Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [267]
Driven to distraction by her failure to cure that grave child who never cried, my Parvati-Laylah refused to believe my pessimistic theories; but she became vulnerable to every other cockeyed notion. When one of the older women in the colony of the magicians told her—as Resham Bibi might have—that the illness could not come out while the child remained dumb, Parvati seemed to find that plausible. “Sickness is a grief of the body,” she lectured me, “It must be shaken off in tears and groans.” That night, she returned to the hut clutching a little bundle of green powder, wrapped in newspaper and tied up with pale pink string, and told me that this was a preparation of such power that it would oblige even a stone to shriek. When she administered the medicine the child’s cheeks began to bulge, as though his mouth were full of food; the long-suppressed sounds of his babyhood flooded up behind his lips, and he jammed his mouth shut in fury. It became clear that the infant was close to choking as he tried to swallow back the torrential vomit of pent-up sound which the green powder had stirred up; and this was when we realized that we were in the presence of one of the earth’s most implacable wills. At the end of an hour during which my son turned first saffron, then saffron-and-green, and finally the color of grass, I could not stand it any more and bellowed, “Woman, if the little fellow wants so much to stay quiet, we mustn’t kill him for it!” I picked up Aadam to rock him, and felt his little body becoming rigid, his knee-joints elbows neck were filling up with the held-back tumult of unexpressed sounds, and at last Parvati relented and prepared an antidote by mashing arrowroot and camomile in a tin bowl while muttering strange imprecations under her breath. After that, nobody ever tried to make Aadam Sinai do anything he did not wish to do; we watched him battling against tuberculosis and tried to find reassurance in the idea that a will so steely would surely refuse to be defeated by any mere disease.
In those last days my wife Laylah or Parvati was also being gnawed by the interior moths of a despair, because when she came towards me for comfort or warmth in the isolation of our sleeping hours, I still saw superimposed upon her features the horribly eroded physiognomy of Jamila Singer; and although I confessed to Parvati the secret of the specter, consoling her by pointing out that at its present rate of decay it would have crumbled away entirely before long, she told me dolorously that spittoons and war had softened my brain, and despaired of her marriage which would, as it transpired, never be consummated; slowly, slowly there appeared on her lips the ominous pout of her grief … but what could I do? What solace could I offer—I, Saleem Snotnose, who had been reduced to poverty by the withdrawal of my family’s protection, who had chosen (if it was a choice) to live by my olfactory gifts, earning a few paisa a day by sniffing out what people had eaten for dinner the previous day and which of them were in love; what consolation could I bring her, when I was already in the clutches of the cold hand of that lingering midnight, and could sniff finality in the air?
Saleem’s nose (you can’t have forgotten) could smell stranger things than horse-dung. The perfumes of emotions and ideas, the odor of how-things-were: all these were and are nosed out by me with ease. When the Constitution was altered to give the Prime Minister well-nigh-absolute powers, I smelled the ghosts of ancient empires in the air … in that city which was littered with the phantoms of Slave Kings and Mughals, of Aurangzeb the merciless and the last, pink conquerors, I inhaled once again the sharp aroma of despotism. It smelled like burning oily rags.
But even the nasally incompetent could have worked out that, during the winter of 1975–6, something smelled rotten in the capital; what alarmed me was a stranger, more personal stink: the whiff of personal danger, in which I discerned the presence of a pair of treacherous, retributive knees