Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

It is fortunate for Jamila Singer's legion of fans that Ahmed Sinai was a man in love with his wife; mellowed by his own happiness, he failed to eject Major Latif on the spot. I also believe today that my parents had already come to the conclusion that their daughter's gift was too extraordinary to keep to themselves; the sublime magic of her angel's voice had begun to teach them the inevitable imperatives of talent. But Ahmed and Amina had one concern. 'Our daughter,' Ahmed said-he was always the more old-fashioned of the two beneath the surface-'is from a good family; but you want to put her on a stage in front of God knows how many strange men… ?' The Major looked affronted. 'Sir,' he said stiffly, 'you think I am not a man of sensibility? Got daughters myself, old man. Seven, thank God. Set up a little travel agency business for them; strictly over the telephone, though. Wouldn't dream of sitting them in an office-window. It's the biggest telephonic travel agency in the place, actually. We send train-drivers to England, matter of fact; bus-wallahs, too. My point,' he added hastily, 'is that your daughter would be given as much respect as mine. More, actually; she's going to be a star!'

Major Latif's daughters-Sana and Rafia and five other-afias-were dubbed, collectively, 'the Puffias' by the remaining Monkey in my sister; their father was nicknamed first Tather-Puffia' and then Uncle-a courtesy title-Puffs. He was as good as his word; in six months Jamila Singer was to have hit records, an army of admirers, everything; and all, as I'll explain in a moment, without revealing her face.

Uncle Puffs became a fixture in our lives; he visited the Clayton Road house most evenings, at what I used to think of as the cocktail hour, to sip pomegranate juice and ask Jamila to sing a little something. She, who was growing into the sweetest-natured of girls, always obliged… afterwards he would clear his throat as if something had got stuck in it and begin to joke heartily with me about getting married. Twenty-four-carat grins blinded me as he, 'Time you took a wife, young man. Take my advice: pick a girl with good brains and bad teeth; you'll have got a friend and a safe-deposit box rolled into one!' Uncle Puffs' daughters, he claimed, all conformed to the above description… I, embarrassed, smelling out that he was only half-joking, would cry, 'O, Uncle Puffs!' He knew his nick-name; quite liked it, even. Slapping my thigh, he cried, 'Playing hard to get, eh? Darn right. O.K., my boy: you pick one of my girls, and I guarantee to have all her teeth pulled out; by the time you marry her she'll have a million-buck smile for a dowry!' Whereupon my mother usually contrived to change the subject; she wasn't keen on Uncle Puffs' idea, no matter how pricey the dentures… on that first night, as so often afterwards, Jamila sang to Major Alauddin Latif. Her voice wafted out through the window and silenced the traffic; the birds stopped chattering and, at the hamburger shop across the street, the radio was switched off; the street was full of stationary people, and my sister's voice washed over them… when she finished, we noticed that Uncle Puffs was crying.

'A jewel,' he said, honking into a handkerchief, 'Sir and Madam, your daughter is a jewel. I am humbled, absolutely. Darn humbled. She has proved to me that a golden voice is preferable even to golden teeth.'

And when Jamila Singer's fame had reached the point at which she could no longer avoid giving a public concert, it was Uncle Puffs who started the rumour that she had been involved in a terrible, disfiguring car-crash; it was Major (Retired) Latif who devised her famous, all-concealing, white silk chadar, the curtain or veil, heavily embroidered in gold brocade-work and religious calligraphy, behind which she sat demurely whenever she performed in public. The chadar of Jamila Singer was held up by two tireless, muscular figures, also (but more simply) veiled from head to foot-the official story was that they were her female attendants, but their sex was impossible to determine through their burqas; and at its very centre, the Major had cut a hole. Diameter: three inches. Circumference: embroidered in finest gold thread. That was how the history of our family once again became the fate of a nation, because when Jamila sang with her lips pressed against the brocaded aperture, Pakistan fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl whom it only ever glimpsed through a gold-and-white perforated sheet.

The accident rumour set the final seal on her popularity; her concerts packed out the Bambino theatre in Karachi and filled the Shalimar-bagh in Lahore; her records constantly topped the sales charts. And as she became public property, 'Pakistan's Angel', 'The Voice of the Nation', the 'Bulbul-e-Din' or nightingale-of-the-faith, and began to receive one thousand and one firm proposals of marriage a week; as she became the whole country's favourite daughter and grew into an existence which threatened to overwhelm her place in our own family, so she fell prey to the twin viruses of fame, the first of which made her the victim of her own public image, because the accident-rumour obliged her to wear a gold-and-white burqa at all times, even in my aunt Alia's school, which she continued to attend; while the second virus subjected her to the exaggerations and simplifications of self which are the unavoidable side-effects of stardom, so that the blind and blinding devoutness and the right-or-wrong nationalism which had already begun to emerge in her now began to dominate her personality, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Publicity imprisoned her inside a gilded tent; and, being the new daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident aspects of the national persona than to the child-world of her Monkey years.

Jamila Singer's voice was on Voice-Of-Pakistan Radio constantly, so that in the villages of West and East Wings she came to seem like a superhuman being, incapable of being fatigued, an angel who sang to her people through all the days and nights; while Ahmed Sinai, whose few remaining qualms about his daughter's career had been more than allayed by her enormous earnings (although he had once been a Delhi man, he was by now a true Bombay Muslim at heart, placing cash matters above most other things), became fond of telling my sister: 'You see, daughter: decency, purity, art and good business sense can be one and the same things; your old father has been wise enough to work that out.' Jamila smiled sweetly and agreed… she was growing out of scrawny tomboy youth into a slender, slant-eyed, golden-skinned beauty whose hair was nearly long enough to sit on; even her nose looked good. 'In my daughter,' Ahmed Sinai told Uncle Puffs proudly, 'it is my side of the family's noble features which have prevailed.' Uncle Puffs cast a quizzical, awkward glance at me and cleared his throat. 'Darn fine-looking girl, sir,' he told my father, 'Top-hole, by gum.'

The thunder of applause was never far from my sister's ears; at her first, now-legendary Bambino recital (we sat in seats provided by Uncle Puffs-'Best darn seats in the house!'-beside his seven Puffias, all veiled… Uncle Puffs dug me in the ribs, 'Hey, boy-choose! Take your pick! Remember: the dowry!' and I blushed and stared hard at the stage), the cries of 'Wah! Wah!' were sometimes louder than Jamila's voice; and after the show we found Jamila back-stage drowning in a sea of flowers, so that we had to fight our way through the blossoming camphor garden of the nation's love, to find that she was almost fainting, not from fatigue, but from the overpoweringly sweet perfume of adoration with which the blooms had filled the room. I, too, felt my head beginning to swim; until Uncle Puffs began to hurl flowers in great bushels from an open window-they were gathered by a crowd of fans-while he cried, 'Flowers arc fine, darn it, but even a national heroine needs air!'