Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [134]
And Padma, “Doctors? Who is talking about …” But she is fooling nobody; and with a little smile I say, “Here: everybody: take some chutney. I must tell you some important things.”
And while chutney—the same chutney which, back in 1957, my ayah Mary Pereira had made so perfectly; the grasshopper-green chutney which is forever associated with those days—carried them back into the world of my past, while chutney mellowed them and made them receptive, I spoke to them, gently, persuasively, and by a mixture of condiment and oratory kept myself out of the hands of the pernicious green-medicine men. I said: “My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I’m telling my story for him, so that afterwards, when I’ve lost my struggle against cracks, he will know. Morality, judgment, character … it all starts with memory … and I am keeping carbons.”
Green chutney on chilli-pakoras, disappearing down someone’s gullet; grasshopper-green on tepid chapatis, vanishing behind Padma’s lips. I see them begin to weaken, and press on. “I told you the truth,” I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”
Yes: I said “sane.” I knew what they were thinking: “Plenty of children invent imaginary friends; but one thousand and one! That’s just crazy!” The midnight children shook even Padma’s faith in my narrative; but I brought her round, and now there’s no more talk of outings.
How I persuaded them: by talking about my son, who needed to know my story; by shedding light on the workings of memory; and by other devices, some naïvely honest, others wily as foxes. “Even Muhammad,” I said, “at first believed himself insane: do you think the notion never crossed my mind? But the Prophet had his Khadija, his Abu-Bakr, to reassure him of the genuineness of his Calling; nobody betrayed him into the hands of asylum-doctors.” By now, the green chutney was filling them with thoughts of years ago; I saw guilt appear on their faces, and shame. “What is truth?” I waxed rhetorical, “What is sanity? Did Jesus rise up from the grave? Do Hindus not accept—Padma—that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma dreamed, is dreaming the universe; that we only see dimly through that dream-web, which is Maya. Maya,” I adopted a haughty, lecturing tone, “may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit. Apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya. If I say that certain things took place which you, lost in Brahma’s dream, find hard to believe, then which of us is right? Have some more chutney,” I added graciously, taking a generous helping myself. “It tastes very good.”
Padma began to cry. “I never said I didn’t believe,” she wept. “Of course, every man must tell his story in his own true way; but …”
“But,” I interrupted conclusively, “you also—don’t you—want to know what happens? About the hands that danced without touching, and the knees? And later, the curious baton of Commander Sabarmati, and of course the Widow? And the Children—what became of them?”
And Padma nodded. So much for doctors and asylums; I have been left to write. (Alone, except for Padma at my feet.) Chutney and oratory, theology and curiosity: these are the things that saved me. And one more—call it education, or class-origins; Mary Pereira would have called it my “brought-up.” By my show of erudition and by the purity of my accents, I shamed them into feeling unworthy of judging me; not a very noble deed, but when the ambulance is waiting round the corner, all’s fair. (It was: I smelled it.) Still—I’ve had a valuable warning. It’s a dangerous business to try and impose one’s view of things on others.
Padma: if you’re a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.