Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [256]
As for genealogies: Uncle Mustapha spent all his spare time filling giant log-books with spider-like family trees, eternally researching into and immortalizing the bizarre lineages of the greatest families in the land; but one day during my stay my aunt Sonia heard about a rishi from Hardwar who was reputedly three hundred and ninety-five years old and had memorized the genealogies of every single Brahmin clan in the country. “Even in that,” she screeched at my uncle, “you end up being number two!” The existence of the Hardwar rishi completed her descent into insanity, so that her violence towards her children increased to the point at which we lived in daily expectation of murder, and in the end my uncle Mustapha was forced to have her locked away, because her excesses were embarrassing him in his work.
This, then, was the family to which I had come. Their presence in Delhi came to seem, in my eyes, like a desecration of my own past; in a city which, for me, was forever possessed by the ghosts of the young Ahmed and Amina, this terrible Fly was crawling upon sacred soil.’
But what can never be proved for certain is that, in the years ahead, my uncle’s genealogical obsession would be placed at the service of a government which was falling increasingly beneath the twin spells of power and astrology; so that what happened at the Widows’ Hostel might never have happened without his help … but no, I have been a traitor, too; I do not condemn; all I am saying is that I once saw, amongst his genealogical log-books, a black leather folder labelled TOP SECRET, and titled PROJECT M.C.C.
The end is near, and cannot be escaped much longer; but while the Indira sarkar, like her father’s administration, consults daily with purveyors of occult lore; while Benarsi seers help to shape the history of India, I must digress into painful, personal recollections; because it was at Uncle Mustapha’s that I learned, for certain, about the deaths of my family in the war of ’65; and also about the disappearance, just a few days before my arrival, of the famous Pakistani singer Jamila Singer.
… When mad aunt Sonia heard that I had fought on the wrong side in the war, she refused to feed me (we were at dinner), and screeched, “God, you have a cheek, you know that? Don’t you have a brain to think with? You come to a Senior Civil Servant’s house—an escaped war criminal, Allah! You want to lose your uncle his job? You want to put us all out on the street? Catch your ears for shame, boy! Go—go, get out, or better, we should call the police and hand you over just now! Go, be a prisoner of war, why should we care, you are not even our departed sister’s true-born son …”
Thunderbolts, one after the other: Saleem fears for his safety, and simultaneously learns the inescapable truth about his mother’s death, and also that his position is weaker than he thought, because in this part of his family the act of acceptance has not been made; Sonia, knowing what Mary Pereira confessed, is capable of anything! … And I, feebly, “My mother? Departed?” And now Uncle Mustapha, perhaps feeling that his wife has gone too far, says reluctantly, “Never mind, Saleem, of course you must stay—he must, wife, what else to do?—and poor fellow doesn’t even know …”
Then they told me.
It occurred to me, in the heart of that crazy Fly, that I owed the dead a number of mourning periods; after I learned of the demise of my mother and father and aunts Alia and Pia and Emerald, of