Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [136]
O, the suffering one undergoes in the name of righteousness! The bruising and the bumps! The breathing-in of rubbery boot-air through jolted teeth! And constantly, the fear of discovery … “Suppose she really does go shopping? Will the boot suddenly fly open? Will live chickens be flung in, feet tied together, wings clipped, fluttery pecky birds invading my hidey-hole? Will she see, my God, I’ll have to be silent for a week!” My knees drawn in beneath my chin—which was protected against knee-bumps by an old faded cushion—I voyaged into the unknown in the vehicle of maternal perfidy. My mother was a cautious driver; she went slowly, and turned corners with care; but afterwards I was bruised black and blue and Mary Pereira berated me soundly for getting into fights: “Arré God what a thing it’s a wonder they didn’t smash you to pieces completely my God what will you grow up into you bad black boy you haddi-phaelwan you skin-and-bone wrestler!”
To take my mind off the jolting darkness I entered, with extreme caution, that part of my mother’s mind which was in charge of driving operations, and as a result was able to follow our route. (And, also, to discern in my mother’s habitually tidy mind an alarming degree of disorder. I was already beginning, in those days, to classify people by their degree of internal tidiness, and to discover that I preferred the messier type, whose thoughts, spilling constantly into one another so that anticipatory images of food interfered with the serious business of earning a living and sexual fantasies were superimposed upon their political musings, bore a closer relationship to my own pell-mell tumble of a brain, in which everything ran into everything else and the white dot of consciousness jumped about like a wild flea from one thing to the next … Amina Sinai, whose assiduous ordering-instincts had provided her with a brain of almost abnormal neatness, was a curious recruit to the ranks of confusion.)
We headed north, past Breach Candy Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north along Hornby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali’s island tomb, north off what had once been (before the dream of the first William Methwold became a reality) the island of Bombay. We were heading towards the anonymous mass of tenements and fishing-villages and textile-plants and film-studios that the city became in these northern zones (not far from here! Not at all far from where I sit within view of local trains!) … an area which was, in those days, utterly unknown to me; I rapidly became disoriented and was then obliged to admit to myself that I was lost. At last, down an unprepossessing side-street full of drainpipe-sleepers and bicycle-repair shops and tattered men and boys, we stopped. Clusters of children assailed my mother as she descended; she, who could never shoo away a fly, handed out small coins, thus enlarging the crowd enormously. Eventually, she struggled away from them and headed down the street; there was a boy pleading, “Gib the car poliss, Begum? Number one A-class poliss, Begum? I watch car until you come, Begum? I very fine watchman, ask anyone!” … In some panic, I listened in for her reply. How could I get out of this boot under the eyes of a guardian-urchin? There was the embarrassment of it; and besides, my emergence would have created a sensation in the street … my mother said, “No.” She was disappearing down the street; the would-be polisher and watchman gave up eventually; there was a moment when all eyes turned to watch the passing of a second car, just in case it, too, stopped to disgorge a lady who gave away coins as if they were nuts; and in that instant (I had been looking through several pairs of eyes to help me choose my moment) I performed my trick with the pink plastic and was out in the street beside a closed car-boot in a flash. Setting my lips grimly, and ignoring all outstretched palms, I set off in the direction my mother had taken, a pocket-sized sleuth with the nose of a bloodhound and a loud drum pounding in the place where my heart should have been