Midnight's Children (26 page)

“Good news,” Ismail Ibrahim is saying, “I always thought you should fight the bastards. I’ll begin proceedings at once … but it will take cash, Amina. Have you got cash?”

“The money will be there.”

“Not for myself,” Ismail explains, “My services are, as I said, free, gratis absolutely. But, forgive me, you must know how things are, one must give little presents to people to smooth one’s way …”

“Here,” Amina hands him an envelope, “Will this do for now?”

“My God,” Ismail Ibrahim drops the packet in surprise and rupee notes in large denominations scatter all over his sitting-room floor, “Where did you lay your hands on …” And Amina, “Better you don’t ask—and I won’t ask how you spend it.”

Schaapsteker money paid for our food bills; but horses fought our war. The streak of luck of my mother at the racetrack was so long, a seam so rich, that if it hadn’t happened it wouldn’t have been credible … for month after month, she put her money on a jockey’s nice tidy hair-style or a horse’s pretty piebald coloring; and she never left the track without a large envelope stuffed with notes.

“Things are going well,” Ismail Ibrahim told her, “But Amina sister, God knows what you are up to. Is it decent? Is it legal?” And Amina: “Don’t worry your head. What can’t be cured must be endured. I am doing what must be done.”

Never once in all that time did my mother take pleasure in her mighty victories; because she was weighed down by more than a baby—eating Reverend Mother’s curries filled with ancient prejudices, she had become convinced that gambling was the next worst thing on earth, next to alcohol; so, although she was not a criminal, she felt consumed by sin.

Verrucas plagued her feet, although Purushottam the sadhu, who sat under our garden tap until dripping water created a bald patch amid the luxuriantly matted hair on his head, was a marvel at charming them away; but throughout the snake winter and the hot season, my mother fought her husband’s fight.

You ask: how is it possible? How could a housewife, however assiduous, however determined, win fortunes on the horses, day after racing day, month after month? You think to yourself: aha, the Homi Catrack, he’s a horse-owner; and everyone knows that most of the races are fixed; Amina was asking her neighbor for hot tips! A plausible notion; but Mr. Catrack himself lost as often as he won; he saw my mother at the racetrack and was astounded by her success. (“Please,” Amina asked him, “Catrack Sahib, let this be our secret. Gambling, is a terrible thing; it would be so shaming if my mother found out.” And Catrack, nodding dazedly, said, “Just as you wish.”) So it was not the Parsee who was behind it—but perhaps I can offer another explanation. Here it is, in a sky-blue crib in a sky-blue room with a fisherman’s pointing finger on the wall: here, whenever his mother goes away clutching a purse full of secrets, is Baby Saleem, who has acquired an expression of the most intense concentration, whose eyes have been seized by a singleness of purpose of such enormous power that it has darkened them to a deep navy blue, and whose nose is twitching strangely while he appears to be watching some distant event, to be guiding it from a distance, just as the moon controls the tides.

“Coming to court very soon,” Ismail Ibrahim said, “I think you can be fairly confident … my God, Amina, have you found King Solomon’s Mines?”

The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. O perfect balance of rewards and penalties! O seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes.

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it’s more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose … but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity—because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake … Keeping things simple for the moment, however, I record that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes.

Amina’s brother Hanif had not gone to Pakistan. Following the childhood dream which he had whispered to Rashid the rickshaw-boy in an Agra cornfield, he had arrived in Bombay and sought employment in the great film studios. Precociously confident, he had not only succeeded in becoming the youngest man ever to be given a film to direct in the history of the Indian cinema; he had also wooed and married one of the brightest stars of that celluloid heaven, the divine Pia, whose face was her fortune, and whose saris were made of fabrics whose designers had clearly set out to prove that it was possible to incorporate every color known to man in a single pattern. Reverend Mother did not approve of the divine Pia, but Hanif of all my family was the one who was free of her confining influence; a jolly, burly man with the booming laugh of the boatman Tai and the explosive, innocent anger of his father Aadam Aziz, he took her to live simply in a small, un-filmi apartment on Marine Drive, telling her, “Plenty of time to live like Emperors after I’ve made my name.” She acquiesced; she starred in his first feature, which was partly financed by Homi Catrack and partly by D. W. Rama Studios (Pvt.) Ltd—it was called
The Lovers of Kashmir;
and one evening in the midst of her racing days Amina Sinai went to the premiere. Her parents did not come, thanks to Reverend Mother’s loathing of the cinema, against which Aadam Aziz no longer had the strength to struggle—just as he, who had fought with Mian Abdullah against Pakistan, no longer argued with her when she praised the country, retaining just enough strength to dig in his heels and refuse to emigrate; but Ahmed Sinai, revived by his mother-in-law’s cookery, but resentful of her continued presence, got to his feet and accompanied his wife. They took their seats, next to Hanif and Pia and the male star of the film, one of India’s most successful “lover-boys,” I. S. Nayyar. And, although they didn’t know it, a serpent waited in the wings … but in the meanwhile, let us permit Hanif Aziz to have his moment; because
The Lovers of Kashmir
contained a notion which was to provide my uncle with a spectacular, though brief, period of triumph. In those days it was not permitted for lover-boys and their leading ladies to touch one another on screen, for fear that their osculations might corrupt the nation’s youth … but thirty-three minutes after the beginning of
The Lovers
, the première audience began to give off a low buzz of shock, because Pia and Nayyar had begun to kiss—not one another—but
things.

Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with all the rich fullness of her painted lips; then passed it to Nayyar; who planted, upon its opposite face, a virilely passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as the indirect kiss—and how much more sophisticated a notion it was than anything in our current cinema; how pregnant with longing and eroticism! The cinema audience (which would, nowadays, cheer raucously at the sight of a young couple diving behind a bush, which would then begin to shake ridiculously—so low have we sunk in our ability to suggest) watched, riveted to the screen, as the love of Pia and Nayyar, against a background of Dal Lake and ice-blue Kashmiri sky, expressed itself in kisses applied to cups of pink Kashmiri tea; by the foundations of Shalimar they pressed their lips to a sword … but now, at the height of Hanif Aziz’s triumph, the serpent refused to wait; under its influence, the house-lights came up. Against the larger-than-life figures of Pia and Nayyar, kissing mangoes as they mouthed to playback music, the figure of a timorous, inadequately bearded man was seen, marching on to the stage beneath the screen, microphone in hand. The Serpent can take most unexpected forms; now, in the guise of this ineffectual house-manager, it unleashed its venom. Pia and Nayyar faded and died; and the amplified voice of the bearded man said: “Ladies and gents, your pardon; but there is terrible news.” His voice broke—a sob from the Serpent, to lend power to its teeth!—and then continued. “This afternoon, at Birla House in Delhi, our beloved Mahatma was killed. Some madman shot him in the stomach, ladies and gentlemen—our Bapu is gone!”

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!”