Midnight's Children (56 page)

“Who are these multi-multis? These Dawoods, Saigols, Haroons?” he cried gaily, dismissing the richest families in the land. “Who are Valikas or Zulfikars? I could eat them ten at a time. You wait!”, he promised, “In two years the whole world will be wiping itself on an Amina Brand cloth. The finest terry-cloth! The most modern machines! We shall make the whole world clean and dry; Dawoods and Zulfikars will beg to know my secret; and I will say, yes, the towels are high-quality; but the secret is not in the manufacturing; it was love that conquered all.” (I discerned, in my father’s speech, the lingering effects of the optimism virus.)

Did Amina Brand conquer the world in the name of cleanliness (which is next to …)? Did Valikas and Saigols come to ask Ahmed Sinai, “God, we’re stumped, yaar, how’d you do it?” Did high-quality terry-cloth, in patterns devised by Ahmed himself—a little gaudy, but never mind, they were born of love—wipe away the moistness of Pakistanis and export-markets alike? Did Russians Englishmen Americans wrap themselves in my mother’s immortalized name? … The story of Amina Brand must wait awhile; because the career of Jamila Singer is about to take off; the mosque-shadowed house on Clayton Road has been visited by Uncle Puffs.

His real name was Major (Retired) Alauddin Latif; he had heard about my sister’s voice from “my darn good friend General Zulfikar; use to be with him in the Border Patrol Force back in ’47.” He turned up at Alia Aziz’s house shortly after Jamila’s fifteenth birthday, beaming and bouncing, revealing a mouth filled with solid gold teeth. “I’m a simple fellow,” he explained, “like our illustrious President. I keep my cash where it’s safe.” Like our illustrious President, the Major’s head was perfectly spherical; unlike Ayub Khan, Latif had left the Army and entered show-business. “Pakistan’s absolute number-one impresario, old man,” he told my father. “Nothing to it but organization; old Army habit, dies darn hard.” Major Latif had a proposition: he wanted to hear Jamila sing, “And if she’s two per cent as good as I’m told, my good sir, I’ll make her famous! Oh, yes, overnight, certainly! Contacts: that’s all it takes; contacts and organization; and yours truly Major (Retired) Latif has the lot.
Alauddin
Latif,” he stressed, flashing goldly at Ahmed Sinai, “Know the story? I just rub my jolly old lamp and out pops the genie bringing fame and fortune. Your girl will be in darn good hands.
Darn
good.”

It is fortunate for Jamila Singer’s legion of fans that Ahmed Sinai was a man in love with his wife; mellowed by his own happiness, he failed to eject Major Latif on the spot. I also believe today that my parents had already come to the conclusion that their daughter’s gift was too extraordinary to keep to themselves; the sublime magic of her angel’s voice had begun to teach them the inevitable imperatives of talent. But Ahmed and Amina had one concern. “Our daughter,” Ahmed said—he was always the more old-fashioned of the two beneath the surface—“is from a good family; but you want to put her on a stage in front of God knows how many strange men … ?” The Major looked affronted. “Sir,” he said stiffly, “you think I am not a man of sensibility? Got daughters myself, old man. Seven, thank God. Set up a little travel agency business for them; strictly over the telephone, though. Wouldn’t dream of sitting them in an office-window. It’s the biggest telephonic travel agency in the place, actually. We send train-drivers to England, matter of fact; bus-wallahs, too. My point,” he added hastily, “is that your daughter would be given as much respect as mine. More, actually; she’s going to be a star!”

Major Latif’s daughters—Safia and Rafia and five other -afias—were dubbed, collectively, “the Puffias” by the remaining Monkey in my sister; their father was nicknamed first “Father-Puffia” and then Uncle—a courtesy title—Puffs. He was as good as his word; in six months Jamila Singer was to have hit records, an army of admirers, everything; and all, as I’ll explain in a moment, without revealing her face.

Uncle Puffs became a fixture in our lives; he visited the Clayton Road house most evenings, at what I used to think of as the cocktail hour, to sip pomegranate juice and ask Jamila to sing a little something. She, who was growing into the sweetest-natured of girls, always obliged … afterwards he would clear his throat as if something had got stuck in it and begin to joke heartily with me about getting married. Twenty-four-carat grins blinded me as he, “Time you took a wife, young man. Take my advice: pick a girl with good brains and bad teeth; you’ll have got a friend and a safe-deposit box rolled into one!” Uncle Puffs’ daughters, he claimed, all conformed to the above description … I, embarrassed, smelling out that he was only half-joking, would cry, “O, Uncle
Puffs!
” He knew his nickname; quite liked it, even. Slapping my thigh, he cried, “Playing hard to get, eh? Darn right. Okay my boy: you pick one of my girls, and I guarantee to have all her teeth pulled out; by the time you marry her she’ll have a million-buck smile for a dowry!” Whereupon my mother usually contrived to change the subject; she wasn’t keen on Uncle Puffs’ idea, no matter how pricey the dentures … on that first night, as so often afterwards, Jamila sang to Major Alauddin Latif. Her voice wafted out through the window and silenced the traffic; the birds stopped chattering and, at the hamburger shop across the street, the radio was switched off; the street was full of stationary people, and my sister’s voice washed over them … when she finished, we noticed that Uncle Puffs was crying.

“A jewel,” he said, honking into a handkerchief, “Sir and Madam, your daughter is a jewel. I am humbled, absolutely. Darn humbled. She has proved to me that a golden voice is preferable even to golden teeth.”

And when Jamila Singer’s fame had reached the point at which she could no longer avoid giving a public concert, it was Uncle Puffs who started the rumor that she had been involved in a terrible, disfiguring car-crash; it was Major (Retired) Latif who devised her famous, all-concealing, white silk chadar, the curtain or veil, heavily embroidered in gold brocade-work and religious calligraphy, behind which she sat demurely whenever she performed in public. The chadar of Jamila Singer was held up by two tireless, muscular figures, also (but more simply) veiled from head to foot—the official story was that they were her female attendants, but their sex was impossible to determine through their burqas; and at its very center, the Major had cut a hole. Diameter: three inches. Circumference: embroidered in finest gold thread. That was how the history of our family once again became the fate of a nation, because when Jamila sang with her lips pressed against the brocaded aperture, Pakistan fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl whom it only ever glimpsed through a gold-and-white perforated sheet.

The accident rumor set the final seal on her popularity; her concerts packed out the Bambino Theatre in Karachi and filled the Shalimar-bagh in Lahore; her records constantly topped the sales charts. And as she became public property, “Pakistan’s Angel,” “The Voice of the Nation,” the “Bulbul-e-Din” or nightingale-of-the-faith, and began to receive one thousand and one firm proposals of marriage a week; as she became the whole country’s favorite daughter and grew into an existence which threatened to overwhelm her place in our own family, so she fell prey to the twin viruses of fame, the first of which made her the victim of her own public image, because the accident-rumor obliged her to wear a gold-and-white burqa at all times, even in my aunt Alia’s school, which she continued to attend; while the second virus subjected her to the exaggerations and simplifications of self which are the unavoidable side-effects of stardom, so that the blind and blinding devoutness and the right-or-wrong nationalism which had already begun to emerge in her now began to dominate her personality, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Publicity imprisoned her inside a gilded tent; and, being the new daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident aspects of the national persona than to the child-world of her Monkey years.

Jamila Singer’s voice was on Voice of Pakistan Radio constantly, so that in the villages of West and East Wings she came to seem like a superhuman being, incapable of being fatigued, an angel who sang to her people through all the days and nights; while Ahmed Sinai, whose few remaining qualms about his daughter’s career had been more than allayed by her enormous earnings (although he had once been a Delhi man, he was by now a true Bombay Muslim at heart, placing cash matters above most other things), became fond of telling my sister: “You see, daughter: decency, purity, art and good business sense can be one and the same things; your old father has been wise enough to work that out.” Jamila smiled sweetly and agreed … she was growing out of scrawny tomboy youth into a slender, slant-eyed, golden-skinned beauty whose hair was nearly long enough to sit on; even her nose looked good. “In my daughter,” Ahmed Sinai told Uncle Puffs proudly, “it is my side of the family’s noble features which have prevailed.” Uncle Puffs cast a quizzical, awkward glance at me and cleared his throat. “Darn fine-looking girl, sir,” he told my father, “Top-hole, by gum.”

The thunder of applause was never far from my sister’s ears; at her first, now-legendary Bambino recital (we sat in seats provided by Uncle Puffs—“Best darn seats in the house!”—beside his seven Puffias, all veiled … Uncle Puffs dug me in the ribs, “Hey, boy—choose! Take your pick! Remember: the dowry!” and I blushed and stared hard at the stage), the cries of
“Wah! Wah!”
were sometimes louder than Jamila’s voice; and after the show we found Jamila back-stage drowning in a sea of flowers, so that we had to fight our way through the blossoming camphor garden of the nation’s love, to find that she was almost fainting, not from fatigue, but from the overpoweringly sweet perfume of adoration with which the blooms had filled the room. I, too, felt my head beginning to swim; until Uncle Puffs began to hurl flowers in great bushels from an open window—they were gathered by a crowd of fans—while he cried, “Flowers are fine, darn it, but even a national heroine needs air!”

There was applause, too, on the evening Jamila Singer (and family) was invited to President House to sing for the commander of pepperpots. Ignoring reports in foreign magazines about embezzled money and Swiss bank accounts, we scrubbed ourselves until we shone; a family in the towel business is obliged to be spotlessly clean. Uncle Puffs gave his gold teeth an extra-careful polish; and in a large hall dominated by garlanded portraits of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Quaid-i-Azam, and of his assassinated friend and successor Liaquat Ali, a perforated sheet was held up and my sister sang. Jamila’s voice fell silent at last; the voice of gold braid succeeded her brocade-bordered song. “Jamila daughter,” we heard, “your voice will be a sword for purity; it will be a weapon with which we shall cleanse men’s souls.” President Ayub was, by his own admission, a simple soldier; he instilled in my sister the simple, soldierly virtues of faith-in-leaders and trust-in-God; and she, “The President’s will is the voice of my heart.” Through the hole in a perforated sheet, Jamila Singer dedicated herself to patriotism; and the diwan-i-khas, the hall of this private audience, rang with applause, polite now, not the wild wah-wahing of the Bambino crowd, but the regimented approbation of braided gongs-and-pips and the delighted clapping of weepy parents. “I say!” Uncle Puffs whispered, “Darn fine, eh?”

What I could smell, Jamila could sing. Truth beauty happiness pain: each had its separate fragrance, and could be distinguished by my nose; each, in Jamila’s performances, could find its ideal voice. My nose, her voice: they were exactly complementary gifts; but they were growing apart. While Jamila sang patriotic songs, my nose seemed to prefer to linger on the uglier smells which invaded it: the bitterness of Aunt Alia, the hard unchanging stink of my fellow-students’ closed minds; so that while she rose into the clouds, I fell into the gutter.

Looking back, however, I think I was already in love with her, long before I was told … is there proof of Saleem’s unspeakable sister-love? There is. Jamila Singer had one passion in common with the vanished Brass Monkey; she loved bread. Chapatis, parathas, tandoori nans? Yes, but. Well then: was yeast preferred? It was; my sister—despite patriotism—hankered constantly after leavened bread. And, in all Karachi, what was the only source of quality, yeasty loaves? Not a baker’s; the best bread in the city was handed out through a hatch in an otherwise blind wall, every Thursday morning, by the sisters of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia. Each week, on my Lambretta scooter, I brought my sister the warm fresh loaves of nuns. Despite long snaking queues; making light of the overspiced, hot, dung-laden odor of the narrow streets around the nunnery; ignoring all other calls upon my time, I fetched the bread. Criticism was entirely absent from my heart; never once did I ask my sister whether this last relic of her old flirtation with Christianity might not look rather bad in her new role of Bulbul of the Faith …

Is it possible to trace the origins of unnatural love? Did Saleem, who had yearned after a place in the center of history, become besotted with what he saw in his sister of his own hopes for life? Did much-mutilated no-longer-Snotnose, as broken a member of the Midnight Children’s Conference as the knife-scarred beggar-girl Sundari, fall in love with the new wholeness of his sibling? Once the Mubarak, the Blessed One, did I adore in my sister the fulfilment of my most private dreams? … I shall say only that I was unaware of what had happened to me until, with a scooter between my sixteen-year-old thighs, I began to follow the spoors of whores.

While Alia smoldered; during the early days of Amina Brand towels; amid the apotheosis of Jamila Singer; when a split-level house, rising by command of an umbilical cord, was still far from complete; in the time of the late-flowering love of my parents; surrounded by the somehow barren certitudes of the land of the pure, Saleem Sinai came to terms with himself. I will not say he was not sad; refusing to censor my past, I admit he was as sullen, often as uncooperative, certainly as spotty as most boys of his age. His dreams, denied the children of midnight, became filled with nostalgia to the point of nausea, so that he often woke up gagging with the heavy musk of regret overpowering his senses; there were nightmares of numbers marching one two three, and of a tightening, throttling pair of prehensile knees … but there was a new gift, and a Lambretta scooter, and (though still unconscious) a humble, submissive love of his sister … jerking my narrator’s eyes away from the described past, I insist that Saleem, then-as-now, succeeded in turning his attention towards the as-yet-undescribed future. Escaping, whenever possible, from a residence in which the acrid fumes of his aunt’s envy made life unbearable, and also from a college filled with other equally dislikeable smells, I mounted my motorized steed and explored the olfactory avenues of my new city. And after we heard of my grandfather’s death in Kashmir, I became even more determined to drown the past in the thick, bubbling scent-stew of the present … O dizzying early days before categorization! Formlessly, before I began to shape them, the fragrances poured into me: the mournful decaying fumes of animal feces in the gardens of the Frere Road museum, the pustular body odors of young men in loose pajamas holding hands in Sadar evenings, the knife-sharpness of expectorated betel-nut and the bitter-sweet commingling of betel and opium: “rocket paans” were sniffed out in the hawker-crowded alleys between Elphinstone Street and Victoria Road. Camel-smells, car-smells, the gnat-like irritation of motor-rickshaw fumes, the aroma of contraband cigarettes and “black-money,” the competitive effluvia of the city’s bus-drivers and the simple sweat of their sardine-crowded passengers. (One bus-driver, in those days, was so incensed at being overtaken by his rival from another company—the nauseating odor of defeat poured from his glands—that he took his bus round to his opponent’s house at night, hooted until the poor fellow emerged, and ran him down beneath wheels reeking, like my aunt, of revenge.) Mosques poured over me the itr of devotion; I could smell the orotund emissions of power sent out by flag-waving Army motors; in the very hoardings of the cinemas I could discern the cheap tawdry perfumes of imported spaghetti Westerns and the most violent martial-arts films ever made. I was, for a time, like a drugged person, my head reeling beneath the complexities of smell; but then my overpowering desire for form asserted itself, and I survived.