Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [53]
But here, refusing to wait its turn, is another taxi, pausing outside another fort, unloading its cargo of three men in business suits, each carrying a bulky gray bag under his coat … one man long as a life and thin as a lie, a second who seems to lack a spine, and a third whose lower lip juts, whose belly tends to squashiness, whose hair is thinning and greasy and worming over the tops of his ears, and between whose eyebrows is the tell-tale furrow that will, as he ages, deepen into the scar of a bitter, angry man. The taxi-driver is ebullient despite the cold. “Purana Qila!” he calls out, “Everybody out, please! Old Fort, here we are!” … There have been many, many cities of Delhi, and the Old Fort, that blackened ruin, is a Delhi so ancient that beside it our own Old City is merely a babe in arms. It is to this ruin of an impossibly antique time that Kemal, Butt and Ahmed Sinai have been brought by an anonymous telephone call which ordered, “Tonight. Old Fort. Just after sunset. But no police … or godown funtoosh!” Clutching their gray bags, they move into the ancient, crumbling world.
… Clutching at her handbag, my mother sits beside a peep-show, while Lifafa Das rides in front with the puzzled, irascible driver, and directs the cab into the streets on the wrong side of the General Post Office; and as she enters these causeways where poverty eats away at the tarmac like a drought, where people lead their invisible lives (because they share Lifafa Das’s curse of invisibility, and not all of them have beautiful smiles), something new begins to assail her. Under the pressure of these streets which are growing narrower by the minute, more crowded by the inch, she has lost her “city eyes.” When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don’t impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don’t look like dormitories. My mother lost her city eyes and the newness of what she was seeing made her flush, newness like a hailstorm pricking her cheeks. Look, my God, those beautiful children have black teeth! Would you believe … girl children baring their nipples! How terrible, truly! And, Allah-tobah, heaven forfend, sweeper women with—no!—how dreadful!—collapsed spines, and bunches of twigs, and no caste marks; untouchables, sweet Allah! … and cripples everywhere, mutilated by loving parents to ensure them of a lifelong income from begging … yes, beggars in boxcars, grown men with babies’ legs, in crates on wheels, made out of discarded roller-skates and old mango boxes; my mother cries out, “Lifafa Das, turn back!” … but he is smiling his beautiful smile, and says, “We must walk from here.” Seeing that there is no going back, she tells the taxi to wait, and the bad-tempered driver says, “Yes, of course, for a great lady what is there to do but wait, and when you come I must drive my car in reverse all the way back to main-road, because here is no room to turn!” … Children tugging at the pallu of her sari, heads everywhere staring at my mother, who thinks, It’s like being surrounded by some terrible monster, a creature with heads and heads and heads; but she corrects herself, no, of course not a monster, these poor poor people—what then? A power of some sort, a force which does not know its strength, which has perhaps decayed into impotence through never having been used … No, these are not decayed people, despite everything. “I’m frightened,” my mother finds herself thinking, just as a hand touches her arm. Turning, she finds herself looking into the