Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [206]
The tragedy of Mutasim the Handsome, however, is only a subplot in our story; because now Saleem and his sister were alone, and she, awakened by the exchange between the two youths, asked, “Saleem? What is happening?”
Saleem approached his sister’s bed; his hand sought hers; and parchment was pressed against skin. Only now did Saleem, his tongue loosened by the moon and the lust-drenched breeze, abandon all notions of purity and confess his own love to his open-mouthed sister.
There was a silence; then she cried, “Oh, no, how can you—,” but the magic of the parchment was doing battle with the strength of her hatred of love; so although her body grew stiff and jerky as a wrestler’s, she listened to him explaining that there was no sin, he had worked it all out, and after all, they were not truly brother and sister; the blood in his veins was not the blood in hers; in the breeze of that insane night he attempted to undo all the knots which not even Mary Pereira’s confession had succeeded in untying; but even as he spoke he could hear his words sounding hollow, and realized that although what he was saying was the literal truth, there were other truths which had become more important because they had been sanctified by time; and although there was no need for shame or horror, he saw both emotions on her forehead, he smelt them on her skin, and, what was worse, he could feel and smell them in and upon himself. So, in the end, not even the magic parchment of Mutasim the Handsome was powerful enough to bring Saleem Sinai and Jamila Singer together; he left her room with bowed head, followed by her deer-startled eyes; and in time the effects of the spell faded altogether, and she took a dreadful revenge. As he left the room the corridors of the palace were suddenly filled with the shriek of a newly-affianced princess, who had awoken from a dream of her wedding-night in which her marital bed had suddenly and unaccountably become awash in rancid yellow liquid; afterwards, she made inquiries, and when she learned the prophetic truth of her dream, resolved never to reach puberty while Zafar was alive, so that she could stay in her palatial bedroom and avoid the foul-smelling horror of his weakness.
The next morning, the two badmaashes of the Combined Opposition Party awoke to find themselves back in their own beds; but when they had dressed, they opened the door of their chamber to find two of the biggest soldiers in Pakistan outside it, standing peacefully with crossed rifles, barring the exit. The badmaashes shouted and wheedled, but the soldiers stayed in position until the polls were closed; then they quietly disappeared. The badmaashes sought out the Nawab, finding him in his exceptional rose-garden; they waved their arms and raised their voices; travesty-of-justice was mentioned, and electoral-jiggery-pokery; also chicanery; but the Nawab showed them thirteen new varieties of Kifi rose, crossbred by himself. They ranted on—death-of-democracy, autocratic-tyranny—until he smiled gently, gently, and said, “My friends, yesterday my daughter was betrothed to Zafar Zulfikar; soon, I hope, my other girl will wed our President’s own dear son. Think, then—what dishonor for me, what scandal on my name, if even one vote were cast in Kif against my future relative! Friends, I am a man to whom honor is of concern; so stay in my house, eat, drink; only do not ask for what I cannot give.”
And we all lived happily … at any rate, even without the traditional last-sentence fiction of fairy-tales, my story does indeed end in fantasy; because when Basic Democrats had done their duty, the newspapers—Fang, Dawn, Pakistan Times—announced a crushing victory for the President’s Muslim League over the Mader-i-Millat’s Combined Opposition Party; thus proving to me that I have been only the humblest of jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence