It seems like a day for big questions. I reply across the unreliable years to S. P. Butt, who got his throat slit in the Partition riots and lost interest in time: “What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.” True, for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories Mary Pereira told me: Mary my ayah who was both more and less than a mother; Mary who knew everything about all of us. True was a thing concealed just over the horizon towards which the fisherman’s finger pointed in the picture on my wall, while the young Raleigh listened to his tales. Now, writing this in my Anglepoised pool of light, I measure truth against those early things: Is this how Mary would have told it? I ask. Is this what that fisherman would have said? … And by those standards it is undeniably true that, one day in January 1947, my mother heard all about me six months before I turned up, while my father came up against a demon king.
Amina Sinai had been waiting for a suitable moment to accept Lifafa Das’s offer; but for two days after the burning of the Indiabike factory Ahmed Sinai stayed at home, never visiting his office at Con-naught Place, as if he were steeling himself for some unpleasant encounter. For two days the gray money-bag lay supposedly secret in its place under his side of their bed. My father showed no desire to talk about the reasons for the gray bag’s presence; so Amina said to herself, “Let him be like that; who cares?” because she had her secret, too, waiting patiently for her by the gates of the Red Fort at the top of Chandni Chowk. Pouting in secret petulance, my mother kept Lifafa Das to herself. “Unless-and-until he tells me what he’s up to, why should I tell him?” she argued.
And then a cold January evening, on which “I’ve got to go out tonight,” said Ahmed Sinai; and despite her pleas of “It’s cold—you’ll get sick …” he put on his business suit and coat under which the mysterious gray bag made a ridiculously obvious lump; so finally she said, “Wrap up warm,” and sent him off wherever he was going, asking, “Will you be late?” To which he replied, “Yes, certainly.” Five minutes after he left, Amina Sinai set off for the Red Fort, into the heart of her adventure.
One journey began at a fort; one should have ended at a fort, and did not. One foretold the future; the other settled its geographical location. During one journey, monkeys danced entertainingly; while, in the other place, a monkey was also dancing, but with disastrous results. In both adventures, a part was played by vultures. And many-headed monsters lurked at the end of both roads.
One at a time, then … and here is Amina Sinai beneath the high walls of the Red Fort, where Mughals ruled, from whose heights the new nation will be proclaimed … neither monarch nor herald, my mother is nevertheless greeted with warmth (despite the weather). In the last light of the day, Lifafa Das exclaims, “Begum Sahiba! Oh, that is excellent that you came!” Dark-skinned in a white sari, she beckons him towards the taxi; he reaches for the back door; but the driver snaps, “What do you think? Who do you think you are? Come on now, get in the front seat damn smart, leave the lady to sit in the back!” So Amina shares her seat with a black peepshow on wheels, while Lifafa Das apologizes: “Sorry, hey, Begum Sahiba? Good intents are no offence.”
But here, refusing to wait its turn, is another taxi, pausing outside another fort, unloading its cargo of three men in business suits, each carrying a bulky gray bag under his coat … one man long as a life and thin as a lie, a second who seems to lack a spine, and a third whose lower lip juts, whose belly tends to squashiness, whose hair is thinning and greasy and worming over the tops of his ears, and between whose eyebrows is the tell-tale furrow that will, as he ages, deepen into the scar of a bitter, angry man. The taxi-driver is ebullient despite the cold. “Purana Qila!” he calls out, “Everybody out, please! Old Fort, here we are!” … There have been many, many cities of Delhi, and the Old Fort, that blackened ruin, is a Delhi so ancient that beside it our own Old City is merely a babe in arms. It is to this ruin of an impossibly antique time that Kemal, Butt and Ahmed Sinai have been brought by an anonymous telephone call which ordered, “Tonight. Old Fort. Just after sunset. But no police … or godown funtoosh!” Clutching their gray bags, they move into the ancient, crumbling world.
… Clutching at her handbag, my mother sits beside a peep-show, while Lifafa Das rides in front with the puzzled, irascible driver, and directs the cab into the streets on the wrong side of the General Post Office; and as she enters these causeways where poverty eats away at the tarmac like a drought, where people lead their invisible lives (because they share Lifafa Das’s curse of invisibility, and not all of them have beautiful smiles), something new begins to assail her. Under the pressure of these streets which are growing narrower by the minute, more crowded by the inch, she has lost her “city eyes.” When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don’t impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don’t look like dormitories. My mother lost her city eyes and the newness of what she was seeing made her flush, newness like a hailstorm pricking her cheeks. Look, my God, those beautiful children have black teeth! Would you believe … girl children baring their nipples! How terrible, truly! And, Allah-tobah, heaven forfend, sweeper women with—no!—how dreadful!—collapsed spines, and bunches of twigs, and no caste marks; untouchables, sweet Allah! … and cripples everywhere, mutilated by loving parents to ensure them of a lifelong income from begging … yes, beggars in boxcars, grown men with babies’ legs, in crates on wheels, made out of discarded roller-skates and old mango boxes; my mother cries out, “Lifafa Das, turn back!” … but he is smiling his beautiful smile, and says, “We must walk from here.” Seeing that there is no going back, she tells the taxi to wait, and the bad-tempered driver says, “Yes, of course, for a great lady what is there to do but wait, and when you come I must drive my car in reverse all the way back to main-road, because here is no room to turn!” … Children tugging at the pallu of her sari, heads everywhere staring at my mother, who thinks, It’s like being surrounded by some terrible monster, a creature with heads and heads and heads; but she corrects herself, no, of course not a monster, these poor poor people—what then? A power of some sort, a force which does not know its strength, which has perhaps decayed into impotence through never having been used … No, these are not decayed people, despite everything. “I’m frightened,” my mother finds herself thinking, just as a hand touches her arm. Turning, she finds herself looking into the face of—impossible!—a white man, who stretches out a raggedy hand and says in a voice like a high foreign song, “Give something, Begum Sahiba …” arid repeats and repeats like a stuck record while she looks with embarrassment into a white face with long eyelashes and a curved patrician nose—embarrassment, because he was white, and begging was not for white people. “… All the way from Calcutta, on foot,” he was saying, “and covered in ashes, as you see, Begum Sahiba, because of my shame at having been there for the Killing—last August you remember, Begum Sahiba, thousands knifed in four days of screaming …” Lifafa Das is standing helplessly by, not knowing how to behave with a white man, even a beggar, and “… Did you hear about the European?” the beggar asks, “… Yes, among the killers, Begum Sahiba, walking through the town at night with blood on his shirt, a white man deranged by the coming futility of his kind; did you hear?” … And now a pause in that perplexing song of a voice, and then: “He was my husband.” Only now did my mother see the stifled breasts beneath the rags … “Give something for my shame.” Tugging at her arm. Lifafa Das tugging at the other, whispering Hijra, transvestite, come away, Begum Sahiba; and Amina standing still as she is tugged in opposite directions wants to say Wait, white woman, just let me finish my business, I will take you home, feed you clothe you, send you back into your own world; but just then the woman shrugs and walks off empty-handed down the narrowing street, shrinking to a point until she vanishes—now!—into the distant meanness of the lane. And now Lifafa Das, with a curious expression on his face, says, “They’re funt
oosh! All finished! Soon they will all go; and then we’ll be free to kill each other.” Touching her belly with one light hand, she follows him into a darkened doorway while her face bursts into flames.
… While at the Old Fort, Ahmed Sinai waits for Ravana. My father in the sunset: standing in the darkened doorway of what was once a room in the ruined walls of the fort, lower lip protruding fleshily, hands clasped behind his back, head full of money worries. He was never a happy man. He smelled faintly of future failure; he mistreated servants; perhaps he wished that, instead of following his late father into the leathercloth business, he had had the strength to pursue his original ambition, the rearrangement of the Quran in accurately chronological order. (He once told me: “When Muhammed prophesied, people wrote down what he said on palm leaves, which were kept any old how in a box. After he died, Abubakr and the others tried to remember the correct sequence; but they didn’t have very good memories.” Another wrong turning: instead of rewriting a sacred book, my father lurked in a ruin, awaiting demons. It’s no wonder he wasn’t happy; and I would be no help. When I was born, I broke his big toe.) … My unhappy father, I repeat, thinks bad-temperedly about cash. About his wife, who wheedles rupees out of him and picks his pockets at night. And his ex-wife (who eventually died in an accident, when she argued with a camel-cart driver and was bitten in the neck by the camel), who writes him endless begging letters, despite the divorce settlement. And his distant cousin Zohra, who needs dowry money from him, so that she can raise children to marry his and so get her hooks into even more of his cash. And then there are Major Zulfikar’s promises of money (at this stage, Major Zulfy and my father got on very well). The Major had been writing letters saying, “You must decide for Pakistan when it comes, as it surely will. It’s certain to be a goldmine for men like us. Please let me introduce you to M. A. J. himself …” but Ahmed Sinai distrusted Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and never accepted Zulfy’s offer; so when Jinnah became President of Pakistan, there would be another wrong turning to think about. And, finally, there were letters from my father’s old friend, the gynecologist Doctor Narlikar, in Bombay. “The British are leaving in droves, Sinai bhai. Property is dirt cheap! Sell up; come here; buy; live the rest of your life in luxury!” Verses of the Quran had no place in a head so full of cash … and, in the meantime, here he is, alongside S. P. Butt who will die in a train to Pakistan, and Mustapha Kemal who will be murdered by goondas in his grand Flagstaff Road house and have the words “mother-sleeping hoarder” written on his chest in his own blood … alongside these two doomed men, waiting in the secret shadow of a ruin to spy on a black-mailer coming for his money. “South-west corner,” the phone call said, “Turret. Stone staircase inside. Climb. Topmost landing. Leave money there. Go. Understood?” Defying orders, they hide in the ruined room; somewhere above them, on the topmost landing of the turret tower, three gray bags wait in the gathering dark.
… In the gathering dark of an airless stairwell, Amina Sinai is climbing towards a prophecy. Lifafa Das is comforting her; because now that she has come by taxi into the narrow bottle of his mercy, he has sensed an alteration in her, a regret at her decision; he reassures her as they climb. The darkened stairwell is full of eyes, eyes glinting through shuttered doors at the spectacle of the climbing dark lady, eyes lapping her up like bright rough cats’ tongues; and as Lifafa talks, soothingly, my mother feels her will ebbing away, What will be, will be, her strength of mind and her hold on the world seeping out of her into the dark sponge of the staircase air. Sluggishly her feet follow his, up into the upper reaches of the huge gloomy chawl, the broken-down tenement building in which Lifafa Das and his cousins have a small corner, at the very top … here, near the top, she sees dark light filtering, down on to the heads of queueing cripples. “My number two cousin,” Lifafa Das says, “is bone-setter.” She climbs past men with broken arms, women with feet twisted backwards at impossible angles, past fallen window-cleaners and splintered bricklayers, a doctor’s daughter entering a world older than syringes and hospitals; until, at last, Lifafa Das says, “Here we are, Begum,” and leads her through a room in which the bone-setter is fastening twigs and leaves to shattered limbs, wrapping cracked heads in palm-fronds, until his patients begin to resemble artificial trees, sprouting vegetation from their injuries … then out on to a flat expanse of cemented roof. Amina, blinking in the dark at the brightness of lanterns, makes out insane shapes on the roof: monkeys dancing; mongeese leaping; snakes swaying in baskets; and on the parapet, the silhouettes of large birds, whose bodies are as hooked and cruel as their beaks: vultures.
“Arré baap,” she cries, “where are you bringing me?”
“Nothing to worry, Begum, please,” Lifafa Das says. “These are my cousins here. My number-three-and-four cousins. That one is monkey-dancer …”
“Just practicing, Begum!” a voice calls. “See: monkey goes to war and dies for his country!”
“… and there, snake-and-mongoose man.”
“See mongoose jump, Sahiba! See cobra dance!”
“… But the birds? …”
“Nothing, Madam: only there is Parsee Tower of Silence just near here; and when there are no dead ones there, the vultures come. Now they are asleep; in the days, I think, they like to watch my cousins practicing.”
A small room, on the far side of the roof. Light streams through the door as Amina enters … to find, inside, a man the same age as her husband, a heavy man with several chins, wearing white stained trousers and a red check shirt and no shoes, munching aniseed and drinking from a bottle of Vimto, sitting cross-legged in a room on whose walls are pictures of Vishnu in each of his avatars, and notices reading, WRITING TAUGHT, and SPITTING DURING VISIT IS QUITE A BAD HABIT. There is no furniture … and Shri Ramram Seth is sitting cross-legged, six inches above the ground.
I must admit it: to her shame, my mother screamed …
… While, at the Old Fort, monkeys scream among ramparts. The ruined city, having been deserted by people, is now the abode of langoors. Long-tailed and black-faced, the monkeys are possessed of an overriding sense of mission. Upupup they clamber, leaping to the topmost heights of the ruin, staking out territories, and thereafter dedicating themselves to the dismemberment, stone by stone, of the entire fortress. Padma, it’s true: you’ve never been there, never stood in the twilight watching straining, resolute, furry creatures working at the stones, pulling and rocking, rocking and pulling, working the stones loose one at a time … every day the monkeys send stones rolling down the walls, bouncing off angles and outcrops, crashing down into the ditches below. One day there will be no Old Fort; in the end, nothing but a pile of rubble surmounted by monkeys screaming in triumph … and here is one monkey, scurrying along the ramparts—I shall call him Hanuman, after the monkey god who helped Prince Rama defeat the original Ravana, Hanuman of the flying chariots … Watch him now as he arrives at this turret—his territory; as he hops chatters runs from corner to corner of his kingdom, rubbing his rear on the stones; and then pauses, sniffs something that should not be here … Hanuman races to the alcove here, on the topmost landing, in which the three men have left three soft gray alien things. And, while monkeys dance on a roof behind the post office, Hanuman the monkey dances with rage. Pounces on the gray things. Yes, they are loose enough, won’t take much rocking and pulling, pulling and rocking … watch Hanuman now, dragging the soft gray stones to the edge of the long drop of the outside wall of the Fort. See him tear at them: rip! rap! rop! … Look how deftly he scoops paper from the insides of the gray things, sending it down like floating rain to bathe the fallen stones in the ditch! … Paper falling with lazy, reluctant grace, sinking like a beautiful memory into the maw of the darkness; and now, kick! thump! and again kick! the three soft gray stones go over the edge, downdown into the dark, and at last there comes a soft disconsolate plop. Hanuman, his work done, loses interest, scurries away to some distant pinnacle of his kingdom, begins to rock on a stone.
… While, d
own below, my father has seen a grotesque figure emerging from the gloom. Not knowing a thing about the disaster which has taken place above, he observes the monster from the shadow of his ruined room: a ragged-pajama’d creature in the headdress of a demon, a papier-mâché devil-top which has faces grinning on every side of it … the appointed representative of the Ravana gang. The collector. Hearts thumping, the three businessman watch this specter out of a peasant’s nightmare vanish into the stairwell leading to the landing; and after a moment, in the stillness of the empty night, hear the devil’s perfectly human oaths. “Mother-sleepers! Eunuchs from somewhere!” … Uncomprehending, they see their bizarre tormentor emerge, rush away into the darkness, vanish. His imprecations … “Sodomizers of asses! Sons of pigs! Eaters of their own excrement!” … linger on the breeze. And up they go now, confusion addling their spirits; Butt finds a torn fragment of gray cloth; Mustapha Kemal stoops over a crumpled rupee; and maybe, yes, why not, my father sees a dark flurry of monkey out of the corner of an eye … and they guess.
And now their groans and Mr. Butt’s shrill curses, which are echoes of the devil’s oaths; and there’s a battle raging, unspoken, in all their heads: money or godown or godown or money? Businessmen ponder, in mute panic, this central riddle—but then, even if they abandon the cash to the depredations of scavenging dogs and humans, how to stop the fire-raisers?—and at last, without a word having been spoken, the inexorable law of cash-in-hand wins them over; they rush down stone stairs, along grassed lawns, through ruined gates, and arrive—PELL-MELL!—at the ditch, to begin scooping rupees into their pockets, shoveling grabbing scrabbling, ignoring pools of urine and rotting fruit, trusting against all likelihood that tonight—by the grace of—just tonight for once, the gang will fail to wreak its promised revenge. But, of course …