Midnight's Children (80 page)

Mute autocracy of a less-than-two-year-old infant: Aadam did not tell us when he was hungry or sleepy or anxious to perform his natural functions. He expected us to know. The perpetual attention he required may be one of the reasons why I managed, in spite of all indications to the contrary, to stay alive … incapable of anything else in those days after my release from captivity, I concentrated on watching my son. “I tell you, captain, it’s lucky you came back,” Picture Singh joked, “otherwise this one would have turned us all into ayahs.” I understood once again that Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the eyes of the child who was simultaneously not-my-son and also more my heir than any child of my flesh could have been, I found in his empty, limpid pupils a second mirror of humility, which showed me that, from now on, mine would be as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster: the traditional function, perhaps, of reminiscer, of teller-of-tales … I wondered if all over the country the bastard sons of Shiva were exerting similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisaged for the second time that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything. (How these children may, in the future, be identified: their bimbis stick out instead of in.)

But it’s time to get things moving: a taunt, a last railway-train heading south south south, a final battle … on the day following the weaning of Aadam, Saleem accompanied Picture Singh to Connaught Place, to assist him in his snake-charming. Durga the dhoban agreed to take my son with her to the dhobighat: Aadam spent the day observing how power was thrashed out of the clothes of the well-to-do and absorbed by the succubus-woman. On that fateful day, when the warm weather was returning to the city like a swarm of bees, I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed silver spittoon. Picture Singh had provided me with a spittoon-surrogate, an empty Dalda Vanaspati can, but although I used this to entertain my son with my expertise in the gentle art of spittoon-hittery, sending long jets of betel-juice across the grimy air of the magicians’ colony, I was not consoled. A question: why such grief over a mere receptacle of juices? My reply is that you should never underestimate a spittoon. Elegant in the salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, it permitted intellectuals to practice the artforms of the masses; gleaming in a cellar, it transformed Nadir Khan’s underworld into a second Taj Majal; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it was nevertheless present throughout my history, covertly assimilating incidents in washing-chests, ghost-visions, freeze-unfreeze, drainage, exiles; falling from the sky like a piece of the moon, it perpetrated a transformation. O talismanic spittoon! O beauteous lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice! What sensitive person could fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its loss?

… Beside me at the back of a bus bulging with humanity, Picture Singh sat with snake-baskets coiled innocently on his lap. As we rattled and banged through that city which was also filled with the resurgent ghosts of earlier, mythological Delhis, the Most Charming Man In The World wore an air of faded despondency, as if a battle in a distant darkroom were already over … until my return, nobody had understood that Pictureji’s real and unvoiced fear was that he was growing old, that his powers were dimming, that he would soon be adrift and incompetent in a world he did not understand: like me, Picture Singh clung to the presence of Baby Aadam as if the child were a torch in a long dark tunnel. “A fine child, captain,” he told me, “a child of dignity: you hardly notice his ears.”

That day, however, my son was not with us.

New Delhi smells assailed me in Connaught Place—the biscuity perfume of the J. B. Mangharam advertisement, the mournful chalkiness of crumbling plaster; and there was also the tragic spoor of the auto-rickshaw drivers, starved into fatalism by rising petrol costs; and green-grass-smells from the circular park in the middle of the whirling traffic, mingled with the fragrance of con-men persuading foreigners to change money on the black market in shadowy archways. From the India Coffee House, under whose marquees could be heard the endless babbling of gossips, there came the less pleasant aroma of new stories beginning: intrigues marriages quarrels, whose smells were all mixed up with those of tea and chili-pakoras. What I smelled in Connaught Place: the begging nearby presence of a scar-faced girl who had once been Sundari-the-too-beautiful; and loss-of-memory, and turning-towards-the-future, and nothing-really-changes … turning away from these olfactory intimations, I concentrated on the all-pervasive and simpler odors of (human) urine and animal dung.

Underneath the colonnade of Block F in Connaught Place, next to a pavement bookstall, a paan-wallah had his little niche. He sat cross-legged behind a green glass counter like a minor deity of the place: I admit him into these last pages because, although he gave off the aromas of poverty, he was, in fact, a person of substance, the owner of a Lincoln Continental motor-car, which he parked out of sight in Connaught Circus, and, which he had paid for by the fortunes he earned through his sales of contraband imported cigarettes and transistor radios; for two weeks each year he went to jail for a holiday, and the rest of the time paid several policement a handsome salary. In jail he was treated like a king, but behind his green glass counter he looked inoffensive, ordinary, so that it was not easy (without the benefit of a nose as sensitive as Saleem’s) to tell that this was a man who knew everything about everything, a man whose infinite network of contacts made him privy to secret knowledge … to me he provided an additional and not unpleasant echo of a similar character I had known in Karachi during the time of my Lambretta voyages; I was so busy inhaling the familiar perfumes of nostalgia that, when he spoke, he took me by surprise.

We had set up our act next to his niche; while Pictureji busied himself polishing flutes and donning an enormous saffron turban, I performed the function of barker. “Roll up roll up—once in a lifetime an opportunity such as this—ladees, ladahs, come see come see come see! Who is here? No common bhangi; no street-sleeping fraud; this, citizens, ladies and gents, is the Most Charming Man In The World! Yes, come see come see: his photo has been taken by Eastman-Kodak Limited! Come close and have no fear—
PICTURE SINGH
is here!” … And other such garbage; but then the paan-wallah spoke:

“I know of a better act. This fellow is not number-one; oh, no, certainly not. In Bombay there is a better man.”

That was how Picture Singh learned of the existence of his rival; and why, abandoning all plans of giving a performance, he marched over to the blandly smiling paan-wallah, reaching into his depths for his old voice of command, and said, “You will tell me the truth about this faker, captain, or I will send your teeth down your gullet until they bite up your stomach.” And the paan-wallah, unafraid, aware of the three lurking policemen who would move in swiftly to protect their salaries if the need arose, whispered to us the secrets of his omniscience, telling us who when where, until Picture Singh said in a voice whose firmness concealed his fear: “I will go and show this Bombay fellow who is best. In one world, captains, there is no room for two Most Charming Men.”

The vendor of betel-nut delicacies, shrugging delicately, expectorated at our feet.

Like a magic spell, the taunts of a paan-wallah opened the door through which Saleem returned to the city of his birth, the abode of his deepest nostalgia. Yes, it was an open-sesame, and when we returned to the ragged tents beneath the railway bridge, Picture Singh scrabbled in the earth and dug up the knotted handkerchief of his security, the dirt-discolored cloth in which he had hoarded pennies for his old age; and when Durga the washerwoman refused to accompany him, saying, “What do you think, Pictureji, I am a crorepati rich woman that I can take holidays and what-all?”, he turned to me with something very like supplication in his eyes and asked me to accompany him, so that he did not have to go into his worst battle, the test of his old age, without a friend … yes, and Aadam heard it too, with his flapping ears he heard the rhythm of the magic, I saw his eyes light up as I accepted, and then we were in a third-class railway carriage heading south south south, and in the quinquesyllabic monotony of the wheels I heard the secret word: abracadabra abracadabra abracadabra sang the wheels as they bore us back-to-Bom.

Yes, I had left the colony of the magicians behind me for ever, I was heading abracadabra abracadabra into the heart of a nostalgia which would keep me alive long enough to write these pages (and to create a corresponding number of pickles); Aadam and Saleem and Picture Singh squeezed into a third-class carriage, taking with us a number of baskets tied up with string, baskets which alarmed the jam-packed humanity in the carriage by hissing continually, so that the crowds pushed back back back, away from the menace of the snakes, and allowed us a measure of comfort and space; while the wheels sang their abracadabras to Aadam’s flapping ears.

As we traveled to Bombay, the pessimism of Picture Singh expanded until it seemed that it had become a physical entity which merely looked like the old snake-charmer. At Mathura an American youth with pustular chin and a head shaved bald as an egg got into our carriage amid the cacophony of hawkers selling earthen animals and cups of chaloo-chai; he was fanning himself with a peacock-feather fan, and the bad luck of peacock feathers depressed Picture Singh beyond imagining. While the infinite flatness of the Indo-Gangetic plain unfolded outside the window, sending the hot insanity of the afternoon loo-wind to torment us, the shaven American lectured the occupants of the carriage on the intricacies of Hinduism and began to teach them mantras while extending a walnut begging bowl; Picture Singh was blind to this remarkable spectacle and also deaf to the abracadabra of the wheels. “It is no good, captain,” he confided mournfully, “This Bombay fellow will be young and strong, and I am doomed to be only the second most charming man from now on.” By the time we reached Kotah Station, the odors of misfortune exuded by the peacock-feather fan had possessed Pictureji utterly, had eroded him so alarmingly that although everyone in the carriage was getting out on the side farthest from the platform to urinate against the side of the train, he showed no sign of needing to go. By Ratlam Junction, while my excitement was mounting, he had fallen into a trance which was not sleep but the rising paralysis of the pessimism. “At this rate,” I thought, “he won’t even be able to challenge this rival.” Baroda passed: no change. At Surat, the old John Company depot, I realized I’d have to do something soon, because abracadabra was bringing us closer to Bombay Central by the minute, and so at last I picked up Picture Singh’s old wooden flute, and by playing it with such terrible ineptitude that all the snakes writhed in agony and petrified the American youth into silence, by producing a noise so hellish that nobody noticed the passing of Bassein Road, Kurla, Mahim, I overcame the miasma of the peacock-feathers; at last Picture Singh shook himself out of his despondency with a faint grin and said, “Better you stop, captain, and let me play that thing; otherwise some people are sure to die of pain.”

Serpents subsided in their baskets; and then the wheels stopped singing, and we were there:

Bombay! I hugged Aadam fiercely, and was unable to resist uttering an ancient cry: “Back-to-Bom!” I cheered, to the bewilderment of the American youth; who had never heard this mantra: and again, and again, and again: “Back! Back-to-Bom!”

By bus down Bellasis Road, towards the Tardeo roundabout, we traveled past Parsees with sunken eyes, past bicycle-repair shops and Irani cafés; and then Hornby Vellard was on our right—where promenaders watched as Sherri the mongrel bitch was left to spill her guts! Where cardboard effigies of wrestlers still towered above the entrances to Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium!—and we were rattling and banging past traffic-cops with sun-umbrellas, past Mahalaxmi temple—and then Warden Road! The Breach Candy Swimming Baths! And there, look, the shops … but the names had changed: where was Reader’s Paradise with its stacks of Superman comics? Where, the Band Box Laundry and Bombelli’s, with their One Yard Of Chocolates? And, my God, look, atop a two-storey hillock where once the palaces of William Methwold stood wreathed in bougainvillaea and stared proudly out to sea … look at it, a great pink monster of a building, the roseate skyscraper obelisk of the Narlikar women, standing over and obliterating the circus-ring of childhood … yes, it was my Bombay, but also not-mine, because we reached Kemp’s Corner to find the hoardings of Air-India’s little rajah and of the Kolynos Kid gone, gone for good, and Thomas Kemp and Co. itself had vanished into thin air … flyovers crisscrossed where, once upon a time, medicines were dispensed and a pixie in a chlorophyll cap beamed down upon the traffic. Elegiacally, I murmured under my breath: “Keep Teeth Kleen and Keep Teeth Brite! Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White!” But despite my incantation, the past failed to reappear; we rattled on down Gibbs Road and dismounted near Chowpatty Beach.

Chowpatty, at least, was much the same: a dirty strip of sand aswarm with pickpockets, and strollers, and vendors of hot-channa-channa-hot, of kulfi and bhel-puri and chutter-mutter; but further down Marine Drive I saw what tetrapods had achieved. On land reclaimed by the Narlikar consortium from the sea, vast monsters soared upwards to the sky, bearing strange alien names:
OBEROI-SHERATON
screamed at me from afar. And where was the neon Jeep sign? … “Come on, Pictureji,” I said at length, hugging Aadam to my chest, “Let’s go where we’re going and be done with it; the city has been changed.”

What can I say about the Midnite-Confidential Club? That its location is underground, secret (although known to omniscient paan-wallahs); its door, unmarked; its clientèle, the cream of Bombay society. What else? Ah, yes: managed by one Anand “Andy” Shroff, businessman-playboy, who is to be found on most days tanning himself at the Sun ’n’ Sand Hotel on Juhu Beach, amid film-stars and disenfranchised princesses. I ask you: an Indian, sunbathing? But apparently it’s quite normal, the international rules of playboydom must be obeyed to the letter, including, I suppose, the one stipulating daily worshipping of the sun.