Why Methwold’s Estate continued to tolerate Wee Willie Winkie despite the decay of his voice and the violence of his son: he had, once, given them an important clue about their lives. “The first birth,” he had said, “will make you real.”
As a direct result of Winkie’s clue, I was, in my early days, highly in demand. Amina and Mary vied for my attention; but in every house on the Estate, there were people who wanted to know me; and eventually Amina, allowing her pride in my popularity to overcome her reluctance to let me out of her sight, agreed to lend me, on a kind of rota basis, to the various families on the hill. Pushed by Mary Pereira in a sky-blue pram, I began a triumphal progress around the red-tiled palaces, gracing each in turn with my presence, and making them seem real to their owners. And so, looking back now through the eyes of Baby Saleem, I can reveal most of the secrets of my neighborhood, because the grown-ups lived their lives in my presence without fear of being observed, not knowing that, years later, someone would look back through baby-eyes and decide to let the cats out of their bags.
So here is old man Ibrahim, dying with worry because, back in Africa, governments are nationalizing his sisal plantations; here is his elder son Ishaq fretting over his hotel business, which is running into debt, so that he is obliged to borrow money from local gangsters; here are Ishaq’s eyes, coveting his brother’s wife, though why Nussie-the-duck should have aroused sexual interest in anyone is a mystery to me; and here is Nussie’s husband, Ismail the lawyer, who has learned an important lesson from his son’s forcep-birth: “Nothing comes out right in life,” he tells his duck of a wife, “unless it’s forced out.” Applying this philosophy to his legal career, he embarks on a career of bribing judges and fixing juries; all children have the power to change their parents, and Sonny turned his father into a highly successful crook. And, moving across to Versailles Villa, here is Mrs. Dubash with her shrine to the god Ganesh, stuck in the corner of an apartment of such supernatural untidiness that, in our house, the word “dubash” became a verb meaning “to make a mess” … “Oh, Saleem you’ve dubashed your room again, you black man!” Mary would cry. And now the cause of the mess, leaning over the hood of my pram to chuck me under the chin: Adi Dubash, the physicist, genius of atoms and litter. His wife, who is already carrying Cyrus-the-great within her, hangs back, growing her child, with something fanatical gleaming in the inner corners of her eyes, biding its time; it will not emerge until Mr. Dubash, whose daily life was spent working with the most dangerous substances in the world, dies by choking on an orange from which his wife forgot to remove the pips. I was never invited into the flat of Doctor Narlikar, the child-hating gynecologist; but in the homes of Lila Sabarmati and Homi Catrack I became a voyeur, a tiny party to Lila’s thousand and one infidelities, and eventually a witness to the beginnings of the liaison between the naval officer’s wife and the film-magnate-and-racehorse-owner; which, all in good time, would serve me well when I planned a certain act of revenge.
Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I’m bound to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views on the subject, being a Blessed One to a guru under a tap, a voyeur to Lila Sabarmati; in the eyes of Nussie-the-duck I was a rival, and a more successful rival, to her own Sonny (although, to her credit, she never showed her resentment, and asked to borrow me just like everyone else); to my two-headed mother I was all kinds of babyish things—they called me joonoo-moonoo, and putch-putch, and little-piece-of-the-moon.
But what, after all, can a baby do except swallow all of it and hope to make sense of it later? Patiently, dry-eyed, I imbibed Nehru-letter and Winkie’s prophecy; but the deepest impression of all was made on the day when Homi Catrack’s idiot daughter sent her thoughts across the circus-ring and into my infant head.
Toxy Catrack, of the outsize head and dribbling mouth; Toxy, who stood at a barred top-floor window, stark naked, masturbating with motions of consummate self-disgust; who spat hard and often through her bars, and sometimes hit us on the head … she was twenty-one years old, a gibbering half-wit, the product of years of inbreeding; but inside my head she was beautiful, because she had not lost the gifts with which every baby is born and which life proceeds to erode. I can’t remember anything Toxy said when she sent her thoughts to whisper to me; probably nothing except gurgles and spittings; but she gave a door in my mind a little nudge, so that when an accident took place in a washing-chest it was probably Toxy who made it possible.
That’s enough for the moment, about the first days of Baby Saleem—already my very presence is having an effect on history; already Baby Saleem is working changes on the people around him; and, in the case of my father, I am convinced that it was I who pushed him into the excesses which led, perhaps inevitably, to the terrifying time of the freeze.
Ahmed Sinai never forgave his son for breaking his toe. Even after the splint was removed, a tiny limp remained. My father leaned over my crib and said, “So, my son: you’re starting as you mean to go on. Already you’ve started bashing your poor old father!” In my opinion, this was only half a joke. Because, with my birth, everything changed for Ahmed Sinai. His position in the household was undermined by my coming. Suddenly Amina’s assiduity had acquired different goals; she never wheedled money out of him any more, and the napkin in his lap at the breakfast-table felt sad pangs of nostalgia for the old days. Now it was, “Your son needs so-and-so,” or “Janum, you must give money for such-and-such.” Bad show, Ahmed Sinai thought. My father was a self-important man.
And so it was my doing that Ahmed Sinai fell, in those days after my birth, into the twin fantasies which were to be his undoing, into the unreal worlds of the djinns and of the land beneath the sea.
A memory of my father in a cool-season evening, sitting on my bed (I was seven years old) and telling me, in a slightly thickened voice, the story of the fisherman who found the djinn in a bottle washed up on a beach … “Never believe in a djinn’s promises, my son! Let them out of the bottle and they’ll eat you up!” And I, timidly—because I could smell danger on my father’s breath: “But, Abba, can a djinn really live inside a bottle?” Whereupon my father, in a mercurial change of mood, roared with laughter and left the room, returning with a dark green bottle with a white label. “Look,” he said sonorously, “Do you want to see the djinn in here?” “No!” I squealed in fright; but “Yes!” yelled my sister the Brass Monkey from the neighboring bed … and cowering together in excited terror we watched him unscrew the cap and dramatically cover the bottleneck with the palm of his hand; and now, in the other hand, a cigarette-lighter materialized. “So perish all evil djinns!” my father cried; and, removing his palm, applied the flame to the neck of the bottle. Awestruck, the Monkey and I watched an eerie flame, blue-green-yellow, move in a slow circle down the interior walls of the bottle; until, reaching the bottom, it flared briefly and died. The next day I provoked gales of laughter when I told Sonny, Eyeslice and Hairoil, “My father fights with djinns; he beats them; it’s true! …” And it was true. Ahmed Sinai, deprived of wheedles and attention, began, soon after my birth, a life-long struggle with djinn-bottles. But I was mistaken about one thing: he didn’t win.
Cocktail-cabinets had whetted his appetite; but it was my arrival that drove him to it … In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry state. The only way to get a drink was to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up, djinn-doctors, one of whom, Doctor Sharabi, was introduced to my father by Homi Catrack next door. After that, on the first of every month, my father and Mr. Catrack and many of the city’s most respectable men queued up outside Doctor Sharabi’s mottled-glass surgery door, went in, and emerged with the little pink chitties of alcoholism. But the permitted ration was too small for my father’s needs; and so he began to send his servants along, too, and gardeners, bearers, drivers (we had a motorcar now, a 1946 Rover with running-boards, just like William Methwold
’s), even old Musa and Mary Pereira, brought my father back more and more pink chitties, which he took to Vijay Stores opposite the circumzising barbershop in Gowalia Tank Road and exchanged for the brown paper bags of alcoholism, inside which were the chinking green bottles, full of djinn. And whisky, too: Ahmed Sinai blurred the edges of himself by drinking the green bottles and red labels of his servants. The poor, having little else to peddle, sold their identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father turned them into liquid and drank them down.
At six o’clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.
After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever, and he didn’t relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother’s preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door—Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries; After nights in which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language—“What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse—what difference?” And then tears, and Amina, “Oh, janum—don’t torture me!” which, in turn, provoked, “Torture my foot! You think it’s torture for a man to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!”—my father limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while Amina began to notice how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left suddenly, flouncing down our drive without any notice; and you must judge whether she chose to be blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but she did nothing about it, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act of recognition was to give the girls a collective name. “Those Anglos,” she said to Mary, revealing a touch of snobbery, “with their funny names, Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I don’t know what. What should I care about them? Cheap type females. I call them all his Coca-Cola girls—that’s what they all sound like.”
While Ahmed pinched bottoms, Amina became long-suffering; but he might have been glad if she had appeared to care.
Mary Pereira said, “They aren’t so funny names, Madam; beg your pardon, but they are good Christian words.” And Amina remembered Ahmed’s cousin Zohra making fun of dark skin—and, falling over herself to apologize, tumbled into Zohra’s mistake: “Oh, not you, Mary, how could you think I was making fun of you?”
Horn-templed, cucumber-nosed, I lay in my crib and listened; and everything that happened, happened because of me … One day in January 1948, at five in the afternoon, my father was visited by Doctor Narlikar. There were embraces as usual, and slaps on the back. “A little chess?” my father asked, ritually, because these visits were getting to be a habit. They would play chess in the old Indian way, the game of shatranj, and, freed by the simplicities of the chess-board from the convolutions of his life, Ahmed would daydream for an hour about the reshaping of the Quran; and then it would be six o’clock, cocktail hour, time for the djinns … but this evening Narlikar said, “No.” And Ahmed, “No? What’s this no? Come, sit, play, gossip …” Narlikar, interrupting: “Tonight, brother Sinai, there is something I must show you.” They are in a 1946 Rover now, Narlikar working the crankshaft and jumping in; they are driving north along Warden Road, past Mahalaxmi Temple on the left and Willingdon Club golf-course on the right, leaving the race-track behind them, cruising along Hornby Vellard beside the sea wall; Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium is in sight, with its giant cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, Bano Devi the Invincible Woman and Dara Singh, mightiest of all … there are channa-vendors and dog-walkers promenading by the sea. “Stop,” Narlikar commands, and they get out. They stand facing the sea; sea-breeze cools their faces; and out there, at the end of a narrow cement path in the midst of the waves, is the island on which stands the tomb of Haji Ali the mystic. Pilgrims are strolling between Vellard and tomb.
“There,” Narlikar points, “What do you see?” And Ahmed, mystified, “Nothing. The tomb. People. What’s this about, old chap?” And Narlikar, “None of that. There!” And now Ahmed sees that Narlikar’s pointing finger is aimed at the cement path … “The promenade?” he asks, “What’s that to you? In some minutes the tide will come and cover it up, everybody knows …” Narlikar, his skin glowing like a beacon, becomes philosophical. “Just so, brother Ahmed; just so. Land and sea; sea and land; the eternal struggle, not so?” Ahmed, puzzled, remains silent. “Once there were seven islands,” Narlikar reminds him, “Worli, Mahim, Salsette, Matunga, Colaba, Mazagaon, Bombay. The British joined them up. Sea, brother Ahmed, became land. Land arose, and did not sink beneath the tides!” Ahmed is anxious for his whisky; his lip begins to jut while pilgrims scurry off the narrowing path. “The point,” he demands. And Narlikar, dazzling with effulgence: “The point, Ahmed bhai, is this!”
It comes out of his pocket: a little plaster-of-paris model two inches high: the tetrapod! Like a three-dimensional Mercedes-Benz sign, three legs standing on his palm, a fourth rearing lingam-fashion into the evening air, it transfixes my father. “What is it?” he asks; and now Narlikar tells him: “This is the baby that will make us richer than Hyderabad, bhai! The little gimmick that will make you, you and me, the masters of that!” He points outwards to where sea is rushing over deserted cement pathway—“The land beneath the sea, my friend! We must manufacture these by the thousand—by tens of thousands! We must tender for reclamation contracts; a fortune is waiting; don’t miss it, brother, this is the chance of a lifetime!”
Why did my father agree to dream a gynecologist’s entrepreneurial dream? Why, little by little, did the vision of full-sized concrete tetrapods marching over sea walls, four-legged conquerors triumphing over the sea, capture him as surely as it had the gleaming doctor? Why, in the following years, did Ahmed dedicate himself to the fantasy of every island-dweller—the myth of conquering the waves? Perhaps because he was afraid of missing yet another turning; perhaps for the fellowship of games of shatranj; or maybe it was Narlikar’s plausibility—“Your capital and my contacts, Ahmed bhai, what problem can there be? Every great man in this city has a son brought into the world by me; no doors will close. You manufacture; I will get the contract! Fifty-fifty; fair is fair!” But, in my view, there is a simpler explanation. My father, deprived of wifely attention, supplanted by his son, blurred by whisky and djinn, was trying to restore his position in the world; and the dream of tetrapods offered him the chance. Whole-heartedly, he threw himself into the great folly; letters were written, doors knocked upon, black money changed hands; all of which served to make Ahmed Sinai a name known in the corridors of the Sachivalaya—in the passageways of the State Secretariat they got the whiff of a Muslim who was throwing his rupees around like water. And Ahmed Sinai, drinking himself to sleep, was unaware of the danger he was in.
* * *
Our lives, at this period, were shaped by correspondence. The Prime Minister wrote to me when I was just seven days old—before I could even wipe my own nose I was receiving fan letters from Times of India readers; and one morning in January Ahmed Sinai, too, received a letter he would never forget.
Red eyes at breakfast were followed by the shaven chin of the working day; footsteps down the stairs; alarmed giggles of Coca-Cola girl. The squeak of a chair drawn up to a desk topped with green leathercloth. Metallic noise of a metal paper-cutter being lifted, colliding momentarily with telephone. The brief rasp of metal slicing envelope; and one minute later, Ahmed was running back up the stairs, yelling for my mother, shouting:
“Amina! Come here, wife! The bastards have shoved my balls in an ice-bucket!”
In
the days after Ahmed received the formal letter informing him of the freezing of all his assets, the whole world was talking at once … “For pity’s sake, janum, such language!” Amina is saying—and is it my imagination, or does a baby blush in a sky-blue crib?
And Narlikar, arriving in a lather of perspiration, “I blame myself entirely; we made ourselves too public. These are bad times, Sinai bhai—freeze a Muslim’s assets, they say, and you make him run to Pakistan, leaving all his wealth behind him. Catch the lizard’s tail and he’ll snap it off! This so-called secular state gets some damn clever ideas.”
“Everything,” Ahmed Sinai is saying, “bank account; savings bonds; the rents from the Kurla properties—all blocked, frozen. By order, the letter says. By order they will not let me have four annas, wife—not a chavanni to see the peepshow!”
“It’s those photos in the paper,” Amina decides. “Otherwise how could those jumped-up clever dicks know whom to prosecute? My God, janum, it’s my fault …”
“Not ten pice for a twist of channa,” Ahmed Sinai adds, “not one anna to give alms to a beggar. Frozen—like in the fridge!”
“It’s my fault,” Ismail Ibrahim is saying, “I should have warned you, Sinai bhai. I have heard about these freezings—only well-off Muslims are selected, naturally. You must fight.:.”
“… Tooth and nail!” Homi Catrack insists, “Like a lion! Like Aurangzeb—your ancestor, isn’t it?—like the Rani of Jhansi! Then let’s see what kind of country we’ve ended up in!”
“There are lawcourts in this State,” Ismail Ibrahim adds; Nussie-the-duck smiles a bovine smile as she suckles Sonny; her fingers move, absently stroking his hollows, up and around, down and about, in a steady, unchanging rhythm … “You must accept my legal services,” Ismail tells Ahmed, “absolutely free, my good friend. No, no I won’t hear of it. How can it be? We are neighbors.”