Midnights Children

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 nickname; quite liked it, even. Slapping my thigh, he cried, “Playing hard to get, eh? Darn right. Okay 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 rumor 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 center, 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 rumor 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 favorite 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-rumor 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