Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

'What nonsense,' our Padma says. 'How can a picture talk? Stop now; you must be too tired to think.' But when I say to her that Mian Abdullah had the strange trait of humming without pause, humming in a strange way, neither musical nor unmusical, but somehow mechanical, the hum of an engine or dynamo, she swallows it easily enough, saying judiciously, 'Well, if he was such an energetic man, it's no surprise to me.' She's all ears again; so I warm to my theme and report that Mian Abdullah's hum rose and fell in direct relationship to his work rate. It was a hum that could fall low enough to give you toothache, and when it rose to its highest, most feverish pitch, it had the ability of inducing erections in anyone within its vicinity. ('Arre baap,' Padma laughs, 'no wonder he was so popular with the men!') Nadir Khan, as his secretary, was attacked constantly by his master's vibratory quirk, and his ears jaw penis were forever behaving according to the dictates of the Hummingbird. Why, then, did Nadir stay, despite erections which embarrassed him in the company of strangers, despite aching molars and a work schedule which often occupied twenty-two hours in every twenty-four? Not-I believe-because he saw it as his poetic duty to get close to the centre of events and transmute them into literature. Nor because he wanted fame for himself. No: but Nadir had one thing in common with my grandfather, and it was enough. He, too, suffered from the optimism disease.

Like Aadam Aziz, like the Rani of Cooch Naheen, Nadir Khan loathed the Muslim League ('That bunch of toadies!' the Rani cried in her silvery voice, swooping around the octaves like a skier. 'Landowners with vested interests to protect! What do they have to do with Muslims? They go like toads to the British and form governments for them, now mat the Congress refuses to do it!' It was the year of the 'Quit India' resolution. 'And what's more,' the Rani said with finality, 'they are mad. Otherwise why would they want to partition India?')

Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird, had created the Free Islam Convocation almost single-handedly. He invited the leaders of the dozens of Muslim splinter groups to form a loosely federated alternative to the dogmatism and vested interests of the Leaguers. It had been a great conjuring trick, because they had all come. That was the first Convocation, in Lahore; Agra would see the second. The marquees would be filled with members of agrarian movements, urban labourers' syndicates, religious divines and regional groupings. It would see confirmed what the first assembly had intimated: that the League, with its demand for a partitioned India, spoke on nobody's behalf but its own. They have turned their backs on us,' said the Convocation's posters, 'and now they claim we're standing behind them!' Mian Abdullah opposed the partition.

In the throes of the optimism epidemic, the Hummingbird's patron, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, never mentioned the clouds on the horizon. She never pointed out that Agra was a Muslim League stronghold, saying only, 'Aadam my boy, if the Hummingbird wants to hold Convocation here, I'm not about to suggest he goes to Allahabad.' She was bearing the entire expense of the event without complaint or interference; not, let it be said, without making enemies in the town. The Rani did not live like other Indian princes. Instead of teetar-hunts, she endowed scholarships. Instead of hotel scandals, she had politics. And so the rumours began. 'These scholars of hers, man, everyone knows they have to perform extra-curricular duties. They go to her bedroom in the dark, and she never lets them see her blotchy face, but bewitches them into bed with her voice of a singing witch!' Aadam Aziz had never believed in witches. He enjoyed her brilliant circle of friends who were as much at home in Persian as they were in German. But Naseem Aziz, who half-believed the stories about the Rani, never accompanied him to the princess's house. 'If God meant people to speak many tongues,' she argued, 'why did he put only one in our heads?'

And so it was that none of the Hummingbird's optimists were prepared for what happened. They played hit-the-spittoon, and ignored the cracks in the earth.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. According to legend, then-according to the polished gossip of the ancients at the paan-shop-Mian Abdullah owed his downfall to his purchase, at Agra railway station, of a peacock-feather fan, despite Nadir Khan's warning about bad luck. What is more, on that night of crescent moons, Abdullah had been working with Nadir, so that when the new moon rose they both saw it through glass. 'These things matter,' the betel-chewers say. 'We have been alive too long, and we know.' (Padma is nodding her head in agreement.)

The Convocation offices were on the ground floor of the historical faculty building at the University campus. Abdullah and Nadir were coming to the end of their night's work; the Hummingbird's hum was low-pitched and Nadir's teeth were on edge. There was a poster on the office wall, expressing Abdullah's favourite anti-Partition sentiment, a quote from the poet Iqbal: 'Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?' And now the assassins reached the campus.

Facts: Abdullah had plenty of enemies. The British attitude to him was always ambiguous. Brigadier Dodson hadn't wanted him in town. There was a knock on the door and Nadir answered it. Six new moons came into the room, six crescent knives held by men dressed all in black, with covered faces. Two men held Nadir while the others moved towards the Hummingbird.

'At this point,' the betel-chewers say, 'the Hummingbird's hum became higher. Higher and higher, yara, and the assassins' eyes became wide as their members made tents under their robes. Then-Allah, then!-the knives began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he'd never hummed before. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with red. But now-listen!-Abdullah's humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were eating, others dying; there were some who fornicated and others who did not hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that left six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these turned and ran for the University, many of them rushing across the railway tracks from the wrong side of town. It is well known that this is true. Everyone in town saw it, except those who were asleep. They went noisily, like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair… and all the time Abdullahji was humming, humming-humming, and the knives were singing. And know this: suddenly one of the killers' eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!'

They say, 'When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives were blunt… they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which had no glass because Abdullah's hum had shattered it… they thudded against the door until the wood broke… and then they were everywhere, baba!… some without legs, others lacking hair, but most of them had some teeth at least, and some of these were sharp… And now see this: the assassins cannot have feared interruption, because they had posted no guards; so the dogs got them by surprise… the two men holding Nadir Khan, that spineless one, fell beneath the weight of the beasts, with maybe sixty-eight dogs on their necks… afterwards the killers were so badly damaged that nobody could say who they were.'

'At some point,' they say, 'Nadir dived out of the window and ran. The dogs and assassins were too busy to follow him.'