Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [278]
When four-hundred-and-twenty suffered ectomies, an avenging Goddess ensured that certain ectomized parts were curried with onions and green chillies, and fed to the pie-dogs of Benares. (There were four hundred and twenty-one ectomies performed: because one of us, whom we called Narada or Markandaya, had the ability of changing sex; he, or she, had to be operated on twice.)
No, I can’t prove it, not any of it. Evidence went up in smoke: some was fed to pie-dogs, and later, on March 20th, files were burned by a mother with particolored hair and her beloved son.
But Padma knows what I can no longer do; Padma, who once, in her anger, cried out: “But what use are you, my God, as a lover?” That part, at least, can be verified: in the hovel of Picture Singh, I cursed myself with the lie of impotence; I cannot say I was not warned, because he told me: “Anything could happen, captain.” It did.
Sometimes I feel a thousand years old: or (because I cannot, even now, abandon form), to be exact, a thousand and one.
The Widow’s Hand had rolling hips and once owned a jewelery boutique. I began among jewels: in Kashmir, in 1915, there were rubies and diamonds. My great-grandparents ran a gemstone store. Form—once again, recurrence and shape!—no escape from it.
In the walls, the hopeless whispers of the stunned four-hundred-and-nineteen; while the four-hundred-and-twentieth gives vent—just once; one moment of ranting is permissible—to the following petulant question … at the top of my voice, I shriek: “What about him? Major Shiva, the traitor? Don’t you care about him?” And the reply, from gorgeous-with-big-rolling-hips: “The Major has undergone voluntary vasectomy.”
And now, in his sightless cell, Saleem begins to laugh, wholeheartedly, without stinting: no, I was not laughing cruelly at my archrival, nor was I cynically translating the word “voluntary” into another word; no, I was remembering stories told me by Parvati or Laylah, the legendary tales of the war hero’s philandering, of the legions of bastards swelling in the unectomied bellies of great ladies and whores; I laughed because Shiva, destroyer of the midnight children, had also fulfilled the other role lurking in his name, the function of Shivalingam, of Shiva-the-procreator, so that at this very moment, in the boudoirs and hovels of the nation, a new generation of children, begotten by midnight’s darkest child, was being raised towards the future. Every Widow manages to forget something important.
Late in March 1977, I was unexpectedly released from the palace of the howling widows, and stood blinking like an owl in the sunlight, not knowing how what why. Afterwards, when I had remembered how to ask questions, I discovered that on January 18th (the very day of the end of snip-snip, and of substances fried in an iron skillet: what further proof would you like that we, the four hundred and twenty, were what the Widow feared most of all?) the Prime Minister had, to the astonishment of all, called a general election. (But now that you know about us, you may find it easier to understand her over-confidence.) But on that day, I knew nothing about her crushing defeat, nor about burning files; it was only later that I learned how the tattered hopes of the nation had been placed in the custody of an ancient dotard who ate pistachios and cashews and daily took a glass of “his own water.” Urine-drinkers had come to power. The Janata Party, with one of its leaders trapped in a kidney-machine, did not seem to me (when I heard about it) to represent a new dawn; but maybe I’d managed to cure myself of the optimism virus at last—maybe others, with the disease still in their blood, felt otherwise. At any rate, I’ve had—I had had, on that March day—enough, more than enough of politics.
Four hundred and twenty stood blinking in the sunlight and tumult of the gullies of Benares; four hundred and twenty looked at one another and saw in each other’s eyes the memory of their gelding, and then, unable to bear the sight, mumbled farewells and dispersed, for the last time, into the healing privacy of the crowds.