Neither A nor O. And the rhesus factor: impossibly negative. And zygosity offers no clues. And present in the blood, rare Kell antibodies. And my mother, crying, crying-crying, crying … “I don’t understand. A doctor’s daughter, and I don’t understand.”
Have Alpha and Omega unmasked me? Is rhesus pointing its unanswerable finger? And will Mary Pereira be obliged to … I wake up in a cool, white, Venetian-blinded room with All-India Radio for company. Tony Brent is singing: “Red Sails In The Sunset.”
Ahmed Sinai, his face ravaged by whisky and now by something worse, stands beside the Venetian blind. Amina, speaking in whispers. Again, snatches across the million miles of distance. Janumplease. Ibegyou. No, what are you saying. Of course it was. Of course you are the. How could you think I would. Who could it have. O God don’t just stand and look. I swear Iswearonmymother’shead. Now shh he is …
A new song from Tony Brent, whose repertoire today is uncannily similar to Wee Willie Winkie’s: “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?” hangs in the air, floating on radio waves. My father advances on my bed, towers over me, I’ve never seen him look like this before. “Abba …” And he, “I should have known. Just look, where am I in that face. That nose, I should have …” He turns on his heel and leaves the room; my mother follows him, too distraught to whisper now: “No, janum, I won’t let you believe such things about me! I’ll kill myself! I’ll,” and the door swings shut behind them. There is a noise outside: like a clap. Or a slap. Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Tony Brent begins crooning his latest hit into my good ear: and assures me, melodiously, that “The Clouds Will Soon Roll By.”
… And now I, Saleem Sinai, intend briefly to endow myself-then with the benefits of hindsight; destroying the unities and conventions of fine writing, I make him cognizant of what was to come, purely so that he can be permitted to think the following thoughts: “O eternal opposition of inside and outside! Because a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. The body, on the other hand, is homogeneous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, a sacred temple, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness. But the loss of my finger (which was conceivably foretold by the pointing digit of Raleigh’s fisherman), not to mention the removal of certain hairs from my head, has undone all that. Thus we enter into a state of affairs which is nothing short of revolutionary; and its effect on history is bound to be pretty damn startling. Uncork the body, and God knows what you permit to come tumbling out. Suddenly you are forever other than you were; and the world becomes such that parents can cease to be parents, and love can turn to hate. And these, mark you, are only the effects on private life. The consequences for the sphere of public action, as will be shown, are—were—will be no less profound.”
Finally, withdrawing my gift of foreknowledge, I leave you with the image of a ten-year-old boy with a bandaged finger, sitting in a hospital bed, musing about blood and noises-like-claps and the expression on his father’s face; zooming out slowly into long shot, I allow the sound-track music to drown my words, because Tony Brent is reaching the end of his medley, and his finale, too, is the same as Winkie’s: “Good Night, Ladies” is the name of the song. Merrily it rolls along, rolls along, rolls along …
(Fade-out.)
The Kolynos Kid
FROM AYAH TO WIDOW, I’ve been the sort of person to whom things have been done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing himself as protagonist. Despite Mary’s crime; setting aside typhoid and snake-venom; dismissing two accidents, in washing-chest and circus-ring (when Sonny Ibrahim, master lock-breaker, permitted my budding horns of temples to invade his forcep-hollows, and through this combination unlocked the door to the midnight children); disregarding the effects of Evie’s push and my mother’s infidelity; in spite of losing my hair to the bitter violence of Emil Zagallo and my finger to the lip-licking goads of Masha Miovic; setting my face against all indications to the contrary, I shall now amplify, in the manner and with the proper solemnity of a man of science, my claim to a place at the center of things.
“… Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,” the Prime Minister wrote, obliging me scientifically to face the question: In what sense? How, in what terms, may the career of a single individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation? I must answer in adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term “modes of connection” composed of “dualistically-combined configurations” of the two pairs of opposed adverbs given above. This is why hyphens are necessary: actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world.
Sensing Padma’s unscientific bewilderment, I revert to the inexactitudes of common speech: By the combination of “active” and “literal” I mean, of course, all actions of mine which directly—literally—affected, or altered the course of, seminal historical events, for instance the manner in which I provided the language marchers with their battle-cry. The union of “passive” and “metaphorical” encompasses all socio-political trends and events which, merely by existing, affected me metaphorically—for example, by reading between the lines of the episode entitled “The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger,” you will perceive the unavoidable connection between the infant state’s attempts at rushing towards full-sized adulthood and my own early, explosive efforts at growth … Next, “passive” and “literal,” when hyphenated, cover all moments at which national events had a direct bearing upon the lives of myself and my family—under this heading you should file the freezing of my father’s assets, and also the explosion at Walkeshwar Reservoir, which unleashed the great cat invasion. And finally there is the “mode” of the “active-metaphorical,” which groups together those occasions on which things done by or to me were mirrored in the macrocosm of public affairs, and my private existence was shown to be symbolically at one with history. The mutilation of my middle finger was a case in point, because when I was detached from my fingertip and blood (neither Alpha nor Omega) rushed out in fountains, a similar thing happened to history, and all sorts of everywhichthing began pouring out all over us; but because history operates on a grander scale than any individual, it took a good deal longer to stitch it back together and mop up the mess.
“Passive-metaphorical,” “passive-literal,” “active-metaphorical”: the Midnight Children’s Conference was all three; but it never became what I most wanted it to be; we never operated in the first, most significant of the “modes of connection.” The “active-literal” passed us by.
Transformation without end: nine-fingered Saleem has been brought to the doorway of the Breach Candy Hospital by a squat blonde nurse whose face is frozen into a smile of terrifying insincerity. He is blinking in the hot glare of the outside world, trying to focus on two swimming shadow-shapes coming towards him out of the sun; “See?” the nurse coos, “See who’s come to get you, then?” And Saleem realizes that something terrible has gone wrong with the world, because his mother and father, who should have come to collect him, had apparently been transformed en route into his ayah Mary Pereira and his Uncle Hanif.
Hanif Aziz boomed like the horns of ships in the harbor and smelled like an old tobacco factory. I loved him dearly, for his laughter, his unshaven chin, his air of having been put together rather loosely, his lack of co-ordination which made his every movement fraught with risk. (When he visited Buckingham Villa my mother hid the cut-glass vases.) Adults never trusted him to behave with proper decorum (“Watch out for the Communists!” he bellowed, and they blushed), which was a bond between himself and all children—other people’s children, since he and Pia were childless. Uncle Hanif who would one day, without warning, take a walk off the roof of his home.
… He wallops me in the back, toppling me forwards into Mary’s arms. “Hey, little wrestler! You look fine!” But Mary, hastily, “But so thin, Jesus! They haven’t been feeding you properly? You want cornflour pudding? Banana mashed with milk? Did they give you chips?” … while Saleem is looking round at this new world in which everything seems to be going too fast; his voice, when it comes, sounds high-pitched, as though somebody had speeded it up: “Amma-Abba?” he asks. “The Monkey?” And Hanif booms, “Yes, tickety-boo! The boy is really ship-shape! Come on phaelwan: a ride in my Packard, okay?” And talking at the same time is Mary Pereira, “Chocolate cake,” she is promising, “laddoos, pista-ki-lauz, meat samosas, kulfi. So thin you got, baba, the wind will blow you away.” The Packard is driving away; it is failing to turn off Warden Road, up the two-storey hillock; and Saleem, “Hanif mamu, where are we …” No time to get it out; Hanif roars, “Your Pia aunty is waiting! My God, you see if we don’t have a number one good time!” His voice drops conspiratorially: “Lots,” he says darkly, “of fun.” And Mary: “Arré baba yes! Such steak! And green chutney!” …
“Not the dark one,” I say, captured at last; relief appears on the cheeks of my captors. “No no no,” Mary babbles, “light green, baba. Just like you like.” And, “Pale green!” Hanif is bellowing, “My God, green like grasshoppers!”
All too fast … we are at Kemp’s Corner now, cars rushing around like bullets … but one thing is unchanged. On his billboard, the Kolynos Kid is grinning, the eternal pixie grin of the boy in the green chlorophyll cap, the lunatic grin of the timeless Kid, who endlessly squeezes an inexhaustible tube of toothpaste on to a bright green brush: Keep Teeth Kleen And Keep Teeth Brite, Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White! … and you may wish to think of me, too, as an involuntary Kolynos Kid, squeezing crises and transformations out of a bottomless tube, extruding time on to my metaphorical toothbrush; clean, white time with green chlorophyll in the stripes.
This, then, was the beginning of my first exile. (There will be a second, and a third.) I bore it uncomplainingly. I had guessed, of course, that there was one question I must never ask; that I had been loaned out, like a comic-book from the Scandal Point Second Hand Library, for some indefinite period; and that when my parents wanted me back, they would send for me. When, or even if: because I blamed myself not a little for my banishment. Had I not inflicted upon myself one more deformity to add to bandylegs cucumbernose horn-temples staincheeks? Was it not possible that my mutilated finger had been (as my announcement of my voices had nearly been), for my long-suffering parents, the last straw? That I was no longer a good business risk, no longer worth the investment of their love and protection? … I decided to reward my uncle and aunt for their kindness in taking in so wretched a creature as myself, to play the model nephew and await events. There were times when I wished that the Monkey would come and see me, or even call me on the phone; but dwelling on such matters only punctured the balloon of my equanimity, so I did my best to put them out of my mind. Besides, living with Hanif and Pia Aziz turned out to be exactly what my uncle had promised: lots of fun.
They made all the fuss of me that children expect, and accept graciously, from childless adults. Their flat overlooking Marine Drive wasn’t large, but there was a balcony from which I could drop monkey-nut shells on to the heads of passing pedestrians; there was no spare bedroom, but I was offered a deliciously soft white sofa with green stripes (an early proof of my transformation into the Kolynos Kid); ayah Mary, who had apparently followed me into exile, slept on the floor by my side. By day, she filled my stomach with the promised cakes and sweetmeats (paid for, I now believe, by my mother); I should have grown immensely fat, except that I had begun once again to grow in other directions, and at the end of the year of accelerated history (when I was only eleven and a half) I had actually attained my full adult height, as if someone had grasped me by the folds of my puppy-fat and squeezed them harder than any toothpaste-tube, so that inches shot out of me under the pressure. Saved from obesity by the Kolynos effect, I basked in my uncle and aunt’s delight at having a child around the house. When I spilt 7-Up on the carpet or sneezed into my dinner, the worst my uncle would say was “Hai-yo! Black man!” in his booming steamship’s voice, spoiling the effect by grinning hugely. Meanwhile, my aunty Pia was becoming the next in the long series of women who have bewitched and finally undone me good and proper.
(I should mention that, while I stayed in the Marine Drive apartment, my testicles, forsaking the protection of pelvic bone, decided prematurely and without warning to drop into their little sacs. This event, too, played its part in what followed.)
My mumani—my aunty—the divine Pia Aziz: to live with her was to exist in the hot sticky heart of a Bombay talkie. In those days, my uncle’s career in the cinema had entered a dizzy decline, and, for such is the way of the world, Pia’s star had gone into decline along with his. In her presence, however, thoughts of failure were impossible. Deprived of film roles, Pia had turned her life into a feature picture, in which I was cast in an increasing number of bit-parts. I was the Faithful Body-Servant: Pia in petticoats, soft hips rounding towards my desperately-averted eyes, giggling while her eyes, bright with antimony, flashed imperiously—“Come on, boy, what are you shy for, hold these pleats in my sari while I fold.” I was her Trusted Confidant, too. While my uncle sat on chlorophyll-striped sofa pounding out scripts which nobody would ever film, I listened to the nostalgic soliloquy of my aunt, trying to keep my eyes away from two impossible orbs, spherical as melons, golden as mangoes: I refer, you will have guessed, to the adorable breasts of Pia mumani. While she, sitting on her bed, one arm flung across her brow, declaimed: “Boy, you know, I am great actress: I have interpreted several major roles! But look, what fate will do! Once, boy, goodness knows who would beg absolutely to come to this flat; once the reporters of Filmfare and Screen Goddess would pay black-money to get inside! Yes, and dancing, and I was well-known at Venice restaurant—all of those great jazzmen came to sit at my feet, yes, even that Braz. Boy, after Lovers of Kashmir, who was a bigger star? Not Poppy; not Vyjayantimala; not one person!” And I, nodding emphatically, no-naturally-nobody, while her wondrous skin-wrapped melons heaved and … With a dramatic cry, she went on: “But even then, in the time of our world-beating fame, every picture a golden jubilee movie, this uncle of yours wants to live in a two-room flat like a clerk! So I make no fuss; I am not like some of your cheap-type actresses; I live simply and ask for no Cadillacs or air-conditioners or Dunlopillo beds from England; no swimming pools shaped like bikinis like that Roxy Vishwanatham’s! Here, like a wife of the masses, I have stayed; here, now, I am rotting! Rotting, absolutely. But I know this: my face is my fortune; after that, what riches do I need?” And I, anxiously agreeing: “Mumani, none; none at all.” She shrieked wildly; even my slap-deafened ear was penetrated. “Yes, of course, you also want me to be poor! All the world wants Pia to be in rags! Even that one, your uncle, writing his boring-boring scripts! O my God, I tell him, put in dances, or exotic locations! Make your villains villainous, why not, make heroes like men! But he says, no, all that is rubbish, he sees that now—although once he was not so proud! Now he must write about ordinary people and social problems! And I say, yes, Hanif, do that, that is good; but put in a little comedy routine, a little dance for your Pia to do, and tragedy and drama also; that is what the Public is wanting!” Her eyes were brimming with tears. “So you know what he is writing now? About …” she looked as if her heart would break “… the Ordinary Life of a Pickle-Factory!”
“Shh, mumani, shh,” I beg, “Hanif mamu will hear!”
“Let him hear!” she stormed, weeping copiously now; “Let his mother hear also, in Agra; they will make me die for shame!”
Reverend Mother had never liked her actress daughter-in-law. I overheard her once telling my mother: “To marry an actress, whatsitsname, my son has made his bed in the gutter, soon, whatsitsname, she will be making him drink alcohol a
nd also eat some pig.” Eventually, she accepted the inevitability of the match with bad grace; but she took to writing improving epistles to Pia. “Listen, daughter,” she wrote, “don’t do this actressy thing. Why to do such shameless behavior? Work, yes, you girls have modern ideas, but to dance naked on the screen! When for a small sum only you could acquire the concession on a good petrol pump. From my own pocket I would get it for you in two minutes. Sit in an office, hire attendants; that is proper work.” None of us ever knew whence Reverend Mother acquired her dream of petrol pumps, which would be the growing obsession of her old age; but she bombarded Pia with it, to the actress’s disgust.
“Why that woman doesn’t ask me to be shorthand typist?” Pia wailed to Hanif and Mary and me at breakfast. “Why not taxi-driver, or handloom weaver? I tell you, this pumpery-shumpery makes me wild.”
My uncle quivered (for once in his life) on the edge of anger. “There is a child present,” he said, “and she is your mother; show her respect.”
“Respect she can have,” Pia flounced from the room, “but she wants gas”.
… And my most-treasured bit-part of all was played out when during Pia and Hanifs regular card-games with friends, I was promoted to occupy the sacred place of the son she never had. (Child of an unknown union, I have had more mothers than most mothers have children; giving birth to parents has been one of my stranger talents—a form of reverse fertility beyond the control of contraception, and even of the Widow herself.) In the company of visitors, Pia Aziz would cry: “Look, friends, here’s my own crown prince! The jewel in my ring! The pearl in my necklace!” And she would draw me towards her, cradling my head so that my nose was pushed down against her chest and nestled wonderfully between the soft pillows of her indescribable … unable to cope with such delights, I pulled my head away. But I was her slave; and I know now why she permitted herself such familiarity with me. Prematurely testicled, growing rapidly, I nevertheless wore (fraudulently) the badge of sexual innocence: Saleem Sinai, during his sojourn at his uncle’s home, was still in shorts. Bare knees proved my childishness to Pia; deceived by ankle-socks, she held my face against her breasts while her sitar-perfect voice whispered in my good ear: “Child, child, don’t fear; your clouds will soon roll by.”
Midnight's Children Page 34