Midnight's Children (8 page)

She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch’s nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties. Earlier that year Aadam Aziz had commissioned life-size blow-up photographs of his family to hang on the living-room wall; the three girls and two boys had posed dutifully enough, but Reverend Mother had rebelled when her turn came. Eventually, the photographer had tried to catch her unawares, but she seized his camera and broke it over his skull. Fortunately, he lived; but there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone’s little black box. It was enough for her that she must live in unveiled, barefaced shamelessness—there was no question of allowing the fact to be recorded.

It was perhaps the obligation of facial nudity, coupled with Aziz’s constant requests for her to move beneath him, that had driven her to the barricades; and the domestic rules she established were a system of self-defense so impregnable that Aziz, after many fruitless attempts, had more or less given up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain. (Perhaps, too, it wasn’t a system of self-defense at all, but a means of defense against her self.)

Among the things to which she denied entry were all political matters. When Doctor Aziz wished to talk about such things, he visited his friend the Rani, and Reverend Mother sulked; but not very hard, because she knew his visits represented a victory for her.

The twin hearts of her kingdom were her kitchen and her pantry. I never entered the former, but remembered staring through the pantry’s locked screen-doors at the enigmatic world within, a world of hanging wire baskets covered with linen cloths to keep out the flies, of tins which I knew to be full of gur and other sweets, of locked chests with neat square labels, of nuts and turnips and sacks of grain, of goose-eggs and wooden brooms. Pantry and kitchen were her inalienable territory; and she defended them ferociously. When she was carrying her last child, my aunt Emerald, her husband offered to relieve her of the chore of supervising the cook. She did not reply; but the next day, when Aziz approached the kitchen, she emerged from it with a metal pot in her hands and barred the doorway. She was fat and also pregnant, so there was not much room left in the doorway. Aadam Aziz frowned. “What is this, wife?” To which my grandmother answered, “This, whatsitsname, is a very heavy pot; and if just once I catch you in here, whatsitsname, I’ll push your head into it, add some dahi, and make, whatsitsname, a korma.” I don’t know how my grandmother came to adopt the term
whatsitsname
as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry for help … as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe. She didn’t know, you see, what it was called.

… And at the dinner-table, imperiously, she continued to rule. No food was set upon the table, no plates were laid. Curry and crockery were marshalled upon a low side-table by her right hand, and Aziz and the children ate what she dished out. It is a sign of the power of this custom that, even when her husband was afflicted by constipation, she never once permitted him to choose his food, and listened to no requests or words of advice. A fortress may not move. Not even when its dependants’ movements become irregular.

During the long concealment of Nadir Khan, during the visits to the house on Cornwallis Road of young Zulfikar who fell in love with Emerald and of the prosperous reccine-and-leathercloth merchant named Ahmed Sinai who hurt my aunt Alia so badly that she bore a grudge for twenty-five years before discharging it cruelly upon my mother, Reverend Mother’s iron grip upon her household never faltered; and even before Nadir’s arrival precipitated the great silence, Aadam Aziz had tried to break this grip, and been obliged to go to war with his wife. (All this helps to show how remarkable his affliction by optimism actually was.)

… In 1932, ten years earlier, he had taken control of his children’s education. Reverend Mother was dismayed; but it was a father’s traditional role, so she could not object. Alia was eleven; the second daughter, Mumtaz, was almost nine. The two boys, Hanif and Mustapha, were eight and six, and young Emerald was not yet five. Reverend Mother took to confiding her fears to the family cook, Daoud. “He fills their heads with I don’t know what foreign languages, whatsitsname, and other rubbish also, no doubt.” Daoud stirred pots and Reverend Mother cried, “Do you wonder, whatsitsname, that the little one calls herself Emerald? In English, whatsitsname? That man will ruin my children for me. Put less cumin in that, whatsitsname, you should pay more attention to your cooking and less to minding other people’s business.”

She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction. Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. “You have your Hummingbird,” she told him, “but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man’s hum.” It was one of her rare political comments … and then the day arrived when Aziz threw out the religious tutor. Thumb and forefinger closed around the maulvi’s ear. Naseem Aziz saw her husband leading the stragglebearded wretch to the door in the garden wall; gasped; then cried out as her husband’s foot was applied to the divine’s fleshy parts. Unleashing thunderbolts, Reverend Mother sailed into battle.

“Man without dignity!” she cursed her husband, and, “Man without, whatsitsname,
shame
!” Children watched from the safety of the back verandah. And Aziz, “Do you know what that man was teaching your children?,” And Reverend Mother hurling question against question, “What will you not do to bring disaster, whatsitsname, on our heads?”—But now Aziz, “You think it was Nastaliq script? Eh?”—to which his wife, warming up: “Would you eat pig? Whatsitsname? Would you spit on the Quran?” And, voice rising, the doctor ripostes, “Or was it some verses of ‘The Cow’? You think that?” … Paying no attention, Reverend Mother arrives at her climax: “Would you marry your daughters to Germans!?” And pauses, fighting for breath, letting my grandfather reveal, “He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs and who knows what other vegetarians. Will you have hateful children, woman?”

“Will you have godless ones?” Reverend Mother envisages the legions of the Archangel Gabriel descending at night to carry her heathen brood to Hell. She has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages … “I take this oath, whatsitsname,” my grandmother said, “I swear no food will come from my kitchen to your lips! No, not one chapati, until you bring the maulvi sahib back and kiss his, whatsitsname, feet!”

The war of starvation which began that day very nearly became a duel to the death. True to her word, Reverend Mother did not hand her husband, at mealtimes, so much as an empty plate. Doctor Aziz took immediate reprisals, by refusing to feed himself when he was out. Day by day the five children watched their father disappearing, while their mother grimly guarded the dishes of food. “Will you be able to vanish completely?” Emerald asked with interest, adding solicitously, “Don’t do it unless you know how to come back again.” Aziz’s face acquired craters; even his nose appeared to be getting thinner. His body had become a battlefield and each day a piece of it was blasted away. He told Alia, his eldest, the wise child: “In any war, the field of battle suffers worse devastation than either army. This is natural.” He began to take rickshaws when he did his rounds. Hamdard the rickshaw-wallah began to worry about him.

The Rani of Cooch Naheen sent emissaries to plead with Reverend Mother. “India isn’t full enough of starving people?” the emissaries asked Naseem, and she unleashed a basilisk glare which was already becoming a legend. Hands clasped in her lap, a muslin dupatta wound miser-tight around her head, she pierced her visitors with lid-less eyes and stared them down. Their voices turned to stone; their hearts froze; and alone in a room with strange men, my grandmother sat in triumph, surrounded by downcast eyes. “Full enough, whatsitsname?” she crowed. “Well, perhaps. But also, perhaps not.”

But the truth was that Naseem Aziz was very anxious; because while Aziz’s death by starvation would be a clear demonstration of the superiority of her idea of the world over his, she was unwilling to be widowed for a mere principle; yet she could see no way out of the situation which did not involve her in backing down and losing face, and having learned to bare her face, my grandmother was most reluctant to lose any of it.

“Fall ill, why don’t you?”—Alia, the wise child, found the solution. Reverend Mother beat a tactical retreat, announced a pain, a killing pain absolutely, whatsitsname, and took to her bed. In her absence Alia extended the olive branch to her father, in the shape of a bowl of chicken soup. Two days later, Reverend Mother rose (having refused to be examined by her husband for the first time in her life), reassumed her powers, and with a shrug of acquiescence in her daughter’s decision, passed Aziz his food as though it were a mere trifle of a business.

That was ten years earlier; but still, in 1942, the old men at the paan-shop are stirred by the sight of the whistling doctor into giggling memories of the time when his wife had nearly made him do a disappearing trick, even though he didn’t know how to come back. Late into the evening they nudge each other with, “Do you remember when—” and “Dried up like a skeleton on a washing-line! He couldn’t even ride his—” and “—I tell you, baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream her daughters’ dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!” But as evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest. Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a pursing of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but instead a long red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in unerring accuracy towards an old brass spittoon. There is much slapping of thighs and self-admiring utterance of “Wah, wah, sir!” and, “Absolutely master shot!” … Around the oldsters, the town fades into desultory evening pastimes. Children play hoop and kabaddi and draw beards on posters of Mian Abdullah. And now the old men place the spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting-place, and aim longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. “Oh too good, yara!” The street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams, superimposing this game of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon … But here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes … here, Brigadier Dodson, the town’s military commander, stifling with heat … and here, his A.D.C., Major Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of the Raj.

Memory of a mildewing photograph (perhaps the work of the same poor brained photographer whose life-size blow-ups so nearly cost him his life): Aadam Aziz, aglow with optimism-fever, shakes hands with a man of sixty or so, an impatient, sprightly type with a lock of white hair falling across his brow like a kindly scar. It is Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird. (“You see, Doctor Sahib, I keep myself fit. You wish to hit me in the stomach? Try, try. I’m in tiptop shape.” … In the photographs, folds of a loose white shirt conceal the stomach, and my grandfather’s fist is not clenched, but swallowed up by the hand of the ex-conjurer.) And behind them, looking benignly on, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, who was going white in blotches, a disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous scale shortly after Independence … “I am the victim,” the Rani whispers, through photographed lips that never move, “the hapless victim of my cross-cultural concerns. My skin is the outward expression of the internationalism of my spirit.” Yes, there is a conversation going on in this photograph, as like expert ventriloquists the optimists meet their leader. Beside the Rani—listen carefully now; history and ancestry are about to meet!—stands a peculiar fellow, soft and paunchy, his eyes like stagnant ponds, his hair long like a poet’s. Nadir Khan, the Hummingbird’s personal secretary. His feet, if they were not frozen by the snapshot, would be shuffling in embarrassment. He mouths through his foolish, rigid smile, “It’s true; I have written verses …” Whereupon Mian Abdullah interrupts, booming through his open mouth with glints of pointy teeth: “But what verses! Not one rhyme in page after page! …” And the Rani, gently: “A modernist, then?” And Nadir, shyly: “Yes.” What tensions there are now in the still, immobile scene! What edgy banter, as the Hummingbird speaks: “Never mind about that; art should uplift; it should remind us of our glorious literary heritage!” … And is that a shadow, or a frown on his secretary’s brow? … Nadir’s voice, issuing lowaslow from the fading picture: “I do not believe in high art, Mian Sahib. Now art must be beyond categories; my poetry and—oh—the game of hit-the-spittoon are equals.” … So now the Rani, kind woman that she is, jokes, “Well, I shall set aside a room, perhaps; for paan-eating and spittoon-hittery. I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, and you must all come and practice. Let the walls be splashed with our inaccurate expectorating! They will be honest stains, at least.” And now the photograph has run out of words; now I notice, with my mind’s eye, that all the while the Hummingbird has been staring towards the door, which is past my grandfather’s shoulder at the very edge of the picture. Beyond the door, history calls. The Hummingbird is impatient to get away … but he has been with us, and his presence has brought us two threads which will pursue me through all my days: the thread that leads to the ghetto of the magicians; and the thread that tells the story of Nadir the rhymeless, verbless poet and a priceless silver spittoon.