Midnights Children

push your head into it, add some dahi, and make, whatsitsname, a korma.” I don’t know how my grandmother came to adopt the term
whatsitsname
as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry for help … as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe. She didn’t know, you see, what it was called.
    … And at the dinner-table, imperiously, she continued to rule. No food was set upon the table, no plates were laid. Curry and crockery were marshalled upon a low side-table by her right hand, and Aziz and the children ate what she dished out. It is a sign of the power of this custom that, even when her husband was afflicted by constipation, she never once permitted him to choose his food, and listened to no requests or words of advice. A fortress may not move. Not even when its dependants’ movements become irregular.
    During the long concealment of Nadir Khan, during the visits to the house on Cornwallis Road of young Zulfikar who fell in love with Emerald and of the prosperous reccine-and-leathercloth merchant named Ahmed Sinai who hurt my aunt Alia so badly that she bore a grudge for twenty-five years before discharging it cruelly upon my mother, Reverend Mother’s iron grip upon her household never faltered; and even before Nadir’s arrival precipitated the great silence, Aadam Aziz had tried to break this grip, and been obliged to go to war with his wife. (All this helps to show how remarkable his affliction by optimism actually was.)
    … In 1932, ten years earlier, he had taken control of his children’s education. Reverend Mother was dismayed; but it was a father’s traditional role, so she could not object. Alia was eleven; the second daughter, Mumtaz, was almost nine. The two boys, Hanif and Mustapha, were eight and six, and young Emerald was not yet five. Reverend Mother took to confiding her fears to the family cook, Daoud. “He fills their heads with I don’t know what foreign languages, whatsitsname, and other rubbish also, no doubt.” Daoud stirred pots and Reverend Mother cried, “Do you wonder, whatsitsname, that the little one calls herself Emerald? In English, whatsitsname? That man will ruin my children for me. Put less cumin in that, whatsitsname, you should pay more attention to your cooking and less to minding other people’s business.”
    She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction. Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. “You have your Hummingbird,” she told him, “but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man’s hum.” It was one of her rare political comments … and then the day arrived when Aziz threw out the religious tutor. Thumb and forefinger closed around the maulvi’s ear. Naseem Aziz saw her husband leading the stragglebearded wretch to the door in the garden wall; gasped; then cried out as her husband’s foot was applied to the divine’s fleshy parts. Unleashing thunderbolts, Reverend Mother sailed into battle.
    “Man without dignity!” she cursed her husband, and, “Man without, whatsitsname,
shame
!” Children watched from the safety of the back verandah. And Aziz, “Do you know what that man was teaching your children?,” And Reverend Mother hurling question against question, “What will you not do to bring disaster, whatsitsname, on our heads?”—But now Aziz, “You think it was Nastaliq script? Eh?”—to which his wife, warming up: “Would you eat pig? Whatsitsname? Would you spit on the Quran?” And, voice rising, the doctor ripostes, “Or was it some verses of ‘The Cow’? You think that?” … Paying no attention, Reverend Mother arrives at her climax: “Would you marry your daughters to Germans!?” And pauses, fighting for breath, letting my grandfather reveal, “He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs and who knows what other vegetarians. Will you have hateful children, woman?”
    “Will you have godless ones?” Reverend Mother envisages the legions of the Archangel Gabriel descending at night to carry her heathen brood to Hell. She has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages … “I take this oath, whatsitsname,” my grandmother said, “I