Midnight's Children Page 3

  “Oh, you don’t believe?”—licking his sore lips with a grin, knowing it to be the reverse of the truth; “Your attention is wandering?”—again, he knew how furiously Aziz was hanging on his words. “Maybe the straw is pricking your behind, hey? Oh, I’m so sorry, babaji, not to provide for you silk cushions with gold brocade-work—cushions such as the Emperor Jehangir sat upon! You think of the Emperor Jehangir as a gardener only, no doubt,” Tai accused my grandfather, “because he built Shalimar. Stupid! What do you know? His name meant Encompasser of the Earth. Is that a gardener’s name? God knows what they teach you boys these days. Whereas I” … puffing up a little here … “I knew his precise weight, to the tola! Ask me how many maunds, how many seers! When he was happy he got heavier and in Kashmir he was heaviest of all. I used to carry his litter … no, no, look, you don’t believe again, that big cucumber in your face is waggling like the little one in your pajamas! So, come on, come on, ask me questions! Give examination! Ask how many times the leather thongs wound round the handles of the litter—the answer is thirty-one. Ask me what was the Emperor’s dying word—I tell you it was ‘Kashmir.’ He had bad breath and a good heart. Who do you think I am? Some common ignorant lying pie-dog? Go, get out of the boat now, your nose makes it too heavy to row; also your father is waiting to beat my gas out of you, and your mother to boil off your skin.”

  In the brandy bottle of the boatman Tai I see, foretold, my own father’s possession by djinns … and there will be another bald foreigner … and Tai’s gas prophesies another kind, which was the consolation of my grandmother’s old age, and taught her stories, too … and pie-dogs aren’t far away … Enough. I’m frightening myself.

  Despite beating and boiling, Aadam Aziz floated with Tai in his shikara, again and again, amid goats hay flowers furniture lotus-roots, though never with the English sahibs, and heard again and again the miraculous answers to that single terrifying question: “But Taiji, how old are you, honestly?”

  From Tai, Aadam learned the secrets of the lake—where you could swim without being pulled down by weeds; the eleven varieties of water-snake; where the frogs spawned; how to cook a lotus-root; and where the three English women had drowned a few years back. “There is a tribe of feringhee women who come to this water to drown,” Tai said. “Sometimes they know it, sometimes they don’t, but I know the minute I smell them. They hide under the water from God knows what or who—but they can’t hide from me, baba!” Tai’s laugh, emerging to infect Aadam—a huge, booming laugh that seemed macabre when it crashed out of that old, withered body, but which was so natural in my giant grandfather that nobody knew, in later times, that it wasn’t really his (my uncle Hanif inherited this laugh; so until he died, a piece of Tai lived in Bombay). And, also from Tai, my grandfather heard about noses.

  Tai tapped his left nostril. “You know what this is, nakkoo? It’s the place where the outside world meets the world inside you. If they don’t get on, you feel it here. Then you rub your nose with embarrassment to make the itch go away. A nose like that, little idiot, is a great gift. I say: trust it. When it warns you, look out or you’ll be finished. Follow your nose and you’ll go far.” He cleared his throat; his eyes rolled away into the mountains of the past. Aziz settled back on the straw. “I knew one officer once—in the army of that Iskandar the Great. Never mind his name. He had a vegetable just like yours hanging between his eyes. When the army halted near Gandhara, he fell in love with some local floozy. At once his nose itched like crazy. He scratched it, but that was useless. He inhaled vapors from crushed boiled eucalyptus leaves. Still no good, baba! The itching sent him wild; but the damn fool dug in his heels and stayed with his little witch when the army went home. He became—what?—a stupid thing, neither this nor that, a half-and-halfer with a nagging wife and an itch in the nose, and in the end he pushed his sword into his stomach. What do you think of that?”

  … Doctor Aziz in 1915, whom rubies and diamonds have turned into a half-and-halfer, remembers this story as Tai enters hailing distance. His nose is itching still. He scratches, shrugs, tosses his head; and then Tai shouts.

  “Ohé! Doctor Sahib! Ghani the landowner’s daughter is sick.”

  The message, delivered curtly, shouted unceremoniously across the surface of the lake although boatman and pupil have not met for half a decade, mouthed by woman’s lips that are not smiling in longtime-no-see greeting, sends time into a speeding, whirligig, blurry fluster of excitement …

  … “Just think, son,” Aadam’s mother is saying as she sips fresh lime water, reclining on a takht in an attitude of resigned exhaustion, “how life does turn out. For so many years even my ankles were a secret, and now I must be stared at by strange persons who are not even family members.”

  … While Ghani the landowner stands beneath a large oil painting of Diana the Huntress, framed in squiggly gold. He wears thick dark glasses and his famous poisonous smile, and discusses art. “I purchased it from an Englishman down on his luck, Doctor Sahib. Five hundred rupees only—and I did not trouble to beat him down. What are five hundred chips? You see, I am a lover of culture.”

  … “See, my son,” Aadam’s mother is saying as he begins to examine her, “what a mother will not do for her child. Look how I suffer. You are a doctor … feel these rashes, these blotchy bits, understand that my head aches morning noon and night. Refill my glass, child.”

  … But the young Doctor has entered the throes of a most unhippocratic excitement at the boatman’s cry, and shouts, “I’m coming just now! Just let me bring my things!” The shikara’s prow touches the garden’s hem. Aadam is rushing indoors, prayer-mat rolled like cheroot under one arm, blue eyes blinking in the sudden interior gloom; he has placed the cheroot on a high shelf on top of stacked copies of Vorwärts and Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and other pamphlets, dusty echoes of his half-faded German life; he is pulling out, from under his bed, a second-hand leather case which his mother called his “doctori-attaché,” and as he swings it and himself upwards and runs from the room, the word HEIDELBERG is briefly visible, burned into the leather on the bottom of the bag. A landowner’s daughter is good news indeed to a doctor with a career to make, even if she is ill. No: because she is ill.

  … While I sit like an empty pickle-jar in a pool of Anglepoised light, visited by this vision of my grandfather sixty-three years ago, which demands to be recorded, filling my nostrils with the acrid stench of his mother’s embarrassment which has brought her out in boils, with the vinegary force of Aadam Aziz’s determination to establish a practice so successful that she’ll never have to return to the gem-stone-shop, with the blind mustiness of a big shadowy house in which the young Doctor stands, ill-at-ease, before a painting of a plain girl with lively eyes and a stag transfixed behind her on the horizon, speared by a dart from her bow. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air … everything, and not just the few clues one stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed.

  … Aadam refills his mother’s glass and continues, worriedly, to examine her. “Put some cream on these rashes and blotches, Amma. For the headache, there are pills. The boils must be lanced. But maybe if you wore purdah when you sat in the store … so that no disrespectful eyes could … such complaints often begin in the mind …”

  … Slap of oar in water. Plot of spittle in lake. Tai clears his throat and mutters angrily, “A fine business. A wet-head nakkoo child goes away before he’s learned one damned thing and he comes back a big doctor sahib with a big bag full of foreign machines, and he’s still as silly as an owl. I swear: a too bad business.”

  … Doctor Aziz is shifting uneasily, from foot to foot, under the influence of the landowner’s smile, in whose presence it is not possible to feel re
laxed; and is waiting for some tic of reaction to his own extraordinary appearance. He has grown accustomed to these involuntary twitches of surprise at his size, his face of many colors, his nose … but Ghani makes no sign, and the young Doctor resolves, in return, not to let his uneasiness show. He stops shifting his weight. They face each other, each suppressing (or so it seems) his view of the other, establishing the basis of their future relationship. And now Ghani alters, changing from art-lover to tough-guy. “This is a big chance for you, young man,” he says. Aziz’s eyes have strayed to Diana. Wide expanses of her blemished pink skin are visible.

  … His mother is moaning, shaking her head. “No, what do you know, child, you have become a big-shot doctor but the gemstone business is different. Who would buy a turquoise from a woman hidden inside a black hood? It is a question of establishing trust. So they must look at me; and I must get pains and boils. Go, go, don’t worry your head about your poor mother.”

  … “Big shot,” Tai is spitting into the lake, “big bag, big shot. Pah! We haven’t got enough bags at home that you must bring back that thing made of a pig’s skin that makes one unclean just by looking at it? And inside, God knows what all.” Doctor Aziz, seated amongst flowery curtains and the smell of incense, has his thoughts wrenched away from the patient waiting across the lake. Tai’s bitter monologue breaks into his consciousness, creating a sense of dull shock, a smell like a casualty ward overpowering the incense … the old man is clearly furious about something, possessed by an incomprehensible rage that appears to be directed at his erstwhile acolyte, or, more precisely and oddly, at his bag. Doctor Aziz attempts to make small talk … “Your wife is well? Do they still talk about your bag of golden teeth?” … tries to remake an old friendship; but Tai is in full flight now, a stream of invective pouring out of him. The Heidelberg bag quakes under the torrent of abuse. “Sister-sleeping pigskin bag from Abroad full of foreigners’ tricks. Big-shot bag. Now if a man breaks an arm that bag will not let the bone-setter bind it in leaves. Now a man must let his wife lie beside that bag and watch knives come and cut her open. A fine business, what these foreigners put in our young men’s heads. I swear: it is a too-bad thing. That bag should fry in Hell with the testicles of the ungodly.”

  … Ghani the landowner snaps his braces with his thumbs. “A big chance, yes indeed. They are saying good things about you in town. Good medical training. Good … good enough … family. And now our own lady doctor is sick so you get your opportunity. That woman, always sick these days, too old, I am thinking, and not up in the latest developments also, what-what? I say: physician heal thyself. And I tell you this: I am wholly objective in my business relations. Feelings, love, I keep for my family only. If a person is not doing a first-class job for me, out she goes! You understand me? So: my daughter Naseem is not well. You will treat her excellently. Remember I have friends; and ill-health strikes high and low alike.”

  … “Do you still pickle water-snakes in brandy to give you virility, Taiji? Do you still like to eat lotus-root without any spices?” Hesitant questions, brushed aside by the torrent of Tai’s fury. Doctor Aziz begins to diagnose. To the ferryman, the bag represents Abroad; it is the alien thing, the invader, progress. And yes, it has indeed taken possession of the young Doctor’s mind; and yes, it contains knives, and cures for cholera and malaria and smallpox; and yes, it sits between doctor and boatman, and has made them antagonists. Doctor Aziz begins to fight, against sadness, and against Tai’s anger, which is beginning to infect him, to become his own, which erupts only rarely, but comes, when it does come, unheralded in a roar from his deepest places, laying waste everything in sight; and then vanishes, leaving him wondering why everyone is so upset … They are approaching Ghani’s house. A bearer awaits the shikara, standing with clasped hands on a little wooden jetty. Aziz fixes his mind on the job in hand.

  … “Has your usual doctor agreed to my visit, Ghani Sahib?” … Again, a hesitant question is brushed lightly aside. The landowner says, “Oh, she will agree. Now follow me, please.”

  … The bearer is waiting on the jetty. Holding the shikara steady as Aadam Aziz climbs out, bag in hand. And now, at last, Tai speaks directly to my grandfather. Scorn in his face, Tai asks, “Tell me this, Doctor Sahib: have you got in that bag made of dead pigs one of those machines that foreign doctors use to smell with?” Aadam shakes his head, not understanding. Tai’s voice gathers new layers of disgust. “You know, sir, a thing like an elephant’s trunk.” Aziz, seeing what he means, replies: “A stethoscope? Naturally.” Tai pushes the shikara off from the jetty. Spits. Begins to row away. “I knew it,” he says. “You will use such a machine now, instead of your own big nose.”

  My grandfather does not trouble to explain that a stethoscope is more like a pair of ears than a nose. He is stifling his own irritation, the resentful anger of a cast-off child; and besides, there is a patient waiting. Time settles down and concentrates on the importance of the moment.

  The house was opulent but badly lit. Ghani was a widower and the servants clearly took advantage. There were cobwebs in corners and layers of dust on ledges. They walked down a long corridor; one of the doors was ajar and through it Aziz saw a room in a state of violent disorder. This glimpse, connected with a glint of light in Ghani’s dark glasses, suddenly informed Aziz that the landowner was blind. This aggravated his sense of unease: a blind man who claimed to appreciate European paintings? He was, also, impressed, because Ghani hadn’t bumped into anything … they halted outside a thick teak door. Ghani said, “Wait here two moments,” and went into the room behind the door.

  In later years, Doctor Aadam Aziz swore that during those two moments of solitude in the gloomy spidery corridors of the landowner’s mansion he was gripped by an almost uncontrollable desire to turn and run away as fast as his legs would carry him. Unnerved by the enigma of the blind art-lover, his insides filled with tiny scrabbling insects as a result of the insidious venom of Tai’s mutterings, his nostrils itching to the point of convincing him that he had somehow contracted venereal disease, he felt his feet begin slowly, as though encased in boots of lead, to turn; felt blood pounding in his temples; and was seized by so powerful a sensation of standing upon a point of no return that he very nearly wet his German woollen trousers. He began, without knowing it, to blush furiously; and at this point his mother appeared before him, seated on the floor before a low desk, a rash spreading like a blush across her face as she held a turquoise up to the light. His mother’s face had acquired all the scorn of the boatman Tai. “Go, go, run,” she told him in Tai’s voice, “Don’t worry about your poor old mother.” Doctor Aziz found himself stammering, “What a useless son you’ve got, Amma; can’t you see there’s a hole in the middle of me the size of a melon?” His mother smiled a pained smile. “You always were a heartless boy,” she sighed, and then turned into a lizard on the wall of the corridor and stuck her tongue out at him. Doctor Aziz stopped feeling dizzy, became unsure that he’d actually spoken aloud, wondered what he’d meant by that business about the hole, found that his feet were no longer trying to escape, and realized that he was being watched. A woman with the biceps of a wrestler was staring at him, beckoning him to follow her into the room. The state of her sari told him that she was a servant; but she was not servile. “You look green as a fish,” she said. “You young doctors. You come into a strange house and your liver turns to jelly. Come, Doctor Sahib, they are waiting for you.” Clutching his bag a fraction too tightly, he followed her through the dark teak door.

  … Into a spacious bedchamber that was as ill-lit as the rest of the house; although here there were shafts of dusty sunlight seeping in through a fanlight high on one wall. These fusty rays illuminated a scene as remarkable as anything the Doctor had ever witnessed: a tableau of such surpassing strangeness that his feet began to twitch towards the door once again. Two more women, also built like professional wrestlers, stood stiffly in the light, each holding one corner of an enormous white bedsheet, their
arms raised high above their heads so that the sheet hung between them like a curtain. Mr. Ghani welled up out of the murk surrounding the sunlit sheet and permitted the nonplussed Aadam to stare stupidly at the peculiar tableau for perhaps half a minute, at the end of which, and before a word had been spoken, the Doctor made a discovery: