Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [258]
At every turn I am thwarted; a prophet in the wilderness, like Maslama, like ibn Sinan! No matter how I try, the desert is my lot. O vile unhelpfulness of lickspittle uncles! O fettering of ambitions by second-best toadying relatives! My uncle’s rejection of my pleas for preferment had one grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested her. He was, in fact, preparing me for my return to the magicians’ ghetto, and for … for her … the Widow.
Jealousy: that was it. The green jealousy of my mad aunt Sonia, dripping like poison into my uncle’s ears, prevented him from doing a single thing to get me started on my chosen career. The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also: tiny madwomen.
On the four hundred and eighteenth day of my stay, there was a change in the atmosphere of the madhouse. Someone came to dinner: someone with a plump stomach, a tapering head covered with oily curls and a mouth as fleshy as a woman’s labia. I thought I recognized him from newspaper photographs. Turning to one of my sexless ageless faceless cousins, I inquired with interest, “Isn’t it, you know, Sanjay Gandhi?” But the pulverized creature was too annihilated to be capable of replying … was it wasn’t it? I did not, at that time, know what I now set down: that certain high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons of prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves … a few years later, there would be gangs of Sanjays all over India! No wonder that incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth control on the rest of us … so maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; but someone disappeared into my uncle’s study with Mustapha Aziz; and that night—I sneaked a look—there was a locked black leather folder saying TOP SECRET and also PROJECT M.C.C.; and the next morning my uncle was looking at me differently, with fear almost, or with that special look of loathing which Civil Servants reserve for those who fall into official disfavor. I should have known then what was in store for me; but everything is simple with hindsight. Hindsight comes to me now, too late, now that I am finally consigned to the peripheries of history, now that the connections between my life and the nation’s have broken for good and all … to avoid my uncle’s inexplicable gaze, I went out into the garden; and saw Parvati-the-witch.
She was squatting on the pavement with the basket of invisibility by her side; when she saw me her eyes brightened with reproach. “You said you’d come, but you never, so I,” she stuttered. I bowed my head. “I have been in mourning,” I said, lamely, and she, “But still you could have—my God, Saleem, you don’t know, in our colony I can’t tell anyone about my real magic, never, not even Picture Singh who is like a father, I must bottle it and bottle it, because they don’t believe in such things, and I thought, Here is Saleem come, now at last I will have one friend, we can talk, we can be together, we have both been, and known, and arré how to say it, Saleem, you don’t care, you got what you wanted and went off just like that, I am nothing to you, I know …”
That night my mad aunt Sonia, herself only days away from confinement in a strait-jacket (it got into the papers, a small piece on the inside page; my uncle’s Department must have been annoyed), had one of the fierce inspirations of the profoundly insane and burst into the