Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [112]
But death, when it visited Methwold’s Estate, still managed to take me by surprise.
Even though the freezing of his assets had ended many years ago, the zone below Ahmed Sinai’s waist had remained as cold as ice. Ever since the day he had cried out, “The bastards are shoving my balls in an ice-bucket!”, and Amina had taken them in her hands to warm them so that her fingers got glued to them by the cold, his sex had lain dormant, a woolly elephant in an iceberg, like the one they found in Russia in ’56. My mother Amina, who had married for children, felt the uncreated lives rotting in her womb and blamed herself for becoming unattractive to him, what with her corns and all. She discussed her unhappiness with Mary Pereira, but the ayah only told her that there was no happiness to be gained from “the mens”; they made pickles together as they talked, and Amina stirred her disappointments into a hot lime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes.
Although Ahmed Sinai’s office hours were filled with fantasies of secretaries taking dictation in the nude, visions of his Fernandas or Poppys strolling around the room in their birthday suits with crisscross cane-marks on their rumps, his apparatus refused to respond; and one day, when the real Fernanda or Poppy had gone home, he was playing chess with Doctor Narlikar, his tongue (as well as his game) made somewhat loose by djinns, and he confided awkwardly, “Narlikar, I seem to have lost interest in you-know-what.”
A gleam of pleasure radiated from the luminous gynecologist; the birth-control fanatic in the dark, glowing doctor leaped out through his eyes and made the following speech: “Bravo!” Doctor Narlikar cried, “Brother Sinai, damn good show! You—and, may I add, myself—yes, you and I, Sinai bhai, are persons of rare spiritual worth! Not for us the panting humiliations of the flesh—is it not a finer thing, I ask you, to eschew procreation—to avoid adding one more miserable human life to the vast multitudes which are presently beggaring our country—and, instead, to bend our energies to the task of giving them more land to stand on? I tell you, my friend: you and I and our tetrapods: from the very oceans we shall bring forth soil!” To consecrate this oration, Ahmed Sinai poured drinks; my father and Doctor Narlikar drank a toast to their four-legged concrete dream.
“Land, yes! Love, no!” Doctor Narlikar said, a little unsteadily; my father refilled his glass.
By the last days of 1956, the dream of reclaiming land from the sea with the aid of thousands upon thousands of large concrete tetrapods—that same dream which had been the cause of the freeze—and which was now, for my father, a sort of surrogate for the sexual activity which the aftermath of the freeze denied him—actually seemed to be coming close to fruition. This time, however, Ahmed Sinai was spending money cautiously; this time he remained hidden in the background, and his name appeared on no documents; this time, he had learned the lessons of the freeze and was determined to draw as little attention to himself as possible; so that when Doctor Narlikar betrayed him by dying, leaving behind him no record of my father’s involvement in the tetrapod scheme, Ahmed Sinai (who was prone, as we have seen, to react badly in the face of disaster) was swallowed up by the mouth of a long, snaking decline from which he would not emerge until, at the very end of his days, he at last fell in love with his wife.
This is the story that got back to Methwold’s Estate: Doctor Narlikar had been visiting friends near Marine Drive; at the end of the visit, he had resolved to stroll down to Chowpatty Beach and buy himself some bhel-puri and a little coconut milk. As he strolled briskly along the pavement by the sea-wall, he overtook the tail-end of a language march, which moved slowly along, chanting peacefully. Doctor Narlikar neared the place where, with the Municipal Corporation’s permission, he had arranged for a single, symbolic tetrapod to be placed upon the sea-wall, as a kind of icon pointing the way to the future; and here he noticed a thing which made him lose his reason. A group of beggar-women had clustered around the tetrapod and were performing the rite of puja. They had lighted oil-lamps at the base of the object; one of them had painted the OM-symbol on its upraised tip; they were chanting prayers as they gave the tetrapod a thorough and worshipful wash. Technological miracle had been transformed into Shiva-lingam; Doctor Narlikar, the opponent of fertility, was driven wild at this vision, in which it seemed to him that all the old dark priapic forces of ancient, procreative India had been unleashed upon the beauty of sterile twentieth-century concrete