"The Perforated Sheet"

Leaving No Holes

No Holes

I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. (1368)

• Here is a good example of meta-awareness from Postmodernism
• rather than letting the reader figure out or leave them ignorant of that date, our narrator completely spells it out
• is it good to not explain everything so readers can think about it themselves?
• or are you wondering why all of our readings from this semester couldn't be a direct as this?
• Note the blend of magic and historic realism: "once upon a time... on August 15th, 1947"

One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes. (1369)

Homelessness

• Note that his nose is hit (later it says "punch" as if assaulting him (1370)) due to both the "earth [and] while attempting to pray"
• how does this reinforce the resolution he makes as a result of it
• what is suggested by having him bleed rubies and cry diamonds in this moment?
• Again, the narrator is spelling things out here: his hole (which is unclear if its literal or figurative, as the two overlap a lot with this story's magic realism) leaves "him vulnerable to women and history"
• Why do you think he takes his prayer mat with him if he has just resolved to never serve any god?

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, word pouring from him like fools' money, past his two gold teeth, laced with hiccup and brandy, soaring up to the most remote Himalayas of the past, thei 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 ragger reprobate's hunched-up frame steering its magical boat through the enchanter waters of the morning. (1373)

Tai & History

'No, tell, Taiji, how old, truly?' And now a brandy bottle, materialising fron nowhere: cheap liquor from the folds of the great warm chugha-coat. Then shudder, a belch, a glare. Glint of gold. And – at last! – speech. 'How old You ask how old, you little wet-head, you nosey ...' Tai pointed at the mountains. “So old, nakkoo! Aadam, th nakkoo, the nosey one, followed his pointing finger. 'I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die. Listen. Listen, nakkoo ... – the brandy bottle again, followed by brandy-voice, and words more intoxicating than booze - '... I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once was set down in old lost books. Once I knew where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year. Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can't read.' Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping hand. Which sweeps again to chugha-pocket, to brandy bottle, to lips chapped with cold. Tai always had woman's lips. 'Nakkoo, listen, listen. I have seen plenty. Yara, you should've seen that Isa when he came, beard down to his balls, bald as an egg on his head. He was old and fagged-out but he knew his manners. “You first, Taiji,” he'd say, and “Please to sit”; always a respectful tongue, he never called me crackpot, never called me tu either. Always aap. Polite, see? And what an appetite! Such a hunger, I would catch my ears in fright. Saint or devil, I swear he could eat a whole kid in one go. And so what? I told him, eat, fill your hole, a man comes to Kashmir to enjoy life, or to end it, or both. His work was finished. He just came up here to live it up a little.' Mesmerized by this brandied portrait of a bald, gluttonous Christ, Aziz listened, later repeating every word to the consternation of his parents, who dealt in stones and had no time for ‘gas'. (1374)

Naseem

Naseem & Women

• Does Aadam's headless image of Nasseem in his head sound like love?
• Even though he has seen nearly every part of her and put her together, does he really know her?
• Since this is a magic realist story, is the perforated sheet literally magical as it is described?
• How is viewing Naseem through the perforated sheet like listening to Tai's stories of history?
• How is Aadam vulnerable to both?
• How might Aadam's perception of Naseem and Tai's history explain why the narrator explains everything instead of leaving holes for the reader to fill in?

So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination, she accompanied him on all his rounds, she moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of her ankles; he could smell her scent of lavendar and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face... That evening, Aadam contemplated the blush. Did the magic of the sheet work on both sides of the hole?... In short: my grandfather had fallen in love, and had come to think of the perforated sheet as something sacred and magical, because through it he had seen the things which had filled up the hole inside him which had been created when he had been hit on the nose by a tussock and insulted by the boatman Tai. (1379)