Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [194]
Alice found him the next day, when, by chance, she returned to collect a forgotten umbrella; like a good secretary, she enlisted the power of telecommunications, telephoning an ambulance and telegramming us. Owing to censorship of the mails between India and Pakistan, the “heartboot cable” took a full week to reach Amina Sinai.
“Back-to-Bom!” I yelled happily, alarming airport coolies. “Back-to-Bom!” I cheered, despite everything, until the newly-sober Jamila said, “Oh, Saleem, honestly, shoo!” Alice Pereira met us at the airport (a telegram had alerted her); and then we were in a real Bombay black-and-yellow taxi, and I was wallowing in the sounds of hot-channa-hot hawkers, the throng of camels bicycles and people people people, thinking how Mumbadevi’s city made Rawalpindi look like a village, rediscovering especially the colors, the forgotten vividness of gulmohr and bougainvillaea, the livid green of the waters of the Mahalaxmi Temple “tank,” the stark black-and-white of the traffic policemen’s sun umbrellas and the blue-and-yellowness of their uniforms; but most of all the blue blue blue of the sea … only the gray of my father’s stricken face distracted me from the rainbow riot of the city, and made me sober up.
Alice Pereira left us at the hospital and went off to work for the Narlikar women; and now a remarkable thing happened. My mother Amina Sinai, jerked out of lethargy and depression and guilt-fogs and verruca-pain by the sight of my father, seemed miraculously to regain her youth; with all her old gifts of assiduity restored, she set about the rehabilitation of Ahmed, driven by an unstoppable will. She brought him home to the first-floor bedroom in which she had nursed him through the freeze; she sat with him day and night, pouring her strength into his body. And her love had its reward, because not only did Ahmed Sinai make a recovery so complete as to astound Breach Candy’s European doctors, but also an altogether more wonderful change occurred, which was that, as Ahmed came to himself under Amina’s care, he returned not to the self which had practiced curses and wrestled djinns, but to the self he might always have been, filled with contrition and forgiveness and laughter and generosity and the finest miracle of all, which was love. Ahmed Sinai had, at long last, fallen in love with my mother.
And I was the sacrifical lamb with which they anointed their love.
They had even begun to sleep together again; and although my sister—with a flash of her old Monkey-self—said, “In the same bed, Allah, chhi-chhi, how dirty!”, I was happy for them; and even, briefly, happier for myself, because I was back in the land of the Midnight Children’s Conference. While newspaper headlines marched towards war, I renewed my acquaintance with my miraculous fellows, not knowing how many endings were in store for me.
On October 9th—INDIAN ARMY POISED FOR ALL-OUT EFFORT—I felt able to convene the Conference (time and my own efforts had erected the necessary barrier around Mary’s secret). Back into my head they came; it was a happy night, a night for burying old disagreements, for making our own all-out effort at reunion. We repeated, over and over again, our joy at being back together; ignoring the deeper truth—that we were like all families, that family reunions are more delightful in prospect than in reality, and that the time comes when all families must go their separate ways. On October 15th—UNPROVOKED ATTACK ON INDIA—the questions I’d been dreading and trying not to provoke began: Why is Shiva not here? And: Why have you closed off part of your mind?
On October 20th, the Indian forces were defeated—thrashed—by the Chinese at Thag La ridge. An official Peking statement announced: