Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [152]
“Yes sir no sir you show us sir!”
“See here—the Deccan peninsula hanging down!” Again ouch-mynose.
“Sir sir if that’s the map of India what are the stains sir?” It is Glandy Keith Colaco feeling bold. Sniggers, titters from my fellows. And Zagallo, taking the question in his stride: “These stains,” he cries, “are Pakistan! Thees birthmark on the right ear is the East Wing; and thees horrible stained left cheek, the West! Remember, stupid boys: Pakistan ees a stain on the face of India!”
“Ho ho,” the class laughs, “Absolute master joke, sir!”
But now my nose has had enough; staging its own, unprompted revolt against the grasping thumb-and-forefinger, it unleashes a weapon of its own … a large blob of shining goo emerges from the left nostril, to plop into Mr. Zagallo’s palm. Fat Perce Fishwala yells, “Lookit that, sir! The drip from his nose, sir! Is that supposed to be Ceylon?”
His palm smeared with goo, Zagallo loses his jokey mood. “Animal,” he curses me, “You see what you do?” Zagallo’s hand releases my nose; returns to hair. Nasal refuse is wiped into my neatly-parted locks. And now, once again, my hair is seized; once again, the hand is pulling … but upwards now, and my head has jerked upright, my feet are moving on to tiptoe, and Zagallo, “What are you? Tell me what you are!”
“Sir an animal sir!”
The hand pulls harder higher. “Again.” Standing on my toenails now, I yelp: “Aiee sir an animal an animal please sir aiee!”
And still harder and still higher … “Once more!” But suddenly it ends; my feet are flat on the ground again; and the class has fallen into a deathly hush.
“Sir,” Sonny Ibrahim is saying, “you pulled his hair out, sir.”
And now the cacophony: “Look sir, blood.” “He’s bleeding sir.” “Please sir shall I take him to the nurse?”
Mr. Zagallo stood like a statue with a clump of my hair in his fist. While I—too shocked to feel any pain—felt the patch on my head where Mr. Zagallo had created a monkish tonsure, a circle where hair would never grow again, and realized that the curse of my birth, which connected me to my country, had managed to find yet one more unexpected expression of itself.
Two days later, Croaker Crusoe announced that, unfortunately, Mr. Emil Zagallo was leaving the staff for personal reasons; but I knew what the reasons were. My uprooted hairs had stuck to his hands, like bloodstains that wouldn’t wash out, and nobody wants a teacher with hair on his palms, “The first sign of madness,” as Glandy Keith was fond of saying, “and the second sign is looking for them.”
Zagallo’s legacy: a monk’s tonsure; and, worse than that, a whole set of new taunts, which my classmates flung at me while we waited for school buses to take us home to get dressed for the Social: “Snotnose is a bal-die!” and, “Sniffer’s got a map-face!” When Cyrus arrived in the bus-queue, I tried to turn the crowd against him, by attempting to set up a chant of “Cyrus-the-great, Born on a plate, In nineteen hundred and forty-eight,” but nobody took up the offer.
So we come to the events of the Cathedral School Social. At which bullies became instruments of destiny, and fingers were transmuted into fountains, and Masha Miovic, the legendary breast-stroker, fell into a dead faint … I arrived at the Social with the nurse’s bandage still on my head. I was late, because it hadn’t been easy to persuade my mother to let me come; so by the time I stepped into the Assembly Hall, beneath streamers and balloons and the professionally suspicious gazes of bony female chaperones, all the best girls were already box-stepping and Mexican-Hatting with absurdly smug partners. Naturally, the prefects had the pick of the ladies; I watched them with passionate envy, Guzder and Joshi and Stevenson and Rushdie and Talyarkhan and Tayabali and Jussawalla and Waglé and King; I tried butting in on them during excuse-mes but when they saw my bandage and my cucumber of a nose and the stains on my face they just laughed and turned