And her hands are moving. Lost in their memory of other days, of what happened after games of hit-the-spittoon in an Agra cellar, they flutter gladly at her cheeks; they hold her bosom tighter than any brassieres; and now they caress her bare midriff, they stray below decks … yes, this is what we used to do, my love, it was enough, enough for me, even though my father made us, and you ran, and now the telephone,
Nadirnadirnadirnadirnadirnadir … hands which held telephone now hold flesh, while in another place what does another hand do? To what, after replacing receiver, is another hand getting up? … No matter; because here, in her spied-out privacy, Amina Sinai repeats an ancient name, again and again, until finally she bursts out with, “Arré Nadir Khan, where have you come from now?”
Secrets. A man’s name. Never-before-glimpsed motions of the hands. A boy’s mind filled with thoughts which have no shape, tormented by ideas which refuse to settle into words; and in a left nostril, a pajama-cord is snaking up up up, refusing to be ignored…
And now—O shameless mother! Revealer of duplicity, of emotions which have no place in family life; and more: O brazen unveiler of Black Mango!—Amina Sinai, drying her eyes, is summoned by a more trivial necessity; and as her son’s right eye peers out through the wooden slats at the top of the washing-chest, my mother unwinds her sari! While I, silently in the washing-chest: “Don’t do it don’t do it don’t do!” … but I cannot close my eye. Unblinking pupil takes in upside-down image of sari falling to the floor, an image which is, as usual, inverted by the mind; through ice-blue eyes I see a slip follow the sari; and then—O horrible!—my mother, framed in laundry and slatted wood, bends over to pick up her clothes! And there it is, searing my retina—the vision of my mother’s rump, black as night, rounded and curved, resembling nothing on earth so much as a gigantic, black Alfonso mango! In the washing-chest, unnerved by the vision, I wrestle with myself … self-control becomes simultaneously imperative and impossible … under the thunderclap influence of the Black Mango, my nerve cracks; pajama-cord wins its victory; and while Amina Sinai seats herself on a commode, I … what? Not sneeze; it was less than a sneeze. Not a twitch, either; it was more than that. It’s time to talk plainly: shattered by two-syllabic voice and fluttering hands, devastated by Black Mango, the nose of Saleem Sinai, responding to the evidence of maternal duplicity, quivering at the presence of maternal rump, gave way to a pajama-cord and was possessed by a cataclysmic—a world-altering—an irreversible sniff. Pajama-cord rises painfully half an inch further up the nostril. But other things are rising, too: hauled by that feverish inhalation, nasal liquids are being sucked relentlessly up up up, nose-goo flowing upwards, against gravity, against nature. Sinuses are subjected to unbearable pressure … until, inside the nearlynineyearold head, something bursts. Snot rockets through a breached dam into dark new channels. Mucus, rising higher than mucus was ever intended to rise, Waste fluid, reaching as far, perhaps, as the frontiers of the brain … there is a shock. Something electrical has been moistened.
Pain. And then noise, deafening manytongued terrifying, inside his head! … Inside a white wooden washing-chest, within the darkened auditorium of my skull, my nose began to sing.
But just now there isn’t time to listen; because one voice is very close indeed. Amina Sinai has opened the lower door of the washing-chest; I am tumbling downdown with laundry wrapped around my head like a caul. Pajama-cord jerks out of my nose; and now there is lightning flashing through the dark clouds around my mother—and a refuge has been lost for ever.
“I didn’t look!” I squealed up through socks and sheets. "I didn’t see one thing, Ammi, I swear!!"
(Salman Rushdie - "Midnight's Children")
