Midnights Children

is asking to be let in, nuns are opening doors as she cries sanctuary, yes, there she is, safely inside, doors being bolted behind her, exchanging one kind of invisibility for another, there is another Reverend Mother now, as Jamila Singer who once, as the Brass Monkey, flirted with Christianity, finds safety shelter peace in the midst of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia … yes, she is there, safe, not vanished, not in the grip of police who kick beat starve, but at rest, not in an unmarked grave by the side of the Indus, but alive, baking bread, singing sweetly to the secret nuns; I know, I know, I know. How do I know? A brother knows; that’s all.
    Responsibility, assaulting me yet again: because there is no way out of it—Jamila’s fall was, as usual, all my fault.
    I lived in the home of Mr. Mustapha Aziz for four hundred and twenty days … Saleem was in belated mourning for his dead; but do not think for one moment that my ears were closed! Don’t assume I didn’t hear what was being said around me, the repeated quarrels between uncle and aunt (which may have helped him decide to consign her to the insane asylum): Sonia Aziz yelling, “That bhangi—that dirtyfilthy fellow, not even your nephew, I don’t know what’s got into you, we should throw him out on his ear!” And Mustapha, quietly, replying: “Poor chap is stricken with grief, so how can we, you just have to look to see, he is not quite right in the head, has suffered many bad things.” Not quite right in the head! That was tremendous, coming from them—from that family beside which a tribe of gibbering cannibals would have seemed calm and civilized! Why did I put up with it? Because I was a man with a dream. But for four hundred and twenty days, it was a dream which failed to come true.
    Droopy-moustachioed, tall-but-stooped, an eternal number-two: my uncle Mustapha was not my uncle Hanif. He was the head of the family now, the only one of his generation to survive the holocaust of 1965; but he gave me no help at all … I bearded him in his genealogy-filled study one bitter evening and explained—with proper solemnity and humble but resolute gestures—my historic mission to rescue the nation from her fate; but he sighed deeply and said, “Listen, Saleem, what would you have me do? I keep you in my house; you eat my bread and do nothing—but that is all right, you are from my dead sister’s house, and I must look after—so stay, rest, get well in yourself; then let us see. You want a clerkship or so, maybe it can be fixed; but leave these dreams of God-knows-what. Our country is in safe hands. Already Indiraji is making radical reforms—land reforms, tax structures, education, birth control—you can leave it to her and her sarkar.” Patronizing me, Padma! As if I were a foolish child! O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts!
    At every turn I am thwarted; a prophet in the wilderness, like Maslama, like ibn Sinan! No matter how I try, the desert is my lot. O vile unhelpfulness of lickspittle uncles! O fettering of ambitions by second-best toadying relatives! My uncle’s rejection of my pleas for preferment had one grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested her. He was, in fact, preparing me for my return to the magicians’ ghetto, and for … for
her
… the Widow.
    Jealousy: that was it. The green jealousy of my mad aunt Sonia, dripping like poison into my uncle’s ears, prevented him from doing a single thing to get me started on my chosen career. The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also: tiny madwomen.
    On the four hundred and eighteenth day of my stay, there was a change in the atmosphere of the madhouse. Someone came to dinner: someone with a plump stomach, a tapering head covered with oily curls and a mouth as fleshy as a woman’s labia. I thought I recognized him from newspaper photographs. Turning to one of my sexless ageless faceless cousins, I inquired with interest, “Isn’t it, you know, San-jay Gandhi?” But the pulverized creature was too annihilated to be capable of replying … was it wasn’t it? I did not, at that time, know what I now set down: that certain high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons of prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves … a few years later, there would be gangs of Sanjays all over India! No wonder that incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth