Midnight's Children (15 page)

Padma can hear it: there's nothing like a countdown for building suspense. I watched my dung-flower at work today, stirring vats like a whirlwind, as if that would make the time go faster. (And perhaps it did; time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay's electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don't believe me-tied to electricity, it's usually a few hours wrong. Unless we're the ones who are wrong… no people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for' tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.)

But today, Padma heard Mountbatten's ticktock… English-made, it beats with relentless accuracy. And now the factory is empty; fumes linger, but the vats are still; and I've kept my word. Dressed up to the nines, I greet Padma as she rushes to my desk, flounces down on the floor beside me, commands: 'Begin.' I give a little satisfied smile; feel the children of midnight queueing up in my head, pushing and jostling like Koli fishwives; I tell them to wait, it won't be long now; I clear my throat, give my pen a little shake; and start.

Thirty-two years before the transfer of power, my grandfather bumped his nose against Kashmir! earth. There were rubies and diamonds. There was the ice of the future, waiting beneath the water's skin There was an oath: not to bow down before god or man. The oath created a hole, which would temporarily be filled by a woman behind a perforated sheet. A boatman who had once prophesied dynasties lurking in my grandfather's nose ferried him angrily across a lake. There were blind landowners and lady wrestlers. And there was a sheet in a gloomy room. On that day, my inheritance began to form-the blue of Kashmiri sky which dripped into my grandfather's eyes; the long sufferings of my great-grandmother which would become the forebearance of my own mother and the late steeliness of Naseem Aziz; my great-grandfather's gift of conversing with birds whkh would descend through meandering bloodlines into the veins of my sister the Brass Monkey; the conflict between grandpaternal scepticism and grandmaternal credulity; and above all the ghostly essence of that perforated sheet, which doomed my mother to learn to love a man in segments, and which condemned me to see my own life-its meanings, its structures-in fragments also; so that by the time I understood it, it was far too late.

Years ticking away-and my inheritance grows, because now I have the mythical golden teeth of the boatman Tai, and his brandy bottle which foretold my father's alcoholic djinns; I have Ilse Lubin for suicide and pickled snakes for virility; I have Tai-for-changelessness opposed to Aadam-for-progress; and I have, too, the odours of the unwashed boatman which drove my grandparents south, and made Bombay a possibility.

… And now, driven by Padma and ticktock, I move on, acquiring Mahatma Gandhi and his hartal, ingesting thumb-and-forefinger, swallowing the moment at which Aadam Aziz did not know whether he was Kashmir! or Indian; now I'm drinking Mercurochrome and stains the shape of hands which will recur in spilt betel-juice, and I'm gulping down Dyer, moustache and all; my grandfather is saved by his nose and a bruise appears on his chest, never to fade, so that he and I find in its ceaseless throbbing the answer to the question, Indian or Kashmiri? Stained by the bruise of a Heidelberg bag's clasp, we throw our lot in with India; but the alienness of blue eyes remains. Tai dies, but his magic hangs over us still, and makes us men apart.

… Hurtling on, I pause to pick up the game of hit-the-spittoon. Five years before the birth of a nation, my inheritance grows, to include an optimism disease which would flare up again in my own time, and cracks in the earth which will-be-have-been reborn in my skin, and ex-conjurer Hummingbirds who began the long line of street-entertainers which has run in parallel with my life, and my grandmother's moles like witchnipples and hatred of photographs, and whatsitsname, and wars of starvation and silence, and the wisdom of my aunt Alia which turned into spinsterhood and bitterness and finally burst out in deadly revenge, and the love of Emerald and Zulfikar which would enable me to start a revolution, and crescent knives, fatal moons echoed by my mother's love-name for me, her innocent chand-ka-tukra, her affectionate piece-of-the-… growing larger now, floating in the amniotic fluid of the past, I feed on a hum that rose higherhigher until dogs came to the rescue, on an escape into a cornfield and a rescue by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah with his Gai-Wallah antics as he ran-full-tilt!-screaming silently, as he revealed the secrets of locks made in India and brought Nadir Khan into a toilet containing a washing-chest; yes, I'm getting heavier by the second, fattening up on washing-chests and the under-the-carpet love of Mumtaz and the rhymeless bard, plumping out as I swallow Zulnkar's dream of a bath by his bedside and an underground Taj Mahal and a silver spittoon encrusted with lapis lazuli; a marriage disintegrates, and feeds me; an aunt runs traitorously through Agra streets, without her honour, and that feeds me too; and now false starts are over, and Amina has stopped being Mumtaz, and Ahmed Sinai has become, in a sense, her father as well as her husband… my inheritance includes this gift, the gift of inventing new parents for myself whenever necessary. The power of giving birth to fathers and mothers: which Ahmed wanted and never had.

Through my umbilical cord, I'm taking in fare dodgers and the dangers of purchasing peacock-feather fans; Amina's assiduity seeps into me, and more ominous things-clattering footsteps, my mother's need to plead for money until the napkin in my father's lap began to quiver and make a little tent-and the cremated ashes of Arjuna Indiabikes, and a peepshow into which Lifafa Das tried to put everything in the world, and rapscallions perpetrating outrages; many-headed monsters swell inside me-masked Ravanas, eight-year-old girls with lisps and one continuous eyebrow, mobs crying Rapist. Public announcements nurture me as I grow towards my time, and there are only seven months left to go.

How many things people notions we bring with us into the world, how many possibilities and also restrictions of possibility!-Because all of these were the parents of the child born that midnight, and for every one of the midnight children there were as many more. Among the parents of midnight: the failure of the Cabinet Mission scheme; the determination of M. A. Jinnah, who was dying and wanted to see Pakistan formed in his lifetime, and would have done anything to ensure it-that same Jinnah whom my father, missing a turn as usual, refused to meet; and Mountbatten with his extraordinary haste and his chicken-breast-eater of a wife; and more and more-Red Fort and Old fort, monkeys and vultures dropping hands, and white transvestites, and bone-setters and mongoose-trainers and Shri Ramram Seth who made too much prophecy. And my father's dream of rearranging the Quran has its place; and the burning of a godown which turned him into a man of property and not leathercloth; and the piece of Ahmed which Amina could not love. To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.

And fishermen, and Catharine of Braganza, and Mumbadevi coconuts rice; Sivaji's statue and Methwold's Estate; a swimming pool in the shape of British India and a two-storey hillock; a centre-parting and a nose from Bergerac; an inoperative clocktower and a little circus-ring; an Englishman's lust for an Indian allegory and the seduction of an accordionist's wife. Budgerigars, ceiling fans, the Times of India are all part of the luggage I brought into the world… do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child? Blue Jesus leaked into me; and Mary's desperation, and Joseph's revolutionary wildness, and the flightiness of Alice Pereira… all these made me, too.

If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance… perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

'At last,' Padma says with satisfaction, 'you've learned how to tell things really fast.'

August I3th, 1947: discontent in the heavens. Jupiter, Saturn and Venus are in quarrelsome vein; moreover, the three crossed stars are moving into the most ill-favoured house of all. Benarsi astrologers name it fearfully: 'Karamstan! They enter Karamstan!'

While astrologers make frantic representations to Congress Party bosses, my mother lies down for her afternoon nap. While Earl Mountbatten deplores the lack of trained occultists on his General Staff, the slowly turning shadows of a ceiling fan caress Amina into sleep. While M. A. Jinnah, secure in the knowledge that his Pakistan will be born in just eleven hours, a full day before independent India, for which there are still thirty-five hours to go, is scoffing at the protestations of horoscope-mongers, shaking his head in amusement, Amina's head, too, is moving from side to side.

But she is asleep. And in these days of her boulder-like pregnancy, an enigmatic dream of flypaper has been plaguing her sleeping hours… in which she wanders now, as before, in a crystal sphere filled with dangling strips of the sticky brown material, which adhere to her clothing and rip it off as she stumbles through the impenetrable papery forest; and now she struggles, tears at paper, but it grabs at her, until she is naked, with the baby kicking inside her, and long tendrils of flypaper stream out to seize her by her undulating womb, paper glues itself to her hair nose teeth breasts thighs, and as she opens her mouth to shout a brown adhesive gag falls across her parting lips…

'Amina Begum!' Musa is saying. 'Wake up! Bad dream, Begum Sahiba!'

Incidents of those last few hours-the last dregs of my inheritance: when there were thirty-five hours to go, my mother dreamed of being glued to brown paper like a fly. And at the cocktail hour (thirty hours to go) William Methwold visited my father in the garden of Buckingham Villa. Centre-parting strolling beside and above big toe, Mr Methwold reminisced. Tales of the first Methwold, who had dreamed the city into existence, filled the evening air in that penultimate sunset. And my father-apeing Oxford drawl, anxious to impress the departing Englishman-responded with, 'Actually, old chap, ours is a pretty distinguished family, too.' Methwold listening: head cocked, red rose in cream lapel, wide-brimmed hat concealing parted hair, a veiled hint of amusement in his eyes… Ahmed Sinai, lubricated by whisky, driven on by self-importance, warms to his theme. 'Mughal blood, as a matter of fact.' To which Methwold, 'No! Really? You're pulling my leg.' And Ahmed, beyond the point of no return, is obliged to press on. 'Wrong side of the blanket, of course; but Mughal, certainly.'

That was how, thirty hours before my birth, my father de-monstrated that he, too, longed for fictional ancestors… how he came to invent a family pedigree that, in later years, when whisky had blurred the edges of his memory and djinn-bottles came to confuse him, would obliterate all traces of reality… and how, to hammer his point home, he introduced into our lives the idea of the family curse.

'Oh yes.' my father said as Methwold cocked a grave unsmiling head, 'many old families possessed such curses. In our line, it is handed down from eldest son to eldest son-in writing only, because merely to speak it is to unleash its power, you know.' Now Methwold: 'Amazing! And you know the words?' My father nods, lip jutting, toe still as he taps his forehead for emphasis. 'All in here; all memorized. Hasn't been used since an ancestor quarrelled with the Emperor Babar and put the curse on his son Humayun… terrible story, that-every schoolboy knows.'

And the time would come when my father, in the throes of his utter retreat from reality, would lock himself in a blue room and try to remember a curse which he had dreamed up one evening in the gardens of his house while he stood tapping his temple beside the descendant of William Methwold.

Saddled now with flypaper-dreams and imaginary ancestors, I am still over a day away from being born… but now the remorseless ticktock reasserts itself: twenty-nine hours to go, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…

What other dreams were dreamed on that last night? Was it then-yes, why not-that Dr Narlikar, ignorant of the drama that was about to unfold at his Nursing Home, first dreamed of tetrapods? Was it on that last night-while Pakistan was being born to the north and west of Bombay-that my uncle Hanif, who had come (like his sister) to Bombay, and who had fallen in love with an actress, the divine Pia ('Her face is her fortune!' the Illustrated Weekly once said), first imagined the cinematic device which would soon give him the first of his three hit pictures?… It seems likely; myths, nightmares, fantasies were in the air. This much is certain: on that last night, my grandfather Aadam Aziz, alone now in the big old house in Cornwallis Road-except for a wife whose strength of will seemed to increase as Aziz was ground down by age, and for a daughter, Alia, whose embittered virginity would last until a bomb split her in two over eighteen years later-was suddenly imprisoned by great metal hoops of nostalgia, and lay awake as they pressed down upon his chest; until finally, at five o'clock in the morning of August I4th-nineteen hours to go-he was pushed out of bed by an invisible force and drawn towards an old tin trunk. Opening it, he found: old copies of German magazines; Lenin's What Is To Be Done?; a folded prayer-mat; and at last the thing which he had felt an irresistible urge to see once more-white and folded and glowing faintly in the dawn-my grandfather drew out, from the tin trunk of his past, a stained and perforated sheet, and discovered that the hole had grown; that there were other, smaller holes in the surrounding fabric; and in the grip of a wild nostalgic rage he shook his wife awake and astounded her by yelling, as he waved her history under her nose:

'Moth-eaten! Look, Begum: moth-eaten! You forgot to put in any naphthalene balk!'

But now the countdown will not be denied… eighteen hours; seventeen; sixteen… and already, at Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, it is possible to hear the shrieks of a woman in labour. Wee Willie Winkie is here; and his wife Vanita; she has been in a protracted, unproductive labour for eight hours now. The first pangs hit her just as, hundreds of miles away, M. A. Jinnah announced the midnight birth of a Muslim nation… but still she writhes on a bed in the Narlikar Home's 'charity ward' (reserved for the babies of the poor)… her eyes are standing halfway out of her head; her body glistens with sweat, but the baby shows no signs of coming, nor is its father present; it is eight o'clock in the morning, but there is still the possibility that, given the circumstances, the baby could be waiting for midnight.