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Copyright © Salman Rushdie 1981
Introduction © Salman Rushdie 2006
Salman Rushdie has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Excerpts from the Koran come from the Penguin Classics edition, translated by N. J. Dawood, copyright © 1956, 1959, 1966, 1968, 1974. Reprinted by kind permission of Penguin Books Ltd
Published by Vintage 2006
First published in Great Britain in 1981 by Jonathan Cape
First published by Vintage in 1995
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
‘I was overwhelmed by its zest and sparkle; the sheer joy in creation shown in every gleefully overloaded sentence, every authorial sleight of hand and every scatological joke. Midnight’s Children is … tremendous fun’
Guardian
‘Midnight’s Children is simultaneously a family history, fantasy, allegory, political satire and a Life and Opinions of Saleem Sinai – a life-story with a distinctly Shandian turn, but one that is also a serious inward quest and self-examination. These different departments are juxtaposed or merged with dazzling fluency – the verve, the apparently spontaneous resourcefulness of the tale are amazing’
London Review of Books
‘Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air’
The New York Times Book Review
‘An almost unbearably imaginative and critically acclaimed epic of modern India’
Atlantic
‘Ambitious, chaotic, fantastical, mythic … Rushdie’s stylistically bold, time-juggling Bildungsroman’
Los Angeles Times
‘A brilliant and endearing novel’
London Review of Books
‘Salman Rushdie is a magnificent writer. He has a free-ranging imagination and a coarse, strong wit. He attacks language with energy and without constraint’
Independent
‘In Salman Rushdie, India has produced a glittering novelist – one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling’
The New Yorker
‘Rushdie is the great post-imperial Indian writer’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Salman Rushdie has earned the right to be called one of our greatest storytellers’
Observer
‘[Rushdie] has a rare mastery of language, and when you read his work you cannot help but feel you are in the company of a mighty intelligence … Salman Rushdie is undoubtedly one of our greatest storytellers’
Daily Herald
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels, one collection of short stories, three works of non-fiction, his memoir Joseph Anton, and the co-editor of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing. In 2008 Midnight’s Children was judged to be the Best of the Booker, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its forty-year history. The Moor’s Last Sigh won the Whitbread Prize in 1995 and the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature in 1996. Salman Rushdie is a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres and in 2007 was knighted for his services to literature.
FICTION
Grimus
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the Clown
The Enchantress of Florence
Luka and the Fire of Life
NON-FICTION
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991
Step Across this Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002
Joseph Anton: A Memoir
PLAYS
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (with Tim Supple and David Tushingham)
Midnight’s Children (with Tim Supple and Simon Reade)
SCREENPLAY
Midnight’s Children
ANTHOLOGIES
The Vintage Book of Indian Writing (co-editor)
Best American Short Stories 2008 (co-editor)
Born at the stroke of midnight, at the precise moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai is destined from birth to be special. For he is one of 1,001 children born in the midnight hour, children who all have special gifts, children with whom Saleem is telepathically linked.
But there has been a terrible mix-up at birth, and Saleem’s life takes some unexpected twists and turns. As he grows up amidst a whirlwind of triumphs and disasters, Saleem must learn the ominous consequences of his gift, for the course of his life is inseparably tied to that of his motherland, and his every act is mirrored and magnified in the events that shape the newborn nation of India. It is a great gift, and a terrible burden.
For Zafar Rushdie who, contrary to all expectations, was born in the afternoon
In 1975 I published my first novel, Grimus, and decided to use the seven-hundred-pound advance to travel in India as cheaply as possible for as long as I could make the money last, and on that journey of fifteen-hour bus rides and humble hostelries Midnight’s Children was born. It was the year that India became a nuclear power and Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party and Sheikh Mujib, the founder of Bangladesh, was murdered; when the Baader-Meinhof Gang was on trial in Stuttgart and Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham and the last Americans were evacuated from Saigon and Generalissimo Franco died. In Cambodia it was the Khmer Rouge’s bloody Year Zero. E.L. Doctorow published Ragtime that year, and David Mamet wrote American Buffalo, and Eugenio Montale won the Nobel Prize. And just after my return from India, Mrs Indira Gandhi was convicted of election fraud, and one week after my twenty-eighth birthday she declared a State of Emergency and assumed tyrannical powers. It was the beginning of a long period of darkness which would not end until 1977. I understood almost at once that Mrs G. had somehow become central to my still-tentative literary plans.
I had wanted for some time to write a novel of childhood, arising from my memories of my own childhood in Bombay. Now, having drunk deeply from the well of India, I conceived a more ambitious plan. I remembered a minor character named Saleem Sinai, born at the midnight moment of Indian independence, who had appeared in the abandoned draft of a still-born novel called The Antagonist. As I placed Saleem at the centre of my new scheme I understood that his time of birth would oblige me immensely to increase the size of my canvas. If he and India were to be paired, I would need to tell the story of both twins. Then Saleem, ever a striver for meaning, suggested to me that the whole of modern Indian history happened as it did because of him; that history, the life of his nation-twin, was somehow all his fault. With that immodest proposal the novel’s characteristic tone of voice, comically assertive, unrelentingly garrulous, and with, I hope, a growing pathos in its narrator’s increasingly tragic over-claiming, came into being. I even made the boy and the country identical twins. When the sadistic geography teacher Emil Zagallo, giving the boys a lesson in ‘human geography,’ compares Saleem’s nose to the Deccan peninsula, the cruelty of his joke is also, obviously, mine.
There were many problems along the way, most of them literary, some of them urgently practical. When we returned from India I was broke. The novel in my head was clearly going to be long and strange and take quite a while to write and in the meanwhile I had no money. As a result I was forced back into the world of advertising. Before we left I had worked for a year or so as a copywriter at the London office of the Ogilvy & Mather agency, whose founder, David Ogilvy, immortally instructed us that ‘the consumer is not a moron, she is your wife,’ and whose creative director (and my boss) was Dan Ellerington, a man of rumoured Romanian origins with a command of English that was, let us say, eccentric, so that, according to mirthful company legend, he once had to be forcibly restrained from presenting to the Milk Marketing Board a successor campaign to the famous ‘Drinka pinta milka day’ which would be based on the amazing, the positively Romanian slogan, ‘Milk goes down like a dose of salts’. In those less hard-nosed times Ogilvy’s was prepared to employ a few oddball creative people on a part-time basis, and I managed to persuade them to re-hire me as one of that happy breed. I worked two or three days a week, essentially job-sharing with another part-timer, the writer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny. On Friday nights I would come home to Kentish Town from the agency’s offices near Waterloo Bridge, take a long hot bath, wash the week’s commerce away, and emerge – or so I told myself – as a novelist. As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self’s dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.
Still, advertising taught me discipline, forcing me to learn how to get on with whatever task needed getting on with, and ever since those days I have treated my writing simply as a job to be done, refusing myself all (well, most) luxuries of artistic temperament. And it was at my desk at Ogilvy’s that I remember becoming worried that I didn’t know what my new novel was to be called. I took several hours off from the important work of coming up with campaigns for fresh cream cakes (‘Naughty but nice’), Aero chocolate bars (‘Irresistibubble’), and the Daily Mirror newspaper (‘Look into the Mirror tomorrow – you’ll like what you see’) to solve the problem. In the end I had two titles and couldn’t choose between them: Midnight’s Children and Children of Midnight. I typed them out one after the other, over and over, and then all at once I understood that there was no contest, that Children of Midnight was a banal title and Midnight’s Children a good one. To know the title was also to understand the book better, and after that it became easier, a little easier, to write.
I have written and spoken elsewhere about my debt to the oral narrative traditions of India; also to those great Indian novelists, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens – Austen for her portraits of brilliant women caged by the social convention of their time, women whose Indian counterparts I knew well; Dickens for his great, rotting, Bombay-like city, and his ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyper-realistic background, out of which the comic and fantastic elements of his work seemed to grow organically, becoming intensifications of, and not escapes from, the real world. I have probably said enough, too, about my interest in creating a literary idiolect that allowed the rhythms and thought patterns of Indian languages to blend with the idiosyncrasies of ‘Hinglish’ and ‘Bambaiyya’, the polyglot street-slang of Bombay. The novel’s interest in the slippages and distortions of memory will also, I think, be evident enough to the reader. This may, however, be an appropriate moment to give thanks to the original people from whom my fictional characters sprang: my family, my ayah Miss Mary Menezes and my childhood friends.
My father was so angry about the character of ‘Ahmed Sinai’ that he refused to speak to me for many months; then he decided to ‘forgive’ me, which annoyed me so much that for several more months I refused to speak to him. I had been more worried about my mother’s reaction to the book, but she immediately understood that it was ‘just a story – Saleem isn’t you, Amina isn’t me, they’re all just characters,’ thus demonstrating that her level head was a lot more use to her than my father’s Cambridge University education in English literature was to him. My sister Sameen, who really was called ‘the brass monkey’ as a girl, was also happy with the use I’d made of my raw material, even though some of that raw material was her. Of the reactions of my boyhood friends and schoolmates Arif Tayabali, Darab and Fudli Talyarkhan, Keith Stevenson and Percy Karanjia I can’t be sure, but I must thank them for having contributed bits of themselves (not always the best bits) to the characters of Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice and Hairoil, and Fat Perce and Glandy Keith. Evie Burns was born out of an Australian girl, Beverly Burns, the first girl I ever kissed: the real Beverly was no bicycle queen, though, and I lost touch with her after she returned to Australia. Masha Miovic the champion breast-stroker owed something to the real-life Alenka Miovic, but a couple of years ago I received a letter about Midnight’s Children from Alenka’s father in Serbia, in which he mentioned a little crushingly that his daughter had no memory of ever having met me during her childhood years in Bombay. So it goes. Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
And as for Mary Menezes, my second mother, who never really loved a revolutionary nursing-home employee or swapped any babies at birth, who lived to a hundred, who never married and always called me her son, she was illiterate, even though she spoke seven or eight languages, so she didn’t read the book, but did tell me, one afternoon in Bombay in 1982, how proud she was of its success. If she had any objection to what I’d made her character do, she didn’t mention it.
I reached the end of Midnight’s Children in mid-1979 and sent it to my friend and editor Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape. I afterwards learned that the first reader’s report had been brief and forbiddingly negative. ‘The author should concentrate on short stories until he has mastered the novel form.’ Liz asked for a second report, and this time I was luckier, because the second reader, Susannah Clapp, was enthusiastic; as, after her, was another eminent publishing figure, the editor Catherine Carver. Liz bought the book, and soon afterwards so did Bob Gottlieb at Alfred Knopf. I quit my part-time copywriting job. (I had moved on from Ogilvy & Mather to another agency, Ayer Barker Hegemann.) ‘Oh,’ the Creative Director said when I tendered my resignation, ‘you want a rise?’ No, I explained, I was just giving notice as required so that I could leave and be a full-time writer. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘You want a big rise.’ But on the night Midnight’s Children won the Booker, he sent me a telegram of congratulations. ‘One of us made it,’ it read.
Liz Calder’s editing saved me from making at least two bad mistakes. The manuscript as originally submitted contained a second ‘audience’ character, an off-stage woman journalist to whom Saleem was sending the written pages of his life story which he also read aloud to the ‘mighty pickle-woman’, Padma. All the book’s readers at Cape agreed that this character was redundant, and I’m extremely glad I took their advice. Liz also helped me untangle a knot in the time-line. In the submitted manuscript the story jumped from the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 to the end of the Bangladesh war, then circled back to tell the story of Saleem’s rôle in that conflict, caught up with itself at the surrender of the Pakistani army, and then went on. Liz felt that there were too many temporal shifts here, and the reader’s concentration was broken by them. I agreed to re-structure the story chronologically, and, again, am very relieved that I did. The rôle of the great publishing editor is often effaced by the editor’s modesty. But without Liz Calder, Midnight’s Children would have been something rather less than she helped it to become.
The novel’s publication was delayed by a series of industrial strikes, but in the end it was published in London in early April 1981, and on April 6th my first wife Clarissa Luard and I threw a party at our friend Tony Stokes’s little art gallery in Langley Court, Covent Garden, to celebrate it. I still have the invitation, tucked into my first-received copy of the novel, and can remember feeling, above all, relieved. When I finished the book, I suspected that I might at last have written something good, but I was not sure if anyone else would agree, and I told myself that if the book were generally disliked it would mean that I probably didn’t know what a good book was, and should stop wasting my time trying to write one. So there was a lot riding on the novel’s reception, and, fortunately, the reviews were good; hence the high spirits in Covent Garden that spring night.
In the West people tended to read Midnight’s Children as a fantasy, while in India people thought of it as pretty realistic, almost a history book. (‘I could have written your book,’ one reader told me when I was lecturing in India in 1982. ‘I know all that stuff.’) But it was wonderfully well liked almost everywhere, and changed its author’s life. One reader who didn’t care for it, however, was Mrs Indira Gandhi, and in 1984, three years after its publication – she was Prime Minister again by this time – she brought an action against it, claiming to have been defamed by one single sentence. It appeared in the penultimate paragraph of chapter 28, ‘A wedding’, a paragraph in which Saleem provides a brief account of Mrs Gandhi’s life. This was it: ‘It has often been said that Mrs Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through her neglect, for his father’s death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything.’ Tame stuff, you might think, not really the kind of thing a thick-skinned politician would usually sue a novelist for mentioning, and an odd choice of casus belli in a book that excoriated Indira for the many crimes of the Emergency. After all, it was a thing much said in India in those days, had often been in print, and was indeed reprinted prominently in the Indian press (‘The sentence Mrs Gandhi is afraid of’ read one front-page headline) after she brought her action for defamation. Yet she sued nobody else.
Before the book’s publication, Cape’s lawyers had been worried about my criticisms of Mrs Gandhi and had asked me to write them a letter in support of the claims I was making. In this letter I justified the text to their satisfaction, except with regard to one sentence which, as I said, was hard to substantiate, as it was about three people, two of whom were dead, while the third would be the one suing us. However, I argued, as I was clearly characterizing the information as gossip, and as it had been printed before, we should be all right. The lawyers agreed; and then, three years later, this one sentence, the novel’s Achilles heel, was the very sentence Mrs Gandhi tried to spear. This was not, in my view, a coincidence.
The case never came to court. The law of defamation is highly technical, and to repeat a defamatory rumour is to commit the defamation oneself, so technically we were in the wrong. Mrs Gandhi was not asking for damages, only for the sentence to be removed from future editions of the book. The only defence we had was a high-risk route: we would have had to argue that her actions during the Emergency were so heinous that she could no longer be considered a person of good character, and could therefore not be defamed. In other words, we would have had, in effect, to put her on trial for her misdeeds. But if, in the end, a British court refused to accept that the Prime Minister of India was not a woman of good character, then we would be, not to put too fine a point upon it, royally screwed. Unsurprisingly, this was not the strategy which Cape wished to follow – and when it became clear that she was also willing to accept that this was her sole complaint against the book, I agreed to settle the matter. It was after all an amazing admission she was making, considering what the Emergency chapters of Midnight’s Children were about. Her willingness to make such an admission felt to me like an extraordinary validation of the novel’s portrait of those Emergency years. The reaction to the settlement in India was not favourable to the Prime Minister. A few short weeks later, stunningly, she was dead, assassinated on October 31st, 1984, by her Sikh bodyguards. ‘All of us who love India,’ I wrote in a newspaper article, ‘are in mourning today.’ In spite of our disagreements, I meant every word.
This is by now an old story. I rehearse it here in part because I worried from the beginning that incorporating such momentarily ‘hot’ contemporary material in the novel was a risk – and by that I meant a literary risk, not a legal one. One day, I knew, the subject of Mrs Gandhi and the Emergency would cease to be current, would no longer exercise anyone overmuch, and at that point, I told myself, my novel would either get worse – because it would lose the power of topicality – or else it would get better – because once the topical had faded, the novel’s literary architecture would stand alone, and even, perhaps, be better appreciated. Clearly, I hoped for the latter, but there was no way to be sure. The fact that Midnight’s Children is still of interest twenty-five years after it first appeared is, therefore, reassuring.
In 1981, Margaret Thatcher was British Prime Minister, the American hostages in Iran were released, President Reagan was shot and wounded, there were race riots across Britain, the Pope was shot and wounded, Picasso’s Guernica went back to Spain, and President Sadat of Egypt was assassinated. It was the year of V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers and Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise and John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich. Like all novels, Midnight’s Children is a product of its moment in history, touched and shaped by its time in ways which its author cannot wholly know. I am very glad that it still seems like a book worth reading in this very different time. If it can pass the test of another generation or two, it may endure. I will not be around to see that. But I am happy that I saw it leap the first hurdle.
Salman Rushdie, December 25th, 2005, London
I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate – at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time.
Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning – yes, meaning – something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.
(The sheet, incidentally, is stained too, with three drops of old, faded redness. As the Quran tells us: Recite, in the name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.)
One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes.
The world was new again. After a winter’s gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow. The new grass bided its time underground; the mountains were retreating to their hill-stations for the warm season. (In the winter, when the valley shrank under the ice, the mountains closed in and snarled like angry jaws around the city on the lake.)
In those days the radio mast had not been built and the temple of Sankara Acharya, a little black blister on a khaki hill, still dominated the streets and lake of Srinagar. In those days there was no army camp at the lakeside, no endless snakes of camouflaged trucks and jeeps clogged the narrow mountain roads, no soldiers hid behind the crests of the mountains past Baramulla and Gulmarg. In those days travellers were not shot as spies if they took photographs of bridges, and apart from the Englishmen’s houseboats on the lake, the valley had hardly changed since the Mughal Empire, for all its springtime renewals; but my grandfather’s eyes – which were, like the rest of him, twenty-five years old – saw things differently … and his nose had started to itch.
To reveal the secret of my grandfather’s altered vision: he had spent five years, five springs, away from home. (The tussock of earth, crucial though its presence was as it crouched under a chance wrinkle of the prayer-mat, was at bottom no more than a catalyst.) Now, returning, he saw through travelled eyes. Instead of the beauty of the tiny valley circled by giant teeth, he noticed the narrowness, the proximity of the horizon; and felt sad, to be at home and feel so utterly enclosed. He also felt – inexplicably – as though the old place resented his educated, stethoscoped return. Beneath the winter ice, it had been coldly neutral, but now there was no doubt; the years in Germany had returned him to a hostile environment. Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up with hate, and he came to sacrifice himself at the shrine of the black stone god in the temple on the hill, he would try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise, the way it was before travel and tussocks and army tanks messed everything up.
On the morning when the valley, gloved in a prayer-mat, punched him on the nose, he had been trying, absurdly, to pretend that nothing had changed. So he had risen in the bitter cold of four-fifteen, washed himself in the prescribed fashion, dressed and put on his father’s astrakhan cap; after which he had carried the rolled cheroot of the prayer-mat into the small lakeside garden in front of their old dark house and unrolled it over the waiting tussock. The ground felt deceptively soft under his feet and made him simultaneously uncertain and unwary. ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful …’ – the exordium, spoken with hands joined before him like a book, comforted a part of him, made another, larger part feel uneasy – ‘… Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Creation …’ – but now Heidelberg invaded his head; here was Ingrid, briefly his Ingrid, her face scorning him for this Mecca-turned parroting; here, their friends Oskar and Ilse Lubin the anarchists, mocking his prayer with their anti-ideologies – ‘… The Compassionate, the Merciful, King of the Last Judgment!…’ – Heidelberg, in which, along with medicine and politics, he learned that India – like radium – had been ‘discovered’ by the Europeans; even Oskar was filled with admiration for Vasco da Gama, and this was what finally separated Aadam Aziz from his friends, this belief of theirs that he was somehow the invention of their ancestors – ‘… You alone we worship, and to You alone we pray for help …’ – so here he was, despite their presence in his head, attempting to re-unite himself with an earlier self which ignored their influence but knew everything it ought to have known, about submission for example, about what he was doing now, as his hands, guided by old memories, fluttered upwards, thumbs pressed to ears, fingers spread, as he sank to his knees – ‘… Guide us to the straight path, The path of those whom You have favoured …’ But it was no good, he was caught in a strange middle ground, trapped between belief and disbelief, and this was only a charade after all – ‘… Not of those who have incurred Your wrath, Nor of those who have gone astray.’ My grandfather bent his forehead towards the earth. Forward he bent, and the earth, prayer-mat-covered, curved up towards him. And now it was the tussock’s time. At one and the same time a rebuke from Ilse-Oskar-Ingrid-Heidelberg as well as valley-and-God, it smote him upon the point of the nose. Three drops fell. There were rubies and diamonds. And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood. Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.
The young, newly-qualified Doctor Aadam Aziz stood facing the springtime lake, sniffing the whiffs of change; while his back (which was extremely straight) was turned upon yet more changes. His father had had a stroke in his absence abroad, and his mother had kept it a secret. His mother’s voice, whispering stoically: ‘… Because your studies were too important, son.’ This mother, who had spent her life housebound, in purdah, had suddenly found enormous strength and gone out to run the small gemstone business (turquoises, rubies, diamonds) which had put Aadam through medical college, with the help of a scholarship; so he returned to find the seemingly immutable order of his family turned upside down, his mother going out to work while his father sat hidden behind the veil which the stroke had dropped over his brain … in a wooden chair, in a darkened room, he sat and made bird-noises. Thirty different species of birds visited him and sat on the sill outside his shuttered window conversing about this and that. He seemed happy enough.
(… And already I can see the repetitions beginning; because didn’t my grandmother also find enormous … and the stroke, too, was not the only … and the Brass Monkey had her birds … the curse begins already, and we haven’t even got to the noses yet!)
The lake was no longer frozen over. The thaw had come rapidly, as usual; many of the small boats, the shikaras, had been caught napping, which was also normal. But while these sluggards slept on, on dry land, snoring peacefully beside their owners, the oldest boat was up at the crack as old folk often are, and was therefore the first craft to move across the unfrozen lake. Tai’s shikara … this, too, was customary.
Watch how the old boatman, Tai, makes good time through the misty water, standing stooped over at the back of his craft! How his oar, a wooden heart on a yellow stick, drives jerkily through the weeds! In these parts he’s considered very odd because he rows standing up … among other reasons. Tai, bringing an urgent summons to Doctor Aziz, is about to set history in motion … while Aadam, looking down into the water, recalls what Tai taught him years ago: ‘The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba, just under the water’s skin.’ Aadam’s eyes are a clear blue, the astonishing blue of mountain sky, which has a habit of dripping into the pupils of Kashmiri men; they have not forgotten how to look. They see – there! like the skeleton of a ghost, just beneath the surface of Lake Dal! – the delicate tracery, the intricate crisscross of colourless lines, the cold waiting veins of the future. His German years, which have blurred so much else, haven’t deprived him of the gift of seeing. Tai’s gift. He looks up, sees the approaching V of Tai’s boat, waves a greeting. Tai’s arm rises – but this is a command. ‘Wait!’ My grandfather waits; and during this hiatus, as he experiences the last peace of his life, a muddy, ominous sort of peace, I had better get round to describing him.
Keeping out of my voice the natural envy of the ugly man for the strikingly impressive, I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. Pressed flat against a wall of his family home, he measured twenty-five bricks (a brick for each year of his life), or just over six foot two. A strong man also. His beard was thick and red – and annoyed his mother, who said only Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had said, ‘They went mad with the colours when they made your face.’ But the central feature of my grandfather’s anatomy was neither colour nor height, neither strength of arm nor straightness of back. There it was, reflected in the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face … Aadam Aziz, waiting for Tai, watches his rippling nose. It would have dominated less dramatic faces than his easily; even on him, it is what one sees first and remembers longest. ‘A cyranose,’ Ilse Lubin said, and Oskar added, ‘A proboscissimus.’ Ingrid announced, ‘You could cross a river on that nose.’ (Its bridge was wide.)
My grandfather’s nose: nostrils flaring, curvaceous as dancers. Between them swells the nose’s triumphal arch, first up and out, then down and under, sweeping in to his upper lip with a superb and at present red-tipped flick. An easy nose to hit a tussock with. I wish to place on record my gratitude to this mighty organ – if not for it, who would ever have believed me to be truly my mother’s son, my grandfather’s grandson? – this colossal apparatus which was to be my birthright, too. Doctor Aziz’s nose – comparable only to the trunk of the elephant-headed god Ganesh – established incontrovertibly his right to be a patriarch. It was Tai who taught him that, too. When young Aadam was barely past puberty the dilapidated boatman said, ‘That’s a nose to start a family on, my princeling. There’d be no mistaking whose brood they were. Mughal Emperors would have given their right hands for noses like that one. There are dynasties waiting inside it,’ – and here Tai lapsed into coarseness – ‘like snot.’
On Aadam Aziz, the nose assumed a patriarchal aspect. On my mother, it looked noble and a little long-suffering; on my aunt Emerald, snobbish; on my aunt Alia, intellectual; on my uncle Hanif it was the organ of an unsuccessful genius; my uncle Mustapha made it a second-rater’s sniffer; the Brass Monkey escaped it completely; but on me – on me, it was something else again. But I mustn’t reveal all my secrets at once.
(Tai is getting nearer. He, who revealed the power of the nose, and who is now bringing my grandfather the message which will catapult him into his future, is stroking his shikara through the early morning lake …)
Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been plying this same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen Lakes … forever. As far as anyone knew. He lived somewhere in the insanitary bowels of the old wooden-house quarter and his wife grew lotus roots and other curious vegetables on one of the many ‘floating gardens’ lilting on the surface of the spring and summer water. Tai himself cheerily admitted he had no idea of his age. Neither did his wife – he was, she said, already leathery when they married. His face was a sculpture of wind on water: ripples made of hide. He had two golden teeth and no others. In the town, he had few friends. Few boatmen or traders invited him to share a hookah when he floated past the shikara moorings or one of the lakes’ many ramshackle, waterside provision-stores and tea-shops.
The general opinion of Tai had been voiced long ago by Aadam Aziz’s father the gemstone merchant: ‘His brain fell out with his teeth.’ (But now old Aziz sahib sat lost in bird tweets while Tai simply, grandly, continued.) It was an impression the boatman fostered by his chatter, which was fantastic, grandiloquent and ceaseless, and as often as not addressed only to himself. Sound carries over water, and the lake people giggled at his monologues; but with undertones of awe, and even fear. Awe, because the old halfwit knew the lakes and hills better than any of his detractors; fear, because of his claim to an antiquity so immense it defied numbering, and moreover hung so lightly round his chicken’s neck that it hadn’t prevented him from winning a highly desirable wife and fathering four sons upon her … and a few more, the story went, on other lakeside wives. The young bucks at the shikara moorings were convinced he had a pile of money hidden away somewhere – a hoard, perhaps, of priceless golden teeth, rattling in a sack like walnuts. Years later, when Uncle Puffs tried to sell me his daughter by offering to have her teeth drawn and replaced in gold, I thought of Tai’s forgotten treasure … and, as a child, Aadam Aziz had loved him.
He made his living as a simple ferryman, despite all the rumours of wealth, taking hay and goats and vegetables and wood across the lakes for cash; people, too. When he was running his taxi-service he erected a pavilion in the centre of the shikara, a gay affair of flowered-patterned curtains and canopy, with cushions to match; and deodorised his boat with incense. The sight of Tai’s shikara approaching, curtains flying, had always been for Doctor Aziz one of the defining images of the coming of spring. Soon the English sahibs would arrive and Tai would ferry them to the Shalimar Gardens and the King’s Spring, chattering and pointy and stooped. He was the living antithesis of Oskar-Ilse-Ingrid’s belief in the inevitability of change … a quirky, enduring familiar spirit of the valley. A watery Caliban, rather too fond of cheap Kashmiri brandy.
Memory of my blue bedroom wall: on which, next to the P.M.’s letter, the Boy Raleigh hung for many years, gazing rapturously at an old fisherman in what looked like a red dhoti, who sat on – what? – driftwood? – and pointed out to sea as he told his fishy tales … and the Boy Aadam, my grandfather-to-be, fell in love with the boatman Tai precisely because of the endless verbiage which made others think him cracked. It was magical talk, words pouring from him like fools’ money, past his two gold teeth, laced with hiccups and brandy, soaring up to the most remote Himalayas of the past, then swooping shrewdly on some present detail, Aadam’s nose for instance, to vivisect its meaning like a mouse. This friendship had plunged Aadam into hot water with great regularity. (Boiling water. Literally. While his mother said, ‘We’ll kill that boatman’s bugs if it kills you.’) But still the old soliloquist would dawdle in his boat at the garden’s lakeside toes and Aziz would sit at his feet until voices summoned him indoors to be lectured on Tai’s filthiness and warned about the pillaging armies of germs his mother envisaged leaping from that hospitably ancient body on to her son’s starched white loose-pajamas. But always Aadam returned to the water’s edge to scan the mists for the ragged reprobate’s hunched-up frame steering its magical boat through the enchanted waters of the morning.
‘But how old are you really, Taiji?’ (Doctor Aziz, adult, redbearded, slanting towards the future, remembers the day he asked the unaskable question.) For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall. The monologue, interrupted. Slap of oar in water. He was riding in the shikara with Tai, squatting amongst goats, on a pile of straw, in full knowledge of the stick and bathtub waiting for him at home. He had come for stories – and with one question had silenced the storyteller.
‘No, tell, Taiji, how old, truly?’ And now a brandy bottle, materialising from nowhere: cheap liquor from the folds of the great warm chugha-coat. Then a shudder, a belch, a glare. Glint of gold. And – at last! – speech. ‘How old? You ask how old, you little wet-head, you nosey …’ Tai, forecasting the fisherman on my wall, pointed at the mountains. ‘So old, nakkoo!’ Aadam, the nakkoo, the nosey one, followed his pointing finger. ‘I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die. Listen. Listen, nakkoo …’ – the brandy bottle again, followed by brandy-voice, and words more intoxicating than booze – ‘… I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. Once I knew where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year. Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can’t read.’ Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping hand. Which sweeps again to chugha-pocket, to brandy bottle, to lips chapped with cold. Tai always had woman’s lips. ‘Nakkoo, listen, listen. I have seen plenty. Yara, you should’ve seen that Isa when he came, beard down to his balls, bald as an egg on his head. He was old and fagged-out but he knew his manners. “You first, Taiji,” he’d say, and “Please to sit”; always a respectful tongue, he never called me crackpot, never called me tu either. Always aap. Polite, see? And what an appetite! Such a hunger, I would catch my ears in fright. Saint or devil, I swear he could eat a whole kid in one go. And so what? I told him, eat, fill your hole, a man comes to Kashmir to enjoy life, or to end it, or both. His work was finished. He just came up here to live it up a little.’ Mesmerized by this brandied portrait of a bald, gluttonous Christ, Aziz listened, later repeating every word to the consternation of his parents, who dealt in stones and had no time for ‘gas’.
‘Oh, you don’t believe?’ – licking his sore lips with a grin, knowing it to be the reverse of the truth; ‘Your attention is wandering?’ – again, he knew how furiously Aziz was hanging on his words. ‘Maybe the straw is pricking your behind, hey? Oh, I’m so sorry, babaji, not to provide for you silk cushions with gold brocade-work – cushions such as the Emperor Jehangir sat upon! You think of the Emperor Jehangir as a gardener only, no doubt,’ Tai accused my grandfather, ‘because he built Shalimar. Stupid! What do you know? His name meant Encompasser of the Earth. Is that a gardener’s name? God knows what they teach you boys these days. Whereas I’ …