Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Watching this scene, Saleem Sinai learned that Picture Singh and the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was.

The problems of the magicians' ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India; within the confines of the colony could be found, in miniature, the many divisions and dissensions which racked the Party in the country. Picture Singh, I hasten to add, was above it all; the patriarch of the ghetto, he was the possessor of an umbrella whose shade could restore harmony to the squabbling factions; but the disputes which were brought into the shelter of the snake-charmer's umbrella were becoming more and more bitter, as the prestidigitators, the pullers of rabbits from hats, aligned themselves firmly behind Mr Dange's Moscow-line official C.P.I., which supported Mrs Gandhi throughout the Emergency; the contortionists, however, began to lean more towards the left and the slanting intricacies of the Chinese-oriented wing. Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers applauded the guerrilla tactics of the Naxalite movement; while mesmerists and walkers-on-hot-coals espoused Namboodiripad's manifesto (neither Muscovite nor Pekinese) and deplored the Naxa-lites' violence. There were Trotskyist tendencies amongst card-sharpers, and even a Communism-through-the-ballot-box movement amongst the moderate members of the ventriloquist section. I had entered a milieu in which, while religious and regionalist bigotry were wholly absent, our ancient national gift for fissiparousness had found new outlets. Picture Singh told me, sorrowfully, that during the 1971 general election a bizarre murder had resulted from the quarrel between a Naxalite fire-eater and a Moscow-line conjurer who, incensed by the former's views, had attempted to draw a pistol from his magic hat; but no sooner had the weapon been produced than the supporter of Ho Chi Minh had scorched his opponent to death in a burst of terrifying flame.

Under his umbrella, Picture Singh spoke of a socialism which owed nothing to foreign influences. 'Listen, captains,' he told warring ventriloquists and puppeteers, 'will you go to your villages and talk about Stalins and Maos? Will Bihari or Tamil peasants care about the killing of Trotsky?' The chaya of his magical umbrella cooled the most intemperate of the wizards; and had the effect, on me, of convincing me that one day soon the snake-charmer Picture Singh would follow in the footsteps of Mian Abdullah so many years ago; that, like the legendary Hummingbird, he would leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will; and that, unlike my grandfather's hero, he would not be stopped until he, and his cause, had won the day… but, but. Always a but but. What happened, happened. We all know that.

Before I return to telling the story of my private life, I should like it to be known that it was Picture Singh who revealed to me that the country's corrupt, 'black' economy had grown as large as the official, 'white' variety, which he did by showing me a newspaper photograph of Mrs Gandhi. Her hair, parted in the centre, was snow-white on one side and blackasnight on the other, so that, depending on which profile she presented, she resembled either a stoat or an ermine. Recurrence of the centre-parting in history; and also, economy as an analogue of a Prime Ministerial hair-style… I owe these important perceptions to the Most Charming Man In The World. Picture Singh it was who told me that Mishra, the railway minister, was also the officially-appointed minister for bribery, through whom the biggest deals in the black economy were cleared, and who arranged for pay-offs to appropriate ministers and officials; without Picture Singh, I might never have known about the poll-fixing in the state elections in Kashmir. He was no lover of democracy, however: 'God damn this election business, captain,' he told me, 'Whenever they come, something bad happens; and our countrymen behave like clowns.' I, in the grip of my fever-for-revolution, failed to take issue with my mentor.

There were, of course, a few exceptions to the ghetto's rules: one or two conjurers retained their Hindu faith and, in politics, espoused the Hindusectarian Jana Sangh party or the notorious Ananda Marg extremists; there were even Swatantra voters amongst the jugglers. Non-politically speaking, the old lady Resham Bibi was one of the few members of the community who remained an incurable fantasist, believing (for instance) in the superstition which forbade women to climb mango trees, because a mango tree which had once borne the weight of a woman would bear sour fruit for ever more… and there was the strange fakir named Chishti Khan, whose face was so smooth and lustrous that nobody knew whether he was nineteen or ninety, and who had surrounded his shack with a fabulous creation of bamboo-sticks and scraps of brightly-coloured paper, so that his home looked like a miniature, multi-coloured replica of the nearby Red Fort. Only when you passed through its castellated gateway did you realize that behind the meticulously hyperbolic fa9ade of bamboo-and-paper crenellations and ravelins hid a tin-and-card board hovel like all the rest. Chishti Khan had committed the ultimate solecism of permitting his illusionist expertise to infect his real life; he was not popular in the ghetto. The magicians kept their distance, lest they become diseased by his dreams.

So you will understand why Parvati-the-witch, the possessor of truly wondrous powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her midnight-given gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community which had constantly denied such possibilities.

On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of sight, and the only danger was from scavengers-after-scrap, from searchers-for-abandoned crates or hunters-for-corrugated-tin… that was where Parvati-the-witch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a humble shalwar-kameez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others, midnight's sorceress performed for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a child. Saucer-eye, rope-like pony-tail, fine full red lips… I would never have resisted her for so long if not for the face, the sick decaying eyes nose lips of… There seemed at first to be no limits to Parvati's abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were demons conjured? Did djinns appear, offering riches and overseas travel on levitating rugs? Were frogs turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose into jewels? Was there selling-of-souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit of it; the magic which Parvati-the-witch performed for me-the only magic she was ever willing to perform-was of the type known as 'white'. It was as though the Brahmins' 'Secret Book', the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her; she could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she permitted snakes to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, involving praying to the snake-god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the goodness of the Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reciting a spell: Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless; in a like manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected)-she could cure sores and consecrate talismans-she knew the sraktya charm and the Rite of the Tree. And all this, in a series of extraordinary night-time displays, she revealed to me beneath the walls of the Mosque-but still she was not happy.

As ever, I am obliged to accept responsibility; the scent of mourn-fulness which hung around Parvati-the-witch was my creation. Because she was twenty-five years old, and wanted more from me than my willingness to be her audience; God knows why, but she wanted me in her bed-or, to be precise, to lie with her on the lengdi of sackcloth which served her for a bed in the hovel she shared with a family of contortionist triplets from Kerala, three girls who were orphans just like her-just like myself.