Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [105]
“All right,” my mother said, coming into a sky-blue room to embrace me, “you’re forgiven now. But never hide in there again …”
“Amma,” I said eagerly, “my Ammi, please listen. I must tell you something. Something big. But please, please first of all, wake Abba.”
And after a period of “What?” “Why?” and “Certainly not,” my mother saw something extraordinary sitting in my eyes and went to wake Ahmed Sinai anxiously, with “Janum, please come. I don’t know what’s got into Saleem.”
Family and ayah assembled in the sitting-room. Amid cut-glass vases and plump cushions, standing on a Persian rug beneath the swirling shadows of ceiling-fans, I smiled into their anxious eyes and prepared my revelation. This was it; the beginning of the repayment of their investment; my first dividend—first, I was sure, of many … my black mother, lip-jutting father, Monkey of a sister and crime-concealing ayah waited in hot confusion.
Get it out. Straight, without frills. “You should be the first to know,” I said, trying to give my speech the cadences of adulthood. And then I told them. “I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think—Ammi, Abboo, I really think—that Archangels have started to talk to me.”
There! I thought. There! It’s said! Now there will be pats on the back, sweetmeats, public announcements, maybe more photographs; now their chests will puff up with pride. O blind innocence of childhood! For my honesty—for my open-hearted desperation to please—I was set upon from all sides. Even the Monkey: “O God, Saleem, all this tamasha, all this performance, for one of your stupid cracks?” And worse than the Monkey was Mary Pereira: “Christ Jesus! Save us, Lord! Holy Father in Rome, such blasphemy I’ve heard today!” And worse than Mary Pereira was my mother Amina Sinai: Black Mango concealed now, her own unnameable names still warm upon her lips, she cried, “Heaven forfend! The child will bring down the roof upon our heads!” (Was that my fault, too?) And Amina continued: “You black man! Goonda! O Saleem, has your brain gone raw? What has happened to my darling baby boy—are you growing into a madman—a torturer!?” And worse than Amina’s shrieking was my father’s silence; worse than her fear was the wild anger sitting on his forehead; and worst of all was my father’s hand, which stretched out suddenly, thick-fingered, heavy-jointed, strong-as-an-ox, to fetch me a mighty blow on the side of my head, so that I could never hear properly in my left ear after that day; so that I fell sideways across the startled room through the scandalized air and shattered a green tabletop of opaque glass; so that, having been certain of myself for the first time in my life, I was plunged into a green, glass-cloudy world filled with cutting edges, a world in which I could no longer tell the people who mattered most about the goings-on inside my head; green shards lacerated my hands as I entered that swirling universe in which I was doomed, until it was far too late, to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for.
In a white-tiled bathroom beside a washing-chest, my mother daubed me with Mercurochrome; gauze veiled my cuts, while through the door my father’s voice commanded, “Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me? Let him enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!”
That night, Amina Sinai would dream of Ramram Seth, who was floating six inches above the ground, his eye-sockets filled with egg-whites, intoning: “Washing will hide him … voices will guide him” … but when, after several days in which the dream sat upon her shoulders wherever she went, she plucked up the courage to ask her disgraced son a little more about his outrageous claim, he replied in a voice restrained as the unwept tears of his childhood: “It was just fooling, Amma. A stupid joke, like you said.”
She died, nine years later, without discovering the truth.
All-India Radio
REALITY IS A QUESTION of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars