Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [246]
Did I run from that lock of fateful hair? Did Saleem, fearing a reunion with his alter ego, whom he had so-long-ago banned from the councils of the night, flee back into the bosom of that family whose comforts had been denied the war-hero? Was it high-mindedness or guilt? I can no longer say; I set down only what I remember, namely that Parvati-the-witch whispered, “Maybe he will come when he has time; and then we will be three!” And another, repeated phrase: “Midnight’s children, yaar … that’s something, no?” Parvati-the-witch reminded me of things I had tried to put out of my mind; and I walked away from her, to the home of Mustapha Aziz.
Of my last miserable contact with the brutal intimacies of family life, only fragments remain; however, since it must all be set down and subsequently pickled, I shall attempt to piece together an account … to begin with, then, let me report that my Uncle Mustapha lived in a commodiously anonymous Civil Service bungalow set in a tidy Civil Service garden just off Rajpath in the heart of Lutyens’s city; I walked along what-had-once-been-Kingsway, breathing in the numberless perfumes of the street, which blew out of State Handicraft Emporia and the exhaust-pipes of auto-rickshaws; the aromas of banyan and deodar mingled with the ghostly scents of long-gone viceroys and memsahibs in gloves, and also with the rather more strident bodily odors of gaudy rich begums and tramps. Here was the giant election scoreboard around which (during the first battle-for-power between Indira and Morarji Desai) crowds had thronged, awaiting the results, asking eagerly: “Is it a boy or a girl?” … amid ancient and modern, between India Gate and the Secretariat buildings, my thoughts teeming with vanished (Mughal and British) empires and also with my own history—because this was the city of the public announcement, of many-headed monsters and a hand, falling from the sky—I marched resolutely onwards, smelling, like everything else in sight, to high heaven. And at last, having turned left towards Dupleix Road, I arrived at an anonymous garden with a low wall and a hedge; in a corner of which I saw a signboard waving in the breeze, just as once signboards had flowered in the gardens of Methwold’s Estate; but this echo of the past told a different story. Not FOR SALE, with its three ominous vowels and four fateful consonants; the wooden flower of my uncle’s garden proclaimed strangely: Mr. Mustapha Aziz and Fly.
Not knowing that the last word was my uncle’s habitual, desiccated abbreviation of the throbbingly emotional noun “family,” I was thrown into confusion by the nodding signboard; after I had stayed in his household for a very short time, however, it began to seem entirely fitting, because the family of Mustapha Aziz was indeed as crushed, as insect-like, as insignificant as the mythically truncated Fly.
With what words was I greeted when, a little nervously, I rang a doorbell, filled with hopes of beginning a new career? What face appeared behind the wire-netted outer door and scowled in angry surprise? Padma: I was greeted by Uncle Mustapha’s wife, by my mad aunt Sonia, with the exclamation: “Ptui! Allah! How the fellow stinks!”
And although I, ingratiatingly, “Hullo, Sonia Aunty darling,” grinned sheepishly at this wire-netting-shaded vision of my aunt’s wrinkling Irani beauty, she went on, “Saleem, is it? Yes, I remember you. Nasty little brat you were. Always thought you were growing up to be God or what. And why? Some stupid letter the P.M.