Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [137]
We are not alone. It is morning at the pickle-factory; they have brought my son to see me. Someone (never mind who) stands beside Padma at my bedside, holding him in her arms. “Baba, thank God you are better, you don’t know what you were talking in your sickness.” Someone speaks anxiously, trying to force her way into my story ahead of time; but it won’t work … someone, who founded this pickle-factory and its ancillary bottling works, who has been looking after my impenetrable child, just as once … wait on! She nearly wormed it out of me then, but fortunately I’ve still got my wits about me, fever or no fever! Someone will just have to step back and remain cloaked in anonymity until it’s her turn; and that won’t be until the very end. I turn my eyes away from her to look at Padma. “Do not think,” I admonish her, “that because I had a fever, the things I told you were not completely true. Everything happened just as I described.”
“Oh God, you and your stories,” she cries, “all day, all night—you have made yourself sick! Stop some time, na, what will it hurt?” I set my lips obstinately; and now she, with a sudden change of mood: “So, tell me now, mister: is there anything you want?”
“Green chutney,” I request, “Bright green—green as grasshoppers.” And someone who cannot be named remembers and tells Padma (speaking in the soft voice which is only used at sickbeds and funerals), “I know what he means.”
… Why, at this crucial instant, when all manner of things were waiting to be described—when the Pioneer Café was so close, and the rivalry of knees and nose—did I introduce a mere condiment into the conversation? (Why do I waste time, in this account, on a humble preserve, when I could be describing the elections of 1957—when all India is waiting, twenty-one years ago, to vote?) Because I sniffed the air; and scented, behind the solicitous expressions of my visitors, a sharp whiff of danger. I intended to defend myself; but I required the assistance of chutney …
I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what has remained undescribed: through green-tinged glass windows, my room looks out on to an iron catwalk and then down to the cooking-floor, where copper vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps, working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle fumes; while (looking the other way, through a green-tinged window on the world) railway tracks shine dully in morning sun, bridged over at regular intervals by the messy gantries of the electrification system. In daylight, our saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance above the factory doors; we switch her off to save power. But electric trains are using power: yellow-and-brown local trains clatter south towards Churchgate Station from Dadar and Borivli, from Kurla and Bassein Road. Human flies hang in thick white-trousered clusters from the trains; I do not deny that, within the factory walls, you may also see some flies. But there are also compensating lizards, hanging stilly upside-down on the ceiling, their jowls reminiscent of the Kathiawar peninsula … sounds, too have been waiting to be heard: bubbling of vats, loud singing, coarse imprecations, bawdy humor of fuzz-armed women; the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped admonitions of overseers; the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the adjacent bottling-works; and rush of trains, and the buzzing (infrequent, but inevitable) of flies … while grasshopper-green chutney is being extracted from its vat, to be brought on a wiped-clean plate with saffron and green stripes around the rim, along with another