The day of November 20th was a terrible day; the night was a terrible night … six days earlier, on Nehru’s seventy-third birthday, the great confrontation with the Chinese forces had begun; the Indian army—JAWANS SWING INTO ACTION!—had attacked the Chinese at Walong. News of the disaster of Walong, and the rout of General Kaul and four battalions, reached Nehru on Saturday 18th; on Monday 20th, it flooded through radio and press and arrived at Methwold’s Estate. ULTIMATE PANIC IN NEW DELHI! INDIAN FORCES IN TATTERS! That day—the last day of my old life—I sat huddled with my sister and parents around our Telefunken radiogram, while telecommunications struck the fear of God and China into our hearts. And my father now said a fateful thing: “Wife,” he intoned gravely, while Jamila and I shook with fear, “Begum Sahiba, this country is finished. Bankrupt. Funtoosh.” The evening paper proclaimed the end of the optimism disease: PUBLIC MORALE DRAINS AWAY. And after that end, there were others to come; other things would also drain away.
I went to bed with my head full of Chinese faces guns tanks … but at midnight, my head was empty and quiet, because the midnight Conference had drained away as well; the only one of the magic children who was willing to talk to me was Parvati-the-witch, and we, dejected utterly by what Nussie-the-duck would have called “the end of the world,” were unable to do more than simply commune in silence.
And other, more mundane drainages: a crack appeared in the mighty Bhakra Nangal Hydro-Electric Dam, and the great reservoir behind it flooded through the fissure … and the Narlikar women’s reclamation consortium, impervious to optimism or defeat or anything except the lure of wealth, continued to draw land out of the depths of the seas … but the final evacuation, the one which truly gives this episode its title, took place the next morning, just when I had relaxed and thought that something, after all, might turn out all right … because in the morning we heard the improbably joyous news that the Chinese had suddenly, without needing to, stopped advancing; having gained control of the Himalayan heights, they were apparently content; CEASEFIRE! the newspapers screamed, and my mother almost fainted in relief. (There was talk that General Kaul had been taken prisoner; the President of India, Dr. Radhakrishnan, commented, “Unfortunately, this report is completely untrue.”)
Despite streaming eyes and puffed-up sinuses, I was happy; despite even the end of the Children’s Conference, I was basking in the new glow of happiness which permeated Buckingham Villa; so when my mother suggested, “Let’s go and celebrate! A picnic, children, you’d like that?” I naturally agreed with alacrity. It was the morning of November 21st; we helped make sandwiches and parathas; we stopped at a fizzy-drinks shop and loaded ice in a tin tub and Cokes in a crate into the boot of our Rover; parents in the front, children in the back, we set off. Jamila Singer sang for us as we drove.
Through inflamed sinuses, I asked: “Where are we going? Juhu? Elephanta? Marvé? Where?” And my mother, smiling awkwardly: “Surprise; wait and see.” Through streets filled with relieved, rejoicing crowds we drove … “This is the wrong way,” I exclaimed; “This isn’t the way to a beach?” My parents both spoke at once, reassuringly, brightly: “Just one stop first, and then we’re off; promise.”
Telegrams recalled me; radiograms frightened me; but it was a telephone which booked the date time place of my undoing … and my parents lied to me.
… We halted in front of an unfamiliar building in Carnac Road. Exterior: crumbling. All its windows: blind. “You coming with me, son?” Ahmed Sinai got out of the car; I, happy to be accompanying my father on his business, walked jauntily beside him. A brass plate on the doorway: Ear Nose Throat Clinic. And I, suddenly alarmed: “What’s this, Abba? Why have we come …” And my father’s hand, tightening on my shoulder—and then a man in a white coat—and nurses—and “Ah yes Mr. Sinai so this is young Saleem—right on time—fine, fine”; while I, “Abba, no—what about the picnic—”; but doctors are steering me along now, my father is dropping back, the man in the coat calls to him, “Shan’t be long—damn good news about the war, no?” And the nurse, “Please accompany me for dressing and anesthesia.”
Tricked! Tricked, Padma! I told you: once, picnics tricked me; and then there was a hospital and a room with a hard bed and bright hanging lamps and me crying, “No no no,” and the nurse, “Don’t be stupid now, you’re almost a grown man, lie down,” and I, remembering how nasal passages had started everything in my head, how nasal fluid had been sniffed upupup into somewhere-that-nosefluid-shouldn’t-go, how the connection had been made which released my voices, was kicking yelling so that they had to hold me down, “Honestly,” the nurse said, “such a baby, I never saw.”
And so what began in a washing-chest ended on an operating table, because I was held down hand-and-foot and a man saying “You won’t feel a thing, easier than having your tonsils out, get those sinuses fixed in no time, complete clear-out,” and me “No please no,” but the voice continued, “I’ll put this mask on you now, just count to ten.”
Count. The numbers marching one two three.
Hiss of released gas. The numbers crushing me four five six.
Faces swimming in fog. And still the tumultuous numbers, I was crying, I think, the numbers pounding seven eight nine.
Ten.
“Good God, the boy’s still conscious. Extraordinary. We’d better try another—can you hear me? Saleem, isn’t it? Good chap, just give me another ten!” Can’t catch me. Multitudes have teemed inside my head. The master of the numbers, me. Here they go again ’leven twelve.
But they’ll never let me up until … thirteen fourteen fifteen … O God O God the fog dizzy and falling back back back, sixteen, beyond war and pepperpots, back back, seventeen eighteen nineteen.
Twen
There was a washing-chest and a boy who sniffed too hard. His mother undressed and revealed a Black Mango. Voices came, which were not the voices of Archangels. A hand, deafening the left ear. And what grew best in the heat: fantasy, irrationality, lust. There was a clocktower refuge, and cheatery-in-class. And love in Bombay caused a bicycle-accident; horn-temples entered forcep-hollows, and five hundred and eighty-one children visited my head. Midnight’s children: who may have been the embodiment of the hope of freedom, who may also have been freaks-who-ought-to-be-finished-off. Parvati-the-witch, most loyal of all, and Shiva, who became a principle of life. There was the question of purpose, and the debate between ideas and things. There were knees and nose and nose and knees.
Quarrels began, and the adult world infiltrated the children’s; there was selfishness and snobbishness and hate. And the impossibility of a third principle; the fear of coming-to-nothing-after-all began to grow. And what nobody said: that the purpose of the five hundred and eighty-one lay in their destruction; that they had come, in order to come to nothing. Prophecies were ignored when they spoke to this effect.
And revelations, and the closing of a mind; and exile, and four-years-after return; suspicions growing, dissension breeding, departures in twenties and tens. And, at the end, just one voice left; but optimism lingered—what-we-had-in-common retained the possibility of overpowering what-forced-us-apart.
Until:
Silence outside me. A dark room (blinds down). Can’t see anything (nothing there to see).
Silence inside me. A connection broken (for ever). Can’t hear anything (nothing there to hear).
Silence, like a desert. And a clear, free nose (nasal passages full of air). Air, like a vandal, invading my private places.
Drained. I have been drained. The parahamsa, grounded. (For good.)
O, spell it out, spell it out: the operation whose ostensible purpose was the draining of my inflamed sinuses and the once-and-for-all clearing of my nasal passages had the effect of breaking whatever connection had been made in a washing-chest; of depriving me of nose-given telepathy; of banishing me from the possibility of midnight children.
Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not acquired the meani
nglessness of the West, and are still more than mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles. Sinai contains Ibn Sina, master magician, Sufi adept; and also Sin the moon, the ancient god of Hadhramaut, with his own mode of connection, his powers of action-at-a-distance upon the tides of the world. But Sin is also the letter S, as sinuous as a snake; serpents lie coiled within the name. And there is also the accident of transliteration—Sinai, when in Roman script, though not in Nastaliq, is also the name of the place-of-revelation, of put-off-thy-shoes, of commandments and golden calves; but when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert—of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end.
In Arabia—Arabia Deserta—at the time of the prophet Muhammad, other prophets also preached: Maslama of the tribe of the Banu Hanifa in the Yamama, the very heart of Arabia; and Hanzala ibn Safwan; and Khalid ibn Sinan. Maslama’s God was ar-Rahman, “the Merciful”; today Muslims pray to Allah, ar-Rahman. Khalid ibn Sinan was sent to the tribe of ’Abs; for a time, he was followed, but then he was lost. Prophets are not always false simply because they are overtaken, and swallowed up, by history. Men of worth have always roamed the desert.
“Wife,” Ahmed Sinai said, “this country is finished.” After ceasefire and drainage, these words returned to haunt him; and Amina began to persuade him to emigrate to Pakistan, where her surviving sisters already were, and to which her mother would go after her father’s death. “A fresh start,” she suggested, “Janum, it would be lovely. What is left for us on this God-forsaken hill?”
So in the end Buckingham Villa was delivered into the clutches of the Narlikar women, after all; and over fifteen years late, my family moved to Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. Ahmed Sinai left very little behind; there are ways of transmitting money with the help of multinational companies, and my father knew those ways. And I, although sad to leave the city of my birth, was not unhappy about moving away from the city in which Shiva lurked somewhere like a carefully-concealed land-mine.
We left Bombay, finally, in February 1963; and on the day of our departure I took an old tin globe down to the garden and buried it amongst the cacti. Inside it: a Prime Minister’s letter, and a jumbo-sized front-page baby-snap, captioned “Midnight’s Child” … They may not be holy relics—I do not presume to compare the trivial memorabilia of my life with the Hazratbal hair of the Prophet, or the body of St. Francis Xavier in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus—but they are all that has survived of my past: a squashed tin globe, a mildewed letter, a photograph. Nothing else, not even a silver spittoon. Apart from a Monkey-crushed planet, the only records are sealed in the closed books of heaven, Sidjeen and Illiyun, the Books of Evil and Good; at any rate, that’s the story.
… Only when we were aboard S.S. Sabarmati, and anchored off the Rann of Kutch, did I remember old Schaapsteker; and wondered, suddenly, if anyone had told him we were going. I didn’t dare to ask, for fear that the answer might be no; so as I thought of the demolition crew getting to work, and pictured the machines of destruction smashing into my father’s office and my own blue room, pulling down the servants’ spiral iron staircase and the kitchen in which Mary Pereira had stirred her fears into chutneys and pickles, massacring the verandah where my mother had sat with the child in her belly like a stone, I also had an image of a mighty, swinging ball crashing into the domain of Sharpsticker Sahib, and of the old crazy man himself, pale wasted flick-tongued, being exposed there on top of a crumbling house, amid falling towers and red-tiled roof, old Schaapsteker shrivelling ageing dying in the sunlight which he hadn’t seen for so many years. But perhaps I’m dramatizing; I may have got all this from an old film called Lost Horizon, in which beautiful women shrivelled and died when they departed from Shangri-La.
For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake. We arrived in Karachi on February 9th—and within months, my sister Jamila had been launched on the career which would earn her the names of “Pakistan’s Angel” and “Bulbul-of-the-Faith”; we had left Bombay, but we gained reflected glory. And one more thing: although I had been drained—although no voices spoke in my head, and never would again—there was one compensation: namely that, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the astonishing delights of possessing a sense of smell.
Jamila Singer
IT TURNED OUT to be a sense so acute as to be capable of distinguishing the glutinous reek of hypocrisy behind the welcoming smile with which my spinster aunt Alia greeted us at the Karachi docks. Irremediably embittered by my father’s years-ago defection into the arms of her sister, my headmistress aunt had acquired the heavy-footed corpulence of undimmed jealousy; the thick dark hairs of her resentment sprouted through most of the pores of her skin. And perhaps she succeeded in deceiving my parents and Jamila with her spreading arms, her waddling run towards us, her cry of “Ahmed bhai, at last! But better late than never!” her spider-like—and inevitably accepted—offers of hospitality; but I, who had spent much of my babyhood in the bitter mittens and soured pom-pom hats of her envy, who had been unknowingly infected with failure by the innocent-looking baby-things into which she had knitted her hatred, and who, moreover, could clearly remember what it was like to be possessed by revenge-lust, I, Saleem-the-drained, could smell the vengeful odors leaking out of her glands. I was, however, powerless to protest; we were swept into the Datsun of her vengeance and driven away down Bunder Road to her house at Guru Mandir—like flies, only more foolish, because we celebrated our captivity.
… But what a sense of smell it was! Most of us are conditioned, from the cradle onwards, into recognizing the narrowest possible spectrum of fragrances; I, however, had been incapable of smelling a thing all my life, and was accordingly ignorant of all olfactory taboos. As a result, I had a tendency not to feign innocence when someone broke wind—which landed me in a certain amount of parental trouble; more important, however, was my nasal freedom to inhale a very great deal more than the scents of purely physical origin with which the rest of the human race has chosen to be content. So, from the earliest days of my Pakistani adolescence, I began to learn the secret aromas of the world, the heady but quick-fading perfume of new love, and also the deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate. (It was not long after my arrival in the “Land of the Pure” that I discovered within myself the ultimate impurity of sister-love; and the slow burning fires of my aunt filled my nostrils from the start.) A nose will give you knowledge, but not power-over-events; my invasion of Pakistan, armed (if that’s the right word) only with a new manifestation of my nasal inheritance, gave me the powers of sniffing-out-the-truth, of smelling-what-was-in-the-air, of following trails; but not the only power an invader needs—the strength to conquer my foes.
I won’t deny it: I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay. Set between the desert and bleakly saline creeks whose shores were littered with stunted mangroves, my new city seemed to possess an ugliness which eclipsed even my own; having grown too fast—its population had quadrupled since 1947—it had acquired the misshapen lumpiness of a gigantic dwarf. On my sixteenth birthday, I was given a Lambretta motor-scooter; riding the city streets on my windowless vehicle, I breathed in the fatalistic hopelessness of the slum dwellers and the smug defensiveness of the rich; I was sucked along the smell-trails of dispossession and also fanaticism, lured down a long underworld corridor at whose end was the door to Tai Bibi, the oldest whore in the world … but I’m running away with myself. At the heart of my Karachi was Alia Aziz’s house, a large old building on Clayton Road (she must have wandered in it for years like a ghost with nobody to haunt), a place of shadows and yellowed paint, across which there fell, every afternoon, the long accusing shadow of the minaret of the local mosque. Even when, years later in the magicians’ ghetto, I lived in another mosque’s shade, a shade which was, at least for a time, a protective, unmenacing penumbra, I never lost my Karachi-born view of mosque-shadows, in which, it seemed to me, I c
ould sniff the narrow, clutching, accusative odor of my aunt. Who bided her time; but whose vengeance, when it came, was crushing.
It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert’s power. Oases shone in the tarmac of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst the hovels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city (whose only common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had started life as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient powers of apparition-mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by illusionary sand-dunes and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant “submission,” my new fellow-citizens exuded the flat boiled odors of acquiescence, which were depressing to a nose which had smelt—at the very last, and however briefly—the highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay.