Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [106]
… But today, I feel confused. Padma has not returned—should I alert the police? Is she a Missing Person?—and in her absence, my certainties are falling apart. Even my nose has been playing tricks on me—by day, as I stroll between the pickle-vats tended by our army of strong, hairy-armed, formidably competent women, I have found myself failing to distinguish lemon-odors from lime. The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor sahib has been crossed in—what?—surely not love? … Padma, and the cracks spreading all over me, radiating like a spider’s web from my navel; and the heat … a little confusion is surely permissable in these circumstances. Rereading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.
Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can’t judge. I’ll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I’ve started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began …
Yé Akashvani hai. This is All-India Radio.
Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani café, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light with only a cheap transistor for company. A hot night; bubbling air filled with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle-vats; voices in the dark. Pickle-fumes, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then … it was hot then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat … it was not the voices (then or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea—the idea that his parents’ outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their love; that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deformity … while I, now, Padma-less, send these words into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he … I no longer have his gift; he never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost … he had no cracks. No spiders’ webs spread through him in the heat.
Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook.
And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive through the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize impotence—ever since the notorious free-transistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented what men could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied) … then, the nearlynineyearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines.
Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat-haze, then and now, blurs his then-time into mine … my confusion, travelling across the heat-waves, is also his.
What grows best in the heat: cane-sugar; the coconut palm; certain millets such as bajra, ragi and jowar; linseed, and (given water) tea and rice. Our hot land is also the world’s second largest producer of cotton—at least, it was when I learned geography under the mad eye of Mr. Emil Zagallo, and the steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador. But the tropical summer grows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom, to fill the close perspiring nights with odors as heavy as musk, which give men dark dreams of discontent