Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [210]
… He also developed a penchant for lapsing into long broody silences, which he interrupted by bursting out suddenly with a meaningless word: “No!” or, “But!” or even more arcane exclamations, such as “Bang!” or “Whaam!” Nonsense words amidst clouded silences: as if Saleem were conducting some inner dialogue of such intensity that fragments of it, or its pain, boiled up from time to time past the surface of his lips. This inner discord was undoubtedly worsened by the curries of disquiet which we were obliged to eat; and at the end, when Amina was reduced to talking to invisible washing-chests and Ahmed, in the desolation of his stroke, was capable of little more than dribbles and giggles, while I glowered silently in my own private withdrawal, my aunt must have been well-pleased with the effectiveness of her revenge upon the Sinai clan; unless she, too, was drained by the fulfilment of her long-nurtured ambition; in which case she, too, had run out of possibilities, and there were hollow overtones in her footsteps as she stalked through the insane asylum of her home with her chin covered in hair-plasters, while her niece jumped over suddenly-hot patches of floor and her nephew yelled “Yaa!” out of nowhere and her erstwhile suitor sent spittle down his chin and Amina greeted the resurgent ghosts of her past: “So it’s you again; well, why not? Nothing ever seems to go away.”
Tick, tock … In January 1965, my mother Amina Sinai discovered that she was pregnant again, after a gap of seventeen years. When she was sure, she told her good news to her big sister Alia, giving my aunt the opportunity of perfecting her revenge. What Alia said to my mother is not known; what she stirred into her cooking must remain a matter for conjecture; but the effect on Amina was devastating. She was plagued by dreams of a monster child with a cauliflower instead of a brain; she was beset by phantoms of Ramram Seth, and the old prophecy of a child with two heads began to drive her wild all over again. My mother was forty-two years old; and the fears (both natural and Alia-induced) of bearing a child at such an age tarnished the brilliant aura which had hung around her ever since she nursed her husband into his loving autumn; under the influence of the kormas of my aunt’s vengeance—spiced with forebodings as well as cardamoms—my mother became afraid of her child. As the months passed, her forty-two years began to take a terrible toll; the weight of her four decades grew daily, crushing her beneath her age. In her second month, her hair went white. By the third, her face had shrivelled like a rotting mango. In her fourth month she was already an old woman, lined and thick, plagued by verrucas once again, with the inevitability of hair sprouting all over her face; she seemed shrouded once more in a fog of shame, as though the baby were a scandal in a lady of her evident antiquity. As the child of those confused days grew within her, the contrast between its youth and her age increased; it was at this point that she collapsed into an old cane chair and received visits from the specters of her past. The disintegration of my mother was appalling in its suddenness; Ahmed Sinai, observing helplessly, found himself, all of a sudden, unnerved, adrift, unmanned.
Even now, I find it hard to write about those days of the end of possibility, when my father found his towel factory crumbling in his hands. The effects of Alia’s culinary witchcraft (which operated both through his stomach, when he ate, and his eyes, when he saw his wife) were now all too apparent in him: he became slack at factory management, and irritable with his work-force.
To sum up the ruination of Amina Brand Towels: Ahmed Sinai began treating his workers as peremptorily as once, in Bombay, he had mistreated servants, and sought to inculcate, in master weavers and assistant packers alike, the eternal verities of the master-servant relationship. As a result his work-force walked out on him in droves, explaining, for instance,