What I did not understand must wait to be told; let me record here that my sister earned her name at her fourteenth birthday party, and was known after that as Jamila Singer; and that I knew, as I listened to “My Red Dupatta Of Muslin” and “Shahbaz Qalandar,” that the process which had begun during my first exile was nearing completion in my second; that, from now on, Jamila was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to her talent for ever.
Jamila sang—I, humbly, bowed my head. But before she could enter fully into her kingdom, something else had to happen: I had to be properly finished off.
Drainage and the Desert
WHAT-CHEWS-ON-BONES refuses to pause … it’s only a matter of time. This is what keeps me going: I hold on to Padma. Padma is what matters—Padma-muscles, Padma’s hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus … who, embarrassed, commands: “Enough. Start. Start now.”
Yes, it must start with the cable. Telepathy set me apart; telecommunications dragged me down …
Amina Sinai was cutting verrucas out of her feet when the telegram arrived … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: my mother, right ankle on left knee, was scooping corn-tissue out of the sole of her foot with a sharp-ended nail file on September 9th, 1962. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: in the afternoon. No, it’s important to be more … At the stroke of three o’clock, which, even in the north, is the hottest time of day, a bearer brought her an envelope on a silver dish. A few seconds later, far away in New Delhi, Defense Minister Krishna Menon (acting on his own initiative, during Nehru’s absence at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference) took the momentous decision to use force if necessary against the Chinese army on the Himalayan frontier. “The Chinese must be ejected from the Thag La ridge,” Mr. Menon said while my mother tore open a telegram. “No weakness will be shown.” But this decision was a mere trifle when set beside the implication of my mother’s cable; because while the eviction operation, code-named LEGHORN, was doomed to fail, and eventually to turn India into that most macabre of theaters, the Theater of War, the cable was to plunge me secretly but surely towards the crisis which would end with my final eviction from my own inner world. While the Indian XXXIII Corps were acting on instructions passed from Menon to General Thapar, I, too, had been placed in great danger; as if unseen forces had decided that I had also overstepped the boundaries of what I was permitted to do or know or be; as though history had decided to put me firmly in my place. I was left entirely without a say in the matter; my mother read the telegram, burst into tears and said, “Children, we’re going home!” … after which, as I began by saying in another context, it was only a matter of time.
What the telegram said: PLEASE COME QUICK SINAI-SAHIB SUFFERED HEARTBOOT GRAVELY ILL SALAAMS ALICE PEREIRA.
“Of course, go at once, my darling,” my aunt Emerald told her sister, “But what, my God, can be this heartboot?”
It is possible, even probable, that I am only the first historian to write the story of my undeniably exceptional life-and-times. Those who follow in my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work, this source-book, this Hadith or Purana or Grundrisse, for guidance and inspiration. I say to these future exegetes: when you come to examine the events which followed on from the “heartboot cable,” remember that at the very eye of the hurricane which was unleashed upon me—the sword to switch metaphors, with which the coup de grâce was applied—there lay a single unifying force. I refer to telecommunications.
Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my undoing; generously, however, I shall accuse nobody of conspiracy; although it would be easy to believe that the controllers of communication had resolved to regain their monopoly of the nation’s air-waves … I must return (Padma is frowning) to the banal chain of cause-and-effect: we arrived at Santa Cruz airport, by Dakota, on September 16th; but to explain the telegram, I must go further back in time.
If Alice Pereira had once sinned, by stealing Joseph D’Costa from her sister Mary, she had in these latter years gone a long way towards attaining redemption; because for four years she had been Ahmed Sinai’s only human companion. Isolated on the dusty hillock which had once been Methwold’s Estate, she had borne enormous demands on her accommodating good nature. He would make her sit with him until midnight while he drank djinns and ranted about the injustices of his life; he remembered, after years of forgetfulness, his old dream of translating and re-ordering the Quran, and blamed his family for emasculating him so that he didn’t have the energy to begin such a task; in addition, because she was there, his anger often directed itself at her, taking the form of long tirades filled with gutter-oaths and the useless curses he had devised in the days of his deepest abstraction. She attempted to be understanding: he was a lonely man; his once-infallible relationship with the telephone had been destroyed by the economic vagaries of the times; his touch in financial matters had begun to desert him … he fell prey, too, to strange fears. When the Chinese road in the Aksai Chin region was discovered, he became convinced that the yellow hordes would be arriving at Methwold’s Estate in a matter of days; and it was Alice who comforted him with ice-cold Coca-Cola, saying, “No good worrying. Those Chinkies are too little to beat our jawans. Better you drink your Coke; nothing is going to change.”
In the end he wore her out; she stayed with him, finally, only because she demanded and received large pay increases, and sent much of the money to Goa, for the support of her sister Mary; but on September 1st, she, too, succumbed to the blandishments of the telephone.
By then, she spent as much time on the instrument as her employer, particularly when the Narlikar women called up. The formidable Narlikars were, at that time, besieging my father, telephoning him twice a day, coaxing and persuading him to sell, reminding him that his position was hopeless, flapping around his head like vultures around a burning go-down … on September 1st, like a long-ago vulture, they flung down an arm which slapped him in the face, because they bribed Alice Pereira away from him. Unable to stand him any more, she cried, “Answer your own telephone! I’m off.”
That night, Ahmed Sinai’s heart began to bulge. Overfull of hate resentment self-pity grief, it became swollen like a balloon, it beat too hard, skipped beats, and finally felled him like an ox; at the Breach Candy Hospital the doctors discovered that my father’s heart had actually changed shape—a new swelling had pushed lumpily out of the lower left ventricle. It had, to use Alice’s word, “booted.”
Alice found him the next day, when, by chance, she returned to collect a forgotten umbrella; like a good secretary, she enlisted the power of telecommunications, telephoning an ambulance and telegramming us. Owing to censorship of the mails between India and Pakistan, the “heartboot cable” took a full week to reach Amina Sinai.
“Back-to-Bom!” I yelled happily, alarming airport coolies. “Back-to-Bom!” I cheered, despite everything, until the newly-sober Jamila said, “Oh, Saleem, honestly, shoo!” Alice Pereira met us at the airport (a telegram had alerted her); and then we were in a real Bombay black-and-yellow taxi, and I was wallowing in the sounds of hot-channa-hot hawkers, the throng of camels bicycles and people people people, thinking how Mumbadevi’s city made Rawalpindi look like a village, rediscovering especially the colors, the forgotten vividness of gulmohr and bougainvillaea, the livid green of the waters of the Mahalaxmi Temple “tank,” the stark black-and-white of the traffic policemen’s sun umbrellas and the blue-and-yellowness of their uniforms; but most of all the blue blue blue of the sea … only the gray of my father’s stricken face distracted me from the rainbow riot of the city, and made me sober up.
Alice Pereira left us at the hospital and went off to work for the Narlikar women; and now a remarkable thing happened. My mother Amina Sinai, jerked out of lethargy and depression and guilt-fogs and verruca-pain by the sight of my father, seemed miraculously to regain her youth; with all her old gifts of assiduity restored, she set about the rehabili
tation of Ahmed, driven by an unstoppable will. She brought him home to the first-floor bedroom in which she had nursed him through the freeze; she sat with him day and night, pouring her strength into his body. And her love had its reward, because not only did Ahmed Sinai make a recovery so complete as to astound Breach Candy’s European doctors, but also an altogether more wonderful change occurred, which was that, as Ahmed came to himself under Amina’s care, he returned not to the self which had practiced curses and wrestled djinns, but to the self he might always have been, filled with contrition and forgiveness and laughter and generosity and the finest miracle of all, which was love. Ahmed Sinai had, at long last, fallen in love with my mother.
And I was the sacrificial lamb with which they anointed their love.
They had even begun to sleep together again; and although my sister—with a flash of her old Monkey-self—said, “In the same bed, Allah, chhi-chhi, how dirty!”, I was happy for them; and even, briefly, happier for myself, because I was back in the land of the Midnight Children’s Conference. While newspaper headlines marched towards war, I renewed my acquaintance with my miraculous fellows, not knowing how many endings were in store for me.
On October 9th—INDIAN ARMY POISED FOR ALL-OUT EFFORT—I felt able to convene the Conference (time and my own efforts had erected the necessary barrier around Mary’s secret). Back into my head they came; it was a happy night, a night for burying old disagreements, for making our own all-out effort at reunion. We repeated, over and over again, our joy at being back together; ignoring the deeper truth—that we were like all families, that family reunions are more delightful in prospect than in reality, and that the time comes when all families must go their separate ways. On October 15th—UNPROVOKED ATTACK ON INDIA—the questions I’d been dreading and trying not to provoke began: Why is Shiva not here? And: Why have you closed off part of your mind?
On October 20th, the Indian forces were defeated—thrashed—by the Chinese at Thag La ridge. An official Peking statement announced: In self-defense, Chinese frontier guards were compelled to strike back resolutely. But when, that same night, the children of midnight launched a concerted assault on me, I had no defense. They attacked on a broad front and from every direction, accusing me of secrecy, prevarication, high-handedness, egotism; my mind, no longer a parliament chamber, became the battleground on which they annihilated me. No longer “big brother Saleem,” I listened helplessly while they tore me apart; because, despite all their sound-and-fury, I could not unblock what I had sealed away; I could not bring myself to tell them Mary’s secret. Even Parvati-the-witch, for so long my fondest supporter, lost patience with me at last. “O, Saleem,” she said, “God knows what that Pakistan has done to you; but you are badly changed.”
Once, long ago, the death of Mian Abdullah had destroyed another Conference, which had been held together purely by the strength of his will; now, as the midnight children lost faith in me, they also lost their belief in the thing I had made for them. Between October 20th and November 20th, I continued to convene—to attempt to convene—our nightly sessions; but they fled from me, not one by one, but in tens and twenties; each night, less of them were willing to tune in; each week, over a hundred of them retreated into private life. In the high Himalayas, Gurkhas and Rajputs fled in disarray from the Chinese army; and in the upper reaches of my mind, another army was also destroyed by things—bickerings, prejudices, boredom, selfishness—which I had believed too small, too petty to have touched them.
(But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued to believe—I continue now—that what-we-had-in-common would finally have outweighed what-drove-us-apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate responsibility for the end of the Children’s Conference; because what destroyed all possibility of renewal was the love of Ahmed and Amina Sinai.)
… And Shiva? Shiva, whom I cold-bloodedly denied his birthright? Never once, in that last month, did I send my thoughts in search of him; but his existence, somewhere in the world, nagged away at the corners of my mind. Shiva-the-destroyer, Shiva Knocknees … he became, for me, first a stabbing twinge of guilt; then an obsession; and finally, as the memory of his actuality grew dull, he became a sort of principle; he came to represent, in my mind, all the vengefulness and violence and simultaneous-love-and-hate-of-Things in the world; so that even now, when I hear of drowned bodies floating like balloons on the Hooghly and exploding when nudged by passing boats; or trains set on fire, or politicians killed, or riots in Orissa or Punjab, it seems to me that the hand of Shiva lies heavily over all these things, dooming us to flounder endlessly amid murder rape greed war—that Shiva, in short, has made us who we are. (He, too, was born on the stroke of midnight; he, like me, was connected to history. The modes of connection—if I’m right in thinking they applied to me—enabled him, too, to affect the passage of the days.)
I’m talking as if I never saw him again; which isn’t true. But that, of course, must get into the queue like everything else; I’m not strong enough to tell that tale just now.
The disease of optimism, in those days, once again attained epidemic proportions; I, meanwhile, was afflicted by an inflammation of the sinuses. Curiously triggered off by the defeat of Thag La ridge, public optimism about the war grew as fat (and as dangerous) as an overfilled balloon; my long-suffering nasal passages, however, which had been overfilled all their days, finally gave up the struggle against congestion. While parliamentarians poured out speeches about “Chinese aggression” and “the blood of our martyred jawans,” my eyes began to stream with tears; while the nation puffed itself up, convincing itself that the annihilation of the little yellow men was at hand, my sinuses, too, puffed up and distorted a face which was already so startling that Ayub Khan himself had stared at it in open amazement. In the clutches of the optimism disease, students burned Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-Lai in effigy; with optimism-fever on their brows, mobs attacked Chinese shoemakers, curio dealers and restauranteurs. Burning with optimism, the Government even interned Indian citizens of Chinese descent—now “enemy aliens”—in camps in Rajasthan. Birla Industries donated a miniature rifle range to the nation; schoolgirls began to go on military parade. But I, Saleem, felt as if I was about to die of asphyxiation. The air, thickened by optimism, refused to enter my lungs.
Ahmed and Amina Sinai were amongst the worst victims of the renewed disease of optimism; having already contracted it through the medium of their new-born love, they entered into the public enthusiasm with a will. When Morarji Desai, the urine-drinking Finance Minister, launched his “Ornaments for Armaments” appeal, my mother handed over gold bangles and emerald ear-rings; when Morarji floated an issue of defense bonds, Ahmed Sinai bought them in bushels. War, it seemed, had brought a new dawn to India; in the Times of India, a cartoon captioned “War with China” showed Nehru looking at graphs labelled “Emotional Integration,” “Industrial Peace” and “People’s Faith in Government” and crying, “We never had it so good!” Adrift in the sea of optimism, we—the nation, my parents, I—floated blindly towards the reefs.
As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences. Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form—or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes. Hence our vulnerability to omens … when the Indian flag was first raised, for instance, a rainbow appeared above that Delhi field, a rainbow of saffron and green; and we felt blessed. Born amidst correspondence, I have found it continuing to hound me … while Indians headed blindly towards a military débâcle, I, too, was nearing (and entirely without knowing it) a catastrophe of my own.
Times of India cartoons spoke of “Emotional Integration”; in Buckingham Villa, last remnant of Methwold’s Estate, emotions had never been so integrated. Ahmed and Amina spent their days like just-courting youngsters; and while the Peking Peopl
e’s Daily complained, “The Nehru Government has finally shed its cloak of non-alignment,” neither my sister nor I were complaining, because for the first time in years we did not have to pretend we were non-aligned in the war between our parents; what war had done for India, the cessation of hostilities had achieved on our two-storey hillock. Ahmed Sinai had even given up his nightly battle with the djinns.
By November 1st—INDIANS ATTACK UNDER COVER OF ARTILLERY—my nasal passages were in a state of acute crisis. Although my mother subjected me to daily torture by Vick’s Inhaler and steaming bowls of Vick’s ointment dissolved in water, which, blanket over head, I was obliged to try and inhale, my sinuses refused to respond to treatment. This was the day on which my father held out his arms to me and said, “Come, son—come here and let me love you.” In a frenzy of happiness (maybe the optimism disease had got to me, after all) I allowed myself to be smothered in his squashy belly; but when he let me go, nose-goo had stained his bush-shirt. I think that’s what finally doomed me; because that afternoon, my mother went on to the attack. Pretending to me that she was telephoning a friend, she made a certain telephone call. While Indians attacked under cover of artillery, Amina Sinai planned my downfall, protected by a lie.
Before I describe my entry into the desert of my later years, however, I must admit the possibility that I have grievously wronged my parents. Never once, to my knowledge, never once in all the time since Mary Pereira’s revelations, did they set out to look for the true son of their blood; and I have, at several points in this narrative, ascribed this failure to a certain lack of imagination—I have said, more or less, that I remained their son because they could not imagine me out of the role. And there are worse interpretations possible, too—such as their reluctance to accept into their bosom an urchin who had spent eleven years in the gutter; but I wish to suggest a nobler motive: maybe, despite everything, despite cucumber-nose stainface chinlessness horn-temples bandy-legs finger-loss monk’s-tonsure and my (admittedly unknown to them) bad left ear, despite even the midnight baby-swap of Mary Pereira … maybe, I say, in spite of all these provocations, my parents loved me. I withdrew from them into my secret world; fearing their hatred, I did not admit the possibility that their love was stronger than ugliness, stronger even than blood. It is certainly likely that what a telephone call arranged, what finally took place on November 21st, 1962, was done for the highest of reasons; that my parents ruined me for love.
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