Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [201]
I won’t deny it: I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay. Set between the desert and bleakly saline creeks whose shores were littered with stunted mangroves, my new city seemed to possess an ugliness which eclipsed even my own; having grown too fast—its population had quadrupled since 1947—it had acquired the misshapen lumpiness of a gigantic dwarf. On my sixteenth birthday, I was given a Lambretta motor-scooter; riding the city streets on my windowless vehicle, I breathed in the fatalistic hopelessness of the slum dwellers and the smug defensiveness of the rich; I was sucked along the smell-trails of dispossession and also fanaticism, lured down a long underworld corridor at whose end was the door to Tai Bibi, the oldest whore in the world … but I’m running away with myself. At the heart of my Karachi was Alia Aziz’s house, a large old building on Clayton Road (she must have wandered in it for years like a ghost with nobody to haunt), a place of shadows and yellowed paint, across which there fell, every afternoon, the long accusing shadow of the minaret of the local mosque. Even when, years later in the magicians’ ghetto, I lived in another mosque’s shade, a shade which was, at least for a time, a protective, unmenacing penumbra, I never lost my Karachi-born view of mosque-shadows, in which, it seemed to me, I could sniff the narrow, clutching, accusative odor of my aunt. Who bided her time; but whose vengeance, when it came, was crushing.
It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert’s power. Oases shone in the tarmac of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst the hovels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city (whose only common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had started life as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient powers of apparition-mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by illusionary sand-dunes and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant “submission,” my new fellow-citizens exuded the flat boiled odors of acquiescence, which were depressing to a nose which had smelt—at the very last, and however briefly—the highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay.
Soon after our arrival—and, perhaps, oppressed by the mosque-shadowed air of the Clayton Road house—my father resolved to build us a new home. He bought a plot of land in the smartest of the “societies,” the new housing development zones; and on my sixteenth birthday, Saleem acquired more than a Lambretta—I learned the occult powers of umbilical cords.
What, pickled in brine, sat for sixteen years in my father’s almirah, awaiting just such a day? What, floating like a water-snake in an old pickle-jar, accompanied us on our sea-journey and ended up buried in hard, barren Karachi-earth? What had once nourished life in a womb—what now infused earth with miraculous life, and gave birth to a split-level, American-style modern bungalow? … Eschewing these cryptic questions, I explain that, on my sixteenth birthday, my family (including Alia Aunty) assembled on our plot of Korangi Road earth; watched by the eyes of a team of laborers and the beard of a mullah, Ahmed handed Saleem a pickaxe; I drove it inaugurally into the ground. “A new beginning,” Amina said, “Inshallah, we shall all be new people now.” Spurred on by her noble and unattainable desire, a workman rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a pickle-jar was produced. Brine was discarded on the thirsty ground; and what-was-left-inside received the mullah