Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [300]
A pleasant enough day, on which old days are recalled. The day when I realized that an old cactus-bed had survived the revolution of the Narlikar women, and borrowing a spade from the mali, dug up a long-buried world: a tin globe containing yellowed ant-eaten jumbo-size baby-snap, credited to Kalidas Gupta, and a Prime Minister’s letter. And days further off: for the dozenth time we chatter about the change in Mary Pereira’s fortunes. How she owed it all to her dear Alice. Whose poor Mr. Fernandes died of color-blindness, having become confused, in his old Ford Prefect, at one of the city’s then-few traffic lights. How Alice visited her in Goa with the news that her employers, the fearsome and enterprising Narlikar women, were willing to put some of their tetrapod-money into a pickle firm. “I told them, nobody makes achar-chutney like our Mary,” Alice had said, with perfect accuracy, “because she puts her feelings inside them.” So Alice turned out to be a good girl in the end. And baba, what do you think, how could I believe the whole world would want to eat my poor pickles, even in England they eat. And now, just think, I sit here where your dear house used to be, while God-knows what-all has happened to you, living like a beggar so long, what a world, baapu-ré!
And bitter-sweet lamentations: O, your poor mummy-daddy! That fine madam, dead! And the poor man, never knowing who loved him or how to love! And even the Monkey … but I interrupt, no, not dead: no, not true, not dead. Secretly, in a nunnery, eating bread.
Mary, who has stolen the name of poor Queen Catharine who gave these islands to the British, taught me the secrets of the pickling process. (Finishing an education which began in this very air-space when I stood in a kitchen as she stirred guilt into green chutney.) Now she sits at home, retired in her white-haired old-age, once more happy as an ayah with a baby to raise. “Now you finished your writing-writing, baba, you should take more time for your son.” But Mary, I did it for him. And she, switching the subject, because her mind makes all sorts of flea-jumps these days: “O baba, baba, look at you, how old you got already!”
Rich Mary, who never dreamed she would be rich, is still unable to sleep on beds. But drinks sixteen Coca-Colas a day, unworried about teeth, which have all fallen out anyway. A flea-jump: “Why you getting married so sudden sudden?” Because Padma wants. No, she is not in trouble, how could she, in my condition? “Okay, baba, I only asked.”
And the day would have wound down peacefully, a twilight day near the end of time, except that now, at last, at the age of three years, one month and two weeks, Aadam Sinai uttered a sound.
“Ab …” Arré, O my God, listen, baba, the boy is saying something! And Aadam, very carefully: “Abba …” Father. He is calling me father. But no, he has not finished, there is strain on his face, and finally my son, who will have to be a magician to cope with the world I’m leaving him, completes his awesome first word: “… cadabba.”
Abracadabra! But nothing happens, we do not turn into toads, angels do not fly in through the window: the lad is just flexing his muscles. I shall not see his miracles.… Amid Mary’s celebrations of Aadam’s achievement, I go back to Padma, and the factory; my son’s enigmatic first incursion into language has left a worrying fragrance in my nostrils.
Abracadabra: not an Indian word at all, a cabbalistic formula derived from the name of the supreme god of the Basilidan gnostics, containing the number 365, the number of the days of the year, and of the heavens, and of the spirits emanating from the god Abraxas. “Who,” I am wondering, not for the first time, “does the boy imagine he is?”
My special blends: I’ve been saving them up. Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar;