Midnight's Children (52 page)

“Mr. Commander-in-Chief,” my aunt said, “be welcome in our home.”

“Emerald, Emerald,” came from the mouth set in the earth-shaped head—the mouth positioned immediately beneath a neat moustache, “Why such formality, such takalluf?” Whereupon she embraced him with, “Well then, Ayub, you’re looking wonderful.”

He was a General then, though Field-Marshalship was not far away … we followed him into the house; we watched him drink (water) and laugh (loudly); at dinner we watched him again, saw how he ate like a peasant, so that his moustache became stained with gravy … “Listen, Em,” he said, “Always such preparations when I come! But I’m only a simple soldier; dal and rice from your kitchens would be a feast for me.”

“A soldier, sir,” my aunt replied, “but simple—never! Not once!”

Long trousers qualified me to sit at table, next to cousin Zafar, surrounded by gongs-and-pips; tender years, however, placed us both under an obligation to be silent. (General Zulfikar told me in a military hiss, “One peep out of you and you’re off to the guardhouse. If you want to stay, stay mum. Got it?” Staying mum, Zafar and I were free to look and listen. But Zafar, unlike me, was not trying to prove himself worthy of his name …)

What did eleven-year-olds hear at dinner? What did they understand by jocund military references to “that Suhrawardy, who always opposed the Pakistan Idea”—or to Noon, “who should have been called Sunset, what?” And through discussions of election-rigging and black-money, what undercurrent of danger permeated their skins, making the downy hairs on their arms stand on end? And when the Commander-in-Chief quoted the Quran, how much of its meaning was understood by eleven-year-old ears?

“It is written,” said the round-headed man, and the gongs-and-pips fell silent, “
Aad and Thamoud we also destroyed. Satan had made their foul deeds seem fair to them, keen-sighted though they were.
”

It was as though a cue had been given; a wave of my aunt’s hands dismissed the servants. She rose to go herself; my mother and Pia went with her. Zafar and I, too, rose from our seats, but
he
, he himself, called down the length of the sumptuous table: “The little men should stay. It is their future, after all.” The little men, frightened but also proud, sat and stayed mum, following orders.

Just men now. A change in the roundhead’s face; something darker, something mottled and desperate has occupied it … “Twelve months ago,” he says, “I spoke to all of you. Give the politicians one year—is that not what I said?” Heads nod; murmurs of assent. “Gentlemen, we have given them a year; the situation has become intolerable, and I am not prepared to tolerate it any longer!” Gongs-and-pips assume stern, statesman-like expressions. Jaws are set, eyes gaze keenly into the future. “Tonight, therefore,”—yes! I was there! A few yards from him!—General Ayub and I, myself and old Ayub Khan!—“I am assuming control of the State.”

How do eleven-year-olds react to the announcement of a coup? Hearing the words, “… national finances in frightening disarray … corruption and impurity are everywhere …” do their jaws stiffen, too? Do their eyes focus on brighter tomorrows? Eleven-year-olds listen as a General cries, “The Constitution is hereby abrogated! Central and Provincial legislatures are dissolved! Political parties are forthwith abolished!”—how do you think they feel?

When General Ayub Khan said, “Martial Law is now imposed,” both cousin Zafar and I understood that his voice—that voice filled with power and decision and the rich timbre of my aunt’s finest cooking—was speaking a thing for which we knew only one word: treason. I’m proud to say I kept my head; but Zafar lost control of a more embarrassing organ. Moisture stained his trouser-fronts; the yellow moisture of fear trickled down his leg to stain Persian carpets; gongs-and-pips smelled something, and turned upon him with looks of infinite distaste; and then (worst of all) came laughter.

General Zulfikar had just begun saying, “If you permit, sir, I shall map out tonight’s procedures,” when his son wet his pants. In cold fury my uncle hurled his son from the room; “Pimp! Woman!” followed Zafar out of the dining-chamber, in his father’s thin sharp voice; “Coward! Homosexual! Hindu!” leaped from Punchinello-face to chase his son up the stairs … Zulfikar’s eyes settled on me. There was a plea in them.
Save the honor of the family. Redeem me from the incontinence of my son
. “You, boy!” my uncle said, “You want to come up here and help me?”

Of course, I nodded. Proving my manhood, my fitness for sonship, I assisted my uncle as he made the revolution. And in so doing, in earning his gratitude, in stilling the sniggers of the assembled gongs-and-pips, I created a new father for myself; General Zulfikar became the latest in the line of men who have been willing to call me “sonny,” or “sonny Jim,” or even simply “my son.”

How we made the revolution: General Zulfikar described troop movements; I moved pepperpots symbolically while he spoke. In the clutches of the active-metaphorical mode of connection, I shifted saltcellars and bowls of chutney: This mustard-jar is Company A occupying Head Post Office; there are two pepperpots surrounding a serving-spoon, which means Company B has seized the airport. With the fate of the nation in my hands, I shifted condiments and cutlery, capturing empty biriani-dishes with water-glasses, stationing saltcellars, on guard, around water-jugs. And when General Zulfikar stopped talking, the march of the table-service also came to an end. Ayub Khan seemed to settle down in his chair; was the wink he gave me just my imagination?—at any rate, the Commander-in-Chief said, “Very good, Zulfikar; good show.”

In the movements performed by pepperpots etcetera, one table-ornament remained uncaptured: a cream-jug in solid silver, which, in our tabletop coup, represented the Head of State, President Iskander Mirza; for three weeks, Mirza remained President.

An eleven-year-old boy cannot judge whether a President is truly corrupt, even if gongs-and-pips say he is; it is not for eleven-year-olds to say whether Mirza’s association with the feeble Republican Party should have disqualified him from high office under the new régime. Saleem Sinai made no political judgments; but when, inevitably at midnight, on November 1st, my uncle shook me awake and whispered, “Come on, sonny, it’s time you got a taste of the real thing!,” I leaped out of bed smartly; I dressed and went out into the night, proudly aware that my uncle had preferred my company to that of his own son.

Midnight. Rawalpindi speeding past us at seventy m.p.h. Motorcycles in front of us beside us behind us. “Where are we going Zulfy-uncle?”
Wait and see
. Black smoked-windowed limousine pausing at darkened house. Sentries guard the door with crossed rifles; which part, to let us through. I am marching at my uncle’s side, in step, through half-lit corridors; until we burst into a dark room with a shaft of moonlight spotlighting a four-poster bed. A mosquito net hangs over the bed like a shroud.

There is a man waking up, startled,
what the hell is going
… But General Zulfikar has a long-barrelled revolver; the tip of the gun is forced mmff between the man’s parted teeth. “Shut up,” my uncle says, superfluously. “Come with us.” Naked overweight man stumbling from his bed. His eyes, asking:
Are you going to shoot me?
Sweat rolls down ample belly, catching moonlight, dribbling on to his soo-soo; but it is bitterly cold; he is not perspiring from the heat. He looks like a white Laughing Buddha; but not laughing. Shivering. My uncle’s pistol is extracted from his mouth. “Turn. Quick march!” … And gun-barrel pushed between the cheeks of an overfed rump. The man cries, “For God’s sake be careful; that thing has the safety off!” Jawans giggle as naked flesh emerges into moonlight, is pushed into black limousine … That night, I sat with a naked man as my uncle drove him to a military airfield; I stood and watched as the waiting aircraft taxied, accelerated, flew. What began, active-metaphorically, with pepperpots, ended then; not only did I overthrow a government—I also consigned a president to exile.

Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots … I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I—even I—had dreamed.

“Really truly?” Padma asks. “You were truly there?” Really truly. “They say that Ayub was a good man before he became bad,” Padma says; it is a question. But Saleem, at eleven, made no such judgments. The movement of pepperpots does not necessitate moral choices. What Saleem was concerned with: not public upheaval, but personal rehabilitation. You see the paradox—my most crucial foray into history up to that moment was inspired by the most parochial of motives. Anyway, it was not “my” country—or not then. Not my country, although I stayed in it—as refugee, not citizens; entered on my mother’s Indian passport, I would have come in for a good deal of suspicion, maybe even deported or arrested as a spy, had it not been for my tender years and the power of my guardian with the Punch-like features—for four long years.

Four years of nothing.

Except growing into a teenager. Except watching my mother as she fell apart. Except observing the Monkey, who was a crucial year younger than me, fall under the insidious spell of that God-ridden country; the Monkey, once so rebellious and wild, adopting expressions of demureness and submission which must, at first, have seemed false even to her; the Monkey, learning how to cook and keep house, how to buy spices in the market; the Monkey, making the final break with the legacy of her grandfather, by learning prayers in Arabic and saying them at all prescribed times; the Monkey, revealing the streak of puritan fanaticism which she had hinted at when she asked for a nun’s outfit; she, who spurned all offers of worldly love, was seduced by the love of that God who had been named after a carved idol in a pagan shrine built around a giant meteorite: Al-Lah, in the Qa’aba, the shrine of the great Black Stone.

But nothing else.

Four years away from the midnight children; four years without Warden Road and Breach Candy and Scandal Point and the lures of One Yard of Chocolates; away from the Cathedral School and the equestrian statue of Sivaji and melon-sellers at the Gateway of India: away from Divali and Ganesh Chaturthi and Coconut Day; four years of separation from a father who sat alone in a house he would not sell; alone, except for Professor Schaapsteker, who stayed in his apartment and shunned the company of men.

Can nothing really happen for four years? Obviously, not quite. My cousin Zafar, who had never been forgiven by his father for wetting his pants in the presence of history, was given to understand that he would be joining the Army as soon as he was of age. “I want to see you prove you’re not a woman,” his father told him.

And Bonzo died; General Zulfikar shed manly tears.

And Mary’s confession faded until, because nobody spoke of it, it came to feel like a bad dream; to everyone except me.

And (without any assistance from me) relations between India and Pakistan grew worse; entirely without my help, India conquered Goa—“the Portuguese pimple on the face of Mother India”; I sat on the sidelines and played no part in the acquisition of large-scale U.S. aid for Pakistan, nor was I to blame for Sino-India border skirmishes in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh; the Indian census of 1961 revealed a literacy level of 23.7 percent, but I was not entered in its records. The untouchable problem remained acute; I did nothing to alleviate it; and in the elections of 1962, the All-India Congress won 361 out of 494 seats in the Lok Sabha, and over 61 per cent of all State Assembly seats. Not even in this could my unseen hand be said to have moved; except, perhaps, metaphorically: the
status quo
was preserved in India; in my life, nothing changed either.

Then, on September 1st, 1962, we celebrated the Monkey’s fourteenth birthday. By this time (and despite my uncle’s continued fondness for me) we were well-established as social inferiors, the hapless poor relations of the great Zulfikars; so the party was a skimpy affair. The Monkey, however, gave every appearance of enjoying herself. “It’s my duty, brother,” she told me. I could hardly believe my ears … but perhaps my sister had an intuition of her fate; perhaps she knew the transformation which lay in store for her; why should I assume that I alone have had the powers of secret knowledge?

Perhaps, then, she guessed that when the hired musicians began to play (shehnai and vina were present; sarangi and sarod had their turns; tabla and sitar performed their virtuosic cross-examinations), Emerald Zulfikar would descend on her with callous elegance, demanding, “Come on, Jamila, don’t sit there like a melon, sing us a song like any good girl would!”

And that with this sentence my emerald-icy aunt would have begun, quite unwittingly, my sister’s transformation from monkey into Singer; because although she protested with the sullen clumsiness of fourteen-year-olds, she was hauled unceremoniously on to the musicians’ dais by my organizing aunt; and although she looked as if she wished the floor would open up beneath her feet, she clasped her hands together; seeing no escape, the Monkey began to sing.

I have not, I think, been good at describing emotions—believing my audience to be capable of
joining in;
of imagining for themselves what I have been unable to re-imagine, so that my story becomes yours as well … but when my sister began to sing, I was certainly assailed by an emotion of such force that I was unable to understand until, much later, it was explained to me by the oldest whore in the world. Because, with her first note, the Brass Monkey sloughed off her nick-name; she, who had talked to birds (just as, long ago in a mountain valley, her great-grandfather used to do), must have learned from songbirds the arts of song. With one good ear and one bad ear, I listened to her faultless voice, which at fourteen was the voice of a grown woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God; a voice which was afterwards compared to that of Muhammed’s muezzin Bilal, issuing from the lips of a somewhat scrawny girl.