Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [81]
Anything you want to be, you can be:
You can be just what-all you want.
By the time of my circumcision by a barber with a cleft palate from the Royal Barber House on Gowalia Tank Road (I was just over two months old), I was already much in demand at Methwold’s Estate. (Incidentally, on the subject of the circumcision: I still swear that I can remember the grinning barber, who held me by the foreskin while my member waggled frantically like a slithering snake; and the razor descending, and the pain; but I’m told that, at the time, I didn’t even blink.)
Yes, I was a popular little fellow: my two mothers, Amina and Mary, couldn’t get enough of me. In all practical matters, they were the most intimate of allies. After my circumcision, they bathed me together; and giggled together as my mutilated organ waggled angrily in the bathwater. “We better watch this boy, Madam,” Mary said naughtily, “His thing has a life of its own!” And Amina, “Tch, tch, Mary, you’re terrible, really …” But then amid sobs of helpless laughter, “Just see, Madam, his poor little soo-soo!” Because it was wiggling again, thrashing about, like a chicken with a slitted gullet … Together, they cared for me beautifully; but in the matter of emotion, they were deadly rivals. Once, when they took me for a pramride through the Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill, Amina overheard Mary telling the other ayahs, “Look: here’s my own big son”—and felt oddly threatened. Baby Saleem became, after that, the battleground of their loves; they strove to outdo one another in demonstrations of affection; while he, blinking by now, gurgling aloud, fed on their emotions, using it to accelerate his growth, expanding and swallowing infinite hugs kisses chucks-under-the-chin, charging towards the moment when he would acquire the essential characteristic of human beings: every day, and only in those rare moments when I was left alone with the fisherman’s pointing finger, I tried to heave myself erect in my cot.
(And while I made unavailing efforts to get to my feet, Amina, too, was in the grip of a useless resolve—she was trying to expel from her mind the dream of her unnameable husband, which had replaced the dream of flypaper on the night after I was born; a dream of such over-whelming reality that it stayed with her throughout her waking hours. In it, Nadir Khan came to her bed and impregnated her; such was the mischievous perversity of the dream that it confused Amina about the parentage of her child, and provided me, the child of midnight, with a fourth father to set beside Winkie and Methwold and Ahmed Sinai. Agitated but helpless in the clutches of the dream, my mother Amina began at that time to form the fog of guilt which would, in later years, surround her head like a dark black wreath.)
I never heard Wee Willie Winkie in his prime. After his blind-eyed bereavement, his sight gradually returned; but something harsh and bitter crept into his voice. He told us it was asthma, and continued to arrive at Methwold’s Estate once a week to sing songs which were, like himself, relics of the Methwold era. “Good Night, Ladies,” he sang; and, keeping up to date, added “The Clouds Will Soon Roll By” to his repertoire, and, a little later, “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?” Placing a sizeable infant with menacingly knocking knees on a small mat beside him in the circus-ring, he sang songs filled with nostalgia, and nobody had the heart to turn him away. Winkie and the fisherman’s finger were two of the few survivals of the days of William Methwold, because after the Englishman’s disappearance his successors emptied his palaces of their abandoned contents. Lila Sabarmati preserved her pianola; Ahmed Sinai kept his whisky-cabinet; old man Ibrahim came to terms with ceiling-fans; but the goldfish died, some from starvation, others as a result of being so colossally overfed that they exploded in little clouds of scales and undigested fish-food; the dogs ran wild, and eventually ceased to roam the Estate; and the fading clothes in the old almirahs were distributed amongst the sweeper-women and other servants on the Estate, so that for years afterwards the heirs of William Methwold were cared for by men and women wearing the increasingly ragged shirts and cotton print dresses of their erstwhile masters. But Winkie and the picture on my wall survived; singer and fisherman became institutions of our lives, like the cocktail hour, which was already a habit too powerful to be broken.