Midnight's Children (50 page)

Behind his foolishness and his rages, the cracks continued to spread; the disease munched steadily on his bones, while hatred ate the rest of him away. He did not die, however, until 1964. It happened like this: on Wednesday, December 25th, 1963—on Christmas Day!—Reverend Mother awoke to find her husband gone. Coming out into the courtyard of her home, amid hissing geese and the pale shadows of the dawn, she called for a servant; and was told that the Doctor Sahib had gone by rickshaw to the railway station. By the time she reached the station, the train had gone; and in this way my grandfather, following some unknown impulse, began his last journey, so that he could end his story where it (and mine) began, in a city surrounded by mountains and set upon a lake.

The valley lay hidden in an eggshell of ice; the mountains had closed in,
to snarl like angry jaws around the city on the lake
… winter in Srinagar; winter in Kashmir. On Friday, December 27th, a man answering to my grandfather’s description was seen, chugha-coated, drooling, in the vicinity of the Hazratbal Mosque. At four forty-five on Saturday morning, Haji Muhammad Khalil Ghanai noticed the theft, from the Mosque’s inner sanctum, of the valley’s most treasured relic: the holy hair of the Prophet Muhammad.

Did he? Didn’t he? If it was him, why did he not enter the Mosque, stick in hand, to belabor the faithful as he had become accustomed to doing? If not him, then why? There were rumors of a Central Government plot to “demoralize the Kashmiri Muslims,” by stealing their sacred hair; and counter-rumors about Pakistani
agents provocateurs
, who supposedly stole the relic to foment unrest … did they? Or not? Was this bizarre incident truly political, or was it the penultimate attempt at revenge upon God by a father who had lost his son? For ten days, no food was cooked in any Muslim home; there were riots and burnings of cars; but my grandfather was above politics now, and is not known to have joined in any processions. He was a man with a single mission; and what is known is that on January 1st, 1964 (a Wednesday, just one week after his departure from Agra), he set his face towards the hill which Muslims erroneously called the Takht-e-Sulaiman, Solomon’s seat, atop which stood a radio mast, but also the black blister of the temple of Sankara Acharya. Ignoring the distress of the city, my grandfather climbed; while the cracking sickness within him gnawed patiently through his bones. He was not recognized.

Doctor Aadam Aziz
(Heidelberg-returned)
died five days before the government announced that its massive search for the single hair of the Prophet’s head had been successful. When the State’s holiest saints assembled to authenticate the hair, my grandfather was unable to tell them the truth. (If they were wrong … but I can’t answer the questions I’ve asked.) Arrested for the crime—and later released on grounds of ill-health—was one Abdul Rahim Bande; but perhaps my grandfather, had he lived, could have shed a stranger light on the affair … at midday on January 1st, Aadam Aziz arrived outside the temple of Sankara Acharya. He was seen to raise his walking-stick; inside the temple, women performing the rite of puja at the Shiva-lingam shrunk back—as women had once shrank from the wrath of another, tetra-pod-obsessed doctor; and then the cracks claimed him, and his legs gave way beneath him as the bones disintegrated, and the effect of his fall was to shatter the rest of his skeleton beyond all hope of repair. He was identified by the papers in the pocket of his chugha-coat: a photograph of his son, and a half-completed (and fortunately, correctly addressed) letter to his wife. The body, too fragile to be transported, was buried in the valley of his birth.

I am watching Padma; her muscles have begun to twitch distractedly. “Consider this,” I say. “Is what happened to my grandfather so very strange? Compare it with the mere fact of the holy fuss over the theft of a hair; because every last detail of that is true, and by comparison, an old man’s death is surely perfectly normal.” Padma relaxes; her muscles give me the go-ahead. Because I’ve spent too long on Aadam Aziz; perhaps I’m afraid of what must be told next; but the revelation will not be denied.

One last fact: after the death of my grandfather, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru fell ill and never recovered his health. This fatal sickness finally killed him on May 27th, 1964.

If I hadn’t wanted to be a hero, Mr. Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn’t have taunted me; Masha Miovic wouldn’t have goaded me into losing my finger. And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn’t died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the father of the nation was Nehru. Nehru’s death: can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault?

But now we’re back in 1958; because of the thirty-seventh day of the mourning period, the truth, which had been creeping up on Mary Pereira—and therefore on me—for over eleven years, finally came out into the open; truth, in the shape of an old, old man, whose stench of Hell penetrated even my clogged-up nostrils, and whose body lacked fingers and toes and was littered with boils and holes, walked up our two-storey hillock and appeared through the dust-cloud to be seen by Mary Pereira, who was cleaning the chick-blinds on the verandah.

Here, then, was Mary’s nightmare come true; here, visible through the pall of dust, was the ghost of Joe D’Costa, walking towards the ground-floor office of Ahmed Sinai! As if it hadn’t been enough to show himself to Aadam Aziz … “Arré, Joseph,” Mary screamed, dropping her duster, “you go away now! Don’t come here now! Don’t be bothering the sahibs with your troubles! O God, Joseph, go, go na, you will kill me today!” But the ghost walked on down the driveway.

Mary Pereira, abandoning chick-blinds, leaving them hanging askew, rushes into the heart of the house to throw herself at the feet of my mother—small fat hands joined in supplication—“Begum Sahiba! Begum Sahiba, forgive me!” And my mother astounded: “What is this, Mary? What has got your goat?” But Mary is beyond dialogue, she is weeping uncontrollably, crying “O God my hour has come, my darling Madam, only let me go peacefully, do not put me in the jailkhana!” And also, “Eleven years, my Madam, see if I haven’t loved you all, O Madam, and that boy with his face like the moon; but now I am killed, I am no-good woman, I shall burn in hell!
Funtoosh!
” cried Mary, and again, “It’s finished;
funtoosh!
”

Still I did not guess what was coming; not even when Mary threw herself upon me (I was taller than her now; her tears wet my neck): “O baba, baba; today you must learn a thing, such a thing I have done; but come now …” and the little woman drew herself up with immense dignity, “… I will tell you all before that Joseph does. Begum, children, all you other great sirs and madams, come now to sahib’s office, and I will tell.”

Public announcements have punctuated my life; Amina in a. Delhi gully, and Mary in a sunless office … with my whole family trooping amazedly behind us, I went downstairs with Mary Pereira, who would not let go of my hand.

What was in the room with Ahmed Sinai? What had given my father a face from which djinns and money had been chased away and replaced by a look of utter desolation? What sat huddled up in the corner of the room, filling the air with a sulphurous stench? What, shaped like a man, lacked fingers and toes; whose face seemed to bubble like the hot springs of New Zealand (which I’d seen in the
Wonder Book of Wonders
)? … No time to explain, because Mary Pereira has begun to talk, gabbling out a secret which has been hidden for over eleven years, pulling us all out of the dream-world she invented when she changed name-tags, forcing us into the horror of the truth. And all the time she held on to me; like a mother protecting her child, she shielded me from my family. (Who were learning … as I was … that they were not …)

… It was just after midnight and in the streets there were fireworks and crowds, the many-headed monster roaring, I did it for my Joseph, Sahib, but please don’t send me to jail, look the boy is a good boy, Sahib, I am a poor woman, Sahib, one mistake, one minute in so many years, not jailkhana Sahib, I will go, eleven years I gave but I will go now, Sahib, only this is a good boy, Sahib, you must not send him, Sahib, after eleven years he is your son … O, you boy with your face like the sun coming out, O Saleem my piece-of-the-moon, you must know that your father was Winkie and your mother is also dead …

Mary Pereira ran out of the room.

Ahmed Sinai said, in a voice as faraway as a bird: “That, in the corner, is my old servant Musa, who tried to rob me once.”

(Can any narrative stand so much so soon? I glance towards Padma; she appears to be stunned, like a fish.)

Once upon a time there was a servant who robbed my father; who swore he was innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should prove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I told you then he was a time-bomb, and he had returned to explode. Musa had, indeed, contracted leprosy; and had returned across the silence of the years to beg for my father’s forgiveness, so that he could be released from his self-inflicted curse.

… Someone was called God who was not God; someone else was taken for a ghost, and was not a ghost; and a third person discovered that although his name was Saleem Sinai, he was not his parents’ son …

“I forgive you,” Ahmed Sinai said to the leper. After that day, he was cured of one of his obsessions; he never tried again to discover his own (and wholly imaginary) family curse.

“I couldn’t tell it any other way,” I say to Padma. “Too painful; I had to just blurt it out, all crazy-sounding, just like that.”

“O, mister,” Padma blubbers helplessly, “O, mister, mister!”

“Come on now,” I say, “It’s an old story.”

But her tears aren’t for me; for the moment, she’s forgotten about what-chews-at-bones-beneath-the-skin; she’s crying over Mary Pereira, of whom, as I’ve said, she has become excessively fond.

“What happened to her?” she says with red eyes. “That Mary?”

I am seized by an irrational anger. I shout: “You ask her!”

Ask her how she went home to the city of Panjim in Goa, how she told her ancient mother the story of her shame! Ask how her mother went wild with the scandal (appropriately enough; it was a time for old folk to lose their wits)! Ask: did daughter and old mother go into the streets to seek forgiveness? Was that not the one time in each ten years when the mummified corpse of St. Francis Xavier (as holy a relic as the Prophet’s hair) is taken from its vault in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus and carried around the town? Did Mary and old distraught Mrs. Pereira find themselves pressing up against the catafalque; was the old lady beside herself with grief for her daughter’s crime? Did old Mrs. Pereira, shouting, “Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai”, clamber up on to the bier to kiss the foot of the Holy One? Amidst uncountable crowds, did Mrs. Pereira enter a holy frenzy? Ask! Did she or didn’t she, in the clutches of her wild spirit, place her lips around the big toe on St. Francis’s left foot? Ask for yourself: did Mary’s mother
bite the toe right off?

“How?” Padma wails, unnerved by my wrath. “How,
ask
?”

… And is this also true: were the papers making it up when they wrote that the old lady had been miraculously punished; when they quoted Church sources and eye-witnesses, who described how the old woman was turned into solid stone? No? Ask her if it’s true that the Church sent a stone-statue figure of an old woman around the towns and the villages of Goa, to show what happened to those who misbehave with the saints? Ask: was this statue not seen in several villages simultaneously—and does that prove fraud, or a further miracle?

“You know I can’t ask anyone,” Padma howls … but I, feeling my fury subside, am making no more revelations tonight.

Baldly, then: Mary Pereira left us, and went to her mother in Goa. But Alice Pereira stayed; Alice remained in Ahmed Sinai’s office, and typed, and fetched snacks and fizzy drinks.

As for me—at the end of the mourning period for my uncle Hanif, I entered my second exile.

I
WAS OBLIGED TO COME
to the conclusion that Shiva, my rival, my changeling brother, could no longer be admitted into the forum of my mind; for reasons which were, I admit, ignoble. I was afraid he would discover what I was sure I could not conceal from him—the secrets of our birth. Shiva, for whom the world was things, for whom history could only be explained as the continuing struggle of oneself-against-the-crowd, would certainly insist on claiming his birthright; and, aghast at the very notion of my knock-kneed antagonist replacing me in the blue room of my childhood while I, perforce, walked morosely off the two-storey hillock to enter the northern slums; refusing to accept that the prophecy of Ramram Seth had been intended for Winkie’s boy, that it was to Shiva that Prime Ministers had written, and for Shiva that fishermen pointed out to sea … placing, in short, a far higher value on my eleven-year-old sonship than on mere blood, I resolved that my destructive, violent alter ego should never again enter the increasingly fractious councils of the Midnight Children’s Conference; that I would guard my secret—which had once been Mary’s—with my very life.

There were nights, at this time, when I avoided convening the Conference at all—not because of the unsatisfactory turn it had taken, but simply because I knew it would take time, and cool blood, to erect a barrier around my new knowledge which could deny it to the Children; eventually, I was confident, I would manage this … but I was afraid of Shiva. Most ferocious and powerful of the Children, he would penetrate where others could not go … At any rate, I avoided my fellow-Children; and then suddenly it was too late, because, having exiled Shiva, I found myself hurled into an exile from which I was incapable of contacting my more-than-five-hundred colleagues: I was flung across the Partition-created frontier into Pakistan.