Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [80]
Thus abandoned, I have returned, having no option, to my work.
The fisherman’s pointing finger: unforgettable focal point of the picture which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above the sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight’s child, I spent my earliest days. The young Raleigh—and who else?—sat, framed in teak, at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor—did he have a walrus moustache?—whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh—and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic … and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child with a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor sat in a sky-blue room, beneath the pointing finger, and copied the attire of the English milords … “Look, how chweet!” Lila Sabarmati exclaimed to my eternal mortification, “It’s like he’s just stepped out of the picture!”
In a picture hanging on a bedroom wall, I sat beside Walter Raleigh and followed a fisherman’s pointing finger with my eyes; eyes straining at the horizon, beyond which lay—what?—my future, perhaps; my special doom, of which I was aware from the beginning, as a shimmering gray presence in that sky-blue room, indistinct at first, but impossible to ignore … because the finger pointed even further than that shimmering horizon, it pointed beyond teak frame, across a brief expanse of sky-blue wall, driving my eyes towards another frame, in which my inescapable destiny hung, forever fixed under glass: here was a jumbo-sized baby-snap with its prophetic captions, and here, beside it, a letter on high-quality vellum, embossed with the seal of state—the lions of Sarnath stood above the dharma-chakra on the Prime Minister’s missive, which arrive, via Vishwanath the post-boy, one week after my photograph appeared on the front page of the Times of India.
Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: “Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.”
And Mary Pereira, awestruck, “The Government, Madam? It will be keeping one eye on the boy? But why, Madam? What’s wrong with him?”—And Amina, not understanding the note of panic in her ayah’s voice: “It’s just a way of putting things, Mary; it doesn’t really mean what it says.” But Mary does not relax; and always, whenever she enters the baby’s room, her eyes flick wildly towards the letter in its frame; her eyes look around her, trying to see whether the Government is watching; wondering eyes: what do they know? Did somebody see? … As for me, as I grew up, I didn’t quite accept my mother’s explanation, either; but it lulled me into a sense of false security; so that, even though something of Mary’s suspicions had leaked into me, I was still taken by surprise when …
Perhaps the fisherman’s finger was not pointing at the letter in the frame; because if one followed it even further, it led one out through the window, down the two-storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy Pools, and out to another sea which was not the sea in the picture; a sea on which the sails of Koli dhows glowed scarlet in the setting sun … an accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at the city’s dispossessed.