Soon after our arrival—and, perhaps, oppressed by the mosque-shadowed air of the Clayton Road house—my father resolved to build us a new home. He bought a plot of land in the smartest of the “societies,” the new housing development zones; and on my sixteenth birthday, Saleem acquired more than a Lambretta—I learned the occult powers of umbilical cords.
What, pickled in brine, sat for sixteen years in my father’s almirah, awaiting just such a day? What, floating like a water-snake in an old pickle-jar, accompanied us on our sea-journey and ended up buried in hard, barren Karachi-earth? What had once nourished life in a womb—what now infused earth with miraculous life, and gave birth to a split-level, American-style modern bungalow? … Eschewing these cryptic questions, I explain that, on my sixteenth birthday, my family (including Alia Aunty) assembled on our plot of Korangi Road earth; watched by the eyes of a team of laborers and the beard of a mullah, Ahmed handed Saleem a pickaxe; I drove it inaugurally into the ground. “A new beginning,” Amina said, “Inshallah, we shall all be new people now.” Spurred on by her noble and unattainable desire, a workman rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a pickle-jar was produced. Brine was discarded on the thirsty ground; and what-was-left-inside received the mullah’s blessings. After which, an umbilical cord—was it mine? Or Shiva’s?—was implanted in the earth; and at once, a house began to grow. There were sweetmeats and soft drinks; the mullah, displaying remarkable hunger, consumed thirty-nine laddoos; and Ahmed Sinai did not once complain of the expense. The spirit of the buried cord inspired the workmen; but although the foundations were dug very deep, they would not prevent the house from failing down before we ever lived in it.
What I surmised about umbilical cords: although they possessed the power of growing houses, some were evidently better at the job than others. The city of Karachi proved my point; clearly constructed on top of entirely unsuitable cords, it was full of deformed houses, the stunted hunchback children of deficient life-lines, houses growing mysteriously blind, with no visible windows, houses which looked like radios or air-conditioners or jail-cells, crazy top-heavy edifices which fell over with monotonous regularity, like drunks; a wild proliferation of mad houses, whose inadequacies as living quarters were exceeded only by their quite exceptional ugliness. The city obscured the desert; but either the cords, or the infertility of the soil, made it grow into something grotesque.
Capable of smelling sadness and joy, of sniffing out intelligence and stupidity with my eyes closed, I arrived at Karachi, and adolescence—understanding, of course, that the subcontinent’s new nations and I had all left childhood behind; that growing pains and strange awkward alterations of voice were in store for us all. Drainage censored my inner life; my sense of connection remained undrained.
Saleem invaded Pakistan armed only with a hypersensitive nose; but, worst of all, he invaded from the wrong direction! All successful conquests of that part of the world have begun in the north; all conquerors have come by land. Sailing ignorantly against the winds of history, I reached Karachi from the south-east, and by sea. What followed should not, I suppose, have surprised me.
With hindsight, the advantages of sweeping down from the north are self-evident. From the north came the Umayyad generals, Hajjaj bin Yusuf and Muhammad bin Qasim; also the Ismailis. (Honeymoon Lodge, where it is said Aly Khan sojourned with Rita Hayworth, overlooked our plot of umbilicized earth; rumor has it that the film-star created much scandal by wandering in the grounds dressed in a series of fabulous, gauzy, Hollywood negligées.) O ineluctable superiority of northernness! From which direction did Mahmud of Ghazni descend upon these Indus plains, bringing with him a language boasting no fewer than three forms of the letter S? The inescapable answer: sé, sin and swad were northern intruders. And Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, who overthrew the Ghaznavids and established the Delhi Caliphate? Sam Ghuri’s son, too, moved southwards on his progress.
And Tughlaq, and the Mughal Emperors … but I’ve made my point. It remains only to add that ideas, as well as armies, swept south south south from the northern heights: the legend of Sikandar But-Shikan, the Iconoclast of Kashmir, who at the end of the fourteenth century destroyed every Hindu temple in the Valley (establishing a precedent for my grandfather), travelled down from the hills to the river-plains; and five hundred years later the mujahideen movement of Syed Ahmad Barilwi followed the well-trodden trail. Barilwi’s ideas: self-denial, hatred-of-Hindus, holy war … philosophies as well as kings (to cut this short) came from the opposite direction to me.
Saleem’s parents said, “We must all become new people”; in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s (like India’s first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country whose population of deities rivalled the numbers of its people, so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body was to show a marked preference for the impure. Mopla-like, I was doomed to be a misfit; but, in the end, purity found me out, and even I, Saleem, was cleansed of my misdeeds.
After my sixteenth birthday, I studied history at my aunt Alia’s college; but not even learning could make me feel a part of this country devoid of midnight children, in which my fellow-students took out processions to demand a stricter, more Islamic society—proving that they had contrived to become the antitheses of students everywhere else on earth, by demanding more-rules-not-less. My parents, however, were determined to put down roots; although Ayub Khan and Bhutto were forging an alliance with China (which had so recently been our enemy), Ahmed and Amina would listen to no criticisms of their new home; and my father bought a towel factory.
There was a new brilliance about my parents in those days; Amina had lost her guilt-fog, her verrucas seemed not to be playing up any more; while Ahmed, although still whitened, had felt the freeze of his loins thawing under the heat of his newfound love for his wife. On some mornings, Amina had toothmarks on her neck; she giggled uncontrollably at times, like a schoolgirl. “You two, honestly,” her sister Alia said, “Like honeymooners or I don’t know what.” But I could smell what was hidden behind Alia’s teeth; what stayed inside when the friendly words came out … Ahmed Sinai named his towels after his wife: Amina Brand.
“Who are these multi-multis? These Dawoods, Saigols, Haroons?” he cried gaily, dismissing the richest families in the land. “Who are Valikas or Zulfikars? I could eat them ten at a time. You wait!”, he promised, “In two years the whole world will be wiping itself on an Amina Brand cloth. The finest terry-cloth! The most modern machines! We shall make the whole world clean and dry; Dawoods and Zulfikars will beg to know my secret; and I will say, yes, the towels are high-quality; but the secret is not in the manufacturing; it was love that conquered all.” (I discerned, in my father’s speech, the lingering effects of the optimism virus.)
Did Amina Brand conquer the world in the name of cleanliness (which is next to …)? Did Valikas and Saigols come to ask Ahmed Sinai, “God, we’re stumped, yaar, how’d you do it?” Did high-quality terry-cloth, in patterns devised by Ahmed himself—a little gaudy, but never mind, they were born of love—wipe away the moistness of Pakistanis and export-markets alike? Did Russians Englishmen Americans wrap themselves in my mother’s immortalized name? … The story of Amina Brand must wait awhile; because the career of Jamila Singer is about to take off; the mosque-shadowed house on Clayton Road has been visited by Uncle Puffs.
His real name was Major (Retired) Alauddin Latif; he had heard about my sister’s voice from “my darn good friend General Zulfikar; use to be with him in the Border Patrol Force back in ’47.” He turned up at Alia Aziz’s house shortly after Jamila’s fifteenth birthday, beaming and bouncing, revealing a mouth filled with solid gold teeth. “I’m a simple fellow,” he explained, “like our illustrious President. I keep my cash where it’s safe.” Like our illustrious President, the
Major’s head was perfectly spherical; unlike Ayub Khan, Latif had left the Army and entered show-business. “Pakistan’s absolute number-one impresario, old man,” he told my father. “Nothing to it but organization; old Army habit, dies darn hard.” Major Latif had a proposition: he wanted to hear Jamila sing, “And if she’s two per cent as good as I’m told, my good sir, I’ll make her famous! Oh, yes, overnight, certainly! Contacts: that’s all it takes; contacts and organization; and yours truly Major (Retired) Latif has the lot. Alauddin Latif,” he stressed, flashing goldly at Ahmed Sinai, “Know the story? I just rub my jolly old lamp and out pops the genie bringing fame and fortune. Your girl will be in darn good hands. Darn good.”
It is fortunate for Jamila Singer’s legion of fans that Ahmed Sinai was a man in love with his wife; mellowed by his own happiness, he failed to eject Major Latif on the spot. I also believe today that my parents had already come to the conclusion that their daughter’s gift was too extraordinary to keep to themselves; the sublime magic of her angel’s voice had begun to teach them the inevitable imperatives of talent. But Ahmed and Amina had one concern. “Our daughter,” Ahmed said—he was always the more old-fashioned of the two beneath the surface—“is from a good family; but you want to put her on a stage in front of God knows how many strange men … ?” The Major looked affronted. “Sir,” he said stiffly, “you think I am not a man of sensibility? Got daughters myself, old man. Seven, thank God. Set up a little travel agency business for them; strictly over the telephone, though. Wouldn’t dream of sitting them in an office-window. It’s the biggest telephonic travel agency in the place, actually. We send train-drivers to England, matter of fact; bus-wallahs, too. My point,” he added hastily, “is that your daughter would be given as much respect as mine. More, actually; she’s going to be a star!”
Major Latif’s daughters—Safia and Rafia and five other -afias—were dubbed, collectively, “the Puffias” by the remaining Monkey in my sister; their father was nicknamed first “Father-Puffia” and then Uncle—a courtesy title—Puffs. He was as good as his word; in six months Jamila Singer was to have hit records, an army of admirers, everything; and all, as I’ll explain in a moment, without revealing her face.
Uncle Puffs became a fixture in our lives; he visited the Clayton Road house most evenings, at what I used to think of as the cocktail hour, to sip pomegranate juice and ask Jamila to sing a little something. She, who was growing into the sweetest-natured of girls, always obliged … afterwards he would clear his throat as if something had got stuck in it and begin to joke heartily with me about getting married. Twenty-four-carat grins blinded me as he, “Time you took a wife, young man. Take my advice: pick a girl with good brains and bad teeth; you’ll have got a friend and a safe-deposit box rolled into one!” Uncle Puffs’ daughters, he claimed, all conformed to the above description … I, embarrassed, smelling out that he was only half-joking, would cry, “O, Uncle Puffs!” He knew his nickname; quite liked it, even. Slapping my thigh, he cried, “Playing hard to get, eh? Darn right. Okay my boy: you pick one of my girls, and I guarantee to have all her teeth pulled out; by the time you marry her she’ll have a million-buck smile for a dowry!” Whereupon my mother usually contrived to change the subject; she wasn’t keen on Uncle Puffs’ idea, no matter how pricey the dentures … on that first night, as so often afterwards, Jamila sang to Major Alauddin Latif. Her voice wafted out through the window and silenced the traffic; the birds stopped chattering and, at the hamburger shop across the street, the radio was switched off; the street was full of stationary people, and my sister’s voice washed over them … when she finished, we noticed that Uncle Puffs was crying.
“A jewel,” he said, honking into a handkerchief, “Sir and Madam, your daughter is a jewel. I am humbled, absolutely. Darn humbled. She has proved to me that a golden voice is preferable even to golden teeth.”
And when Jamila Singer’s fame had reached the point at which she could no longer avoid giving a public concert, it was Uncle Puffs who started the rumor that she had been involved in a terrible, disfiguring car-crash; it was Major (Retired) Latif who devised her famous, all-concealing, white silk chadar, the curtain or veil, heavily embroidered in gold brocade-work and religious calligraphy, behind which she sat demurely whenever she performed in public. The chadar of Jamila Singer was held up by two tireless, muscular figures, also (but more simply) veiled from head to foot—the official story was that they were her female attendants, but their sex was impossible to determine through their burqas; and at its very center, the Major had cut a hole. Diameter: three inches. Circumference: embroidered in finest gold thread. That was how the history of our family once again became the fate of a nation, because when Jamila sang with her lips pressed against the brocaded aperture, Pakistan fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl whom it only ever glimpsed through a gold-and-white perforated sheet.
The accident rumor set the final seal on her popularity; her concerts packed out the Bambino Theatre in Karachi and filled the Shalimar-bagh in Lahore; her records constantly topped the sales charts. And as she became public property, “Pakistan’s Angel,” “The Voice of the Nation,” the “Bulbul-e-Din” or nightingale-of-the-faith, and began to receive one thousand and one firm proposals of marriage a week; as she became the whole country’s favorite daughter and grew into an existence which threatened to overwhelm her place in our own family, so she fell prey to the twin viruses of fame, the first of which made her the victim of her own public image, because the accident-rumor obliged her to wear a gold-and-white burqa at all times, even in my aunt Alia’s school, which she continued to attend; while the second virus subjected her to the exaggerations and simplifications of self which are the unavoidable side-effects of stardom, so that the blind and blinding devoutness and the right-or-wrong nationalism which had already begun to emerge in her now began to dominate her personality, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Publicity imprisoned her inside a gilded tent; and, being the new daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident aspects of the national persona than to the child-world of her Monkey years.
Jamila Singer’s voice was on Voice of Pakistan Radio constantly, so that in the villages of West and East Wings she came to seem like a superhuman being, incapable of being fatigued, an angel who sang to her people through all the days and nights; while Ahmed Sinai, whose few remaining qualms about his daughter’s career had been more than allayed by her enormous earnings (although he had once been a Delhi man, he was by now a true Bombay Muslim at heart, placing cash matters above most other things), became fond of telling my sister: “You see, daughter: decency, purity, art and good business sense can be one and the same things; your old father has been wise enough to work that out.” Jamila smiled sweetly and agreed … she was growing out of scrawny tomboy youth into a slender, slant-eyed, golden-skinned beauty whose hair was nearly long enough to sit on; even her nose looked good. “In my daughter,” Ahmed Sinai told Uncle Puffs proudly, “it is my side of the family’s noble features which have prevailed.” Uncle Puffs cast a quizzical, awkward glance at me and cleared his throat. “Darn fine-looking girl, sir,” he told my father, “Top-hole, by gum.”
The thunder of applause was never far from my sister’s ears; at her first, now-legendary Bambino recital (we sat in seats provided by Uncle Puffs—“Best darn seats in the house!”—beside his seven Puffias, all veiled … Uncle Puffs dug me in the ribs, “Hey, boy—choose! Take your pick! Remember: the dowry!” and I blushed and stared hard at the stage), the cries of “Wah! Wah!” were sometimes louder than Jamila’s voice; and after the show we found Jamila back-stage drowning in a sea of flowers, so that we had to fight our way through the blossoming camphor garden of the nation’s love, to find that she was almost fainting, not from fatigue, but from the overpoweringly sweet perfume of adoration with which the blooms had filled the room. I, too, felt my head beginning to swim; until Uncle Puffs began to hurl flowers in great bushels from an open window—they w
ere gathered by a crowd of fans—while he cried, “Flowers are fine, darn it, but even a national heroine needs air!”
There was applause, too, on the evening Jamila Singer (and family) was invited to President House to sing for the commander of pepperpots. Ignoring reports in foreign magazines about embezzled money and Swiss bank accounts, we scrubbed ourselves until we shone; a family in the towel business is obliged to be spotlessly clean. Uncle Puffs gave his gold teeth an extra-careful polish; and in a large hall dominated by garlanded portraits of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Quaid-i-Azam, and of his assassinated friend and successor Liaquat Ali, a perforated sheet was held up and my sister sang. Jamila’s voice fell silent at last; the voice of gold braid succeeded her brocade-bordered song. “Jamila daughter,” we heard, “your voice will be a sword for purity; it will be a weapon with which we shall cleanse men’s souls.” President Ayub was, by his own admission, a simple soldier; he instilled in my sister the simple, soldierly virtues of faith-in-leaders and trust-in-God; and she, “The President’s will is the voice of my heart.” Through the hole in a perforated sheet, Jamila Singer dedicated herself to patriotism; and the diwan-i-khas, the hall of this private audience, rang with applause, polite now, not the wild wah-wahing of the Bambino crowd, but the regimented approbation of braided gongs-and-pips and the delighted clapping of weepy parents. “I say!” Uncle Puffs whispered, “Darn fine, eh?”
What I could smell, Jamila could sing. Truth beauty happiness pain: each had its separate fragrance, and could be distinguished by my nose; each, in Jamila’s performances, could find its ideal voice. My nose, her voice: they were exactly complementary gifts; but they were growing apart. While Jamila sang patriotic songs, my nose seemed to prefer to linger on the uglier smells which invaded it: the bitterness of Aunt Alia, the hard unchanging stink of my fellow-students’ closed minds; so that while she rose into the clouds, I fell into the gutter.