Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [279]
What of Shiva? Major Shiva was placed under military detention by the new régime; but he did not remain there long, because he was permitted to receive one visit: Roshanara Shetty bribed coquetted wormed her way into his cell, the same Roshanara who had poured poison into his ears at Mahalaxmi Racecourse and who had since been driven crazy by a bastard son who refused to speak and did nothing he did not wish to do. The steel magnate’s wife drew from her handbag the enormous German pistol owned by her husband, and shot the war hero through the heart. Death, as they say, was instantaneous.
The Major died without knowing that once, in a saffron-and-green nursing home amid the mythological chaos of an unforgettable midnight, a tiny distraught women had changed baby-tags and denied him his birthright, which was that hillock-top world cocooned in money and starched white clothes and things things things—a world he would dearly have loved to possess.
And Saleem? No longer connected to history, drained above-and-below, I made my way back to the capital, conscious that an age, which had begun on that long-ago midnight, had come to a sort of end. How I traveled: I waited beyond the platform at Benares or Varanasi station with nothing but a platform-ticket in my hand, and leaped on to the step of a first-class compartment as the mail-train pulled out, heading west. And now, at least, I knew how it felt to clutch on for dear life, while particles of soot dust ash gritted in your eyes, and you were obliged to bang on the door and yell, “Ohé, maharaj! Open up! Let me in, great sir, maharaj!” While inside, a voice uttered familiar words: “On no account is anyone to open. Just fare-dodgers, that’s all.”
In Delhi: Saleem asks questions. Have you seen where? Do you know if the magicians? Are you acquainted with Picture Singh? A postman with the memory of snake-charmers fading in his eyes points north. And, later, a black-tongued paanwallah sends me back the way I came. Then, at last, the trail ceases meandering; street-entertainers put me on the scent. A Dilli-dekho man with a peepshow machine, a mongoose-and-cobra trainer wearing a paper hat like a child’s sailboat, a girl in a cinema box-office who retains her nostalgia for her childhood as a sorcerer’s apprentice … like fishermen, they point with fingers. West west west, until at last Saleem arrives at the Shadipur bus depot on the western outskirts of the city. Hungry thirsty enfeebled sick, skipping weakly out of the paths of buses roaring in and out of the depot—gaily-painted buses, bearing inscriptions on their bonnets such as God Willing! and other mottoes, for instance Thank God! on their backsides—he comes to a huddle of ragged tents clustered under a concrete railway bridge, and sees, in the shadow of concrete, a snake-charming giant breaking into an enormous rotten-toothed smile, and, in his arms, wearing a tee-shirt decorated with pink guitars, a small boy of some twenty-one months, whose ears are the ears of elephants, whose eyes are wide as saucers and whose face is as serious as the grave.
Abracadabra
TO TELL THE TRUTH, I lied about Shiva’s death. My first out-and-out lie—although my presentation of the Emergency in the guise of a six-hundred-and-thirty-five-day-long midnight was perhaps excessively romantic, and certainly contradicted by the available meteorological data. Still and all, whatever anyone may think, lying doesn’t come easily to Saleem, and I’m hanging my head in shame as I confess … Why, then, this single barefaced lie? (Because, in actuality, I’ve no idea where my changeling-rival went after the Widows’ Hostel; he could be in hell or the brothel down the road and I wouldn’t know the difference.) Padma, try and understand: I’m still terrified of him. There is unfinished business between us, and I spend my days quivering at the thought that the war hero might somehow have discovered the secret of his birth—was he ever shown a file bearing three tell-tale initials?—and that, roused to wrath by the irrecoverable loss of his past, he might come looking for me to exact a stifling revenge