“Broke,” Ahmed is saying, “Frozen, like water.”
“Come on now,” Amina interrupts him; her dedication rising to new heights, she leads him towards her bedroom … “Janum, you need to lie for some time.” And Ahmed: “What’s this, wife? A time like this—cleaned out; finished; crushed like ice—and you think about …” But she has closed the door; slippers have been kicked off; arms are reaching towards him; and some moments later her hands are stretching down down down; and then, “Oh my goodness, janum, I thought you were just talking dirty but it’s true! So cold, Allah, so coooold, like little round cubes of ice!”
Such things happen; after the State froze my father’s assets, my mother began to feel them growing colder and colder. On the first day, the Brass Monkey was conceived—just in time, because after that, although Amina lay every night with her husband to warm him, although she snuggled up tightly when she felt him shiver as the icy fingers of rage and powerlessness spread upwards from his loins, she could no longer bear to stretch out her hand and touch because his little cubes of ice had become too frigid to hold.
They—we—should have known something bad would happen. That January, Chowpatty Beach, and Juhu and Trombay, too, were littered with the ominous corpses of dead pomfret, which floated, without the ghost of an explanation, belly-side-up, like scaly fingers in to shore.
Snakes and Ladders
AND OTHER OMENS: comets were seen exploding above the Back Bay; it was reported that flowers had been seen bleeding real blood; and in February the snakes escaped from the Schaapsteker Institute. The rumor spread that a mad Bengali snake-charmer, a Tubriwallah, was travelling the country, charming reptiles from captivity, leading them out of snake farms (such as the Schaapsteker, where snake venom’s medicinal functions were studied, and antivenenes devised) by the Pied Piper fascination of his flute, in retribution for the partition of his beloved Golden Bengal. After a while the rumors added that the Tubriwallah was seven feet tall, with bright blue skin. He was Krishna come to chastise his people; he was the sky-hued Jesus of the missionaries.
It seems that, in the aftermath of my changeling birth, while I enlarged myself at breakneck speed, everything that could possibly go wrong began to do so. In the snake winter of early 1948, and in the succeeding hot and rainy seasons, events piled upon events, so that by the time the Brass Monkey was born in September we were all exhausted, and ready for a few years’ rest.
Escaped cobras vanished into the sewers of the city; banded kraits were seen on buses. Religious leaders described the snake escape as a warning—the good Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation’s official renunciation of its deities. (“We are a secular State,” Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary had been asking, “How are we going to live now, Madam?” Homi Catrack introduced us to Doctor Schaapsteker himself. He was eighty-one years old; his tongue flicked constantly in and out between his papery lips; and he was prepared to pay cash rent for a top-floor apartment overlooking the Arabian Sea. Ahmed Sinai, in those days, had taken to his bed; the icy cold of the freeze impregnated his bedsheets; he downed vast quantities of whisky for medicinal purposes, but it failed to warm him up … so it was Amina who agreed to let the upper storey of Buckingham Villa to the old snake-doctor. At the end of February, snake poison entered our lives.
Doctor Schaapsteker was a man who engendered wild stories. The more superstitious orderlies at his Institute swore that he had the capacity of dreaming every night about being bitten by snakes, and thus remained immune to their bites. Others whispered that he was half-snake himself, the child of an unnatural union between a woman and a cobra. His obsession with the venom of the banded krait—bungarus fasciatus—was becoming legendary. There is no known antivenene to the bite of bungarus; but Schaapsteker had devoted his life to finding one. Buying broken-down horses from the Catrack stables (among others) he injected them with small doses of the poison; but the horses, unhelpfully, failed to develop antibodies, frothed at the mouth, died standing up and had to be transformed into glue. It was said that Doctor Schaapsteker—“Sharpsticker Sahib”—had now acquired the power of killing horses simply by approaching them with a hypodermic syringe … but Amina paid no attention to these tall stories. “He is an old gentleman,” she told Mary Pereira; “What should we care about people who black-tongue him? He pays his rent, and permits us to live.” Amina was grateful to the European snake-doctor, particularly in those days of the freeze when Ahmed did not seem to have the nerve to fight.
“My beloved father and mother,” Amina wrote, “By my eyes and head I swear I do not know why such things are happening to us … Ahmed is a good man, but this business has hit him hard. If you have advice for your daughter, she is greatly in need of it.” Three days after they received this letter, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother arrived at Bombay Central Station by Frontier Mail; and Amina, driving them home in our 1946 Rover, looked out of a side window and saw the Mahalaxmi Racecourse; and had the first germ of her reckless idea.
“This modern decoration is all right for you young people, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother said. “But give me one old-fashioned takht to sit on. These chairs are so soft, whatsitsname, they make me feel like I’m falling.”
“Is he ill?” Aadam Aziz asked. “Should I examine him and prescribe medicines?”
“This is no time to hide in bed,” Reverend Mother pronounced. “Now he must be a man, whatsitsname, and do a man’s business.”
“How well you both look, my parents,” Amina cried, thinking that her father was turning into an old man who seemed to be getting shorter with the passing years; while Reverend Mother had grown so wide that armchairs, though soft, groaned beneath her weight … and sometimes, through a trick of the light, Amina thought she saw, in the center of her father’s body, a dark shadow like a hole.
“What is left in this India?” Reverend Mother asked, hand slicing air. “Go, leave it all, go to Pakistan. See how well that Zulfikar is doing—he will give you a start. Be a man, my son—get up and start again!”
“He doesn’t want to speak now,” Amina said, “he must rest.”
“Rest?” Aadam Aziz roared. “The man is a jelly!”
“Even Alia, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother said, “all on her own, gone to Pakistan—even she is making a decent life, teaching in a fine school. They say she will be headmistress soon.”
“Shhh, mother, he wants to sleep … let’s go next door …”
“There is a time to sleep, whatsitsname, and a time to wake! Listen: Mustapha is making many hundreds of rupees a month, whatsitsname, in the Civil Service. What is your husband. Too good to work?”
“Mother, he is upset. His temperature is so low …”
“What food are you giving? From today, whatsitsname, I will run your kitchen. Young people today—like babies, whatsitsname!”
“Just as you like, mother.”
“I tell you whatsitsname, it’s those photos in the paper. I wrote—didn’t I write?—no good would come of that. Photos take away pieces of you. My God, whatsitsname, when I saw your picture, you had become so transparent I could see the writing from the other side coming right through your face!”
“But that’s only …”
“Don’t tell me your stories, whatsitsname! I give thanks to God you have recovered from that photography!”
After that day, Amina was freed from the exigencies of running her home. Reverend Mother sat at the head of the dining-table, doling out food (Amina took plates to Ahmed, who stayed in bed, moaning from time to time, “Smashed, wife! Snapped—like an icicle!”); while, in the kitchens, Mary Pereira took the time to prepare, for the benefit of their visitors, some of the finest and most delicate mango pickles, lime chutneys and cucumber kasaundies in the world. And now, restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people’s food see
ping into her—because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes imbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination. And, although Mary’s pickles had a partially counteractive effect—since she had stirred into them the guilt of her heart, and the fear of discovery, so that, good as they tasted, they had the power of making those who ate them subject to nameless uncertainties and dreams of accusing fingers—the diet provided by Reverend Mother filled Amina with a kind of rage, and even produced slight signs of improvements in her defeated husband. So that finally the day came when Amina, who had been watching me play incompetently with toy horses of sandalwood in the bath, inhaling the sweet odors of sandalwood which the bathwater released, suddenly rediscovered within herself the adventurous streak which was her inheritance from her fading father, the streak which had brought Aadam Aziz down from his mountain valley; Amina turned to Mary Pereira and said, “I’m fed up. If nobody in this house is going to put things right, then it’s just going to be up to me!”
Toy horses galloped behind Amina’s eyes as she left Mary to dry me and marched into her bedroom. Remembered glimpses of Mahalaxmi Racecourse cantered in her head as she pushed aside saris and petticoats. The fever of a reckless scheme flushed her cheeks as she opened the lid of an old tin trunk … filling her purse with the coins and rupee notes of grateful patients and wedding-guests, my mother went to the races.
With the Brass Monkey growing inside her, my mother stalked the paddocks of the racecourse named after the goddess of wealth; braving early-morning sickness and varicose veins, she stood in line at the Tote window, putting money on three-horse accumulators and long-odds outsiders. Ignorant of the first thing about horses, she backed mares known not to be stayers to win long races; she put her money on jockeys because she liked their smiles. Clutching a purse full of the dowry which had lain untouched in its trunk since her own mother had packed it away, she took wild flutters on stallions who looked fit for the Schaapsteker Institute … and won, and won, and won.
“Good news,” Ismail Ibrahim is saying, “I always thought you should fight the bastards. I’ll begin proceedings at once … but it will take cash, Amina. Have you got cash?”
“The money will be there.”
“Not for myself,” Ismail explains, “My services are, as I said, free, gratis absolutely. But, forgive me, you must know how things are, one must give little presents to people to smooth one’s way …”
“Here,” Amina hands him an envelope, “Will this do for now?”
“My God,” Ismail Ibrahim drops the packet in surprise and rupee notes in large denominations scatter all over his sitting-room floor, “Where did you lay your hands on …” And Amina, “Better you don’t ask—and I won’t ask how you spend it.”
Schaapsteker money paid for our food bills; but horses fought our war. The streak of luck of my mother at the racetrack was so long, a seam so rich, that if it hadn’t happened it wouldn’t have been credible … for month after month, she put her money on a jockey’s nice tidy hair-style or a horse’s pretty piebald coloring; and she never left the track without a large envelope stuffed with notes.
“Things are going well,” Ismail Ibrahim told her, “But Amina sister, God knows what you are up to. Is it decent? Is it legal?” And Amina: “Don’t worry your head. What can’t be cured must be endured. I am doing what must be done.”
Never once in all that time did my mother take pleasure in her mighty victories; because she was weighed down by more than a baby—eating Reverend Mother’s curries filled with ancient prejudices, she had become convinced that gambling was the next worst thing on earth, next to alcohol; so, although she was not a criminal, she felt consumed by sin.
Verrucas plagued her feet, although Purushottam the sadhu, who sat under our garden tap until dripping water created a bald patch amid the luxuriantly matted hair on his head, was a marvel at charming them away; but throughout the snake winter and the hot season, my mother fought her husband’s fight.
You ask: how is it possible? How could a housewife, however assiduous, however determined, win fortunes on the horses, day after racing day, month after month? You think to yourself: aha, the Homi Catrack, he’s a horse-owner; and everyone knows that most of the races are fixed; Amina was asking her neighbor for hot tips! A plausible notion; but Mr. Catrack himself lost as often as he won; he saw my mother at the racetrack and was astounded by her success. (“Please,” Amina asked him, “Catrack Sahib, let this be our secret. Gambling, is a terrible thing; it would be so shaming if my mother found out.” And Catrack, nodding dazedly, said, “Just as you wish.”) So it was not the Parsee who was behind it—but perhaps I can offer another explanation. Here it is, in a sky-blue crib in a sky-blue room with a fisherman’s pointing finger on the wall: here, whenever his mother goes away clutching a purse full of secrets, is Baby Saleem, who has acquired an expression of the most intense concentration, whose eyes have been seized by a singleness of purpose of such enormous power that it has darkened them to a deep navy blue, and whose nose is twitching strangely while he appears to be watching some distant event, to be guiding it from a distance, just as the moon controls the tides.
“Coming to court very soon,” Ismail Ibrahim said, “I think you can be fairly confident … my God, Amina, have you found King Solomon’s Mines?”
The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. O perfect balance of rewards and penalties! O seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes.
All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it’s more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose … but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity—because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake … Keeping things simple for the moment, however, I record that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes.
Amina’s brother Hanif had not gone to Pakistan. Following the childhood dream which he had whispered to Rashid the rickshaw-boy in an Agra cornfield, he had arrived in Bombay and sought employment in the great film studios. Precociously confident, he had not only succeeded in becoming the youngest man ever to be given a film to direct in the history of the Indian cinema; he had also wooed and married one of the brightest stars of that celluloid heaven, the divine Pia, whose face was her fortune, and whose saris were made of fabrics whose designers had clearly set out to prove that it was possible to incorporate every color known to man in a single pattern. Reverend Mother did not approve of the divine Pia, but Hanif of all my family was the one who was free of her confining influence; a jolly, burly man with the booming laugh of the boatman Tai and the explosive, innocent anger of his father Aadam Aziz, he took her to live simply in a small, un-filmi apartment on Marine Drive, telling her, “Plenty of time to live like Emperors after I’ve made my name.” She acquiesced; she starred in his first feature, which was partly financed by Homi Catrack and partly by D. W. Rama Studios (Pvt.) Ltd—it
was called The Lovers of Kashmir; and one evening in the midst of her racing days Amina Sinai went to the premiere. Her parents did not come, thanks to Reverend Mother’s loathing of the cinema, against which Aadam Aziz no longer had the strength to struggle—just as he, who had fought with Mian Abdullah against Pakistan, no longer argued with her when she praised the country, retaining just enough strength to dig in his heels and refuse to emigrate; but Ahmed Sinai, revived by his mother-in-law’s cookery, but resentful of her continued presence, got to his feet and accompanied his wife. They took their seats, next to Hanif and Pia and the male star of the film, one of India’s most successful “lover-boys,” I. S. Nayyar. And, although they didn’t know it, a serpent waited in the wings … but in the meanwhile, let us permit Hanif Aziz to have his moment; because The Lovers of Kashmir contained a notion which was to provide my uncle with a spectacular, though brief, period of triumph. In those days it was not permitted for lover-boys and their leading ladies to touch one another on screen, for fear that their osculations might corrupt the nation’s youth … but thirty-three minutes after the beginning of The Lovers, the première audience began to give off a low buzz of shock, because Pia and Nayyar had begun to kiss—not one another—but things.
Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with all the rich fullness of her painted lips; then passed it to Nayyar; who planted, upon its opposite face, a virilely passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as the indirect kiss—and how much more sophisticated a notion it was than anything in our current cinema; how pregnant with longing and eroticism! The cinema audience (which would, nowadays, cheer raucously at the sight of a young couple diving behind a bush, which would then begin to shake ridiculously—so low have we sunk in our ability to suggest) watched, riveted to the screen, as the love of Pia and Nayyar, against a background of Dal Lake and ice-blue Kashmiri sky, expressed itself in kisses applied to cups of pink Kashmiri tea; by the foundations of Shalimar they pressed their lips to a sword … but now, at the height of Hanif Aziz’s triumph, the serpent refused to wait; under its influence, the house-lights came up. Against the larger-than-life figures of Pia and Nayyar, kissing mangoes as they mouthed to playback music, the figure of a timorous, inadequately bearded man was seen, marching on to the stage beneath the screen, microphone in hand. The Serpent can take most unexpected forms; now, in the guise of this ineffectual house-manager, it unleashed its venom. Pia and Nayyar faded and died; and the amplified voice of the bearded man said: “Ladies and gents, your pardon; but there is terrible news.” His voice broke—a sob from the Serpent, to lend power to its teeth!—and then continued. “This afternoon, at Birla House in Delhi, our beloved Mahatma was killed. Some madman shot him in the stomach, ladies and gentlemen—our Bapu is gone!”