Midnights Children

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 are fine, darn it, but even a national heroine needs air!”
    There was applause, too, on the evening Jamila Singer (and family) was invited to President House to sing for the commander of pepperpots. Ignoring reports in foreign magazines about embezzled money and Swiss bank accounts, we scrubbed ourselves until we shone; a family in the towel business is obliged to be spotlessly clean. Uncle Puffs gave his gold teeth an extra-careful polish; and in a large hall dominated by garlanded portraits of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Quaid-i-Azam, and of his assassinated friend and successor Liaquat Ali, a perforated sheet was held up and my sister sang. Jamila’s voice fell silent at last; the voice of gold braid succeeded her brocade-bordered song. “Jamila daughter,” we heard, “your voice will be a sword for purity; it will be a weapon with which we shall cleanse men’s souls.” President Ayub was, by his own admission, a simple soldier; he instilled in my sister the simple, soldierly virtues of faith-in-leaders and trust-in-God; and she, “The President’s will is the voice of my heart.” Through the hole in a perforated sheet, Jamila Singer dedicated herself to patriotism; and the diwan-i-khas, the hall of this private audience, rang with applause, polite now, not the wild wah-wahing of the Bambino crowd, but the regimented approbation of braided gongs-and-pips and the delighted clapping of weepy parents. “I say!” Uncle Puffs whispered, “Darn fine, eh?”
    What I could smell, Jamila could sing. Truth beauty happiness pain: each had its separate fragrance, and could be distinguished by my nose; each, in Jamila’s performances, could find its ideal voice. My nose, her voice: they were exactly complementary gifts; but they were growing apart. While Jamila sang patriotic songs, my nose seemed to prefer to linger on the uglier smells which invaded it: the bitterness of Aunt Alia, the hard unchanging stink of my fellow-students’ closed minds; so that while she rose into the clouds, I fell into the gutter.
    Looking back, however, I think I was already in love with her, long before I was told … is there proof of Saleem’s unspeakable sister-love? There is. Jamila Singer had one passion in common with the vanished Brass Monkey; she loved bread. Chapatis, parathas, tandoori nans? Yes, but. Well then: was yeast preferred? It was; my sister—despite patriotism—hankered constantly after leavened bread. And, in all Karachi, what was the only source of quality, yeasty loaves? Not a baker’s; the best bread in the city was handed out through a hatch in an otherwise blind wall, every Thursday morning, by the sisters of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia. Each week, on my Lambretta scooter, I brought my sister the warm fresh loaves of nuns. Despite long snaking queues; making light of the