Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [36]
“I’d never have thought he was up to it.” Padma sounds admiring. “The fat old good-for-nothing!”
And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif’s dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then
“And then? Come on, baba, what then?”
shyly, she smiles at him.
“What?”
And after that, there are smiles in the underworld, and something has begun.
“Oh, so what? You’re telling me that’s all?”
That’s all: until the day Nadir Khan asked to see my grandfather—his sentences barely audible in the fog of silence—and asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
“Poor girl,” Padma concludes, “Kashmiri girls are normally fair like mountain snow, but she turned out black. Well, well, her skin would have stopped her making a good match, probably; and that Nadir’s no fool. Now they’ll have to let him stay, and get fed, and get a roof over his head, and all he has to do is hide like a fat earthworm under the ground. Yes, maybe he’s not such a fool.”
My grandfather tried hard to persuade Nadir Khan that he was no longer in danger; the assassins were dead, and Mian Abdullah had been their real target; but Nadir Khan still dreamed about the singing knives, and begged, “Not yet, Doctor Sahib; please, some more time.” So that one night in the late summer of 1943—the rains had failed again—my grandfather, his voice sounding distant and eerie in that house in which so few words were spoken, assembled his children in the drawing-room where their portraits hung. When they entered they discovered that their mother was absent, having chosen to remain immured in her room with her web of silence; but present were a lawyer and (despite Aziz’s reluctance, he had complied with Mumtaz’s wishes) a mullah, both provided by the ailing Rani of Cooch Naheen, both “utterly discreet.” And their sister Mumtaz was there in bridal finery, and beside her in a chair set in front of the radiogram was the lank-haired, overweight, embarrassed figure of Nadir Khan. So it was that the first wedding in the house was one at which there were no tents, no singers, no sweetmeats and only a minimum of guests; and after the rites were over and Nadir Khan lifted his bride’s veil—giving Aziz a sudden shock, making him young for a moment, and in Kashmir again, sitting on a dais while people put rupees in his lap—my grandfather made them all swear an oath not to reveal the presence in their cellar of their new brother-in-law. Emerald, reluctantly, gave her promise last of all.
After that Aadam Aziz made his sons help him carry all manner of furnishings down through the trap-door in the drawing-room floor: draperies and cushions and lamps and a big comfortable bed. And at last Nadir and Mumtaz stepped down into the vaults; the trap-door was shut and the carpet rolled into place and Nadir Khan, who loved his wife as delicately as a man ever had, had taken her into his underworld.
Mumtaz Aziz began to lead a double life. By day she was a single girl, living chastely with her parents, studying mediocrely at the university, cultivating those gifts of assiduity, nobility and forbearance which were to be her hallmarks throughout her life, up to and including the time when she was assailed by the talking washing-chests of her past and then squashed flat as a rice pancake; but at night, descending through a trap-door, she entered a lamplit, secluded marriage chamber which her secret husband had taken to calling the Taj Mahal, because Taj Bibi was the name by which people had called an earlier Mumtaz