MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN 精彩片段：
How Saleem achieved purity
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 theres 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 Alias 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 Nehrus 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 sisters 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 managers 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 peoples lives than her own, took to inviting the pumps 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 peoples 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 Ill still be here after a century, whatsitsname, and Allah knows how big Ill have become; I dont 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? Im 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, Ill be alive.
But it seems to me that there was something hollow in Pias 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 wasnt 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 grandfathers 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 Acharyas 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 familys 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 sisters 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 spinsters revenge.
Guru Mandir days: paan smells, cooking smells, the languorous odour of the shadow of the minaret, the mosques long pointing finger: while my aunt Alias 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 Alias 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 Alias 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.