Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [191]
Four years of nothing.
Except growing into a teenager. Except watching my mother as she fell apart. Except observing the Monkey, who was a crucial year younger than me, fall under the insidious spell of that God-ridden country; the Monkey, once so rebellious and wild, adopting expressions of demureness and submission which must, at first, have seemed false even to her; the Monkey, learning how to cook and keep house, how to buy spices in the market; the Monkey, making the final break with the legacy of her grandfather, by learning prayers in Arabic and saying them at all prescribed times; the Monkey, revealing the streak of puritan fanaticism which she had hinted at when she asked for a nun’s outfit; she, who spurned all offers of worldly love, was seduced by the love of that God who had been named after a carved idol in a pagan shrine built around a giant meteorite: Al-Lah, in the Qa’aba, the shrine of the great Black Stone.
But nothing else.
Four years away from the midnight children; four years without Warden Road and Breach Candy and Scandal Point and the lures of One Yard of Chocolates; away from the Cathedral School and the equestrian statue of Sivaji and melon-sellers at the Gateway of India: away from Divali and Ganesh Chaturthi and Coconut Day; four years of separation from a father who sat alone in a house he would not sell; alone, except for Professor Schaapsteker, who stayed in his apartment and shunned the company of men.
Can nothing really happen for four years? Obviously, not quite. My cousin Zafar, who had never been forgiven by his father for wetting his pants in the presence of history, was given to understand that he would be joining the Army as soon as he was of age. “I want to see you prove you’re not a woman,” his father told him.
And Bonzo died; General Zulfikar shed manly tears.
And Mary’s confession faded until, because nobody spoke of it, it came to feel like a bad dream; to everyone except me.
And (without any assistance from me) relations between India and Pakistan grew worse; entirely without my help, India conquered Goa—“the Portuguese pimple on the face of Mother India”; I sat on the sidelines and played no part in the acquisition of large-scale U.S. aid for Pakistan, nor was I to blame for Sino-India border skirmishes in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh; the Indian census of 1961 revealed a literacy level of 23.7 percent, but I was not entered in its records. The untouchable problem remained acute; I did nothing to alleviate it; and in the elections of 1962, the All-India Congress won 361 out of 494 seats in the Lok Sabha, and over 61 per cent of all State Assembly seats. Not even in this could my unseen hand be said to have moved; except, perhaps, metaphorically: the status quo was preserved in India; in my life, nothing changed either.
Then, on September 1st, 1962, we celebrated the Monkey’s fourteenth birthday. By this time (and despite my uncle’s continued fondness for me) we were well-established as social inferiors, the hapless poor relations of the great Zulfikars; so the party was a skimpy affair. The Monkey, however, gave every appearance of enjoying herself. “It’s my duty, brother,” she told me. I could hardly believe my ears … but perhaps my sister had an intuition of her fate; perhaps she knew the transformation which lay in store for her; why should I assume that I alone have had the powers of secret knowledge?
Perhaps, then, she guessed that when the hired musicians began to play (shehnai and vina were present; sarangi and sarod had their turns; tabla and sitar performed their virtuosic cross-examinations), Emerald Zulfikar would descend on her with callous elegance, demanding, “Come on, Jamila, don’t sit