Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Using my nose (because, although it has lost the powers which enabled it, so recently, to make history, it has acquired other, compensatory gifts)-turning it inwards, I've been sniffing out the atmosphere in my grandfather's house in those days after the death of India's humming hope; and wafting down to me through the years comes a curious melange of odours, filled with unease, the whiff of things concealed mingling with the odours of burgeoning romance and the sharp stink of my grandmother's curiosity and strength… while the Muslim League rejoiced, secretly of course, at the fall of its opponent, my grandfather could be found (my nose finds him) seated every morning on what he called his 'thunderbox', tears standing in his eyes. But these are not tears of grief; Aadam Aziz has simply paid the price of being Indianized, and suffers terribly from constipation. Balefully, he eyes the enema contraption hanging on the toilet wall.

Why have I invaded my grandfather's privacy? Why, when I might have described how, after Mian Abdullah's death, Aadam buried himself in his work, taking upon himself the care of the sick in the shanty-towns by the railway tracks-rescuing them from quacks who injected them with pepperwater and thought that fried spiders could cure blindness-while continuing to fulfil his dudes as university physician; when I might have elaborated on the great love that had begun to grow between my grandfather and his second daughter, Mumtaz, whose dark skin stood between her and the affections of her mother, but whose gifts of gentleness, care and fragility endeared her to her father with his inner torments which cried out for her form of unquestioning tenderness; why, when I might have chosen to describe the by-now-constant itch in his nose, do I choose to wallow in excrement? Because this is where Aadam Aziz was, on the afternoon after his signing of a death certificate, when all of a sudden a voice-soft, cowardly, embarrassed, the voice of a rhymeless poet-spoke to him from the depths of the large old laundry-chest standing in the corner of the room, giving him a shock so profound that it proved laxative, and the enema contraption did not have to be unhooked from its perch. Rashid the rickshaw boy had let Nadir Khan into the thunderbox-room by way of the sweeper's entrance, and he had taken refuge in the washing-chest. While my grandfather's astonished sphincter relaxed, his ears heard a request for sanctuary, a request muffled by linen, dirty underwear, old shirts and the embarrassment of the speaker. And so it was that Aadam Aziz resolved to hide Nadir Khan.

Now comes the scent of a quarrel, because Reverend Mother Naseem is thinking about her daughters, twenty-one-year-old Alia, black Mumtaz, who is nineteen, and pretty, nighty Emerald, who isn't fifteen yet but has a look in her eyes that's older than anything her sisters possess. In the town, among spittoon-hitters and rickshaw-wallahs, among film-poster-trolley pushers and college students alike, the three sisters are known as the Teen Batti', the three bright lights…and how can Reverend Mother permit a strange man to dwell in the same house as Alia's gravity, Mumtaz's black, luminous skin and Emerald's eyes?… 'You are out of your mind, husband; that death has hurt your brain.' But Aziz, determinedly: 'He is staying.' In the cellars… because concealment has always been a crucial architectural consideration in India, so that Aziz's house has extensive underground chambers, which can be reached only through trap-doors in the floors, which are covered by carpets and mats… Nadir Khan hears the dull rumble of the quarrel and fears for his fate. My God (I sniff the thoughts of the clammy-palmed poet), the world is gone insane… are we men in this country? Are we beasts? And if I must go, when will the knives come for me?… And through his mind pass images of peacock-feather fans and the new moon seen through glass and transformed into a stabbing, red-stained blade… Upstairs, Reverend Mother says, 'The house is full of young unmarried girls, whatsitsname; is this how you show your daughters respect?' And now the aroma of a temper lost; the great destroying rage of Aadam Aziz is unleashed, and instead of pointing out that Nadir Khan will be under ground, swept under the carpet where he will scarcely be able to defile daughters; instead of paying due testimony to the verbless bard's sense of propriety, which is so advanced that he could not even dream of making improper advances without blushing in his sleep; instead of these avenues of reason, my grandfather bellows, 'Be silent, woman! The man needs our shelter; he will stay.' Whereupon an implacable perfume, a hard cloud of determination settles upon my grandmother, who says, 'Very well. You ask me, whatsitsname, for silence. So not one word, whatsitsname, will pass my lips from now on.' And Aziz, groaning, 'Oh, damnation, woman, spare us your crazy oaths!'

But Reverend Mother's lips were sealed, and silence descended. The smell of silence, like a rotting goose-egg, fills my nostrils; overpowering everything else, it possesses the earth… While Nadir Khan hid in his half-lit underworld, his hostess hid, too, behind a deafening wall of soundlessness. At first my grandfather probed the wall, looking for chinks; he found none. At last he gave up, and waited for her sentences to offer up their glimpses of her self, just as once he had lusted after the brief fragments of her body he had seen through a perforated sheet; and the silence filled the house, from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, so that the flies seemed to give up buzzing, and mosquitoes refrained from humming before they bit; silence stilling the hissing of geese in the courtyard. The children spoke in whispers at first, and then fell quiet: while in the cornfield, Rashid the rickshaw boy yelled his silent 'yell of hate', and kept his own vow of silence, which he had sworn upon his mother's hairs.

Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice, as a result, was thin and sharp-it had to be, to squeeze through the narrow gap between his breathing apparatus and his jaw… a man whose short sight obliged him to take life one step at a time, which gained him a reputation for thoroughness and dullness, and endeared him to his superiors by enabling them to feel well-served without feeling threatened; a man whose starched, pressed uniform reeked of Blanco and rectitude, and about whom, despite his appearance of a character out of a puppet-show, there hung the unmistakable scent of success: Major Zulfikar, a man with a future, came to call, as he had promised, to tie up a few loose ends. Abdullah's murder, and Nadir Khan's suspicious disappearance, were much on his mind, and since he knew about Aadam Aziz's infection by the optimism bug, he mistook the silence in the house for a hush of mourning, and did not stay for long. (In the cellar, Nadir huddled with cockroaches.) Sitting quietly in the drawing-room with the five children, his hat and stick beside him on the Telefunken radiogram, the life-size images of the young Azizes staring at him from the walls, Major Zulfikar fell in love. He was short-sighted, but he wasn't blind, and in the impossibly adult gaze of young Emerald, the brightest of the 'three bright lights', he saw that she had understood his future, and forgiven him, because of it, for his appearance; and before he left, he had decided to marry her after a decent interval. ('Her?' Padma guesses. 'That hussy is your mother?' But there are other mothers-to-be, other future fathers, wafting in and out through the silence.)

In that marshy time without words the emotional life of grave Alia, the eldest, was also developing; and Reverend Mother, locked up in the pantry and kitchen, sealed behind her lips, was incapable-because of her vow-of expressing her distrust of the young merchant in reccine and leathercloth who came to visit her daughter. (Aadam Aziz had always insisted that his daughters be permitted to have male friends.) Ahmed Sinai-'Ahaa!' yells Padma in triumphant recognition-had met Alia at the University, and seemed intelligent enough for the bookish, brainy girl on whose face my grandfather's nose had acquired an air of overweight wisdom; but Naseem Aziz felt uneasy about him, because he had been divorced at twenty. ('Anyone can make one mistake,' Aadam had told her, and that nearly began a fight, because she thought for a moment that there had been something overly personal in his tone of voice. But then Aadam had added, 'Just let this divorce of his fade away for a year or two; then we'll give this house its first wedding, with a big marquee in the garden, and singers and sweetmeats and all.' Which, despite everything, was an idea that appealed to Naseem.) Now, wandering through the walled-jn gardens of silence, Ahmed Sinai and Alia communed without speech; but although everyone expected him to propose, the silence seemed to have got through to him, too, and the question remained unasked. Alia's face acquired a weigh tiness at this time, a jowly pessimistic quality which she was never entirely to lose. ('Now then,' Padma reproves me, 'that's no way to describe your respected motherji.')