Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [77]
How do I know this? Because, at the end of the interview, the photographer presented my mother with a cheque—for one hundred rupees.
One hundred rupees! Is it possible to imagine a more piffling, derisory sum? It is a sum by which one could, were one of a mind to do so, feel insulted. I shall, however, merely thank them for celebrating my arrival, and forgive them for their lack of a genuine historical sense.
“Don’t be vain,” Padma says grumpily. “One hundred rupees is not so little; after all, everybody gets born, it’s not such a big big thing.”
BOOK TWO
The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger
IS IT POSSIBLE to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival? I can think of no other reason for Padma’s bizarre behavior; and this explanation at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading aloud) a word which should not have been spoken … ever since the episode of the quack doctor’s visit, I have sniffed out a strange discontent in Padma, exuding its enigmatic spoor from her eccrine (or apocrine) glands. Distressed, perhaps, by the futility of her midnight attempts at resuscitating my “other pencil,” the useless cucumber hidden in my pants, she has been waxing grouchy. (And then there was her ill-tempered reaction, last night, to my revelation of the secrets of my birth, and her irritation at my low opinion of the sum of one hundred rupees.) I blame myself: immersed in my autobiographical enterprise, I failed to consider her feelings, and began tonight on the most unfortunate of false notes.
“Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,” I wrote and read aloud, “I have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because while Aadam Aziz remained the sheet’s victim, I have become its master—and Padma is the one who is now under its spell. Sitting in my enchanted shadows, I vouchsafe daily glimpses of myself—while she, my squatting glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose frozen into immobility by the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralyzed—yes!—by love.”
That was the word: love. Written-and-spoken, it raised her voice to an unusually shrill pitch; it unleashed from her lips a violence which would have wounded me, were I still vulnerable to words. “Love you?” our Padma piped scornfully, “What for, my God? What use are you, little princeling,”—and now came her attempted coup de grâce—“as a lover?” Arm extended, its hairs glowing in the lamplight, she jabbed a contemptuous index finger in the direction of my admittedly nonfunctional loins; a long, thick digit, rigid with jealousy, which unfortunately served only to remind me of another, long-lost finger … so that she, seeing her arrow miss its mark, shrieked, “Madman from somewhere! That doctor was right!” and rushed distractedly from the room. I heard footsteps clattering down the metal stairs to the factory floor; feet rushing between the dark-shrouded pickle-vats; and a door, first unbolted and then slammed.
Thus abandoned, I have returned, having no option, to my work.
The fisherman’s pointing finger: unforgettable focal point of the picture which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above the sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight’s child, I spent my earliest days. The young Raleigh—and who else?—sat, framed in teak, at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor—did he have a walrus moustache?—whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh—and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic … and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child with a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor sat in a sky-blue room, beneath the pointing finger, and copied the attire of the English milords