“A baldie!” Padma exclaims. “That slicked-up hair of his … I knew it; too good to be true!”
Bald, bald; shiny-pated! Revealed: the deception which had tricked an accordionist’s wife. Samson-like, William Methwold’s power had resided in his hair; but now, bald patch glowing in the dusk, he flings his thatch through the window of his motor-car; distributes, with what looks like carelessness, the signed title-deeds to his palaces; and drives away. Nobody at Methwold’s Estate ever saw him again; but I, who never saw him once, find him impossible to forget.
Suddenly everything is saffron and green. Amina Sinai in a room with saffron walls and green woodwork. In a neighboring room, Wee Willie Winkie’s Vanita, green-skinned, the whites of her eyes shot with saffron, the baby finally beginning its descent through inner passages that are also, no doubt, similarly colorful. Saffron minutes and green seconds tick away on the clocks on the walls. Outside Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home, there are fireworks and crowds, also conforming to the colors of the night—saffron rockets, green sparkling rain; the men in shirts of zafaran hue, the women in saris of lime. On a saffron-and-green carpet, Doctor Narlikar talks to Ahmed Sinai. “I shall see to your Begum personally,” he says, in gentle tones the color of the evening, “Nothing to worry about. You wait here; plenty of room to pace.” Doctor Narlikar, who dislikes babies, is nevertheless an expert gynecologist. In his spare time he lectures writes pamphlets berates the nation on the subject of contraception. “Birth Control,” he says, “is Public Priority Number One. The day will come when I get that through people’s thick heads, and then I’ll be out of a job.” Ahmed Sinai smiles, awkward, nervous. “Just for tonight,” my father says, “forget lectures—deliver my child.”
It is twenty-nine minutes to midnight. Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home is running on a skeleton staff; there are many absentees, many employees who have preferred to celebrate the imminent birth of the nation, and will not assist tonight at the births of children. Saffron-shirted, green-skirted, they throng in the illuminated streets, beneath the infinite balconies of the city on which little dia-lamps of earthenware have been filled with mysterious oils; wicks float in the lamps which line every balcony and rooftop, and these wicks, too, conform to our two-tone color scheme: half the lamps burn saffron, the others flame with green.
Threading its way through the many-headed monster of the crowd is a police car, the yellow and blue of its occupants’ uniforms transformed by the unearthly lamplight into saffron and green. (We are on Colaba Causeway now, just for a moment, to reveal that at twenty-seven minutes to midnight, the police are hunting for a dangerous criminal. His name: Joseph D’Costa. The orderly is absent, has been absent for several days, from his work at the Nursing Home, from his room near the slaughterhouse, and from the life of a distraught virginal Mary.)
Twenty minutes pass, with aaahs from Amina Sinai, coming harder and faster by the minute, and weak tiring aaahs from Vanita in the next room. The monster in the streets has already begun to celebrate; the new myth courses through its veins, replacing its blood with corpuscles of saffron and green. And in Delhi, a wiry serious man sits in the Assembly Hall and prepares to make a speech. At Methwold’s Estate goldfish hang stilly in ponds while the residents go from house to house bearing pistachio sweetmeats, embracing and kissing one another—green pistachio is eaten, and saffron laddoo-balls. Two children move down secret passages while in Agra an ageing doctor sits with his wife, who has two moles on her face like witchnipples, and in the midst of sleeping geese and motheaten memories they are somehow struck silent, and can find nothing to say. And in all the cities all the towns all the villages the little dia-lamps burn on window-sills porches verandahs, while trains burn in the Punjab, with the green flames of blistering paint and the glaring saffron of fired fuel, like the biggest dias in the world.
And the city of Lahore, too, is burning.
The wiry serious man is getting to his feet. Anointed with holy water from the Tanjore River, he rises; his forehead smeared with sanctified ash, he clears his throat. Without written speech in hand, without having memorized any prepared words, Jawaharlal Nehru begins: “… Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge—not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially …”
It is two minutes to twelve. At Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home, the dark glowing doctor, accompanied by a midwife called Flory, a thin kind lady of no importance, encourages Amina Sinai: “Push! Harder! … I can see the head! …” while in the neighboring room one Doctor Bose—with Miss Mary Pereira by his side—presides over the terminal stages of Vanita’s twenty-four-hour labor … “Yes; now; just one last try, come on; at last, and then it will be over! …” Women wail and shriek while in another room men are silent. Wee Willie Winkie—incapable of song—squats in a corner, rocking back and forth, back and forth … and Ahmed Sinai is looking for a chair. But there are no chairs in this room; it is a room designated for pacing; so Ahmed Sinai opens a door, finds a chair at a deserted receptionist’s desk, lifts it, carries it back into the pacing room, where Wee Willie Winkie rocks, rocks, his eyes as empty as a blind man’s … will she live? won’t she? … and now, at last, it is midnight.
The monster in the streets has begun to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man is saying, “… At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India awakens to life and freedom …” And beneath the roar of the monster there are two more yells, cries, bellows, the howls of children arriving in the world, their unavailing protests mingling with the din of independence which hangs saffron-and-green in the night sky—“A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance …” while in a room with saffron-and-green carpet Ahmed Sinai is still clutching a chair when Doctor Narlikar enters to inform him: “On the stroke of midnight, Sinai brother, your Begum Sahiba gave birth to a large, healthy child: a son!” Now my father began to think about me (not knowing …); with the image of my face filling his thoughts he forgot about the chair; possessed by the love of me (even though …), filled with it from top of head to fingertips, he let the chair fall.
Yes, it was my fault (despite everything) … it was the power of my face, mine and nobody else’s, which caused Ahmed Sinai’s hands to release the chair; which caused the chair to drop, accelerating at thirty-two feet per second, and as Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly Hall, “We end today a period of ill-fortune,” as conch-shells blared out the news of freedom, it was on my account that my father cried out too, because the falling chair shattered his toe.
And now we come to it: the noise brought everyone running; my father and his injury grabbed a brief moment of limelight from the two aching mothers, the two, synchronous midnight births—because Vanita had finally been delivered of a baby of remarkable size: “You wouldn’t have believed it,” Doctor Bose said, “It just kept on coming, more and more of the boy forcing its way out, it’s a real ten-chip whopper all right!” And Narlikar, washing himself: “Mine, too.” But that was a little later—just now Narlikar and Bose were tending to Ahmed Sinai’s toe; midwives had been instructed to wash and swaddle the newborn pair; and now Miss Mary Pereira made her contribution.
“Go, go,” she said to poor Flory, “see if you can help. I can do all right here.”
And when she was alone—two babies in her hands—two lives in her power—she did it for Joseph, her own private revolutionary act, thinking He will certainly love me for this, as she changed name-tags on the two huge infants, giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich-born child to accordions and poverty … “Love me, Joseph!” was in Mary Pereira’s mind, and then it was done. On the ankle of a ten-chip whopper with eyes as blue as Kashmiri sky—which were also eyes as blue as Methwold’s—and a nose as dramatic as a Kashmiri grandfather’s—which was also the nose of grandmother from France—she placed this name: Sinai.
>
Saffron swaddled me as, thanks to the crime of Mary Pereira, I became the chosen child of midnight, whose parents were not his parents, whose son would not be his own … Mary took the child of my mother’s womb, who was not to be her son, another ten-chip pomfret, but with eyes which were already turning brown, and knees as knobbly as Ahmed Sinai’s, wrapped it in green, and brought it to Wee Willie Winkie—who was staring at her blind-eyed, who hardly saw his new son, who never knew about center-partings … Wee Willie Winkie, who had just learned that Vanita had not managed to survive her childbearing. At three minutes past midnight, while doctors fussed over broken toe, Vanita had hemorrhaged and died.
So I was brought to my mother; and she never doubted my authenticity for an instant. Ahmed Sinai, toe in splint, sat on her bed as she said: “Look, janum, the poor fellow, he’s got his grandfather’s nose.” He watched mystified as she made sure there was only one head; and then she relaxed completely, understanding that even fortune-tellers have only limited gifts.
“Janum,” my mother said excitedly, “you must call the papers. Call them at the Times of India. What did I tell you? I won.”
“… This is no time for petty or destructive criticism,” Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly. “No time for ill-will. We have to build the noble mansion of free India, where all her children may dwell.” A flag unfurls: it is saffron, white and green.
“An Anglo?” Padma exclaims in horror. “What are you telling me? You are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?”
“I am Saleem Sinai,” I told her, “Snotnose, Stainface, Sniffer, Baldy, Piece-of-the-Moon. Whatever do you mean—not my own?”
“All the time,” Padma wails angrily, “you tricked me. Your mother, you called her; your father, your grandfather, your aunts. What thing are you that you don’t even care to tell the truth about who your parents were? You don’t care that your mother died giving you life? That your father is maybe still alive somewhere, penniless, poor? You are a monster or what?”
No: I’m no monster. Nor have I been guilty of trickery. I provided clues … but there’s something more important than that. It’s this: when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts … if you had asked my father (even him, despite all that happened!) who his son was, nothing on earth would have induced him to point in the direction of the accordionist’s knock-kneed, unwashed boy. Even though he would grow up, this Shiva, to be something of a hero.
So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents—the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.
“Enough,” Padma sulks. “I don’t want to listen.” Expecting one type of two-headed child, she is peeved at being offered another. Nevertheless, whether she is listening or not, I have things to record.
Three days after my birth, Mary Pereira was consumed by remorse. Joseph D’Costa, on the run from the searching police cars, had clearly abandoned her sister Alice as well as Mary; and the little plump woman—unable, in her fright, to confess her crime—realized that she had been a fool. “Donkey from somewhere!” she cursed herself; but she kept her secret. She decided, however, to make amends of a kind. She gave up her job at the Nursing Home and approached Amina Sinai with, “Madam, I saw your baby just one time and fell in love. Are you needing an ayah?” And Amina, her eyes shining with motherhood, “Yes.” Mary Pereira (“You might as well call her your mother,” Padma interjects, proving she is still interested, “She made you, you know”), from that moment on, devoted her life to bringing me up, thus binding the rest of her days to the memory of her crime.
On August 20th, Nussie Ibrahim followed my mother into the Pedder Road clinic, and little Sonny followed me into the world—but he was reluctant to emerge; forceps were obliged to reach in and extract him; Doctor Bose, in the heat of the moment, pressed a little too hard, and Sonny arrived with little dents beside each of his temples, shallow forcep-hollows which would make him as irresistibly attractive as the hairpiece of William Methwold had made the Englishman. Girls (Evie, the Brass Monkey, others) reached out to stroke his little valleys … it would lead to difficulties between us.
But I’ve saved the most interesting snippet for the last. So let me reveal now that, on the day after I was born, my mother and I were visited in a saffron and green bedroom by two persons from the Times of India (Bombay edition). I lay in a green crib, swaddled in saffron, and looked up at them. There was a reporter, who spent his time interviewing my mother; and a tall, aquiline photographer who devoted his attentions to me. The next day, words as well as pictures appeared in newsprint …
Quite recently, I visited a cactus-garden where once, many years back, I buried a toy tin globe, which was badly dented and stuck together with Scotch Tape; and extracted from its insides the things I had placed there all those years ago. Holding them in my left hand now, as I write, I can still see—despite yellowing and mildew—that one is a letter, a personal letter to myself, signed by the Prime Minister of India; but the other is a newspaper cutting.
It has a headline: MIDNIGHT’S CHILD.
And a text: “A charming pose of Baby Saleem Sinai, who was born last night at the exact moment of our Nation’s independence—the happy Child of that glorious Hour!”
And a large photograph: an A-l top-quality front-page jumbo-sized baby-snap, in which it is still possible to make out a child with birthmarks staining his cheeks and a runny and glistening nose. (The picture is captioned: Photo by Kalidas Gupta.)
Despite headline, text and photograph, I must accuse our visitors of the crime of trivialization; mere journalists, looking no further than the next day’s paper, they had no idea of the importance of the event they were covering. To them, it was no more than a human-interest drama.
How do I know this? Because, at the end of the interview, the photographer presented my mother with a cheque—for one hundred rupees.
One hundred rupees! Is it possible to imagine a more piffling, derisory sum? It is a sum by which one could, were one of a mind to do so, feel insulted. I shall, however, merely thank them for celebrating my arrival, and forgive them for their lack of a genuine historical sense.
“Don’t be vain,” Padma says grumpily. “One hundred rupees is not so little; after all, everybody gets born, it’s not such a big big thing.”
BOOK TWO
The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger
IS IT POSSIBLE to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival? I can think of no other reason for Padma’s bizarre behavior; and this explanation at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading aloud) a word which should not have been spoken … ever since the episode of the quack doctor’s visit, I have sniffed out a strange discontent in Padma, exuding its enigmatic spoor from her eccrine (or apocrine) glands. Distressed, perhaps, by the futility of her midnight attempts at resuscitating my “other pencil,” the useless cucumber hidden in my pants, she has been waxing grouchy. (And then there was her ill-tempered reaction, last night, to my revelation of the secrets of my birth, and her irritation at my low opinion of the sum of one hundred rupees.) I blame myself: immersed in my autobiographical enterprise, I failed to consider her feelings, and began tonight on the most unfortunate of false notes.
“Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,” I wrote and read aloud, “I have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because while Aadam Aziz remained the sheet’s victim, I have become its master—and Padma is the one who is now under its spell
. Sitting in my enchanted shadows, I vouchsafe daily glimpses of myself—while she, my squatting glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose frozen into immobility by the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralyzed—yes!—by love.”
That was the word: love. Written-and-spoken, it raised her voice to an unusually shrill pitch; it unleashed from her lips a violence which would have wounded me, were I still vulnerable to words. “Love you?” our Padma piped scornfully, “What for, my God? What use are you, little princeling,”—and now came her attempted coup de grâce—“as a lover?” Arm extended, its hairs glowing in the lamplight, she jabbed a contemptuous index finger in the direction of my admittedly nonfunctional loins; a long, thick digit, rigid with jealousy, which unfortunately served only to remind me of another, long-lost finger … so that she, seeing her arrow miss its mark, shrieked, “Madman from somewhere! That doctor was right!” and rushed distractedly from the room. I heard footsteps clattering down the metal stairs to the factory floor; feet rushing between the dark-shrouded pickle-vats; and a door, first unbolted and then slammed.
Thus abandoned, I have returned, having no option, to my work.
The fisherman’s pointing finger: unforgettable focal point of the picture which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above the sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight’s child, I spent my earliest days. The young Raleigh—and who else?—sat, framed in teak, at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor—did he have a walrus moustache?—whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh—and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic … and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child with a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor sat in a sky-blue room, beneath the pointing finger, and copied the attire of the English milords … “Look, how chweet!” Lila Sabarmati exclaimed to my eternal mortification, “It’s like he’s just stepped out of the picture!”