What is waiting to be told: the return of ticktock. But now time is counting down to an end, not a birth; there is, too, a weariness to be mentioned, a general fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will be the only solution, because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply run out of steam, and then there's nothing for it but to finish with them.
How a piece fell out of the moon, and Saleem achieved purity ... the clock is ticking now; and because all countdowns require a zero, let me state that the end came on September 22nd, 1965; and that the precise instant of the arrival-at-zero was, inevitably, the stroke of midnight. Although the old grandfather clock in my aunt Alia's house, which kept accurate time but always chimed two minutes late, never had a chance to strike.
My grandmother Naseem Aziz arrived in Pakistan in mid-1964, leaving behind an India in which Nehru's death had precipitated a bitter power struggle. Morarji Desai, the Finance Minister, and Jagjivan Ram, most powerful of the untouchables, united in their determination to prevent the establishment of a Nehru dynasty; so Indira Gandhi was denied the leadership. The new Prime Minister was Lal Bahadur Shastri, another member of that generation of politicians who seemed to have been pickled in immortality; in the case of Shastri, however, this was only maya, illusion. Nehru and Shastri have both fully proved their mortality; but there are still plenty of the others left, clutching Time in their mummified fingers and refusing to let it move ... in Pakistan, however, the clocks ticked and locked.
Reverend Mother did not overtly approve of my sister's career; it smacked too much of film-stardom. 'My family, whatsitsname,' she sighed to Pia mumani, 'is even less controllable than the price of gas.' Secretly, however, she may have been impressed, because she respected power and position and Jamila was now so exalted as to be welcome in the most powerful and best-placed houses in the land ... my grandmother settled in Rawalpindi; however, with a strange show of independence, she chose not to live in the house of General Zulfikar. She and my aunt Pia moved into a modest bungalow in the old part of town; and by pooling their savings, purchased a concession on the long-dreamed-of petrol pump.
Naseem never mentioned Aadam Aziz, nor would she grieve over him; it was almost as though she were relieved that my querulous grandfather, who had in his youth despised the Pakistan movement, and who in all probability blamed the Muslim League for the death of his friend Mian Abdullah, had by dying permitted her to go alone into the Land of the Pure. Setting her face against the past, Reverend Mother concentrated on gasoline and oil. The pump was on a prime site, near the Rawalpindi-Lahore grand trunk road-it did very well. Pia and Naseem took it in turns to spend the day in the manager's glass booth while attendants filled up cars and Army trucks. They proved a magical combination. Pia attracted customers with the beacon of a beauty which obstinately refused to fade; while Reverend Mother, who had been transformed by bereave, ment into a woman who was more interested in other people's lives than her own, took to inviting the pump's customers into her glass booth for cups of pink Kashmiri tea; they would accept with some trepidation, but when they realized that the old lady did not propose to bore them with endless reminiscences, they relaxed, loosened collars and tongues, and Reverend Mother was able to bathe in the blessed oblivion of other people's lives. The pump rapidly became famous in those parts, drivers began to go out of their way to use it - often on two consecutive days, so that they could both feast their eyes on my divine aunt and tell their woes to my eternally patient grandmother, who had developed the absorbent properties of a sponge, and always waited until her guests had completely finished before squeezing out of her own lips a few drops of simple, firm advice - while their cars were filled up with petrol and polished by pump-attendants, my grandmother would re-charge and polish their lives. She sat in her glass confessional and solved the problems of the world; her own family, however, seemed to have lost importance in her eyes.
Moustachioed, matriarchal, proud: Naseem Aziz had found her own way of coping with tragedy; but in finding it had become the first victim of that spirit of detached fatigue which made the end the only possible solution. (Tick, tock.)
... However, on the face of it, she appeared to have not the slightest intention of following her husband into the camphor garden reserved for the righteous; she seemed to have more in common with the methuselah leaders of her abandoned India. She grew, with alarming rapidity, wider and wider; until builders were summoned to expand her glassed-in booth. 'Make it big big,' she instructed them, with a rare flash of humour, 'Maybe I'll still be here after a century, whatsitsname, and Allah knows how big I'll have become; I don't want to be troubling you every ten-twelve years.'
Pia Aziz, however, was not content with 'pumpery-shumpery'. She began a series of liaisons with colonels cricketers polo-players diplomats, which were easy to conceal from a Reverend Mother who had lost interest in the doings of everyone except strangers; but which were otherwise the talk of what was, after all, a small town. My aunt Emerald took Pia to task; she replied: 'You want me to be forever howling and pulling hair? I'm still young; young folk should gad a little.' Emerald, thin-lipped: 'But be a little respectable ... the family name ...' At which Pia tossed her head. 'You be respectable, sister,' she said, 'Me, I'll be alive.'
But it seems to me that there was something hollow in Pia's self-assertion; that she, too, felt her personality draining away with the years; that her feverish romancing was a last desperate attempt to behave 'in character' - in the way a woman like her was supposed to do. Her heart wasn't in it; somewhere inside, she, too, was waiting for an end ... In my family, we have always been vulnerable to things which fall from the skies, ever since Ahmed Sinai was slapped by a vulture-dropped hand; and bolts from the blue were only a year away.
After the news of my grandfather's death and the arrival of Reverend Mother in Pakistan, I began to dream repeatedly of Kashmir; although I had never walked in Shalimar-bagh, I did so at night; I floated in shikaras and climbed Sankara Acharya's hill as my grandfather had; I saw lotus-roots and mountains like angry jaws. This, too, may be seen as an aspect of the detachment which came to afflict us all (except Jamila, who had God and country to keep her going) - a reminder of my family's separateness from both India and Pakistan. In Rawalpindi, my grandmother drank pink Kashmiri tea; in Karachi, her grandson was washed by the waters of a lake he had never seen. It would not be long before the dream of Kashmir spilled over into the minds of the rest of the population of Pakistan; connection-to-history refused to abandon me, and I found my dream becoming, in 1965, the common property of the nation, and a factor of prime importance in the coming end, when all manner of things fell from the skies, and I was purified at last.
Saleem could sink no lower: I could smell, on myself, the cess-pit stink of my iniquities. I had come to the Land of the Pure, and sought the company of whores - when I should have been forging a new, upright life for myself, I gave birth, instead, to an unspeakable (and also unrequited) love. Possessed by the beginnings of the great fatalism which was to overwhelm me, I rode the city streets on my Lambretta; Jamila and I avoided each, other as much as possible, unable, for the first time in our lives, to say a word to one another.
Purity - that highest of ideals! - that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister's songs! - seemed very far away; how could I have known that history - which has the power of pardoning sinners - was at that moment counting down towards a moment in which it would manage, at one stroke, to cleanse me from head to foot?
In the meantime, other forces were spending themselves; Alia Aziz had begun to wreak her awful spinster's revenge.
Guru Mandir days: paan-smells, cooking-smells, the languorous odour of the shadow of the minaret, the mosque's long pointing finger: while my aunt Alia's hatred of the man who had abandoned her and of the sister who had married him grew into a tangible, visible thing, it sat on her living-room rug like a great gecko, reeking of vomit; but it seemed I was the only one to smell it, because Alia's skill at dissimulation had grown as rapidly as the hairiness of her chin and her adeptness with the plasters with which, each evening, she ripped her beard out by the roots.
My aunt Alia's contribution to the fate of nations - through her school and college - must not be minimized. Having allowed her old-maid frustrations to leak into the curricula, the bricks and also the students at her twin educational establishments, she had raised a tribe of children and young adults who felt themselves possessed by an ancient vengefulness, without fully knowing why. O omnipresent aridity of maiden aunts! It soured the paintwork of her home; her furniture was made lumpy by the harsh stuffing of bitterness; old-maid repressions were sewn into curtain-seams. As once long ago into baby things of.
Bitterness, issuing through the fissures of the earth.
What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the lonely madness of the years, raised to the level of an art-form: the impregnation of food with emotions. To whom she remained second in her achievements in this field: my old ayah, Mary Pereira. By whom, today, both old cooks have been outdone: Saleem Sinai, pickler-in-chief at the Braganza pickle works ...
nevertheless, while we lived in her Guru Mandir mansion, she fed us the birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord; and little by little, even the harmonies of my parents' autumnal love went out of tune.
But good things must also be said about my aunt. In politics, she spoke out vociferously against government-by-military-say-so; if she had not had a General for a brother-in-law, her school and college might well have been taken out of her hands. Let me not show her entirely through the dark glass of my private despondency: she had given lecture-tours in the Soviet Union and America. Also, her food tasted good. (Despite its hidden content.)
But the air and the food in that mosque-shadowed house began to take its toll ... Saleem, under the doubly dislocating influence of his awful love and Alia's food, began to blush like a beetroot whenever his sister appeared in his thoughts; while Jamila, unconsciously seized by a longing for fresh air and food unseasoned by dark emotions, began to spend less and less time there, travelling instead up and down the country (but never to the East Wing) to give her concerts. On those increasingly rare occasions when brother and sister found themselves in the same room they would jump, startled, half an inch off the floor, and then, landing, stare furiously at the spot over which they had leaped, as if it had suddenly become as hot as a bread-oven. At other times, too, they indulged in behaviour whose meaning would have been transparently obvious, were it not for the fact that each occupant of the house had other things on his or her mind: Jamila, for instance, took to keeping on her gold-and-white travelling veil indoors until she was sure her brother was out, even if she was dizzy with heat; while Saleem - who continued, slave-fashion, to fetch leavened bread from the nunnery of Santa Ignacia - avoided handing her the loaves himself; on occasion he asked his poisonous aunt to act as intermediary.
Alia looked at him with amusement and asked, 'What's wrong with you, boy - you haven't got an infectious disease?' Saleem blushed furiously, fearing that his aunt had guessed about his encounters with paid women; and maybe she had, but she was after bigger fish.
... He also developed a penchant for lapsing into long broody silences, which he interrupted by bursting out suddenly with a meaningless word: 'No!' or, 'But!'
or even more arcane exclamations, such as 'Bang!' or 'Whaam!' Nonsense words amidst clouded silences: as if Saleem were conducting some inner dialogue of such intensity that fragments of it, or its pain, boiled up from time to time past the surface of his lips. This inner discord was undoubtedly worsened by the curries of disquiet which we were obliged to eat; and at the end, when Amina was reduced to talking to invisible washing-chests and Ahmed, in the desolation of his stroke, was capable of little more than dribbles and giggles, while I glowered silently in my own private withdrawal, my aunt must have been well-pleased with the effectiveness of her revenge upon the Sinai clan; unless she, too, was drained by the fulfilment of her long-nurtured ambition; in which case she, too, had run out of possibilities, and there were hollow overtones in her footsteps as she stalked through the insane asylum of her home with her chin covered in hair-plasters, while her niece jumped over suddenly-hot patches of floor and her nephew yelled 'Yaa!' out of nowhere and her erstwhile suitor sent spittle down his chin and Amina greeted the resurgent ghosts of her past: 'So it's you again; well, why not? Nothing ever seems to go away.'
Tick, tock ... In January 1965, my mother Amina Sinai discovered that she was pregnant again, after a gap of seventeen years. When she was sure, she told her good news to her big sister Alia, giving my aunt the opportunity of perfecting her revenge. What Alia said to my mother is not known; what she stirred into her cooking must remain a matter for conjecture; but the effect on Amina was devastating. She was plagued by dreams of a monster child with a cauliflower instead of a brain; she was beset by phantoms of Ramram Seth, and the old prophecy of a child with two heads began to drive her wild all over again. My mother was forty-two years old; and the fears (both natural and Alia-induced) of bearing a child at such an age tarnished the brilliant aura which had hung around her ever since she nursed her husband into his loving autumn; under the influence of the kormas of my aunt's vengeance - spiced with forebodings as well as cardamoms - my mother became afraid of her child. As the months passed, her forty-two years began to take a terrible toll; the weight of her four decades grew daily, crushing her beneath her age. In her second month, her hair went white. By the third, her face had shrivelled like a rotting mango. In her fourth month she was already an old woman, lined and thick, plagued by verrucas once again, with the inevitability of hair sprouting all over her face; she seemed shrouded once more in a fog of shame, as though the baby were a scandal in a lady of her evident antiquity. As the child of those confused days grew within her, the contrast between its youth and her age increased; it was at this point that she collapsed into an old cane chair and received visits from the spectres of her past. The disintegration of my mother was appalling in its suddenness; Ahmed Sinai, observing helplessly, found himself, all of a sudden, unnerved, adrift, unmanned.
Even now, I find it hard to write about those days of the end of possibility, when my father found his towel factory crumbling in his hands. The effects of Alia's culinary witchcraft (which operated both through his stomach, when he ate, and his eyes, when he saw his wife) were now all too apparent in him: he became slack at factory management, and irritable with his work-force.
To sum up the ruination of Amina Brand Towels: Ahmed Sinai began treating his workers as peremptorily as once, in Bombay, he had mis-treated servants, and sought to inculcate, in master weavers and assistant packers alike, the eternal verities of the master-servant relationship. As a result his work-force walked out on him in droves, explaining, for instance, 'I am not your latrine-cleaner, sahib; I am qualified Grade One weaver,' and in general refusing to show proper gratitude for his beneficence in having employed them. In the grip of the befuddling wrath of my aunt's packed lunches, he let them all go, and hired a bunch of ill-favoured slackers who pilfered cotton spools and machine parts but were willing to bow and scrape whenever required to do so; and the percentage of defective towels rocketed alarmingly, contracts were not fulfilled, re-orders shrank alarmingly. Ahmed Sinai began bringing home mountains - Himalayas! - of reject towelling, because the factory warehouse was full to overflowing of the sub-standard product of his mismanagement; he took to drink again, and by the summer of that year the house in Guru Mandir was awash in the old obscenities of his battle against the djinns, and we had to squeeze sideways past the Everests and Nanga-Parbats of badly-made terrycloth which lined the passages and hall.
We had delivered ourselves into the lap of my fat aunt's long-simmered wrath; with the single exception of Jamila, who was least affected owing to her long absences, we all ended up with our geese well and truly cooked. It was a painful and bewildering time, in which the love of my parents disintegrated under the joint weight of their new baby and of my aunt's age-old grievances; and gradually the confusion and ruin seeped out through the windows of the house and took over the hearts and minds of the nation, so that war, when it came, was wrapped in the same fuddled haze of unreality in which we had begun to live.
My father was heading steadily towards his stroke; but before the bomb went off in his brain, another fuse was lit: in April 1965, we heard about the peculiar incidents in the Rann of Kutch.
While we thrashed like flies in the webs of my aunt's revenge, the mill of history continued to grind. President Ayub's reputation was in decline: rumours of malpractice in the 1964 election buzzed about, refusing to be swatted. There was, too, the matter of the President's son: Gauhar Ayub, whose enigmatic Gandhara Industries made him a 'multi-multi' overnight. O endless sequence of nefarious sons-of-the-great! Gauhar, with his bullyings and ran tings; and later, in India, Sanjay Gandhi and his Maruti Car Company and his Congress Youth; and most recently of all, Kami Lal Desai ... the sons of the great unmake their parents. But I, too, have a son; Aadam Sinai, flying in the face of precedent, will reverse the trend. Sons can be better than their fathers, as well as worse ... in April 1965, however, the air buzzed with the fallibility of sons. And whose son was it who scaled the walls of President House on April 1st - what unknown father spawned the foul-smelling fellow who ran up to the President and fired a pistol at his stomach? Some fathers remain mercifully unknown to history; at any rate, the assassin failed, because his gun miraculously jammed. Somebody's son was taken away by police to have his teeth pulled out one by one, to have his nails set on fire; burning cigarette-ends were no doubt pressed against the tip of his penis, so it would probably not be much consolation for that nameless, would-be assassin to know that he had simply been carried away by a tide of history in which sons (high and low) were frequently observed to behave exceptionally badly. (No: I do not exempt myself.)
Divorce between news and reality: newspapers quoted foreign economists - PAKISTAN A MODEL FOR EMERGING NATIONS - while peasants (unreported) cursed the so-called 'green revolution', claiming that most of the newly-drilled water-wells had been useless, poisoned, and in the wrong places anyway; while editorials praised the probity of the nation's leadership, rumours, thick as flies, mentioned Swiss bank accounts and the new American motor-cars of the President's son. The Karachi Dawn spoke of another dawn - GOOD INDO-PAK RELATIONS JUST AROUND THE CORNER? - but, in the Rann of Kutch, yet another inadequate son was discovering a different story.
In the cities, mirages and lies; to the north, in the high mountains, the Chinese were building roads and planning nuclear blasts; but it is time to revert from the general to the particular; or, to be more exact, to the General's son, my cousin, the enuretic Zafar Zulfikar. Who became, between April and July, the archetype of all the many disappointing sons in the land; history, working through him, was also pointing its finger at Gauhar, at future-Sanjay and Kanti-Lal-to-come; and, naturally, at me.
So - cousin Zafar. With whom I had much in common at that time ... my heart was full of forbidden love; his trousers, despite all his efforts, filled continually with something rather more tangible, but equally forbidden. I dreamed of mythical lovers, both happy and star-crossed - Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal, but also Montague-and-Capulet; he dreamed of his Kifi fiancee, whose failure to arrive at puberty even after her sixteenth birthday must have made her seem, in his thoughts, a fantasy of an unattainable future ... in April 1965, Zafar was sent on manoeuvres to the Pakistan-controlled zone of the Rann of Kutch.
Cruelty of the continent towards the loose-bladdered: Zafar, although a Lieutenant, was the laughing-stock of the Abbottabad military base. There was a story that he had been instructed to wear a rubber undergarment like a balloon around his genitals, so that the glorious uniform of the Pak Army should not be desecrated; mere jawans, when he passed, would make a blowing movement of their cheeks, as if they were puffing up the balloon. (All this became public later, in the statement he made, in floods of tears, after his arrest for murder.) It is possible that Zafar's assignment to the Rann of Kutch was thought up by a tactful superior, who was only trying to get him out of the firing-line of Abbottabad humour ... Incontinence doomed Zafar Zulfikar to a crime as heinous as my own. I loved my sister; while he ... but let me tell the story the right way up.
Ever since Partition, the Rann had been 'disputed territory.'; although, in practice, neither side had much heart for the dispute. On the hillocks along the 23rd parallel, the unofficial frontier, the Pakistan Government had built a string of border posts, each with its lonely garrison of six men and one beacon-light. Several of these posts were occupied on April 9th, 1965, by troops of the Indian Army; a Pakistani force, including my cousin Zafar, which had been in the area on manoeuvres, engaged in an eighty-two-day struggle for the frontier. The war in the Rann lasted until July 1st. That much is fact; but everything else lies concealed beneath the doubly hazy air of unreality and make-believe which affected all goings-on in those days, and especially all events in the phantasmagoric Rann ... so that the story I am going to tell, which is substantially that told by my cousin Zafar, is as likely to be true as anything; as anything, that is to say, except what we were officially told.
... As the young Pakistani soldiers entered the marshy terrain of the Rann, a cold clammy perspiration broke out on their foreheads, and they were unnerved by the greeny sea-bed quality of the light; they recounted stories which frightened them even more, legends of terrible things whi............