Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [257]
She had heard about my disappearance in the turmoil of the war in Bangladesh; she, who always showed her love when it was too late, had perhaps been driven a little crazy by the news. Jamila, the Voice of Pakistan, Bulbul-of-the-Faith, had spoken out against the new rulers of truncated, moth-eaten, war-divided Pakistan; while Mr. Bhutto was telling the U.N. Security Council, “We will build a new Pakistan! A better Pakistan! My country hearkens for me!”, my sister was reviling him in public; she, purest of the pure, most patriotic of patriots, turned rebel when she heard about my death. (That, at least, is how I see it; all I heard from my uncle were the bald facts; he had heard them through diplomatic channels, which do not go in for psychological theorizing.) Two days after her tirade against the perpetrators of the war, my sister had vanished off the face of the earth. Uncle Mustapha tried to speak gently: “Very bad things are happening over there, Saleem; people disappearing all the time; we must fear the worst.”
No! No no no! Padma: he was wrong! Jamila did not disappear into the clutches of the State; because that same night, I dreamed that she, in the shadows of darkness and the secrecy of a simple veil, not the instantly recognizable gold-brocade tent of Uncle Puffs but a common black burqa, fled by air from the capital city; and here she is, arriving in Karachi, unquestioned unarrested free, she is taking a taxi into the depths of the city, and now there is a high wall with bolted doors and a hatch through which, once, long ago, I received bread, the leavened bread of my sister’s weakness, she is asking to be let in, nuns are opening doors as she cries sanctuary, yes, there she is, safely inside, doors being bolted behind her, exchanging one kind of invisibility for another, there is another Reverend Mother now, as Jamila Singer who once, as the Brass Monkey, flirted with Christianity, finds safety shelter peace in the midst of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia … yes, she is there, safe, not vanished, not in the grip of police who kick beat starve, but at rest, not in an unmarked grave by the side of the Indus, but alive, baking bread, singing sweetly to the secret nuns; I know, I know, I know. How do I know? A brother knows; that’s all.
Responsibility, assaulting me yet again: because there is no way out of it—Jamila’s fall was, as usual, all my fault.
I lived in the home of Mr. Mustapha Aziz for four hundred and twenty days … Saleem was in belated mourning for his dead; but do not think for one moment that my ears were closed! Don’t assume I didn’t hear what was being said around me, the repeated quarrels between uncle and aunt (which may have helped him decide to consign her to the insane asylum): Sonia Aziz yelling, “That bhangi—that dirtyfilthy fellow, not even your nephew, I don’t know what’s got into you, we should throw him out on his ear!” And Mustapha, quietly, replying: “Poor chap is stricken with grief, so how can we, you just have to look to see, he is not quite right in the head, has suffered many bad things.” Not quite right in the head! That was tremendous, coming from them—from that family beside which a tribe of gibbering cannibals would have seemed calm and civilized! Why did I put up with it? Because I was a man with a dream. But for four hundred and twenty days, it was a dream which failed to come true.
Droopy-moustachioed, tall-but-stooped, an eternal number-two: my uncle Mustapha was not my uncle Hanif. He was the head of the family now, the only one of his generation to survive the holocaust of 1965; but he gave me no help at all … I bearded him in his genealogy-filled study one bitter evening and explained—with proper solemnity and humble but resolute gestures—my historic mission to rescue the nation