Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [42]
“In the end, everyone can do without fathers,” Doctor Aziz told his daughter when he said goodbye; and Reverend Mother added, “Another orphan in the family, whatsitsname, but never mind, Muhammad was an orphan too; and you can say this for your Ahmed Sinai, whatsitsname, at least he is half Kashmiri.” Then, with his own hands, Doctor Aziz had passed a green tin trunk into the railway compartment where Ahmed Sinai awaited his bride. “The dowry is neither small nor vast as these things go,” my grandfather said. “We are not crorepatis, you understand. But we have given you enough; Amina will give you more.” Inside the green tin trunk: silver samovars, brocade saris, gold coins given to Doctor Aziz by grateful patients, a museum in which the exhibits represented illnesses cured and lives saved. And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up after the dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so reinvented her, thus becoming in a sense her father as well as her new husband … he walked (with his own feet) along the platform as the train began to move. A relay runner at the end of his lap, he stood wreathed in smoke and comic-book vendors and the confusion of peacock-feather fans and hot snacks and the whole lethargic hullabaloo of squatting porters and plaster animals on trolleys as the train picked up speed and headed for the capital city, accelerating into the next lap of the race. In the compartment the new Amina Sinai sat (in mint condition) with her feet on the green tin trunk which had been an inch too high to fit under the seat. With her sandals bearing down on the locked museum of her father’s achievements she sped away into her new life, leaving Aadam Aziz behind to dedicate himself to an attempt to fuse the skills of Western and hakimi medicine, an attempt which would gradually wear him down, convincing him that the hegemony of superstition, mumbo-jumbo and all things magical would never be broken in India, because the hakims refused to co-operate; and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to do so.
As the train pulled out of the station Ahmed Sinai jumped up and bolted the compartment door and pulled down the shutters, much to Amina’s amazement; but then suddenly there were thumps outside and hands moving the doorknobs and voices saying, “Let us in, maharaj! Maharajin, are you there, ask your husband to open.” And always, in all the trains in this story, there were these voices and these fists banging and pleading; in the Frontier Mail to Bombay and in all the expresses of the years; and it was always frightening, until at last I was the one on the outside, hanging on for dear life, and begging, “Hey, maharaj! Let me in, great sir.”
“Fare-dodgers,” Ahmed Sinai said, but they were more than that. They were a prophecy. There were to be others soon.
… And now the sun was in the wrong place. She, my mother, lay in bed and felt ill-at-ease; but also excited by the thing that had happened inside her and which, for the moment, was her secret. At her side, Ahmed Sinai snored richly. No insomnia for him; none, despite the troubles which had made him bring a gray bag full of money and hide it under his bed when he thought Amina wasn’t looking. My father slept soundly, wrapped in the soothing envelope of my mother’s greatest gift, which turned out to be worth a good deal more than the contents of the green tin trunk: Amina Sinai gave Ahmed the gift of her inexhaustible assiduity.
Nobody ever took pains the way Amina did. Dark of skin, glowing of eye, my mother was by nature the most meticulous person on earth. Assiduously, she arranged flowers in the corridors and rooms of the Old Delhi house; carpets were selected with infinite care. She could spend twenty-five minutes worrying at the positioning of a chair. By the time she’d finished with her home-making, adding tiny touches here, making fractional alterations there, Ahmed Sinai found his orphan