Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [270]
Pictureji and I had gone into the tapering tenement streets behind the General Post Office, where memories of fortune-tellers peep-show-men healers hung in the breeze; and here Picture Singh had performed an act which was growing more political by the day. His legendary artistry drew large good-natured crowds; and he made his snakes enact his message under the influence of his weaving flute music. While I, in my role of apprentice, read out a prepared harangue, serpents dramatized my speech. I spoke of the gross inequities of wealth distribution; two cobras performed, in dumbshow, the mime of a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar. Police harassment, hunger disease illiteracy, were spoken of and also danced by serpents; and then Picture Singh, concluding his act, began to talk about the nature of red revolution, and promises began to fill the air, so that even before the police materialized out of the back-doors of the post office to break up the meeting with lathi-charges and tear-gas, certain wags in our audience had begun to heckle the Most Charming Man In The World. Unconvinced, perhaps, by the ambiguous mimes of the snakes, whose dramatic content was admittedly a little obscure, a youth shouted out: “Ohé, Pictureji, you should be in the Government, man, not even Indiramata makes promises as nice as yours!”
Then the tear-gas came and we had to flee, coughing spluttering blind, from riot police, like criminals, crying falsely as we ran. (Just as once, in Jallianwala Bagh—but at least there were no bullets on this occasion.) But although the tears were the tears of gas, Picture Singh was indeed cast down into an awesome gloom by the heckler’s gibe, which had questioned the hold on reality which was his greatest pride; and in the aftermath of gas and sticks, I, too, was dejected, having suddenly identified a moth of unease in my stomach, and realized that something in me objected to Picture’s portrayal in snake-dance of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich; I found myself thinking, “There is good and bad in all—and they brought me up, they looked after me, Pictureji!” After which I began to see that the crime of Mary Pereira had detached me from two worlds, not one; that having been expelled from my uncle’s house I could never fully enter the world-according-to-Picture-Singh; that, in fact, my dream of saving the country was a thing of mirrors and smoke; insubstantial, the maunderings of a fool.
And then there was Parvati, with her altered profile, in the harsh clarity of the winter day.
It was—or am I wrong? I must rush on; things are slipping from me all the time—a day of horrors. It was then—unless it was another day—that we found old Resham Bibi dead of cold, lying in her hut which she had built out of Dalda Vanaspati packing-cases. She had turned bright blue, Krishna-blue, blue as Jesus, the blue of Kashmiri sky, which sometimes leaks into eyes; we burned her on the banks of the Jamuna amongst mudflats and buffalo, and she missed my wedding as a result, which was sad, because like all old women she loved weddings, and had in the past joined in the preliminary henna-ceremonies with energetic glee, leading the formal singing in which the bride’s friends insulted the groom and his family. On one occasion her insults had been so brilliant and finely calculated that the groom took umbrage and cancelled the wedding; but Resham had been undaunted, saying that it wasn’t her fault if young men nowadays were as fainthearted and inconstant as chickens.
I was absent when Parvati went away; I was not present