Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [43]
Why had she married him?—For solace, for children. But at first the insomnia coating her brain got in the way of her first aim; and children don’t always come at once. So Amina had found herself dreaming about an undreamable poet’s face and waking with an unspeakable name on her lips. You ask: what did she do about it? I answer: she gritted her teeth and set about putting herself straight. This is what she told herself: “You big ungrateful goof, can’t you see who is your husband now? Don’t you know what a husband deserves?” To avoid fruitless controversy about the correct answers to these questions, let me say that, in my mother’s opinion, a husband deserved unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. But there was a difficulty: Amina, her mind clogged up with Nadir Khan and his insomnia, found she couldn’t naturally provide Ahmed Sinai with these things. And so, bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes … in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit.
Each day she selected one fragment of Ahmed Sinai, and concentrated her entire being upon it until it became wholly familiar; until she felt fondness rising up within her and becoming affection and, finally, love. In this way she came to adore his over-loud voice and the way it assaulted her eardrums and made her tremble; and his peculiarity of always being in a good mood until after he had shaved—after which, each morning, his manner became stern, gruff, business-like and distant; and his vulture-hooded eyes which concealed what she was sure was his inner goodness behind a bleakly ambiguous gaze; and the way his lower lip jutted out beyond his upper one; and his shortness which led him to forbid her ever to wear high heels … “My God,” she told herself, “it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man!” But she was undismayed. “Who, after all,” she reasoned privately, “ever truly knows another human being completely?” and continued to learn to love and admire his appetite for fried foods, his ability to quote Persian poetry, the furrow of anger between his eyebrows … “At this rate,” she thought, “there will always be something fresh about him to love; so our marriage just can’t go stale.” In this way, assiduously, my mother settled down to life in the old city. The tin trunk sat unopened in an old almirah.
And Ahmed, without knowing or suspecting, found himself and his life worked upon by his wife until, little by little, he came to resemble—and to live in a place that resembled—a man he had never known and an underground chamber he had never seen. Under the influence of a painstaking magic so obscure that Amina was probably unaware of working it, Ahmed Sinai found his hair thinning, and what was left becoming lank and greasy; he discovered that he was willing to let it grow until it began to worm over the tops of his ears. Also, his stomach began to spread, until it became the yielding, squashy belly in which I would so often be smothered and which none of us, consciously at any rate, compared to the pudginess of Nadir Khan. His distant cousin Zohra told him, coquettishly, “You must diet, cousinji, or we won’t be able to reach you to kiss!” But it did no good … and little by little Amina constructed in Old Delhi a world of soft cushions and draperies over the windows which let in as little light as possible … she lined the chick-blinds with black cloths; and all these minute transformations helped her in her Herculean task, the task of accepting, bit by bit, that she must love a new man. (But she remained susceptible to the forbidden dream-images of