Midnights Children

film-stardom. “My family, whatsitsname,” she sighed to Pia mumani, “is even less controllable than the price of gas.” Secretly, however, she may have been impressed, because she respected power and position and Jamila was now so exalted as to be welcome in the most powerful and best-placed houses in the land … my grandmother settled in Rawalpindi; however, with a strange show of independence, she chose not to live in the house of General Zulfikar. She and my aunt Pia moved into a modest bungalow in the old part of town; and by pooling their savings, purchased a concession on the long-dreamed-of petrol pump.
    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 bereavement 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 recharge 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 humor, “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