Midnight's Children (49 page)

For forty days, we were besieged by the dust; dust creeping under the wet towels we placed around all the windows, dust slyly following in each mourning arrival, dust filtering through the very walls to hang like a shapeless wraith in the air, dust deadening the sounds of formal ululation and also the deadly sniping of grieving kinsfolk; the remnants of Methwold’s Estate settled on my grandmother and goaded her towards a great fury; they irritated the pinched nostrils of Punchinello-faced General Zulfikar and forced him to sneeze on to his chin. In the ghost-haze of the dust it sometimes seemed we could discern the shapes of the past, the mirage of Lila Sabarmati’s pulverized pianola or the prison bars at the window of Toxy Catrack’s cell; Dubash’s nude statuette danced in dust-form through our chambers, and Sonny Ibrahim’s bullfight-posters visited us as clouds. The Narlikar women had moved away while bulldozers did their work; we were alone inside the dust-storm, which gave us all the appearance of neglected furniture, as if we were chairs and tables which had been abandoned for decades without covering-sheets; we looked like the ghosts of ourselves. We were a dynasty born out of a nose, the aquiline monster on the face of Aadam Aziz, and the dust, entering our nostrils in our time of grief, broke down our reserve, eroded the barriers which permit families to survive; in the dust storm of the dying palaces things were said and seen and done from which none of us ever recovered.

It was started by Reverend Mother, perhaps because the years had filled her out until she resembled the Sankara Acharya mountain in her native Srinagar, so that she presented the dust with the largest surface area to attack. Rumbling up from her mountainous body came a noise like an avalanche, which, when it turned into words, became a fierce attack on Aunt Pia, the bereaved widow. We had all noticed that my mumani was behaving unusually. There was an unspoken feeling that an actress of her standing should have risen to the challenge of widowhood in high style; we had unconsciously been eager to see her grieving, looking forward to watching an accomplished tragedienne orchestrate her own calamity, anticipating a forty-day raga in which bravura and gentleness, howling pain and soft despond would all be blended in the exact proportions of art; but Pia remained still, dry-eyed, and anticlimactically composed. Amina Sinai and Emerald Zulfikar wept and rent their hair, trying to spark off Pia’s talents; but finally, when it seemed nothing would move Pia, Reverend Mother lost patience. The dust entered her disappointed fury and increased its bitterness. “That woman, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother rumbled, “didn’t I tell you about her? My son, Allah, he could have been anything, but no, whatsitsname, she must make him ruin his life; he must jump off a roof, whatsitsname, to be free of her.”

It was said; could not be unsaid. Pia sat like stone; my insides shook like cornflour pudding. Reverend Mother went grimly on; she swore an oath upon the hairs of her dead son’s head. “Until that woman shows my son’s memory some respect, whatsitsname, until she takes out a wife’s true tears, no food will pass my lips. It is shame and scandal, whatsitsname, how she sits with antimony instead of tears in her eyes!” The house resounded with this echo of her old wars with Aadam Aziz. And until the twentieth day of the forty, we were all afraid that my grandmother would die of starvation and the forty days would have to start all over again. She lay dustily on her bed; we waited and feared.

I broke the stalemate between grandmother and aunt; so at least I can legitimately claim to have saved one life. On the twentieth day, I sought out Pia Aziz who sat in her groundfloor room like a blind woman; as an excuse for my visit, I apologized clumsily for my indiscretions in the Marine Drive apartment. Pia spoke, after a distant silence: “Always melodrama,” she said, flatly, “In his family members, in his work. He died for his hate of melodrama; it is why I would not cry.” At the time I did not understand; now I’m sure that Pia Aziz was exactly right. Deprived of a livelihood by spurning the cheap-thrill style of the Bombay cinema, my uncle strolled off the edge of a roof; melodrama inspired (and perhaps tainted) his final dive to earth. Pia’s refusal to weep was in honor of his memory … but the effort of admitting it breached the walls of her self-control. Dust made her sneeze; the sneeze brought tears to her eyes; and now the tears would not stop, and we all witnessed our hoped-for performance after all, because once they fell they fell like Flora Fountain, and she was unable to resist her own talent; she shaped the flood like the performer she was, introducing dominant themes and subsidiary motifs, beating her astonishing breasts in a manner genuinely painful to observe, now squeezing, now pummelling … she tore her garments and her hair. It was an exaltation of tears, and it persuaded Reverend Mother to eat. Dal and pistachio-nuts poured into my grandmother while salt water flooded from my aunt. Now Naseem Aziz descended upon Pia, embracing her, turning the solo into a duet, mingling the music of reconciliation with the unbearably beautiful tunes of grief. Our palms itched with inexpressible applause. And the best was still to come, because Pia, the artiste, brought her epic efforts to a superlative close. Laying her head in her mother-in-law’s lap, she said in a voice filled with submission and emptiness, “Ma, let your unworthy daughter listen to you at last; tell me what to do, I will do.” And Reverend Mother, tearfully: “Daughter, your father Aziz and I will go to Rawalpindi soon; in our old age we will live near our youngest daughter, our Emerald. You will also come, and a petrol pump will be purchased.” And so it was that Reverend Mother’s dream began to come true, and Pia Aziz agreed to relinquish the world of films for that of fuel. My uncle Hanif, I thought, would probably have approved.

The dust affected us all during those forty days; it made Ahmed Sinai churlish and raucous, so that he refused to sit in the company of his in-laws and made Alice Pereira relay messages to the mourners, messages which he also yelled out from his office: “Keep the racket down! I am working in the middle of this hullabaloo!” It made General Zulfikar and Emerald look constantly at calendars and airline timetables, while their son Zafar began to boast to the Brass Monkey that he was getting his father to arrange a marriage between them. “You should think you’re lucky,” this cocky cousin told my sister, “My father is a big man in Pakistan.” But although Zafar had inherited his father’s looks, the dust had clogged up the Monkey’s spirits, and she didn’t have the heart to fight him. Meanwhile my aunt Alia spread her ancient, dusty disappointment through the air and my most absurd relatives, the family of my uncle Mustapha, sat sullenly in corners and were forgotten, as usual; Mustapha Aziz’s moustache, proudly waxed and upturned at the tips when he arrived, had long since sagged under the depressive influence of the dust.

And then, on the twenty-second day of the mourning period, my grandfather, Aadam Aziz, saw God.

He was sixty-eight that year—still a decade older than the century. But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll; his eyes were still blue, but his back was bent. Shuffling around Buckingham Villa in embroidered skull-cap and full-length chugha-coat—coated, too, in a thin film of dust—he munched aimlessly on raw carrots and sent thin streaks of spittle down the grizzled white contours of his chin. And as he declined, Reverend Mother grew larger and stronger; she, who had once wailed pitifully at the sight of Mercurochrome, now appeared to thrive on his weakness, as though their marriage had been one of those mythical unions in which succubi appear to men as innocent damsels, and, after luring them into the matrimonial bed, regain their true, awful aspect and begin to swallow their souls … my grandmother, in those days, had acquired a moustache almost as luxuriant as the dustily-sagging hair on the upper lip of her one surviving son. She sat cross-legged on her bed, smearing her lip with a mysterious fluid which set hard around the hairs and was then ripped off by a sharp, violent hand; but the remedy only served to exacerbate the ailment.

“He has become like a child again, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother told my grandfather’s children, “and Hanif has finished him off.” She warned us that he had begun to see things. “He talks to people who are not there,” she whispered loudly while he wandered through the room sucking his teeth, “How he calls out, whatsitsname! In the middle of the night!” And she mimicked him: “Ho, Tai? Is it you?” She told us children about the boatman, and the Hummingbird, and the Rani of Cooch Naheen. “Poor man has lived too long, whatsitsname; no father should see his son die first.” … And Amina, listening, shook her head in sympathy, not knowing that Aadam Aziz would leave her this legacy—that she, too, in her last days, would be visited by things which had no business to return.

We could not use the ceiling-fans for the dust; perspiration ran down the face of my stricken grandfather and left streaks of mud on his cheeks. Sometimes he would grab anyone who was near him and speak with utter lucidity: “These Nehrus will not be happy until they have made themselves hereditary kings!” Or, dribbling into the face of a squirming General Zulfikar: “Ah, unhappy Pakistan! How ill-served by her rulers!” But at other times he seemed to imagine himself in a gemstone store, and muttered, “… Yes: there were emeralds and rubies …” The Monkey whispered to me, “Is grandpa going to die?”

What leaked into me from Aadam Aziz: a certain vulnerability to women, but also its cause, the hole at the center of himself caused by his (which is also my) failure to believe or disbelieve in God. And something else as well—something which, at the age of eleven, I saw before anyone else noticed. My grandfather had begun to crack.

“In the head?” Padma asks, “You mean in the upper storey?”

The boatman Tai said: “The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba, just under the water’s skin
.” I saw the cracks in his eyes—a delicate tracery of colorless lines against the blue; I saw a network of fissures spreading beneath his leathery skin; and I answered the Monkey’s question: “I think he is.” Before the end of the forty-day mourning period, my grandfather’s skin had begun to split and flake and peel; he could hardly open his mouth to eat because of the cuts in the corners of his lips; and his teeth began to drop like Flitted flies. But a crack-death can be slow; and it was a long time before we knew about the other cracks, about the disease which was nibbling at his bones, so that finally his skeleton disintegrated into powder inside the weatherbeaten sack of his skin.

Padma is looking suddenly panicky. “What are you saying? You, mister: are you telling that you also … what nameless thing can eat up any man’s
bones?
Is it …”

No time to pause now; no time for sympathy or panic; I have already gone further than I should. Retreating a little in time, I must mention that something also leaked into Aadam Aziz from me; because on the twenty-third day of the mourning period, he asked the entire family to assemble in the same room of glass vases (no need to hide them from my uncle now) and cushions and immobilized fans, the same room in which I had announced visions of my own … Reverend Mother had said, “He has become like a child again”; like a child, my grandfather announced that, three weeks after he had heard of the death of a son whom he had believed to be alive and well, he had seen with his own eyes the God in whose death he had tried all his life to believe. And, like a child, he was not believed. Except by one person … “Yes, listen,” my grandfather said, his voice a weak imitation of his old booming tones, “Yes, Rani? You are here? And Abdullah? Come, sit, Nadir, this is news—where is Ahmed? Alia will want him here … God, my children; God whom I fought all my life. Oskar? Ilse?—No, of course I know they are dead. You think I’m old, maybe foolish; but I have seen God.” And the story, slowly, despite rambles and diversions, comes inching out: at midnight, my grandfather awoke in his darkened room. Someone else present—someone who was not his wife. Reverend Mother, snoring in her bed. But someone. Someone with shining dust on him, lit by the setting moon. And Aadam Aziz, “Ho, Tai? Is it you?” And Reverend Mother, mumbling in her sleep, “O, sleep, husband, forget this …” But the someone, the something, cries in a loud startling (and startled?) voice, “Jesus Christ Almighty!” (Amid the cut-glass vases, my grandfather laughs apologetically heh-heh, for mentioning the infidel name.) “Jesus Christ Almighty!” and my grandfather looking, and seeing, yes, there are holes in hands, perforations in the feet as there once were in a … But he is rubbing his eyes, shaking his head, saying: “Who? What name? What did you say?” And the apparition, startling-startled, “God! God!” And, after a pause, “I didn’t think you could see me.”

“But I saw Him,” my grandfather says beneath motionless fans. “Yes, I can’t deny it, I surely did.” … And the apparition: “You’re the one whose son died”; and my grandfather, with a pain in his chest: “Why? Why did that happen?” To which the creature, made visible only by dust: “God has his reasons, old man; life’s like that, right?”

Reverend Mother dismissed us all. “Old man doesn’t know what he means, whatsitsname. Such a thing, that gray hairs should make a man blaspheme!” But Mary Pereira left with her face pale as bedsheets; Mary knew whom Aadam Aziz had seen—who, decayed by his responsibility for her crime, had holes in hands and feet; whose heel had been penetrated by a snake; who died in a nearby clocktower, and had been mistaken for God.

I may as well finish my grandfather’s story here and now; I’ve gone this far, and the opportunity may not present itself later on … somewhere in the depths of my grandfather’s senility, which inevitably reminded me of the craziness of Professor Schaapsteker upstairs, the bitter idea took root that God, by his offhand attitude to Hanif’s suicide, had proved his own culpability in the affair; Aadam grabbed General Zulfikar by his military lapels and whispered to him: “Because I never believed, he stole my son!” And Zulfikar: “No, no, Doctor Sahib, you must not trouble yourself so …” But Aadam Aziz never forgot his vision; although the details of the particular deity he had seen grew blurred in his mind, leaving behind only a passionate, drooling desire for revenge (which lust is also common to us both) … at the end of the forty-day mourning period, he would refuse to go to Pakistan (as Reverend Mother had planned) because that was a country built especially for God; and in the remaining years of his life he often disgraced himself by stumbling into mosques and temples with his old man’s stick, mouthing imprecations and lashing out at any worshipper or holy man within range. In Agra, he was tolerated for the sake of the man he had once been; the old ones at the Cornwallis Road paan-shop played hit-the-spittoon and reminisced with compassion about the Doctor Sahib’s past. Reverend Mother was obliged to yield to him for this reason if for no other—the iconoclasm of his dotage would have created a scandal in a country where he was not known.