Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [209]
Purity—that highest of ideals!—that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister’s songs!—seemed very far away; how could I have known that history—which has the power of pardoning sinners—was at that moment counting down towards a moment in which it would manage, at one stroke, to cleanse me from head to foot?
In the meantime, other forces were spending themselves; Alia Aziz had begun to wreak her awful spinster’s revenge.
Guru Mandir days: paan-smells, cooking-smells, the langorous odor of the shadow of the minaret, the mosque’s long pointing finger: while my aunt Alia’s hatred of the man who had abandoned her and of the sister who had married him grew into a tangible, visible thing, it sat on her living-room rug like a great gecko, reeking of vomit; but it seemed I was the only one to smell it, because Alia’s skill at dissimulation had grown as rapidly as the hairiness of her chin and her adeptness with the plasters with which, each evening, she ripped her beard out by the roots.
My aunt Alia’s contribution to the fate of nations—through her school and college—must not be minimized. Having allowed her old-maid frustrations to leak into the curricula, the bricks and also the students at her twin educational establishments, she had raised a tribe of children and young adults who felt themselves possessed by an ancient vengefulness, without fully knowing why. O omnipresent aridity of maiden aunts! It soured the paintwork of her home; her furniture was made lumpy by the harsh stuffing of bitterness; old-maid repressions were sewn into curtain-seams. As once long ago into baby-things of. Bitterness, issuing through the fissures of the earth.
What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the lonely madness of the years, raised to the level of an art-form: the impregnation of food with emotions. To whom she remained second in her achievements in this field: my old ayah, Mary Pereira. By whom, today, both old cooks have been outdone: Saleem Sinai, pickler-in-chief at the Braganza pickle works … nevertheless, while we lived in her Guru Mandir mansion, she fed us the birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord; and little by little, even the harmonies of my parents’ autumnal love went out of tune.
But good things must also be said about my aunt. In politics, she spoke out vociferously against government-by-military-say-so; if she had not had a General for a brother-in-law, her school and college might well have been taken out of her hands. Let me not show her entirely through the dark glass of my private despondency: she had given lecture-tours in the Soviet Union and America. Also, her food tasted good. (Despite its hidden content.)
But the air and the food in that mosque-shadowed house began to take its toll … Saleem, under the doubly dislocating influence of his awful love and Alia’s food, began to blush like a beetroot whenever his sister appeared in his thoughts; while Jamila, unconsciously seized by a longing for fresh air and food unseasoned by dark emotions, began to spend less and less time there, travelling instead up and down the country (but never to the East Wing) to give her concerts. On those increasingly rare occasions when brother and sister found themselves in the same room they would jump, startled, half an inch off the floor, and then, landing, stare furiously at the spot over which they had leaped, as if it had suddenly become as hot as a bread-oven. At other times, too, they indulged in behavior whose meaning would have been transparently obvious, were it not for the fact that each occupant of the house had other things on his or her mind: Jamila, for instance, took to keeping on her gold-and-white travelling veil indoors until she was sure her brother was out, even if she was dizzy with heat; while Saleem—who continued, slave-fashion, to fetch leavened bread from the nunnery of Santa Ignacia—avoided handing her the loaves himself; on occasion he asked his poisonous aunt to act as intermediary. Alia looked at him with amusement and asked,