Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [52]
“It was only a matter of time,” my father said, with every appearance of pleasure; but time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in Pakistan would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts … Mr. Kemal, who wanted nothing to do with Partition, was fond of saying, “Here’s proof of the folly of the scheme! Those Leaguers plan to abscond with a whole thirty minutes! Time Without Partitions,” Mr. Kemal cried, “That’s the ticket!” And S. P. Butt said, “If they can change the time just like that, what’s real any more? I ask you? What’s true?”
It seems like a day for big questions. I reply across the unreliable years to S. P. Butt, who got his throat slit in the Partition riots and lost interest in time: “What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.” True, for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories Mary Pereira told me: Mary my ayah who was both more and less than a mother; Mary who knew everything about all of us. True was a thing concealed just over the horizon towards which the fisherman’s finger pointed in the picture on my wall, while the young Raleigh listened to his tales. Now, writing this in my Anglepoised pool of light, I measure truth against those early things: Is this how Mary would have told it? I ask. Is this what that fisherman would have said? … And by those standards it is undeniably true that, one day in January 1947, my mother heard all about me six months before I turned up, while my father came up against a demon king.
Amina Sinai had been waiting for a suitable moment to accept Lifafa Das’s offer; but for two days after the burning of the Indiabike factory Ahmed Sinai stayed at home, never visiting his office at Connaught Place, as if he were steeling himself for some unpleasant encounter. For two days the gray money-bag lay supposedly secret in its place under his side of their bed. My father showed no desire to talk about the reasons for the gray bag’s presence; so Amina said to herself, “Let him be like that; who cares?” because she had her secret, too, waiting patiently for her by the gates of the Red Fort at the top of Chandni Chowk. Pouting in secret petulance, my mother kept Lifafa Das to herself. “Unless-and-until he tells me what he’s up to, why should I tell him?” she argued.
And then a cold January evening, on which “I’ve got to go out tonight,” said Ahmed Sinai; and despite her pleas of “It’s cold—you’ll get sick …” he put on his business suit and coat under which the mysterious gray bag made a ridiculously obvious lump; so finally she said, “Wrap up warm,” and sent him off wherever he was going, asking, “Will you be late?” To which he replied, “Yes, certainly.” Five minutes after he left, Amina Sinai set off for the Red Fort, into the heart of her adventure.
One journey began at a fort; one should have ended at a fort, and did not. One foretold the future; the other settled its geographical location. During one journey, monkeys danced entertainingly; while, in the other place, a monkey was also dancing, but with disastrous results. In both adventures, a part was played by vultures. And many-headed monsters lurked at the end of both roads.
One at a time, then … and here is Amina Sinai beneath the high walls of the Red Fort, where Mughals ruled, from whose heights the new nation will be proclaimed … neither monarch nor herald, my mother is nevertheless greeted with warmth (despite the weather).