Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [74]
Rumors in the city: “The statue galloped last night!” … “And the stars are unfavorable!” … But despite these signs of ill-omen, the city was poised, with a new myth glinting in the corners of its eyes. August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna’s birthday and Coconut Day; and this year—fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve—there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth—a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
I have been, in my time, the living proof of the fabulous nature of this collective dream; but for the moment, I shall turn away from these generalized, macrocosmic notions to concentrate upon a more private ritual; I shall not describe the mass blood-letting in progress on the frontiers of the divided Punjab (where the partitioned nations are washing themselves in one another’s blood, and a certain Punchinello-faced Major Zulfikar is buying refugee property at absurdly low prices, laying the foundations of a fortune that will rival the Nizam of Hyderabad’s); I shall avert my eyes from the violence in Bengal and the long pacifying walk of Mahatma Gandhi. Selfish? Narrow-minded? Well, perhaps; but excusably so, in my opinion. After all, one is not born every day.
Twelve hours to go. Amina Sinai, having awakened from her flypaper nightmare, will not sleep again until after … Ramram Seth is filling her head, she is adrift in a turbulent sea in which waves of excitement alternate with deep, giddying, dark, watery hollows of fear. But something else is in operation, too. Watch her hands—as, without any conscious instructions, they press down, hard, upon her womb; watch her lips, muttering without her knowledge: “Come on, slowpoke, you don’t want to be late for the newspapers!”
Eight hours to go … at four o’clock that afternoon, William Methwold drives up the two-storey hillock in his black 1946 Rover. He parks in the circus-ring between the four noble villas; but today he visits neither goldfish-pond nor cactus-garden; he does not greet Lila Sabarmati with his customary, “How goes the pianola? Everything tickety-boo?”—nor does he salute old man Ibrahim who sits in the shade of a ground-floor verandah, rocking in a rocking-chair and musing about sisal; looking neither towards Catrack nor Sinai, he takes up his position in the exact center of the circus-ring. Rose in lapel, cream hat held stiffly against his chest, center-parting glinting in afternoon light, William Methwold stares straight ahead, past clocktower and Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy’s map-shaped pool, across the golden four o’clock waves, and salutes; while out there, above the horizon, the sun begins its long dive towards the sea.
Six hours to go. The cocktail hour. The successors of William Methwold are in their gardens—except that Amina sits in her tower-room, avoiding the mildly competitive glances being flung in her direction by Nussie-next-door, who is also, perhaps, urging her Sonny down and out between her legs; curiously they watch the Englishman, who stands as still and stiff as the ramrod to which we have previously compared his center-parting; until they are distracted by a new arrival. A long, stringy man,