Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [299]
Taking Aadam with me, I went.
Journey’s end: from the underworld of the blind waitresses, I walked north north north, holding my son in my arms; and came at last to where flies are gobbled by lizards, and vats bubble, and strong-armed women tell bawdy jokes; to this world of sharp-lipped overseers with conical breasts, and the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the bottling-plant … and who, at the end of my road, planted herself in front of me, arms akimbo, hair glistening with perspiration on the forearms? Who, direct as ever, demanded, “You, mister: what you want?”
“Me!” Padma is yelling, excited and a little embarrassed by the memory. “Of course, who else? Me me me!”
“Good afternoon, Begum,” I said. (Padma interjects: “O you—always so polite and all!”) “Good afternoon; may I speak to the manager?”
O grim, defensive, obstinate Padma! “Not possible, Manager Begum is busy. You must make appointment, come back later, so please go away just now.”
Listen: I would have stayed, persuaded, bullied, even used force to get past my Padma’s arms; but there was a cry from the catwalk—this catwalk, Padma, outside the offices!—the catwalk from which someone whom I have not been willing to name until now was looking down, across gigantic picklevats and simmering chutneys—someone rushing down clattering metal steps, shrieking at the top of her voice:
“O my God, O my God, O Jesus sweet Jesus, baba, my son, look who’s come here, arré baba, don’t you see me, look how thin you got, come, come, let me kiss you, let me give you cake!”
Just as I had guessed, the Manager Begum of Braganza Pickles (Private) Ltd., who called herself Mrs. Braganza, was of course my erstwhile ayah, the criminal of midnight, Miss Mary Pereira, the only mother I had left in the world.
Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taking offense at my voyeurism, calls: “Watch this!” and proceeds to extrude the longest turd I have ever seen. “Fifteen inches!” he calls, “How long can you make yours?” Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I’d have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times; but now I’m disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write. So, waving at the champion defecator, I call back: “Seven on a good day,” and forget him.
Tomorrow. Or the day after. The cracks will be waiting for August 15th. There is still a little time: I’ll finish tomorrow.
Today I gave myself the day off and visited Mary. A long hot dusty bus-ride through streets beginning to bubble with the excitement of the coming Independence Day, although I can smell other, more tarnished perfumes: disillusion, venality, cynicism … the nearly-thirty-one-year-old myth of freedom is no longer what it was. New myths are needed; but that’s none of my business.
Mary Pereira, who now calls herself Mrs. Braganza, lives with her sister Alice, now Mrs. Fernandes, in an apartment in the pink obelisk of the Narlikar women on the two-storey hillock where once, in a demolished palace, she slept on a servant’s mat. Her bedroom occupies more or less the same cube of air in which a fisherman’s pointing finger led a pair of boyish eyes