Creation and Leviathan: Water Symbolism through Chapter 4

“In the beginning there were the Waters restrained within a shell, which was personified as a wicked withholding demon named Vᶉtra, the “Encloser.” There existed a natural force for expansion, which in its turn was personified as the god Varuᶇa. But the power of contraction or conservatism, Vᶉtra, was greater than that of liberation and growth. Meanwhile besides the withheld Waters there was a Fashioner god, named Tvastr, who created Heaven and Earth to be his house. Of those two was born a son Indra, who drank the soma that made him expand and be strong, and he forced apart Heaven and Earth, filling the space between them and being, we may suppose, the informing power of the atmosphere. He split the covering within which lay the Waters, so that they came forth. They were impregnated and gave birth to the Sun, and themselves flowed into the atmospheric ocean. By this great deed Indra separated the Sat from the Asat, the Existent from the Non-existent. This was creation”

-          Norman Brown, The Creation Myth of the Rig Veda

Indra killing Vrtra with thunderbolt

As in the ancient Indian myth, water has a prevalent symbolic role in the opening chapters of Midnight’s Children. Water does not ground more abstract concepts (change, time, etc.) as a fundamentally basic or simple concept; instead, it illuminates them by analogy with our intimately familiar experience of water.  In what follows I will explore some of the ways that Rushdie draws on this familiarity to introduce and sustain the more abstract, existential themes at issue in his story.

                Water as such -- or rather, the lack of water as such -- appears as our background mirror in chapters 3 and 4. In our characters’ lives, it is a period of drought, of failed harvest (68), which, on the historical level and individual levels respectively, sees the seeds of both the optimism “pandemic” and a marriage bear no fruit. According to the narrator, the rains “failed”, and to a native Indian, this would immediately refer to the failure of the southwest monsoon: each summer the land heats faster than the ocean, which causes lifting, lower pressure, and the transport of moist air over the subcontinent. This annual cyclic phenomenon accounts for over 80% of India’s rainfall; and in 1942 - the period covered in chapters 3 and 4 -its failure resulted in a drought that killed over 1.5 million people; it has its own effects on the lives of our characters.  

The drought means not only failed harvest but also, the splitting, the dis-integration of the earth: the desiccated ground forms “huge gaping fissures …in the midst of macadamed intersections” (38). This same dis-integration has appeared earlier: the narrator has hinted at his gift of “filling in the gaps” (14) (which he also more describes more explicitly aquatically as the past dripping into him (37)); and in that context the fissure represents the forgotten past. This ability to fill in gaps is what makes the narrator omniscient (in the literary, not theological, sense). And if the completely integrated earth takes on the role of an unlimited recollection, than the completely disintegrated and desiccated earth, viz., dust, symbolizes an ultimate forgetting: Saleem anticipates his own death thus: -“I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust” (36).

Not only is dust oblivious, incapable of memory, but it is also anonymousand we’ve already seen the inability to name – his grandmother’s ‘whatitsname’ exclamation – as an inability to make sense, a being “adrift in the universe” (41).  Relatedly, the drought itself is a time of silence (and ‘unspeakable’ acts (63)) in the Aziz household.  Conversely, when the rains return, the basement becomes moist, Mumtaz falls ill, her father inspects her and perepeteia: the truth is exposed and the silence is broken: the Deluge begins. “Three years of words poured out of [Naseem]”, speech returns to the household, so much so that the “house was full of puddles” (64). Indeed, the link between water and cathartic, purifying, revelatory speech is so tight that Rushdie leaves it ambiguous whether the house is flooded from the literal storm going on outside or the one going on in the drawing room. So at the very least, the withheld water corresponds to failure, to disintegration, to forgetting, to silence: to the absurd. Indeed, it is only with the Flood that we can move past all the “false starts” of these drought-ridden chapters.

Water, like all elements, goes through phase changes. Indeed, the fact that the freezing temperature and the boiling point of water are used to create the scale for temperature shows how central these phase changes are to us. If water as drought - as evaporated, as vapor neither condensing nor precipitating – is one polarity on this spectrum, then we can expect to see, and do see, themes developed out of water’s other polarity: viz., ice.

Indeed, the story begins with the images of Aadem’s blood and tears falling from his face and freezing before they hit his prayer mat. This is complicated imagery, but it deserves special attention, considering that it is rather a suspect situation: after all it is early spring, the lake is thawed, and so too the ice that closes in the valley each winter has melted. His fluids freeze, we can conclude, for a non-chemical reason, and, relatedly, this entire opening sequence raises itself to an almost mythical level: a retelling of the Fall. His prayer is in the garden, the appearance of doubt in the form of his western education – fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil – his loss of faith. The sequence ends with his being dispatched to tend to a sick girl, which is at once the “end of his peace”, and his entrance into history: family, procreation and so on. Reading the opening sequence through the fall, as a paradise lost, connects the phenomenon of freezing  to the timeless and the pre-historic. His fluids becoming rubies and diamonds then can be seen to give rise to themes of everlastingness, of unchanging purity and splendor, and moreover, to the livelihood of his parents, who deal in gems. But, more importantly, the three drops of blood that fall from his grandfather’s nose allude immediately to the “three drops of old, faded redness” on the perforated sheet introduced in the previous paragraph. These stains on the sheet, with their suggestion of the onset of fertility (and so birth, change, history) and even the sheet itself qua veil for nakedness (and so shame, good, and evil) all reinforce the Fall allegory, and also makes the following contrast clear: what is frozen does not stain. It leaves no mark, and so retains no history.    

Liquidity and time, as well as solidity and timelessness, are not new symbols. But Rushdie does enhance them a bit. Water, in its liquid form, has the ability to receive -to mix – and to deposit – to stain. Again, then, we see water suggesting recollection, as the theme of staining – it’s ability to leave a mark – is used again and again to mark the incidents in Saleem’s family history: from the stains on the perforated sheet, to the mercurochrome on Aadem’s shirt and it’s sinister repetition as blood, to the jets of betel-juice that stain Major Zulphy’s pants. It is no coincidence that what the water carries in each of these instances is a red substance. The narrator himself equates the “redness” and blood” (62) of a history with what is ‘unspeakable’ – not in the sense of anonymity mentioned above, but in the sense of what withdraws into secret, what asks to be covered up, which of course has application in each of the above instances of staining, as well as in the entire story itself, which the narrator uncovers, not without some reluctance (a theme begun in my first post).  

Water, as what is capable of mixing and changing, is strongly related to the notion of recollection, and with it, the further notions of temporal endurance: of retaining, of being laden, with an ever-growing past. This moisture holds us together, and delays our inevitable transformation into dust. We are thrown, in the world, toward death – and water still serves as the medium of our being as well as our angst: “Panic - like a bubbling sea-beast comes up for air, boils on the surface, but eventually returns to the deep. It is impossible…to remain calm” (36). The spittoon too takes on a deeper significance, as it preserves our fluids from disappearing into the “dust of the street” (44). At one point our narrator espouses the motto, “expectorate and rise above the fissures” (38), which suggests a sort of playful -even disdainful - self-consciously wasteful expenditure of one’s precious fluids in the face of desiccation, of drought and disintegration.  This hitting-the-spittoon is also contrasted with an activity involving many of the same body parts, viz., whistling, which is in turn associated with the hollow optimism of the time.

                But if we begin in ice then so too will we end. So says, Tai in all his twisted and ancient wisdom, that “The ice is always waiting…under the water’s skin” (7). What waits is what no longer mixes, what no longer flows through, or stains; it only cracks. If dust scatters itself, then ice shuts closes itself off. Such fissures and cracks, so foreign to the nature liquid water, bound its phases at both extremes. And like his mortal fear of disintegrating, so too, Saleem fears his eventual transformation into the ice that waits under the water’s skin: “My own hand…has begun to wobble…because I have noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing in my wrist, beneath the skin…No matter. We all own death a life” (35)

 

Titian, Perseus and Andromeda