Midnight's Children Read online

  In the very center of the sheet, a hole had been cut, a crude circle about seven inches in diameter.

  “Close the door, ayah,” Ghani instructed the first of the lady wrestlers, and then, turning to Aziz, became confidential. “This town contains many good-for-nothings who have on occasion tried to climb into my daughter’s room. She needs,” he nodded at the three muscle-bound women, “protectors.”

  Aziz was still looking at the perforated sheet. Ghani said, “All right, come on, you will examine my Naseem right now. Pronto”.

  My grandfather peered around the room. “But where is she, Ghani Sahib?” he blurted out finally. The lady wrestlers adopted supercilious expressions and, it seemed to him, tightened their musculatures, just in case he intended to try something fancy.

  “Ah, I see your confusion,” Ghani said, his poisonous smile broadening, “You Europe-returned chappies forget certain things. Doctor Sahib, my daughter is a decent girl, it goes without saying. She does not flaunt her body under the noses of strange men. You will understand that you cannot be permitted to see her, no, not in any circumstances; accordingly I have required her to be positioned behind that sheet. She stands there, like a good girl.”

  A frantic note had crept into Doctor Aziz’s voice. “Ghani Sahib, tell me how I am to examine her without looking at her?” Ghani smiled on.

  “You will kindly specify which portion of my daughter it is necessary to inspect. I will then issue her with my instructions to place the required segment against that hole which you see there. And so, in this fashion the thing may be achieved.”

  “But what, in any event, does the lady complain of?”—my grandfather, despairingly. To which Mr. Ghani, his eyes rising upwards in their sockets, his smile twisting into a grimace of grief, replied: “The poor child! She has a terrible, a too dreadful stomach-ache.”

  “In that case,” Doctor Aziz said with some restraint, “will she show me her stomach, please.”

  Mercurochrome

  PADMA—OUR PLUMP PADMA—is sulking magnificently. (She can’t read and, like all fish-lovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she doesn’t. Padma: strong, jolly, a consolation for my last days. But definitely a bitch-in-the-manger.) She attempts to cajole me from my desk: “Eat, na, food is spoiling.” I remain stubbornly hunched over paper. “But what is so precious,” Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air up-downup in exasperation, “to need all this writing-shiting?” I reply: now that I’ve let out the details of my birth, now that the perforated sheet stands between doctor and patient, there’s no going back. Padma snorts. Wrist smacks against forehead. “Okay, starve starve, who cares two pice?” Another louder, conclusive snort … but I take no exception to her attitude. She stirs a bubbling vat all day for a living; something hot and vinegary has steamed her up tonight. Thick of waist, somewhat hairy of forearm, she flounces, gesticulates, exits. Poor Padma. Things are always getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told her, when she was only small, that she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is “The One Who Possesses Dung.”

  In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a little of turmeric, ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air—just as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten up by curiosity, used to do night after night! I’ll begin at once: by revealing that my grandfather’s premonitions in the corridor were not without foundation. In the succeeding months and years, he fell under what I can only describe as the sorcerer’s spell of that enormous—and as yet unstained—perforated cloth.

  “Again?” Aadam’s mother said, rolling her eyes. “I tell you, my child, that girl is so sickly from too much soft living only. Too much sweetmeats and spoiling, because of the absence of a mother’s firm hand. But go, take care of your invisible patient, your mother is all right with her little nothing of a headache.”

  In those years, you see, the landowner’s daughter Naseem Ghani contracted a quite extraordinary number of minor illnesses, and each time a shikara-wallah was despatched to summon the tall young Doctor Sahib with the big nose who was making such a reputation for himself in the valley. Aadam Aziz’s visits to the bedroom with the shaft of sunlight and the three lady wrestlers became weekly events; and on each occasion he was vouchsafed a glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of the young woman’s body. Her initial stomach-ache was succeeded by a very slightly twisted right ankle, an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of the left foot, a tiny cut on the lower left calf. (“Tetanus is a killer, Doctor Sahib,” the landowner said, “My Naseem must not die for a scratch.”) There was the matter of her stiff right knee, which the Doctor was obliged to manipulate through the hole in the sheet … and after a time the illnesses leapt upwards, avoiding certain unmentionable zones, and began to proliferate around her upper half. She suffered from something mysterious which her father called Finger Rot, which made the skin flake off her hands; from weakness of the wrist-bones, for which Aadam prescribed calcium tablets; and from attacks of constipation, for which he gave her a course of laxatives, since there was no question of being permitted to administer an enema. She had fevers and she also had subnormal temperatures. At these times his thermometer would be placed under her armpit and he would hum and haw about the relative inefficiency of the method. In the opposite armpit she once developed a slight case of tineachloris and he dusted her with yellow powder; after this treatment—which required him to rub the powder in, gently but firmly, although the soft secret body began to shake and quiver and he heard helpless laughter coming through the sheet, because Naseem Ghani was very ticklish—the itching went away, but Naseem soon found a new set of complaints. She waxed anemic in the summer and bronchial in the winter. (“Her tubes are most delicate,” Ghani explained, “like little flutes.”) Far away the Great War moved from crisis to crisis, while in the cobwebbed house Doctor Aziz was also engaged in a total war against his sectioned patient’s inexhaustible complaints. And, in all those war years, Naseem never repeated an illness. “Which only shows,” Ghani told him, “that you are a good doctor. When you cure, she is cured for good. But alas!”—he struck his forehead—“She pines for her late mother, poor baby, and her body suffers. She is a too loving child.”

  So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination, she accompanied him on all his rounds, she moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of the ankles; he could smell her scent of lavender and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little girl; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face.

  His mother lay on her bed, spreadeagled on her stomach. “Come, come and press me,” she said, “my doctor son whose fingers can soothe his old mother’s muscles. Press, press, my child with his expression of a constipated goose.” He kneaded her shoulders. She grunted, twitched, relaxed. “Lower now,” she said, “now higher. To the right. Good. My brilliant son who cannot see what that Ghani landowner is doing. So clever, my child, but he doesn’t guess why that girl is forever ill with her piffling disorders. Listen, my boy: see the nose on your face for once: that Ghani thinks you are a good catch for her. Foreign-educated and all. I have worked in shops and been undressed by the eyes of strangers so that you should marry that Naseem! Of course I am right; otherwise why would he look twice at our family?” Aziz pressed his mother. “O God, stop now, no need to kill me because I tell you the truth!”

  By 1918, Aadam Aziz had come to live for his regular trips across the lake. And now his eagerness became even more intense, because it became clear that, after three years, th
e landowner and his daughter had become willing to lower certain barriers. Now, for the first time, Ghani said, “A lump in the right chest. Is it worrying, Doctor? Look. Look well.” And there, framed in the hole, was a perfectly-formed and lyrically lovely … “I must touch it,” Aziz said, fighting with his voice. Ghani slapped him on the back. “Touch, touch!” he cried, “The hands of the healer! The curing touch, eh, Doctor?” And Aziz reached out a hand … “Forgive me for asking; but is it the lady’s time of the month?” … Little secret smiles appearing on the faces of the lady wrestlers. Ghani, nodding affably: “Yes. Don’t be so embarrassed, old chap. We are family and doctor now.” And Aziz, “Then don’t worry. The lumps will go when the time ends.” … And the next time, “A pulled muscle in the back of her thigh, Doctor Sahib. Such pain!” And there, in the sheet, weakening the eyes of Aadam Aziz, hung a superbly rounded and impossible buttock … And now Aziz: “Is it permitted that …” Whereupon a word from Ghani; an obedient reply from behind the sheet; a drawstring pulled; and pajamas fall from the celestial rump, which swells wondrously through the hole. Aadam Aziz forces himself into a medical frame of mind … reaches out … feels. And swears to himself, in amazement, that he sees the bottom reddening in a shy, but compliant blush.

  That evening, Aadam contemplated the blush. Did the magic of the sheet work on both sides of the hole? Excitedly, he envisaged his headless Naseem tingling beneath the scrutiny of his eyes, his thermometer, his stethoscope, his fingers, and trying to build a picture in her mind of him. She was at a disadvantage, of course, having seen nothing but his hands … Aadam began to hope with an illicit desperation for Naseem Ghani to develop a migraine or graze her unseen chin, so they could look each other in the face. He knew how unprofessional his feelings were; but did nothing to stifle them. There was not much he could do. They had acquired a life of their own. In short: my grandfather had fallen in love, and had come to think of the perforated sheet as something sacred and magical, because through it he had seen the things which had filled up the hole inside him which had been created when he had been hit on the nose by a tussock and insulted by the boatman Tai.

  On the day the World War ended, Naseem developed the longed-for headache. Such historical coincidences have littered, and perhaps befouled, my family’s existence in the world.

  He hardly dared to look at what was framed in the hole in the sheet. Maybe she was hideous; perhaps that explained all this performance … he looked. And saw a soft face that was not at all ugly, a cushioned setting for her glittering, gemstone eyes, which were brown with flecks of gold: tiger’s-eyes. Doctor Aziz’s fall was complete. And Naseem burst out, “But Doctor, my God, what a nose!” Ghani, angrily, “Daughter, mind your …” But patient and doctor were laughing together, and Aziz was saying, “Yes, yes, it is a remarkable specimen. They tell me there are dynasties waiting in it …” And he bit his tongue because he had been about to add, “… like snot.”

  And Ghani, who had stood blindly beside the sheet for three long years, smiling and smiling and smiling, began once again to smile his secret smile, which was mirrored in the lips of the wrestlers.

  Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai chose to stink. For three years now, he had neither bathed nor washed himself after answering calls of nature. He wore the same clothes, unwashed, year in, year out; his one concession to winter was to put his chugha-coat over his putrescent pajamas. The little basket of hot coals which he carried inside the chugha, in the Kashmiri fashion, to keep him warm in the bitter cold, only animated and accentuated his evil odors. He took to drifting slowly past the Aziz household, releasing the dreadful fumes of his body across the small garden and into the house. Flowers died; birds fled from the ledge outside old Father Aziz’s window. Naturally, Tai lost work; the English in particular were reluctant to be ferried about by a human cesspit. The story went around the lake that Tai’s wife, driven to distraction by the old man’s sudden filthiness, pleaded for a reason. He had answered: “Ask our foreign-returned doctor, ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz.” Was it, then, an attempt to offend the Doctor’s hypersensitive nostrils (in which the itch of danger had subsided somewhat under the anaesthetizing ministrations of love)? Or a gesture of unchangingness in defiance of the invasion of the doctori-attaché from Heidelberg? Once Aziz asked the ancient, straight out, what it was all for; but Tai only breathed on him and rowed away. The breath nearly felled Aziz; it was sharp as an axe.

  In 1918, Doctor Aziz’s father, deprived of his birds, died in his sleep; and at once his mother, who had been able to sell the gemstone business thanks to the success of Aziz’s practice, and who now saw her husband’s death as a merciful release for her from a life filled with responsibilities, took to her own deathbed and followed her man before the end of his own forty-day mourning period. By the time the Indian regiments returned at the end of the war, Doctor Aziz was an orphan, and a free man—except that his heart had fallen through a hole some seven inches across.

  Desolating effect of Tai’s behavior: it ruined Doctor Aziz’s good relations with the lake’s floating population. He, who as a child had chatted freely with fishwives and flower-sellers, found himself looked at askance. “Ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz.” Tai had branded him as an alien, and therefore a person not completely to be trusted. They didn’t like the boatman, but they found the transformation which the Doctor had evidently worked upon him even more disturbing. Aziz found himself suspected, even ostracized, by the poor; and it hurt him badly. Now he understood what Tai was up to: the man was trying to chase him out of the valley.

  The story of the perforated sheet got out, too. The lady wrestlers were evidently less discreet than they looked. Aziz began to notice people pointing at him. Women giggled behind their palms …

  “I’ve decided to give Tai his victory,” he said. The three lady wrestlers, two holding up the sheet, the third hovering near the door, strained to hear him through the cotton wool in their ears. (“I made my father do it,” Naseem told him, “These chatterjees won’t do any more of their tittling and tattling from now on.”) Naseem’s eyes, hole-framed, became wider than ever.

  … Just like his own when, a few days earlier, he had been walking the city streets, had seen the last bus of the winter arrive, painted with its colorful inscriptions—on the front, GOD WILLING in green shadowed in red; on the back, blue-shadowed yellow crying THANK GOD!, and in cheeky maroon, SORRY-BYE-BYE!—and had recognized, through a web of new rings and lines on her face, Ilse Lubin as she descended …

  Nowadays, Ghani the landowner left him alone with the earplugged guardians, “To talk a little; the doctor-patient relationship can only deepen in strictest confidentiality. I see that now, Aziz Sahib—forgive my earlier intrusions.” Nowadays, Naseem’s tongue was getting freer all the time. “What kind of talk is this? What are you—a man or a mouse? To leave home because of a stinky shikara-man!” …

  “Oskar died,” Ilse told him, sipping fresh lime water on his mother’s takht. “Like a comedian. He went to talk to the army and tell them not to be pawns. The fool really thought the troops would fling down their guns and walk away. We watched from a window and I prayed they wouldn’t just trample all over him. The regiment had learned to march in step by then, you wouldn’t recognize them. As he reached the streetcorner across from the parade ground he tripped over his own shoelace and fell into the street. A staff car hit him and he died. He could never keep his laces tied, that ninny” … here there were diamonds freezing in her lashes … “He was the type that gives anarchists a bad name.”

  “All right,” Naseem conceded, “so you’ve got a good chance of landing a good job. Agra University, it’s a famous place, don’t think I don’t know. University doctor! … sounds good. Say you’re going for that, and it’s a different business.” Eyelashes drooped in the hole. “I wi
ll miss you, naturally …”

  “I’m in love,” Aadam Aziz said to Ilse Lubin. And later, “… So I’ve only seen her through a hole in a sheet, one part at a time; and I swear her bottom blushes.”

  “They must be putting something in the air up here,” Ilse said.

  “Naseem, I’ve got the job,” Aadam said excitedly. “The letter came today. With effect from April 1919. Your father says he can find a buyer for my house and the gemstone shop also.”

  “Wonderful,” Naseem pouted. “So now I must find a new doctor. Or maybe I’ll get that old hag again who didn’t know two things about anything.”

  “Because I am an orphan,” Doctor Aziz said, “I must come myself in place of my family members. But I have come nevertheless, Ghani Sahib, for the first time without being sent for. This is not a professional visit.”

  “Dear boy!” Ghani, clapping Aadam on the back. “Of course you must marry her. With an A-l fine dowry! No expense spared! It will be the wedding of the year, oh most certainly, yes!”

  “I cannot leave you behind when I go,” Aziz said to Naseem. Ghani said, “Enough of this tamasha! No more need for this sheet tomfoolery! Drop it down, you women, these are young lovers now!”

  “At last,” said Aadam Aziz, “I see you whole at last. But I must go now. My rounds … and an old friend is staying with me, I must tell her, she will be very happy for us both. A dear friend from Germany.”

  “No, Aadam baba,” his bearer said, “since the morning I have not seen Ilse Begum. She hired that old Tai to go for a shikara ride.”

  “What can be said, sir?” Tai mumbled meekly. “I am honored indeed to be summoned into the home of a so-great personage as yourself. Sir, the lady hired me for a trip to the Mughal Gardens, to do it before the lake freezes. A quiet lady, Doctor Sahib, not one word out of her all the time. So I was thinking my own unworthy private thoughts as old fools will and suddenly when I look she is not in her seat. Sahib, on my wife’s head I swear it, it is not possible to see over the back of the seat, how was I to tell? Believe a poor old boatman who was your friend when you were young …”