The audience had begun to scream before he finished; the poison of his words entered their veins—there were grown men rolling in the aisles clutching their bellies, not laughing but crying, Hai Ram! Hai Ram!—and women tearing their hair: the city’s finest coiffures tumbling around the ears of the poisoned ladies—there were film-stars yelling like fishwives and something terrible to smell in the air—and Hanif whispered, “Get out of here, big sister—if a Muslim did this thing there will be hell to pay.”
For every ladder, there is a snake … and for forty-eight hours after the abortive end of The Lovers of Kashmir, our family remained within the walls of Buckingham Villa (“Put furniture against the doors, whatsitsname!” Reverend Mother ordered. “If there are Hindu servants, let them go home!”); and Amina did not dare to visit the racetrack.
But for every snake, there is a ladder: and finally the radio gave us a name. Nathuram Godse. “Thank God,” Amina burst out, “it’s not a Muslim name!”
And Aadam, upon whom the news of Gandhi’s death had placed a new burden of age: “This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!”
Amina, however, was full of the light-headedness of relief, she was rushing dizzily up the long ladder of relief … “Why not, after all? By being Godse he has saved our lives!”
Ahmed Sinai, after rising from his supposed sickbed, continued to behave like an invalid. In a voice like cloudy glass he told Amina, “So, you have told Ismail to go to court; very well, good; but we will lose. In these courts you have to buy judges …” And Amina, rushing to Ismail, “Never—never under any circumstances—must you tell Ahmed about the money. A man must keep his pride.” And, later on, “No, janum, I’m not going anywhere; no, the baby is not being tiring at all; you rest, I must just go to shop—maybe I will visit Hanif—we women, you know, must fill up our days!”
And coming home with envelopes brimming with rupee-notes … “Take, Ismail, now that he’s up we have to be quick and careful!” And sitting dutifully beside her mother in the evenings, “Yes, of course you’re right, and Ahmed will be getting so rich soon, you’ll just see!”
And endless delays in court; and envelopes, emptying; and the growing baby, nearing the point at which Amina will not be able to insert herself behind the driving-wheel of the 1946 Rover; and can her luck hold?; and Musa and Mary, quarrelling like aged tigers.
What starts fights?
What remnants of guilt fear shame, pickled by time in Mary’s intestines, led her willingly? unwillingly? to provoke the aged bearer in a dozen different ways—by a tilt of the nose to indicate her superior status; by aggressive counting of rosary beads under the nose of the devout Muslim; by acceptance of the title mausi, little mother, bestowed upon her by the other Estate servants, which Musa saw as a threat to his status; by excessive familiarity with the Begum Sahiba—little giggled whispers in corners, just loud enough for formal, stiff, correct Musa to hear and feel somehow cheated?
What tiny grain of grit, in the sea of old age now washing over the old bearer, lodged between his lips to fatten into the dark pearl of hatred—into what unaccustomed torpors did Musa fall, becoming leaden of hand and foot, so that vases were broken, ashtrays spilled, and a veiled hint of forthcoming dismissal—from Mary’s conscious or unconscious lips?—grew into an obsessive fear, which rebounded upon the person who started it off?
And (not to omit social factors) what was the brutalizing effect of servant status, of a servants’ room behind a black-stoved kitchen, in which Musa was obliged to sleep along with gardener, odd-job boy, and hamal—while Mary slept in style on a rush mat beside a new-born child?
And was Mary blameless or not? Did her inability to go to church—because in churches you found confessionals, and in confessionals secrets could not be kept—turn sour inside her and make her a little sharp, a little hurtful?
Or must we look beyond psychology—seeking our answer in statements such as, there was a snake lying in wait for Mary, and Musa was doomed to learn about the ambiguity of ladders? Or further still, beyond snake-and-ladder, should we see the Hand of Fate in the quarrel—and say, in order for Musa to return as explosive ghost, in order for him to adopt the role of Bomb-in-Bombay, it was necessary to engineer a departure … or, descending from such sublimities to the ridiculous, could it be that Ahmed Sinai—whom whisky provoked, whom djinns goaded into excesses of rudeness—had so incensed the aged bearer that his crime, with which he equalled Mary’s record, was committed out of the injured pride of an abused old servitor—and was nothing to do with Mary at all?
Ending questions, I confine myself to facts: Musa and Mary were perpetually at daggers drawn. And yes: Ahmed insulted him, and Amina’s pacifying efforts may not have been successful; and yes: the fuddling shadows of age had convinced him he would be dismissed, without warning, at any moment; and so it was that Amina came to discover, one August morning, that the house had been burgled.
The police came. Amina reported what was missing: a silver spittoon encrusted with lapis lazuli; gold coins; bejewelled samovars and silver tea-services; the contents of a green tin trunk. Servants were lined up in the hall and subjected to the threats of Inspector Johnny Vakeel. “Come on, own up now”—lathistick tapping against his leg—“or you’ll see what we can’t do to you. You want to stand on one leg all day and night? You want water thrown over you, sometimes boiling hot, sometimes freezing cold? We have many methods in the Police Force …” And now a cacophony of noise from servants, Not me, Inspector Sahib, I am honest boy; for pity’s sake, search my things, Sahib! And Amina: “This is too much, sir, you go too far. My Mary I know, anyway, is innocent. I will not have her questioned.” Suppressed irritation of police officer. A search of belongings is instituted—“Just in case, Madam. These fellows have limited intelligence—and maybe you discovered the theft too soon for the felon to abscond with the booty!”
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-r
ing—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.
Accident in a Washing-chest
IT 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.
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