Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [195]
It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert’s power. Oases shone in the tarmac of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst the hovels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city (whose only common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had started life as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient powers of apparition-mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by illusionary sand-dunes and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant “submission,” my new fellow-citizens exuded the flat boiled odors of acquiescence, which were depressing to a nose which had smelt—at the very last, and however briefly—the highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay.
Soon after our arrival—and, perhaps, oppressed by the mosque-shadowed air of the Clayton Road house—my father resolved to build us a new home. He bought a plot of land in the smartest of the “societies,” the new housing development zones; and on my sixteenth birthday, Saleem acquired more than a Lambretta—I learned the occult powers of umbilical cords.
What, pickled in brine, sat for sixteen years in my father’s almirah, awaiting just such a day? What, floating like a water-snake in an old pickle-jar, accompanied us on our sea-journey and ended up buried in hard, barren Karachi-earth? What had once nourished life in a womb—what now infused earth with miraculous life, and gave birth to a split-level, American-style modern bungalow? … Eschewing these cryptic questions, I explain that, on my sixteenth birthday, my family (including Alia Aunty) assembled on our plot of Korangi Road earth; watched by the eyes of a team of laborers and the beard of a mullah, Ahmed handed Saleem a pickaxe; I drove it inaugurally into the ground. “A new beginning,” Amina said, “Inshallah, we shall all be new people now.” Spurred on by her noble and unattainable desire, a workman rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a pickle-jar was produced. Brine was discarded on the thirsty ground; and what-was-left-inside received the mullah’s blessings. After which, an umbilical cord—was it mine? Or Shiva’s?—was implanted in the earth; and at once, a house began to grow. There were sweetmeats and soft drinks; the mullah, displaying remarkable hunger, consumed thirty-nine laddoos; and Ahmed Sinai did not once complain of the expense. The spirit of the buried cord inspired the workmen; but although the foundations were dug very deep, they would not prevent the house from falling down before we ever lived in it.
What I surmised about umbilical cords: although they possessed the power of growing houses, some were evidently better at the job than others. The city of Karachi proved my point; clearly constructed on top of entirely unsuitable cords, it was full of deformed houses, the stunted hunchback children of deficient life-lines, houses growing mysteriously blind, with no visible windows, houses which looked like radios or air-conditioners or jail-cells, crazy top-heavy edifices which fell over with monotonous regularity, like drunks; a wild proliferation of mad houses, whose inadequacies as living quarters were exceeded only by their quite exceptional ugliness. The city obscured the desert; but either the cords, or the infertility of the soil, made it grow into something grotesque.