Midnight's Children (7 page)

“You are a mad man. I want more lime water.”

My grandfather opens the windows, turns to his bride. “The smoke will take time to go; I will take a walk. Are you coming?”

Lips clamped; eyes squeezed, a single violent No from the head; and my grandfather goes into the streets alone. His parting shot: “Forget about being a good Kashmiri girl. Start thinking about being a modern Indian woman.”

… While in the Cantonment area, at British Army H.Q., one Brigadier R. E. Dyer is waxing his moustache.

It is April 7th, 1919, and in Amritsar the Mahatma’s grand design is being distorted. The shops have shut; the railway station is closed; but now rioting mobs are breaking them up. Doctor Aziz, leather bag in hand, is out in the streets, giving help wherever possible. Trampled bodies have been left where they fell. He is bandaging wounds, daubing them liberally with Mercurochrome, which makes them look bloodier than ever, but at least disinfects them. Finally he returns to his hotel room, his clothes soaked in red stains, and Naseem commences a panic. “Let me help, let me help, Allah what a man I’ve married, who goes into gullies to fight with goondas!” She is all over him with water on wads of cotton wool. “I don’t know why can’t you be a respectable doctor like ordinary people are just cure important illnesses and all? O God you’ve got blood everywhere! Sit, sit now, let me wash you at least!”

“It isn’t blood, wife.”

“You think I can’t see for myself with my own eyes? Why must you make a fool of me even when you’re hurt? Must your wife not look after you, even?”

“It’s Mercurochrome, Naseem. Red medicine.”

Naseem—who had become a whirlwind of activity, seizing clothes, running taps—freezes. “You do it on purpose,” she says, “to make me look stupid. I am not stupid. I have read several books.”

It is April 13th, and they are still in Amritsar. “This affair isn’t finished,” Aadam Aziz told Naseem. “We can’t go, you see: they may need doctors again.”

“So we must sit here and wait until the end of the world?”

He rubbed his nose. “No, not so long, I am afraid.”

That afternoon, the streets are suddenly full of people, all moving in the same direction, defying Dyer’s new Martial Law regulations. Aadam tells Naseem, “There must be a meeting planned—there will be trouble from the military. They have banned meetings.”

“Why do you have to go? Why not wait to be called?”

… A compound can be anything from a wasteland to a park. The largest compound in Amritsar is called Jallianwala Bagh. It is not grassy. Stones cans glass and other things are everywhere. To get into it, you must walk down a very narrow alleyway between two buildings. On April 13th, many thousands of Indians are crowding through this alleyway. “It is peaceful protest,” someone tells Doctor Aziz. Swept along by the crowds, he arrives at the mouth of the alley. A bag from Heidelberg is in his right hand. (No close-up is necessary.) He is, I know, feeling very scared, because his nose is itching worse than it ever has; but he is a trained doctor, he puts it out of his mind, he enters the compound. Somebody is making a passionate speech. Hawkers move through the crowd selling channa and sweetmeats. The air is filled with dust. There do not seem to be any goondas, any troublemakers, as far as my grandfather can see. A group of Sikhs has spread a cloth on the ground and is eating, seated around it. There is still a smell of ordure in the air. Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. E. Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack troops. He is the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar—an important man, after all; the waxed tips of his moustache are rigid with importance. As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather’s nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer’s right and twenty-five to his left; and Aadam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. “Yaaaakh-
thoooo
!” he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life. His “doctori-attaché” flies open; bottles, liniment and syringes scatter in the dust. He is scrabbling furiously at people’s feet, trying to save his equipment before it is crushed. There is a noise like teeth chattering in winter and someone falls on him. Red stuff stains his shirt. There are screams now and sobs and the strange chattering continues. More and more people seem to have stumbled and fallen on top of my grandfather. He becomes afraid for his back. The clasp of his bag is digging into his chest, inflicting upon it a bruise so severe and mysterious that it will not fade until after his death, years later, on the hill of Sankara Acharya or Takht-e-Sulaiman. His nose is jammed against a bottle of red pills. The chattering stops and is replaced by the noises of people and birds. There seems to be no traffic noise whatsoever. Brigadier Dyer’s fifty men put down their machine-guns and go away. They have fired a total of one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into the unarmed crowd. Of these, one thousand five hundred and sixteen have found their mark, killing or wounding some person. “Good shooting,” Dyer tells his men, “We have done a jolly good thing.”

When my grandfather got home that night, my grandmother was trying hard to be a modern woman, to please him; and so she did not turn a hair at his appearance. “I see you’ve been spilling the Mercurochrome again, clumsy,” she said, appeasingly.

“It’s blood,” he replied, and she fainted. When he brought her round with the help of a little sal volatile, she said, “Are you hurt?”

“No,” he said.

“But
where
have you
been
, my
God
?”

“Nowhere on earth,” he said, and began to shake in her arms.

My own hand, I confess, has begun to wobble; not entirely because of its theme, but because I have noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing in my wrist, beneath the skin … No matter. We all owe death a life. So let me conclude with the uncorroborated rumor that the boatman Tai, who recovered from his scrofulous infection soon after my grandfather left Kashmir, did not die until 1947, when (the story goes) he was infuriated by India and Pakistan’s struggle over his valley, and walked to Chhamb with the express purpose of standing between the opposing forces and giving them a piece of his mind. Kashmir for the Kashmiris: that was his line. Naturally, they shot him. Oskar Lubin would probably have approved of his rhetorical gesture; R. E. Dyer might have commended his murderers’ rifle skills.

I must go to bed. Padma is waiting; and I need a little warmth.

P
LEASE BELIEVE
that I am falling apart.

I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug—that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust. This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)

There are moments of terror, but they go away. Panic like a bubbling sea-beast comes up for air, boils on the surface, but eventually returns to the deep. It is important for me to remain calm. I chew betel-nut and expectorate in the direction of a cheap brassy bowl, playing the ancient game of hit-the-spittoon: Nadir Khan’s game, which he learned from the old men in Agra … and these days you can buy “rocket paans” in which, as well as the gum-reddening paste of the betel, the comfort of cocaine lies folded in a leaf. But that would be cheating.

… Rising from my pages comes the unmistakable whiff of chutney. So let me obfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately-gifted olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments. But now, “A cook?” you gasp in horror, “A khansama merely? How is it possible?” And, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings—by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.

But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next: “At this rate,” Padma complains, “you’ll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.” She is affecting nonchalance, jutting a careless hip in my general direction, but doesn’t fool me. I know now that she is, despite all her protestations, hooked. No doubt about it: my story has her by the throat, so that all at once she’s stopped nagging me to go home, to take more baths, to change my vinegar-stained clothes, to abandon even for a moment this darkling pickle-factory where the smells of spices are forever frothing in the air … now my dung goddess simply makes up a cot in the corner of this office and prepares my food on two blackened gas-rings, only interrupting my Anglepoise-lit writing to expostulate, “You better get a move on or you’ll die before you get yourself born.” Fighting down the proper pride of the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her. “Things—even people—have a way of leaking into each other,” I explain, “like flavors when you cook. Ilse Lubin’s suicide, for example, leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise,” I intone earnestly, “the past has dripped into me … so we can’t ignore it …” Her shrug, which does pleasantly wavy things to her chest, cuts me off. “To me it’s a crazy way of telling your life-story,” she cries, “if you can’t even get to where your father met your mother.”

… And certainly Padma is leaking into me. As history pours out of my fissured body, my lotus is quietly dripping in, with her down-to-earthery, and her paradoxical superstition, her contradictory love of the fabulous—so it’s appropriate that I’m about to tell the story of the death of Mian Abdullah. The doomed Hummingbird: a legend of our times.

… And Padma is a generous woman, because she stays by me in these last days, although I can’t do much for her. That’s right—and once again, it’s a fitting thing to mention before I launch into the tale of Nadir Khan—I am unmanned. Despite Padma’s many and varied gifts and ministrations, I can’t leak into her, not even when she puts her left foot on my right, winds her right leg around my waist, inclines her head up toward mine and makes cooing noises; not even when she whispers in my ear, “So now that the writery is done, let’s see if we can make your other pencil work!”; despite everything she tries, I cannot hit her spittoon.

Enough confessions. Bowing to the ineluctable Padma-pressures of what-happened-nextism, and remembering the finite quantity of time at my disposal, I leap forwards from Mercurochrome and land in 1942. (I’m keen to get my parents together, too.)

It seems that in the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism. Bicycling around Agra, he whistled piercingly, badly, but very happily. He was by no means alone, because, despite strenuous efforts by the authorities to stamp it out, this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year, and drastic steps were to be taken before it was brought under control. The old men at the paan-shop at the top of Cornwallis Road chewed betel and suspected a trick. “I have lived twice as long as I should have,” the oldest one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing up against each other around his vocal chords, “and I’ve never seen so many people so cheerful in such a bad time. It is the Devil’s work.” It was, indeed, a resilient virus—the weather alone should have discouraged such germs from breeding, since it had become clear that the rains had failed. The earth was cracking. Dust ate the edges of roads, and on some days huge gaping fissures appeared in the midst of macadamed intersections. The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might now issue from the Assuring earth. Apparently a Sikh from the bicycle-repair shop had had his turban pushed off his head in the heat of one afternoon, when his hair, without any reason, had suddenly stood on end. And, more prosaically, the water shortage had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with which to adulterate the milk … Far away, there was a World War in progress once again. In Agra, the heat mounted. But still my grandfather whistled. The old men at the paan-shop found his whistling in rather poor taste, given the circumstances.

(And I, like them, expectorate and rise above fissures.)

Astride his bicycle, leather attaché attached to carrier, my grandfather whistled. Despite irritations of the nose, his lips pursed. Despite a bruise on his chest which had refused to fade for twenty-three years, his good humor was unimpaired. Air passed his lips and was transmuted into sound. He whistled an old German tune:
Tannenbaum
.

The optimism epidemic had been caused by one single human being, whose name, Mian Abdullah, was only used by newspapermen. To everyone else, he was the Hummingbird, a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist. “Magician turned conjurer,” the newspapermen wrote, “Mian Abdullah rose from the famous magicians’ ghetto in Delhi to become the hope of India’s hundred million Muslims.” The Hummingbird was the founder, chairman, unifier and moving spirit of the Free Islam Convocation; and in 1942, marquees and rostrums were being erected on the Agra maidan, where the Convocation’s second annual assembly was about to take place. My grandfather, fifty-two-years-old, his hair turned white by the years and other afflictions, had begun whistling as he passed the maidan. Now he leaned round corners on his bicycle, taking them at a jaunty angle, threading his way between cowpats and children … and, in another time and place, told his friend the Rani of Cooch Naheen: “I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian. I’m still not much of a Muslim, but I’m all for Abdullah. He’s fighting my fight.” His eyes were still the blue of Kashmiri sky … he arrived home, and although his eyes retained a glimmer of contentment, the whistling stopped; because waiting for him in the courtyard filled with malevolent geese were the disapproving features of my grandmama, Naseem Aziz, whom he had made the mistake of loving in fragments, and who was now unified and transmuted into the formidable figure she would always remain, and who was always known by the curious title of Reverend Mother.