Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [159]
“Go to her,” my uncle was saying, “Maybe you can cheer her up.”
The boy Saleem moves through repeatedly-slammed doors to the sanctum of his tragic aunt; and enters, to find her loveliest of bodies splayed out in wondrous abandon across the marital bed—where, only last night, bodies nestled against bodies—where paper passed from hand to hand … a hand flutters at her heart; her chest heaves; and the boy Saleem stammers, “Aunt, O Aunt, I’m sorry.”
A banshee-wail from the bed. Tragedienne’s arms, flying outwards towards me. “Hai! Hai, hai! Ai-hai-hai!” Needing no further invitation, I fly towards those arms; I fling myself between them, to lie atop my mourning aunt. The arms close around me, tightertighter, nails digging through my school-white shirt, but I don’t care!—Because something has started twitching below my S-buckled belt. Aunty Pia thrashes about beneath me in her despair and I thrash with her, remembering to keep my right hand clear of the action. I hold it stiffly out above the fray. One-handed, I begin to caress her, not knowing what I’m doing, I’m only ten years old and still in shorts, but I’m crying because she’s crying, and the room is full of the noise—and on the bed as two bodies begin to acquire a kind of rhythm, unnameable unthinkable, hips pushing up towards me, while she yells, “O! O God, O God, O!” And maybe I am yelling too, I can’t say, something is taking over from grief here, while my uncle snaps pencils on a striped sofa, something getting stronger, as she writhes and twists beneath me, and at last in the grip of a strength greater than my strength I am bringing down my right hand, I have forgotten my finger, and when it touches her breast, wound presses against skin …
“Yaaaouuuu!” I scream with the pain; and my aunt, snapping out of the macabre spell of those few moments, pushes me off her and delivers a resounding wallop to my face. Fortunately, it is the left cheek; there is no danger of damage to my remaining good ear. “Badmaash!” my aunty screams, “A family of maniacs and perverts, woe is me, what woman ever suffered so badly?”
There is a cough in the doorway. I am standing up now, shivering with pain. Pia is standing, too, her hair dripping off her head like tears. Mary Pereira is in the doorway, coughing, scarlet confusion all over her skin, holding a brown paper parcel in her hands.
“See, baba, what I have forgotten,” she finally manages to say, “You are a big man now: look, your mother has sent you two pairs of nice, white long trousers.”
After I got so indiscreetly carried away while trying to cheer up my aunt, it became difficult for me to remain in the apartment on Marine Drive. Long intense telephone calls were made regularly during the next few days; Hanif persuading someone, while Pia gesticulated, that perhaps now, after five weeks … and one evening after I got back from school, my mother picked me up in our old Rover, and my first exile came to an end.
Neither during our drive home, nor at any other time, was I given any explanation for my exile. I decided, therefore, that I would not make it my business to ask. I was wearing long pants now; I was, therefore, a man, and must bear my troubles accordingly. I told my mother: “The finger is not so bad. Hanif mamu has taught me to hold the pen differently, so I can write okay.” She seemed to be concentrating very hard on the road. “It was a nice holiday,” I added, politely. “Thank you for sending me.”
“O child,” she burst out, “with your face like the sun coming out, what can I tell you? Be good with your father; he is not happy these days.