Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [9]
The general opinion of Tai had been voiced long ago by Aadam Aziz’s father the gemstone merchant: “His brain fell out with his teeth.” (But now old Aziz Sahib sat lost in bird tweets while Tai simply, grandly, continued.) It was an impression the boatman fostered by his chatter, which was fantastic, grandiloquent and ceaseless, and as often as not addressed only to himself. Sound carries over water, and the lake people giggled at his monologues; but with undertones of awe, and even fear. Awe, because the old half-wit knew the lakes and hills better than any of his detractors; fear, because of his claim to an antiquity so immense it defied numbering, and moreover hung so lightly round his chicken’s neck that it hadn’t prevented him from winning a highly desirable wife and fathering four sons upon her … and a few more, the story went, on other lakeside wives. The young bucks at the shikara moorings were convinced he had a pile of money hidden away somewhere—a hoard, perhaps, of priceless golden teeth, rattling in a sack like walnuts. Years later, when Uncle Puffs tried to sell me his daughter by offering to have her teeth drawn and replaced in gold, I thought of Tai’s forgotten treasure … and, as a child, Aadam Aziz had loved him.
He made his living as a simple ferryman, despite all the rumors of wealth, taking hay and goats and vegetables and wood across the lakes for cash; people, too. When he was running his taxi-service he erected a pavilion in the center of the shikara, a gay affair of flowered-patterned curtains and canopy, with cushions to match; and deodorized his boat with incense. The sight of Tai’s shikara approaching, curtains flying, had always been for Doctor Aziz one of the defining images of the coming of spring. Soon the English sahibs would arrive and Tai would ferry them to the Shalimar Gardens and the King’s Spring, chattering and pointy and stooped. He was the living antithesis of Oskar-Ilse-Ingrid’s belief in the inevitability of change … a quirky, enduring familiar spirit of the valley. A watery Caliban, rather too fond of cheap Kashmiri brandy.
Memory of my blue bedroom wall: on which, next to the P.M.’s letter, the Boy Raleigh hung for many years, gazing rapturously at an old fisherman in what looked like a red dhoti, who sat on—what?—driftwood?—and pointed out to sea as he told his fishy tales … and the Boy Aadam, my grandfather-to-be, fell in love with the boatman Tai precisely because of the endless verbiage which made others think him cracked. It was magical talk, words pouring from him like fools’ money, past his two gold teeth, laced with hiccups and brandy, soaring up to the most remote Himalayas of the past, then swooping shrewdly on some present detail, Aadam’s nose for instance, to vivisect its meaning like a mouse. This friendship had plunged Aadam into hot water with great regularity. (Boiling water. Literally. While his mother said, “We’ll kill that boatman’s bugs if it kills you.”) But still the old soliloquist would dawdle in his boat at the garden’s lakeside toes and Aziz would sit at his feet until voices summoned him indoors to be lectured on Tai’s filthiness and warned about the pillaging armies of germs his mother envisaged leaping from that hospitably ancient body on to her son’s starched white loose-pajamas. But always Aadam returned to the water’s edge to scan the mists for the ragged reprobate’s hunched-up frame steering its magical boat through the enchanted waters of the morning.
“But how old are you really, Taiji?” (Doctor Aziz, adult, red-bearded, slanting towards the future, remembers the day he asked the unaskable question.) For an instant, silence, noisier than