Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [69]
Mary Pereira’s confession: like every Mary she had her Joseph. Joseph D’Costa, an orderly at a Pedder Road clinic called Dr. Narlikar’s Nursing Home (“Oho!” Padma sees a connection at last), where she worked as a midwife. Things had been very good at first; he had taken her for cups of tea or lassi or falooda and told her sweet things. He had eyes like road-drills, hard and full of ratatat, but he spoke softly and well. Mary, tiny, plump, virginal, had revelled in his attentions; but now everything had changed.
“Suddenly suddenly he’s sniffing the air all the time. In a funny way, nose high up. I ask, ‘You got a cold or what, Joe?’ But he says no; no, he says, he’s sniffing the wind from the north. But I tell him, Joe, in Bombay the wind comes off the sea, from the west, Joe …” In a fragile voice Mary Pereira describes the ensuing rage of Joseph D’Costa, who told her, “You don’t know nothing, Mary, the air comes from the north now, and it’s full of dying. This independence is for the rich only; the poor are being made to kill each other like flies. In Punjab, in Bengal. Riots riots, poor against poor. It’s in the wind.”
And Mary: “You talking crazy, Joe, why you worrying with those so-bad things? We can live quietly still, no?”
“Never mind, you don’t know one thing.”
“But Joseph, even if it’s true about the killing, they’re Hindu and Muslim people only; why get good Christian folk mixed up in their fight? Those ones have killed each other for ever and ever.”
“You and your Christ. You can’t get it into your head that that’s the white people’s religion? Leave white gods for white men. Just now our own people are dying. We got to fight back; show the people who to fight instead of each other, you see?”
And Mary, “That’s why I asked about color, Father … and I told Joseph, I told and told, fighting is bad, leave off these wild ideas; but then he stops talking with me, and starts hanging about with dangerous types, and there are rumors starting up about him, Father, how he’s throwing bricks at big cars apparently, and burning bottles also, he’s going crazy, Father, they say he helps to burn buses and blow up trams, and I don’t know what. What to do, Father, I tell my sister about it all. My sister Alice, a good girl really, Father. I said: ‘That Joe, he lives near a slaughterhouse, maybe that’s the smell that got into his nose and muddled him all up.’ So Alice went to find him, ‘I will talk for you,’ she says; but then, O God what is happening to the world … I tell you truly, Father … O baba …” And the floods are drowning her words, her secrets are leaking saltily out of her eyes, because Alice came back to say that in her opinion Mary was the one to blame, for haranguing Joseph until he wanted no more of her, instead of giving him support in his patriotic cause of awakening the people. Alice was younger than Mary; and prettier; and after that there were more rumors, Alice-and-Joseph stories, and Mary came to her wits’ end.
“That one,” Mary said, “What does she know about this politics-politics? Only to get her nails into my Joseph she will repeat any rubbish he talks, like one stupid mynah bird. I swear, Father …”
“Careful, daughter. You are close to blasphemy …”
“No, Father, I swear to God, I don’t know what I won’t do to get me back that man. Yes: in spite of … never mind what he … ai-o-ai-ooo!”
Salt water washes the confessional floor … and now, is there a new dilemma for the young father? Is he, despite the agonies of an unsettled stomach, weighing in invisible scales the sanctity of the confessional against the danger to civilized society of a man like Joseph