Midnight's Children (34 page)

“But hey, man, that’s no-fair man, why don’t you do it yourself?”

“Listen, Sonny,” I pleaded, “you’re my friend, right?”

“Yeah, but you didn’t even help …”

“That was my sister, Sonny, so how could I?”

“No, so you have to do your own dirty …”

“Hey, Sonny, man, think. Think only. These girls need careful handling, man. Look how the Monkey flies off the handle! You’ve got the experience, yaar, you’ve been through it. You’ll know how to go gently this time. What do I know, man? Maybe she doesn’t like me even. You want me to have my clothes torn off, too? That would make you feel better?”

And innocent, good-natured Sonny, “… Well, no … ?”

“Okay, then. You go. Sing my praises a little. Say never mind about my nose. Character is what counts. You can do that?”

“… Weeeelll … I … okay, but you talk to your sis also, yah?”

“I’ll talk, Sonny. What can I promise? You know what she’s like. But I’ll talk to her for sure.”

You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke. For every victorious election campaign, there are twice as many that fail … from the verandah of Buckingham Villa, through the slats of the chick-blind, I spied on Sonny Ibrahim as he canvassed my chosen constituency … and heard the voice of the electorate, the rising nasality of Evie Burns, splitting the air with scorn: “Who?
Him?
Whynt’cha tell him to jus’ go blow his nose? That sniffer? He can’t even ride a
bike!
”

Which was true.

And there was worse to come; because now (although a chick-blind divided the scene into narrow slits) did I not see the expression on Evie’s face begin to soften and change?—did Evie’s hand (sliced lengthways by the chick) not reach out towards my electoral agent?—and weren’t those Evie’s fingers (the nails bitten down to the quick) touching Sonny’s temple-hollows, the fingertips getting covered in dribbled Vaseline?—and did Evie say or did she not: “Now you, f’r instance: you’re
cute
”? Let me sadly affirm that I did; it did; they were; she did.

Saleem Sinai loves Evie Burns; Evie loves Sonny Ibrahim; Sonny is potty about the Brass Monkey; but what does the Monkey say?

“Don’t make me sick, Allah,” my sister said when I tried—rather nobly, considering how he’d failed me—to argue Sonny’s case. The voters had given the thumbs-down to us both.

I wasn’t giving in just yet. The siren temptations of Evie Burns—who never cared about me, I’m bound to admit—led me inexorably towards my fall. (But I hold nothing against her; because my fall led to a rise.)

Privately, in my clocktower, I took time off from my trans-subcontinental rambles to consider the wooing of my freckled Eve. “Forget middlemen,” I advised myself, “You’ll have to do this personally.” Finally, I formed my scheme: I would have to share her interests, to make her passions mine … guns have never appealed to me. I resolved to learn how to ride a bike.

Evie, in those days, had given in to the many demands of the hillock-top children that she teach them her bicycle-arts; so it was a simple matter for me to join the queue for lessons. We assembled in the circus-ring; Evie, ring-mistress supreme, stood in the center of five wobbly, furiously concentrating cyclists … while I stood beside her, bikeless. Until Evie’s coming I’d shown no interest in wheels, so I’d never been given any … humbly, I suffered the lash of Evie’s tongue.

“Where’ve you been
living
, fat nose? I suppose you wanna borrow mine?”

“No,” I lied penitently, and she relented. “Okay, okay,” Evie shrugged, “Get in the saddle and lessee whatchou’re made of.”

Let me reveal at once that, as I climbed on to the silver Arjuna Indiabike, I was filled with the purest elation; that, as Evie walked roundandround, holding the bike by the handlebars, exclaiming, “Gotcha balance yet?
No?
Geez, nobody’s got all year!”—as Evie and I perambulated, I felt … what’s the word? … happy.

Roundandroundand … Finally, to please her, I stammered, “Okay … I think I’m … let me,” and instantly I was on my own, she had given me a farewell shove, and the silver creature flew gleaming and uncontrollable across the circus-ring … I heard her shouting: “The brake! Use the goddamn brake, ya dummy!”—but my hands couldn’t move, I had gone rigid as a plank, and there
LOOK OUT
in front of me was the blue two-wheeler of Sonny Ibrahim, collision course,
OUTA THE WAY YA CRAZY
, Sonny in the saddle, trying to swerve and miss, but still blue streaked towards silver, Sonny swung right but I went the same way
EEYAH MY BIKE
and silver wheel touched blue, frame kissed frame, I was flying up and over handlebars towards Sonny who had embarked on an identical parabola towards me
CRASH
bicycles fell to earth beneath us, locked in an intimate embrace
CRASH
suspended in mid-air Sonny and I met each other, Sonny’s head greeted mine … Over nine years ago I had been born with bulging temples, and Sonny had been given hollows by forceps; everything is for a reason, it seems, because now my bulging temples found their way into Sonny’s hollows. A perfect fit. Heads fitting together, we began our descent to earth, falling clear of the bikes, fortunately,
WHUMMP
and for a moment the world went away.

Then Evie with her freckles on fire, “O ya little creep, ya pile of snot, ya wrecked my …” But I wasn’t listening, because circus-ring accident had completed what washing-chest calamity had begun, and they were there in my head, in the front now, no longer a muffled background noise I’d never noticed, all of them, sending their here-I-am signals, from north south east west … the other children born during that midnight hour, calling “I,” “I,” “I” and “I.”

“Hey! Hey, snothead! You okay? … Hey, where’s his
mother?
”

Interruptions, nothing but interruptions! The different parts of my somewhat complicated life refuse, with a wholly unreasonable obstinacy, to stay neatly in their separate compartments. Voices spill out of their clocktower to invade the circus-ring, which is supposed to be Evie’s domain … and now, at the very moment when I should be describing the fabulous children of ticktock, I’m being whisked away by Frontier Mail—spirited off to the decaying world of my grandparents, so that Aadam Aziz is getting in the way of the natural unfolding of my tale. Ah well.
What can’t be cured must be endured.

That January, during my convalescence from the severe concussion I received in my bicycling accident, my parents took us off to Agra for a family reunion that turned out worse than the notorious (and arguably fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta. For two weeks we were obliged to listen to Emerald and Zulfikar (who was now a Major-General and insisted on being called a General) dropping names, and also hints of their fabulous wealth, which had by now grown into the seventh largest private fortune in Pakistan; their son Zafar tried (but only once!) to pull the Monkey’s fading red pig-tails. And we were obliged to watch in silent horror while my Civil Servant uncle Mustapha and his half-Irani wife Sonia beat and bludgeoned their litter of nameless, genderless brats into utter anonymity; and the bitter aroma of Alia’s spinsterhood filled the air and ruined our food; and my father would retire early to begin his secret nightly war against the djinns; and worse, and worse, and worse.

One night I awoke on the stroke of twelve to find my grandfather’s dream inside my head, and was therefore unable to avoid seeing him as he saw himself—as a crumbling old man in whose center, when the light was right, it was possible to discern a gigantic shadow. As the convictions which had given strength to his youth withered away under the combined influence of old age, Reverend Mother and the absence of like-minded friends, an old hole was reappearing in the middle of his body, turning him into just another shrivelled, empty old man, over whom the God (and other superstitions) against which he’d fought for so long was beginning to reassert His dominion … meanwhile, Reverend Mother spent the entire fortnight finding little ways of insulting my uncle Hanif’s despised film-actress wife. And that was also the time when I was cast as a ghost in a children’s play, and found, in an old leather attaché-case on top of my grandfather’s almirah, a sheet which had been chewed by moths, but whose largest hole was man-made: for which discovery I was repaid (you will recall) in roars of grandparental rage.

But there was one achievement. I was befriended by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah (the same fellow who had, in his youth, screamed silently in a corn field and helped Nadir Khan into Aadam Aziz’s toilet): taking me under his wing—and without telling my parents, who would have forbidden it so soon after my accident—he taught me how to ride a bicycle. By the time we left, I had this secret tucked away with all my others: only I didn’t intend this one to stay secret for very long.

… And on the train home, there were voices hanging on to the outside of the compartment: “Ohé, maharaj! Open up, great sir!”—fare-dodgers’ voices fighting with the ones I wanted to listen to, the new ones inside my head—and then back to Bombay Central Station, and the drive home past race-course and temple, and now Evelyn Lilith Burns is demanding that I finish her part first before concentrating on higher things.

“Home again!” the Monkey shouts. “Hurry … Back-to-Bom!” (She is in disgrace. In Agra, she incinerated the General’s boots.)

It is a matter of record that the States Reorganization Committee had submitted its report to Mr. Nehru as long ago as October 1955; a year later, its recommendations had been implemented. India had been divided anew, into fourteen states and six centrally-administered “territories.” But the boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any natural features of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words. Language divided us: Kerala was for speakers of Malayalam, the only palindromically-named tongue on earth; in Karnataka you were supposed to speak Kanarese; and the amputated state of Madras—known today as Tamil Nadu—enclosed the
aficionados
of Tamil. Owing to some oversight, however, nothing was done with the state of Bombay; and in the city of Mumbadevi, the language marches grew longer and noisier and finally metamorphosed into political parties, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (“United Maharashtra Party”) which stood for the Marathi language and demanded the creation of the Deccan state of Maharashtra, and the Maha Gujarat Parishad (“Great Gujarat Party”) which marched beneath the banner of the Gujarati language and dreamed of a state to the north of Bombay City, stretching all the way to the Kathiawar peninsula and the Rann of Kutch … I am warming over all this cold history, these old dead struggles between the barren angularity of Marathi which was born in the arid heat of the Deccan and Gujarati’s boggy, Kathiawari softness, to explain why, on the day in February 1957 immediately following our return from Agra, Methwold’s Estate was cut off from the city by a stream of chanting humanity which flooded Warden Road more completely than monsoon water, a parade so long that it took two days to pass, and of which it was said that the statue of Sivaji had come to life to ride stonily at its head. The demonstrators carried black flags; many of them were shopkeepers on hartal; many were striking textile-workers from Mazagaon and Matunga; but on our hillock, we knew nothing about their jobs; to us children, the endless ant-trail of language in Warden Road seemed as magnetically fascinating as a light-bulb to a moth. It was a demonstration so immense, so intense in its passions, that it made all previous marches vanish from the mind as if they had never occurred—and we had all been banned from going down the hill for even the tiniest of looks. So who was the boldest of us all? Who urged us to creep at least half-way down, to the point where the hillock-road swung round to face Warden Road in a steep U-bend? Who said, “What’s to be scared of? We’re only going halfway for a
peek
”? … Wide-eyed, disobedient Indians followed their freckled American chief. (“They killed Doctor Narlikar—marchers did,” Hairoil warned us in a shivery voice. Evie spat on his shoes.)

But I, Saleem Sinai, had other fish to fry. “Evie,” I said with quiet offhandedness, “how’d you like to see me bicycling?” No response. Evie was immersed in the spectacle … and was that her fingerprint in Sonny Ibrahim’s left forcep-hollow, embedded in Vaseline for all the world to see? A second time, and with slightly more emphasis, I said, “I can do it, Evie. I’ll do it on the Monkey’s cycle. You want to watch?” And now Evie, cruelly, “I’m watching this. This is good. Why’d I wanna watch
you?
” And me, a little snivelly now, “But I
learned
, Evie, you’ve
got
to …” Roars from Warden Road below us drown my words. Her back is to me; and Sonny’s back, the backs of Eyeslice and Hairoil, the intellectual rear of Cyrus-the-great … my sister, who has seen the fingerprint too, and looks displeased, eggs me on: “Go on. Go on, show her. Who’s she think she is?” And up on her bike … “I’m doing it, Evie, look!” Bicycling in circles, round and round the little cluster of children, “See? You
see?
” A moment of exultation; and then Evie, deflating impatient couldn’t-care-less: “Willya get outa my way, fer Petesake? I wanna see
that!
” Finger, chewed-off nail and all, jabs down in the direction of the language march; I am dismissed in favor of the parade of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti! And despite the Monkey, who loyally, “That’s not fair! He’s doing it really
good!
”—and in spite of the exhilaration of the thing-in-itself—something goes haywire inside me; and I’m riding round Evie, fasterfasterfaster, crying sniffing out of control, “So what is it with you, anyway? What do I have to do to …” And then something else takes over, because I realize I don’t have to ask her, I can just get inside that freckled mouth-metalled head and find out, for once I can really get to know what’s going on … and in I go, still bicycling, but the front of her mind is all full up with Marathi language-marchers, there are American pop songs stuck in the corners of her thoughts, but nothing I’m interested in; and now, only now, now for the very first time, now driven on by the tears of unrequited love, I begin to probe … I find myself pushing, diving, forcing my way behind her defenses … into the secret place where there’s a picture of her mother who wears a pink smock and holds up a tiny fish by the tail, and I’m ferreting deeperdeeperdeeper, where is it, what makes her tick, when she gives a sort of jerk and swings round to stare at me as I bicycle roundandroundand-roundandroundand …