Midnight's Children (13 page)

Nobody ever took pains the way Amina did. Dark of skin, glowing of eye, my mother was by nature the most meticulous person on earth. Assiduously, she arranged flowers in the corridors and rooms of the Old Delhi house; carpets were selected with infinite care. She could spend twenty-five minutes worrying at the positioning of a chair. By the time she’d finished with her home-making, adding tiny touches here, making fractional alterations there, Ahmed Sinai found his orphan’s dwelling transformed into something gentle and loving. Amina would rise before he did, her assiduity driving her to dust everything, even the cane chick-blinds (until he agreed to employ a hamal for the purpose); but what Ahmed never knew was that his wife’s talents were most dedicatedly, most determinedly applied not to the externals of their lives, but to the matter of Ahmed Sinai himself.

Why had she married him?—For solace, for children. But at first the insomnia coating her brain got in the way of her first aim; and children don’t always come at once. So Amina had found herself dreaming about an undreamable poet’s face and waking with an unspeakable name on her lips. You ask: what did she do about it? I answer: she gritted her teeth and set about putting herself straight. This is what she told herself: “You big ungrateful goof, can’t you see who is your husband now? Don’t you know what a husband deserves?” To avoid fruitless controversy about the correct answers to these questions, let me say that, in my mother’s opinion, a husband deserved unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. But there was a difficulty: Amina, her mind clogged up with Nadir Khan and his insomnia, found she couldn’t naturally provide Ahmed Sinai with these things. And so, bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes … in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit.

Each day she selected one fragment of Ahmed Sinai, and concentrated her entire being upon it until it became wholly familiar; until she felt fondness rising up within her and becoming affection and, finally, love. In this way she came to adore his over-loud voice and the way it assaulted her eardrums and made her tremble; and his peculiarity of always being in a good mood until after he had shaved—after which, each morning, his manner became stern, gruff, business-like and distant; and his vulture-hooded eyes which concealed what she was sure was his inner goodness behind a bleakly ambiguous gaze; and the way his lower lip jutted out beyond his upper one; and his shortness which led him to forbid her ever to wear high heels … “My God,” she told herself, “it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man!” But she was undismayed. “Who, after all,” she reasoned privately, “ever truly knows another human being completely?” and continued to learn to love and admire his appetite for fried foods, his ability to quote Persian poetry, the furrow of anger between his eyebrows … “At this rate,” she thought, “there will always be something fresh about him to love; so our marriage just can’t go stale.” In this way, assiduously, my mother settled down to life in the old city. The tin trunk sat unopened in an old almirah.

And Ahmed, without knowing or suspecting, found himself and his life worked upon by his wife until, little by little, he came to resemble—and to live in a place that resembled—a man he had never known and an underground chamber he had never seen. Under the influence of a painstaking magic so obscure that Amina was probably unaware of working it, Ahmed Sinai found his hair thinning, and what was left becoming lank and greasy; he discovered that he was willing to let it grow until it began to worm over the tops of his ears. Also, his stomach began to spread, until it became the yielding, squashy belly in which I would so often be smothered and which none of us, consciously at any rate, compared to the pudginess of Nadir Khan. His distant cousin Zohra told him, coquettishly, “You must diet, cousinji, or we won’t be able to reach you to kiss!” But it did no good … and little by little Amina constructed in Old Delhi a world of soft cushions and draperies over the windows which let in as little light as possible … she lined the chick-blinds with black cloths; and all these minute transformations helped her in her Herculean task, the task of accepting, bit by bit, that she must love a new man. (But she remained susceptible to the forbidden dream-images of … and was always drawn to men with soft stomachs and longish, lankish hair.)

You could not see the new city from the old one. In the new city, a race of pink conquerors had built palaces in pink stone; but the houses in the narrow lanes of the old city leaned over, jostled, shuffled, blocked each other’s view of the roseate edifices of power. Not that anyone ever looked in that direction, anyway. In the Muslim muhallas or neighborhoods which clustered around Chandni Chowk, people were content to look inwards into the screened-off courtyards of their lives; to roll chick-blinds down over their windows and verandahs. In the narrow lanes, young loafers held hands and linked arms and kissed when they met and stood in hip-jutting circles, facing inwards. There was no greenery and the cows kept away, knowing they weren’t sacred here. Bicycle bells rang constantly. And above their cacophony sounded the cries of itinerant fruit-sellers:
Come all you greats-O, eat a few dates-O!

To all of which was added, on that January morning when my mother and father were each concealing secrets from the other, the nervous clatter of the footsteps of Mr. Mustapha Kemal and Mr. S. P. Butt; and also the insistent rattle of Lifafa Das’s dugdugee drum.

When the clattering footsteps were first heard in the gullies of the muhalla, Lifafa Das and his peepshow and drum were still some distance away. Clatter-feet descended from a taxi and rushed into the narrow lanes; meanwhile, in their corner house, my mother stood in her kitchen stirring khichri for breakfast overhearing my father conversing with his distant cousin Zohra. Feet clacked past fruit salesmen and hand-holding loafers; my mother overheard: “… You newlyweds, I can’t stop coming to see,
cho chweet
I can’t tell you!” While feet approached, my father actually colored. In those days he was in the high summer of his charm; his lower lip really didn’t jut so much, the line between his eyebrows was still only faint … and Amina, stirring khichri, heard Zohra squeal, “Oh look, pink! But then you are so fair, cousinji! …” And he was letting her listen to All-India Radio at the table, which Amina was not allowed to do; Lata Mangeshkar was singing a waily love-song as “Just like me, don’tyouthink,” Zohra went on. “Lovely pink babies we’ll have, a perfect match, no, cousinji, pretty white couples?” And the feet clattering and the pan being stirred while “How awful to be black, cousinji, to wake every morning and see it staring at you, in the mirror to be shown proof of your inferiority! Of course they know; even blackies know white is nicer, don’tyouthinkso?” The feet very close now and Amina stamping into the dining-room pot in hand, concentrating hard at restraining herself, thinking Why must she come today when I have news to tell and also I’ll have to ask for money in front of her. Ahmed Sinai liked to be asked nicely for money, to have it wheedled out of him with caresses and sweet words until his table napkin began to rise in his lap as something moved in his pajamas; and she didn’t mind, with her assiduity she learned to love this also, and when she needed money there were strokes and “Janum, my life, please …” and “… Just a little so that I can make nice food and pay the bills …” and “Such a generous man, give me what you like, I know it will be enough” … the techniques of street beggars and she’d have to do it in front of that one with her saucer eyes and giggly voice and loud chat about blackies. Feet at the door almost and Amina in the dining-room with hot khichri at the ready, so very near to Zohra’s silly head, whereupon Zohra cries, “Oh, present company excluded,
of course!
” just in case, not being sure whether she’s been overheard or not, and “Oh, Ahmed, cousinji, you are really too dreadful to think I meant our lovely Amina who really isn’t so black but only like a white lady standing in the shade!” While Amina with her pot in hand looks at the pretty head and thinks Should I? And, Do I dare? And calms herself down with: “It’s a big day for me; and at least she raised the subject of children; so now it’ll be easy for me to …” But it’s too late, the wailing of Lata on the radio has drowned the sound of the doorbell so they haven’t heard old Musa the bearer going to answer the door; Lata has obscured the sound of anxious feet clattering upstairs; but all of a sudden here they are, the feet of Mr. Mustapha Kemal and Mr. S. P. Butt, coming to a shuffling halt.

“The rapscallions have perpetrated an outrage!” Mr. Kemal, who is the thinnest man Amina Sinai has ever seen, sets off with his curiously archaic phraseology (derived from his fondness for litigation, as a result of which he has become infected with the cadences of the law-courts) a kind of chain reaction of farcical panic, to which little, squeaky, spineless S. P. Butt, who has something wild dancing like a monkey in the eyes, adds considerably, by getting out these three words: “Yes, the firebugs!” And now Zohra in an odd reflex action clutches the radio to her bosom, muffling Lata between her breasts, screaming, “O God, O God, what firebugs, where? This house? O God I can feel the heat!” Amina stands frozen khichri-in-hand staring at the two men in their business suits as her husband, secrecy thrown to the winds now, rises shaven but as-yet-unsuited to his feet and asks, “The godown?”

Godown, gudam, warehouse, call it what you like; but no sooner had Ahmed Sinai asked his question than a hush fell upon the room, except of course that Lata Mangeshkar’s voice still issued from Zohra’s cleavage; because these three men shared one such large edifice, located on the industrial estate at the outskirts of the city. “Not the godown, God forfend,” Amina prayed silently, because the reccine and leathercloth business was doing well—through Major Zulfikar, who was now an aide at Military G.H.Q. in Delhi, Ahmed Sinai had landed a contract to supply leathercloth jackets and waterproof table coverings to the Army itself—and large stocks of the material on which their lives depended were stored in that warehouse. “But who would do such a thing?” Zohra wailed in harmony with her singing breasts, “What mad people are loose in the world these days?” … and that was how Amina heard, for the first time, the name which her husband had hidden from her, and which was, in those times, striking terror into many hearts. “It is Ravana,” said S. P. Butt … but Ravana is the name of a many-headed demon; are demons, then, abroad in the land? “What rubbish is this?” Amina, speaking with her father’s hatred of superstition, demanded an answer; and Mr. Kemal provided it. “It is the name of a dastardly crew, Madam; a band of incendiary rogues. These are troubled days; troubled days.”

In the godown: roll upon roll of leathercloth; and the commodities dealt in by Mr. Kemal, rice tea lentils—he hoards them all over the country in vast quantities, as a form of protection against the many-headed many-mouthed rapacious monster that is the public, which, if given its heads, would force prices so low in a time of abundance that godfearing entrepreneurs would starve while the monster grew fat … “Economics is scarcity,” Mr. Kemal argues, “therefore my hoards not only keep prices at a decent level but underpin the very structure of the economy.”—And then there is, in the godown, Mr. Butt’s stockpile, boxed in cartons bearing the words
AAG BRAND
. I do not need to tell you that aag means fire. S. P. Butt was a manufacturer of matches.

“Our informations,” Mr. Kemal says, “reveal only the fact of a fire at the estate. The precise godown is not specified.”

“But why should it be ours?” Ahmed Sinai asks. “Why, since we still have time to pay?”

“Pay?” Amina interrupts. “Pay whom? Pay what? Husband, janum, life of mine, what is happening here?” … But “We must go,” S. P. Butt says, and Ahmed Sinai is leaving, crumpled night-pajamas and all, rushing clatter-footed out of the house with the thin one and the spineless one, leaving behind him uneaten khichri, wide-eyed women, muffled Lata, and hanging in the air the name of Ravana … “a gang of ne’er-do-wells, Madam; unscrupulous cut-throats and bounders to a man!”

And S. P. Butt’s last quavering words: “Damnfool Hindu firebugs, Begum Sahiba. But what can we Muslims do?”

What is known about the Ravana gang? That it posed as a fanatical anti-Muslim movement, which, in those days before the Partition riots, in those days when pigs’ heads could be left with impunity in the courtyards of Friday mosques, was nothing unusual. That it sent men out, at dead of night, to paint slogans on the walls of both old and new cities:
NO PARTITION OR ELSE PERDITION! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA
! and so forth. And that it burned down Muslim-owned factories, shops, godowns. But there’s more, and this is not commonly known: behind this facade of racial hatred, the Ravana gang was a brilliantly-conceived commercial enterprise. Anonymous phone calls, letters written with words cut out of newspapers were issued to Muslim businessmen, who were offered the choice between paying a single, once-only cash sum and having their world burned down. Interestingly, the gang proved itself to be ethical. There were no second demands. And they meant business: in the absence of gray bags fall of pay-off money, fire would lick at shopfronts factories warehouses. Most people paid, preferring that to the risky alternative of trusting to the police. The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. And it is said (though I can’t be sure of this) that when the blackmail letters arrived, they contained a list of “satisfied customers” who had paid up and stayed in business. The Ravana gang—like all professionals—gave references.

Two men in business suits, one in pajamas, ran through the narrow gullies of the Muslim muhalla to the taxi waiting on Chandni Chowk. They attracted curious glances; not only because of their varied attire, but because they were trying not to run. “Don’t show panic,” Mr. Kemal said, “Look calm.” But their feet kept getting out of control and rushing on. Jerkily, in little rushes of speed followed by a few badly-disciplined steps at walking pace, they left the muhalla; and passed, on their way, a young man with a black metal peepshow box on wheels, a man holding a dugdugee drum: Lifafa Das, on his way to the scene of the important annunciation which gives this episode its name. Lifafa Das was rattling his drum and calling: “Come see everything, come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi, come see India, come see! Come see, come see!”