Midnights Children

swear no food will come from my kitchen to your lips! No, not one chapati, until you bring the maulvi sahib back and kiss his, whatsitsname, feet!”
    The war of starvation which began that day very nearly became a duel to the death. True to her word, Reverend Mother did not hand her husband, at mealtimes, so much as an empty plate. Doctor Aziz took immediate reprisals, by refusing to feed himself when he was out. Day by day the five children watched their father disappearing, while their mother grimly guarded the dishes of food. “Will you be able to vanish completely?” Emerald asked with interest, adding solicitously, “Don’t do it unless you know how to come back again.” Aziz’s face acquired craters; even his nose appeared to be getting thinner. His body had become a battlefield and each day a piece of it was blasted away. He told Alia, his eldest, the wise child: “In any war, the field of battle suffers worse devastation than either army. This is natural.” He began to take rickshaws when he did his rounds. Hamdard the rickshaw-wallah began to worry about him.
    The Rani of Cooch Naheen sent emissaries to plead with Reverend Mother. “India isn’t full enough of starving people?” the emissaries asked Naseem, and she unleashed a basilisk glare which was already becoming a legend. Hands clasped in her lap, a muslin dupatta wound miser-tight around her head, she pierced her visitors with lid-less eyes and stared them down. Their voices turned to stone; their hearts froze; and alone in a room with strange men, my grandmother sat in triumph, surrounded by downcast eyes. “Full enough, whatsitsname?” she crowed. “Well, perhaps. But also, perhaps not.”
    But the truth was that Naseem Aziz was very anxious; because while Aziz’s death by starvation would be a clear demonstration of the superiority of her idea of the world over his, she was unwilling to be widowed for a mere principle; yet she could see no way out of the situation which did not involve her in backing down and losing face, and having learned to bare her face, my grandmother was most reluctant to lose any of it.
    “Fall ill, why don’t you?”—Alia, the wise child, found the solution. Reverend Mother beat a tactical retreat, announced a pain, a killing pain absolutely, whatsitsname, and took to her bed. In her absence Alia extended the olive branch to her father, in the shape of a bowl of chicken soup. Two days later, Reverend Mother rose (having refused to be examined by her husband for the first time in her life), reassumed her powers, and with a shrug of acquiescence in her daughter’s decision, passed Aziz his food as though it were a mere trifle of a business.
    That was ten years earlier; but still, in 1942, the old men at the paan-shop are stirred by the sight of the whistling doctor into giggling memories of the time when his wife had nearly made him do a disappearing trick, even though he didn’t know how to come back. Late into the evening they nudge each other with, “Do you remember when—” and “Dried up like a skeleton on a washing-line! He couldn’t even ride his—” and “—I tell you, baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream her daughters’ dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!” But as evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest. Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a pursing of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but instead a long red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in unerring accuracy towards an old brass spittoon. There is much slapping of thighs and self-admiring utterance of “Wah, wah, sir!” and, “Absolutely master shot!” … Around the oldsters, the town fades into desultory evening pastimes. Children play hoop and kabaddi and draw beards on posters of Mian Abdullah. And now the old men place the spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting-place, and aim longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. “Oh too good, yara!” The street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams, superimposing this game of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon … But here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes … here, Brigadier Dodson, the town’s military commander, stifling with heat … and here, his A.D.C., Major Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face;