Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [147]
“So answer the question. You know what ees human geography?”
Pain fills my head, obliterating all notions of telepathic cheatery: “Aiee sir no sir ouch!”
… And now it is possible to observe a joke descending on Zagallo, a joke pulling his face into the simulacrum of a smile; it is possible to watch his hand darting forward, thumb-and-forefinger extended; to note how thumb-and-forefinger close around the tip of my nose and pull downwards … where the nose leads, the head must follow, and finally the nose is hanging down and my eyes are obliged to stare damply at Zagallo’s sandalled feet with their dirty toenails while Zagallo unleashes his wit.
“See, boys—you see what we have here? Regard, please, the heedeous face of thees primitive creature. It reminds you of?”
And the eager responses: “Sir the devil sir.” “Please sir one cousin of mine!” “No sir a vegetable sir I don’t know which.” Until Zagallo, shouting above the tumult, “Silence! Sons of baboons! Thees object here”—a tug on my nose—“thees is human geography!”
“How sir where sir what sir?”
Zagallo is laughing now. “You don’t see?” he guffaws. “In the face of thees ugly ape you don’t see the whole map of India?”
“Yes sir no sir you show us sir!”
“See here—the Deccan peninsula hanging down!” Again ouch-mynose.
“Sir sir if that’s the map of India what are the stains sir?” It is Glandy Keith Colaco feeling bold. Sniggers, titters from my fellows. And Zagallo, taking the question in his stride: “These stains,” he cries, “are Pakistan! Thees birthmark on the right ear is the East Wing; and thees horrible stained left cheek, the West! Remember, stupid boys: Pakistan ees a stain on the face of India!”
“Ho ho,” the class laughs, “Absolute master joke, sir!”
But now my nose has had enough; staging its own, unprompted revolt against the grasping thumb-and-forefinger, it unleashes a weapon of its own … a large blob of shining goo emerges from the left nostril, to plop into Mr. Zagallo’s palm. Fat Perce Fishwala yells, “Lookit that, sir! The drip from his nose, sir! Is that supposed to be Ceylon?”
His palm smeared with goo, Zagallo loses his jokey mood. “Animal,” he curses me, “You see what you do?” Zagallo’s hand releases my nose; returns to hair. Nasal refuse is wiped into my neatly-parted locks. And now, once again, my hair is seized; once again, the hand is pulling … but upwards now, and my head has jerked upright, my feet are moving on to tiptoe, and Zagallo, “What are you? Tell me what you are!”
“Sir an animal sir!”
The hand pulls harder higher. “Again.” Standing on my toenails now, I yelp: “Aiee sir an animal an animal please sir aiee!”
And still harder and still higher … “Once more!” But suddenly it ends; my feet are flat on the ground again; and the class has fallen into a deathly hush.
“Sir,” Sonny Ibrahim is saying, “you pulled his hair out, sir.”
And now the cacophony: “Look sir, blood.” “He’s bleeding sir.” “Please sir shall I take him to the nurse?”
Mr. Zagallo stood like a statue with a clump of my hair in his fist. While I—too shocked to feel any pain—felt the patch on my head where Mr. Zagallo had created a monkish tonsure, a circle where hair would never grow again, and realized that the curse of my birth, which connected me to my country, had managed to find yet one more unexpected expression of itself.
Two days later, Croaker Crusoe announced that, unfortunately, Mr. Emil Zagallo was leaving the staff for personal reasons; but I knew what the reasons were. My uprooted hairs had stuck to his hands, like bloodstains that wouldn’t wash out, and nobody wants a teacher with hair on his palms, “The first sign of madness,” as Glandy Keith was fond of saying, “and the second sign is looking for them.”
Zagallo’s legacy: a monk