And S. P. Butt’s last quavering words: “Damnfool Hindu firebugs, Begum Sahiba. But what can we Muslims do?”
What is known about the Ravana gang? That it posed as a fanatical anti-Muslim movement, which, in those days before the Partition riots, in those days when pigs’ heads could be left with impunity in the courtyards of Friday mosques, was nothing unusual. That it sent men out, at dead of night, to paint slogans on the walls of both old and new cities: NO PARTITION OR ELSE PERDITION! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA! and so forth. And that it burned down Muslim-owned factories, shops, godowns. But there’s more, and this is not commonly known: behind this facade of racial hatred, the Ravana gang was a brilliantly-conceived commercial enterprise. Anonymous phone calls, letters written with words cut out of newspapers were issued to Muslim businessmen, who were offered the choice between paying a single, once-only cash sum and having their world burned down. Interestingly, the gang proved itself to be ethical. There were no second demands. And they meant business: in the absence of gray bags fall of pay-off money, fire would lick at shopfronts factories warehouses. Most people paid, preferring that to the risky alternative of trusting to the police. The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. And it is said (though I can’t be sure of this) that when the blackmail letters arrived, they contained a list of “satisfied customers” who had paid up and stayed in business. The Ravana gang—like all professionals—gave references.
Two men in business suits, one in pajamas, ran through the narrow gullies of the Muslim muhalla to the taxi waiting on Chandni Chowk. They attracted curious glances; not only because of their varied attire, but because they were trying not to run. “Don’t show panic,” Mr. Kemal said, “Look calm.” But their feet kept getting out of control and rushing on. Jerkily, in little rushes of speed followed by a few badly-disciplined steps at walking pace, they left the muhalla; and passed, on their way, a young man with a black metal peepshow box on wheels, a man holding a dugdugee drum: Lifafa Das, on his way to the scene of the important annunciation which gives this episode its name. Lifafa Das was rattling his drum and calling: “Come see everything, come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi, come see India, come see! Come see, come see!”
But Ahmed Sinai had other things to look at.
The children of the muhalla had their own names for most of the local inhabitants. One group of three neighbors was known as the “fighting-cock people,” because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose homes were separated by one of the muhalla’s few Hindu residences. The Sindhi and the Bengali had very little in common—they didn’t speak the same language or cook the same food; but they were both Muslims, and they both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from their rooftops. They hurled multi-lingual abuse at him from their windows. They flung scraps of meat at his door … while he, in turn, paid urchins to throw stones at their windows, stones with messages wrapped round them: “Wait,” the messages said, “Your turn will come” … the children of the muhalla did not call my father by his right name. They knew him as “the man who can’t follow his nose.”
Ahmed Sinai was the possessor of a sense of direction so inept that, left to his own devices, he could even get lost in the winding gullies of his own neighborhood. Many times the street-arabs in the lanes had come across him, wandering forlornly, and been offered a four-anna chavanni piece to escort him home. I mention this because I believe that my father’s gift for taking wrong turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it was also a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir Khan, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what’s more, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road … But that’s enough for now, because I’ve given the three businessmen enough time to get to the industrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct consequence of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future failure, the odor of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths. Mr. Kemal, who smelled it, would say privately to S. P. Butt, “These Kashmiri types, old boy: well-known fact they never wash.” This slander connects my father to the boatman Tai … to Tai in the grip of the self-destructive rage which made him give up being clean.
At the industrial estate, night-watchmen were sleeping peacefully through the noise of the fire-engines. Why? How? Because they had made a deal with the Ravana mob, and, when tipped off about the gang’s impending arrival, would take sleeping draughts and pull their charpoy beds away from the buildings of the estate. In this way the gang avoided violence, and the night-watchmen augmented their meager wages. It was an amicable and not unintelligent arrangement.
Amid sleeping night-watchmen, Mr. Kemal, my father and S. P. Butt watched cremated bicycles rise up into the sky in thick black clouds. Butt father Kemal stood alongside fire-engines, as relief flooded through them, because it was the Arjuna Indiabike godown that was burning—the Arjuna brand-name, taken from a hero of Hindu mythology, had failed to disguise the fact that the company was Muslim-owned. Washed by relief, father Kemal Butt breathed air filled with incendiarized bicycles, coughing and spluttering as the fumes of incinerated wheels, the vaporized ghosts of chains bells saddlebags handlebars, the transubstantiated frames of Arjuna Indiabikes moved in and out of their lungs. A crude cardboard mask had been nailed to a telegraph pole in front of the flaming godown—a mask of many faces—a devil’s mask of snarling faces with broad curling lips and bright red nostrils. The faces of the many-headed monster, Ravana the demon king, looking angrily down at the bodies of the night-watchmen who were sleeping so soundly that no one, neither the firemen, nor Kemal, nor Butt, nor my father, had the heart to disturb them; while the ashes of pedals and inner tubes fell upon them from the skies.
“Damn bad business,” Mr. Kemal said. He was not being sympathetic. He was criticizing the owners of the Arjuna Indiabike Company.
Look: the cloud of the disaster (which is also a relief) rises and gathers like a ball in the discolored morning sky. See how it thrusts itself westward into the heart of the old city; how it is pointing, good lord, like a finger, pointing down at the Muslim muhalla near Chandni Chowk! … Where, right now, Lifafa Das is crying his wares in the Sinais’ very own gully.
“Come see everything, see the whole world, come see!”
* * *
It’s almost time for the public announcement. I won’t deny I’m excited: I’ve been hanging around in the background of my own story for too long, and although it’s still a little while before I can take over, it’s nice to get a look in. So, with a sense of high expectation, I follow the pointing finger in the sky and look down on my parents’ neighborhood, upon bicycles, upon street-vendors touting roasted gram in twists of paper, upon the hip-jutting, hand-holding street loafers, upon flying scraps of paper and little clustered whirlwinds of flies around the sweetmeat stalls … all of it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view. And there are children, swarms of them, too, attracted into the street by the magical rattle of Lifafa Das’s dugdugee drum and his voice, “Dunya dekho,” see the whole world! Boys without shorts on, girls without vests, and other, smarter infants in school whites, their shorts held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped snake-buckles, fat little boys with pudgy fingers; all flocking to the black box on wheels, including this one particular girl, a girl with one long hairy continuous eyebrow shading both eyes, the eight-year-old daughter of that same discourteous Sindhi who is even now raising the flag of the still-fictional country of Pakistan on his roof, who is even now hurling abuse at his neighbor, while his daughter rushes into the street with her chavanni in her hand, her expression of a midget queen, and murder lurking just behind her lips. What’s her name? I don’t k
now; but I know those eyebrows.
Lifafa Das: who has by an unfortunate chance set up his black peepshow against a wall on which someone has daubed a swastika (in those days you saw them everywhere; the extremist R.S.S.S. party got them on every wall; not the Nazi swastika which was the wrong way round, but the ancient Hindu symbol of power. Svasti is Sanskrit for good) … this Lifafa Das whose arrival I’ve been trumpeting was a young fellow who was invisible until he smiled, when he became beautiful, or rattled his drum, whereupon he became irresistible to children. Dugdugee-men: all over India, they shout, “Dilli dekho,” “come see Delhi!” But this was Delhi, and Lifafa Das had altered his cry accordingly. “See the whole world, come see everything!” The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to prey upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put everything into his box. (I am suddenly reminded of Nadir Khan’s friend the painter: is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?)
Inside the peepshow of Lifafa Das were pictures of the Taj Mahal, and Meenakshi Temple, and the holy Ganges; but as well as these famous sights the peepshow-man had felt the urge to include more contemporary images—Stafford Cripps leaving Nehru’s residence; untouchables being touched; educated persons sleeping in large numbers on railway lines; a publicity still of a European actress with a mountain of fruit on her head—Lifafa called her Carmen Verandah; even a newspaper photograph, mounted on card, of a fire at the industrial estate. Lifafa Das did not believe in shielding his audiences from the not-always-pleasant features of the age … and often, when he came into these gullies, grown-ups as well as children came to see what was new inside his box on wheels, and among his most frequent customers was Begum Amina Sinai.
But today there is something hysterical in the air; something brittle and menacing has settled on the muhalla as the cloud of cremated Indiabikes hangs overhead … and now it slips its leash, as this girl with her one continuous eyebrow squeals, her voice lisping with an innocence it does not possess, “Me firtht! Out of my way … let me thee! I can’t thee!” Because there are already eyes at the holes in the box, there are already children absorbed in the progression of postcards, and Lifafa Das says (without pausing in his work—he goes right on turning the knob which keeps the postcards moving inside the box), “A few minutes, bibi; everyone will have his turn; wait only.” To which the one-eyebrowed midget queen replies, “No! No! I want to be firtht!” Lifafa stops smiling—becomes invisible—shrugs. Unbridled fury appears on the face of the midget queen. And now an insult rises; a deadly barb trembles on her lips. “You’ve got a nerve, coming into thith muhalla! I know you: my father knows you: everyone knows you’re a Hindu!!”
Lifafa Das stands silently, turning the handles of his box; but now the pony-tailed one-eyebrowed valkyrie is chanting, pointing with pudgy fingers, and the boys in their school whites and snake-buckles are joining in, “Hindu! Hindu! Hindu!” And chick-blinds are flying up; and from his window the girl’s father leans out and joins in, hurling abuse at a new target, and the Bengali joins in in Bengali …“Mother raper! Violator of our daughters!” … and remember the papers have been talking about assaults on Muslim children, so suddenly a voice screams out—a woman’s voice, maybe even silly Zohra’s, “Rapist! Arré my God they found the badmaash! There he is!” And now the insanity of the cloud like a pointing finger and the whole disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant, “Ra-pist! Ra-pist! Ra-ray-ray-pist!” without really knowing what they’re saying; the children have edged away from Lifafa Das and he’s moved, too, dragging his box on wheels, trying to get away, but now he is surrounded by voices filled with blood, and the street loafers are moving towards him, men are getting off bicycles, a pot flies through the air and shatters on a wall beside him; he has his back against a doorway as a fellow with a quiff of oily hair grins sweetly at him and says, “So, mister: it is you? Mister Hindu, who defiles our daughters? Mister idolater, who sleeps with his sister?” And Lifafa Das, “No, for the love of …”, smiling like a fool … and then the door behind him opens and he falls backwards, landing in a dark cool corridor beside my mother Amina Sinai.
She had spent the morning alone with giggling Zohra and the echoes of the name Ravana, not knowing what was happening out there at the industrial estate, letting her mind linger upon the way the whole world seemed to be going mad; and when the screaming started and Zohra—before she could be stopped—joined in, something hardened inside her, some realization that she was her father’s daughter, some ghost-memory of Nadir Khan hiding from crescent knives in a cornfield, some irritation of her nasal passages, and she went downstairs to the rescue, although Zohra screeched, “What you doing, sisterji, that mad beast, for God, don’t let him in here, have your brains gone raw?” … My mother opened the door and Lifafa Das fell in.
Picture her that morning, a dark shadow between the mob and its prey, her womb bursting with its invisible untold secret: “Wah, wah,” she applauded the crowd. “What heroes! Heroes, I swear, absolutely! Only fifty of you against this terrible monster of a fellow! Allah, you make my eyes shine with pride.”
… And Zohra, “Come back, sisterji!” And the oily quiff, “Why speak for this goonda, Begum Sahiba? This is not right acting.” And Amina, “I know this man. He is a decent type. Go, get out, none of you have anything to do? In a Muslim muhalla you would tear a man to pieces? Go, remove yourselves.” But the mob has stopped being surprised, and is moving forward again … and now. Now it comes.
“Listen,” my mother shouted, “Listen well. I am with child. I am a mother who will have a child, and I am giving this man my shelter. Come on now, if you want to kill, kill a mother also and show the world what men you are!”
That was how it came about that my arrival—the coming of Saleem Sinai—was announced to the assembled masses of the people before my father had heard about it. From the moment of my conception, it seems, I have been public property.
But although my mother was right when she made her public announcement, she was also wrong. This is why: the baby she was carrying did not turn out to be her son.
My mother came to Delhi; worked assiduously at loving her husband; was prevented by Zohra and khichri and clattering feet from telling her husband her news; heard screams; made a public announcement. And it worked. My annunciation saved a life.
After the crowd dispersed, old Musa the bearer went into the street and rescued Lifafa Das’s peepshow, while Amina gave the young man with the beautiful smile glass after glass of fresh lime water. It seemed that his experience had drained him not only of liquid but also sweetness, because he put four spoonfuls of raw sugar into every glass, while Zohra cowered in pretty terror on a sofa. And, at length, Lifafa Das (rehydrated by lime water, sweetened by sugar) said: “Begum Sahiba, you are a great lady. If you allow, I bless your house; also your unborn child. But also—please permit—I will do one thing more for you.”
“Thank you,” my mother said, “but you must do nothing at all.”
But he continued (the sweetness of sugar coating his tongue). “My cousin, Shri Ramram Seth, is a great seer, Begum Sahiba. Palmist, astrologer, fortune-teller. You will please come to him, and he will reveal to you the future of your son.”
Soothsayers prophesied me … in January 1947, my mother Amina Sinai was offered the gift of a prophecy in return for her gift of a life. And despite Zohra’s “It is madness to go with this one, Amina sister, do not even think of it for one sec, these are times to be careful”; despite her memories of her father’s scepticism and of his thumbandforefinger closing around a maulvi’s ear, the offer touched my mother in a place which answered Yes. Caught up in the illogical wonderment of her brand-new motherhood of which she had only just become certain, “Yes,” she said, “Lifafa Das, you will please meet me after some days at the gate to the Red
Fort. Then you will take me to your cousin.”
“I shall be waiting every day,” he joined his palms; and left.
Zohra was so stunned that, when Ahmed Sinai came home, she could only shake her head and say, “You newlyweds; crazy as owls; I must leave you to each other!”
Musa, the old bearer, kept his mouth shut, too. He kept himself in the background of our lives, always, except twice … once when he left us; once when he returned to destroy the world by accident.
Many-headed Monsters
UNLESS, OF COURSE, there’s no such thing as chance; in which case Musa—for all his age and servility—was nothing less than a time-bomb, ticking softly away until his appointed time; in which case, we should either—optimistically—get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might—as pessimists—give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway; things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos? Was my father being opti- or pessimistic when my mother told him her news (after everyone in the neighborhood had heard it), and he replied with, “I told you so; it was only a matter of time.”? My mother’s pregnancy, it seems, was fated; my birth, however, owed a good deal to accident.
“It was only a matter of time,” my father said, with every appearance of pleasure; but time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in Pakistan would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts … Mr. Kemal, who wanted nothing to do with Partition, was fond of saying, “Here’s proof of the folly of the scheme! Those Leaguers plan to abscond with a whole thirty minutes! Time Without Partitions,” Mr. Kemal cried, “That’s the ticket!” And S. P. Butt said, “If they can change the time just like that, what’s real any more? I ask you? What’s true?”