Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Nodding signboards had scarcely been taken down when the demolition crews of the Narlikar women moved in; Buckingham Villa was enveloped in the tumultuous dust of the dying palaces of William Methwold. Concealed by dust from Warden Road below, we were nevertheless still vulnerable to telephones; and it was the telephone which informed us, in the tremulous voice of my aunt Pia, of the suicide of my beloved uncle Hanif. Deprived of the income he had received from Homi Catrack, my uncle had taken his booming voice and his obsessions with hearts and reality up to the roof of his Marine Drive apartment block; he had stepped out into the evening sea-breeze, frightening the beggars so much (when he fell) that they gave up pretending to be blind and ran away yelling… in death as in life, Hanif Aziz espoused the cause of truth and put illusion to flight. He was nearly thirty-four years old. Murder breeds death; by killing Homi Catrack, I had killed my uncle, too. It was my fault; and the dying wasn't over yet.

The family gathered at Buckingham Villa: from Agra, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother; from Delhi, my uncle Mustapha, the Civil Servant who had polished the art of agreeing with his superiors to the point at which they had stopped hearing him, which is why he never got promoted; and his half-Irani wife Sonia and their children who had been so thoroughly beaten into insignificance that I can't even remember how many of them there were; and from Pakistan, bitter Alia, and even General Zulfikar and my aunt Emerald, who brought twenty-seven pieces of luggage and two servants, and never stopped looking at their watches and inquiring about the date. Their son Zafar also came. And, to complete the circle, my mother brought Pia to stay in our house, 'at least for the forty-day mourning period, my sister.'

For forty days, we were besieged by the dust; dust creeping under the wet towels we placed around all the windows, dust slyly following in each mourning arrival, dust filtering through the very walls to hang like a shapeless wraith in the air,' dust deadening the sounds of formal ululation and also the deadly sniping of grieving kinsfolk; the remnants of Methwold's Estate settled on my grandmother and goaded her towards a great fury; they irritated the pinched nostrils of Punchinello-faced General Zulfikar and forced him to sneeze on to his chin. In the ghost-haze of the dust it sometimes seemed we could discern the shapes of the past, the mirage of Lila Sabarmati's pulverized pianola or the prison bars at the window of Toxy Catrack's cell; Dubash's nude statuette danced in dust-form through our chambers, and Sonny Ibrahim's bullfight-posters visited us as clouds. The Narlikar women had moved away while bulldozers did their work; we were alone inside the dust-storm, which gave us all the appearance of neglected furniture, as if we were chairs and tables which had been abandoned for decades without covering-sheets; we looked like the ghosts of ourselves. We were a dynasty born out of a nose, the aquiline monster on the face of Aadam Aziz, and the dust, entering our nostrils in our time of grief, broke down our reserve, eroded the barriers which permit families to survive; in the dust storm of the dying palaces things were said and seen and done from which none of us ever recovered.

It was started by Reverend Mother, perhaps because the years had filled her out until she resembled the Sankara Acharya mountain in her native Srinagar, so that she presented the dust with the largest surface area to attack. Rumbling up from her mountainous body came a noise like an avalanche, which, when it turned into words, became a fierce attack on aunt Pia, the bereaved widow. We had all noticed that my mumani was behaving unusually. There was an unspoken feeling that an actress of her standing should have risen to the challenge of widowhood in high style; we had unconsciously been eager to see her grieving, looking forward to watching an accomplished tragedienne orchestrate her own calamity, anticipating a forty-day raga in which bravura and gentleness, howling pain and soft despond would all be blended in the exact proportions of art; but Pia remained still, dry-eyed, and anticlimactically composed. Amina Sinai and Emerald Zulfikar wept and rent their hair, trying to spark off Pia's talents; but finally, when it seemed nothing would move Pia, Reverend Mother lost patience. The dust entered her disappointed fury and increased its bitterness. 'That woman, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother rumbled, didn't I tell you about her? My son, Allah, he could have been anything, but no, whatsitsname, she must make him ruin his life; he must jump off a roof, whatsitsname, to be free of her.'

It was said; could not be unsaid. Pia sat like stone; my insides shook like cornflour pudding. Reverend Mother went grimly on; she swore an oath upon the hairs of her dead son's head. 'Until that woman shows my son's memory some respect, whatsitsname, until she takes out a wife's true tears, no food will pass my lips. It is shame and scandal, whatsitsname, how she sits with antimony instead of tears in her eyes!' The house resounded with this echo of her old wars with Aadam Aziz. And until the twentieth day of the forty, we were all afraid that my grandmother would die of starvation and the forty days would have to start all over again. She lay dustily on her bed; we waited and feared.

I broke the stalemate between grandmother and aunt; so at least I can legitimately claim to have saved one life. On the twentieth day, I sought out Pia Aziz who sat in her ground-floor room like a blind woman; as an excuse for my visit, I apologized clumsily for my indiscretions in the Marine Drive apartment. Pia spoke, after a distant silence: 'Always melodrama,' she said, flatly, 'In his family members, in his work. He died for his hate of melodrama; it is why I would not cry.' At the time I did not understand; now I'm sure that Pia Aziz was exactly right. Deprived of a livelihood by spurning the cheap-thrill style of the Bombay cinema, my uncle strolled off the edge of a roof; melodrama inspired (and perhaps tainted) his final dive to earth. Pia's refusal to weep was in honour of his memory… but the effort of admitting it breached the walls of her self-control. Dust made her sneeze; the sneeze brought tears to her eyes; and now the tears would not stop, and we all witnessed our hoped-for performance after all, because once they fell they fell like Flora Fountain, and she was unable to resist her own talent; she shaped the flood like the performer she was, introducing dominant themes and subsidiary motifs, beating her astonishing breasts in a manner genuinely painful to observe, now squeezing, now pummelling… she tore her garments and her hair. It was an exaltation of tears, and it persuaded Reverend Mother to eat. Dal and pistachio-nuts poured into my grandmother while salt water flooded from my aunt. Now Naseem Aziz descended upon Pia, embracing her, turning the solo into a duet, mingling the music of reconciliation with the unbearably beautiful tunes of grief. Our palms itched with inexpressible applause. And the best was still to come, because Pia, the artiste, brought her epic efforts to a superlative close. Laying her head in her mother-in-law's lap, she said in a voice filled with submission and emptiness, 'Ma, let your unworthy daughter listen to you at last; tell me what to do, I will do.' And Reverend Mother, tearfully: 'Daughter, your father Aziz and I will go to Rawalpindi soon; in our old age we will live near our youngest daughter, our Emerald. You will also come, and a petrol pump will be purchased.' And so it was that Reverend Mother's dream began to come true, and Pia Aziz agreed to relinquish the world of films for that of fuel. My uncle Hanif, I thought, would probably have approved.

The dust affected us all during those forty days; it made Ahmed Sinai churlish and raucous, so that he refused to sit in the company of his in-laws and made Alice Pereira relay messages to the mourners, messages which he also yelled out from his office: 'Keep the racket down! I am working in the middle of this hullabaloo!' It made General Zulfikar and Emerald look constantly at calendars and airline timetables, while their son Zafar began to boast to the Brass Monkey that he was getting his father to arrange a marriage between them. 'You should think you're lucky,' this cocky cousin told my sister, 'My father is a big man in Pakistan.' But although Zafar had inherited his father's looks, the dust had clogged up the Monkey's spirits, and she didn't have the heart to fight him. Meanwhile my aunt Alia spread her ancient, dusty disappointment through the air and my most absurd relatives, the family of my uncle Mustapha, sat sullenly in corners and were forgotten, as usual; Mustapha Aziz's moustache, proudly waxed and upturned at the tips when he arrived, had long since sagged under the depressive influence of the dust.