Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Naseem never mentioned Aadam Aziz, nor would she grieve over him; it was almost as though she were relieved that my querulous grandfather, who had in his youth despised the Pakistan movement, and who in all probability blamed the Muslim League for the death of his friend Mian Abdullah, had by dying permitted her to go alone into the Land of the Pure. Setting her face against the past, Reverend Mother concentrated on gasoline and oil. The pump was on a prime site, near the Rawalpindi-Lahore grand trunk road-it did very well. Pia and Naseem took it in turns to spend the day in the manager's glass booth while attendants filled up cars and Army trucks. They proved a magical combination. Pia attracted customers with the beacon of a beauty which obstinately refused to fade; while Reverend Mother, who had been transformed by bereave, ment into a woman who was more interested in other people's lives than her own, took to inviting the pump's customers into her glass booth for cups of pink Kashmiri tea; they would accept with some trepidation, but when they realized that the old lady did not propose to bore them with endless reminiscences, they relaxed, loosened collars and tongues, and Reverend Mother was able to bathe in the blessed oblivion of other people's lives. The pump rapidly became famous in those parts, drivers began to go out of their way to use it-often on two consecutive days, so that they could both feast their eyes on my divine aunt and tell their woes to my eternally patient grandmother, who had developed the absorbent properties of a sponge, and always waited until her guests had completely finished before squeezing out of her own lips a few drops of simple, firm advice-while their cars were filled up with petrol and polished by pump-attendants, my grandmother would re-charge and polish their lives. She sat in her glass confessional and solved the problems of the world; her own family, however, seemed to have lost importance in her eyes.

Moustachioed, matriarchal, proud: Naseem Aziz had found her own way of coping with tragedy; but in finding it had become the first victim of that spirit of detached fatigue which made the end the only possible solution. (Tick, tock.)… However, on the face of it, she appeared to have not the slightest intention of following her husband into the camphor garden reserved for the righteous; she seemed to have more in common with the methuselah leaders of her abandoned India. She grew, with alarming rapidity, wider and wider; until builders were summoned to expand her glassed-in booth. 'Make it big big,' she instructed them, with a rare flash of humour, 'Maybe I'll still be here after a century, whatsitsname, and Allah knows how big I'll have become; I don't want to be troubling you every ten-twelve years.'

Pia Aziz, however, was not content with 'pumpery-shumpery'. She began a series of liaisons with colonels cricketers polo-players diplomats, which were easy to conceal from a Reverend Mother who had lost interest in the doings of everyone except strangers; but which were otherwise the talk of what was, after all, a small town. My aunt Emerald took Pia to task; she replied: 'You want me to be forever howling and pulling hair? I'm still young; young folk should gad a little.' Emerald, thin-lipped: 'But be a little respectable… the family name…' At which Pia tossed her head. 'You be respectable, sister,' she said, 'Me, I'll be alive.'

But it seems to me that there was something hollow in Pia's self-assertion; that she, too, felt her personality draining away with the years; that her feverish romancing was a last desperate attempt to behave 'in character'-in the way a woman like her was supposed to do. Her heart wasn't in it; somewhere inside, she, too, was waiting for an end… In my family, we have always been vulnerable to things which fall from the skies, ever since Ahmed Sinai was slapped by a vulture-dropped hand; and bolts from the blue were only a year away.

After the news of my grandfather's death and the arrival of Reverend Mother in Pakistan, I began to dream repeatedly of Kashmir; although I had never walked in Shalimar-bagh, I did so at night; I floated in shikaras and climbed Sankara Acharya's hill as my grandfather had; I saw lotus-roots and mountains like angry jaws. This, too, may be seen as an aspect of the detachment which came to afflict us all (except Jamila, who had God and country to keep her going)-a reminder of my family's separateness from both India and Pakistan. In Rawalpindi, my grandmother drank pink Kashmiri tea; in Karachi, her grandson was washed by the waters of a lake he had never seen. It would not be long before the dream of Kashmir spilled over into the minds of the rest of the population of Pakistan; connection-to-history refused to abandon me, and I found my dream becoming, in 1965, the common property of the nation, and a factor of prime importance in the coming end, when all manner of things fell from the skies, and I was purified at last.

Saleem could sink no lower: I could smell, on myself, the cess-pit stink of my iniquities. I had come to the Land of the Pure, and sought the company of whores-when I should have been forging a new, upright life for myself, I gave birth, instead, to an unspeakable (and also unrequited) love. Possessed by the beginnings of the great fatalism which was to overwhelm me, I rode the city streets on my Lambretta; Jamila and I avoided each, other as much as possible, unable, for the first time in our lives, to say a word to one another.

Purity-that highest of ideals!-that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister's songs!-seemed very far away; how could I have known that history-which has the power of pardoning sinners-was at that moment counting down towards a moment in which it would manage, at one stroke, to cleanse me from head to foot?

In the meantime, other forces were spending themselves; Alia Aziz had begun to wreak her awful spinster's revenge.

Guru Mandir days: paan-smells, cooking-smells, the languorous odour of the shadow of the minaret, the mosque's long pointing finger: while my aunt Alia's hatred of the man who had abandoned her and of the sister who had married him grew into a tangible, visible thing, it sat on her living-room rug like a great gecko, reeking of vomit; but it seemed I was the only one to smell it, because Alia's skill at dissimulation had grown as rapidly as the hairiness of her chin and her adeptness with the plasters with which, each evening, she ripped her beard out by the roots.

My aunt Alia's contribution to the fate of nations-through her school and college-must not be minimized. Having allowed her old-maid frustrations to leak into the curricula, the bricks and also the students at her twin educational establishments, she had raised a tribe of children and young adults who felt themselves possessed by an ancient vengefulness, without fully knowing why. O omnipresent aridity of maiden aunts! It soured the paintwork of her home; her furniture was made lumpy by the harsh stuffing of bitterness; old-maid repressions were sewn into curtain-seams. As once long ago into baby things of. Bitterness, issuing through the fissures of the earth.

What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the lonely madness of the years, raised to the level of an art-form: the impregnation of food with emotions. To whom she remained second in her achievements in this field: my old ayah, Mary Pereira. By whom, today, both old cooks have been outdone: Saleem Sinai, pickler-in-chief at the Braganza pickle works… nevertheless, while we lived in her Guru Mandir mansion, she fed us the birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord; and little by little, even the harmonies of my parents' autumnal love went out of tune.

But good things must also be said about my aunt. In politics, she spoke out vociferously against government-by-military-say-so; if she had not had a General for a brother-in-law, her school and college might well have been taken out of her hands. Let me not show her entirely through the dark glass of my private despondency: she had given lecture-tours in the Soviet Union and America. Also, her food tasted good. (Despite its hidden content.)