Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [203]
You may legitimately ask: Did it happen in just this … And surely she couldn’t have been five hundred and … but I swore to confess everything, and I insist that I learned the unspeakable secret of my love for Jamila Singer from the mouth and scent-glands of that most exceptional of whores.
“Our Mrs. Braganza is right,” Padma is scolding me, “She says there is nothing but dirt in the heads of the mens.” I ignore her; Mrs. Braganza, and her sister Mrs. Fernandes, will be dealt with in due course; for the moment, the latter must be content with the factory accounts while the former looks after my son. And while I, to recapture the rapt attention of my revolted Padma Bibi, recount a fairy-tale.
Once upon a time, in the far northern princedom of Kif, there lived a prince who had two beautiful daughters, a son of equally remarkable good looks, a brand-new Rolls-Royce motor-car, and excellent political contacts. This prince, or Nawab, believed passionately in progress, which was why he had arranged the engagement of his elder daughter to the son of the prosperous and well-known General Zulfikar; for his younger daughter he had high hopes of a match with the son of the President himself. As for his motor-car, the first ever seen in his mountain-ringed valley, he loved it almost as much as his children; it grieved him that his subjects, who had become used to using the roads of Kif for purposes of social intercourse, quarrels and games of hit-the-spittoon, refused to get out of its way. He issued a proclamation explaining that the car represented the future, and must be allowed to pass; the people ignored the notice, although it was pasted to shop-fronts and walls and even, it is said, to the sides of cows. The second notice was more peremptory, ordering the citizenry to clear the highways when they heard the horn of the car; the Kifis, however, continued to smoke and spit and argue in the streets. The third notice, which was adorned with a gory drawing, said that the car would henceforth run down anybody who failed to obey its horn. The Kifis added new, more scandalous pictures to the one on the poster; and then the Nawab, who was a good man but not one of infinite patience, actually did as he threatened. When the famous singer Jamila arrived with her family and impresario to sing at her cousin’s engagement ceremony, the car drove her without trouble from border to palace; and the Nawab said proudly, “No trouble; the car is respected now. Progress has occurred.”
The Nawab’s son Mutasim, who had travelled abroad and wore his hair in something called a “beetle-cut,” was a source of worry to his father; because although he was so good-looking that, whenever he travelled around Kif, girls with silver nose-jewelery fainted in the heat of his beauty, he seemed to take no interest in such matters, being content with his polo-ponies and the guitar on which he picked out strange Western songs. He wore bush-shirts on which musical notation and foreign street-signs jostled against the half-clad bodies of pink-skinned girls. But when Jamila Singer, concealed within a gold-brocaded burqa, arrived at the palace, Mutasim the Handsome—who owing to his foreign travels had never heard the rumors of her disfigurement—became obsessed with the idea of seeing her face; he fell head-over-heels with the glimpses of her demure eyes he saw through her perforated sheet.
In those days, the President of Pakistan had decreed an election; it was to take place on the day after the engagement ceremony, under a form of suffrage called Basic Democracy. The hundred million people of Pakistan had been divided up into a hundred and twenty thousand approximately equal parts, and each part was represented by one Basic Democrat. The electoral college of one hundred and twenty thousand “B.D.s” were to elect the President. In Kif, the 420 Basic Democrats included mullahs, road-sweepers, the Nawab’s chauffeur, numerous men who sharecropped hashish on the Nawab’s estate, and other loyal citizens; the Nawab had invited all of these to his daughter