Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [48]
But Ahmed Sinai had other things to look at.
The children of the muhalla had their own names for most of the local inhabitants. One group of three neighbors was known as the “fighting-cock people,” because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose homes were separated by one of the muhalla’s few Hindu residences. The Sindhi and the Bengali had very little in common—they didn’t speak the same language or cook the same food; but they were both Muslims, and they both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from their rooftops. They hurled multi-lingual abuse at him from their windows. They flung scraps of meat at his door … while he, in turn, paid urchins to throw stones at their windows, stones with messages wrapped round them: “Wait,” the messages said, “Your turn will come” … the children of the muhalla did not call my father by his right name. They knew him as “the man who can’t follow his nose.”
Ahmed Sinai was the possessor of a sense of direction so inept that, left to his own devices, he could even get lost in the winding gullies of his own neighborhood. Many times the street-arabs in the lanes had come across him, wandering forlornly, and been offered a four-anna chavanni piece to escort him home. I mention this because I believe that my father’s gift for taking wrong turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it was also a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir Khan, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what’s more, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road … But that’s enough for now, because I’ve given the three businessmen enough time to get to the industrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct consequence of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future failure, the odor of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths. Mr. Kemal, who smelled it, would say privately to S. P. Butt, “These Kashmiri types, old boy: well-known fact they never wash.”This slander connects my father to the boatman Tai … to Tai in the grip of the self-destructive rage which made him give up being clean.
At the industrial estate, night-watchmen were sleeping peacefully through the noise of the fire-engines. Why? How? Because they had made a deal with the Ravana mob, and, when tipped off about the gang’s impending arrival, would take sleeping draughts and pull their charpoy beds away from the buildings of the estate. In this way the gang avoided violence, and the night-watchmen augmented their meager wages. It was an amicable and not unintelligent arrangement.
Amid sleeping night-watchmen, Mr. Kemal, my father and S. P. Butt watched cremated bicycles rise up into the sky in thick black clouds. Butt father Kemal stood alongside fire-engines, as relief flooded through them, because it was the Arjuna Indiabike godown that was burning—the Arjuna brand-name, taken from a hero of Hindu mythology, had failed to disguise the fact that the company was Muslim-owned.