Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [183]
Still I did not guess what was coming; not even when Mary threw herself upon me (I was taller than her now; her tears wet my neck): “O baba, baba; today you must learn a thing, such a thing I have done; but come now …” and the little woman drew herself up with immense dignity, “… I will tell you all before that Joseph does. Begum, children, all you other great sirs and madams, come now to sahib’s office, and I will tell.”
Public announcements have punctuated my life; Amina in a Delhi gully, and Mary in a sunless office … with my whole family trooping amazedly behind us, I went downstairs with Mary Pereira, who would not let go of my hand.
What was in the room with Ahmed Sinai? What had given my father a face from which djinns and money had been chased away and replaced by a look of utter desolation? What sat huddled up in the corner of the room, filling the air with a sulphurous stench? What, shaped like a man, lacked fingers and toes; whose face seemed to bubble like the hot springs of New Zealand (which I’d seen in the Wonder Book of Wonders)? … No time to explain, because Mary Pereira has begun to talk, gabbling out a secret which has been hidden for over eleven years, pulling us all out of the dream-world she invented when she changed name-tags, forcing us into the horror of the truth. And all the time she held on to me; like a mother protecting her child, she shielded me from my family. (Who were learning … as I was … that they were not …)
… It was just after midnight and in the streets there were fireworks and crowds, the many-headed monster roaring, I did it for my Joseph, Sahib, but please don’t send me to jail, look the boy is a good boy, Sahib, I am a poor woman, Sahib, one mistake, one minute in so many years, not jailkhana Sahib, I will go, eleven years I gave but I will go now, Sahib, only this is a good boy, Sahib, you must not send him, Sahib, after eleven years he is your son … O, you boy with your face like the sun coming out, O Saleem my piece-of-the-moon, you must know that your father was Winkie and your mother is also dead …
Mary Pereira ran out of the room.
Ahmed Sinai said, in a voice as faraway as a bird: “That, in the corner, is my old servant Musa, who tried to rob me once.”
(Can any narrative stand so much so soon? I glance towards Padma; she appears to be stunned, like a fish.)
Once upon a time there was a servant who robbed my father; who swore he was innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should prove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I told you then he was a time-bomb, and he had returned to explode. Musa had, indeed, contracted leprosy; and had returned across the silence of the years to beg for my father’s forgiveness, so that he could be released from his self-inflicted curse.
… Someone was called God who was not God; someone else was taken for a ghost, and was not a ghost; and a third person discovered that although his name was Saleem Sinai, he was not his parents’ son …
“I forgive you,” Ahmed Sinai said to the leper. After that day, he was cured of one of his obsessions; he never tried again to discover his own (and wholly imaginary) family curse.
“I couldn’t tell it any other way,” I say to Padma. “Too painful; I had to just blurt it out, all crazy-sounding, just like that.”
“O, mister,” Padma blubbers helplessly, “O, mister, mister!”
“Come on now,” I say, “It’s an old story.”
But her tears