Midnight's Children (57 page)

Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorated; the borders were closed, so that we could not go to Agra to mourn my grandfather; Reverend Mother’s emigration to Pakistan was also somewhat delayed. In the meantime, Saleem was working towards a general theory of smell: classification procedures had begun. I saw this scientific approach as my own, personal obeisance to the spirit of my grandfather … to begin with, I perfected my skill at distinguishing, until I could tell apart the infinite varieties of betel-nut and (with my eyes shut) the twelve different available brands of fizzy drink. (Long before the American commentator Herbert Feldman came to Karachi to deplore the existence of a dozen aerated waters in a city which had only three suppliers of bottled milk, I could sit blindfolded and tell Pakola from Hoffman’s Mission, Citra Cola from Fanta. Feldman saw these drinks as a manifestation of capitalist imperialism; I, sniffing out which was Canada Dry and which 7-Up, unerringly separating Pepsi from Coke, was more interested in passing their subtle olfactory test. Double Kola and Kola Kola, Perri Cola and Bubble Up were blindly identified and named.) Only when I was sure of my mastery of physical scents did I move on to those other aromas which only I could smell: the perfumes of emotions and all the thousand and one drives which make us human: love and death, greed and humility, have and have-not were labelled and placed in neat compartments of my mind.

Early attempts at ordering: I tried to classify smells by color—boiling underwear and the printer’s ink of the
Daily Jang
shared a quality of blueness, while old teak and fresh farts were both dark brown. Motor-cars and graveyards I jointly classified as gray … there was, too, classification-by-weight: flyweight smells (paper), bantam odors (soap-fresh bodies, grass), welterweights (perspiration, queen-of-the-night); shahi-korma and bicycle-oil were light-heavyweight in my system, while anger, patchouli, treachery and dung were among the heavyweight stinks of the earth. And I had a geometric system also: the roundness of joy and the angularity of ambition; I had elliptical smells, and also ovals and squares … a lexicographer of the nose, I travelled Bunder Road and the P.E.C.H.S.; a lepidopterist, I snared whiffs like butterflies in the net of my nasal hairs. O wondrous voyages before the birth of philosophy! … Because soon I understood that my work must, if it was to have any value, acquire a moral dimension; that the only important divisions were the infinitely subtle gradations of good and evil smells. Having realized the crucial nature of morality, having sniffed out that smells could be sacred or profane, I invented, in the isolation of my scooter-trips, the science of nasal ethics.

Sacred: purdah-veils, halal meat, muezzins’ towers, prayer-mats; profane: Western records, pig-meat, alcohol. I understood now why mullahs (sacred) refused to enter aeroplanes (profane) on the night before Id-ul-Fitr, not even willing to enter vehicles whose secret odor was the antithesis of godliness in order to make sure of seeing the new moon. I learned the olfactory incompatibility of Islam and socialism, and the inalienable opposition existing between the after-shave of Sind Club members and the poverty-reek of the street-sleeping beggars at the Club gates … more and more, however, I became convinced of an ugly truth—namely that the sacred, or good, held little interest for me, even when such aromas surrounded my sister as she sang; while the pungency of the gutter seemed to possess a fatally irresistible attraction. Besides, I was sixteen; things were stirring beneath my belt, behind my duck-white pants; and no city which locks women away is ever short of whores. While Jamila sang of holiness and love-of-country, I explored profanity and lust. (I had money to burn; my father had become generous as well as loving.)

At the eternally unfinished Jinnah Mausoleum I picked up the women of the street. Other youths came here to seduce American girls away, taking them off to hotel rooms or swimming pools; I preferred to retain my independence and pay. And eventually I nosed out the whore of whores, whose gifts were a mirror for my own. Her name was Tai Bibi, and she claimed to be five hundred and twelve.

But her smell! The richest spoor he, Saleem, had ever sniffed; he felt bewitched by something in it, some air of historic majesty … he found himself saying to the toothless creature: “I don’t care about your age; the smell’s the thing.”

(“My God,” Padma interrupts, “Such a thing—how could you?”)

Though she never hinted at any connection with a Kashmiri boatman, her name exerted the strongest of pulls; although she may have been humoring Saleem when she said, “Boy, I am five hundred and twelve,” his sense of history was nevertheless aroused. Think of me what you like; I spent one hot, humid afternoon in a tenement-room containing a flea-ridden mattress and a naked lightbulb and the oldest whore in the world.

What finally made Tai Bibi irresistible? What gift of control did she possess which put other whores to shame? What maddened the newly-sensitized nostrils of our Saleem? Padma: my ancient prostitute possessed a mastery over her glands so total that she could alter her bodily odors to match those of anyone on earth. Eccrines and apocrines obeyed the instructions of her antiquated will; and although she said, “Don’t expect me to do it standing up; you couldn’t pay enough for that,” her gifts of perfume were more than he could bear.

( … “
Chhi-chhi
,” Padma covers her ears, “My God, such a dirty-filthy man, I never knew!” …)

So there he was, this peculiar and hideous youth, with an old hag who said, “I won’t stand up; my corns,” and then noticed that the mention of corns seemed to arouse him; whispering the secret of her eccrine-and-apocrine facility, she asked if he’d like her to imitate anyone’s smells, he could describe and she could try, and by trial-and-error they could … and at first he jerked away, No no no, but she coaxed him in her voice like crumpled paper, until because he was alone, out of the world and out of all time, alone with this impossible mythological old harridan, he began to describe odors with all the perspicacity of his miraculous nose, and Tai Bibi began to imitate his descriptions, leaving him aghast as by trial-and-error she succeeded in reproducing the body odors of his mother his aunts, oho you like that do you little sahibzada, go on, stick your nose as close as you like, you’re a funny fellow for sure … until suddenly, by accident, yes, I swear I didn’t make her do it, suddenly during trial-and-error the most unspeakable fragrance on earth wafts out of the cracked wrinkled leather-ancient body, and now he can’t hide what she sees, oho, little sahibzada, what have I hit on now, you don’t have to tell who she is but this one is the one for sure.

And Saleem, “Shut up shut up—” But Tai Bibi with the relentlessness of her cackling antiquity presses on, “Oho yes, certainly, your lady-love, little sahibzada—who? Your cousin, maybe? Your sister
…”
Saleem’s hand is tightening into a fist; the right hand, despite mutilated finger, contemplates violence … and now Tai Bibi, “My God yes! Your sister! Go on, hit me, you can’t hide what’s sitting there in the middle of your forehead! …” And Saleem gathering up his clothes struggling into trousers Shut up old hag While she Yes go, go, but if you don’t pay me I’ll, I’ll, you see what I don’t do, and now rupees flying across the room floating down around five-hundred-and-twelve-year-old courtesan, Take take only shut your hideous face, while she Careful my princeling you’re not so handsome yourself, dressed now and rushing from the tenement, Lambretta scooter waiting but urchins have urinated on the seat, he is driving away as fast as he can go, but the truth is going with him, and now Tai Bibi leaning out of a window shouts, “Hey, bhaenchud! Hey, little sister-sleeper, where you running? What’s true is true is true …!”

You may legitimately ask: Did it happen in just this … And surely she couldn’t have been five hundred and … but I swore to confess everything, and I insist that I learned the unspeakable secret of my love for Jamila Singer from the mouth and scent-glands of that most exceptional of whores.

“Our Mrs. Braganza is right,” Padma is scolding me, “She says there is nothing but dirt in the heads of the mens.” I ignore her; Mrs. Braganza, and her sister Mrs. Fernandes, will be dealt with in due course; for the moment, the latter must be content with the factory accounts while the former looks after my son. And while I, to recapture the rapt attention of my revolted Padma Bibi, recount a fairy-tale.

Once upon a time, in the far northern princedom of Kif, there lived a prince who had two beautiful daughters, a son of equally remarkable good looks, a brand-new Rolls-Royce motor-car, and excellent political contacts. This prince, or Nawab, believed passionately in progress, which was why he had arranged the engagement of his elder daughter to the son of the prosperous and well-known General Zulfikar; for his younger daughter he had high hopes of a match with the son of the President himself. As for his motor-car, the first ever seen in his mountain-ringed valley, he loved it almost as much as his children; it grieved him that his subjects, who had become used to using the roads of Kif for purposes of social intercourse, quarrels and games of hit-the-spittoon, refused to get out of its way. He issued a proclamation explaining that the car represented the future, and must be allowed to pass; the people ignored the notice, although it was pasted to shop-fronts and walls and even, it is said, to the sides of cows. The second notice was more peremptory, ordering the citizenry to clear the highways when they heard the horn of the car; the Kifis, however, continued to smoke and spit and argue in the streets. The third notice, which was adorned with a gory drawing, said that the car would henceforth run down anybody who failed to obey its horn. The Kifis added new, more scandalous pictures to the one on the poster; and then the Nawab, who was a good man but not one of infinite patience, actually did as he threatened. When the famous singer Jamila arrived with her family and impresario to sing at her cousin’s engagement ceremony, the car drove her without trouble from border to palace; and the Nawab said proudly, “No trouble; the car is respected now. Progress has occurred.”

The Nawab’s son Mutasim, who had travelled abroad and wore his hair in something called a “beetle-cut,” was a source of worry to his father; because although he was so good-looking that, whenever he travelled around Kif, girls with silver nose-jewelery fainted in the heat of his beauty, he seemed to take no interest in such matters, being content with his polo-ponies and the guitar on which he picked out strange Western songs. He wore bush-shirts on which musical notation and foreign street-signs jostled against the half-clad bodies of pink-skinned girls. But when Jamila Singer, concealed within a gold-brocaded burqa, arrived at the palace, Mutasim the Handsome—who owing to his foreign travels had never heard the rumors of her disfigurement—became obsessed with the idea of seeing her face; he fell head-over-heels with the glimpses of her demure eyes he saw through her perforated sheet.

In those days, the President of Pakistan had decreed an election; it was to take place on the day after the engagement ceremony, under a form of suffrage called Basic Democracy. The hundred million people of Pakistan had been divided up into a hundred and twenty thousand approximately equal parts, and each part was represented by one Basic Democrat. The electoral college of one hundred and twenty thousand “B.D.s” were to elect the President. In Kif, the 420 Basic Democrats included mullahs, road-sweepers, the Nawab’s chauffeur, numerous men who sharecropped hashish on the Nawab’s estate, and other loyal citizens; the Nawab had invited all of these to his daughter’s hennaing ceremony. He had, however, also been obliged to invite two real badmaashes, the returning officers of the Combined Opposition Party. These badmaashes quarrelled constantly amongst themselves, but the Nawab was courteous and welcoming. “Tonight you are my honored friends,” he told them, “and tomorrow is another day.” The badmaashes ate and drank as if they had never seen food before, but everybody—even Mutasim the Handsome, whose patience was shorter than his father’s—was told to treat them well.

The Combined Opposition Party, you will not be surprised to hear, was a collection of rogues and scoundrels of the first water, united only in their determination to unseat the President and return to the bad old days in which civilians, and not soldiers, lined their pockets from the public exchequer; but for some reason they had acquired a formidable leader. This was Mistress Fatima Jinnah, the sister of the founder of the nation, a woman of such desiccated antiquity that the Nawab suspected she had died long ago and been stuffed by a master taxidermist—a notion supported by his son, who had seen a movie called
El Cid
in which a dead man led an army into battle … but there she was nevertheless, goaded into electioneering by the President’s failure to complete the marbling of her brother’s mausoleum; a terrible foe, above slander and suspicion. It was even said that her opposition to the President had shaken the people’s faith in him—was he not, after all, the reincarnation of the great Islamic heroes of yesteryear? Of Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, of Iltutmish and the Mughals? Even in Kif itself, the Nawab had noticed C.O.P. stickers appearing in curious places; someone had even had the cheek to affix one to the boot of the Rolls. “Bad days,” the Nawab told his son. Mutasim replied, “That’s what elections get you—latrine-cleaners and cheap tailors must vote to elect a ruler?”

But today was a day for happiness; in the zenana chambers, women were patterning the Nawab’s daughter’s hands and feet with delicate traceries of henna; soon General Zulfikar and his son Zafar would arrive. The rulers of Kif put the election out of their heads, refusing to think of the crumbling figure of Fatima Jinnah, the mader-i-millat or mother of the nation who had so callously chosen to confuse her children’s choosing.

In the quarters of Jamila Singer’s party, too, happiness reigned supreme. Her father, a towel-manufacturer who could not seem to relinquish the soft hand of his wife, cried, “You see? Whose daughter is performing here? Is it a Haroon girl? A Valika woman? Is it a Dawood or Saigol wench? Like hell!” … But his son Saleem, an unfortunate fellow with a face like a cartoon, seemed to be gripped by some deep malaise, perhaps overwhelmed by his presence at the scene of great historical events; he glanced towards his gifted sister with something in his eyes which looked like shame.