Midnight's Children (27 page)

The search succeeds. In the bedroll of Musa the old bearer: a silver spittoon. Wrapped in his puny bundle of clothes: gold coins, a silver samovar. Secreted under his charpoy bed: a missing tea-service. And now Musa has thrown himself at Ahmed Sinai’s feet; Musa is begging, “Forgive, Sahib! I was mad; I thought you were going to throw me into the street!” but Ahmed Sinai will not listen; the freeze is upon him; “I feel so weak,” he says, and leaves the room; and Amina, aghast, asks: “But, Musa, why did you make that terrible oath?”

… Because, in the interim, between line-up in passageway and discoveries in servants’ quarters, Musa had said to his master: “It was not me, Sahib. If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper! May my old skin run with sores!”

Amina, with horror on her face, awaits Musa’s reply. The bearer’s old face twists into a mask of anger; words are spat out. “Begum Sahiba, I only took your precious possessions, but you, and your sahib, and his father, have taken my whole life; and in my old age you have humiliated me with Christian ayahs.”

There is silence in Buckingham Villa—Amina has refused to press charges, but Musa is leaving. Bedroll on his back, he descends a spiral iron staircase, discovering that ladders can go down as well as up; he walks away down hillock, leaving a curse upon the house.

And (was it the curse that did it?) Mary Pereira is about to discover that even when you win a battle; even when staircases operate in your favor, you can’t avoid a snake.

Amina says, “I can’t get you any more money, Ismail; have you had enough?” And Ismail, “I hope so—but you never know—is there any chance of …” But Amina: “The trouble is, I’ve got so big and all, I can’t get in the car any more. It will just have to do.”

… Time is slowing down for Amina once more; once again, her eyes look through leaded glass, on which red tulips, green-stemmed, dance in unison; for a second time, her gaze lingers on a clocktower which has not worked since the rains of 1947; once again, it is raining. The racing season is over.

A pale blue clocktower: squat, peeling, inoperational. It stood on black-tarred concrete at the end of the circus-ring—the flat roof of the upper storey of the buildings along Warden Road, which abutted our two-storey hillock, so that if you climbed over Buckingham Villa’s boundary wall, flat black tar would be under your feet. And beneath black tar, Breach Candy Kindergarten School, from which, every afternoon during term, there rose the tinkling music of Miss Harrison’s piano playing the unchanging tunes of childhood; and below that, the shops, Reader’s Paradise, Fatbhoy Jewellery, Chimalker’s Toys and Bombelli’s, with its windows filled with One Yards of Chocolates. The door to the clocktower was supposed to be locked, but it was a cheap lock of a kind Nadir Khan would have recognized: made in India. And on three successive evenings immediately before my first birthday, Mary Pereira, standing by my window at night, noticed a shadowy figure floating across the roof, his hands full of shapeless objects, a shadow which filled her with an unidentifiable dread. After the third night, she told my mother; the police were summoned; and Inspector Vakeel returned to Methwold’s Estate, accompanied by a special squad of crack officers—“all deadeye shots, Begum Sahiba; just you leave it all to us!”—who, disguised, as sweepers, with guns concealed under their rags, kept the clocktower under surveillance while sweeping up the dust in the circus-ring.

Night fell. Behind curtains and chick-blinds, the inhabitants of Methwold’s Estate peered fearfully in the direction of the clocktower. Sweepers, absurdly, went about their duties in the dark. Johnny Vakeel took up a position on our verandah, rifle just out of sight … and, at midnight, a shadow came over the side wall of the Breach Candy school and made its way towards the tower, with a sack slung over one shoulder … “He must enter,” Vakeel had told Amina; “Must be sure we get the proper johnny.” The johnny, padding across flat tarred roof, arrived at the tower; entered.

“Inspector Sahib, what are you waiting for?”

“Shhh, Begum, this is police business; please go inside some way. We shall take him when he comes out; you mark my words. Caught,” Vakeel said with satisfaction, “like a rat in a trap.”

“But who is he?”

“Who knows?” Vakeel shrugged. “Some badmaash for sure. There are bad eggs everywhere these days.”

… And then the silence of the night is split like silk by a single, sawn-off shriek; somebody lurches against the inside of the clocktower door; it is wrenched open; there is a crash; and something streaks out on to black tarmac. Inspector Vakeel leaps into action, swinging up his rifle, shooting from the hip like John Wayne; sweepers extract marksmen’s weapons from their brushes and blaze away … shrieks of excited women, yells of servants … silence.

What lies, brown and black, banded and serpentine on the black tarmac? What, leaking black blood, provokes Doctor Schaapsteker to screech from his top-floor vantage-point: “You complete fools! Brothers of cockroaches! Sons of transvestites!” … what, flick-tongued, dies while Vakeel races on to tarred roof?

And inside the clocktower door? What weight, falling, created such an almighty crash? Whose hand wrenched a door open; in whose heel are visible the two red, flowing holes, filled with a venom for which there is no known antivenene, a poison which has killed stablefuls of worn-out horses? Whose body is carried out of the tower by plain-clothes men, in a dead march, coffinless, with imitation sweepers for pallbearers. Why, when the moonlight falls upon the dead face, does Mary Pereira fall like a sack of potatoes to the floor, eyes rolling upwards in their sockets, in a sudden and dramatic faint?

And lining the interior walls of the clocktower: what are these strange mechanisms, attached to cheap time-pieces—why are there so many bottles with rags stuffed into their necks?

“Damn lucky you called my boys out, Begum Sahiba,” Inspector Vakeel is saying. “That was Joseph D’Costa—on our Most Wanted list. Been after him for a year or thereabouts. Absolute black-hearted badmaash. You should see the walls inside that clocktower! Shelves, filled from floor to ceiling with home-made bombs. Enough explosive power to blow this hill into the sea!”

Melodrama piling upon melodrama; life acquiring the coloring of a Bombay talkie; snakes following ladders, ladders succeeding snakes; in the midst of too much incident, Baby Saleem fell ill. As if incapable of assimilating so many goings-on, he closed his eyes and became red and flushed. While Amina awaited the results of Ismail’s case against the State authorities; while the Brass Monkey grew in her womb; while Mary entered a state of shock from which she would fully emerge only when Joseph’s ghost returned to haunt her; while umbilical cord hung in pickle-jar and Mary’s chutneys filled our dreams with pointing fingers; while Reverend Mother ran the kitchens, my grandfather examined me and said, “I’m afraid there is no doubt; the poor lad has typhoid.”

“O God in heaven,” Reverend Mother cried out, “What dark devil has come, whatsitsname, to sit upon this house?”

This is how I have heard the story of the illness which nearly stopped me before I’d started: day and night, at the end of August 1948, mother and grandfather looked after me; Mary dragged herself out of her guilt and pressed cold flannels to my forehead; Reverend Mother sang lullabies and spooned food into my mouth; even my father, forgetting momentarily his own disorders, stood flapping helplessly in the doorway. But the night came when Doctor Aziz, looking as broken as an old horse, said, “There is nothing more I can do. He will be dead by morning.” And in the midst of wailing women and the incipient labor of my mother who had been pushed into it by grief and the tearing of Mary Pereira’s hair there was a knock; a servant announced Doctor Schaapsteker; who handed my grandfather a little bottle and said, “I make no bones about it: this is kill or cure. Two drops exactly; then wait and see.”

My grandfather, sitting head in hands in the rubble of his medical learning, asked, “What is it?” And Doctor Schaapsteker, nearly eighty-two, tongue flicking at the corners of his mouth: “Diluted venene of the king cobra. It has been known to work.”

Snakes can lead to triumph, just as ladders can be descended: my grandfather, knowing I would die anyway, administered the cobra poison. The family stood and watched while poison spread through the child’s body … and six hours later, my temperature had returned to normal. After that, my growth-rate lost its phenomenal aspects; but something was given in exchange for what was lost: life, and an early awareness of the ambiguity of snakes.

While my temperature came down, my sister was being born at Narlikar’s Nursing Home. It was September 1st; and the birth was so uneventful, so effortless that it passed virtually unnoticed on Methwold’s Estate; because on the same day Ismail Ibrahim visited my parents at the clinic and announced that the case had been won … While Ismail celebrated, I was grabbing the bars of my cot; while he cried, “So much for freezes! Your assets are your own again! By order of the High Court!”, I was heaving red-faced against gravity; and while Ismail announced, with a straight face, “Sinai bhai, the rule of law has won a famous victory,” and avoided my mother’s delighted, triumphant eyes, I, Baby Saleem, aged exactly one year, two weeks and one day, hauled myself upright in my cot.

The effects of the events of that day were twofold: I grew up with legs that were irretrievably bowed, because I had got to my feet too early; and the Brass Monkey (so called because of her thick thatch of red-gold hair, which would not darken until she was nine) learned that, if she was going to get any attention in her life, she would have to make plenty of noise.

I
T HAS BEEN
two whole days since Padma stormed out of my life. For two days, her place at the vat of mango kasaundy has been taken by another woman—also thick of waist, also hairy of forearm; but, in my eyes, no replacement at all!—while my own dung-lotus has vanished into I don’t know where. A balance has been upset; I feel cracks widening down the length of my body; because suddenly I am alone, without my necessary ear, and it isn’t enough. I am seized by a sudden fist of anger: why should I be so unreasonably treated by my one disciple? Other men have recited stories before me; other men were not so impetuously abandoned. When Valmiki, the author of the
Ramayana
, dictated his masterpiece to elephant-headed Ganesh, did the god walk out on him half-way? He certainly did not. (Note that, despite my Muslim background, I’m enough of a Bombayite to be well up in Hindu stories, and actually I’m very fond of the image of trunk-nosed, flap-eared Ganesh solemnly taking dictation!)

How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience? How to do without her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps—kept!—my feet on the ground? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present … but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?

I am, perhaps, hiding behind all these questions. Yes, perhaps that’s right. I should speak plainly, without the cloak of a question-mark: our Padma has gone, and I miss her. Yes, that’s it.

But there is still work to be done: for instance:

In the summer of 1956, when most things in the world were still larger than myself, my sister the Brass Monkey developed the curious habit of setting fire to shoes. While Nasser sank ships at Suez, thus slowing down the movements of the world by obliging it to travel around the Cape of Good Hope, my sister was also trying to impede our progress. Obliged to fight for attention, possessed by her need to place herself at the center of events, even of unpleasant ones (she was my sister, after all; but no prime minister wrote letters to her, no sadhus watched her from their places under garden taps; unprophesied, unphotographed, her life was a struggle from the start), she carried her war into the world of footwear, hoping, perhaps, that by burning our shoes she would make us stand still long enough to notice that she was there … she made no attempt at concealing her crimes. When my father entered his room to find a pair of black Oxfords on fire, the Brass Monkey was standing over them, match in hand. His nostrils were assailed by the unprecedented odor of ignited boot-leather, mingled with Cherry Blossom boot-polish and a little Three-In-One oil … “Look, Abba!” the Monkey said charmingly, “Look how pretty—just the exact color of my hair!”

Despite all precautions, the merry red flowers of my sister’s obsession blossomed all over the Estate that summer, blooming in the sandals of Nussie-the-duck and the film-magnate footwear of Homi Catrack; hair-colored flames licked at Mr. Dubash’s down-at-heel suedes and at Lila Sabarmati’s stiletto heels. Despite the concealment of matches and the vigilance of servants, the Brass Monkey found her ways, undeterred by punishment and threats. For one year, on and off, Methwold’s Estate was assailed by the fumes of incendiarized shoes; until her hair darkened into anonymous brown, and she seemed to lose interest in matches.

Amina Sinai, abhorring the idea of beating her children, temperamentally incapable of raising her voice, came close to her wits’ end; and the Monkey was sentenced, for day after day, to silence. This was my mother’s chosen disciplinary method: unable to strike us, she ordered us to seal our lips. Some echo, no doubt, of the great silence with which her own mother had tormented Aadam Aziz lingered in her ears—because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound—and with an emphatic
“Chup!”
she would place a finger across her lips and command our tongues to be still. It was a punishment which never failed to cow me into submission; the Brass Monkey, however, was made of less pliant stuff. Soundlessly, behind lips clamped tight as her grandmother’s, she plotted the incineration of leather—just as once, long ago, another monkey in another city had performed the act which made inevitable the burning of a leathercloth godown …