Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [205]
The accident rumor set the final seal on her popularity; her concerts packed out the Bambino Theatre in Karachi and filled the Shalimar-bagh in Lahore; her records constantly topped the sales charts. And as she became public property, “Pakistan’s Angel,” “The Voice of the Nation,” the “Bulbul-e-Din” or nightingale-of-the-faith, and began to receive one thousand and one firm proposals of marriage a week; as she became the whole country’s favorite daughter and grew into an existence which threatened to overwhelm her place in our own family, so she fell prey to the twin viruses of fame, the first of which made her the victim of her own public image, because the accident-rumor obliged her to wear a gold-and-white burqa at all times, even in my aunt Alia’s school, which she continued to attend; while the second virus subjected her to the exaggerations and simplifications of self which are the unavoidable side-effects of stardom, so that the blind and blinding devoutness and the right-or-wrong nationalism which had already begun to emerge in her now began to dominate her personality, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Publicity imprisoned her inside a gilded tent; and, being the new daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident aspects of the national persona than to the child-world of her Monkey years.
Jamila Singer’s voice was on Voice of Pakistan Radio constantly, so that in the villages of West and East Wings she came to seem like a superhuman being, incapable of being fatigued, an angel who sang to her people through all the days and nights; while Ahmed Sinai, whose few remaining qualms about his daughter’s career had been more than allayed by her enormous earnings (although he had once been a Delhi man, he was by now a true Bombay Muslim at heart, placing cash matters above most other things), became fond of telling my sister: “You see, daughter: decency, purity, art and good business sense can be one and the same things; your old father has been wise enough to work that out.” Jamila smiled sweetly and agreed … she was growing out of scrawny tomboy youth into a slender, slant-eyed, golden-skinned beauty whose hair was nearly long enough to sit on; even her nose looked good. “In my daughter,” Ahmed Sinai told Uncle Puffs proudly, “it is my side of the family’s noble features which have prevailed.” Uncle Puffs cast a quizzical, awkward glance at me and cleared his throat. “Darn fine-looking girl, sir,” he told my father, “Top-hole, by gum.”
The thunder of applause was never far from my sister’s ears; at her first, now-legendary Bambino recital (we sat in seats provided by Uncle Puffs—“Best darn seats in the house!”—beside his seven Puffias, all veiled … Uncle Puffs dug me in the ribs, “Hey, boy—choose! Take your pick! Remember: the dowry!” and I blushed and stared hard at the stage), the cries of “Wah! Wah!” were sometimes louder than Jamila’s voice; and after the show we found Jamila back-stage drowning in a sea of flowers, so that we had to fight our way through the blossoming camphor garden of the nation’s love, to find that she was almost fainting, not from fatigue, but from the overpoweringly sweet perfume of adoration with which the blooms had filled the room. I, too, felt my head beginning to swim; until Uncle Puffs began to hurl flowers in great bushels from an open window—they were gathered by a crowd of fans—while he cried, “Flowers are fine, darn it, but even a national heroine needs air!”
There was applause, too, on the evening Jamila Singer (and family) was invited to President House to sing for the commander of pepperpots. Ignoring reports in foreign magazines about embezzled money and Swiss bank accounts, we scrubbed ourselves until we shone; a family in the towel business is obliged to be spotlessly