Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [268]
Perhaps, with such a warning pricking at my nostrils, I should have fled—tipped off by a nose, I could have taken to my heels. But there were practical objections: where would I have gone? And, burdened by wife and son, how fast could I have moved? Nor must it be forgotten that I did flee once, and look where I ended up: in the Sundarbans, the jungle of phantasms and retribution, from which I only escaped by the skin of my teeth! … At any rate, I did not run.
It probably didn’t matter; Shiva—implacable, traitorous, my enemy from our birth—would have found me in the end. Because although a nose is uniquely equipped for the purpose of sniffing-things-out, when it comes to action there’s no denying the advantages of a pair of grasping, choking knees.
I shall permit myself one last, paradoxical observation on this subject: if, as I believe, it was at the house of the wailing women that I learned the answer to the question of purpose which had plagued me all my life, then by saving myself from that palace of annihilations I would also have denied myself this most precious of discoveries. To put it rather more philosophically: every cloud has a silver lining.
Saleem-and-Shiva, nose-and-knees … we shared just three things: the moment (and its consequences) of our birth; the guilt of treachery; and our son, Aadam, our synthesis, unsmiling, grave, with omni-audient ears. Aadam Sinai was in many respects the exact opposite of Saleem. I, at my beginning, grew with vertiginous speed; Aadam, wrestling with the serpents of disease, scarcely grew at all. Saleem wore an ingratiating smile from the start; Aadam had more dignity, and kept his grins to himself. Whereas Saleem had subjugated his will to the joint tyrannies of family and fate, Aadam fought ferociously, refusing to yield even to the coercion of green powder. And while Saleem had been so determined to absorb the universe that he had been, for a time, unable to blink, Aadam preferred to keep his eyes firmly closed … although when, every so often, he deigned to open them, I observed their color, which was blue. Ice-blue, the blue of recurrence, the fateful blue of Kashmiri sky … but there is no need to elaborate further.
We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams.
How much was heard by those flapping ears which seemed, on occasion, to be burning with the heat of their knowledge? If he could have talked, would he have cautioned me against treason and bulldozers? In a country dominated by the twin multitudes of noises and smells, we could have been the perfect team; but my baby son rejected speech, and I failed to obey the dictates of my nose.
“Arré baap,” Padma cries, “Just tell what happened, mister! What is so surprising if a baby does not make conversations?”
And again the rifts inside me: I can’t.—You must.—Yes.
April 1976 found me still living in the colony or ghetto of the magicians; my son Aadam was still in the grip of a slow tuberculosis that seemed unresponsive to any form of treatment. I was full of forebodings (and thoughts of flight); but if any one man was the reason for my remaining in the ghetto, that man was Picture Singh.
Padma: Saleem threw in his lot with the magicians of Delhi partly out of a sense of fitness—a self-flagellant belief in the rectitude of his belated descent into poverty (I took with me, from my uncle’s house, no more than two shirts, white, two pairs trousers, also white, one teeshirt, decorated with pink guitars, and shoes, one pair, black); partly, I came out of loyalty, having been bound by knots of gratitude to my rescuer, Parvati-the-witch; but I stayed