• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 12095 0

with the ghostly scents of long-gone viceroys and memsahibs in gloves, and also with the rather more strident bodily odors of gaudy rich begums and tramps. Here was the giant election scoreboard around which (during the first battle-for-power between Indira and Morarji Desai) crowds had thronged, awaiting the results, asking eagerly: “Is it a boy or a girl?” … amid ancient and modern, between India Gate and the Secretariat buildings, my thoughts teeming with vanished (Mughal and British) empires and also with my own history—because this was the city of the public announcement, of many-headed monsters and a hand, falling from the sky—I marched resolutely onwards, smelling, like everything else in sight, to high heaven. And at last, having turned left towards Dupleix Road, I arrived at an anonymous garden with a low wall and a hedge; in a corner of which I saw a signboard waving in the breeze, just as once signboards had flowered in the gardens of Methwold’s Estate; but this echo of the past told a different story. Not FOR SALE, with its three ominous vowels and four fateful consonants; the wooden flower of my uncle’s garden proclaimed strangely: Mr. Mustapha Aziz and Fly.

Not knowing that the last word was my uncle’s habitual, desiccated abbreviation of the throbbingly emotional noun “family,” I was thrown into confusion by the nodding signboard; after I had stayed in his household for a very short time, however, it began to seem entirely fitting, because the family of Mustapha Aziz was indeed as crushed, as insect-like, as insignificant as the mythically truncated Fly.

With what words was I greeted when, a little nervously, I rang a doorbell, filled with hopes of beginning a new career? What face appeared behind the wire-netted outer door and scowled in angry surprise? Padma: I was greeted by Uncle Mustapha’s wife, by my mad aunt Sonia, with the exclamation: “Ptui! Allah! How the fellow stinks!”

And although I, ingratiatingly, “Hullo, Sonia Aunty darling,” grinned sheepishly at this wire-netting-shaded vision of my aunt’s wrinkling Irani beauty, she went on, “Saleem, is it? Yes, I remember you. Nasty little brat you were. Always thought you were growing up to be God or what. And why? Some stupid letter the P.M.’s fifteenth assistant under-secretary must have sent you.” In that first meeting I should have been able to foresee the destruction of my plans; I should have smelled, on my mad aunt, the implacable odors of Civil Service jealousy, which would thwart all my attempts to gain a place in the world. I had been sent a letter, and she never had; it made us enemies for life. But there was a door, opening; there were whiffs of clean clothes and shower-baths; and I, grateful for small mercies, failed to examine the deadly perfumes of my aunt.

My uncle Mustapha Aziz, whose once-proudly-waxed moustache had never recovered from the paralyzing dust-storm of the destruction of Methwold’s Estate, had been passed over for the headship of his Department no less than forty-seven times, and had at last found consolation for his inadequacies in thrashing his children, in ranting nightly about how he was clearly the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice, in a contradictory but absolute loyalty to the government of the day, and in an obsession with genealogies which was his only hobby and whose intensity was greater even than my father Ahmed Sinai’s long-ago desire to prove himself descended from Mughal emperors. In the first of these consolations he was willingly joined by his wife, the half-Irani would-be-socialite Sonia (née Khosrovani), who had been driven certifiably insane by a life in which she had been required to begin “being a chamcha” (literally a spoon, but idiomatically a flatterer) to forty-seven separate and successive wives of number-ones whom she had previously alienated by her manner of colossal condescension when they had been the wives of number-threes; under the joint batterings of my uncle and aunt, my cousins had by now been beaten into so thorough a pulp that I am unable to recall their number, sexes, proportions