Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [135]
But the love was not returned; Joseph’s egg-white eyes remained expressionless; his lips remained set in an accusing, sardonic grin; and at last she realized that this new manifestation was no different from her old dream-Joseph (although it never assaulted her), and that if she was ever to be free of him she would have to do the unthinkable thing and confess her crime to the world. But she didn’t confess, which was probably my fault—because Mary loved me like her own unconceived and inconceivable son, and to make her confession would have hurt me badly, so for my sake she suffered the ghost of her conscience and stood haunted in the kitchen (my father had sacked the cook one djinn-soaked evening) cooking our dinner and becoming, accidentally, the embodiment of the opening line of my Latin textbook, Ora Maritima: “By the side of the sea, the ayah cooked the meal.” Ora Maritima, ancilla cenam parat Look into the eyes of a cooking ayah, and you will see more than textbooks ever know.
On my tenth birthday, many chickens were coming home to roost.
On my tenth birthday, it was clear that the freak weather—storms, floods, hailstones from a cloudless sky—which had succeeded the intolerable heat of 1956, had managed to wreck the second Five Year Plan. The government had been forced—although the elections were just around the corner—to announce to the world that it could accept no more development loans unless the lenders were willing to wait indefinitely for repayment. (But let me not overstate the case: although the production of finished steel reached only 2.4 million tons by the Plan’s end in 1961, and although, during those five years, the number of landless and unemployed masses actually increased, so that it was greater than it had ever been under the British Raj, there were also substantial gains. The production of iron ore was almost doubled; power capacity did double; coal production leaped from thirty-eight million to fifty-four million tons. Five billion yards of cotton textiles were produced each year. Also large numbers of bicycles, machine tools, diesel engines, power pumps and ceiling-fans. But I can’t help ending on a downbeat: illiteracy survived unscathed; the population continued to mushroom.)
On my tenth birthday, we were visited by my uncle Hanif, who made himself excessively unpopular at Methwold’s Estate by booming cheerily, “Elections coming! Watch out for the Communists!”
On my tenth birthday, when my uncle Hanif made his gaffe, my mother (who had begun disappearing on mysterious “shopping trips”) dramatically and unaccountably blushed.
On my tenth birthday, I was given an Alsatian puppy with a false pedigree who would shortly die of syphilis.
On my tenth birthday, everyone at Methwold’s Estate tried hard to be cheerful, but beneath this thin veneer everyone was possessed by the same thought: “Ten years, my God! Where have they gone? What have we done?”
On my tenth birthday, old man Ibrahim announced his support for the Maha Gujarat Parishad; as far as possession of the city of Bombay was concerned, he nailed his colors to the losing side.
On my tenth birthday, my suspicions aroused by a blush, I spied on my mother’s thoughts; and what I saw there led to my beginning to follow her, to my becoming a private eye as daring as Bombay’s legendary Dom Minto, and to important discoveries at and in the vicinity of the Pioneer Café.
On my tenth birthday, I had a party, which was attended by my family, which had forgotten how to be gay, by classmates from the Cathedral School, who had been sent by their parents, and by a number of mildly bored girl swimmers from the Breach Candy Pools, who permitted the Brass Monkey to fool around