Midnight's Children (58 page)

That afternoon, Mutasim the Handsome took Jamila’s brother Saleem to one side and tried hard to make friends; he showed Saleem the peacocks imported from Rajasthan before Partition and the Nawab’s precious collection of books of spells, from which he extracted such talismans and incantations as would help him rule with sagacity; and while Mutasim (who was not the most intelligent or cautious of youths) was escorting Saleem around the polo-field, he confessed that he had written out a love-charm on a piece of parchment, in the hope of pressing it against the hand of the famous Jamila Singer and making her fall in love. At this point Saleem acquired the air of a bad-tempered dog and tried to turn away; but Mutasim now begged to know what Jamila Singer really looked like. Saleem, however, kept his silence; until Mutasim, in the grip of a wild obsession, asked to be brought close enough to Jamila to press his charm against her hand. Now Saleem, whose sly look did not register on love-struck Mutasim, said, “Give me the parchment”; and Mutasim, who, though expert in the geography of European cities, was innocent in things magical, yielded his charm to Saleem, thinking it would still work on his behalf, even if applied by another.

Evening approached at the palace; the convoy of cars bringing General and Begum Zulfikar, their son Zafar, and friends, approached, too. But now the wind changed, and began to blow from the north: a cold wind, and also an intoxicating one, because in the north of Kif were the best hashish fields in the land, and at this time of year the female plants were ripe and in heat. The air was filled with the perfume of the heady lust of the plants, and all who breathed it became doped to some extent. The vacuous beatitude of the plants affected the drivers in the convoy, which only reached the palace by great good fortune, having overturned a number of street-side barber-stalls and invaded at least one tea-shop, leaving the Kifis wondering whether the new horseless carriages, having stolen the streets, were now going to capture their homes as well.

The wind from the north entered the enormous and highly sensitive nose of Saleem, Jamila’s brother, and made him so drowsy that he fell asleep in his room; so that he missed the events of an evening during which, he afterwards learned, the hashashin wind had transformed the behavior of the guests at the engagement ceremony, making them giggle convulsively and gaze provocatively at one another through heavy-lidded eyes; braided Generals sat splay-legged on gilded chairs and dreamed of Paradise. The mehndi ceremony took place amid a sleepy contentment so profound that nobody noticed when the bridegroom relaxed so completely that he wet his pants; and even the quarreling badmaashes from the C.O.P. linked arms and sang a folk-song. And when Mutasim the Handsome, possessed by the lustiness of hashish-plants, attempted to plunge behind the great gold-and-silken sheet with its single hole, Major Alauddin Latif restrained him with beatific good humor, preventing him from seeing Jamila Singer’s face without even bloodying his nose. The evening ended when all the guests fell asleep at their tables; but Jamila Singer was escorted to her rooms by a sleepily-beaming Latif.

At midnight, Saleem awoke to find that he still clutched the magical parchment of Mutasim the Handsome in his right hand; and since the wind from the north was still blowing gently through his room, he made up his mind to creep, in chappals and dressing-gown, through the darkened passages of the lovely palace, past all the accumulated debris of a decaying world, rusting suits of armor and ancient tapestries which provided centuries of food for the palace’s one billion moths, giant mahseer trout swimming in glass seas, and a profusion of hunting trophies including a tarnished golden teetar-bird on a teak plinth which commemorated the day on which an earlier Nawab, in the company of Lord Curzon and party, had shot 111, 111 teetars in a single day; he crept past the statues of dead birds into the zenana chambers where the women of the palace slept, and then, sniffing the air, he selected one door, turned the handle and went inside.

There was a giant bed with a floating mosquito-net caught in a stream of colorless light from the maddening, midnight moon; Saleem moved towards it, and then stopped, because he had seen, at the window, the figure of a man trying to climb into the room. Mutasim the Handsome, made shameless by his infatuation and the hashashin wind, had resolved to look at Jamila’s face, no matter what the cost … And Saleem, invisible in the shadows of the room cried out: “Hands up! Or I shoot!” Saleem was bluffing; but Mutasim, whose hands were on the window-sill, supporting his full weight, did not know that, and was placed in a quandary: to hang on and be shot, or let go and fall? He attempted to argue back, “You shouldn’t be here yourself,” he said, “I’ll tell Amina Begum.” He had recognized the voice of his oppressor; but Saleem pointed out the weakness of his position, and Mutasim, pleading, “Okay, only don’t fire,” was permitted to descend the way he’d come. After that day, Mutasim persuaded his father to make a formal proposal of marriage to Jamila’s parents; but she, who had been born and raised without love, retained her old hatred of all who claimed to love her, and turned him down. He left Kif and came to Karachi, but she would not entertain his importunate proposals; and eventually he joined the Army and became a martyr in the war of 1965.

The tragedy of Mutasim the Handsome, however, is only a subplot in our story; because now Saleem and his sister were alone, and she, awakened by the exchange between the two youths, asked, “Saleem? What is happening?”

Saleem approached his sister’s bed; his hand sought hers; and parchment was pressed against skin. Only now did Saleem, his tongue loosened by the moon and the lust-drenched breeze, abandon all notions of purity and confess his own love to his open-mouthed sister.

There was a silence; then she cried, “Oh, no, how can you—,” but the magic of the parchment was doing battle with the strength of her hatred of love; so although her body grew stiff and jerky as a wrestler’s, she listened to him explaining that there was no sin, he had worked it all out, and after all, they were not truly brother and sister; the blood in his veins was not the blood in hers; in the breeze of that insane night he attempted to undo all the knots which not even Mary Pereira’s confession had succeeded in untying; but even as he spoke he could hear his words sounding hollow, and realized that although what he was saying was the literal truth, there were other truths which had become more important because they had been sanctified by time; and although there was no need for shame or horror, he saw both emotions on her forehead, he smelt them on her skin, and, what was worse, he could feel and smell them in and upon himself. So, in the end, not even the magic parchment of Mutasim the Handsome was powerful enough to bring Saleem Sinai and Jamila Singer together; he left her room with bowed head, followed by her deer-startled eyes; and in time the effects of the spell faded altogether, and she took a dreadful revenge. As he left the room the corridors of the palace were suddenly filled with the shriek of a newly-affianced princess, who had awoken from a dream of her wedding-night in which her marital bed had suddenly and unaccountably become awash in rancid yellow liquid; afterwards, she made inquiries, and when she learned the prophetic truth of her dream, resolved never to reach puberty while Zafar was alive, so that she could stay in her palatial bedroom and avoid the foul-smelling horror of his weakness.

The next morning, the two badmaashes of the Combined Opposition Party awoke to find themselves back in their own beds; but when they had dressed, they opened the door of their chamber to find two of the biggest soldiers in Pakistan outside it, standing peacefully with crossed rifles, barring the exit. The badmaashes shouted and wheedled, but the soldiers stayed in position until the polls were closed; then they quietly disappeared. The badmaashes sought out the Nawab, finding him in his exceptional rose-garden; they waved their arms and raised their voices; travesty-of-justice was mentioned, and electoral-jiggery-pokery; also chicanery; but the Nawab showed them thirteen new varieties of Kifi rose, crossbred by himself. They ranted on—death-of-democracy, autocratic-tyranny—until he smiled gently, gently, and said, “My friends, yesterday my daughter was betrothed to Zafar Zulfikar; soon, I hope, my other girl will wed our President’s own dear son. Think, then—what dishonor for me, what scandal on my name, if even one vote were cast in Kif against my future relative! Friends, I am a man to whom honor is of concern; so stay in my house, eat, drink; only do not ask for what I cannot give.”

And we all lived happily
… at any rate, even without the traditional last-sentence fiction of fairy-tales, my story does indeed end in fantasy; because when Basic Democrats had done their duty, the newspapers—
Fang, Dawn, Pakistan Times
—announced a crushing victory for the President’s Muslim League over the Mader-i-Millat’s Combined Opposition Party; thus proving to me that I have been only the humblest of jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence—that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

A little bird whispers in my ear: “Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth.” I accept the criticism; I know, I know. And, years later, the Widow knew. And Jamila: for whom what-had-been-sanctified-as-truth (by Time, by habit, by a grandmother’s pronouncement, by lack of imagination, by a father’s acquiescence) proved more believable than what she knew to be so.

W
HAT IS WAITING
to be told: the return of ticktock. But now time is counting down to an end, not a birth; there is, too, a weariness to be mentioned, a general fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will be the only solution, because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply run out of steam, and then there’s nothing for it but to finish with them.

How a piece fell out of the moon, and Saleem achieved purity … the clock is ticking now; and because all countdowns require a zero, let me state that the end came on September 22nd, 1965; and that the precise instant of the arrival-at-zero was, inevitably, the stroke of midnight. Although the old grandfather clock in my aunt Alia’s house, which kept accurate time but always chimed two minutes late, never had a chance to strike.

My grandmother Naseem Aziz arrived in Pakistan in mid-1964, leaving behind an India in. which Nehru’s death had precipitated a bitter power struggle. Morarji Desai, the Finance Minister, and Jagjivan Ram, most powerful of the untouchables, united in their determination to prevent the establishment of a Nehru dynasty; so Indira Gandhi was denied the leadership. The new Prime Minister was Lal Bahadur Shastri, another member of that generation of politicians who seemed to have been pickled in immortality; in the case of Shastri, however, this was only maya, illusion. Nehru and Shastri have both fully proved their mortality; but there are still plenty of the others left, clutching Time in their mummified fingers and refusing to let it move … in Pakistan, however, the clocks ticked and tocked.

Reverend Mother did not overtly approve of my sister’s career; it smacked too much of film-stardom. “My family, whatsitsname,” she sighed to Pia mumani, “is even less controllable than the price of gas.” Secretly, however, she may have been impressed, because she respected power and position and Jamila was now so exalted as to be welcome in the most powerful and best-placed houses in the land … my grandmother settled in Rawalpindi; however, with a strange show of independence, she chose not to live in the house of General Zulfikar. She and my aunt Pia moved into a modest bungalow in the old part of town; and by pooling their savings, purchased a concession on the long-dreamed-of petrol pump.

Naseem never mentioned Aadam Aziz, nor would she grieve over him; it was almost as though she were relieved that my querulous grandfather, who had in his youth despised the Pakistan movement, and who in all probability blamed the Muslim League for the death of his friend Mian Abdullah, had by dying permitted her to go alone into the Land of the Pure. Setting her face against the past, Reverend Mother concentrated on gasoline and oil. The pump was on a prime site, near the Rawalpindi-Lahore grand trunk road; it did very well. Pia and Naseem took it in turns to spend the day in the manager’s glass booth while attendants filled up cars and Army trucks. They proved a magical combination. Pia attracted customers with the beacon of a beauty which obstinately refused to fade; while Reverend Mother, who had been transformed by bereavement into a woman who was more interested in other people’s lives than her own, took to inviting the pump’s customers into her glass booth for cups of pink Kashmiri tea; they would accept with some trepidation, but when they realized that the old lady did not propose to bore them with endless reminiscences, they relaxed, loosened collars and tongues, and Reverend Mother was able to bathe in the blessed oblivion of other people’s lives. The pump rapidly became famous in those parts, drivers began to go out of their way to use it—often on two consecutive days, so that they could both feast their eyes on my divine aunt and tell their woes to my eternally patient grandmother, who had developed the absorbent properties of a sponge, and always waited until her guests had completely finished before squeezing out of her own lips a few drops of simple, firm advice—while their cars were filled up with petrol and polished by pump-attendants, my grandmother would recharge and polish their lives. She sat in her glass confessional and solved the problems of the world; her own family, however, seemed to have lost importance in her eyes.

Moustachioed, matriarchal, proud: Naseem Aziz had found her own way of coping with tragedy; but in finding it had become the first victim of that spirit of detached fatigue which made the end the only possible solution. (Tick, tock.) … However, on the face of it, she appeared to have not the slightest intention of following her husband into the camphor garden reserved for the righteous; she seemed to have more in common with the methuselah leaders of her abandoned India. She grew, with alarming rapidity, wider and wider; until builders were summoned to expand her glassed-in booth. “Make it big big,” she instructed them, with a rare flash of humor, “Maybe I’ll still be here after a century, whatsitsname, and Allah knows how big I’ll have become; I don’t want to be troubling you every ten-twelve years.”