Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [159]
Reverend Mother had never liked her actress daughter-in-law. I overheard her once telling my mother: “To marry an actress, whatsitsname, my son has made his bed in the gutter, soon, whatsitsname, she will be making him drink alcohol and also eat some pig.” Eventually, she accepted the inevitability of the match with bad grace; but she took to writing improving epistles to Pia. “Listen, daughter,” she wrote, “don’t do this actressy thing. Why to do such shameless behavior? Work, yes, you girls have modern ideas, but to dance naked on the screen! When for a small sum only you could acquire the concession on a good petrol pump. From my own pocket I would get it for you in two minutes. Sit in an office, hire attendants; that is proper work.” None of us ever knew whence Reverend Mother acquired her dream of petrol pumps, which would be the growing obsession of her old age; but she bombarded Pia with it, to the actress’s disgust.
“Why that woman doesn’t ask me to be shorthand typist?” Pia wailed to Hanif and Mary and me at breakfast. “Why not taxi-driver, or handloom weaver? I tell you, this pumpery-shumpery makes me wild.”
My uncle quivered (for once in his life) on the edge of anger. “There is a child present,” he said, “and she is your mother; show her respect.”
“Respect she can have,” Pia flounced from the room, “but she wants gas.”
… And my most-treasured bit-part of all was played out when during Pia and Hanif’s regular card-games with friends, I was promoted to occupy the sacred place of the son she never had. (Child of an unknown union, I have had more mothers than most mothers have children; giving birth to parents has been one of my stranger talents—a form of reverse fertility beyond the control of contraception, and even of the Widow herself.) In the company of visitors, Pia Aziz would cry: “Look, friends, here’s my own crown prince! The jewel in my ring! The pearl in my necklace!” And she would draw me towards her, cradling my head so that my nose was pushed down against her chest and nestled wonderfully between the soft pillows of her indescribable … unable to cope with such delights, I pulled my head away. But I was her slave; and I know now why she permitted herself such familiarity with me. Prematurely testicled, growing rapidly, I nevertheless wore (fraudulently) the badge of sexual innocence: Saleem Sinai, during his sojourn at his uncle’s home, was still in shorts. Bare knees proved my childishness to Pia; deceived by ankle-socks, she held my face against her breasts while her sitar-perfect voice whispered in my good ear: “Child, child, don’t fear; your clouds will soon roll by.”
For my uncle, as well as my histrionic aunt, I acted out (with growing polish) the part of surrogate son. Hanif Aziz was to be found during the day on the striped sofa, pencil and exercise book in hand, writing his pickle epic. He wore his usual lungi wound loosely around his waist and fastened with an enormous safety-pin; his legs protruded hairily from its folds. His fingernails bore the stains of a lifetime of Gold Flakes; his toenails seemed similarly discolored. I imagined him smoking cigarettes with his toes. Highly impressed by the vision, I asked him if he could, in fact, perform this feat; and without a word, he inserted Gold Flake between big toe and its sidekick and wound himself into bizarre contortions. I clapped wildly, but he seemed to be in some pain for the rest of the day.
I ministered to his needs as a good son should, emptying ashtrays, sharpening pencils, bringing water to drink; while he, who after his fabulist beginnings had remembered that he was his father’s son and dedicated himself against everything which smacked of the unreal, scribbled out his ill-fated screenplay.
“Sonny Jim,” he informed me, “this damn country has been dreaming for five thousand years. It’s about time it started waking up.” Hanif was fond of railing against princes and demons, gods and heroes, against, in fact, the entire iconography of the Bombay film; in the temple of illusions, he had become