Jealousy: that was it. The green jealousy of my mad aunt Sonia, dripping like poison into my uncle’s ears, prevented him from doing a single thing to get me started on my chosen career. The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also: tiny madwomen.
On the four hundred and eighteenth day of my stay, there was a change in the atmosphere of the madhouse. Someone came to dinner: someone with a plump stomach, a tapering head covered with oily curls and a mouth as fleshy as a woman’s labia. I thought I recognized him from newspaper photographs. Turning to one of my sexless ageless faceless cousins, I inquired with interest, “Isn’t it, you know, San-jay Gandhi?” But the pulverized creature was too annihilated to be capable of replying … was it wasn’t it? I did not, at that time, know what I now set down: that certain high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons of prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves … a few years later, there would be gangs of Sanjays all over India! No wonder that incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth control on the rest of us … so maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; but someone disappeared into my uncle’s study with Mustapha Aziz; and that night—I sneaked a look—there was a locked black leather folder saying TOP SECRET and also PROJECT M.C.C.; and the next morning my uncle was looking at me differently, with fear almost, or with that special look of loathing which Civil Servants reserve for those who fall into official disfavor. I should have known then what was in store for me; but everything is simple with hindsight. Hindsight comes to me now, too late, now that I am finally consigned to the peripheries of history, now that the connections between my life and the nation’s have broken for good and all … to avoid my uncle’s inexplicable gaze, I went out into the garden; and saw Parvati-the-witch.
She was squatting on the pavement with the basket of invisibility by her side; when she saw me her eyes brightened with reproach. “You said you’d come, but you never, so I,” she stuttered. I bowed my head. “I have been in mourning,” I said, lamely, and she, “But still you could have—my God, Saleem, you don’t know, in our colony I can’t tell anyone about my real magic, never, not even Picture Singh who is like a father, I must bottle it and bottle it, because they don’t believe in such things, and I thought, Here is Saleem come, now at last I will have one friend, we can talk, we can be together, we have both been, and known, and arré how to say it, Saleem, you don’t care, you got what you wanted and went off just like that, I am nothing to you, I know …”
That night my mad aunt Sonia, herself only days away from confinement in a strait-jacket (it got into the papers, a small piece on the inside page; my uncle’s Department must have been annoyed), had one of the fierce inspirations of the profoundly insane and burst into the bedroom into which, half an hour earlier, someone-with-saucer-eyes had climbed through a ground-floor window; she found me in bed with Parvati-the-witch, and after that my Uncle Mustapha lost interest in sheltering me, saying, “You were born from bhangis, you will remain a dirty type all your life”; on the four hundred and twentieth day after my arrival, I left my uncle’s house, deprived of family ties, returned at last to that true inheritance of poverty and destitution of which I had been cheated for so long by the crime of Mary Pereira. Parvati-the-witch was waiting for me on the pavement; I did not tell her that there was a sense in which I’d been glad of the interruption, because as I kissed her in the dark of that illicit midnight I had seen her face changing, becoming the face of a forbidden love; the ghostly features of Jamila Singer replaced those of the witch-girl; Jamila who was (I know it!) safely hidden in a Karachi nunnery was suddenly also here, except that she had undergone a dark transformation. She had begun to rot, the dreadful pustules and cankers of forbidden love were spreading across her face; just as once the ghost of Joe D’Costa had rotted in the grip of the occult leprosy of guilt, so now the rancid flowers of incest blossomed on my sister’s phantasmal features, and I couldn’t do it, couldn’t kiss touch look upon that intolerable spectral face, I had been on the verge of jerking away with a cry of desperate nostalgia and shame when Sonia Aziz burst in upon us with electric light and screams.
And as for Mustapha, well, my indiscretion with Parvati may also have been, in his eyes, no more than a useful pretext for getting rid of me; but that must remain in doubt, because the black folder was locked—all I have to go on is a look in his eye, a smell of fear, three initials on a label—because afterwards, when everything was finished, a fallen lady and her labia-lipped son spent two days behind locked doors, burning files; and how can we know whether-or-not one of them was labelled M.C.C.?
I didn’t want to stay, anyway. Family: an overrated idea. Don’t think I was sad! Never for a moment imagine that lumps arose in my throat at my expulsion from the last gracious home open to me! I tell you—I was in fine spirits when I left … maybe there is something unnatural about me, some fundamental lack of emotional response; but my thoughts have always aspired to higher things. Hence my resilience. Hit me: I bounce back. (But no resistance is of any use against the cracks.)
To sum up: forsaking my earlier, naïve hopes of preferment in public service, I returned to the magicians’ slum and the chaya of the Friday Mosque. Like Gautama, the first and true Buddha, I left my life of comfort and went like a beggar into the world. The date was February 23 rd, 1973; coal-mines and the wheat market were being nationalized, the price of oil had begun to spiral up up up, would quadruple in a year, and in the Communist Party of India, the split between Dange’s Moscow faction and Namboodiripad’s C.P.I.(M.) had become unbridgeable; and I, Saleem Sinai, like India, was twenty-five years, six months and eight days old.
The magicians were Communists, almost to a man. That’s right: reds! Insurrectionists, public menaces, the scum of the earth—a community of the godless living blasphemously in the very shadow of the house of God! Shameless, what’s more; innocently scarlet; born with the bloody taint upon their souls! And let me say at once that no sooner had I discovered this than I, who had been raised in India’s other true faith, which we may term Businessism, and who had abandoned-been-abandoned-by its practitioners, felt instantly and comfortingly at home. A renegade Businessist, I began zealously to turn red and then redder, as surely and completely as my father had once turned white, so that now my mission of saving-the-country could be seen in a new light; more revolutionary methodologies suggested themselves. Down with the rule of uncooperative box-wallah uncles and their beloved leaders! Full of thoughts of direct-communication-with-the-masses, I settled into the magicians’ colony, scraping a living by amusing foreign and native tourists with the marvellous perspicacities of my nose, which enabled me to smell out their simple, touristy secrets. Picture Singh asked me to share his shack. I slept on tattered sackcloth amongst baskets sibilant with snakes; but I did not mind, just as I found myself capable of tolerating hunger thirst mosquitoes and (in the beginning) the bitter cold of a Delhi winter. This Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, was also the ghetto’s unquestioned chieftain; squabbles and problems were resolved beneath the shade of his ubiquitous and enormous black umbrella; and I, who could read and write as well as smell, became a sort of aide-de-camp to this monumental man who invariably added a lecture on socialism to his serpentine performances, and who was famous in the main streets and alleys of the city for more than his snake-charmer’s skills. I can say, with utter certainty, that Picture Singh was the greatest man I ever met.
One afternoon during the chaya, the ghetto was visited by another copy of that labia-lipped youth whom I’d seen at my Uncle Mustapha’s. Standing on the steps of the mosque, he unfurled a banner which was then held up by two assistants. It read: ABOLISH POVERTY, and bore the cow-suckling-calf symbol of the Indira Congress. His face looked remarkably like a plump calf’s face, and he unleashed a typhoon of halitosis when he spoke. “Brothers-O! Sisters-O! What does Congress say to you? This: that all men are created equal!” He got no further; the crowd recoiled from his breath of bullock dung under a
hot sun, and Picture Singh began to guffaw. “O ha ha, captain, too good, sir!” And labia-lips, foolishly: “Okay, you, brother, won’t you share the joke?” Picture Singh shook his head, clutched his sides: “O speech, captain! Absolute master speech!” His laughter rolled out from beneath his umbrella to infect the crowd until all of us were rolling on the ground, laughing, crushing ants, getting covered in dust, and the Congress mooncalf’s voice rose in panic: “What is this? This fellow doesn’t think we are equals? What a low impression he must have—” but now Picture Singh, umbrella-over-head, was striding away towards his hut. Labia-lips, in relief, continued his speech … but not for long, because Picture returned, carrying under his left arm a small circular lidded basket and under his right armpit a wooden flute. He placed the basket on the step beside the Congress-wallah’s feet; removed the lid; raised flute to lips. Amid renewed laughter, the young politico leaped nineteen inches into the air as a king cobra swayed sleepily up from its home … Labia-lips is crying: “What are you doing? Trying to kill me to death?” And Picture Singh, ignoring him, his umbrella furled now, plays on, more and more furiously, and the snake uncoils, faster faster Picture Singh plays until the flute’s music fills every cranny of the slum and threatens to scale the walls of the mosque, and at last the great snake, hanging in the air, supported only by the enchantment of the tune, stands nine feet long out of the basket and dances on its tail … Picture Singh relents. Nagaraj subsides into coils. The Most Charming Man In The World offers the flute to the Congress youth: “Okay, captain,” Picture Singh says agreeably, “you give it a try.” But labia-lips: “Man, you know I couldn’t do it!” Whereupon Picture Singh seizes the cobra just below the head, opens his own mouth wide wide wide, displaying an heroic wreckage of teeth and gums; winking left-eyed at the Congress youth, he inserts the snake’s tongue-flicking head into his hideously yawning orifice! A full minute passes before Picture Singh returns the cobra to its basket. Very kindly, he tells the youth: “You see, captain, here is the truth of the business: some persons are better, others are less. But it may be nice for you to think otherwise.”
Watching this scene, Saleem Sinai learned that Picture Singh and the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was.
The problems of the magicians’ ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India; within the confines of the colony could be found, in miniature, the many divisions and dissensions which racked the Party in the country. Picture Singh, I hasten to add, was above it all; the patriarch of the ghetto, he was the possessor of an umbrella whose shade could restore harmony to the squabbling factions; but the disputes which were brought into the shelter of the snake-charmer’s umbrella were becoming more and more bitter, as the prestidigitators, the pullers of rabbits from hats, aligned themselves firmly behind Mr. Dange’s Moscow-line official C.P.I., which supported Mrs. Gandhi throughout the Emergency; the contortionists, however, began to lean more towards the left and the slanting intricacies of the Chinese-oriented wing. Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers applauded the guerrilla tactics of the Naxalite movement; while mesmerists and walkers-on-hot-coals espoused Namboodiripad’s manifesto (neither Muscovite nor Pekinese) and deplored the Naxalites’ violence. There were Trotskyist tendencies amongst card-sharpers, and even a Communism-through-the-ballot-box movement amongst the moderate members of the ventriloquist section. I had entered a milieu in which, while religious and regionalist bigotry were wholly absent, our ancient national gift for fissiparousness had found new outlets. Picture Singh told me, sorrowfully, that during the 1971 general election a bizarre murder had resulted from the quarrel between a Naxalite fire-eater and a Moscow-line conjurer who, incensed by the former’s views, had attempted to draw a pistol from his magic hat; but no sooner had the weapon been produced than the supporter of Ho Chi Minh had scorched his opponent to death in a burst of terrifying flame.
Under his umbrella, Picture Singh spoke of a socialism which owed nothing to foreign influences. “Listen, captains,” he told warring ventriloquists and puppeteers, “will you go to your villages and talk about Stalins and Maos? Will Bihari or Tamil peasants care about the killing of Trotsky?” The chaya of his magical umbrella cooled the most intemperate of the wizards; and had the effect, on me, of convincing me that one day soon the snake-charmer Picture Singh would follow in the footsteps of Mian Abdullah so many years ago; that, like the legendary Hummingbird, he would leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will; and that, unlike my grandfather’s hero, he would not be stopped until he, and his cause, had won the day … but, but. Always a but but. What happened, happened. We all know that.
Before I return to telling the story of my private life, I should like it to be known that it was Picture Singh who revealed to me that the country’s corrupt, “black” economy had grown as large as the official, “white” variety, which he did by showing me a newspaper photograph of Mrs. Gandhi. Her hair, parted in the center, was snow-white on one side and black-asnight on the other, so that, depending on which profile she presented, she resembled either a stoat or an ermine. Recurrence of the center-parting in history; and also, economy as an analogue of a Prime Ministerial hair-style … I owe these important perceptions to the Most Charming Man In The World. Picture Singh it was who told me that Mishra, the railway minister, was also the officially-appointed minister for bribery, through whom the biggest deals in the black economy were cleared, and who arranged for payoffs to appropriate ministers and officials; without Picture Singh, I might never have known about the poll-fixing in the state elections in Kashmir. He was no lover of democracy, however: “God damn this election business, captain,” he told me, “Whenever they come, something bad happens; and our countrymen behave like clowns.” I, in the grip of my fever-for-revolution, failed to take issue with my mentor.
There were, of course, a few exceptions to the ghetto’s rules: one or two conjurers retained their Hindu faith and, in politics, espoused the Hindu-sectarian Jana Sangh party or the notorious Ananda Marg extremists; there were even Swatantra voters amongst the jugglers. Non-politically speaking, the old lady Resham Bibi was one of the few members of the community who remained an incurable fantasist, believing (for instance) in the superstition which forbade women to climb mango trees, because a mango tree which had once borne the weight of a woman would bear sour fruit for ever more … and there was the strange fakir named Chishti Khan, whose face was so smooth and lustrous that nobody knew whether he was nineteen or ninety, and who had surrounded his shack with a fabulous creation of bamboo-sticks and scraps of brightly-colored paper, so that his home looked like a miniature, multi-colored replica of the nearby Red Fort. Only when you passed through its castellated gateway did you realize that behind the meticulously hyperbolic façade of bamboo-and-paper crenellations and ravelins hid a tin-and-cardboard hovel like all the rest. Chishti Khan had committed the ultimate solecism of permitting his illusionist expertise to infect his real life; he was not popular in the ghetto. The magicians kept their distance, lest they become diseased by his dreams.
So you will understand why Parvati-the-witch, the possessor of truly wondrous powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her midnight-given gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community which had constantly denied such possibilities.
On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of sight, and the only danger was from scavengers-after-scrap, from searchers-for-abandoned-crates or hunters-for-corrugated-tin … that was where Parvati-the-witch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a humble shalwar-kameez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others, midnight’s sorceress performed for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a child. Saucer-eye, rope-like pony-tail, fine full red lips … I would never have resisted her for so long if not for the face, the sick decaying eyes nose lips of … There seemed at first to
be no limits to Parvati’s abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were demons conjured? Did djinns appear, offering riches and overseas travel on levitating rugs? Were frogs turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose into jewels? Was there selling-of-souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit of it; the magic which Parvati-the-witch performed for me—the only magic she was ever willing to perform—was of the type known as “white.” It was as though the Brahmins’ “Secret Book”, the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her; she could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she permitted snakes to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, involving praying to the snake-god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the goodness of the Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reciting a spell: Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless; in a like manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected)—she could cure sores and consecrate talismans—she knew the sraktya charm and the Rite of the Tree. And all this, in a series of extraordinary night-time displays, she revealed to me beneath the walls of the Mosque—but still she was not happy.
As ever, I am obliged to accept responsibility; the scent of mournfulness which hung around Parvati-the-witch was my creation. Because she was twenty-five years old, and wanted more from me than my willingness to be her audience; God knows why, but she wanted me in her bed—or, to be precise, to lie with her on the length of sackcloth which served her for a bed in the hovel she shared with a family of contortionist triplets from Kerala, three girls who were orphans just like her—just like myself.