Midnight's Children (35 page)

Who listed, for my benefit, the occult powers of snakes? (Their shadows kill cows; if they enter a man's dreams, his wife conceives; if they are killed, the murderer's family is denied male issue for twenty generations.) And who described to me-with the aid of books and stuffed corpses-the cobra's constant foes? 'Study your enemies, child,' he hissed, 'or they will surely kill you.'… At Schaapsteker's feet, I studied the mongoose and the boar, the dagger-billed adjutant bird and the barasinha deer, which crushes snakes' heads under its feet; and the Egyptian ichneumon, and ibis; the four-feet-high secretary bird, fearless and hook-beaked, whose appearance and name made me think suspicious thoughts about my father's Alice Pereira; and the jackal buzzard, the stink cat, the honey ratel from the hills; the road runner, the peccary, and the formidable cangamba bird. Schaapsteker, from the depths of his senility, instructed me in life. 'Be wise, child. Imitate the action of the snake. Be secret; strike from the cover of a bush.'

Once he said: 'You must think of me as another father. Did I not give you your life when it was lost?' With this statement he proved that he was as much under my spell as I under his; he had accepted that he, too, was one of that endless series of parents to whom I alone had the power of giving birth. And although, after a time, I found the air in his chambers too oppressive, and left him once more to the isolation from which he would never again be disturbed, he had shown me how to proceed. Consumed by the two-headed demon of revenge, I used my telepathic powers (for the first time) as a weapon; and in this way I discovered the details of the relationship between Homi Catrack and Lila Sabarmati. Lila and Pia were always rivals in beauty; it was the wife of the heir-apparent to the title of Admiral of the Fleet who had become the film magnate's new fancy-woman. While Commander Sabarmati was at sea on manoeuvres, Lila and Homi were performing certain manoeuvres of their own; while the lion of the seas awaited' the death of the then-Admiral, Homi and Lila, too, were making an appointment with the Reaper. (With my help.)

'Be secret,' said Sharpsticker sahib; secretly, I spied on my enemy Homi, and on the promiscuous mother of Eyeslice and Hairoil (who were very full of themselves of late, ever since, in fact, the papers announced that Commander Sabarmati's promotion was a mere formality. Only a matter of time…). 'Loose woman,' the demon within me whispered silently, 'Perpetrator of the worst of maternal perfidies! We shall turn you into an awful example; through you we shall demonstrate the fate which awaits the lascivious. О unobservant adulteress! Did you not see what sleeping around did to the illustrious Baroness Simki von der Heiden?-who was, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bitch, just like yourself.'

My view of Lila Sabarmati has mellowed with age; after all, she and I had one thing in common-her nose, like mine, possessed tremendous powers. Hers, however, was a purely worldly magic: a wrinkle of nasal skin could charm the steeliest of Admirals; a tiny flare of the nostrils ignited strange fires in the hearts of film magnates. I am a little regretful about betraying that nose; it was a little like stabbing a cousin in the back.

What I discovered: every Sunday morning at ten a.m., Lila Sabarmati drove Eyeslice and Hairoil to the Metro cinema for the weekly meetings of the Metro Cub Club. (She volunteered to take the rest of us, too; Sonny and Cyrus, the Monkey and I piled into her Indian-made Hindustan car.) And while we drove towards Lana Turner or Robert Taylor or Sandra Dee, Mr Homi Catrack was also preparing himself for a weekly rendezvous. While Lila's Hindustan puttered along beside railway-lines, Homi was knotting a cream silk scarf around his throat; while she halted at red lights, he donned a Technicolored bush-coat; when she was ushering us into the darkness of the auditorium, he was putting on gold-rimmed sunglasses; and when she left us to watch our film, he, too, was abandoning a child. Toxy Catrack never failed to react to his departures by wailing kicking thrashing-of-legs; she knew what was going on, and not even Bi-Appah could restrain her.

Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors. When Lila drove her Hindustan to an address off Colaba Causeway, she was Juliet coming out on to her balcony; when cream-scarfed, gold-shaded Homi sped off to meet her (in the same Studebaker in which my mother had once been rushed to Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home), he was Leander swimming the Hellespont towards Hero's burning candle. As for my part in the business-I will not give it a name.

I confess: what I did was no act of heroism. I did not battle Homi on horseback, with fiery eyes and flaming sword; instead, imitating the action of the snake, I began to cut pieces out of newspapers. From GOAN LIBERATION COMMITTEE LAUNCHES satyagraha campaign I extracted the letters 'com'; speaker OF E-PAK ASSEMBLY DECLARED MANIAC gave me my second syllable, 'man'. I found 'der' concealed in nehru considers RESIGNATION AT CONGRESS ASSEMBLY; into my second word now, I excised 'sab' from riots, mass arrests in red-run kerala: SABOTEURS RUN AMOK: GHOSH ACCUSES CONGRESS GOONDAS, and got 'arm' from chinese armed forces' border activities spurn bandung principles. To complete the name, I snipped the letters 'ati' from dulles foreign policy is inconsistent, erratic, p.m. avers. Cutting up history to suit my nefarious purposes, I seized on why indira gandhi is congress president now and kept the 'why'; but I refused to be tied exclusively to politics, and turned to advertising for the 'does YOUR' in DOES YOUR CHEWING GUM LOSE ITS FLAVOUR? BUT p.k. keeps its savour! A sporting human-interest story, mohun bagan centre-forward takes wife, gave me its last word, and 'go то' I took from the tragic masses go то abul kalam azad's funeral. Now I was obliged to find my words in little pieces once again: death on south col: sherpa plunges provided me with a much-needed 'col', but 'aba' was hard to find, turning up at last in a cinema advertisement: Ali-baba, seventeenth SUPERCOLOSSAL WEEK-PLANS FILLING UP FAST!… Those were the days when Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, was campaigning for a plebiscite in his state to determine its future; his courage gave me the syllable 'cause', because it led to this headline: abdullah 'incitement' cause of his re-arrest-govt spokesman. Then, too, Acharya Vinobha Bhave, who had spent ten years persuading landowners to donate plots to the poor in his bhoodan campaign, announced that donations had passed the million-acre mark, and launched two new campaigns, asking for the donations of whole villages ('gramdan') and of individual lives ('jivandan'). When J. P. Narayan announced the dedication of his life to Bhave's work, the headline narayan walks in bhave's way gave me my much-sought 'way'. I had nearly finished now; plucking an 'on' from pakistan on course for political chaos: faction strife bedevils public affairs, and a 'sunday' from the masthead of the Sunday Blitz, I found myself just one word short. Events in East Pakistan provided me with my finale. FURNITURE HURLING SLAYS DEPUTY E-PAK SPEAKER: MOURNING PERIOD DECLARED gave me 'MOURNING', from which, deftly and deliberately, I excised the letter 'u'. I needed a terminal question-mark, and found it at the end of the perennial query of those strange days: after nehru, who?

In the secrecy of a bathroom, I glued my completed note-my first attempt at rearranging history-on to a sheet of paper; snake-like, I inserted the document in my pocket, like poison in a sac. Subtly, I arranged to spend an evening with Eyeslice and Hairoil. We played a game: 'Murder in the Dark'… During a game of murder, I slipped inside Commander Sabarmati's almirah and inserted my lethal missive into the inside pocket of his spare uniform. At that moment (no point hiding it) I felt the delight of the snake who hits its target, and feels its fangs pierce its victim's heel…

commander SABARMATI (my note read)

WHY DOES YOUR WIFE GO TO COLABA

CAUSEWAY ON SUNDAY MORNING?

No, I am no longer proud of what I did; but remember that my demon of revenge had two heads. By unmasking the perfidy of Lila Sabarmati, I hoped also to administer a salutary shock to my own mother. Two birds with one stone; there were to be two punished women, one impaled on each fang of my forked snake's tongue. It is not untrue to say that what came to be known as the Sabarmati affair had its real beginnings at a dingy cafe in the north of the city, when a stowaway watched a ballet of circling hands.

I was secret; I struck from the cover of a bush. What drove me? Hands at the Pioneer Cafe; wrong-number telephone calls; notes slipped to me on balconies, and passed under cover of bedsheets; my mother's hypocrisy and Pia's inconsolable grief: 'Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai!'… Mine was a slow poison; but three weeks later, it had its effect.

It emerged, afterwards, that after receiving my anonymous note Commander Sabarmati had engaged the services of the illustrious Dom Minto, Bombay's best-known private detective. (Minto, old and almost lame, had lowered his rates by then.) He waited until he received Minto's report. And then:

That Sunday morning, six children sat in a row at the Metro Cub Club, watching Francis The Talking Mule And The Haunted House. You see, I had my alibi; I was nowhere near the scene of the crime. Like Sin, the crescent moon, I acted from a distance upon the tides of the world … while a mule talked on a screen, Commander Sabarmati visited the naval arsenal. He signed out a good, long-nosed revolver; also ammunition. He held, in his left hand, a piece of paper on which an address had been written in a private detective's tidy hand; in his right hand, he grasped the un-holstered gun. By taxi, the Commander arrived at Colaba Causeway. He paid off the cab, walked gun-in-hand down a narrow gully past shirt-stalls and toyshops, and ascended the staircase of an apartment block set back from the gully at the rear of a concrete courtyard. He rang the doorbell of apartment 18c; it was heard in 18b by an Anglo-Indian teacher giving private Latin tuition. When Commander Sabarmati's wife Lila answered the door, he shot her twice in the stomach at point-blank range. She fell backwards; he marched past her, and found Mr Homi Catrack rising from the toilet, his bottom unwiped, pulling frantically at his trousers. Commander Vinoo Sabarmati shot him once in the genitals, once in the heart and once through the right eye. The gun was not silenced; but when it had finished speaking, there was an enormous silence in the apartment. Mr Catrack sat down on the toilet after he was shot and seemed to be smiling.

Commander Sabarmati walked out of the apartment block with the smoking gun in his hand (he was seen, through the crack of a door, by a terrified Latin tutor); he strolled along Colaba Causeway until he saw a traffic policeman on his little podium. Commander Sabarmati told the policeman, 'I have only now killed my wife and her lover with this gun; I surrender myself into your…' But he had been waving the gun under the policeman's nose; the officer was so scared that he dropped his traffic-conducting baton and fled. Commander Sabar-mati, left alone on the policeman's pedestal amid the sudden confusion of the traffic, began to direct the cars, using the smoking gun as a baton. This is how he was found by the posse of twelve policemen who arrived ten minutes later, who sprang courageously upon him and seized him hand and foot, and who removed from him the unusual baton with which, for ten minutes, he had expertly conducted the traffic.

A newspaper said of the Sabarmati affair: 'It is a theatre in which India will discover who she was, what she is, and what she might become.'… But Commander Sabarmati was only a puppet; I was the puppet-master, and the nation performed my play-only I hadn't meant it! I didn't think he'd… I only wanted to… a scandal, yes, a scare, a lesson to all unfaithful wives and mothers, but not that, never, no.

Aghast at the result of my actions, I rode the turbulent thought-waves of the city… at the Parsee General Hospital, a doctor said, 'Begum Sabarmati will live; but she will have to watch what she eats.'… But Homi Catrack was dead… And who was engaged as the lawyer for the defence?-Who said, 'I will defend him free gratis and for nothing'?-Who, once the victor of the Freeze Case, was now the Commander's champion? Sonny Ibrahim said, 'My father will get him off if anyone can.'

Commander Sabarmati was the most popular murderer in the history of Indian jurisprudence. Husbands acclaimed his punishment of an errant wife; faithful women felt justified in their fidelity. Inside Lila's own sons, I found these thoughts: 'We knew she was like that. We knew a Navy man wouldn't stand for it.' A columnist in the Illustrated Weekly of India, writing a pen-portrait to go alongside the 'Personality of the Week' full-colour caricature of the Commander, said: 'In the Sabarmati Case, the noble sentiments of the Ramayana combine with the cheap melodrama of the Bombay talkie; but as for the chief protagonist, all agree on his upstandingness; and he is undeniably an attractive chap.'

My revenge on my mother and Homi Catrack had precipitated a national crisis… because Naval regulations decreed that no man who had been in a civil jail could aspire to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. So Admirals, and city politicians, and of course Ismail Ibrahim, demanded: 'Commander Sabarmati must stay in a Navy jail. He is innocent until proven guilty. His career must not be ruined if it can possibly be avoided.' And the authorities: 'Yes.' And Commander Sabarmati, safe in the Navy's own lock-up, discovered the penalties of fame-deluged with telegrams of support, he awaited trial; flowers filled his cell, and although he asked to be placed on an ascetic's diet of rice and water, well-wishers inundated him with tiffin-carriers filled with birianis and pista-ki-lauz and other rich foods. And, jumping the queue in the Criminal Court, the case began in double-quick time… The prosecution said, 'The charge is murder in the first degree.'

Stern-jawed, strong-eyed, Commander Sabarmati replied: 'Not guilty.'

My mother said, 'O my God, the poor man, so sad, isn't it?' I said, 'But an unfaithful wife is a terrible thing, Amma…' and she turned away her head.