Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [215]
Pia Aziz, however, was not content with “pumpery-shumpery.” She began a series of liaisons with colonels cricketers polo-players diplomats, which were easy to conceal from a Reverend Mother who had lost interest in the doings of everyone except strangers; but which were otherwise the talk of what was, after all, a small town. My aunt Emerald took Pia to task; she replied: “You want me to be forever howling and pulling hair? I’m still young; young folk should gad a little.” Emerald, thin-lipped: “But be a little respectable … the family name …” At which Pia tossed her head. “You be respectable, sister,” she said, “Me, I’ll be alive.”
But it seems to me that there was something hollow in Pia’s self-assertion; that she, too, felt her personality draining away with the years; that her feverish romancing was a last desperate attempt to behave “in character”—in the way a woman like her was supposed to do. Her heart wasn’t in it; somewhere inside, she, too, was waiting for an end … In my family, we have always been vulnerable to things which fall from the skies, ever since Ahmed Sinai was slapped by a vulture-dropped hand; and bolts from the blue were only a year away.
After the news of my grandfather’s death and the arrival of Reverend Mother in Pakistan, I began to dream repeatedly of Kashmir; although I had never walked in Shalimar-bagh, I did so at night; I floated in shikaras and climbed Sankara Acharya’s hill as my grandfather had; I saw lotus-roots and mountains like angry jaws. This, too, may be seen as an aspect of the detachment which came to afflict us all (except Jamila, who had God and country to keep her going)—a reminder of my family’s separateness from both India and Pakistan. In Rawalpindi, my grandmother drank pink Kashmiri tea; in Karachi, her grandson was washed by the waters of a lake he had never seen. It would not be long before the dream of Kashmir spilled over into the minds of the rest of the population of Pakistan; connection-to-history refused to abandon me, and I found my dream becoming, in 1965, the common property of the nation, and a factor of prime importance in the coming end, when all manner of things fell from the skies, and I was purified at last.
Saleem could sink no lower: I could smell, on myself, the cesspit stink of my iniquities. I had come to the Land of the Pure, and sought the company of whores—when I should have been forging a new, upright life for myself, I gave birth, instead, to an unspeakable (and also unrequited) love. Possessed by the beginnings of the great fatalism which was to overwhelm me, I rode the city streets on my Lambretta; Jamila and I avoided each other as much as possible, unable, for the first time in our lives, to say a word to one another.
Purity—that highest of ideals!—that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister’s songs!—seemed very far away; how could I have known that history—which has the power of pardoning sinners—was at that moment counting down towards a moment in which it would manage, at one stroke, to cleanse me from head to foot?
In the meantime, other forces were spending themselves; Alia Aziz had begun to wreak her awful spinster’s revenge.
Guru Mandir days: paan-smells, cooking-smells, the langorous odor of the shadow of the minaret, the mosque’s long pointing finger: while my aunt Alia’s hatred of the man who had abandoned her and of the sister who had married him grew into a tangible, visible thing, it sat on her living-room rug like a great gecko, reeking of vomit; but it seemed I was the only one to smell it, because Alia’s skill at dissimulation had grown as rapidly as the hairiness of her chin and her adeptness with the plasters with which, each evening, she ripped her beard out by the roots.
My aunt Alia’s contribution to the fate of nations—through her school and college—must not be minimized. Having allowed her old-maid frustrations to leak into the curricula, the bricks and also the