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 jewelry boutique before she took up social work … during the Emergency she was, semi-officially, in charġe 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 center-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 anesthetic 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 masses; 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 windows with their magical gifts intact, the awakening from anesthesia 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 marvelous 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 particolored 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 are 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 jewelery 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 archrival, 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 l
urking in his name, the function of Shivalingam, 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 régime; 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 women had changed baby-tags and denied him his birthright, 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 traveled: I waited beyond the platform at Benares or Varanasi 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 least, I knew how it felt to clutch on for dear life, while particles of soot dust ash gritted in your eyes, and you were obliged to bang on the door and yell, “Ohé, 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 paanwallah 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.
Abracadabra
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 harrassment 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 colorless, 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.
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