… But, of course, Ramram the seer was not really floating in midair, six inches above the ground. My mother’s scream faded; her eyes focused; and she noticed the little shelf, protruding from the wall. “Cheap trick,” she told herself, and, “What am I doing here in this God-forsaken place of sleeping vultures and monkey-dancers, waiting to be told who knows what foolishness by a guru who levitates by sitting on a shelf?”
What Amina Sinai did not know was that, for the second time in history, I was about to make my presence felt. (No: not that fraudulent tadpole in her stomach: I mean myself, in my historical role, of which prime ministers have written “… it is, in a sense, the mirror of us all.” Great forces were working that night; and all present were about to feel their power, and be afraid.)
Cousins—one to four—gathering in the doorway through which the dark lady has passed, drawn like moths to the candle of her screech … watching her quietly as she advanced, guided by Lifafa Das, towards the unlikely soothsayer, were bone-setter and cobra-wallah and monkey-man. Whispers of encouragement now (and were there also giggles behind rough hands?): “O such a too fine fortune he will tell, Sahiba!” and, “Come, cousinji, lady is waiting!” … But what was this Ramram? A huckster, a two-chip palmist, a giver of cute forecasts to silly women—or the genuine article, the holder of the keys? And Lifafa Das: did he see, in my mother, a woman who could be satisfied by a two-rupee fake, or did he see deeper, into the underground heart of her weakness?—And when the prophecy came, were cousins astonished too?—And the frothing at the mouth? What of that? And was it true that my mother, under the dislocating influence of that hysterical evening, relinquished her hold on her habitual self—which she had felt slipping away from her into the absorbing sponge of the lightless air in the stairwell—and entered a state of mind in which anything might happen and be believed? And there is another, more horrible possibility, too; but before I voice my suspicion, I must describe, as nearly as possible in spite of this filmy curtain of ambiguities, what actually happened: I must describe my mother, her palm slanted outwards towards the advancing palmist, her eyes wide and unblinking as a pomfret’s—and the cousins (giggling?), “What a reading you are coming to get, Sahiba!” and, “Tell, cousinji, tell!”—but the curtain descends again, so I cannot be sure—did he begin like a cheap circus-tent man and go through the banal conjugations of life-line heart-line and children who would be multi-millionaires, while cousins cheered, “Wah wah!” and, “Absolute master reading, yara!”—and then, did he change?—did Ramram become stiff—eyes rolling upwards until they were white as eggs—did he, in a voice as strange as a mirror, ask, “You permit, Madam, that I touch the place?”—while cousins fell as silent as sleeping vultures—and did my mother, just as strangely, reply, “Yes, I permit,” so that the seer became only the third man to touch her in her life, apart from her family members?—and was it then, at that instant, that a brief sharp jolt of electricity passed between pudgy fingers and maternal skin? And my mother’s face, rabbit-startled, watching the prophet in the check shirt as he began to circle, his eyes still egg-like in the softness of his face; and suddenly a shudder passing through him and again that strange high voice as the words issued through his lips (I must describe those lips, too—but later, because now …) “A son.”
Silent cousins—monkeys on leashes, ceasing their chatter—cobras coiled in baskets—and the circling fortune-teller, finding history speaking through his lips. (Was that how?) Beginning, “A son … such a son!” And then it comes, “A son, Sahiba, who will never be older than his motherland—neither older nor younger.” And now, real fear amongst snake-charmer mongoose-dancer bone-setter and peepshow-wallah, because they have never heard Ramram like this, as he continues, sing-song, high-pitched: “There will be two heads—but you shall see only one—there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees.” Nose and knees and knees and nose … listen carefully, Padma; the fellow got nothing wrong! “Newspapers praise him, two mothers raise him! Bicyclists love him—but, crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep; cobra will creep …” Ramram, circling fasterfaster, while four cousins murmur, “What is this, baba?” and, “Deo, Shiva, guard us!” While Ramram, “Washing will hide him—voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him—blood will betray him!” And Amina Sinai, “What does he mean? I don’t understand—Lifafa Das—what has got into him?” But, inexorably, whirling egg-eyed around her statue-still presence, goes Ramram Seth: “Spittoons will brain him—doctors will drain him—jungle will claim him—wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him—tyrants will fry him …” While Amina begs for explanations and the cousins fall into a hand-flapping frenzy of helpless alarm because something has taken over and nobody dares touch Ramram Seth as he whirls to his climax: “He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die … before he is dead.”
Is that how it was? Is that when Ramram Seth, annihilated by the passage through him of a power greater than his own, fell suddenly to the floor and frothed at the mouth? Was mongoose-man’s stick inserted between his twitching teeth? Did Lifafa Das say, “Begun Sahiba, you must leave, please: our cousinji has become sick”?
And finally the cobra-wallah—or monkey-man, or bone-setter, or even Lifafa Das of the peepshow on wheels—saying, “Too much prophecy, man. Our Ramram made too much damn prophecy tonight.”
Many years later, at the time of her premature dotage, when all kinds of ghosts welled out of her past to dance before her eyes, my mother saw once again the peepshow man whom she saved by announcing my coming and who repaid her by leading her to too much prophecy, and spoke to him evenly, without rancor. “So you’re back,” she said, “Well, let me tell you this: I wish I’d understood what your cousinji meant—about blood, about knees and nose. Because who knows? I might have had a different son.”
Like my grandfather at the beginning, in a webbed corridor in a blind man’s house, and again at the end; like Mary Pereira after she lost her Joseph, and like me, my mother was. good at seeing ghosts.
… But now, because there are yet more questions and ambiguities, I am obliged to voice certain suspicions. Suspicion, too, is a monster with too many heads; why, then, can’t I stop myself unleashing it at my own mother? … What, I ask, would be a fair description of the seer’s stomach? And memory—my new, all-knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother father grandfather grandmother and everyone else—answers: soft; squashy as cornflour pudding. Again, reluctantly, I ask: What was the condition of his lips? And the inevitable response: full; overfleshed; poetic. A third time I interrogate this memory of mine: what of his hair? The reply: thinning; dark; lank; worming over his ears. And now my unreasonable suspicions ask the ultimate question … did Amina, pure-as-pure, actually … because of her weakness for men who resembled Nadir Khan, could she have … in her odd frame of mind, and moved by the seer’s illness, might she not … “No!” Padma shouts, furiously. “How dare you suggest? About that good woman—your own mother? That she would? You do not know one thing and still you say it?” And, of course, she is right, as always. If she knew, she would say I was only getting my revenge, for what I certainly did see Amina doing, years later, through the grimy windows of the Pioneer Café; and maybe that’s where my irrational notion was born, to grow illogically backwards in time, and arrive fully mature at this earlier—and yes, almost certainly innocent—adventure. Yes, that must be it. But the monster won’t lie down … “Ah,” it says, “but what about the matter of her tantrum—the one she threw the day Ahmed announced they were moving to Bombay?” Now it mimics her: “You—always you decide. What about me? Suppose I don’t want … I’ve only now got this house straight and already … !” So, Padma: was that housewifely zeal—or a masquerade?
Yes—a doubt lingers. The monster asks, “Why did she fail, somehow or other, to tell her husband about her visit?” Reply of the accused (voiced by our Padma in my mother’s absence): “But think how angry he’d’ve got, my God! Even
if there hadn’t been all that firebug business to worry him! Strange men; a woman on her own; he’d’ve gone wild! Wild, completely!”
Unworthy suspicions … I must dismiss them; must save my strictures for later, when, in the absence of ambiguity, without the clouding curtain, she gave me hard, clear, irrefutable proofs.
… But, of course, when my father came home late that night, with a ditchy smell on him which overpowered his customary reek of future failure, his eyes and cheeks were streaked with ashy tears; there was sulphur in his nostrils and the gray dust of smoked leathercloth on his head … because of course they had burned the godown.
“But the night-watchmen?”—asleep, Padma, asleep. Warned in advance to take their sleeping draughts just in case … Those brave lalas, warrior Pathans who, city-born, had never seen the Khyber, unwrapped little paper packets, poured rust-colored powders into their bubbling cauldron of tea. They pulled their charpoys well away from my father’s godown to avoid falling beams and showering sparks; and lying on their rope-beds they sipped their tea and entered the bittersweet declensions of the drug. At first they became raucous, shouting the praises of their favorite whores in Pushtu; then they fell into wild giggling as the soft fluttering fingers of the drug tickled their ribs … until the giggling gave way to dreams and they roamed in the frontier passes of the drug, riding the horses of the drug, and finally reached a dreamless oblivion from which nothing on earth could awaken them until the drug had run its course.
Ahmed, Butt and Kemal arrived by taxi—the taxi-driver, unnerved by the three men who clutched wads of crumpled banknotes which smelled worse than hell on account of the unpleasant substances they had encountered in the ditch, would not have waited, except that they refused to pay him. “Let me go, big sirs,” he pleaded, “I am a little man; do not keep me here …” but by then their backs were moving away from him, towards the fire. He watched them as they ran, clutching their rupees that were stained by tomatoes and dogshit; open-mouthed he stared at the burning godown, at the clouds in the night sky, and like everyone else on the scene he was obliged to breathe air filled with leathercloth and matchsticks and burning rice. With his hands over his eyes, watching through his fingers, the little taxi-driver with his incompetent moustache saw Mr. Kemal, thin as a demented pencil, lashing and kicking at the sleeping bodies of night-watchmen; and he almost gave up his fare and drove off in terror at the instant when my father shouted, “Look out!” … but, staying despite it all, he saw the godown as it burst apart under the force of the licking red tongues, he saw pouring out of the godown an improbable lava flow of molten rice lentils chick-peas waterproof jackets matchboxes and pickle, he saw the hot red flowers of the fire bursting skywards as the contents of the warehouse spilled on to the hard yellow ground like a black charred hand of despair. Yes, of course the godown was burned, it fell on their heads from the sky in cinders, it plunged into the open mouths of the bruised, but still snoring, watchmen … “God save us,” said Mr. Butt, but Mustapha Kemal, more pragmatically, answered: “Thank God we are well insured.”
“It was right then,” Ahmed Sinai told his wife later, “right at that moment that I decided to get out of the leathercloth business. Sell the office, the goodwill, and forget everything I know about the reccine trade. Then—not before, not afterwards—I made up my mind, also, to think no more about this Pakistan claptrap of your Emerald’s Zulfy. In the heat of that fire,” my father revealed—unleashing a wifely tantrum—“I decided to go to Bombay, and enter the property business. Property is dirt cheap there now,” he told her before her protests could begin, “Narlikar knows.”
(But in time, he would call Narlikar a traitor.)
In my family, we always go when we’re pushed—the freeze of ’48 being the only exception to this rule. The boatman Tai drove my grandfather from Kashmir; Mercurochrome chased him out of Amritsar; the collapse of her life under the carpets led directly to my mother’s departure from Agra; and many-headed monsters sent my father to Bombay, so that I could be born there. At the end of that January, history had finally, by a series of shoves, brought itself to the point at which it was almost ready for me to make my entrance. There were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I stepped on to the scene … the mystery, for example, of Shri Ramram’s most enigmatic remark: “There will be a nose and knees: knees and a nose.”
The insurance money came; January ended; and in the time it took to close down their affairs in Delhi and move to the city in which—as Doctor Narlikar the gynecologist knew—property was temporarily as cheap as dirt, my mother concentrated on her segmented scheme for learning to love her husband. She came to feel a deep affection for the question marks of his ears; for the remarkable depth of his navel, into which her finger could go right up to the first joint, without even pushing; she grew to love the knobbliness of his knees; but, try as she might (and as I’m giving her the benefit of my doubts I shall offer no possible reasons here), there was one part of him which she never managed to love, although it was the one thing he possessed, in full working order, which Nadir Khan had certainly lacked; on those nights when he heaved himself up on top of her—when the baby in her womb was no bigger than a frog—it was just no good at all.
… “No, not so quick, janum, my life, a little longer, please,” she is saying; and Ahmed, to spin things out, tries to think back to the fire, to the last thing that happened on that blazing night, when just as he was turning to go he heard a dirty screech in the sky, and, looking up, had time to register that a vulture—at night!—a vulture from the Towers of Silence was flying overhead, and that it had dropped a barely-chewed Parsee hand, a right hand, the same hand which—now!—slapped him full in the face as it fell; while Amina, beneath him in bed, ticks herself off: Why can’t you enjoy, you stupid woman, from now on you must really try.
On June 4th, my ill-matched parents left for Bombay by Frontier Mail. (There were hangings, voices hanging on for dear life, fists crying out, “Maharaj! Open for one tick only! Ohé, from the milk of your kindness, great sir, do us favor!” And there was also—hidden beneath dowry in a green tin trunk—a forbidden, lapis-lazuli-encrusted, delicately-wrought silver spittoon.) On the same day, Earl Mountbatten of Burma held a press conference at which he announced the Partition of India, and hung his countdown calendar on the wall: seventy days to go to the transfer of power … sixty-nine … sixty-eight … tick, tock.
Methwold
THE FISHERMEN were here first. Before Mountbatten’s ticktock, before monsters and public announcements; when underworld marriages were still unimagined and spittoons were unknown; earlier than Mercurochrome; longer ago than lady wrestlers who held up perforated sheets; and back and back, beyond Dalhousie and Elphinstone, before the East India Company built its Fort, before the first William Methwold; at the dawn of time, when Bombay was a dumbbell-shaped island tapering, at the center, to a narrow shining strand beyond which could be seen the finest and largest natural harbor in Asia, when Mazagaon and Worli, Matunga and Mahim, Salsette and Colaba were islands, too—in short, before reclamation, before tetrapods and sunken piles turned the Seven Isles into a long peninsula like an outstretched, grasping hand, reaching westward into the Arabian Sea; in this primeval world before clocktowers, the fishermen—who were called Kolis—sailed in Arab dhows, spreading red sails against the setting sun. They caught pomfret and crabs, and made fish-lovers of us all. (Or most of us. Padma has succumbed to their piscine sorceries; but in our house, we were infected with the alienness of Kashmiri blood, with the icy reserve of Kashmiri sky, and remained meat-eaters to a man.)
There were also coconuts and rice. And, above it all, the benign presiding influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, whose name—Mumbadevi, Mumbabai, Mumbai—may well have become the city’s. But then, the Portuguese named the place Bom Bahia for its harbor, and not for the goddess of the pomfret folk … the Portuguese were the first invaders, using the harbor to shelter their merchant ships and their men-of-war; but then, one day in
1633, an East India Company Officer named Methwold saw a vision. This vision—a dream of a British Bombay, fortified, defending India’s West against all comers—was a notion of such force that it set time in motion. History churned ahead; Methwold died; and in 1660, Charles II of England was betrothed to Catharine of the Portuguese House of Braganza—that same Catharine who would, all her life, play second fiddle to orange-selling Nell. But she has this consolation—that it was her marriage dowry which brought Bombay into British hands, perhaps in a green tin trunk, and brought Methwold’s vision a step closer to reality. After that, it wasn’t long until September 21st, 1668, when the Company at last got its hands on the island … and then off they went, with their Fort and land-reclamation, and before you could blink there was a city here, Bombay, of which the old tune sang:
Prima in Indis,
Gateway to India,
Star of the East
With her face to the West.
Our Bombay, Padma! It was very different then, there were no night-clubs or pickle factories or Oberoi-Sheraton Hotels or movie studios; but the city grew at breakneck speed, acquiring a cathedral and an equestrian statue of the Mahratta warrior-king Sivaji which (we used to think) came to life at night and galloped awesomely through the city streets—right along Marine Drive! On Chowpatty sands! Past the great houses on Malabar Hill, round Kemp’s Corner, giddily along the sea to Scandal Point! And yes, why not, on and on, down my very own Warden Road, right alongside the segregated swimming pools at Breach Candy, right up to huge Mahalaxmi Temple and the old Willingdon Club … Throughout my childhood, whenever bad times came to Bombay, some insomniac night-walker would report that he had seen the statue moving; disasters, in the city of my youth, danced to the occult music of a horse’s gray, stone hooves.