Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [138]
But now hands enter the frame—first the hands of Nadir-Qasim, their poetic softness somewhat callused these days; hands flickering like candle-flames, creeping forward across reccine, then jerking back; next a woman’s hands, black as jet, inching forwards like elegant spiders; hands lifting up, off reccine tabletop, hands hovering above three fives, beginning the strangest of dances, rising, falling, circling one another, weaving in and out between each other, hands longing for touch, hands outstretching tensing quivering demanding to be—but always at last jerking back, fingertips avoiding fingertips, because what I’m watching here on my dirty glass cinema-screen is, after all, an Indian movie, in which physical contact is forbidden lest it corrupt the watching flower of Indian youth; and there are feet beneath the table and faces above it, feet advancing towards feet, faces tumbling softly towards faces, but jerking away all of a sudden in a cruel censor’s cut … two strangers, each bearing a screen-name which is not the name of their birth, act out their half-unwanted roles. I left the movie before the end, to slip back into the boot of the unpolished unwatched Rover, wishing I hadn’t gone to see it, unable to resist wanting to watch it all over again.
What I saw at the very end: my mother’s hands raising a half-empty glass of Lovely Lassi; my mother’s lips pressing gently, nostalgically against the mottled glass; my mother’s hands handing the glass to her Nadir-Qasim; who also applied, to the opposite side of the glass, his own, poetic mouth. So it was that life imitated bad art, and my uncle Hanif’s sister brought the eroticism of the indirect kiss into the green neon dinginess of the Pioneer Café.
To sum up: in the high summer of 1957, at the peak of an election campaign, Amina Sinai blushed inexplicably at a chance mention of the Communist Party of India. Her son—in whose turbulent thoughts there was still room for one more obsession, because a ten-year-old brain can accommodate any number of fixations—followed her into the north of the city, and spied on a pain-filled scene of impotent love. (Now that Ahmed Sinai was frozen up, Nadir-Qasim didn’t even have a sexual disadvantage; torn between a husband who locked himself in an office and cursed mongrels, and an ex-husband who had once, lovingly, played games of hit-the-spittoon, Amina Sinai was reduced to glass-kissery and hand-dances.)
Questions: did I ever, after that time, employ the services of pink plastic? Did I return to the café of extras and Marxists? Did I confront my mother with the heinous nature of her offence—because what mother has any business to—never mind about what once-upon-a-time—in full view of her only son, how could she how could she how could she? Answers: I did not; I did not; I did not.
What I did: when she went on “shopping trips,” I lodged myself in her thoughts. No longer anxious to gain the evidence of my own eyes, I rode in my mother’s head, up to the north of the city; in this unlikely incognito, I sat in the Pioneer Café and heard conversations about the electoral prospects of Qasim the Red; disembodied but wholly present, I trailed my mother as she accompanied Qasim on his rounds, up and down the tenements of the district (were they the same chawls which my father had recently sold, abandoning his tenants to their fate?), as she helped him to get water-taps fixed and pestered landlords to initiate repairs and disinfections. Amina Sinai moved amongst the destitute on behalf of the Communist Party