Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [178]
Mary Pereira ran out of the room.
Ahmed Sinai said, in a voice as faraway as a bird: “That, in the corner, is my old servant Musa, who tried to rob me once.”
(Can any narrative stand so much so soon? I glance towards Padma; she appears to be stunned, like a fish.)
Once upon a time there was a servant who robbed my father; who swore he was innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should prove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I told you then he was a time-bomb, and he had returned to explode. Musa had, indeed, contracted leprosy; and had returned across the silence of the years to beg for my father’s forgiveness, so that he could be released from his self-inflicted curse.
… Someone was called God who was not God; someone else was taken for a ghost, and was not a ghost; and a third person discovered that although his name was Saleem Sinai, he was not his parents’ son …
“I forgive you,” Ahmed Sinai said to the leper. After that day, he was cured of one of his obsessions; he never tried again to discover his own (and wholly imaginary) family curse.
“I couldn’t tell it any other way,” I say to Padma. “Too painful; I had to just blurt it out, all crazy-sounding, just like that.”
“O, mister,” Padma blubbers helplessly, “O, mister, mister!”
“Come on now,” I say, “It’s an old story.”
But her tears aren’t for me; for the moment, she’s forgotten about what-chews-at-bones-beneath-the-skin; she’s crying over Mary Pereira, of whom, as I’ve said, she has become excessively fond.
“What happened to her?” she says with red eyes. “That Mary?”
I am seized by an irrational anger. I shout: “You ask her!”
Ask her how she went home to the city of Panjim in Goa, how she told her ancient mother the story of her shame! Ask how her mother went wild with the scandal (appropriately enough; it was a time for old folk to lose their wits)! Ask: did daughter and old mother go into the streets to seek forgiveness? Was that not the one time in each ten years when the mummified corpse of St. Francis Xavier (as holy a relic as the Prophet’s hair) is taken from its vault in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus and carried around the town? Did Mary and old distraught Mrs. Pereira find themselves pressing up against the catafalque; was the old lady beside herself with grief for her daughter’s crime? Did old Mrs. Pereira, shouting, “Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai”, clamber up on to the bier to kiss the foot of the Holy One? Amidst uncountable crowds, did Mrs. Pereira enter a holy frenzy? Ask! Did she or didn’t she, in the clutches of her wild spirit, place her lips around the big toe on St. Francis’s left foot? Ask for yourself: did Mary’s mother bite the toe right off?
“How?” Padma wails, unnerved by my wrath. “How, ask?”
… And is this also true: were the papers making it up when they wrote that the old lady had been miraculously punished; when they quoted Church sources and eye-witnesses, who described how the old woman was turned into solid stone? No? Ask her if it’s true that the Church sent a stone-statue figure of an old woman around the towns and the villages of Goa, to show what happened to those who misbehave with the saints? Ask: was this statue not seen in several villages simultaneously—and does that prove fraud, or a further miracle?
“You know I can’t ask anyone,” Padma howls … but I, feeling my fury subside, am making no more revelations tonight.
Baldly, then: Mary Pereira left us, and went to her mother in Goa. But Alice Pereira stayed; Alice remained in Ahmed Sinai’s office, and typed, and fetched snacks and fizzy drinks.
As for me—at the end of the mourning period for my uncle Hanif, I entered my second exile.