Midnight's Children (38 page)

The fever broke today. For two days (I’m told) Padma has been sitting up all night, placing cold wet flannels on my forehead, holding me through my shivers and dreams of Widow’s hands; for two days she has been blaming herself for her potion of unknown herbs. “But,” I reassure her, “this time, it wasn’t anything to do with that.” I recognize this fever; it’s come up from inside me and from nowhere else; like a bad stink, it’s oozed through my cracks. I caught exactly such a fever on my tenth birthday, and spent two days in bed; now, as my memories return to leak out of me, this old fever has come back, too. “Don’t worry,” I say, “I caught these germs almost twenty-one years ago.”

We are not alone. It is morning at the pickle-factory; they have brought my son to see me. Someone (never mind who) stands beside Padma at my bedside, holding him in her arms. “Baba, thank God you are better, you don’t know what you were talking in your sickness.” Someone speaks anxiously, trying to force her way into my story ahead of time; but it won’t work … someone, who founded this pickle-factory and its ancillary bottling works, who has been looking after my impenetrable child, just as once … wait on! She nearly wormed it out of me then, but fortunately I’ve still got my wits about me, fever or no fever! Someone will just have to step back and remain cloaked in anonymity until it’s her turn; and that won’t be until the very end. I turn my eyes away from her to look at Padma. “Do not think,” I admonish her, “that because I had a fever, the things I told you were not completely true. Everything happened just as I described.”

“Oh God, you and your stories,” she cries, “all day, all night—you have made yourself sick! Stop some time, na, what will it hurt?” I set my lips obstinately; and now she, with a sudden change of mood: “So, tell me now, mister: is there anything you want?”

“Green chutney,” I request, “Bright green—green as grasshoppers.” And someone who cannot be named remembers and tells Padma (speaking in the soft voice which is only used at sickbeds and funerals), “I know what he means.”

… Why, at this crucial instant, when all manner of things were waiting to be described—when the Pioneer Café was so close, and the rivalry of knees and nose—did I introduce a mere condiment into the conversation? (Why do I waste time, in this account, on a humble preserve, when I could be describing the elections of 1957—when all India is waiting, twenty-one years ago, to vote?) Because I sniffed the air; and scented, behind the solicitous expressions of my visitors, a sharp whiff of danger. I intended to defend myself; but I required the assistance of chutney …

I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what has remained undescribed: through green-tinged glass windows, my room looks out on to an iron catwalk and then down to the cooking-floor, where copper vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps, working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle fumes; while (looking the other way, through a green-tinged window on the world) railway tracks shine dully in morning sun, bridged over at regular intervals by the messy gantries of the electrification system. In daylight, our saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance above the factory doors; we switch her off to save power. But electric trains are using power: yellow-and-brown local trains clatter south towards Churchgate Station from Dadar and Borivli, from Kurla and Bassein Road. Human flies hang in thick white-trousered clusters from the trains; I do not deny that, within the factory walls, you may also see some flies. But there are also compensating lizards, hanging stilly upside-down on the ceiling, their jowls reminiscent of the Kathiawar peninsula … sounds, too have been waiting to be heard: bubbling of vats, loud singing, coarse imprecations, bawdy humor of fuzz-armed women; the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped admonitions of overseers; the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the adjacent bottling-works; and rush of trains, and the buzzing (infrequent, but inevitable) of flies … while grasshopper-green chutney is being extracted from its vat, to be brought on a wiped-clean plate with saffron and green stripes around the rim, along with another plate piled high with snacks from the local Irani shop; while what-has-now-been-shown goes on as usual, and what-can-now-be-heard fills the air (to say nothing of what can be smelled), I, alone in bed in my office, realize with a start of alarm that outings are being suggested.

“… When you are stronger,” someone who cannot be named is saying, “a day at Elephanta, why not, a nice ride in a motor-launch, and all those caves with so-beautiful carvings; or Juhu Beach, for swimming and coconut-milk and camel-races; or Aarey Milk Colony, even! …” And Padma: “Fresh air, yes, and the little one will like to be with his father.” And someone, patting my son on his head: “There, of course, we will all go. Nice picnic; nice day out. Baba, it will do you good …”

As chutney arrives, bearer-borne, in my room, I hasten to put a stop to these suggestions. “No,” I refuse. “I have work to do.” And I see a look pass between Padma and someone; and I see that I’ve been right to be suspicious. Because I’ve been tricked by offers of picnics once before! Once before, false smiles and offers of Aarey Milk Colony have fooled me into going out of doors and into a motor-car; and then before I knew it there were hands seizing me, there were hospital corridors and doctors and nurses holding me in place while over my nose a mask poured anesthetic over me and a voice said, Count now, count to ten … I know what they are planning. “Listen,” I tell them, “I don’t need doctors.”

And Padma, “Doctors? Who is talking about …” But she is fooling nobody; and with a little smile I say, “Here: everybody: take some chutney. I must tell you some important things.”

And while chutney—the same chutney which, back in 1957, my ayah Mary Pereira had made so perfectly; the grasshopper-green chutney which is forever associated with those days—carried them back into the world of my past, while chutney mellowed them and made them receptive, I spoke to them, gently, persuasively, and by a mixture of condiment and oratory kept myself out of the hands of the pernicious green-medicine men. I said: “My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I’m telling my story for him, so that afterwards, when I’ve lost my struggle against cracks, he will know. Morality, judgment, character … it all starts with memory … and I am keeping carbons.”

Green chutney on chilli-pakoras, disappearing down someone’s gullet; grasshopper-green on tepid chapatis, vanishing behind Padma’s lips. I see them begin to weaken, and press on. “I told you the truth,” I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”

Yes: I said “sane.” I knew what they were thinking: “Plenty of children invent imaginary friends; but one thousand and one! That’s just crazy!” The midnight children shook even Padma’s faith in my narrative; but I brought her round, and now there’s no more talk of outings.

How I persuaded them: by talking about my son, who needed to know my story; by shedding light on the workings of memory; and by other devices, some naively honest, others wily as foxes. “Even Muhammad,” I said, “at first believed himself insane: do you think the notion never crossed my mind? But the Prophet had his Khadija, his Abu-Bakr, to reassure him of the genuineness of his Calling; nobody betrayed him into the hands of asylum-doctors.” By now, the green chutney was filling them with thoughts of years ago; I saw guilt appear on their faces, and shame. “What is truth?” I waxed rhetorical, “What is sanity? Did Jesus rise up from the grave? Do Hindus not accept—Padma—that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma dreamed, is dreaming the universe; that we only see dimly through that dream-web, which is Maya. Maya,” I adopted a haughty, lecturing tone, “may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit. Apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya. If I say that certain things took place which you, lost in Brahma’s dream, find hard to believe, then which of us is right? Have some more chutney,” I added graciously, taking a generous helping myself. “It tastes very good.”

Padma began to cry. “I never said I didn’t believe,” she wept. “Of course, every man must tell his story in his own true way; but …”

“But,” I interrupted conclusively, “you also—don’t you—want to know what happens? About the hands that danced without touching, and the knees? And later, the curious baton of Commander Sabarmati, and of course the Widow? And the Children—what became of them?”

And Padma nodded. So much for doctors and asylums; I have been left to write. (Alone, except for Padma at my feet.) Chutney and oratory, theology and curiosity: these are the things that saved me. And one more—call it education, or class-origins; Mary Pereira would have called it my “brought-up.” By my show of erudition and by the purity of my accents, I shamed them into feeling unworthy of judging me; not a very noble deed, but when the ambulance is waiting round the corner, all’s fair. (It was: I smelled it.) Still—I’ve had a valuable warning. It’s a dangerous business to try and impose one’s view of things on others.

Padma: if you’re a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.

Meanwhile, I am ten years old, and working out how to hide in the boot of my mother’s car.

That was the month when Purushottam the sadhu (whom I had never told about my inner life) finally despaired of his stationary existence and contracted the suicidal hiccups which assailed him for an entire year, frequently lifting him bodily several inches off the ground so that his water-balded head cracked alarmingly against the garden tap, and finally killed him, so that one evening at the cocktail hour he toppled sideways with his legs still locked in the lotus position, leaving my mother’s verrucas without any hope of salvation; when I would often stand in the garden of Buckingham Villa in the evenings, watching the Sputniks cross the sky, and feeling as simultaneously exalted and isolated as little Laika, the first and still the only dog to be shot into space (the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, shortly to contract syphilis, sat beside me following the bright pinprick of Sputnik II with her Alsatian eyes—it was a time of great canine interest in the space race); when Evie Burns and her gang occupied my clocktower, and washing-chests had been both forbidden and outgrown, so that for the sake of secrecy and sanity I was obliged to limit my visits to the midnight children to our private, silent hour—I communed with them every midnight, and only at midnight, during that hour which is reserved for miracles, which is somehow outside time; and when—to get to the point—I resolved to prove, with the evidence of my own eyes, the terrible thing I had glimpsed sitting in the front of my mother’s thoughts. Ever since I lay hidden in a washing-chest and heard two scandalous syllables, I had been suspecting my mother of secrets; my incursions into her thought processes had confirmed my suspicions; so it was with a hard glint in my eye, and a steely determination, that I visited Sonny Ibrahim one afternoon after school, with the intention of enlisting his help.

I found Sonny in his room, surrounded by posters of Spanish bullfights, morosely playing Indoor Cricket by himself. When he saw me he cried unhappily, “Hey man I’m damn sorry about Evie man she won’t listen to anyone man what the hell’d you do to her anyway?” … But I held up a dignified hand, commanding and being accorded silence.

“No time for that now, man,” I said. “The thing is, I need to know how to open locks without keys.”

A true fact about Sonny Ibrahim: despite all his bullfighting dreams, his genius lay in the realm of mechanical things. For some time now, he had taken on the job of maintaining all the bikes on Methwold’s Estate in return for gifts of comic-books and a free supply of fizzy drinks. Even Evelyn Lilith Burns gave her beloved Indiabike into his care. All machines, it seemed, were won over by the innocent delight with which he caressed their moving parts; no contraption could resist his ministrations. To put it another way: Sonny Ibrahim had become (out of a spirit of pure inquiry) an expert at picking locks.

Now offered a chance of demonstrating his loyalty to me, his eyes brightened. “Jus’ show me the lock, man! Lead me to the thing!”

When we were sure we were unobserved, we crept along the driveway between Buckingham Villa and Sonny’s Sans Souci; we stood behind my family’s old Rover; and I pointed at the boot. “That’s the one,” I stated. “I need to be able to open it from the outside, and the inside also.”

Sonny’s eyes widened. “Hey, what’re you up to, man? You running away from home secretly and all?”

Finger to lips, I adopted a mysterious expression. “Can’t explain, Sonny,” I said solemnly, “Top-drawer classified information.”

“Wow, man,” Sonny said, and showed me in thirty seconds how to open the boot with the aid of a strip of thin pink plastic. “Take it, man,” said Sonny Ibrahim, “You need it more than me.”

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could never manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband’s unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers … shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips. But now, hidden in the boot of the Rover, there travelled with her a stowaway, who lay hidden and protected by stolen cushions, clutching a thin strip of pink plastic in his hand.