Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

She was squatting on the pavement with the basket of invisibility by her side; when she saw me her eyes brightened with reproach. 'You said you'd come, but you never, so I,' she stuttered. I bowed my head. 'I have been in mourning,' I said, lamely, and she, 'But still you could have-my God, Saleem, you don't know, in our colony I can't tell anyone about my real magic, never, not even Picture Singh who is like a father, I must bottle it and bottle it, because they don't believe in such things, and I thought, Here is Saleem come, now at last I will have one friend, we can talk, we can be together, we have both been, and known, and arre how to say it, Saleem, you don't care, you got what you wanted and went off just like that, I am nothing to you, I know…'

That night my mad aunt Sonia, herself only days away from confinement in a strait-jacket (it got into the papers, a small piece on an inside page; my uncle's Department must have been annoyed), had one of the fierce inspirations of the profoundly insane and burst into the bedroom into which, half an hour earlier, someone-with-saucer-eyes had climbed through a ground-floor window; she found me in bed with Parvati-the-witch, and after that my Uncle Mustapha lost interest in sheltering me, saying, 'You were born from bhangis, you will remain a dirty type all your life'; on the four hundred and twentieth day after my arrival, I left my uncle's house, deprived of family ties, returned at last to that true inheritance of poverty and destitution of which I had been cheated for so long by the crime of Mary Pereira. Parvati-the-witch was waiting for me on the pavement; I did not tell her that there was a sense in which I'd been glad of the interruption, because as I kissed her in the dark of that illicit midnight I had seen her face changing, becoming the face of a forbidden love; the ghostly features of Jamila Singer replaced these of the witch-girl; Jamila who was (I know it!) safely hidden in a Karachi nunnery was suddenly also here, except that she had undergone a dark, transformation. She had begun to rot, the dread! . pustules and cankers of forbidden love were spreading across her face; just as once the ghost of Joe D'Costa had rotted in the grip of the occult leprosy of guilt, so now the rancid flowers of incest blossomed on my sister's phantasmal features, and I couldn't do it, couldn't kiss touch look upon that intolerable spectral face, I had been on the verge of jerking away with a cry of desperate nostalgia and shame when Sonia Aziz burst in upon us with electric light and screams.

And as for Mustapha, well, my indiscretion with Parvati may also have been, in his eyes, no more than a useful pretext for getting rid of me; but that must remain in doubt, because the black folder was locked-all I have to go on is a look in his eye, a smell of fear, three initials on a label-because afterwards, when everything was finished, a fallen lady and her labia-lipped son spent two days behind locked doors, burning files; and how can we know whether-or-not one of them was labelled m.C.C.?

I didn't want to stay, anyway. Family: an overrated idea. Don't think I was sad! Never for a moment imagine that lumps arose in my throat at my expulsion from the last gracious home open to me! I tell you-I was in fine spirits when I left… maybe there is something unnatural about me, some fundamental lack of emotional response; but my thoughts have always aspired to higher things. Hence my resilience. Hit me: I bounce back. (But no resistance is of any use against the cracks.)

To sum up: forsaking my earlier, naive hopes of preferment in public service, I returned to the magicians' slum and the chaya of the Friday Mosque. Like Gautama, the first and true Buddha, I left my life and comfort and went like a beggar into the world. The date was February 23rd, 1973; coal-mines and the wheat market were being nationalized, the price of oil had begun to spiral up up up, would quadruple in a year, and in the Communist Party of India, the split between Dange's Moscow faction and Namboodiripad's C.P.I.(M.) had become unbridgeable; and I, Saleem Sinai, like India, was twenty-five years, six months and eight days old.

The magicians were Communists, almost to a man. That's right: reds! Insurrectionists, public menaces, the scum of the earth-a community of the godless living blasphemously in the very shadow of the house of God! Shameless, what's more; innocently scarlet; born with the bloody taint upon their souk! And let me say at once that no sooner had I discovered this than I, who had been raised in India's other true faith, which we may term Businessism, and who had abandoned-been-abandoned-by its practitioners, felt instantly and comfortingly at home. A renegade Businessist, I began zealously to turn red and then redder, as surely and completely as my father had once turned white, so that now my mission of saving-the-country could be seen in a new light; more revolutionary methodologies suggested themselves. Down with the rule of unco-operative box-wallah uncles and their beloved leaders! Full of thoughts of direct-communication-with-the-masses, I settled into the magicians' colony, scraping a living by amusing foreign and native tourists with the marvellous perspicacities of my nose, which enabled me to smell out their simple, touristy secrets. Picture Singh asked me to share his shack. I slept on tattered sackcloth amongst baskets sibilant with snakes; but I did not mind, just as I found myself capable of tolerating hunger thirst mosquitoes and (in the beginning) the bitter cold of a Delhi winter. This Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, was also the ghetto's unquestioned chieftain; squabbles and problems were resolved beneath the shade of his ubiquitous and enormous black umbrella; and I, who could read and write as well as smell, became a sort of aide-de-camp to this monumental man who invariably added a lecture on socialism to his serpentine performances, and who was famous in the main streets and alleys of the city for more than his snake-charmer's skills. I can say, with utter certainty, that Picture Singh was the greatest man I ever met.

One afternoon during the chaya, the ghetto was visited by another copy of that labia-lipped youth whom I'd seen at my Uncle Mustapha's. Standing on the steps of the mosque, he unfurled a banner which was then held up by two assistants. It read: abolish poverty, and bore the cow-suckling-calf symbol of the Indira Congress. His face looked remarkably like a plump calf's face, and he unleashed a typhoon of halitosis when he spoke. 'Brothers-O! Sisters-O! What does Congress say to you? This: that all men are created equal!' He got no further; the crowd recoiled from his breath of bullock dung under a hot sun, and Picture Singh began to guffaw. 'O ha ha, captain, too good, sir!' And labia-lips, foolishly: 'Okay, you, brother, won't you share the joke?' Picture Singh shook his head, clutched his sides: 'O speech, captain! Absolute master speech!' His laughter rolled out from beneath his umbrella to infect the crowd until all of us were rolling on the ground, laughing, crushing ants, getting covered in dust, and the Congress mooncalf's voice rose in panic: 'What is this? This fellow doesn't think we are equals? What a low impression he must have-' but now Picture Singh, umbrella-over-head, was striding away towards his hut. Labia-lips, in relief, continued his speech… but not for long, because Picture returned, carrying under his left arm a small circular lidded basket and under his right armpit a wooden flute. He placed the basket on the step beside the Congress-wallah's feet; removed the lid; raised flute to lips. Amid renewed laughter, the young politico leaped nineteen inches into the air as a king cobra swayed sleepily up from its home… Labia-lips is crying: 'What are you doing? Trying to kill me to death?' And Picture Singh, ignoring him, his umbrella furled now, plays on, more and more furiously, and the snake uncoils, faster faster Picture Singh plays until the flute's music fills every cranny of the slum and threatens to scale the walls of the mosque, and at last the great snake, hanging in the air, supported only by the enchantment of the tune, stands nine feet long out of the basket and dances on its tail… Picture Singh relents. Nagaraj subsides into coils. The Most Charming Man In The World offers the flute to the Congress youth: 'Okay, captain,' Picture Singh says agreeably, 'you give it a try.' But labia-lips: 'Man, you know I couldn't do it!' Whereupon Picture Singh seizes the cobra just below the head, opens his own mouth wide wide wide, displaying an heroic wreckage of teeth and gums; winking left-eyed at the Congress youth, he inserts the snake's tongue-flicking head into his hideously yawning orifice! A full minute passes before Picture Singh returns the cobra to its basket. Very kindly, he tells the youth: 'You see, captain, here is the truth of the business: some persons are better, others are less. But it may be nice for you to think otherwise.'