Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [192]
And that with this sentence my emerald-icy aunt would have begun, quite unwittingly, my sister’s transformation from monkey into Singer; because although she protested with the sullen clumsiness of fourteen-year-olds, she was hauled unceremoniously on to the musicians’ dais by my organizing aunt; and although she looked as if she wished the floor would open up beneath her feet, she clasped her hands together; seeing no escape, the Monkey began to sing.
I have not, I think, been good at describing emotions—believing my audience to be capable of joining in; of imagining for themselves what I have been unable to re-imagine, so that my story becomes yours as well … but when my sister began to sing, I was certainly assailed by an emotion of such force that I was unable to understand until, much later, it was explained to me by the oldest whore in the world. Because, with her first note, the Brass Monkey sloughed off her nick-name; she, who had talked to birds (just as, long ago in a mountain valley, her great-grandfather used to do), must have learned from songbirds the arts of song. With one good ear and one bad ear, I listened to her faultless voice, which at fourteen was the voice of a grown woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God; a voice which was afterwards compared to that of Muhammed’s muezzin Bilal, issuing from the lips of a somewhat scrawny girl.
What I did not understand must wait to be told; let me record here that my sister earned her name at her fourteenth birthday party, and was known after that as Jamila Singer; and that I knew, as I listened to “My Red Dupatta Of Muslin” and “Shahbaz Qalandar,” that the process which had begun during my first exile was nearing completion in my second; that, from now on, Jamila was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to her talent for ever.
Jamila sang—I, humbly, bowed my head. But before she could enter fully into her kingdom, something else had to happen: I had to be properly finished off.
Drainage and the Desert
WHAT-CHEWS-ON-BONES refuses to pause … it’s only a matter of time. This is what keeps me going: I hold on to Padma. Padma is what matters—Padma-muscles, Padma’s hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus … who, embarrassed, commands: “Enough. Start. Start now.”
Yes, it must start with the cable. Telepathy set me apart; telecommunications dragged me down …
Amina Sinai was cutting verrucas out of her feet when the telegram arrived … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: my mother, right ankle on left knee, was scooping corn-tissue out of the sole of her foot with a sharp-ended nail file on September 9th, 1962. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: in the afternoon. No, it’s important to be more … At the stroke of three o’clock, which, even in the north, is the hottest time of day, a bearer brought her an envelope on a silver dish. A few seconds later, far away in New Delhi, Defense Minister Krishna Menon (acting on his own initiative, during Nehru’s absence at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference) took the momentous decision to use force if necessary against the Chinese army on the Himalayan frontier. “The Chinese must be ejected from the Thag La ridge,” Mr. Menon said while my mother tore open a telegram. “No weakness will be shown.” But this decision was a mere trifle when set beside the implication of my mother’s cable; because while the eviction operation, code-named LEGHORN, was doomed to fail, and eventually to turn India into that most macabre of theaters, the Theater of War, the cable was to plunge me secretly but surely towards the crisis which would end with my final eviction from my own inner world. While the Indian XXXIII Corps were acting on instructions passed from Menon to General Thapar, I, too, had been placed in great danger; as if unseen forces had decided that I