Midnight's Children (17 page)

“But the night-watchmen?”—asleep, Padma, asleep. Warned in advance to take their sleeping draughts just in case … Those brave lalas, warrior Pathans who, city-born, had never seen the Khyber, unwrapped little paper packets, poured rust-colored powders into their bubbling cauldron of tea. They pulled their charpoys well away from my father’s godown to avoid falling beams and showering sparks; and lying on their rope-beds they sipped their tea and entered the bittersweet declensions of the drug. At first they became raucous, shouting the praises of their favorite whores in Pushtu; then they fell into wild giggling as the soft fluttering fingers of the drug tickled their ribs … until the giggling gave way to dreams and they roamed in the frontier passes of the drug, riding the horses of the drug, and finally reached a dreamless oblivion from which nothing on earth could awaken them until the drug had run its course.

Ahmed, Butt and Kemal arrived by taxi—the taxi-driver, unnerved by the three men who clutched wads of crumpled banknotes which smelled worse than hell on account of the unpleasant substances they had encountered in the ditch, would not have waited, except that they refused to pay him. “Let me go, big sirs,” he pleaded, “I am a little man; do not keep me here …” but by then their backs were moving away from him, towards the fire. He watched them as they ran, clutching their rupees that were stained by tomatoes and dogshit; open-mouthed he stared at the burning godown, at the clouds in the night sky, and like everyone else on the scene he was obliged to breathe air filled with leathercloth and matchsticks and burning rice. With his hands over his eyes, watching through his fingers, the little taxi-driver with his incompetent moustache saw Mr. Kemal, thin as a demented pencil, lashing and kicking at the sleeping bodies of night-watchmen; and he almost gave up his fare and drove off in terror at the instant when my father shouted, “Look out!” … but, staying despite it all, he saw the godown as it burst apart under the force of the licking red tongues, he saw pouring out of the godown an improbable lava flow of molten rice lentils chick-peas waterproof jackets matchboxes and pickle, he saw the hot red flowers of the fire bursting skywards as the contents of the warehouse spilled on to the hard yellow ground like a black charred hand of despair. Yes, of course the godown was burned, it fell on their heads from the sky in cinders, it plunged into the open mouths of the bruised, but still snoring, watchmen … “God save us,” said Mr. Butt, but Mustapha Kemal, more pragmatically, answered: “Thank God we are well insured.”

“It was right then,” Ahmed Sinai told his wife later, “right at that moment that I decided to get out of the leathercloth business. Sell the office, the goodwill, and forget everything I know about the reccine trade. Then—not before, not afterwards—I made up my mind, also, to think no more about this Pakistan claptrap of your Emerald’s Zulfy. In the heat of that fire,” my father revealed—unleashing a wifely tantrum—“I decided to go to Bombay, and enter the property business. Property is dirt cheap there now,” he told her before her protests could begin, “Narlikar knows.”

(But in time, he would call Narlikar a traitor.)

In my family, we always go when we’re pushed—the freeze of ’48 being the only exception to this rule. The boatman Tai drove my grandfather from Kashmir; Mercurochrome chased him out of Amritsar; the collapse of her life under the carpets led directly to my mother’s departure from Agra; and many-headed monsters sent my father to Bombay, so that I could be born there. At the end of that January, history had finally, by a series of shoves, brought itself to the point at which it was almost ready for me to make my entrance. There were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I stepped on to the scene … the mystery, for example, of Shri Ramram’s most enigmatic remark: “There will be a nose and knees: knees and a nose.”

The insurance money came; January ended; and in the time it took to close down their affairs in Delhi and move to the city in which—as Doctor Narlikar the gynecologist knew—property was temporarily as cheap as dirt, my mother concentrated on her segmented scheme for learning to love her husband. She came to feel a deep affection for the question marks of his ears; for the remarkable depth of his navel, into which her finger could go right up to the first joint, without even pushing; she grew to love the knobbliness of his knees; but, try as she might (and as I’m giving her the benefit of my doubts I shall offer no possible reasons here), there was one part of him which she never managed to love, although it was the one thing he possessed, in full working order, which Nadir Khan had certainly lacked; on those nights when he heaved himself up on top of her—when the baby in her womb was no bigger than a frog—it was just no good at all.

… “No, not so quick, janum, my life, a little longer, please,” she is saying; and Ahmed, to spin things out, tries to think back to the fire, to the last thing that happened on that blazing night, when just as he was turning to go he heard a dirty screech in the sky, and, looking up, had time to register that a vulture—at night!—a vulture from the Towers of Silence was flying overhead, and that it had dropped a barely-chewed Parsee hand, a right hand, the same hand which—now!—slapped him full in the face as it fell; while Amina, beneath him in bed, ticks herself off: Why can’t you enjoy, you stupid woman, from now on you must really
try
.

On June 4th, my ill-matched parents left for Bombay by Frontier Mail. (There were hangings, voices hanging on for dear life, fists crying out, “Maharaj! Open for one tick only! Ohé, from the milk of your kindness, great sir, do us favor!” And there was also—hidden beneath dowry in a green tin trunk—a forbidden, lapis-lazuli-encrusted, delicately-wrought silver spittoon.) On the same day, Earl Mountbatten of Burma held a press conference at which he announced the Partition of India, and hung his countdown calendar on the wall: seventy days to go to the transfer of power … sixty-nine … sixty-eight … tick, tock.

T
HE FISHERMEN
were here first. Before Mountbatten’s ticktock, before monsters and public announcements; when underworld marriages were still unimagined and spittoons were unknown; earlier than Mercurochrome; longer ago than lady wrestlers who held up perforated sheets; and back and back, beyond Dalhousie and Elphinstone, before the East India Company built its Fort, before the first William Methwold; at the dawn of time, when Bombay was a dumbbell-shaped island tapering, at the center, to a narrow shining strand beyond which could be seen the finest and largest natural harbor in Asia, when Mazagaon and Worli, Matunga and Mahim, Salsette and Colaba were islands, too—in short, before reclamation, before tetrapods and sunken piles turned the Seven Isles into a long peninsula like an outstretched, grasping hand, reaching westward into the Arabian Sea; in this primeval world before clocktowers, the fishermen—who were called Kolis—sailed in Arab dhows, spreading red sails against the setting sun. They caught pomfret and crabs, and made fish-lovers of us all. (Or most of us. Padma has succumbed to their piscine sorceries; but in our house, we were infected with the alienness of Kashmiri blood, with the icy reserve of Kashmiri sky, and remained meat-eaters to a man.)

There were also coconuts and rice. And, above it all, the benign presiding influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, whose name—Mumbadevi, Mumbabai, Mumbai—may well have become the city’s. But then, the Portuguese named the place Bom Bahia for its harbor, and not for the goddess of the pomfret folk … the Portuguese were the first invaders, using the harbor to shelter their merchant ships and their men-of-war; but then, one day in 1633, an East India Company Officer named Methwold saw a vision. This vision—a dream of a British Bombay, fortified, defending India’s West against all comers—was a notion of such force that it set time in motion. History churned ahead; Methwold died; and in 1660, Charles II of England was betrothed to Catharine of the Portuguese House of Braganza—that same Catharine who would, all her life, play second fiddle to orange-selling Nell. But she has this consolation—that it was her marriage dowry which brought Bombay into British hands, perhaps in a green tin trunk, and brought Methwold’s vision a step closer to reality. After that, it wasn’t long until September 21st, 1668, when the Company at last got its hands on the island … and then off they went, with their Fort and land-reclamation, and before you could blink there was a city here, Bombay, of which the old tune sang:

Our Bombay, Padma! It was very different then, there were no night-clubs or pickle factories or Oberoi-Sheraton Hotels or movie studios; but the city grew at breakneck speed, acquiring a cathedral and an equestrian statue of the Mahratta warrior-king Sivaji which (we used to think) came to life at night and galloped awesomely through the city streets—right along Marine Drive! On Chowpatty sands! Past the great houses on Malabar Hill, round Kemp’s Corner, giddily along the sea to Scandal Point! And yes, why not, on and on, down my very own Warden Road, right alongside the segregated swimming pools at Breach Candy, right up to huge Mahalaxmi Temple and the old Willingdon Club … Throughout my childhood, whenever bad times came to Bombay, some insomniac night-walker would report that he had seen the statue moving; disasters, in the city of my youth, danced to the occult music of a horse’s gray, stone hooves.

And where are they now, the first inhabitants? Coconuts have done best of all. Coconuts are still beheaded daily on Chowpatty Beach; while on Juhu Beach, under the languid gaze of film stars at the Sun ‘n’ Sand hotel, small boys still shin up coconut palms and bring down the bearded fruit. Coconuts even have their own festival, Coconut Day, which was celebrated a few days before my synchronistic birth. You may feel reassured about coconuts. Rice has not been so lucky; rice-paddies lie under concrete now; tenements tower where once rice wallowed within sight of the sea. But still, in the city, we are great rice-eaters. Patna rice, Basmati, Kashmiri rice travels to the metropolis daily; so the original, ur-rice has left its mark upon us all, and cannot be said to have died in vain. As for Mumbadevi—she’s not so popular these days, having been replaced by elephant-headed Ganesh in the people’s affections. The calendar of festivals reveals her decline: Ganesh—“Ganpati Baba”—has his day of Ganesh Chaturthi, when huge processions are “taken out” and march to Chowpatty bearing plaster effigies of the god, which they hurl into the sea. Ganesh’s day is a rain-making ceremony, it makes the monsoon possible, and it, too, was celebrated in the days before my arrival at the end of the ticktock countdown—but where is Mumbadevi’s day? It is not on the calendar. Where the prayers of pomfret folk, the devotions of crab-catchers? … Of all the first inhabitants, the Koli fishermen have come off worst of all. Squashed now into a tiny village in the thumb of the hand-like peninsula, they have admittedly given their name to a district—Colaba. But follow Colaba Causeway to its tip—past cheap clothes shops and Irani restaurants and the second-rate flats of teachers, journalists and clerks—and you’ll find them, trapped between the naval base and the sea. And sometimes Koli women, their hands stinking of pomfret guts and crabmeat, jostle arrogantly to the head of a Colaba bus-queue, with their crimson (or purple) saris hitched brazenly up between their legs, and a smarting glint of old defeats and dispossessions in their bulging and somewhat fishy eyes. A fort, and afterwards a city, took their land; pile-drivers stole (tetrapods would steal) pieces of their sea. But there are still Arab dhows, every evening, spreading their sails against the sunset … in August 1947, the British, having ended the dominion of fishing-nets, coconuts, rice and Mumbadevi, were about to depart themselves; no dominion is everlasting.

And on June 19th, two weeks after their arrival by Frontier Mail, my parents entered into a curious bargain with one such departing Englishman. His name was William Methwold.

The road to Methwold’s Estate (we are entering my kingdom now, coming into the heart of my childhood; a little lump has appeared in my throat) turns off Warden Road between a bus-stop and a little row of shops. Chimalker’s Toyshop; Reader’s Paradise; the Chimanbhoy Fatbhoy jewelery store; and, above all, Bombelli’s the Confectioners, with their Marquis cake, their One Yard of Chocolates! Names to conjure with; but there’s no time now. Past the saluting cardboard bellboy of the Band Box Laundry, the road leads us home. In those days the pink skyscraper of the Narlikar women (hideous echo of Srinagar’s radio mast!) had not even been thought of; the road mounted a low hillock, no higher than a two-storey building; it curved round to face the sea, to look down on Breach Candy Swimming Club, where pink people could swim in a pool the shape of British India without fear of rubbing up against a black skin; and there, arranged nobly around a little roundabout, were the palaces of William Methwold, on which hung signs that would—thanks to me—reappear many years later, signs bearing two words; just two, but they lured my unwitting parents into Methwold’s peculiar game:
FOR SALE.

Methwold’s Estate: four identical houses built in a style befitting their original residents (conquerors’ houses! Roman mansions; three-storey homes of gods standing on a two-storey Olympus, a stunted Kailasa!)—large, durable mansions with red gabled roofs and turret towers in each corner, ivory-white corner towers wearing pointy red-tiled hats (towers fit to lock princesses in!)—houses with verandahs, with servants’ quarters reached by spiral iron staircases hidden at the back—houses which their owner, William Methwold, had named majestically after the palaces of Europe: Versailles Villa, Buckingham Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci. Bougainvillaea crept across them; goldfish swam in pale blue pools; cacti grew in rock-gardens; tiny touch-me-not plants huddled beneath tamarind trees; there were butterflies and roses and cane chairs on the lawns. And on that day in the middle of June, Mr. Methwold sold his empty palaces for ridiculously little—but there were conditions. So now, without more ado, I present him to you, complete with the center-parting in his hair … a six-foot Titan, this Methwold, his face the pink of roses and eternal youth. He had a head of thick black brilliantined hair, parted in the center. We shall speak again of this center-parting, whose ramrod precision made Methwold irresistible to women, who felt unable to prevent themselves wanting to rumple it up … Methwold’s hair, parted in the middle, has a lot to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history and sexuality moved. Like tightrope-walkers. (But despite everything, not even I, who never saw him, never laid eyes on languid gleaming teeth or devastatingly combed hair, am capable of bearing him any grudge.)