Salman Rushdie: Midnight's children

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 odours. 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 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-attache 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 behaviour: 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 colourful 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, Ike Lubin as she descended…

Nowadays, Ghani the landowner left him alone with 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 will 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,' Use 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-1 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 honoured 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…'

'Aadam baba,' the old bearer interrupted, 'excuse me but just now I have found this paper on her table.'

'I know where she is,' Doctor Aziz stared at Tai. 'I don't know how you keep getting mixed up in my life; but you showed me the place once. You said: certain foreign women come here to drown.'

'I, Sahib?' Tai shocked, malodorous, innocent. 'But grief is making your head play trick! How can I know these things?'