Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

e, but his back was bent. Shuffling around Buckingham Villa in embroidered
skull cap and full length chugha coat coated, too, in a thin film of dust h
e munched aimlessly on raw carrots and sent thin streaks of spittle down th
e grizzled white contours of his chin. And as he declined, Reverend Mother
grew larger and stronger; she, who had once wailed pitifully at the sight o
f Mercurochrome, now appeared to thrive on his weakness, as though their ma
rriage had been one of those mythical unions in which succubi appear to men
as innocent damsels, and, after luring them into the matrimonial bed, rega
in their true, awful aspect and begin to swallow their souls… my grandmothe
r, in those days, had acquired a moustache almost as luxuriant as the dusti
ly sagging hair on the upper lip of her one surviving son. She sat cross le
gged on her bed, smearing her lip with a mysterious fluid which set hard ar
ound the hairs and was then ripped off by a sharp, violent hand; but the re
medy only served to exacerbate the ailment.
'He has become like a child again, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother told my g
randfather's children, 'and Hanif has finished him off,' She warned us that
he had begun to see things. 'He talks to people who are not there,' she wh
ispered loudly while he wandered through the room sucking his teeth, 'How h
e calls out, whatsitsname! In the middle of the night!' And she mimicked hi
m: 'Ho, Tai? Is it you?' She told us children about the boatman, and the Hu
mmingbird, and the Rani of Cooch Naheen. 'Poor man has lived too long, what
sitsname; no father should see his son die first.'… And Amina, listening, s
hook her head in sympathy, not knowing that Aadam Aziz would leave her this
legacy that she, too, in her last days, would be visited by things which h
ad no business to return.
We could not use the ceiling fans for the dust; perspiration ran down the
face of my stricken grandfather and left streaks of mud on his cheeks. Som
etimes he would grab anyone who was near him and speak with utter lucidity
: 'These Nehrus will not be happy until they have made themselves heredita
ry kings!' Or, dribbling into the face of a squirming General Zulfikar: 'A
h, unhappy Pakistan! How ill served by her rulers!' But at other times he
seemed to imagine himself in a gemstone store, and muttered,'… Yes: there
were emeralds and rubies…' The Monkey whispered to me, 'Is grandpa going t
o die?'
What leaked into me from Aadam Aziz: a certain vulnerability to women, but
also its cause, the hole at the centre of himself caused by his (which is a
lso my) failure to believe or disbelieve in God. And something else as well
something which, at the age of eleven, I saw before anyone else noticed. M
y grandfather had begun to crack.
'In the head?' Padma asks, 'You mean in the upper storey?'
The boatman Tai said:' The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba,just under the w
ater's skin.' I saw the cracks in his eyes a delicate tracery of colourless l