Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [252]
(But there are cracks and gaps … had I, by then, begun to see that my love for Jamila Singer had been, in a sense, a mistake? Had I already understood how I had simply transferred on to her shoulders the adoration which I now perceived to be a vaulting, all-encompassing love of country? When was it that I realized that my truly-incestuous feelings were for my true birth-sister, India herself, and not for that trollop of a crooner who had so callously shed me, like a used snake-skin, and dropped me into the metaphorical waste-basket of Army life? When when when? … Admitting defeat, I am forced to record that I cannot remember for sure.)
… Saleem sat blinking in the dust in the shadow of the mosque. A giant was standing over him, grinning hugely, asking, “Achha, captain, have a good trip?” And Parvati, with huge excited eyes, pouring water from a lotah into his cracked, salty mouth … Feeling! The icy touch of water kept cool in earthenware surahis, the cracked soreness of parched-raw lips, silver-and-lapis clenched in a fist … “I can feel!” Saleem cried to the good-natured crowd.
It was the time of afternoon called the chaya, when the shadow of the tall red-brick-and-marble Friday Mosque fell across the higgledy shacks of the slum clustered at its feet, that slum whose ramshackle tin roofs created such a swelter of heat that it was insupportable to be inside the fragile shacks except during the chaya and at night … but now conjurers and contortionists and jugglers and fakirs had gathered in the shade around the solitary stand-pipe to greet the new arrival. “I can feel!” I cried, and then Picture Singh, “Okay, captain—tell us, how it feels?—to be born again, falling like baby out of Parvati’s basket?” I could smell amazement on Picture Singh; he was clearly astounded by Parvati’s trick, but, like a true professional, would not dream of asking her how she had achieved it. In this way Parvati-the-witch, who had used her limitless powers to spirit me to safety, escaped discovery; and also because, as I later discovered, the ghetto of the magicians disbelieved, with the absolute certainty of illusionists-by-trade, in the possibility of magic. So Picture Singh told me, with amazement, “I swear, captain—you were so light in there, like a baby!”—But he never dreamed that my weightlessness had been anything more than a trick.
“Listen, baby sahib,” Picture Singh was crying, “What do you say, baby-captain? Must I put you over my shoulder and make you belch?”—And now Parvati, tolerantly: “That one, baba, always making joke shoke.” She was smiling radiantly at everyone in sight … but there followed an inauspicious event. A woman’s voice began to wail at the back of the cluster of magicians: “Ai-o-ai-o! Ai-o-o!” The crowd parted in surprise and an old woman burst through it and rushed at Saleem; I was required to defend myself against a brandished frying pan, until Picture Singh, alarmed, seized her by pan-waving arm and bellowed, “Hey, capteena, why so much noise?” And the old woman, obstinately: “Ai-o-ai-o!”
“Resham Bibi,” Parvati said, crossly, “You got ants in your brain?” And Picture Singh, “We got a guest, capteena—what’ll he do with your shouting? Arré, be quiet, Resham, this captain is known to our Parvati personal! Don’t be coming crying in front of him!”
“Ai-o-ai-o! Bad luck is come! You go to foreign places and bring it here! Ai-oooo!”
Disturbed visages of magicians stared from Resham Bibi to me—because although they were a people who denied the supernatural, they were artistes, and like all performers had an implicit faith in luck, good-luck-and-bad-luck, luck … “Yourself you said,” Resham Bibi wailed, “this man is born twice, and not even from woman! Now comes desolation, pestilence and death. I am old and so I know. Arré baba,” she turned plaintively to face