painted toes. In those days (if the Major is to be believed) the lovely scandalous begums of India became awfully clumsy, and their chap-pals spoke of rendezvous-at-midnight, of trellises of bougainvillaea outside bedroom windows, of husbands conveniently away launching ships or exporting tea or buying ball-bearings from Swedes. While these unfortunates were away, the Major visited their homes to steal their most prized possessions: their women fell into his arms. It is possible (I have divided by half the Major's own figures) that at the height of his philanderings there were no less than ten thousand women in love with him.
And certainly there were children. The spawn of illicit midnights. Beautiful bouncing infants secure in the cradles of the rich. Strewing bastards across the map of India, the war hero went his way; but (and this, too, is what he told Parvati) he suffered from the curious fault of losing interest in anyone who became pregnant; no matter how beautiful sensuous loving they were, he deserted the bedrooms of all who bore his children; and lovely ladies with red-rimmed eyes were obliged to persuade their cuckolded husbands that yes, of course it's your baby, darling, life-of-mine, doesn't it look just like you, and of course I'm not sad, why should I be, these are tears of joy..
One such deserted mother was Roshanara, the child-wife of the steel magnate S. P. Shetty; and at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in Bombay, she punctured the mighty balloon of his pride. He had been promenading about the paddock, stooping every few yards to return ladies' shawls and parasols, which seemed to acquire a life of their own and spring out of their owners' hands as he passed; Roshanara Shetty confronted him here, standing squarely in his path and refusing to budge, her seventeen-year-old eyes filled with the ferocious pique of childhood. He greeted her coolly, touching his Army cap, and attempted to pass; but she dug her needle-sharp nails into his arm, smiling dangerously as ice, and strolled along beside him. As they walked she poured her infantile poison into his ear, and her hatred and resentment of her former lover gave her the skill to make him believe her. Callously she whispered that it was so funny, my God, the way he strutted around in high society like some kind of rooster, while all the time the ladies were laughing at him behind his back, O yes, Major Sahib, don't fool yourself, high-class women have always enjoyed sleeping with animals peasants brutes, but that's how we think of you, my God it's disgusting just to watch you eat, gravy down your chin, don't you think we see how you never hold teacups by their handles, do you imagine we can't hear your belches and breakings of wind, you're just our pet ape, Major Sahib, very useful, but basically a clown.
After the onslaught of Roshanara Shetty, the young war hero began to see his world differently. Now he seemed to see women giggling behind fans wherever he went; he noticed strange amused sidelong glances which he'd never noticed before; and although he tried to improve his behaviour, it was no use, he seemed to become clumsier the harder he tried, so that food flew off his plate on to priceless Kelim rugs and belches broke from his throat with the roar of a train emerging from a tunnel and he broke wind with the rage of typhoons. His glittering new life became, for him, a daily humiliation; and now he reinterpreted the advances of the beautiful ladies, understanding that by placing their love-notes beneath their toes they were obliging him to kneel demeaningly at their feet… as he learned that a man may possess every manly attribute and still be despised for not knowing how to hold a spoon, he felt an old violence being renewed in him, a hatred for these high-ups and their power, which is why I am sure-why I know-that when the Emergency offered Shiva-of-the-knees the chance of grabbing some power for himself, he did not wait to be asked a second time.
On May 15th, 1974, Major Shiva returned to his regiment in Delhi; he claimed that, three days later, he was suddenly seized by a desire to see once more the saucer-eyed beauty whom he had first encountered long ago in the conference of the Midnight Children; the pony-tailed temptress who had asked him, in Dacca, for a single lock of his hair. Major Shiva declared to Parvati that his arrival at the magicians' ghetto had been motivated by a desire to be done with the rich bitches of Indian high society; that he had been besotted by her pouting lips the moment he laid eyes on them; and that these were the only reasons for asking her to go away with him. But I have already been overgenerous to Major Shiva-in this, my own personal version of history, I have allowed his account too much space; so I insist that, whatever the knock-kneed Major might have thought, the thing that drew him into the ghetto was quite simply and straightforwardly the magic of Parvati-the-witch.
Saleem was not in the ghetto when Major Shiva arrived by motorcycle; while nuclear explosions rocked the Rajasthani wastes, out of sight, beneath the desert's surface, the explosion which changed my life also took place out of my sight. When Shiva grasped Parvati by the wrist, I was with Picture Singh at an emergency conference of the city's many red cells, discussing the ins and outs of the national railway strike; when Parvati, without demurring, took her place on the pillion of a hero's Honda, I was busily denouncing the government's arrests of union leaders. In short, while I was preoccupied with politics and my dream of national salvation, the powers of Parvati's witchcraft had set in motion the scheme which would end with hennaed palms, and songs, and the signing of a contract.
… I am obliged, perforce, to reply on the accounts of others; only Shiva could tell what had befallen him; it was Resham Bibi who described Parvati's departure to me on my return, saying, 'Poor girl, let her go, so sad she has been for so long, what is to blame?'; and only Parvati could recount to me what befell her while she was away.
Because of the Major's national status as a war hero, he was permitted to take certain liberties with military regulations; so nobody took him to task for importing a woman into what were not, after all, married men's quarters; and he, not knowing what had brought about this remarkable alteration in his life, sat down as requested in a cane chair, while she took off his boots, pressed his feet, brought him water flavoured with freshly-squeezed limes, dismissed his batman, oiled his moustache, caressed his knees and after all that produced a dinner of biriani so exquisite that he stopped wondering what was happening to him and began to enjoy it instead. Parvati-the-witch turned those simple Army quarters into a palace, a Kailasa fit for Shiva-the-god; and Major Shiva, lost in the haunted pools of her eyes, aroused beyond endurance by the erotic protrusion of her lips, devoted his undivided attentions to her for four whole months: or, to be precise, for one hundred and seventeen nights. On September 12th, however, things changed: because Parvati, kneeling at his feet, fully aware of his views on the subject, told him that she was going to have his child.
The liaison of Shiva and Parvati now became a tempestuous business, filled with blows and broken plates: an earthly echo of that eternal marital battle-of-the-gods which their namesakes are said to perform atop Mount Kailasa in the great Himalayas… Major Shiva, at this time, began to drink; also to whore. The whoring trails of the war hero around the capital of India bore a strong resemblance to the Lambretta-travels of Saleem Sinai along the spoors of Karachi streets; Major Shiva, unmanned in the company of the rich by the revelations of Roshanara Shetty, had taken to paving for his pleasures. And such was his phenomenal fecundity (he assured Parvati while beating her) that he ruined the'careers of many a loose woman by giving them babies whom they would love too much to expose; he sired around the capital an army of street-urchins to-mirror the regiment of bastards he had fathered on the begums of the chandeliered salons.
Dark clouds were gathering in political skies as well: in Bihar, where corruption inflation hunger illiteracy landlessness ruled the roost, Jaya-Prakash Narayan led a coalition of students and workers against the governing Indira Congress; in Gujarat, there were riots, railway trains were burned, and Morarji Desai went on a fast-unto-death to bring down the corrupt government of the Congress (under Chimanbhai Patel) in that drought-ridden state… it goes without) saying that he succeeded without being obliged to die; in short, while anger seethed in Shiva's mind, the country was getting angry, too; and what was being born while something grew in Parvati's belly? You know the answer: in late 1974, J. P. Narayan and Morarji Desai formed the opposition party known as the Janata Morcha: the people's front. While Major Shiva reeled from whore to whore, the Indira Congress was reeling too.
And at last, Parvati released him from her spell. (No other explanation will do; if he was not bewitched, why did he not cast her off the instant he heard of her pregnancy? And if the spell had not been lifted, how could he have done it at all?) Shaking his head as though awaking from a dream, Major Shiva found himself in the company of a balloon-fronted slum girl, who now seemed to him to represent everything he most feared-she became the personification of the slums of his childhood, from which he had escaped, and which now, through her, through her damnable child, were trying to drag him down down down again… dragging her by the hair, he hurled her on to his motorcycle, and in a very short time she stood, abandoned, on the fringes of the magicians' ghetto, having been returned whence she came, bringing with her only one thing which she had not owned when she left: the thing hidden inside her like an invisible man in a wicker basket, the thing which was growing growing growing, just as she had planned.
Why do I say that?-Because it must be true; because what followed, followed; because it is my belief that Parvati-the-witch became pregnant in order to invalidate my only defence against marrying her. But I shall only describe, and leave analysis to posterity.
On a cold day in January, when the muezzin's cries from the highest minaret of the Friday Mosque froze as they left his lips and fell upon the city as sacred snow, Parvati returned. She had waited until there could be no possible doubt about her condition; her inner basket bulged through the clean new garments of Shiva's now-defunct infatuation. Her lips, sure of their coming triumph, had lost their fashionable pout; in her saucer-eyes, as she stood on the steps of the Friday Mosque to ensure that as many people as possible saw her changed appearance, there lurked a silvered gleam of contentment. That was how I found her when I returned to the chaya of the mosque with Picture Singh. I was feeling disconsolate, and the sight of Parvati-the-witch on the steps, hands folded calmly over her swollen belly, long rope-of-hair blowing gently in the crystal air, did nothing to cheer me up.
Pictureji! and I had gone into the tapering tenement streets behind the General Post Office, where memories of fortune-tellers peepshow-men healers hung in the breeze; and here Picture Singh had performed an act which was growing more political by the day. His legendary artistry drew large good-natured crowds; and he made his snakes enact his message under the influence of his weaving flute music. While I, in my role of apprentice, read out a prepared harangue, serpents dramatized my speech. I spoke of the gross inequities of wealth distribution; two cobras performed, in dumbshow, the mime of a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar. Police harassment, hunger disease illiteracy, were spoken of and also danced by serpents; and then Picture Singh, concluding his act, began to talk about the nature of red revolution, and promises began to fill the air, so that even before the police materialized out of the back-doors of the post office to break up the meeting with lathi-charges and tear-gas, certain wags in our audience had begun to heckle the Most Charming Man In The World. Unconvinced, perhaps, by the ambiguous mimes of the snakes, whose dramatic content was admittedly a little obscure, a youth shouted out: 'Ohe, Pictureji, you should be in the Government, man, not even Indiramata makes promises as nice as yours!'
Then the tear-gas came and we had to flee, coughing spluttering blind, from riot police, like criminals, crying falsely as we ran. (Just as once, in Jallianwalabagh-but at least there were no bullets on this occasion.) But although the tears were the tears of gas, Picture Singh was indeed cast down into an awesome gloom by the heckler's gibe, which had questioned the hold on reality which was his greatest pride; and in the aftermath of gas and sticks, I, too, was dejected, having suddenly identified a moth of unease in my stomach, and realized that something in me objected to Picture's portrayal in snake-dance of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich; I found myself thinking, 'There is good and bad in all-and they brought me up, they looked after me, Pictureji!' After which I began to see that the crime of Mary Pereira had detached me from two worlds, not one; that having been expelled from my uncle's house I could never fully enter the world-according-to-Picture-Singh; that, in fact, my dream of saving the country was a thing of mirrors and smoke; insubstantial, the maunderings of a fool.
And then there was Parvati, with her altered profile, in the harsh clarity of the winter day.
It was-or am I wrong? I must rush on; things are slipping from me all the time-a day of horrors. It was then-unless it was another day-that we found old Resham Bibi dead of cold, lying in her hut which she had built out of Dalda Vanaspati packing-cases. She had turned bright blue, Krishna-blue, blue as Jesus, the blue of Kashmiri sky, which sometimes leaks into eyes; we burned her on the banks of the Jamuna amongst mud-flats and buffalo, and she missed my wedding as a result, which was sad, because like all old women she loved weddings, and had in the past joined in the preliminary henna-ceremonies with energetic glee, leading the formal singing in which the bride's friends insulted the groom and his family. On one occasion her insults had been so brilliant and finely calculated that the groom took umbrage and cancelled the wedding; but Resham had been undaunted, saying that it wasn't her fault if young men nowadays were as faint-hearted and inconstant as chickens.
I was absent when Parvati went away; I was not present when she returned; and there was one more curious fact… unless I have forgotten, unless it was on another day… it seems to me, at any rate, that on the day of Parvati's return, an Indian Cabinet Minister was in his railway carriage, at Samastipur, when an explosion blew him into the history books; that Parvati, who had departed amid the explosions of atom bombs, returned to us when Mr L. N. Mishra, minister for railways and bribery, departed this world for good. Omens and more omens… perhaps, in Bombay, dead pomfrets were floating belly-side-up to shore.
January 26th, Republic Day, is a good time for illusionists. When the huge crowds gather to watch elephants and fireworks, the city's tricksters go out to earn their living. For me, however, the day holds another meaning; it was on Republic Day that my conjugal fate was sealed.
In the days after Parvati's return, the old women of the ghetto formed the habit of holding their ears for shame whenever they passed her; she, who bore her illegitimate child without any appearance of guilt, would smile innocently and walk on. But on the morning of Republic Day, she awoke to find a rope hung with tattered shoes strung up above her door, and began to weep inconsolably, her poise disintegrating under the force of this greatest of insults. Picture Singh and I, leaving our shack laden with baskets of snakes, came across her in her (calculated? genuine?) misery, and Picture Singh set his jaw in an attitude of determination. 'Come back to the hut, captain,' the Most Charming Man instructed me, 'We must talk.'
And in the hut, 'Forgive me, captain, but I must speak. I am thinking it is a terrible thing for a man to go through life without children. To have no son, captain: how sad for you, is it not?' And I, trapped by the lie of impotence, remained silent while Pictureji suggested the marriage which would preserve Parvati's honour and simultaneously solve the problem of my self-confessed sterility; and despite my fears of the face of Jamila Singer, which, superimposed on Parvati's, had the power of driving me to distraction, I could not find it in myself to refuse.
Parvati-just as she had planned, I'm sure-accepted me at once, said yes as easily and as often as she had said no in the past; and after that the Republic Day celebrations acquired the air of having been staged especially for our benefit, but what was in my mind was that once again destiny, inevitability, the antithesis of choice had come to rule my life, once again a child was to be born to a father who was not his father, although by a terrible irony the child would be the true grandchild of his father's parents; trapped in the web of these interweaving genealogies, it may even have occurred to me to wonder what was beginning, what was ending, and whether another secret countdown was in progress, and what would be born with my child.
Despite the absence of Resham Bibi, the wedding went off well enough. Parvati's formal conversion to Islam (which irritated Picture Singh, but on which I found myself insisting, in another throwback to an earlier life) was performed by a red-bearded Haji who looked ill-at-ease in the presence of so many teasing, provocative members of the ungodly; under the shifting gaze of this fellow who resembled a large and bearded onion she intoned her belief that there was no God but God and that Muhammad was his prophet; she took a name which I chose for her out of the repository of my dreams, becoming Laylah, night, so that she too was caught up in the repetitive cycles of my history, becoming an echo of all the other people who have been obliged to change their names… like my own mother Amina Sinai, Parvati-the-witch became a new person in order to have a child.
At the henna ceremony, half the magicians adopted me, performing the functions of my 'family'; the other half took Parvati's side, and happy insults were sung late into the night while intricate traceries of henna dried into the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet; and if the absence of Resham Bibi deprived the insults of a certain cutting edge, we were not overly sorry about the fact. During the nikah, the wedding proper, the happy couple were seated on a dais hastily constructed out of the Dalda-boxes of Resham's demolished shack, and the magicians filed solemnly past us, dropping coins of small denominations into our laps; and when the new Laylah Sinai fainted everyone smiled contentedly, because every good bride should faint at her wedding, and nobody mentioned the embarrassing possibility that she might have passed out because of the nausea or perhaps the kicking-pains caused by the child inside her basket. That evening the magicians put on a show so wonderful that rumours of it spread throughout the Old City, and crowds gathered to watch, Muslim businessmen from a nearby muhalla in which once a public announcement had been made and silversmiths and milk-shake vendors from Chandni Chowk, evening strollers and Japanese tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs; and there were pink Europeans discussing camera lenses with the Japanese, there were shutters clicking and flash bulbs popping, and I was told by one of the tourists that India was indeed a truly wonderful country with many remarkable traditions, and would be just fine and perfect if one did not constantly have to eat Indian food. And at the valima, the consummation ceremony (at which, on this occasion, no bloodstained sheets were held up, with or without perforations, since I had spent our nuptial night with my eyes shut tight and my body averted from my wife's, lest the unbearable features of Jamila Singer come to haunt me. in the bewilderment of the dark), the magicians surpassed their efforts of the wedding-night.
But when all the excitement had died down, I heard (with one good and one bad ear) the inexorable sound of the future stealing up upon us: tick, tock, louder and louder, until the birth of Saleem Sinai-and also of the baby's father-found a mirror in the events of the night of the 25th of June.
While mysterious assassins killed government officials, and narrowly failed to get rid of Mrs Gandhi's personally-chosen Chief Justice, A. N. Ray, the magicians' ghetto concentrated on another mystery: the ballooning basket of Parvati-the-witch.
While the Janata Morcha grew in all kinds of bizarre directions, until it embraced Maoist Communists (such as our very own contortionists, including the rubber-limbed triplets with whom Parvati had lived before our marriage-since the nuptials, we had moved into a hut of our own, which the ghetto had built for us as a wedding present on the site of Resham's hovel) and extreme right-wing members of the Ananda Marg; until Left-Socialists and conservative Swatantra members joined its ranks… while the people's front expanded in this grotesque manner, I, Saleem, wondered incessantly about what might be growing behind the expanding frontage of my wife.
While public discontent with the Indira Congress threatened to crush the government like a fly, the brand-new Laylah Sinai, whose eyes had grown wider than ever, sat as still as a stone while the weight of the baby increased until it threatened to crush her bones to powder; and Picture Singh, in an innocent echo of an ancient remark, said, 'Hey, captain! It's going to be big big: a real ten-chip whopper for sure!'
And then it was the twelfth of June.
History-books newspapers radio-programmes tell us that at two p.m. on June I2th, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty, by Judge Jag Mohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court, of two counts of campaign malpractice during the election campaign of 1971; what has never previously been revealed is that it was at precisely two p.m. that Parvati-the-witch (now Laylah Sinai) became sure she had entered labour.
The labour of Parvati-Laylah lasted for thirteen days. On the first day, while the Prime Minister was refusing to resign, although her convictions carried with them a mandatory penalty barring her from public office for six years, the cervix of Parvati-the-witch, despite contractions as painful as mule-kicks, obstinately refused to dilate; Saleem Sinai and Picture Singh, barred from the hut of her torment by the contortionist triplets who had taken on the dudes of mid-wives, were obliged to listen to her useless shrieks until a steady stream of fire-eaters card-sharpers coal-walkers came up and slapped them on the back and made dirty jokes; and it was only in my ears that the ticking could be heard… a countdown to God-knows what, until I became possessed by fear, and told Picture Singh, 'I don't know what's going to come out of her, but it isn't going to be good…' And Pictureji, reassuringly: 'Don't you worry, captain! Everything will be fine! A ten-chip whopper, I swear!' And Parvati, screaming screaming, and night fading into day, and on the second day, when in Gujarat Mrs Gandhi's electoral candidates were routed by the Janata Morcha, my Parvati was in the grip of pains so intense that they made her as stiff as steel, and I refused to eat until the baby was born or whatever happened happened, I sat cross-legged outside the hovel of her agony, shaking with terror in the heat, begging don't let her die don't let her die, although I had never made love to her during all the months of our marriage; in spite of my fear of the spectre of Jamila Singer, I prayed and fasted, although Picture Singh, 'For pity's sake, captain,' I refused, and by the ninth day the ghetto had fallen into a terrible hush, a silence so absolute that not even the calls of the muezzin of the mosque could penetrate it, a soundlessness of such immense powers that it shut out the roars of the Janata Morcha demonstrations outside Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President's house, a horror-struck muteness of the same awful enveloping magic as the great silence which had once hung over my grandparents' house in Agra, so that on the ninth day we could not hear Morarji Desai calling on President Ahmad to sack the disgraced Prime Minister, and the only sounds in the entire world were the ruined whimperings of Parvati-Laylah, as the contractions piled upon her like mountains, and she sounded as though she were calling to us down a long hollow tunnel of pain, while I sat cross-legged being dismembered by her agony with the soundless sound of ticktock in my brain, and inside the hut there were the contortionist triplets pouring water over Parvati's body to replenish the moisture which was pouring out of her in fountains, forcing a stick between her teeth to prevent her from biting out her tongue, and trying to force down her eyelids over eyes which were bulging so frighteningly that the triplets were afraid they would fall out and get dirty on the floor, and then it was the twelfth day and I was half dead of starvation while elsewhere in the city the Supreme Court was informing Mrs Gandhi that she need not resign until her appeal, but must neither vote in the Lok Sabha nor draw a salary, and while the Prime Minister in her exultation at this partial victory began to abuse her opponents in language of which a Koli fishwife would have been proud, my Parvati's labour entered a phase in which despite her utter exhaustion she found the energy to issue a string of foul-smelling oaths from her colour-drained lips, so that the cesspit stink of her obscenities filled our nostrils and made us retch, and the three contortionists fled from the hut crying that she had become so stretched, so colourless that you could almost see through her, and she would surely die if the baby did not come now, and in my ears tick tock the pounding tick tock until I was sure, yes, soon soon soon, and when the triplets returned to her bedside in the evening of the thirteenth day they screamed Yes yes she has begun to push, come on Parvati, push push push, and while Parvati pushed in the ghetto, J. P. Narayan and Morarji Desai were also goading Indira Gandhi, while triplets yelled push push push the leaders of the Janata Morcha urged the police and Army to disobey the illegal orders of the disqualified Prime Minister, so in a sense they were forcing Mrs Gandhi to push, and as the night darkened towards the midnight hour, because nothing ever happens at any other time, triplets began to screech it's coming coming coming, and elsewhere the Prime Minister was giving birth to a child of her own… in the ghetto, in the hut beside which I sat cross-legged and starving to death, my son was coming coming coming, the head is out, the triplets screeched, while members of the Central Reserve Police arrested the heads of the Janata Morcha, including the impossibly ancient and almost mythological figures of Morarji Desai and J. P. Narayan, push push push, and in the heart of that terrible midnight while ticktock pounded in my ears a child was born, a ten-chip whopper all right, popping out so easily in the end that it was impossible to understand what all the trouble had been. Parvati gave a final pitiable little yelp and out he popped, while all over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches, and when the three contortionists had washed the baby and wrapped it in an old sari and brought it out for its father to see, at exactly the same moment, the word Emergency was being heard for the first time, and suspension-of-civil rights, and censorship-of-the-press, and armoured-units-on-special-alert, and arrest-of-subversive-elements; something was ending, something was being born, and at the precise instant of the birth of the new India and the beginning of a continuous midnight which would not end for two long years, my son, the child of the renewed ticktock, came out into the world.
And there is more: because when, in the murky half-light of that endlessly prolonged midnight, Saleem Sinai saw his son for the first time, he began to laugh helplessly, his brain ravaged by hunger, yes, but also by the knowledge that his relentless destiny had played yet another of its grotesque little jokes, and although Picture Singh, scandalized by my laughter which in my weakness was like the giggling of a schoolgirl, cried repeatedly, 'Come on, captain! Don't behave mad now! It is a son, captain, be happy!', Saleem Sinai continued to acknowledge the birth by tittering hysterically at fate, because the boy, the baby boy, the-boy-my-son Aadam, Aadam Sinai was perfectly formed-except, that is, for his ears. On either side of his head flapped audient protuberances like sails, ears so colossally huge that the triplets afterwards revealed that when his head popped out they had thought, for one bad moment, that it was the head of a tiny elephant.
… 'Captain, Saleem captain,' Picture Singh was begging, 'be nice now! Ears are not anything to go crazy for!'
He was born in Old Delhi… once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: Aadam Sinai arrived at a night-shadowed slum on June 25th, 1975. And the time? The time matters, too. As I said: at night. No, it's important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at Emergency, he emerged. There were gasps; and, across the country, silences and fears. And owing to the occult tyrannies of that benighted hour, he was mysteriously handcuffed to history, his destinies indissolubly chained to those of his country. Unprophesied, uncelebrated, he came; no prime ministers wrote him letters; but, just the same, as my time of connection neared its end, his began. He, of course, was left entirely without a say in the matter; after all, he couldn't even wipe his own nose at the time.
He was the child of a father who was not his father; but also the child of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again;
He was the true great-grandson of his great-grandfather, but elephantiasis attacked him in the ears instead of the nose-because he was also the true son of Shiva-and-Parvati; he was elephant-headed Ganesh;
He was born with ears which flapped so high and wide that they must have heard the shootings in Bihar and the screams of lathi-charged dock-workers in Bombay… a child who heard too much, and as a result never spoke, rendered dumb by a surfeit of sound, so that between then-and-now, from slum to pickle factory, I have never heard him utter a single word;
He was the possessor of a navel which chose to stick out instead of in, so that Picture Singh, aghast, cried, 'His bimbi, captain! His bimbi, look!', and he became, from the first days, the gracious recipient of our awe;
A child of such grave good nature that his absolute refusal to cry or whimper utterly won over his adoptive father, who gave up laughing hysterically at the grotesque ears and began to rock the silent infant gently in his arms;
A child who heard a song as he rocked in arms, a song sung in the historical accents of a disgraced ayah: 'Anything you want to be, you kin be; you kin be just what-all you want.'
But now that I've given birth to my flap-eared, silent son-there are questions to be answered about that other, synchronous birth. Unpalatable, awkward queries: did Saleem's dream of saving the nation leak, through the osmotic tissues of history, into the thoughts of the Prime Minister herself? Was my lifelong belief in the equation between the State and myself transmuted, in 'the Madam's' mind, into that in-those-days-famous phrase: India is Indira and Indira is India? Were we competitors for centrality-was she gripped by a lust for meaning as profound as my own-and was that, was that why… ?
Influence of hair-styles on the course of history: there's another ticklish business. If William Methwold had lacked a centre-parting, I might not have been here today; and if the Mother of the Nation had had a coiffure of uniform pigment, the Emergency she spawned might easily have lacked a darker side. But she had white hair on one side and black on the other; the Emergency, too, had a white part-public, visible, documented, a matter for historians-and a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a matter for us.
Mrs Indira Gandhi was born in November 1917 to Kamala and Jawaharlal Nehru. Her middle name was Priyadarshini. She was not related to 'Mahatma' M. K. Gandhi; her surname was the legacy of. her marriage, in 1952, to one Feroze Gandhi, who became known as 'the nation's son-in-law'. They had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, but in 1949 she moved back into her father's home and became his 'official hostess'. Feroze made one attempt to live there, too, but it was not a success. He became a ferocious critic of the Nehru Government, exposing the Mundhra scandal and forcing the resignation of the then Finance Minister, T. T. Krishnamachari-T.T.K.' himself. Mr Feroze Gandhi died of a heart seizure in 1960, aged forty-seven. Sanjay Gandhi, and his ex-model wife Menaka, were prominent during the Emergency. The Sanjay Youth Movement was particularly effective in the sterilization campaign.
I have included this somewhat elementary summary just in case you had failed to realize that the Prime Minister of India was, in 1975, fifteen years a widow. Or (because the capital letter may be of use): a Widow.
Yes, Padma: Mother Indira really had it in for me.
No!-But I must.
I don't want to tell it!-But I swore to tell it all.-No, I renounce, not that, surely some things are better left…?-That won't wash; what can't be cured, must be endured!-But surely not the whispering walls, and treason, and snip snip, and the women with the bruised chests?-Especially those things.-But how can I, look at me, I'm tearing myself apart, can't even agree with myself, talking arguing like a wild fellow, cracking up, memory going, yes, memory plunging into chasms and being swallowed by the dark, only fragments remain, none of it makes sense any more!-But I mustn't presume to judge; must simply continue (having once begun) until the end; sense-and-nonsense is no longer (perhaps never was) for me to evaluate.-But the horror of it, I can't won't mustn't won't can't no!-Stop this; begin.-No!-Yes.
About the dream, then? I might be able to tell it as a dream. Yes, perhaps a nightmare: green and black the Widow's hair and clutching hand and children mmff and little balls and one-by-one and torn-in-half and little balls go flying flying green and black her hand is green her nails are black as black.-No dreams. Neither the time nor the place for. Facts, as remembered. To the best of one's ability. The way it was: Begin.-No choice?-None; when was there ever? There are imperatives, and logical-consequences, and inevitabilities, and recurrences; there are things-done-to, and accidents, and bludgeonings-of-fate; when was there ever a choice? When options? When a decision freely-made, to be this or that or the other? No choice; begin.-Yes.
Listen:
Endless night, days weeks months without the sun, or rather (because it's important to be precise) beneath a sun as cold as a stream-rinsed plate, a sun washing us in lunatic midnight light; I'm talking about the winter of 1975-6. In the winter, darkness; and also tuberculosis.
Once, in a blue room overlooking the sea, beneath the pointing finger of a fisherman, I fought typhoid and was rescued by snake-poison; now, trapped in the dynastic webs of recurrence by my recognition of his sonship, our Aadam Sinai was also obliged to spend his early months battling the invisible snakes of a disease. The serpents of tuberculosis wound themselves around his neck and made him gasp for air… but he was a child of ears and silence, and when he spluttered, there were no sounds; when he wheezed, no raspings issued from his throat. In short, my son fell ill, and although his mother, Parvati or Laylah, went in search of the herbs of her magical gift-although infusions of herbs in well-boiled water were constantly administered, the wraith-like worms of tuberculosis refused to be driven away. I suspected, from the first, something darkly metaphorical in this illness-believing that, in those midnight months when the age of my connection-to-history overlapped with his, our private emergency was not unconnected with the larger, macrocosmic disease, under whose influence the sun had become as pallid and diseased as our son. Parvati-then (like Padma-now) dismissed these abstract ruminations, attacking as mere folly my growing obsession with light, in whose grip I began lighting little dia-lamps in the shack of my son's illness, filling our hut with candle-flames at noon… but I insist on the accuracy of my diagnosis; 'I tell you,' I insisted then, 'while the Emergency lasts, he will never become well.'
Driven to distraction by her failure to cure that grave child who never cried, my Parvati-Laylah refused to believe my pessimistic theories; but she became vulnerable to every other cockeyed notion. When one of the older women in the colony of the magicians told her-as Resham Bibi might have-that the illness could not come out while the child remained dumb, Parvati seemed to find that plausible. 'Sickness is a grief of the body,' she lectured me, 'It must be shaken off in tears and groans.' That night, she returned to the hut clutching a little bundle of green powder, wrapped in newspaper and tied up with pale pink string, and told me that this was a preparation of such power that it would oblige even a stone to shriek. When she administered the medicine the child's cheeks began to bulge, as though his mouth were full of food; the long-suppressed sounds of his babyhood flooded up behind his lips, and he jammed his mouth shut in fury. It became clear that the infant was close to choking as he tried to swallow back the torrential vomit of pent-up sound which the green powder had stirred up; and this was when we realized that we were in the presence of one of the earth's most implacable wills. At the end of an hour during which my son turned first saffron, then saffron-and-green, and finally the colour of grass, I could not stand it any more and bellowed, 'Woman, if the little fellow wants so much to stay quiet, we mustn't kill him for it!' I picked up Aadam to rock him, and felt his little body becoming rigid, his knee-joints elbows neck were filling up with the held-back tumult of unexpressed sounds, and at last Parvati relented and prepared an antidote by mashing arrowroot and camomile in a tin bowl while muttering strange imprecations under her breath. After that, nobody ever tried to make Aadam Sinai do anything he did not wish to do; we watched him battling against tuberculosis and tried to find reassurance in the idea that a will so steely would surely refuse to be defeated by any mere disease.
In those last days my wife Laylah or Parvati was also being gnawed by the interior moths of despair, because when she came towards me for comfort or warmth in the isolation of our sleeping hours, I still saw superimposed upon her features the horribly eroded physiognomy of Jamila Singer; and although I confessed to Parvati the secret of the spectre, consoling her by pointing out that at its present rate of decay it would have crumbled away entirely before long, she told me dolorously that spittoons and war had softened my brain, and despaired of her marriage which would, as it transpired, never be consummated; slowly, slowly there appeared on her lips the ominous pout of her grief… but what could I do? What solace could I offer-I, Saleem Snotnose, who had been reduced to poverty by the withdrawal of my family's protection, who had chosen (if it was a choice) to live by my olfactory gifts, earning a few paisa a day by sniffing out what people had eaten for dinner the previous day and which of them were in love; what consolation could I bring her, when I was already in the clutches of the cold hand of that lingering midnight, and could sniff finality in the air?
Saleem's nose (you can't have forgotten) could smell stranger things than horse-dung. The perfumes of emotions and ideas, the odour of how-things-were: all these were and are nosed out by me with ease. When the Constitution was altered to give the Prime Minister well-nigh-absolute powers, I smelted the ghosts of ancient empires in the air… in that city which was littered with the phantoms of Slave Kings and Mughals, of Aurangzeb the merciless and the last, pink conquerors, I inhaled once again the sharp aroma of despotism. It smelled like burning oily rags.
But even the nasally incompetent could have worked out that, during the winter of 1975-6, something smelled rotten in the capital; what alarmed me was a stranger, more personal stink: the whiff of personal danger, in which I discerned the presence of a pair of treacherous, retributive knees… my first intimation that an ancient conflict, which began when a love-crazed virgin switched name-tags, was shortly to end in a frenzy of treason and snippings.
Perhaps, with such a warning pricking at my nostrils, I should have fled-tipped off by a nose, I could have taken to my heels. But there were practical objections: where would I have gone? And, burdened by wife and son, how fast could I have moved? Nor must it be forgotten that I did flee once, and look where I ended up: in the Sundarbans, the jungle of phantasms and retribution, from which I only escaped by the skin of my teeth!… At any rate, I did not run.
It probably didn't matter; Shiva-implacable, traitorous, my enemy from our birth-would have found me in the end. Because although a nose is uniquely equipped for the purpose of sniffing-things-out, when it comes to action there's no denying the advantages of a pair of grasping, choking knees.
I shall permit myself one last, paradoxical observation on this subject: if, as I believe, it was at the house of the wailing women that I learned the answer to the question of purpose which had plagued me all my life, then by saving myself from that palace of annihilations
I would also have denied myself this most precious of discoveries. To put it rather more philosophically: every cloud has a silver lining.
Saleem-and-Shiva, nose-and-knees… we shared just three things: the moment (and its consequences) of our birth; the guilt of treachery; and our son, Aadam, our synthesis, unsmiling, grave, with omni-audient ears. Aadam Sinai was in many respects the exact opposite of Saleem. I, at my beginning, grew with vertiginous speed; Aadam, wrestling with the serpents of disease, scarcely grew at all. Saleem wore an ingratiating smile from the start; Aadam had more dignity, and kept his grins to himself. Whereas Saleem had subjugated his will to the joint tyrannies of family and fate, Aadam fought ferociously, refusing to yield even to the coercion of green powder. And while Saleem had been so determined to absorb the universe that he had been, for a time, unable to blink, Aadam preferred to keep his eyes firmly closed… although when, every so often, he deigned to open them, I observed their colour, which was blue. Ice-blue, the blue of recurrence, the fateful blue of Kashmiri sky… but there is no need to elaborate further.
We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams. How much was heard by those flapping ears which seemed, on occasion, to be burning with the heat of their knowledge? If he could have talked, would he have cautioned me against treason and bulldozers? In a country dominated by the twin multitudes of noises and smells, we could have been the perfect team; but my baby son rejected speech, and I failed to obey the dictates of my nose.
'Arre baap,' Padma cries, 'Just tell what happened, mister! What is so surprising if a baby does not make conversations?'
And again the rifts inside me: I can't.-You must.-Yes.
April 1976 found me still living in the colony or ghetto of the magicians; my son Aadam was still in the grip of a slow tuberculosis that seemed unresponsive to any form of treatment. I was full of forebodings (and thoughts of flight); but if any one man was the reason for my remaining in the ghetto, that man was Picture Singh.
Padma; Saleem threw in his lot with the magicians of Delhi partly out of a sense of fitness-a self-flagellant belief in the rectitude of his belated descent into poverty (I took with me, from my uncle's house, no more than two shirts, white, two pairs trousers, also white, onetee-shirt, decorated with pink guitars, and shoes, one pair, black); ' partly, I came out of loyalty, having been bound by knots of gratitude to my rescuer, Parvati-the-witch; but I stayed-when, as a literate young man, I might at the very least have been a bank clerk or a night-school teacher of reading and writing-because, all my life, consciously or unconsciously, I have sought out fathers. Ahmed Sinai, Hanif Aziz, Sharpsticker sahib, General Zulfikar have all been pressed into service in the absence of William Methwold; Picture Singh was the last of this noble line. And perhaps, in my dual lust for fathers and saving-the-country, I exaggerated Picture Singh; the horrifying possibility exists that I distorted him (and have distorted him again in these pages) into a dream-figment of my own imagination… it is certainly true that whenever I inquired, 'When are you going to lead us, Pictureji-when will the great day come?', he, shuffling awkwardly, replied, 'Get such things out from your head, captain; I am a poor man from Rajasthan, and also the Most Charming Man In The World; don't make me anything else.' But I, urging him on, 'There is a precedent-there was Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird…' to which Picture, 'Captain, you got some crazy notions.'
During the early months of the Emergency, Picture Singh remained in the clutches of a gloomy silence reminiscent (once again!) of the great Boundlessness of Reverend Mother (which had also leaked into my son…), and neglected to lecture his audiences in the highways and back-streets of the Old and New cities as, in the past, he had insisted on doing; but although he, 'This is a time for silence, captain', I remained convinced that one day, one millennial dawn at midnight's end, somehow, at the head of a great jooloos or procession of the dispossessed, perhaps playing his flute and wreathed in deadly snakes, it would be Picture Singh who led us towards the light… but maybe he was never more than a snake-charmer; I do not deny the possibility. I say only that to me my last father, tall gaunt bearded, his hair swept back into a knot behind his neck, seemed the very avatar of Mian Abdullah; but perhaps it was all an illusion, born of my attempt to bind him to the threads of my history by an effort of sheer will. There have been illusions in my life; don't think I'm unaware of the fact. We are coming, however, to a time beyond illusions; having no option, I must at last set down, in black and white, the climax I have avoided all evening.
Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, and must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin. (Once, in a blue room, Ahmed Sinai improvised endings for fairy-tales whose original conclusions he had long ago forgotten; the Brass Monkey and I heard, down the years, all kinds of different versions of the journey of Sinbad, and of the adventures of Hatim Tai… if I began again, would I, too, end in a different place?) Well then: I must content myself with shreds and scraps: as I wrote centuries ago, the trick is to fill in the gaps, guided by the few clues one is given. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence; I must be guided by the memory of a once-glimpsed file with tell-tale initials; and by the other, remaining shards of the past, lingering in my ransacked memory-vaults like broken bottles on a beach… Like scraps of memory, sheets of newsprint used to bowl through the magicians' colony in the silent midnight wind.
Wind-blown newspapers visited my shack to inform me that my uncle, Mustapha Aziz, had been the victim of unknown assassins; I neglected to shed a tear. But there were other pieces of information; and from these, I must build reality.
On one sheet of paper (smelling of turnips) I read that the Prime Minister of India went nowhere without her personal astrologer. In this fragment, I discerned more than turnip-whiffs; mysteriously, my nose recognized, once again, the scent of personal danger. What I am obliged to deduce from this warning aroma: soothsayers prophesied me; might not soothsayers have undone me at the end? Might not a Widow, obsessed with the stars, have learned from astrologers the secret potential of any children born at that long-ago midnight hour? And was that why a Civil Servant, expert in genealogies, was asked to trace… and why he looked at me strangely in the morning? Yes, you see, the scraps begin to fit together! Padma, does it not become clear? Indira is India and India is Indira… but might she not have read her own father's letter to a midnight child, in which her own, sloganized centrality was denied; in which the role of mirror-of-the-nation was bestowed upon me? You see? You see?… And there is more, there is even clearer proof, because here is another scrap of the Times of India, in which the Widow's own news agency Samachar quotes her when she speaks of her 'determination to combat the deep and widespread conspiracy which has been growing'. I tell you: she did not mean the Janata Morcha! No, the Emergency had a black part as well as a white, and here is the secret which has lain concealed for too long beneath the mask of those stifled days: the truest, deepest motive behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight. (Whose Conference had, of course, been disbanded years before; but the mere possibility of our re-unification was enough to trigger off the red alert.)
Astrologers-I have no doubt-sounded the alarums; in a black folder labelled m.c.c., names were gathered from extant records; but there was more to it than that. There were also betrayals and confessions; there were knees and a nose-a nose, and also knees.
Scraps, shreds, fragments: it seems to me that, immediately before 1 awoke with the scent of danger in my nostrils, I had dreamed that I was sleeping. I awoke, in this most unnerving of dreams, to find a stranger in my shack: a poetic-looking fellow with lank hair that wormed over his ears (but who was very thin on top). Yes: during my last sleep before what-has-to-be-described, I was visited by the shade of Nadir Khan, who was staring perplexedly at a silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, asking absurdly, 'Did you steal this?-Because otherwise, you must be-is it possible?-my Mumtaz's little boy?' And when I confirmed, 'Yes, none other, I am he-,' the dream-spectre of Nadir-Qasim issued a warning: 'Hide. There is little time. Hide while you can.'
Nadir, who had hidden under my grandfather's carpet, came to advise me to do likewise; but too late, too late, because now I came properly awake, and smelled the scent of danger blaring like trumpets in my nose… afraid without knowing why, I got to my feet; and is it my imagination or did Aadam Sinai open blue eyes to stare gravely into mine? Were my son's eyes also filled with alarm? Had flap-ears heard what a nose had sniffed out? Did father and son commune wordlessly in that instant before it all began? I must leave the question-marks hanging, unanswered; but what is certain is that Parvati, my Laylah Sinai, awoke also and asked, 'What's up, mister? What's got your goat?'-And I, without fully knowing the reason: 'Hide; stay in here and don't come out.'
Then I went outside.
It must have been morning, although the gloom of the endless midnight hung over the ghetto like a fog… through the murky light of the Emergency, I saw children playing seven-tiles, and Picture Singh, with his umbrella folded under his left armpit, urinating against the walls of the Friday Mosque; a tiny bald illusionist was practising driving knives through the neck of his ten-year-old apprentice, and already a conjurer had found an audience, and was persuading large woollen balls to drop from the armpits of strangers; while in another corner of the ghetto, Chand Sahib the musician was practising his trumpet-playing, placing the ancient mouthpiece of a battered horn against his neck and playing it simply by exercising his throat-muscles… there, over there, were the three contortionist triplets, balancing surahis of water on their heads as they returned to their huts from the colony's single stand-pipe… in short, everything seemed in order. I began to chide myself for my dreams and nasal alarums; but then it started.
The vans and bulldozers came first, rumbling along the main road; they stopped opposite the ghetto of the magicians. A loudspeaker began to blare: 'Civic beautification programme… authorized operation of Sanjay Youth Central Committee… prepare instantly for evacuation to new site… this slum is a public eyesore, can no longer be tolerated… all persons will follow orders without dissent.' And while a loudspeaker blared, there were figures descending from vans: a brightly-coloured tent was being hastily erected, and there were camp beds and surgical equipment… and now from the vans there poured a stream of finely-dressed young ladies of high birth and foreign education, and then a second river of equally-well-dressed young men: volunteers, Sanjay Youth volunteers, doing their bit for society… but then I realized no, not volunteers, because all the men had the same curly hair and lips-like-women's-labia, and the elegant ladies were all identical, too, their features corresponding precisely to those of Sanjay's Menaka, whom news-scraps had described as a 'lanky beauty', and who had once modelled nighties for a mattress company… standing in the chaos of the slum clearance programme, I was shown once again that the ruling dynasty of India had learned how to replicate itself; but then there was no time to think, the numberless labia-lips and lanky-beauties were seizing magicians and old beggars, people were being dragged towards the vans, and now a rumour spread through the colony of magicians: 'They are doing nasbandi-sterilization is being performed!'-And a second cry: 'Save your women and children!'-And a riot is beginning, children who were just now playing seven-tiles are hurling stones at the elegant invaders, and here is Picture Singh rallying the magicians to his side, waving a furious umbrella, which had once been a creator of harmony but was now transmuted into a weapon, a flapping quixotic lance, and the magicians have become a defending army, Molotov cocktails are magically produced and hurled, bricks are drawn out of conjurers' bags, the air is thick with yells and missiles and the elegant labia-lips and lanky-beauties are retreating before the harsh fury of the illusionists; and there goes Picture Singh, leading the assault against the tent of vasectomy… Parvati or Laylah, disobeying orders, is at my side now, saying, 'My God, what are they-', and at this moment a new and more formidable assault is unleashed upon the slum: troops are sent in against magicians, women and children.
Once, conjurers card-tricksters puppeteers and mesmerists marched triumphantly beside a conquering army; but all that is forgotten now, and Russian guns are trained on the inhabitants of the ghetto. What chance do Communist wizards have against socialist rifles? They, we, are running now, every which way, Parvati and I are separated as the soldiers charge, I lose sight of Picture Singh, there are rifle-butts beating pounding, I see one of the contortionist triplets fall beneath the fury of the guns, people are being pulled by the hair towards the waiting yawning vans; and I, too, am running, too late, looking over my shoulder, stumbling on Dalda-cans empty crates and the abandoned sacks of the terrified illusionists, and over my shoulder through the murky night of the Emergency I see that all of this has been a smoke-screen, a side-issue, because hurtling through the confusion of the riot comes a mythical figure, an incarnation of destiny and destruction: Major Shiva has joined the fray, and he is looking only for me. Behind me, as I run, come the pumping knees of my doom…
… The picture of a hovel comes into my mind: my son! And not only my son: a silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli! Somewhere in the confusion of the ghetto a child has been left alone… somewhere a talisman, guarded for so long, has been abandoned. The Friday Mosque watches impassively as I swerve duck run between the tilting shacks, my feet leading me towards flap-eared son and spittoon… but what chance did I have against those knees? The knees of the war hero are coming closer closer as I flee, the joints of my nemesis thundering towards me, and he leaps, the legs of the war hero fly through the air, closing like jaws around my neck, knees squeezing the breath out of my throat, I am falling twisting but the knees hold tight, and now a voice-the voice of treachery betrayal hate!-is saying, as knees rest on my chest and pin me down in the thick dust of the slum: 'So, little rich boy: we meet again. Salaam.' I spluttered; Shiva smiled.
O shiny buttons on a traitor's uniform! Winking blinking like silver… why did he do it? Why did he, who had once led anarchistic apaches through the slums of Bombay, become the warlord of tyranny? Why did midnight's child betray the children of midnight, and take me to my fate? For love of violence, and the legitimizing glitter of buttons on uniforms? For the sake of his ancient antipathy towards me? Or-I find this most plausible-in exchange for immunity from the penalties imposed on the rest of us… yes, that must be it; O birthright-denying war hero! O mess-of-pottage-corrupted rival… But no, I must stop all this, and tell the story as simply as possible: while troops chased arrested dragged magicians from their ghetto, Major Shiva concentrated on me. I, too, was pulled roughly towards a van; while bulldozers moved forwards into the slum, a door was slammed shut… in the darkness I screamed, 'But my son!-And Parvati, where is she, my Laylah?-Picture Singh! Save me, Pictureji!'-But there were bulldozers now, and nobody heard me yelling.
Parvati-the-witch, by marrying me, fell victim to the curse of violent death that hangs over all my people… I do not know whether Shiva, having locked me in a blind dark van, went in search of her, or whether he left her to the bulldozers… because now the machines of destruction were in their element, and the little hovels of the shanty-town were slipping sliding crazily beneath the force of the irresistible creatures, huts snapping like twigs, the little paper parcels of the puppeteers and the magic baskets of the illusionists were being crushed into a pulp; the city was being beautified, and if there were a few deaths, if a girl with eyes like saucers and a pout of grief upon her lips fell beneath the advancing juggernauts, well, what of it, an eyesore was being removed from the face of the ancient capital… and rumour has it that, during the death-throes of the ghetto of the magicians, a bearded giant wreathed in snakes (but this may be an exaggeration) ran-full-tilt!-through the wreckage, ran wildly before the advancing bulldozers, clutching in his hand the handle of an irreparably-shattered umbrella, searching searching, as though his life depended on the search.
By the end of that day, the slum which clustered in the shadow of the Friday Mosque had vanished from the face of the earth; but not all the magicians were captured; not all of them were carted off to the barbed-wire camp called Khichripur, hotch-potch-town, on the far side of the Jamuna River; they never caught Picture Singh, and it is said that the day after the bulldozing of the magicians' ghetto, a new slum was reported in the heart of the city, hard by the New Delhi railway station. Bulldozers were rushed to the scene of the reported hovels; they found nothing. After that the existence of the moving slum of the escaped illusionists became a fact known to all the inhabitants of the city, but the wreckers never found it. It was reported at Mehrauli; but when vasectomists and troops went there, they found the Qutb Minar unbesmirched by the hovels of poverty.. Informers said it had appeared in the gardens of the Jantar Mantar, Jai Singh's Mughal observatory; but the machines of destruction, rushing to the scene, found only parrots and sun-dials. Only after the end of the Emergency did the moving slum come to a standstill; but that must wait for later, because it is time to talk, at long last, and without losing control, about my captivity in the Widows' Hostel in Benares.
Once Resham Bibi had wailed, 'Ai-o-ai-o!'-and she was right: I brought destruction down upon the ghetto of my saviours; Major Shiva, acting no doubt upon the explicit instructions of the Widow, came to the colony to seize me; while the Widow's son arranged for his civic-beautification and vasectomy programmes to carry out a diversionary manoeuvre. Yes, of course it was all planned that way; and (if I may say so) most efficiently. What was achieved during the riot of the magicians: no less a feat than the unnoticed capture of the one person on earth who held the key to the location of every single one of the children of midnight-for had I not, night after night, tuned in to each and every one of them? Did I not carry, for all time, their names addresses faces in my mind? I will answer that question: I did. And I was captured.
Yes, of course it was all planned that way. Parvati-the-witch had told me all about my rival; is it likely that she would not have mentioned me to him? I will answer that question, too: it is not likely at all. So our war hero knew where, in the capital, lurked the one person his masters wanted most (not even my uncle Mustapha knew where I went after I left him; but Shiva knew!)-and, once he had turned traitor, bribed, I have no doubt, by everything from promises of preferment to guarantees of personal safety, it was easy for him to deliver me into the hands of his mistress, the Madam, the Widow with the particoloured hair.
Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain an understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.)
I lost something else that day, besides my freedom: bulldozers swallowed a silver spittoon. Deprived of the last object connecting me to my more tangible, historically-verifiable past, I was taken to Benares to face the consequences of my inner, midnight-given life.
Yes, that was where it happened, in the palace of the widows on the shores of the Ganges in the oldest living city in the world, the city which was already old when the Buddha was young, Kasi Benares Varanasi, City of Divine Light, home of the Prophetic Book, the horoscope of horoscopes, in which every life, past present future, is already recorded. The goddess Ganga streamed down to earth through Shiva's hair… Benares, the shrine to Shiva-the-god, was where I was brought by hero-Shiva to face my fate. In the home of horoscopes, I reached the moment prophesied in a rooftop room by Ramram Seth: 'soldiers will try him… tyrants will fry him!' the fortune-teller had chanted; well, there was no formal trial-Shiva-knees wrapped around my neck, and that was that-but I did smell, one winter's day, the odours of something frying in an iron skillet…
Follow the river, past Scindia-ghat on which young gymnasts in white loincloths perform one-armed push-ups, past Manikarnika-ghat, the place of funerals, at which holy fire can be purchased from the keepers of the flame, past floating carcasses of dogs and cows-unfortunates for whom no fire was bought, past Brahmins under straw umbrellas at Dasashwamedh-ghat, dressed in saffron, dispensing blessings… and now it becomes audible, a strange sound, like the baying of distant hounds… follow follow follow the sound, and it takes shape, you understand that it is a mighty, ceaseless wailing, emanating from the blinded windows of a riverside palace: the Widows' Hostel! Once upon a time, it was a maharajah's residence; but India today is a modern country, and such places have been expropriated by the State. The palace is a home for bereaved women now; they, understanding that their true lives ended with the death of their husbands, but no longer permitted to seek the release of sati, come to the holy city to pass their worthless days in heartfelt ululations. In the palace of the widows lives a tribe of women whose chests are irremediably bruised by the power of their continual pummellings, whose hair it torn beyond repair, and whose voices are shredded by the constant, keening expressions of their grief. It is a vast building, a labyrinth of tiny rooms on the upper storeys giving way to the great halls of lamentation below; and yes, that was where it happened, the Widow sucked me into the private heart of her terrible empire, I was locked away in a tiny upper room and the bereaved women brought me prison food. But I also had other visitors: the war hero invited two of his colleagues along, for purposes of conversation. In other words: I was encouraged to talk. By an ill-matched duo, one fat, one thin, whom I named Abbott-and-Costello because they never succeeded in making me laugh.
Here I record a merciful blank in my memory. Nothing can induce me to remember the conversational techniques of that humourless, uniformed pair; there is no chutney or pickle capable of unlocking the doors behind which I have locked those days! No, I have forgotten, I cannot will not say how they made me spill the beans-but I cannot escape the shameful heart of the matter, which is that despite absence-of-jokes and the generally unsympathetic manner of my two-headed inquisitor, I did most certainly talk. And more than talk: under the influence of their unnamable-forgotten-pressures, I became loquacious in the extreme. What poured, blubbering, from my lips (and will not do so now): names addresses physical descriptions. Yes, I told them everything, I named all five hundred and seventy-eight (because Parvati, they informed me courteously, was dead, and Shiva gone over to the enemy, and the five-hundred-and-eighty-first was doing the talking…)-forced into treachery by the treason of another, I betrayed the children of midnight. I, the Founder of the Conference, presided over its end, while Abbott-and-Costello, unsmilingly, interjected from time to time: 'Aha! Very good! Didn't know about her!' or, 'You are being most co-operative; this fellow is a new one on us!'
Such things happen. Statistics may set my arrest in context; although there is considerable disagreement about the number of 'political' prisoners taken during the Emergency, either thirty thousand or a quarter of a million persons certainly lost their freedom. The Widow said: 'It is only a small percentage of the population of India.' All sorts of things happen during an Emergency: trains run on time, black-money hoarders are frightened into paying taxes, even the weather is brought to heel, and bumper harvests are reaped; there is, I repeat, a white part as well as a black. But in the black part, I sat bar-fettered in a tiny room, on a straw palliasse which was the only article of furniture I was permitted, sharing my daily bowl of rice with cockroaches and ants. And as for the children of midnight-that fearsome conspiracy which had to be broken at all costs-that gang of cut-throat desperadoes before whom an astrology-ridden Prime Minister trembled in terror-the grotesque aberrational monsters of independence, for whom a modern nation-state could have neither time nor compassion-twenty-nine years old now, give or take a month or two, they were brought to the Widows' Hostel, between April and December they were rounded up, and their whispers began to fill the walls. The walls of my cell (paper-thin, peeling-plastered, bare) began to whisper, into one bad ear and one good ear, the consequences of my shameful confessions. A cucumber-nosed prisoner, festooned with iron rods and rings which made various natural functions impossible-walking, using the tin chamber-pot, squatting, sleeping-lay huddled against peeling plaster and whispered to a wail.
It was the end; Saleem gave way to his grief. All my life, and through the greater part of these reminiscences, I have tried to keep my sorrows under lock and key, to prevent them from staining my sentences with their salty, maudlin fluidities; but no more. I was given no reason (until the Widow's Hand…) for my incarceration: but who, of all the thirty thousand or quarter of a million, was told why or wherefore? Who needed to be told? In the walls, I heard the muted voices of the midnight children: needing no further footnotes, I blubbered over peeling plaster.
What Saleem whispered to the wall between April and December 1976:
… Dear Children. How can I say this? What is there to say? My guilt my shame. Although excuses are possible: I wasn't to blame about Shiva. And all manner of folk are being locked up, so why not us? And guilt is a complex matter, for are we not all, each of us in some sense responsible for-do we not get the leaders we deserve? But no such excuses are offered. I did it, I. Dear children: and my Parvati is dead. And my Jamila, vanished. And everyone. Vanishing seems to be yet another of those characteristics which recur throughout my history: Nadir Khan vanished from an underworld, leaving a note behind; Aadam Aziz vanished, too, before my grandmother got up to feed the geese; and where is Mary Pereira? I, in a basket, disappeared; but Laylah or Parvati went phutt without the assistance of spells. And now here we are, disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth. The curse of vanishment, dear children, has evidently leaked into you. No, as to the question of guilt, I refuse absolutely to take the larger view; we are too close to what-is-happening, perspective is impossible, later perhaps analysts will say why and wherefore, will adduce underlying economic trends and political developments, but right now we're too close to the cinema-screen, the picture is breaking up into dots, only subjective judgments are possible. Subjectively, then, I hang my head in shame. Dear children: forgive. No, I do not expect you to forgive.
Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can't be helped. What can't be cured must be endured.
Good question, children: what must be endured? Why are we being amassed here like this, one by one, why are rods and rings hanging from our necks? And stranger confinements (if a whispering wall is to be believed): who-has-the-gift-of-levitation has been tied by the ankles to rings set in the floor, and a werewolf is obliged to wear a muzzle; who-can-escape-through-mirrors must drink water through a hole in a lidded can, so that he cannot vanish through the reflective surface of the drink; and she-whose-looks-can-kill has her head in a sack, and the bewitching beauties of Baud are likewise bag-headed. One of us can eat metal; his head is jammed in a brace, unlocked only at mealtimes… what is being prepared for us? Something bad, children. I don't know what as yet, but it's coming. Children: we, too, must prepare.
Pass it on: some of us have escaped. I sniff absences through the walls. Good news, children! They cannot get us all. Soumitra, the time-traveller, for instance-O youthful folly! O stupid we, to disbelieve him so!-is not here; wandering, perhaps, in some happier time of his life, he has eluded search-parties for ever. No, do not envy him; although I, too, long on occasion to escape backwards, perhaps to the time when I, the apple of the universal eye, made a triumphant tour as a baby of the palaces of William Mcthwold-O insidious nostalgia for times of greater possibility, before history, like a street behind the General Post Office in Delhi, narrowed down to this final full point!-but we are here now; such retrospection saps the spirit; rejoice, simply, that some of us are free!
And some of us are dead. They told me about my Parvati. Across whose features, to the last, there fell the crumbling ghost-face of. No, we are no longer five hundred and eighty-one. Shivering in the December cold, how many of us sit walled-in and waiting? I ask my nose; it replies, four hundred and twenty, the number of trickery and fraud. Four hundred and twenty, imprisoned by widows; and there is one more, who struts booted around the Hostel-I smell his stink approaching receding, the spoor of treachery!-Major Shiva, war hero, Shiva-of-the-knees, supervises our captivity. Will they be content with four hundred and twenty? Children: I don't know how long they'll wait.
… No, you're making fun of me, stop, do not joke. Why whence how-on-earth this good nature, this bonhomie in your passed-on whisperings? No, you must condemn me, out of hand and without appeal-do not torture me with your cheery greetings as one-by-one you are locked in cells; what kind of time or place is this for salaams, namaskars, how-you-beens?-Children, don't you understand, they could do anything to us, anything-no, how can you say that, what do you mean with your what-could-they-do? Let me tell you, my friends, steel rods are painful when applied to the ankles; rifle-butts leave bruises on foreheads. What could they do? Live electric wires up your anuses, children; and that's not the only possibility, there is also hanging-by-the feet, and a candle-ah, the sweet romantic glow of candlelight!-is less than comfortable when applied, lit, to the skin! Stop it now, cease all this friendship, aren't you afraid! Don't you want to kick stamp trample me to smithereens? Why these constant whispered reminiscences, this nostalgia for old quarrels, for the war of ideas and things, why are you taunting me with your calmness, your normality, your powers of rising-above-the-crisis? Frankly, I'm puzzled, children: how can you, aged twenty-nine, sit whispering flirtatiously to each other in your cells? Goddamnit, this is not a social reunion!
Children, children, I'm sorry. I admit openly I have not been myself of late. I have been a buddha, and a basketed ghost, and a would-be-saviour of the nation… Saieem has been rushing down blind alleys, has had considerable problems with reality, ever since a spittoon fell like a piece-of-the-… pity me: I've even lost my spittoon. But I'mgoing wrong again, I wasn't intending to ask for pity, I was going to say that perhaps I see-it was I, not you, who failed to understand what is happening. Incredible, children: we, who could not talk for five minutes without disagreeing: we, who as children quarrelled fought divided distrusted broke apart, are suddenly together, united, as one! O wondrous irony: the Widow, by bringing us here, to break us, has in fact brought us together! O self-fulfilling paranoia of tyrants… because what can they do to us, now that we're all on the same side, no language-rivalries, no religious prejudices: after all, we are twenty-nine now, I should not be calling you children… ! Yes, here is optimism, like a disease: one day she'll have to let us out and then, and then, wait and see, maybe we should form, I don't know, a new political party, yes, the Midnight Party, what chance do politics have against people who can multiply fishes and turn base metals into gold? Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our captivity; let Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility! Children: we've won!
Too painful. Optimism, growing like a rose in a dung-heap: it hurts me to recall it. Enough: I forget the rest.-No!-No, very well, I remember… What is worse than rods bar-fetters candles-against-the-skin? What beats nail-tearing and starvation? I reveal the Widow's finest, most delicate joke: instead of torturing us, she gave us hope. Which meant she had something-no, more than something: the finest thing of all!-to take away. And now, very soon now, I shall have to describe how she cut it off.
Ectomy (from, I suppose, the Greek): a cutting out. To which medical science adds a number of prefixes: appendectomy tonsillectomy mastectomy tubectomy vasectomy testectomy hysterectomy. Saieem would like to donate one further item, free gratis and for nothing, to this catalogue of excisions; it is, however, a term which properly belongs to history, although medical science is, was involved:
Sperectomy: the draining-out of hope.
On New Year's Day, I had a visitor. Creak of door, rustle of expensive chiffon. The pattern: green and black. Her glasses, green, her shoes were black as black… In newspaper articles this woman has been called 'a gorgeous girl with big, rolling hips… she had run a jewellery boutique before she took up social work… during the Emergency she was, semi-ofncially, in charge of sterilization'. But I have my own name for her: she was the Widow's Hand. Which one by one and children mmff and tearing tearing little balls go… greenly-blackly, she sailed into my cell. Children: it begins. Prepare, children. United we stand. Let Widow's Hand do Widow's work but after, after… think of then. Now does not bear thinking about… and she, sweetly, reasonably, 'Basically, you see, it is all a question of God.'
(Are you listening, children? Pass it on.)
'The people of India,' the Widow's Hand explained, 'worship our Lady like a god. Indians are only capable of worshipping one God.'
But I was brought up in Bombay, where Shiva Vishnu Ganesh Ahuramazda Allah and countless others had their flocks… 'What about the pantheon,' I argued, 'the three hundred and thirty million gods of Hinduism alone? And Islam, and Bodhisattvas…?' And now the answer: 'Oh yes! My God, millions of gods, you are right! But all manifestations of the same om. You are Muslim: you know what is om ? Very well. For the masses, our Lady is a manifestation of the om.'
There are four hundred and twenty of us; a mere 0.00007 per cent of the six-hundred-million strong population of India. Statistically insignificant; even if we were considered as a percentage of the arrested thirty (or two hundred and fifty) thousand, we formed a mere 1.4 (or 0.168) per cent! But what I learned from the Widow's Hand is that those who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities; and that, that and that only, is why we, the magical children of midnight, were hated feared destroyed by the Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of India but also aspired to be Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible-aspect, possessor of the shakti of the gods, a multi-limbed divinity with a centre-parting and schizophrenic hair… And that was how I learned my meaning in the crumbling palace of the bruised-breasted women.
Who am I? Who were we? We were are shall be the gods you never had. But also something else; and to explain that, I must tell the difficult part at last.
All in a rush, then, because otherwise it will never come out, I tell you that on New Year's Day, 1977, I was told by a gorgeous girl with rolling hips that yes, they would be satisfied with four hundred and twenty, they had verified one hundred and thirty-nine dead, only a handful had escaped, so now it would begin, snip snip, there would be anaesthetic and count-to-ten, the numbers marching one two three, and I, whispering to the wall, Let them let them, while we live and stay together who can stand against us?… And who led us, one-by-one, to the chamber in the cellar where, because we are not savages, sir, air-conditioning units had been installed, and a table with a hanging lamp, and doctors nurses green and black, their robes were green their eyes were black… who, with knobbly irresistible knees, escorted me to the chamber of my undoing? But you know, you can guess, there is only one war hero in this story, unable to argue with the venom of his knees I walked wherever he ordered… and then I was there, and a gorgeous girl with big rolling hips saying, 'After all, you can't complain, you won't deny that you once made assertions of Prophethood?', because they knew everything, Padma, everything everything, they put me down on the table and the mask coming down over my face and count-to-ten and numbers pounding seven eight nine…
Ten.
And 'Good God he's still conscious, be a good fellow, go on to twenty…'
… Eighteen nineteen twen
They were good doctors: they left nothing to chance. Not for us the simple vas-and tubectomies performed on the teeming nasses; because there was a chance, just a chance that such operations could be reversed… ectomies were performed, but irreversibly: testicles were removed from sacs, and wombs vanished for ever.
Test-and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves… but that was only a side-effect, because they were truly extraordinary doctors, and they drained us of more than that: hope, too, was excised, and I don't know how it was done, because the numbers had marched over me, I was out for the count, and all I can tell you is that at the end of eighteen days on which the stupefying operations were carried out at a mean rate of 23.33 per day, we were not only missing little balls and inner sacs, but other things as well: in this respect, I came off better than most, because drainage-above had robbed me of my midnight-given telepathy, I had nothing to lose, the sensitivity of a nose cannot be drained away… but as for the rest of them, for all those who had come to the palace of the wailing widows with their magical gifts intact, the awakening from anaesthesia was cruel indeed, and whispering through the wall came the tale of their undoing, the tormented cry of children who had lost their magic: she had cut it out of us, gorgeously with wide rolling hips she had devised the operation of our annihilation, and now we were nothing, who were we, a mere 0.00007 per cent, now fishes could not be multiplied nor base metals transmuted; gone forever, the possibilities of flight and lycanthropy and the originally-one-thousand-and-one marvellous promises of a numinous midnight.
Drainage below: it was not a reversible operation.
Who were we? Broken promises; made to be broken.
And now I must tell you about the smell.
Yes, you must have all of it: however overblown, however Bombay-talkie-melodramatic, you must let it sink in, you must see! What Saleem smelled in the evening of January 18th, 1977: something frying in an iron skillet, soft unspeakable somethings spiced with turmeric coriander cumin and fenugreek… the pungent inescapable fumes of what-had-been-excised, cooking over a low, slow fire.
When four-hundred-and-twenty suffered ectomies, an avenging Goddess ensured that certain ectomized parts were curried with onions and green chillies, and fed to the pie-dogs of Benares. (There were four hundred and twenty-one ectomies performed: because one of us, whom we called Narada or Markandaya, had the ability of changing sex; he, or she, had to be operated on twice.)
No, I can't prove it, not any of it. Evidence went up in smoke: some was fed to pie-dogs; and later, on March 20th, files were burned by a mother with particoloured hair and her beloved son.
But Padma knows what I can no longer do; Padma, who once, in her anger, cried out: 'But what use you, my God, as a lover?' That part, at least, can be verified: in the hovel of Picture Singh, I cursed myself with the lie of impotence; I cannot say I was not warned, because he told me: 'Anything could happen, captain.' It did.
Sometimes I feel a thousand years old: or (because I cannot, even now, abandon form), to be exact, a thousand and one.
The Widow's Hand had rolling hips and once owned a jewellery boutique. I began among jewels: in Kashmir, in 1915, there were rubies and diamonds. My great-grandparents ran a gemstone store. Form-once again, recurrence and shape!-no escape from it.
In the walls, the hopeless whispers of the stunned four-hundred-and-nineteen; while the four-hundred-and-twentieth gives vent-just once; one moment of ranting is permissible-to the following petulant question… at the top of my voice, I shriek: 'What about him? Major Shiva, the traitor? Don't you care about him?' And the reply, from gorgeous-with-big-rolling-hips: 'The Major has undergone voluntary vasectomy.'
And now, in his sightless cell, Saleem begins to laugh, wholeheartedly, without stinting: no, I was not laughing cruelly at my arch-rival, nor was I cynically translating the word 'voluntary' into another word; no, I was remembering stories told me by Parvati or Laylah, the legendary tales of the war hero's philandering, of the legions of bastards swelling in the unectomied bellies of great ladies and whores; I laughed because Shiva, destroyer of the midnight children, had also fulfilled the other role lurking in his name, the function of Shiva-lingam, of Shiva-the-procreator, so that at this very moment, in the boudoirs and hovels of the nation, a new generation of children, begotten by midnight's darkest child, was being raised towards the future. Every Widow manages to forget something important.
Late in March 1977, I was unexpectedly released from the palace of the howling widows, and stood blinking like an owl in the sunlight, not knowing how what why. Afterwards, when I had remembered how to ask questions, I discovered that on January 18th (the very day of the end of snip-snip, and of substances fried in an iron skillet: what further proof would you like that we, the four hundred and twenty, were what the Widow feared most of all?) the Prime Minister had, to the astonishment of all, called a general election. (But now that you know about us, you may find it easier to understand her over-confidence.) But on that day, I knew nothing about her crushing defeat, nor about burning files; it was only later that I learned how the tattered hopes of the nation had been placed in the custody of an ancient dotard who ate pistachios and cashews and daily took a glass of 'his own water'. Urine-drinkers had come to power. The Janata Party, with one of its leaders trapped in a kidney-machine, did not seem to me (when I heard about it) to represent a new dawn; but maybe I'd managed to cure myself of the optimism virus at last-maybe others, with the disease still in their blood, felt otherwise. At any rate, I've had-I had had, on that March day-enough, more than enough of politics.
Four hundred and twenty stood blinking in the sunlight and tumult of the gullies of Benares; four hundred and twenty looked at one another and saw in each other's eyes the memory of their gelding, and then, unable to bear the sight, mumbled farewells and dispersed, for the last time, into the healing privacy of the crowds.
What of Shiva? Major Shiva was placed under military detention by the new regime; but he did not remain there long, because he was permitted to receive one visit: Roshanara Shetty bribed coquetted wormed her way into his cell, the same Roshanara who had poured poison into his ears at Mahalaxmi Racecourse and who had since been driven crazy by a bastard son who refused to speak and did nothing he did not wish to do. The steel magnate's wife drew from her handbag the enormous German pistol owned by her husband, and shot the war hero through the heart. Death, as they say, was instantaneous.
The Major died without knowing that once, in a saffron-and-green nursing home amid the mythological chaos of an unforgettable midnight, a tiny distraught woman had changed baby-tags and denied him his birth-right, which was that hillock-top world cocooned in money and starched white clothes and things things things-a world he would dearly have loved to possess.
And Saleem? No longer connected to history, drained above-and-below, I made my way back to the capital, conscious that an age, which had begun on that long-ago midnight, had come to a sort of end. How I travelled: I waited beyond the platform at Benares or Varanaji station with nothing but a platform-ticket in my hand, and leaped on to the step of a first-class compartment as the mail-train pulled out heading west. And now, at last, I knew how it felt to clutch on for dead life, while particles of soot dust ash gritted in your eyes, and you were obliged to bang on the door and yell, 'Ohe, maharaj! Open up! Let me in, great sir, maharaj!' While inside, a voice uttered familiar words 'On' no account is anyone to open. Just fare-dodgers, that's all.'
In Delhi: Saleem asks questions. Have you seen where? Do you know if the magicians? Are you acquainted with Picture Singh? A postman with the memory of snake-charmers fading in his eyes points north. And, later, a black-tongued paan-wallah sends me back the way I came. Then, at last, the trail ceases meandering; street-entertainers put me on the scent. A Dilli-dekho man with a peepshow machine, a mongoose-and-cobra trainer wearing a paper hat like a child's sailboat, a girl in a cinema box-office who retains her nostalgia for her childhood as a sorcerer's apprentice… like fishermen, they point with fingers. West west west, until at last Saleem arrives at the Shadipur bus depot on the western outskirts of the city. Hungry thirsty enfeebled sick, skipping weakly out of the paths of buses roaring in and out of the depot-gaily-painted buses, bearing inscriptions on their bonnets such as God Willing! and other mottoes, for instance Thank God! on their backsides-he comes to a huddle of ragged tents clustered under a concrete railway bridge, and sees, in the shadow of concrete, a snake-charming giant breaking into an enormous rotten-toothed smile, and, in his arms, wearing a tee-shirt decorated with pink guitars, a small boy of some twenty-one months, whose ears are the ears of elephants, whose eyes are wide as saucers and whose face is as serious as the grave.
To tell the truth, I lied about Shiva's death. My first out-and-out lie-although my presentation of the Emergency in the guise of a six-hundred-and-thirty-five-day-long midnight was perhaps excessively romantic, and certainly contradicted by the available meteorological data. Still and all, whatever anyone may think, lying doesn't come easily to Saleem, and I'm hanging my head in shame as I confess… Why, then, this single barefaced lie? (Because, in actuality, I've no idea where my changeling-rival went after the Widows' Hostel; he could be in hell or the brothel down the road and I wouldn't know the difference.) Padma, try and understand: I'm still terrified of him. There is unfinished business between us, and I spend my days quivering at the thought that the war hero might somehow have discovered the secret of his birth-was he ever shown a file bearing three tell-tale initials?-and that, roused to wrath by the irrecoverable loss of his past, he might come looking for me to exact a stifling revenge… is that how it will end, with the life being crushed out of me by a pair of superhuman, merciless knees?
That's why I fibbed, anyway; for the first time, I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred. My present fear put a gun into Roshanara Shetty's hand; with the ghost of Commander Sabarmati looking over my shoulder, I enabled her to bribe coquette worm her way into his cell… in short, the memory of one of my earliest crimes created the (fictitious) circumstances of my last.
End of confession: and now I'm getting perilously close to the end of my reminiscences. It's night; Padma is in position; on the wall above my head, a lizard has just gobbled up a fly; the festering heat of August, which is enough to pickle one's brains, bubbles merrily between my ears; and five minutes ago the last local train yellow-and-browned its way south to Churchgate Station, so that I did not hear what Padma said with a shyness cloaking a determination as powerful as oil. I had to ask her to repeat herself, and the muscles of disbelief began to nictate in her calves. I must at once record that our dung-lotus has proposed marriage, 'so that I can look after you without going to shame in the eyes of the world.'
Just as I feared! But it's out in the open now, and Padma (I can tell) will not take no for an answer. I have been protesting like a blushing virgin: 'So unexpected!-and what about ectomy, and what was fed to pie-dogs: don't you mind?-and Padma, Padma, there is still what-chews-on-bones, it will turn you into a widow!-and just think one moment, there is the curse of violent death, think of Parvati-are you sure, are you sure you're sure… ?' But Padma, her jaw set in the concrete of a majestically unshakeable resolve, replied: 'You listen to me, mister-but me no buts! Never mind all that fancy talk any more. There is the future to think of.' The honeymoon is to be in Kashmir.
In the burning heat of Padma's determination, I am assailed by the demented notion that it might be possible, after all, that she may be capable of altering the ending of my story by the phenomenal force of her will, that cracks-and death itself-might yield to the power of her unquenchable solicitude… 'There is the future to think of,' she warned me-and maybe (I permit myself to think for the first time since I began this narrative)-maybe there is! An infinity of new endings clusters around my head, buzzing like heat-insects… 'Let us be married, mister,' she proposed, and moths of excitement stirred in my guts, as if she had spoken some cabbalistic formula, some awesome abracadabra, and released me from my fate-but reality is nagging at me. Love does not conquer all, except in the Bombay talkies; rip tear crunch will not be defeated by a mere ceremony; and optimism is a disease.
'On your birthday, how about?' she is suggesting. 'At thirty-one, a man is a man, and is supposed to have a wife.'
How am I to tell her? How can I say, there are other plans for that day, I am have always been in the grip of a form-crazy destiny which enjoys wreaking its havoc on numinous days… in short, how am I to tell her about death? I cannot; instead, meekly and with every appearance of gratitude, I accept her proposal. I am, this evening, a man newly affianced; let no one think harshly of me for permitting myself-and my betrothed lotus-this last, vain, inconsequential pleasure.
Padma, by proposing a marriage, revealed her willingness to dismiss everything I've told her about my past as just so much 'fancy talk'; and when I returned to find Picture Singh beaming in the shadow of a railway bridge, it rapidly became clear that the magicians, too, were losing their memories. Somewhere in the many moves of the peripatetic slum, they had mislaid their powers of retention, so that now they had become incapable of judgment, having forgotten everything to which they could compare anything that happened. Even the Emergency was rapidly being consigned to the oblivion of the past, and the magicians concentrated upon the present with the monomania of snails. Nor did they notice that they had changed; they had forgotten that they had ever been otherwise, Communism had seeped out of them and been gulped down by the thirsty, lizard-quick earth; they were beginning to forget their skills in the confusion of hunger, disease, thirst and police harassment which constituted (as usual) the present. To me, however, this change in my old companions seemed nothing short of obscene. Saleem had come through amnesia and been shown the extent of its immorality; in his mind, the past grew daily more vivid while the present (from which knives had disconnected him for ever) seemed colourless, confused, a thing of no consequence; I, who could remember every hair on the heads of jailers and surgeons, was deeply shocked by the magicians' unwillingness to look behind them. 'People are like cats,' I told my son, 'you can't teach them anything.' He looked suitably grave, but held his tongue.
My son Aadam Sinai had, when I rediscovered the phantom colony of the illusionists, lost all traces of the tuberculosis which had afflicted his earliest days. I, naturally, was certain that the disease had vanished with the fall of the Widow; Picture Singh, however, told me that credit for the cure must be given to a certain washerwoman, Durga by name, who had wet-nursed him through his sickness, giving him the daily benefit of her inexhaustibly colossal breasts. 'That Durga, captain,' the old snake-charmer said, his voice betraying the fact that, in his old age, he had fallen victim to the dhoban's serpentine charms, 'What a woman!'
She was a woman whose biceps bulged; whose preternatural breasts unleashed a torrent of milk capable of nourishing regiments; and who, it was rumoured darkly (although I suspect the rumour of being started by herself) had two wombs. She was as full of gossip and tittle-tattle as she was of milk: every day a dozen new stories gushed from her lips. She possessed the boundless energy common to all practitioners of her trade; as she thrashed the life out of shirts and saris on her stone, she seemed to grow in power, as if she were sucking the vigour out of the clothes, which ended up fiat, buttonless and beaten to death. She was a monster who forgot each day the moment it ended. It was with the greatest reluctance that I agreed to make her acquaintance; it is with the greatest reluctance that I admit her into these pages. Her name, even before I met her, had the smell of new things; she represented novelty, beginnings, the advent of new stories events complexities, and I was no longer interested in anything new. However, once Pictureji informed me that he intended to marry her, I had no option; I shall deal with her, however, as briefly as accuracy permits.
Briefly, then: Durga the washerwoman was a succubus! A bloodsucker lizard in human form! And her effect on Picture Singh was comparable only to her power over her stone-smashed shirts: in a word, she flattened him. Having once met her, I understood why Picture Singh looked old and forlorn; deprived now of the umbrella of harmony beneath which men and women would gather for advice and shade, he seemed to be shrinking daily; the possibility of his becoming a second Hummingbird was vanishing before my very eyes. Durga, however, flourished: her gossip grew more scatological, her voice louder and more raucous, until at last she reminded me of Reverend Mother in her later years, when she expanded and my grandfather shrank. This nostalgic echo of my grandparents was the only thing of interest to me in the personality of the hoydenish washerwoman.
But there is no denying the bounty of her mammary glands: Aadam, at twenty-one months, was still suckling contentedly at her nipples. At first I thought of insisting that he be weaned, but then remembered that my son did exactly and only what he wished, and decided not to press the point. (And, as it transpired, I was right not to do so.) As for her supposed double womb, I had no desire to know the truth or otherwise of the story, and made no inquiries.
I mention Durga the dhoban chiefly because it was she who, one evening when we were eating a meal composed of twenty-seven grains of rice apiece, first foretold my death. I, exasperated by her constant stream of news and chit-chat, had exclaimed, 'Durga Bibi, nobody is interested in your stories!' To which she, unperturbed, 'Saleem Baba, I have been good with you because Pictureji says you must be in many pieces after your arrest; but, to speak frankly, you do not appear to be concerned with anything except lounging about nowadays. You should understand that when a man loses interest in new matters, he is opening the door for the Black Angel.'
And although Picture Singh said, mildly, 'Come now, capteena, don't be rough on the boy,' the arrow of Durga the dhoban found its mark.
In the exhaustion of my drained return, I felt the emptiness of the days coating me in a thick gelatinous film; and although Durga offered, the next morning, and perhaps in a spirit of genuine remorse for her harsh words, to restore my strength by letting me suckle her left breast while my son pulled on the right, 'and afterwards maybe you'll start thinking straight again', intimations of mortality began to occupy most of my thoughts; and then I discovered the mirror of humility at the Shadipur bus depot, and became convinced of my approaching demise.
It was an angled mirror above the entrance to the bus garage; I, wandering aimlessly in the forecourt of the depot, found my attention caught by its winking reflections of the sun. I realized that I had not seen myself in a mirror for months, perhaps years, and walked across to stand beneath it. Looking upwards into the mirror, I saw myself transformed into a big-headed, top-heavy dwarf; in the humblingly foreshortened reflection of myself I saw that the hair on my head was now as grey as rainclouds; the dwarf in the mirror, with his lined face and tired eyes, reminded me vividly of my grandfather Aadam Aziz on the day he told us about seeing God. In those days the afflictions cured by Parvati-the-witch had all (in the aftermath of drainage) returned to plague me; nine-fingered, horn-templed, monk's-tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber-nosed, castrated, and now prematurely aged, I saw in the mirror of humility a human being to whom history could do no more, a grotesque creature who had been released from the pre-ordained destiny which had battered him until he was half-senseless; with one good ear and one bad ear I heard the soft footfalls of the Black Angel of death.
The young-old face of the dwarf in the mirror wore an expression of profound relief.
I'm becoming gloomy; let's change the subject… Exactly twenty-four hours before a paan-wallah's taunt provoked Picture Singh into travelling to Bombay, my son Aadam Sinai made the decision which permitted us to accompany the snake-charmer on his journey: overnight, without any warning, and to the consternation of his washerwoman wet-nurse, who was obliged to decant her remaining milk into five-litre vanaspati drums, flat-eared Aadam weaned himself, soundlessly refusing the nipple and demanding (without words) a diet of solid foods: pulped rice overboiled lentils biscuits. It was as though he had decided to permit me to reach my private, and now-very-near, finishing line.
Mute autocracy of a less-than-two-year-old infant: Aadam did not tell us when he was hungry or sleepy or anxious to perform his natural functions. He expected us to know. The perpetual attention he required may be one of the reasons why I managed, in spite of all indications to the contrary, to stay alive… incapable of anything else in those days after my release from captivity, I concentrated on watching my son. 'I tell you, captain, it's lucky you came back,' Picture Singh joked, 'otherwise this one would have turned us all into ayahs.' I understood once again that Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the eyes of the child who was simultaneously not-my-son and also more my heir than any child of my flesh could have been, I found in his empty, limpid pupils a second mirror of humility, which showed me that, from now on, mine would be as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster: the traditional function, perhaps, of reminiscer, of teller-of-tales… I wondered if all over the country the bastard sons of Shiva were exerting similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisaged for the second time that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything. (How these children may, in the future, be identified: their bimbis stick out instead of in.)
But it's time to get things moving: a taunt, a. last railway-train heading south south south, a final battle… on the day following the weaning of Aadam, Saleem accompanied Picture Singh to Connaught Place, to assist him in his snake-charming. Durga the dhoban agreed to take my son with her to the dhobi-ghat: Aadam spent the day observing how power was thrashed out of the clothes of the well-to-do and absorbed by the succubus-woman. On that fateful day, when the warm weather was returning to the city like a swarm of bees, I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed silver spittoon. Picture Singh had provided me with a spittoon-surrogate, an empty Dalda Vanaspati can, but although I used this to entertain my son with my expertise in the gentle art of spittoon-hittery, sending long jets of betel-juice across the grimy air of the magicians' colony, I was not consoled. A question: why such grief over a mere receptacle of juices? My reply is that you should never underestimate a spittoon. Elegant in the salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, it permitted intellectuals to practise the art-forms of the masses; gleaming in a cellar, it transformed Nadir Khan's underworld into a second Taj Mahal; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it was nevertheless present throughout my history, covertly assimilating incidents in washing-chests, ghost-visions, freeze-unfreeze, drainage, exiles; falling from the sky like a piece of the moon, it perpetrated a transformation. O talismanic spittoon! O beauteous lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice! What sensitive person could fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its loss?
… Beside me at the back of a bus bulging with humanity, Picture Singh sat with snake-baskets coiled innocently on his lap. As we rattled and banged through that city which was also filled with the resurgent ghosts of earlier, mythological Delhis, the Most Charming Man In The World wore an air of faded despondency, as if a battle in a distant darkroom were already over… until my return, nobody had understood that Pictureji's real and unvoiced fear was that he was growing old, that his powers were dimming, that he would soon be adrift and incompetent in a world he did not understand: like me, Picture Singh clung to the presence of Baby Aadam as if the child were a torch in a long dark tunnel. 'A fine child, captain,' he told me, 'a child of dignity: you hardly notice his ears.'
That day, however, my son was not with us.
New Delhi smells assailed me in Connaught Place-the biscuity perfume of the J. B. Mangharam advertisement, the mournful chalki-ness of crumbling plaster; and there was also the tragic spoor of the auto-rickshaw drivers, starved into fatalism by rising petrol costs; and green-grass-smells from the circular park in the middle of the whirling traffic, mingled with the fragrance of con-men persuading foreigners to change money on the black market in shadowy archways, From the India Coffee House, under whose marquees could be heard the endless babbling of gossips, there came the less pleasant aroma of new stories beginning: intrigues marriages quarrels, whose smells were all mixed up with those of tea and chili-pakoras. What I smelled in Connaught Place: the begging nearby presence of a scar-faced girl who had once been Sundari-the-too-beautiful; and loss-of-memory, and turning-towards-the-future, and nothing-really-changes… turning away from these olfactory intimations, I concentrated on the all-pervasive and simpler odours of (human) urine and animal dung.
Underneath the colonnade of Block F in Connaught Place, next to a pavement bookstall, a paan-wallah had his little niche. He sat cross-legged behind a green glass counter like a minor deity of the place: I admit him into these last pages because, although he gave off the aromas of poverty, he was, in fact, a person of substance, the owner of a Lincoln Continental motor-car, which he parked out of sight in Connaught Circus, and which he had paid for by the fortunes he earned through his sales of contraband imported cigarettes and transistor radios; for two weeks each year he went to jail for a holiday, and the rest of the time paid several policemen a handsome salary. In jail he was treated like a king, but behind his green glass counter he looked inoffensive, ordinary, so that it was not easy (without the benefit of a nose as sensitive as Saleem's) to tell that this was a man who knew everything about everything, a man whose infinite network of contacts made him privy to secret knowledge… to me he provided an additional and not unpleasant echo of a similar character I had known in Karachi during the time of my Lambretta voyages; I was so busy inhaling the familiar perfumes of nostalgia that, when he spoke, he took me by surprise.
We had set up our act next to his niche; while Pictureji busied himself polishing flutes and donning an enormous saffron turban, I performed the function of barker. 'Roll up roll up-once in a life-time an opportunity such as this-ladees, ladahs, come see come see come see! Who is here? No common bhangi; no street-sleeping fraud; this, citizens, ladies and gents, is the Most Charming Man In The World! Yes, come see come see: his photo has been taken by Eastman-Kodak Limited! Come close and have no fear-picture singh is here!'… And other such garbage; but then the paan-wallah spoke:
'I know of a better act. This fellow is not number-one; oh, no, certainly not. In Bombay there is a better man.'
That was how Picture Singh learned of the existence of his rival; and why, abandoning all plans of giving a performance, he marched over to the blandly smiling paan-wallah, reaching into his depths for his old voice of command, and said, 'You will tell me the truth about this faker, captain, or I will send your teeth down your gullet until they bite up your stomach.' And the paan-wallah, unafraid, aware of the three lurking policemen who would move in swiftly to protect their salaries if the need arose, whispered to us the secrets of his omniscience, telling us who when where, until Picture Singh said in a voice whose firmness concealed his fear: 'I will go and show this Bombay fellow who is best. In one world, captains, there is no room for two Most Charming Men.'
The vendor of betel-nut delicacies, shrugging delicately, expectorated at our feet.
Like a magic spell, the taunts of a paan-wallah opened the door through which Saleem returned to the city of his birth, the abode of his deepest nostalgia. Yes, it was an open-sesame, and when we returned to the ragged tents beneath the railway bridge, Picture Singh scrabbled in the earth and dug up the knotted handkerchief of his security, the dirt-discoloured cloth in which he had hoarded pennies for his old age; and when Durga the washerwoman refused to accompany him, saying, 'What do you think, Pictureji, I am a crorepati rich woman that I can take holidays and what-all?', he turned to me with something very like supplication in his eyes and asked me to accompany him, so that he did not have to go into his worst battle, the test of his old age, without a friend… yes, and Aadam heard it too, with his flapping ears he heard the rhythm of the magic, I saw his eyes light up as I accepted, and then we were in a third-class railway carriage heading south south south, and in the quinquesyl-labic monotony of the wheels I heard the secret word: abracadabra abracadabra abracadabra sang the wheels as they bore us back-to-Bom.
Yes, I had left the colony of the magicians behind me for ever, I was heading abracadabra abracadabra into the heart of a nostalgia which would keep me alive long enough to write these pages (and to create a corresponding number of pickles); Aadam and Saleem and Picture Singh squeezed into a third-class carriage, taking with us a number of baskets tied up with string, baskets which alarmed the jam-packed humanity in the carriage by hissing continually, so that the crowds pushed back back back, away from the menace of the snakes, and allowed us a measure of comfort and space; while the wheels sang their abracadabras to Aadam's flapping ears.
As we travelled to Bombay, the pessimism of Picture Singh expanded until it seemed that it had become a physical entity which merely looked like the old snake-charmer. At Mathura an American youth with pustular chin and a head shaved bald as an egg got into our carriage amid the cacophony of hawkers selling earthen animals and cups of chaloo-chai; he was fanning himself with a peacock-feather fan, and the bad luck of peacock feathers depressed Picture Singh beyond imagining. While the infinite flatness of the Indo-Gangetic plain unfolded outside the window, sending the hot insanity of the afternoon loo-wind to torment us, the shaven American lectured to occupants of the carriage on the intricacies of Hinduism and began to teach them mantras while extending a walnut begging bowl; Picture Singh was blind to this remarkable spectacle and also deaf to the abracadabra of the wheels. 'It is no good, captain,' he confided mournfully, 'This Bombay fellow will be young and strong, and I am doomed to be only the second most charming man from now on.' By the time we reached Kotah Station, the odours of misfortune exuded by the peacock-feather fan had possessed Pictureji utterly, had eroded him so alarmingly that although everyone in the carriage was getting out on the side farthest from the platform to urinate against the side of the train, he showed no sign of needing to go. By Ratlam Junction, while my excitement was mounting, he had fallen into a trance which was not sleep but the rising paralysis of the pessimism. 'At this rate,' I thought, 'he won't even be able to challenge this rival.' Baroda passed: no change. At Surat, the old John Company depot, I realized I'd have to do something soon, because abracadabra was bringing us closer to Bombay Central by the minute, and so at last I picked up Picture Singh's old wooden flute, and by playing it with such terrible ineptitude that all the snakes writhed in agony and petrified the American youth into silence, by producing a noise so hellish that nobody noticed the passing of Bassein Road, Kurla, Mahim, I overcame the miasma of the peacock-feathers; at last Picture Singh shook himself out of his despondency with a faint grin and said, 'Better you stop, captain, and let me play that thing; otherwise some people are sure to die of pain.'
Serpents subsided in their baskets; and then the wheels stopped singing, and we were there:
Bombay! I hugged Aadam fiercely, and was unable to resist uttering an ancient cry: 'Back-to-Bom!' I cheered, to the bewilderment of the American youth, who had never heard this mantra: and again, and again, and again: 'Back! Back-to-Bom!'
By bus down Bellasis Road, towards the Tardeo roundabout, we travelled past Parsees with sunken eyes, past bicycle-repair shops and Irani cafes; and then Hornby Vellard was on our right-where promenaders watched as Sherri the mongrel bitch was left to spill her guts! Where cardboard effigies of wrestlers still towered above the entrances to Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium!-and we were rattling and 'banging past traffic-cops with sun-umbrellas, past Mahalaxmi temple-and then Warden Road! The Breach Candy Swimming Baths! And there, look, the shops… but the names had changed: where was Reader's Paradise with its stacks of Superman comics? Where, the Band Box Laundry and Bombelli's, with their One Yard Of Chocolates? And, my God, look, atop a two-storey hillock where once the palaces of William Methwold stood wreathed in bougainvillaea and stared proudly out to sea… look at it, a great pink monster of a building, the roseate skyscraper obelisk of the Narlikar women, standing over and obliterating the circus-ring of childhood… yes, it was my Bombay, but also not-mine, because we reached Kemp's Corner to find the hoardings of Air-India's little rajah and of the Kolynos Kid gone, gone for good, and Thomas Kemp and Co. itself had vanished into thin air… flyovers crisscrossed where, once upon a time, medicines were dispensed and a pixie in a chlorophyll cap beamed down upon the traffic. Elegiacally, I murmured under my breath: 'Keep Teeth Kleen and Keep Teeth Brite! Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White!' But despite my incantation, the past failed to reappear; we rattled on down Gibbs Road and dismounted near Chowpatty Beach.
Chowpatty, at least, was much the same: a dirty strip of sand aswarm with pickpockets, and strollers, and vendors of hot-channa-channa-hot, of kulfi and bhel-puri and chutter-mutter; but further down Marine Drive I saw what tetrapods had achieved. On land reclaimed by the Narlikar consortium from the sea, vast monsters soared upwards to the sky, bearing strange alien names: oberoi-sheraton screamed at me from afar. And where was the neon Jeep sign?… 'Come on, Pictureji,' I said at length, hugging Aadam to my chest, 'Let's go where we're going and be done with it; the city has been changed.'
What can I say about the Midnite-Confidential Club? That its location is underground, secret (although known to omniscient paan-wallahs); its door, unmarked; its clientele, the cream of Bombay society. What else? Ah, yes: managed by one Anand 'Andy' Shroff, businessman-playboy, who is to be found on most days tanning himself at the Sun 'n' Sand Hotel on Juhu Beach, amid film-stars and disenfranchised princesses. I ask you: an Indian, sun-bathing? But apparently it's quite normal, the international rules of playboydom must be obeyed to the letter, including, I suppose, the one stipulating daily worshipping of the sun.
How innocent I am (and I used to think that Sonny, forcep-dented, was the simple one!)-I never suspected that places like the Midnite-Confidential existed! But of course they do; and clutching flutes and snake-baskets, the three of us knocked on its doors.
Movements visible through a small iron eye-level grille: a low mellifluous female voice asked us to state our business. Picture Singh announced: 'I am the Most Charming Man In The World. You are employing here one other snake-charmer as cabaret; I will challenge him and prove my superiority. For this I do not ask to be paid. It is, capteena, a question of honour.'
It was evening; Mr Anand 'Andy' Shroff was, by good fortune, on the premises. And, to cut a long story short, Picture Singh's challenge was accepted, and we entered that place whose name had already unnerved me somewhat, because it contained the word midnight, and because its initials had once concealed my own, secret world: M.C.C., which stands for Metro Cub Club, once also stood for the Midnight Children's Conference, and had now been usurped by the secret nightspot. In a word: I felt invaded.
Twin problems of the city's sophisticated, cosmopolitan youth: how to consume alcohol in a dry state; and how to romance girls in the best Western tradition, by taking them out to paint the town red, while at the same time preserving total secrecy, to avoid the very Oriental shame of a scandal? The Midnite-Confidential was Mr Shroff's solution to the agonizing difficulties of the city's gilded youth. In that underground of licentiousness, he had created a world of Stygian darkness, black as hell; in the secrecy of midnight darkness, the city's lovers met, drank imported liquor, and romanced; cocooned in the isolating, artificial night, they canoodled with impunity. Hell is other people's fantasies: every saga requires at least one descent into Jahannum, and I followed Picture Singh into the inky negritude of the Club, holding an infant son in my arms.
We were led down a lush black carpet-midnight-black, black as lies, crow-black, anger-black, the black of 'hai-yo, black man!'; in short, a dark rug-by a female attendant of ravishing sexual charms, who wore her sari erotically low on her hips, with a jasmine in her navel; but as we descended into the darkness, she turned towards us with a reassuring smile, and I saw that her eyes were closed; unearthly luminous eyes had been painted on her lids. I could not help but ask, 'Why…' To which she, simply: 'I am blind; and besides, nobody who comes here wants to be seen. Here you are in a world without faces or names; here people have no memories, families or past; here is for now, for nothing except right now.'
And the darkness engulfed us; she guided us through that nightmare pit in which light was kept in shackles and bar-fetters, that place outside time, that negation of history… 'Sit here,' she said, 'The other snake-man will come soon. When it is time, one light will shine on you; then begin your contest.'
We sat there for-what? minutes, hours, weeks?-and there were the glowing eyes of blind women leading invisible guests to their seats; and gradually, in the dark, I became aware of being surrounded by soft, amorous susurrations, like the couplings of velvet mice; I heard the chink of glasses held by twined arms, and gentle brushings of lips; with one good ear and one bad ear, I heard the sound of illicit sexuality filling the midnight air… but no, I did not want to know what was happening; although my nose was able to smell, in the susurrating silence of the Club, all manner of new stories and beginnings, of exotic and forbidden loves, and little invisible contretemps and who-was-going-too-jar, in fact all sorts of juicy tit-bits, I chose to ignore them all, because this was a new world in which I had no place. My son, Aadam, however, sat beside me with ears burning with fascination; his eyes shone in the darkness as he listened, and memorized, and learned… and then there was light.
A single shaft of light spilled into a pool on the floor of the Midnight-Confidential Club. From the shadows beyond the fringe of the illuminated area, Aadam and I saw Picture Singh sitting stiffly, cross-legged, next to a handsome Brylcreemed youth; each of them was surrounded by musical instruments and the closed baskets of their art. A loudspeaker announced the beginning of that legendary contest for the tide of Most Charming Man In The World; but who was listening? Did anyone even pay attention, or were they too busy with lips tongues hands? This was the name of Pictureji's opponent: the Maharaja of Cooch Naheen.
(I don't know: it's easy to assume a tide. But perhaps, perhaps he really was the grandson of that old Rani who had once, long ago, been a friend of Doctor Aziz; perhaps the heir to the supporter-of-the-Hummingbird was pitted, ironically, against the man who might have been the second Mian Abdullah! It's always possible; many maharajas have been poor since the Widow revoked their civil-list salaries.)
How long, in that sunless cavern, did they struggle? Months, years, centuries? I cannot say: I watched, mesmerized, as they strove to outdo one another, charming every kind of snake imaginable, asking for rare varieties to be sent from the Bombay snake-farm (where once Doctor Schaapsteker…); and the Maharaja matched Picture Singh snake for snake, succeeding even in charming constrictors, which only Pictureji had previously managed to do. In that infernal Club whose darkness was another aspect of its proprietor's obsession with the colour black (under whose influence he tanned his skin darker darker every day at the Sun 'n' Sand), the two virtuosi goaded snakes into impossible feats, making them tie themselves in knots, or bows, or persuading them to drink water from wine-glasses, and to jump through fiery hoops… defying fatigue, hunger and age, Picture Singh was putting on the show of his life (but was anyone looking? Anyone at all?)-and at last it became clear that the younger man was tiring first; his snakes ceased to dance in time to his flute; and finally, through a piece of sleight-of-hand so fast that I did not see what happened, Picture Singh managed to knot a king cobra around the Maharaja's neck.
What Picture said: 'Give me best, captain, or I'll tell it to bite.'
That was the end of the contest. The humiliated princeling left the Club and was later reported to have shot himself in a taxi. And on the floor of his last great battle, Picture Singh collapsed like a falling banyan tree… blind attendants (to one of whom I entrusted Aadam) helped me carry him from the field.
But the Midnight-Confidential had one trick left up its sleeve. Once a night-just to add a little spice-a roving spotlight searched out one of the illicit couples, and revealed them to the hidden eyes of their fellows: a touch of luminary Russian roulette which, no doubt, made life more thrilling for the city's young cosmopolitans… and who was the chosen victim that night? Who, horn-templed stain-faced cucumber-nosed, was drowned in scandalous light? Who, made as blind as female attendants by the voyeurism of light-bulbs, almost dropped the legs of his unconscious friend?
Saleem returned to the city of his birth to stand illuminated in a cellar while Bombayites tittered at him from the dark.
Quickly now, because we have come to the end of incidents, I record that, in a back room in which light was permitted, Picture Singh recovered from his fainting fit; and while Aadam slept soundly, one of the blind waitresses brought us a congratulatory, reviving meal. On the thali of victory: samosas, pakoras, rice, dal, puris; and green chutney. Yes, a little aluminium bowl of chutney, green, my God, green as grasshoppers… and before long a puri was in my hand; and chutney was on the puri; and then I had tasted it, and almost imitated the fainting act of Picture Singh, because it carried me back to a day when I emerged nine-fingered from a hospital and went into exile at the home of Hanif Aziz, and was given the best chutney in the world… the taste of the chutney was more than just an echo of that long-ago taste-it was the old taste itself, the very same, with the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away… in frenzy of excitement, I grabbed the blind waitress by the arm; scarcely able to contain myself, I blurted out: 'The chutney! Who made it?' I must have shouted, because Picture, 'Quiet, captain, you'll wake the boy… and what's the matter? You look like you saw your worst enemy's ghost!' And the blind waitress, a little coldly: 'You don't like the chutney?' I had to hold back an almighty bellow. 'I like it,' I said in a voice caged in bars of steel, 'I like it-now will you tell me where it's from?' And she, alarmed, anxious to get away: 'It's Braganza Pickle; best in Bombay, everyone knows.'
I made her bring me the jar; and there, on the label, was the address: of a building with a winking, saffron-and-green neon goddess over the gate, a factory watched over by neon Mumbadevi, while local trains went yellow-and-browning past: Braganza Pickles (Private) Ltd, in the sprawling north of the town.
Once again an abracadabra, an open-sesame: words printed on a chutney-jar, opening the last door of my life… I was seized by an irresistible determination to track down the maker of that impossible chutney of memory, and said, 'Pictureji, I must go…'
I do not know the end of the story of Picture Singh; he refused to accompany me on my quest, and I saw in his eyes that the efforts of his struggle had broken something inside him, that his victory was, in fact, a defeat; but whether he is still in Bombay (perhaps working for Mr Shroff), or back with his washer-woman; whether he is still alive or not, I am not able to say… 'How can I leave you?' I asked, desperately, but he replied, 'Don't be a fool, captain; you have something you must do, then there is nothing to do but do it. Go, go, what do I want with you? Like old Resham told you: go, go quickly, go!'
Taking Aadam with me, I went.
Journey's end: from the underworld of the blind waitresses, I walked north north north, holding my son in my arms; and came at last to where flies are gobbled by lizards, and vats bubble, and strong-armed women tell bawdy jokes; to this world of sharp-lipped overseers with conical breasts, and the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the bottling-plant… and who, at the end of my road, planted herself in front of me, arms akimbo, hair glistening with perspiration on the forearms? Who, direct as ever, demanded, 'You, mister: what you want?'
'Me!' Padma is yelling, excited and a little embarrassed by the memory. 'Of course, who else? Me me me!'
'Good afternoon, Begum,' I said. (Padma interjects: 'O you-always so polite and all!') 'Good afternoon; may I speak to the manager?'
O grim, defensive, obstinate Padma! 'Not possible, Manager Begum is busy. You must make appointment, come back later, so please go away just now.'
Listen: I would have stayed, persuaded, bullied, even used force to get past my Padma's arms; but there was a cry from the catwalk-this catwalk, Padma, outside the offices!-the catwalk from which someone whom I have not been willing to name until now was looking down, across gigantic pickle-vats and simmering chutneys-someone rushing down clattering metal steps, shrieking at the top of her voice:
'O my God, O my God, O Jesus sweet Jesus, baba, my son, look who's come here, arre baba, don't you see me, look how thin you got, come, come, let me kiss you, let me give you cake!'
Just as I had guessed, the Manager Begum of Braganza Pickles (Private) Ltd, who called herself Mrs Braganza, was of course my erstwhile ayah, the criminal of midnight, Miss Mary Pereira, the only mother I had left in the world.
Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taking offence at my voyeurism, calls: 'Watch this!' and proceeds to extrude the longest turd I have ever seen. 'Fifteen inches!' he calls, 'How long can you make yours?' Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I'd have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times; but now I'm disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write. So, waving at the champion defecator, I call back: 'Seven on a good day,' and forget him.
Tomorrow. Or the day after. The cracks will be waiting for August 15th. There is still a little time: I'll finish tomorrow.
Today I gave myself the day off and visited Mary. A long hot dusty bus-ride through streets beginning to bubble with the excitement of the coming Independence Day, although I can smell other, more tarnished perfumes: disillusion, venality, cynicism… the nearly-thirty-one-year-old myth of freedom is no longer what it was. New myths are needed; but that's none of my business.
Mary Pereira, who now calls herself Mrs Braganza, lives with her sister Alice, now Mrs Fernandas, in an apartment in the pink obelisk of the Narlikar women on the two-storey hillock where once, in a demolished palace, she slept on a servant's mat. Her bedroom occupies more or less the same cube of air in which a fisherman's pointing finger led a pair of boyish eyes out towards the horizon; in a teak rocking-chair, Mary rocks my son, singing 'Red Sails In The Sunset'. Red dhow-sails spread against the distant sky.
A pleasant enough day, on which old days are recalled. The day when I realized that an old cactus-bed had survived the revolution of the Narlikar women, and borrowing a spade from the mail, dug up a long-buried world: a tin globe containing yellowed ant-eaten jumbo-size baby-snap, credited to Kalidas Gupta, and a Prime Minister's letter. And days further off: for the dozenth time we chatter about the change in Mary Pereira's fortunes. How she owed it all to her dear Alice. Whose poor Mr Fernandes died of colour-blindness, having become confused, in his old Ford Prefect, at one of the city's then-few traffic lights. How Alice visited her in Goa with the news that her employers, the fearsome and enterprising Narlikar women, were willing to put some of their tetrapod-money into a pickle firm. 'I told them, nobody makes achar-chutney like our Mary,' Alice had said, with perfect accuracy, 'because she puts her feelings inside them.' So Alice turned out to be a good girl in the end. And baba, what do you think, how could I believe the whole world would want to eat my poor pickles, even in England they eat. And now, just think, I sit here where your dear house used to be, while God-knows what-all has happened to you, living like a beggar so long, what a world, baapu-re!
And bitter-sweet lamentations: O, your poor mummy-daddy! That fine madam, dead! And the poor man, never knowing who loved him or how to love! And even the Monkey… but I interrupt, no, not dead: no, not true, not dead. Secretly, in a nunnery, eating bread.
Mary, who has stolen the name of poor Queen Catharine who gave these islands to the British, taught me the secrets of the pickling process. (Finishing an education which began in this very air-space when I stood in a kitchen as she stirred guilt into green chutney.) Now she sits at home, retired in her white-haired old-age, once more happy as an ayah with a baby to raise. 'Now you finished your writing-writing, baba, you should take more time for your son.' But Mary, I did it for him. And she, switching the subject, because her mind makes all sorts of flea-jumps these days: 'O baba, baba, look at you, how old you got already!'
Rich Mary, who never-dreamed she would be rich, is still unable to sleep on beds. But drinks sixteen Coca-Colas a day, unworried about teeth, which have all fallen out anyway. A flea-jump: 'Why you getting married so sudden sudden?' Because Padma wants. No, she is not in trouble, how could she, in my condition? 'Okay, baba, I only asked.'
And the day would have wound down peacefully, a twilight day near the end of time, except that now, at last, at the age of three years, one month and two weeks. Aadam Sinai uttered a sound.
'Ab…' Arre, O my God, listen, baba, the boy is saying something! And Aadam, very carefully: 'Abba…' Father. He is calling me father. But no, he has not finished, there is strain on his face, and finally my son, who will have to be a magician to cope with the world I'm leaving him, completes his awesome first word: '…cadabba.'
Abracadabra! But nothing happens, we do not turn into toads, angels do not fly in through the window: the lad is just flexing his muscles. I shall not see his miracles…. Amid Mary's celebrations of Aadam's achievement, I go back to Padma, and the factory; my son's enigmatic first incursion into language has left a worrying fragrance in my nostrils.
Abracadabra: not an Indian word at all, a cabbalistic formula derived from the name of the supreme god of the Basilidan gnostics, containing the number 365, the number of the days of the year, and of the heavens, and of the spirits emanating from the god Abraxas. 'Who,' I am wondering, not for the first time, 'does the boy imagine he is?'
My special blends: I've been saving them up. Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! I, however, have pickled chapters. Tonight, by screwing the lid firmly on to ajar bearing the legend Special Formula No. 30; 'Abracadabra', I reach the end of my long-winded autobiography; in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfection.
These days, I manage the factory for Mary. Alice-'Mrs Fernandes'-controls the finances; my responsibility is for the creative aspects of our work. (Of course I have forgiven Mary her crime; I need mothers as well as fathers, and a mother is beyond blame.) Amid the wholly-female workforce of Braganza Pickles, beneath the saffron-and-green winking of neon Mumbadevi, I choose mangoes tomatoes limes from the women who come at dawn with baskets on their heads. Mary, with her ancient hatred of 'the mens', admits no males except myself into her new, comfortable universe… myself, and of course my son. Alice, I suspect, still has her little liaisons; and Padma fell for me from the first, seeing in me an outlet for her vast reservoir of pent-up solicitude; I cannot answer for the rest of them, but the formidable competence of the Narlikar females is reflected, on this factory floor, in the strong-armed dedication of the vat-stirrers.
What is required for chutnification? Raw materials, obviously-fruit, vegetables, fish, vinegar, spkes. Daily visits from Koli women with their saris hitched up between their legs. Cucumbers aubergines mint. But also: eyes, blue as ice, which are undeceived by the superficial blandishments of fruit-which can see corruption beneath citrus-skin; fingers which, with featheriest touch, can probe the secret inconstant hearts of green tomatoes: and above all a nose capable of discerning the hidden languages of what-must-be-pickled, its humours and messages and emotions… at Braganza Pickles, I supervise the production of Mary's legendary recipes; but there are also my special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans… believe don't believe but it's true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation.
(And beside them, one jar stands empty.)
The process of revision should be constant and endless; don't think I'm satisfied with what I've done! Among my unhappinesses: an overly-harsh taste from those jars containing memories of my father, a certain ambiguity in the love-flavour of 'Jamila Singer' (Special Formula No. 22), which might lead the unperceptive to conclude that I've invented the whole story of the baby-swap to justify an incestuous love; vague implausibilides in the jar labelled 'Accident in a Washing-chest'-the pickle raises questions which are not fully answered, such as: Why did Saleem need an accident to acquire his powers? Most of the other children didn't… Or again, in 'All-India Radio' and others, a discordant note in the orchestrated flavours: would Mary's confession have come as a shock to a true telepath? Sometimes, in the pickles' version of history, Saleem appears to have known too little; at other times, too much… yes, I should revise and revise, improve and improve; but there is neither the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that's how it happened.
There is also the matter of the spice bases. The intricacies of turmeric and cumin, the subtlety of fenugreek, when to use large (and when small) cardamoms; the myriad possible effects of garlic, garam masala, stick cinnamon, coriander, ginger… not to mention the flavourful contributions of the occasional speck of dirt. (Saleem is no longer obsessed with purity.) In the spice bases, I reconcile myself to the inevitable distortions of the pickling process. To pickle is to give immortality, after all: fish, vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain alteration, a slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely? The art is to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind; and above all (in my thirty jars and ajar) to give it shape and 'form-that is to say, meaning. (I have mentioned my fear of absurdity.)
One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth… that they are, despite everything, acts of love.
One empty jar… how to end? Happily, with Mary in her teak rocking-chair and a son who has begun to speak? Amid recipes, and thirty jars with chapter-headings for names? In melancholy, drowning in memories of Jamila and Parvati and even of Evie Burns? Or with the magic children… but then, should I be glad that some escaped, or end in the tragedy of the disintegrating effects of drainage? (Because in drainage lie the origins of the cracks: my hapless, pulverized body, drained above and below, began to crack because it was dried out. Parched, it yielded at last to the effects of a lifetime's battering. And now there is rip tear crunch, and a stench issuing through the fissures, which must be the smell of death. Control: I must retain control as long as possible.)
Or with questions: now that I can, I swear, see the cracks on the backs of my hands, cracks along my hairline and between my toes, why do I not bleed? Am I already so emptied desiccated pickled? Am I already the mummy of myself?
Or dreams: because last night the ghost of Reverend Mother appeared to me, staring down through the hole in a perforated cloud, waiting for my death so that she could weep a monsoon for forty days… and I, floating outside my body, looked down on the foreshortened image of my self, and saw a grey-haired dwarf who once, in a mirror, looked relieved.
No, that won't do, I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty… What cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place, is that I shall reach my birthday, thirty-one today, and no doubt a marriage will take place, and Padma will have henna-tracery on her palms and soles, and also a new name, perhaps Naseem in honour of Reverend Mother's watching ghost, and outside the window there will be fireworks and crowds, because it will be Independence Day and the many-headed multitudes will be in the streets, and Kashmir will be waiting. I will have train-tickets in my pocket, there will be a taxi-cab driven by a country boy who once dreamed, at the Pioneer Cafe, of film-stardom, we will drive south south south into the.heart of the tumultuous crowds, who will be throwing balloons of paint at each other, at the wound-up windows of the cab, as if it were the day of the paint-festival of Holi; and along Hornby Vellard, where a dog was left to die, the crowd, the dense crowd, the crowd without boundaries, growing until it fills the world, will make progress impossible, we will abandon our taxi-cab and the dreams of its driver, on our feet in the thronging crowd, and yes, I will be separated from Padma, my dung-lotus extending an arm towards me across the turbulent sea, until she drowns in the crowd and I am alone in the vastness of the numbers, the numbers marching one two three, I am being buffeted right and left while rip tear crunch reaches its climax, and my body is screaming, it cannot take this kind of treatment any more, but now I see familiar faces in the crowd, they are all here, my grandfather Aadam and his wife Naseem, and Alia and Mustapha and Hanif and Emerald, and Arnina who was Mumtaz, and Nadir who became Qasim, and Pia and Zafar who wet his bed and also General Zulfikar, they throng around me pushing shoving crushing, and the cracks are widening, pieces of my body are falling off, there is Jamila who has left her nunnery to be present on this last day, night is falling has fallen, there is a countdown ticktocking to midnight, fireworks and stars, the cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, and I see that I shall never reach Kashmir, like Jehangir the Mughal Emperor I shall die with Kashmir on my lips, unable to see the valley of delights to which men go to enjoy life or to end it, or both; because now I see other figures in the crowd, the terrifying figure of a war-hero with lethal knees, who has found out how I cheated him of his birth-right, he is pushing towards me through the crowd which is now wholly composed of familiar faces, there is Rashid the rickshaw boy arm-in-arm with the Rani of Cooch Naheen, and Ayooba Shaheed Farooq with Mutasim the Handsome, and from another direction, the direction of Haji Ali's island tomb, I see a mythological apparition approaching, the Black Angel, except that as it nears me its face is green its eyes are black, a centre-parting in its hair, on the left green and on the right black, its eyes the eyes of Widows; Shiva and the Angel are closing closing, I hear lies being spoken in the night, anything you want to be you kin be, the greatest lie of all, cracking now, fission of Saleem, I am the bomb in Bombay, watch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful pressure of the crowd, bag of bones falling down down down, just as once at Jallianwala, but Dyer seems not to be present today, no Mercurochrome, only a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street, because I have been so-many too-many persons, life unlike syntax allows one more than three, and at last somewhere the striking of a clock, twelve chimes, release.
Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, all in good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.