Midnight's Children (45 page)

Jimmy in a bundle on the floor. “Sir sir please sir will they put up a cross?” He borrowed a pencil, I poked, he fell. His father is a taxi-driver. Now the taxi drives into class; a dhobibundle is put on the back seat, out goes Jimmy. Ding, a bell. Jimmy’s father puts down the taxi flag. Jimmy’s father looks at me: “Snotnose, you’ll have to pay the fare.” “But please sir haven’t got the money sir.” And Zagallo: “We’ll put it on your bill.” See my hair on Zagallo’s hand. Flames are pouring from Zagallo’s eyes. “Five hundred meelion, what’s one death?” Jimmy is dead; five hundred million still alive. I start counting: one two three. Numbers march over Jimmy’s grave. One million two million three million four. Who cares if anyone, anyone dies. One hundred million and one two three. Numbers march through the classroom now. Crushing pounding two hundred million three four five. Five hundred million still alive. And only one of me …

… In the dark of the night, I awoke from the dream of Jimmy Kapadia’s death which became the dream of annihilation-by-numbers, yelling howling screaming, but still with the paper in my fist; and a door flew open, to reveal my uncle Hanif and aunt Pia. Mary Pereira tried to comfort me, but Pia was imperious, she was a divine swirl of petticoats and dupatta, she cradled me in her arms: “Never mind! My diamond, never mind now!” And Uncle Hanif, sleepily: “Hey, phaelwan! It’s okay now; come on, you come with us; bring the boy, Pia!” And now I’m safely in Pia’s arms; “Just for tonight, my pearl, you can sleep with us!”—and there I am, nestling between aunt and uncle, huddling against my mumani’s perfumed curves.

Imagine, if you can, my sudden joy; imagine with what speed the nightmare fled from my thoughts, as I nestled against my extraordinary aunt’s petticoats! As she re-arranged herself, to get comfortable, and one golden melon caressed my cheek! As Pia’s hand sought out mine and grasped it firmly … now I discharged my duty. When my aunt’s hand wrapped itself around mine, paper passed from palm to palm. I felt her stiffen, silently; then, although I snuggled up closer closer closer, she was lost to me; she was reading in the dark, and the stiffness of her body was increasing; and then suddenly I knew that I had been tricked, that Catrack was my enemy; and only the threat of policemen prevented me from telling my uncle.

(At school, the next day, I was told of Jimmy Kapadia’s tragic death, suddenly at home, of a heart seizure. It is possible to kill a human being by dreaming his death? My mother always said so; and, in that case, Jimmy Kapadia was my first murder victim. Homi Catrack was to be the next.)

When I returned from my first day back at school, having basked in the unusual sheepishness of Fat Perce and Glandy Keith (“Lissen, yaar, how did we know your finger was in the … hey, man, we got free tickets for a picture tomorrow, you want to come?”) and my equally unexpected popularity (“No more Zagallo! Solid, man! You really lost your hair for something good!”), Aunty Pia was out. I sat quietly with Uncle Hanif while, in the kitchen, Mary Pereira prepared dinner. It was a peaceful little family scene; but the peace was shattered, abruptly, by the crash of a slamming door. Hanif dropped his pencil as Pia, having slammed the front door, flung open the living-room door with equal force. Then he boomed cheerfully, “So, wife: what’s the drama?” … But Pia was not to be defused. “Scribble,” she said, her hand slicing air, “Allah, don’t stop for me! So much talent, a person cannot go to the pot in this house without finding your genius. Are you happy, husband? We are making much money? God is good to you?” Still Hanif remained cheerful. “Come Pia, our little guest is here. Sit, have tea …” Actress Pia froze in an attitude of disbelief. “O God! Such a family I have come to! My life is in ruins, and you offer tea; your mother offers petrol! All is madness …” And Uncle Hanif, frowning now: “Pia, the boy …” A shriek. “Ahaaa! The boy—but the boy has suffered; he is suffering now; he knows what it is to lose, to feel forlorn! I, too, have been abandoned: I am great actress, and here I sit surrounded by tales of bicycle-postmen and donkey-cart drivers! What do you know of a woman’s grief? Sit, sit, let some fat rich Parsee film-producer give you charity, never mind that your wife wears paste jewels and no new saris for two years; a woman’s back is broad, but, beloved husband, you have made my days into deserts! Go, ignore me now, just leave me in peace to jump from the window! I will go into the bedroom now,” she concluded, “and if you hear no more from me it is because my heart is broken and I am dead.” More doors slammed: it was a terrific exit.

Uncle Hanif broke a pencil, absent-mindedly, into two halves. He shook his head wonderingly: “What’s got into her?” But I knew. I, bearer of secrets, threatened by policemen, I knew and bit my lip. Because, trapped as I was in the crisis of the marriage of my uncle and aunt, I had broken my recently-made rule and entered Pia’s head; I had seen her visit to Homi Catrack and knew that, for years now, she had been his fancy-woman; I had heard him telling her that he had tired of her charms, and there was somebody else now; and I, who would have hated him enough just for seducing my beloved aunt, found myself hating him twice as passionately for doing her the dishonor of discarding her.

“Go to her,” my uncle was saying, “Maybe you can cheer her up.”

The boy Saleem moves through repeatedly-slammed doors to the sanctum of his tragic aunt; and enters, to find her loveliest of bodies splayed out in wondrous abandon across the marital bed—where, only last night, bodies nestled against bodies—where paper passed from hand to hand … a hand flutters at her heart; her chest heaves; and the boy Saleem stammers, “Aunt, O Aunt, I’m sorry.”

A banshee-wail from the bed. Tragedienne’s arms, flying outwards towards me. “Hai! Hai, hai!
Ai
-hai-hai!” Needing no further invitation, I fly towards those arms; I fling myself between them, to lie atop my mourning aunt. The arms close around me, tightertighter, nails digging through my school-white shirt, but I don’t care!—Because something has started twitching below my S-buckled belt. Aunty Pia thrashes about beneath me in her despair and I thrash with her, remembering to keep my right hand clear of the action. I hold it stiffly out above the fray. One-handed, I begin to caress her, not knowing what I’m doing, I’m only ten years old and still in shorts, but I’m crying because she’s crying, and the room is full of the noise—and on the bed as two bodies begin to acquire a kind of rhythm, unnameable unthinkable, hips pushing up towards me, while she yells, “O! O God, O God, O!” And maybe I am yelling too, I can’t say, something is taking over from grief here, while my uncle snaps pencils on a striped sofa, something getting stronger, as she writhes and twists beneath me, and at last in the grip of a strength greater than my strength I am bringing down my right hand, I have forgotten my finger, and when it touches her breast, wound presses against skin …

“Yaaaouuuu!” I scream with the pain; and my aunt, snapping out of the macabre spell of those few moments, pushes me off her and delivers a resounding wallop to my face. Fortunately, it is the left cheek; there is no danger of damage to my remaining good ear.
“Badmaash!
” my aunty screams, “A family of maniacs and perverts, woe is me, what woman ever suffered so badly?”

There is a cough in the doorway. I am standing up now, shivering with pain. Pia is standing, too, her hair dripping off her head like tears. Mary Pereira is in the doorway, coughing, scarlet confusion all over her skin, holding a brown paper parcel in her hands.

“See, baba, what I have forgotten,” she finally manages to say, “You are a big man now: look, your mother has sent you two pairs of nice, white long trousers.”

After I got so indiscreetly carried away while trying to cheer up my aunt, it became difficult for me to remain in the apartment on Marine Drive. Long intense telephone calls were made regularly during the next few days; Hanif persuading someone, while Pia gesticulated, that perhaps now, after five weeks … and one evening after I got back from school, my mother picked me up in our old Rover, and my first exile came to an end.

Neither during our drive home, nor at any other time, was I given any explanation for my exile. I decided, therefore, that I would not make it my business to ask. I was wearing long pants now; I was, therefore, a man, and must bear my troubles accordingly. I told my mother: “The finger is not so bad. Hanif mamu has taught me to hold the pen differently, so I can write okay.” She seemed to be concentrating very hard on the road. “It was a nice holiday,” I added, politely. “Thank you for sending me.”

“O child,” she burst out, “with your face like the sun coming out, what can I tell you? Be good with your father; he is not happy these days.” I said I would try to be good; she seemed to lose control of the wheel and we passed dangerously near a bus. “What a world,” she said after a time, “Terrible things happen and you don’t know how.”

“I know,” I agreed, “Ayah has been telling me.” My mother looked at me fearfully, then glared at Mary in the back seat. “You black woman,” she cried, “what have you been saying?” I explained about Mary’s stories of miraculous events, but the dire rumors seemed to calm my mother down. “What do you know,” she sighed, “You are only a child.”

What do I know, Amma? I know about the Pioneer Café! Suddenly, as we drove home, I was filled once again with my recent lust for revenge upon my perfidious mother, a lust which had faded in the brilliant glare of my exile, but which now returned and was united with my new-born loathing of Homi Catrack. This two-headed lust was the demon which possessed me, and drove me into doing the worst thing I ever did … “Everything will be all right,” my mother was saying, “You just wait and see.”

Yes, mother.

It occurs to me that I have said nothing, in this entire piece, about the Midnight Children’s Conference; but then, to tell the truth, they didn’t seem very important to me in those days. I had other things on my mind.

A
FEW MONTHS LATER
, when Mary Pereira finally confessed her crime, and revealed the secrets of her eleven-year-long haunting by the ghost of Joseph D’Costa, we learned that, after her return from exile, she was badly shocked by the condition into which the ghost had fallen in her absence. It had begun to decay, so that now bits of it were missing: an ear, several toes on each foot, most of its teeth; and there was a hole in its stomach larger than an egg. Distressed by this crumbling spectre, she asked it (when she was sure nobody else was within earshot): “O God, Joe, what you been doing to yourself?” He replied that the responsibility for her crime had been placed squarely on his shoulders until she confessed, and it was playing hell with his system. From that moment it became inevitable that she would confess; but each time she looked at me she found herself prevented from doing so. Still, it was only a matter of time.

In the meanwhile, and utterly ignorant of how close I was to being exposed as a fraud, I was attempting to come to terms with a Methwold’s Estate in which, too, a number of transformations had occurred. In the first place, my father seemed to want nothing more to do with me, an attitude of mind which I found hurtful but (considering my mutilated body) entirely understandable. In the second place, there was the remarkable change in the fortunes of the Brass Monkey. “My position in this household,” I was obliged to admit to myself, “has been usurped.” Because now it was the Monkey whom my father admitted into the abstract sanctum of his office, the Monkey whom he smothered in his squashy belly, and who was obliged to bear the burdens of his dreams about the future. I even heard Mary Pereira singing to the Monkey the little ditty which had been my theme-song all my days: “Anything you want to be,” Mary sang, “you can be; You can be just what-all you want!” Even my mother seemed to have caught the mood; and now it was my sister who always got the biggest helping of chips at the dinner-table, and the extra nargisi kofta, and the choicest pasanda. While I—whenever anyone in the house chanced to look at me—was conscious of a deepening furrow between their eyebrows, and an atmosphere of confusion and distrust. But how could I complain? The Monkey had tolerated my special position for years. With the possible exception of the time I fell out of a tree in our garden after she nudged me (which could have been an accident, after all), she had accepted my primacy with excellent grace and even loyalty. Now it was my turn; long-trousered, I was required to be adult about my demotion. “This growing up,” I told myself, “is harder than I expected.”

The Monkey, it must be said, was no less astonished than I at her elevation to the role of favored child. She did her best to fall from grace, but it seemed she could do no wrong. These were the days of her flirtation with Christianity, which was partly due to the influence of her European school-friends and partly to the rosary-fingering presence of Mary Pereira (who, unable to go to church because of her fear of the confessional, would regale us instead with Bible stories); mostly, however, I believe it was an attempt by the Monkey to regain her old, comfortable position in the family doghouse (and, speaking of dogs, the Baroness Simki had been put to sleep during my absence, killed by promiscuity).

My sister spoke highly of gentle Jesus meek and mild; my mother smiled vaguely and patted her on the head. She went around the house humming hymns; my mother took up the tunes and sang along. She requested a nun’s outfit to replace her favorite nurse’s dress; it was given to her. She threaded chick-peas on a string and used them as a rosary, muttering Hail-Mary-full-of-grace, and my parents praised her skill with her hands. Tormented by her failure to be punished, she mounted to extremes of religious fervor, reciting the Our Father morning and night, fasting in the weeks of Lent instead of during Ramzàn, revealing an unsuspected streak of fanaticism which would, later, begin to dominate her personality; and still, it appeared, she was tolerated. Finally she discussed the matter with me. “Well, brother,” she said, “looks like from now on I’ll just have to be the good guy, and you can have all the fun.”

She was probably right; my parents’ apparent loss of interest in me should have given me a greater measure of freedom; but I was mesmerized by the transformations which were taking place in every aspect of my life, and fun, in such circumstances, seemed hard to have. I was altering physically; too early, soft fuzz was appearing on my chin, and my voice swooped, out of control, up and down the vocal register. I had a strong sense of absurdity: my lengthening limbs were making me clumsy, and I must have cut a clownish figure, as I outgrew shirts and trousers and stuck gawkily and too far out of the ends of my clothes. I felt somehow conspired against, by these garments which flapped comically around my ankles and wrists; and even when I turned inwards to my secret Children, I found change, and didn’t like it.