“All right,” my mother said, coming into a sky-blue room to embrace me, “you’re forgiven now. But never hide in there again …”
“Amma,” I said eagerly, “my Ammi, please listen. I must tell you something. Something big. But please, please first of all, wake Abba.”
And after a period of “What?” “Why?” and “Certainly not,” my mother saw something extraordinary sitting in my eyes and went to wake Ahmed Sinai anxiously, with “Janum, please come. I don’t know what’s got into Saleem.”
Family and ayah assembled in the sitting-room. Amid cut-glass vases and plump cushions, standing on a Persian rug beneath the swirling shadows of ceiling-fans, I smiled into their anxious eyes and prepared my revelation. This was it; the beginning of the repayment of their investment; my first dividend—first, I was sure, of many … my black mother, lip-jutting father, Monkey of a sister and crime-concealing ayah waited in hot confusion.
Get it out. Straight, without frills. “You should be the first to know,” I said, trying to give my speech the cadences of adulthood. And then I told them. “I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think—Ammi, Abboo, I really think—that Archangels have started to talk to me.”
There! I thought. There! It’s said! Now there will be pats on the back, sweetmeats, public announcements, maybe more photographs; now their chests will puff up with pride. O blind innocence of childhood! For my honesty—for my open-hearted desperation to please—I was set upon from all sides. Even the Monkey: “O God, Saleem, all this tamasha, all this performance, for one of your stupid cracks?” And worse than the Monkey was Mary Pereira: “Christ Jesus! Save us, Lord! Holy Father in Rome, such blasphemy I’ve heard today!” And worse than Mary Pereira was my mother Amina Sinai: Black Mango concealed now, her own unnameable names still warm upon her lips, she cried, “Heaven forfend! The child will bring down the roof upon our heads!” (Was that my fault, too?) And Amina continued: “You black man! Goonda! O Saleem, has your brain gone raw? What has happened to my darling baby boy—are you growing into a madman—a torturer!?” And worse than Amina’s shrieking was my father’s silence; worse than her fear was the wild anger sitting on his forehead; and worst of all was my father’s hand, which stretched out suddenly, thick-fingered, heavy-jointed, strong-as-an-ox, to fetch me a mighty blow on the side of my head, so that I could never hear properly in my left ear after that day; so that I fell sideways across the startled room through the scandalized air and shattered a green tabletop of opaque glass; so that, having been certain of myself for the first time in my life, I was plunged into a green, glass-cloudy world filled with cutting edges, a world in which I could no longer tell the people who mattered most about the goings-on inside my head; green shards lacerated my hands as I entered that swirling universe in which I was doomed, until it was far too late, to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for.
In a white-tiled bathroom beside a washing-chest, my mother daubed me with Mercurochrome; gauze veiled my cuts, while through the door my father’s voice commanded, “Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me? Let him enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!”
That night, Amina Sinai would dream of Ramram Seth, who was floating six inches above the ground, his eye-sockets filled with egg-whites, intoning: “Washing will hide him … voices will guide him” … but when, after several days in which the dream sat upon her shoulders wherever she went, she plucked up the courage to ask her disgraced son a little more about his outrageous claim, he replied in a voice restrained as the unwept tears of his childhood: “It was just fooling, Amma. A stupid joke, like you said.”
She died, nine years later, without discovering the truth.
All-India Radio
REALITY IS A QUESTION of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality … we have come from 1915 to 1956, so we’re a good deal closer to the screen … abandoning my metaphor, then, I reiterate, entirely without a sense of shame, my unbelievable claim: after a curious accident in a washing-chest, I became a sort of radio.
… But today, I feel confused. Padma has not returned—should I alert the police? Is she a Missing Person?—and in her absence, my certainties are falling apart. Even my nose has been playing tricks on me—by day, as I stroll between the pickle-vats tended by our army of strong, hairy-armed, formidably competent women, I have found myself failing to distinguish lemon-odors from lime. The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor sahib has been crossed in—what?—surely not love? … Padma, and the cracks spreading all over me, radiating like a spider’s web from my navel; and the heat … a little confusion is surely permissable in these circumstances. Rereading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.
Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can’t judge. I’ll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I’ve started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began …
Yé Akashvani hai. This is All-India Radio.
Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani café, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light with only a cheap transistor for company. A hot night; bubbling air filled with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle-vats; voices in the dark. Pickle-fames, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then … it was hot then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat … it was not the voices (then or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea—the idea that his parents’ outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their love; that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deformity … while I, now, Padma-less, send these words into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he … I no longer have his gift; he never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost … he had no cracks. No spiders’ webs spread through him in the heat.
Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook.
And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive through the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize impotence—ever since the notorious free-transistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented what men could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied) … then, the nearlynineyearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines.
Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat-haze, then and now, blurs his then-time into mine … my confusion, travelling across the heat-waves, is also his.
What grows best in the heat: cane-sugar; the coconut palm; certain millets such as bajra, ragi and jowar; linseed, and (given water) tea and rice. . Our hot land is also the world’s second largest producer of cotton—at least, it was when I learned geography under the mad eye of Mr. Emil Zagallo, and the steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador. But the tropi
cal summer grows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom, to fill the close perspiring nights with odors as heavy as musk, which give men dark dreams of discontent … then as now, unease was in the air. Language marchers demanded the partition of the state of Bombay along linguistic boundaries—the dream of Maharashtra was at the head of some processions, the mirage of Gujarat led the others forward. Heat, gnawing at the mind’s divisions between fantasy and reality, made anything seem possible; the half-waking chaos of afternoon siestas fogged men’s brains, and the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires.
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.
In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through the daytime streets; by night, they rioted in my head. We shall be watching your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.
It’s time to talk about the voices.
But if only our Padma were here …
I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father’s hand—walloping my ear in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another, bodiless hand, which once hit him full in the face—at least had one salutary effect: it obliged me to reconsider and finally to abandon my original, Prophet-aping position. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I withdrew deep inside myself, despite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue room with her pesterings: “But what did you do it for, Saleem? You who’re always too good and all?” … until she fell into dissatisfied sleep with her mouth still working silently, and I was alone with the echoes of my father’s violence, which buzzed in my left ear, which whispered, “Neither Michael nor Anael; not Gabriel; forget Cassiel, Sachiel and Samael! Archangels no longer speak to mortals; the Recitation was completed in Arabia long ago; the last prophet will come only to announce the End.” That night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not after all been chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far from being sacred, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust.
Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you’re always reading about in the sensational magazines. But I ask for patience—wait. Only wait. It was telepathy; but also more than telepathy. Don’t write me off too easily.
Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience—before I began to act—there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Luck-now Urdu to the southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surface transmissions—the front-of-mind stuff which is what I’d originally been picking up—language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words … but that was after I heard, beneath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other precious signals, utterly different from everything else, most of them faint and distant, like far-off drums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke through the fish-market cacophony of my voices … those secret, nocturnal calls, like calling out to like … the unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signalling nothing more than their existence, transmitting simply: “I.” From far to the North, “I.” And the South East West: “I.” “I.” “And I.”
But I mustn’t get ahead of myself. In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening; and soon I was able to “tune” my inner ear to those voices which I could understand; nor was it long before I picked out, from the throng, the voices of my own family; and of Mary Pereira; and of friends, classmates, teachers. In the street, I learned how to identify the mind-stream of passing strangers—the law of Doppler shift continued to operate in these paranormal realms, and the voices grew and diminished as the strangers passed.
All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father’s wrath, and anxious to keep my right ear in good working order, I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy, the difficulties of concealing knowledge are almost insurmountable; but fortunately, my nearest and dearest were as anxious to forget my outburst as I was to conceal the truth.
“O, you Saleem! Such things you talked yesterday! Shame on you, boy: you better go wash out your mouth with soap!” … The morning after my disgrace, Mary Pereira, shaking with indignation like one of her jellies, suggested the perfect means of my rehabilitation. Bowing my head contritely, I went, without a word, into the bathroom, and there, beneath the amazed gaze of ayah and Monkey, scrubbed teeth tongue roofofmouth gums with a toothbrush covered in the sharp foul lather of Coal Tar Soap. The news of my dramatic atonement rushed rapidly around the house, borne by Mary and Monkey; and my mother embraced me, “There, good boy; we’ll say no more about it,” and Ahmed Sinai nodded gruffly at the breakfast table, “At least the boy has the grace to admit when he’s gone too far.”
As my glass-inflicted cuts faded, it was as though my announcement was also erased; and by the time of my ninth birthday, nobody besides myself remembered anything about the day when I had taken the name of Archangels in vain. The taste of detergent lingered on my tongue for many weeks, reminding me of the need for secrecy.
Even the Brass Monkey was satisfied by my show of contrition—in her eyes, I had returned to form, and was once more the goody-two-shoes of the family. To demonstrate her willingness to re-establish the old order, she set fire to my mother’s favorite slippers, and regained her rightful place in the family doghouse. Amongst outsiders, what’s more—displaying a conservatism you’d never have suspected in such a tomboy—she closed ranks with my parents, and kept my one aberration a secret from her friends and mine.
In a country where any physical or mental peculiarity in a child is a source of deep family shame, my parents, who had become accustomed to facial birthmarks, cucumber-nose and bandy legs, simply refused to see any more embarrassing things in me; for my part, I did not once mention the buzzing in my ear, the occasional ringing bells of deafness, the intermittent pain. I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing.
But imagine the confusion inside my head! Where, behind the hideous face, above the tongue tasting of soap, hard by the perforated eardrum, lurked a not-very-tidy mind, as full of bric-a-brac as nine-year-old pockets … imagine yourself inside me somehow, looking out through my eyes, hearing the noise, the voices, and now the obligation of not letting people know, the hardest part was acting surprised, such as when my mother said Hey Saleem guess what we’re going for a picnic to the Aarey Milk Colony and I had to go Ooo, exciting! when I had known all along because I had heard her unspoken inner voice And on my birthday seeing all the presents in the donors’ minds before they were even unwrapped And the treasure hunt ruined because there in my father’s head was the location of each clue every prize And much harder things such as going to see my father in his ground-floor office, here we are, and the moment I’m in there my head is full of godknowswhat rot because he’s thinking about his secretary, Alice or Fernanda, his latest Coca-Cola girl, he’s undressing her slowly in his head and it’s in my head too, she’s sitting stark naked on a cane-bottomed chair and now getting up, crisscross marks all across her rump, that’s my father thinking, MY FATHER, now he’s looking at me all funny What’s the matter son don’t you feel well Yes fine Abba fine, must go now GOT TO GET AWAY homework to do, Abba, and out, run away before he sees the clue on your face (my father always said that when I was lying there was a red light flashing on my forehead) … You see how hard it is, my uncle Hanif comes to take me to the wrestling, and even before we’ve arrived at Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium on Hornby Vellard I’m feeling sad We’re walking with the crowds past giant cardboard cut-outs of Dara Singh and Tagra Baba and the rest and his sadness, my favorite uncle’s sadness is
pouring into me, it lives like a lizard just beneath the hedge of his jollity, concealed by his booming laugh which was once the laugh of the boatman Tai, we’re sitting in excellent seats as floodlights dance on the backs of the interlocked wrestlers and I am caught in the unbreakable grip of my uncle’s grief, the grief of his failing film career, flop after flop, he’ll probably never get a film again But I mustn’t let the sadness leak out of my eyes He’s butting into my thoughts, hey phaelwan, hey little wrestler, what’s dragging your face down, it looks longer than a bad movie, you want channa? pakoras? what? And me shaking my head, No, nothing, Hanif mamu, so that he relaxes, turns away, starts yelling Ohé come on Dara, that’s the ticket, give him hell, Dara yara! And back home my mother squatting in the corridor with the ice-cream tub, saying with her real outside-voice, You want to help me make it, son, your favorite pistachio flavor and I’m turning the handle, but her inside-voice is bouncing against the inside of my head, I can see how she’s trying to fill up every nook and cranny of her thoughts with everyday things, the price of pomfret, the roster of household chores, must call in the electrician to mend the ceiling-fan in the dining-room, how she’s desperately concentrating on parts of her husband to love, but the unmentionable word keeps finding room, the two syllables which leaked out of her in the bathroom that day, Na Dir Na Dir Na, she’s finding it harder and harder to put down the telephone when the wrong numbers come MY MOTHER I tell you when a boy gets inside grown-up thoughts they can really mess him up completely And even at night, no respite, I wake up at the stroke of midnight with Mary Pereira’s dreams inside my head Night after night Always at my personal witching-hour, which also has meaning for her Her dreams are plagued by the image of a man who has been dead for years, Joseph D’Costa, the dream tells me the name, it is coated with a guilt I cannot understand, the same guilt which seeps into us all every time we eat her chutneys, there is a mystery here but because the secret is not in the front of her mind I can’t find it out, and meanwhile Joseph is there, each night, sometimes in human form, but not always, sometimes he’s a wolf, or a snail, once a broomstick, but we (she-dreaming, I-looking in) know it’s him, baleful implacable accusative, cursing her in the language of his incarnations, howling at her when he’s wolf-Joseph, covering her in the slime-trails of Joseph-the-snail, beating her with the business end of his broomstick incarnation … and in the morning when she’s telling me to bathe clean up get ready for school I have to bite back the questions, I am nine years old and lost in the confusion of other people’s lives which are blurring together in the heat.