Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [60]
(But in time, he would call Narlikar a traitor.)
In my family, we always go when we’re pushed—the freeze of ’48 being the only exception to this rule. The boatman Tai drove my grandfather from Kashmir; Mercurochrome chased him out of Amritsar; the collapse of her life under the carpets led directly to my mother’s departure from Agra; and many-headed monsters sent my father to Bombay, so that I could be born there. At the end of that January, history had finally, by a series of shoves, brought itself to the point at which it was almost ready for me to make my entrance. There were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I stepped on to the scene … the mystery, for example, of Shri Ramram’s most enigmatic remark: “There will be a nose and knees: knees and a nose.”
The insurance money came; January ended; and in the time it took to close down their affairs in Delhi and move to the city in which—as Doctor Narlikar the gynecologist knew—property was temporarily as cheap as dirt, my mother concentrated on her segmented scheme for learning to love her husband. She came to feel a deep affection for the question marks of his ears; for the remarkable depth of his navel, into which her finger could go right up to the first joint, without even pushing; she grew to love the knobbliness of his knees; but, try as she might (and as I’m giving her the benefit of my doubts I shall offer no possible reasons here), there was one part of him which she never managed to love, although it was the one thing he possessed, in full working order, which Nadir Khan had certainly lacked; on those nights when he heaved himself up on top of her—when the baby in her womb was no bigger than a frog—it was just no good at all.
… “No, not so quick, janum, my life, a little longer, please,” she is saying; and Ahmed, to spin things out, tries to think back to the fire, to the last thing that happened on that blazing night, when just as he was turning to go he heard a dirty screech in the sky, and, looking up, had time to register that a vulture—at night!—a vulture from the Towers of Silence was flying overhead, and that it had dropped a barely-chewed Parsee hand, a right hand, the same hand which—now!—slapped him full in the face as it fell; while Amina, beneath him in bed, ticks herself off: Why can’t you enjoy, you stupid woman, from now on you must really try.
On June 4th, my ill-matched parents left for Bombay by Frontier Mail. (There were bangings, voices hanging on for dear life, fists crying out, “Maharaj! Open for one tick only! Ohé, from the milk of your kindness, great sir, do us favor!” And there was also—hidden beneath dowry in a green tin trunk—a forbidden, lapis-lazuli-encrusted, delicately-wrought silver spittoon.) On the same day, Earl Mountbatten of Burma held a press conference at which he announced the Partition of India, and hung his countdown calender on the wall: seventy days to go to the transfer of power … sixty-nine … sixty-eight … tick, tock.
Methwold
THE FISHERMEN were here first. Before Mountbatten’s tick-tock, before monsters and public announcements; when underworld marriages were still unimagined and spittoons were unknown; earlier than Mercurochrome; longer ago than lady wrestlers who held up perforated sheets; and back and back, beyond Dalhousie and Elphinstone, before the East India Company built its Fort, before the first William Methwold; at the dawn of time, when Bombay was a dumbbell-shaped island tapering, at the center, to a narrow shining strand beyond which could be seen the finest and largest natural harbor in Asia, when Mazagaon and Worli, Matunga and Mahim, Salsette and Colaba were islands, too—in short, before reclamation, before tetrapods and sunken piles turned the Seven Isles into a long peninsula like an outstretched, grasping hand, reaching westward into the Arabian Sea; in this primeval world before clocktowers, the fishermen—who were called Kolis—sailed in Arab dhows, spreading red sails against