Midnights Children

great regularity. (Boiling water. Literally. While his mother said, “We’ll kill that boatman’s bugs if it kills you.”) But still the old soliloquist would dawdle in his boat at the garden’s lakeside toes and Aziz would sit at his feet until voices summoned him indoors to be lectured on Tai’s filthiness and warned about the pillaging armies of germs his mother envisaged leaping from that hospitably ancient body on to her son’s starched white loose-pajamas. But always Aadam returned to the water’s edge to scan the mists for the ragged reprobate’s hunched-up frame steering its magical boat through the enchanted waters of the morning.
    “But how old are you really, Taiji?” (Doctor Aziz, adult, red-bearded, slanting towards the future, remembers the day he asked the unaskable question.) For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall. The monologue, interrupted. Slap of oar in water. He was riding in the shikara with Tai, squatting amongst goats, on a pile of straw, in full knowledge of the stick and bathtub waiting for him at home. He had come for stories—and with one question had silenced the storyteller.
    “No, tell, Taiji, how old,
truly
?” And now a brandy bottle, materializing from nowhere: cheap liquor from the folds of the great warm chugha-coat. Then a shudder, a belch, a glare. Glint of gold. And—at last!—speech. “How old? You ask how old, you little wet-head, you nosey …” Tai, forecasting the fisherman on my wall, pointed at the mountains. “So old, nakkoo!” Aadam, the nakkoo, the nosey one, followed his pointing finger. “I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die. Listen. Listen, nakkoo …”—the brandy bottle again, followed by brandy-voice, and words more intoxicating than booze—“… I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. Once I knew where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year. Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can’t read.” Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping hand. Which sweeps again to chugha-pocket, to brandy bottle, to lips chapped with cold. Tai always had woman’s lips. “Nakkoo, listen, listen. I have seen plenty. Yara, you should’ve seen that Isa when he came, beard down to his balls, bald as an egg on his head. He was old and fagged-out but he knew his manners. ‘You first, Taiji,’ he’d say, and ‘Please to sit’; always a respectful tongue, he never called me crackpot, never called me
tu
either. Always
aap
. Polite, see? And what an appetite! Such a hunger, I would catch my ears in fright. Saint or devil, I swear he could eat a whole kid in one go. And so what? I told him, eat, fill your hole, a man comes to Kashmir to enjoy life, or to end it, or both. His work was finished. He just came up here to live it up a little.” Mesmerized by this brandied portrait of a bald, gluttonous Christ, Aziz listened, later repeating every word to the consternation of his parents, who dealt in stones and had no time for “gas.”
    “Oh, you don’t believe?”—licking his sore lips with a grin, knowing it to be the reverse of the truth; “Your attention is wandering?”—again, he knew how furiously Aziz was hanging on his words. “Maybe the straw is pricking your behind, hey? Oh, I’m so sorry, babaji, not to provide for you silk cushions with gold brocade-work—cushions such as the Emperor Jehangir sat upon! You think of the Emperor Jehangir as a gardener only, no doubt,” Tai accused my grandfather, “because he built Shalimar. Stupid! What do you know? His name meant Encompasser of the Earth. Is that a gardener’s name? God knows what they teach you boys these days. Whereas I” … puffing up a little here … “I knew his precise weight, to the tola! Ask me how many maunds, how many seers! When he was happy he got heavier and in Kashmir he was heaviest of all. I used to carry his litter … no, no, look, you don’t believe again, that big cucumber in your face is waggling like the little one in your pajamas! So, come on, come on, ask me questions! Give examination! Ask how many times the leather thongs wound round the handles of the litter—the answer is thirty-one. Ask me what was the Emperor’s dying word—I tell you it was ‘Kashmir.’ He had bad breath and a good heart.