Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Follow the river, past Scindia-ghat on which young gymnasts in white loincloths perform one-armed push-ups, past Manikarnika-ghat, the place of funerals, at which holy fire can be purchased from the keepers of the flame, past floating carcasses of dogs and cows-unfortunates for whom no fire was bought, past Brahmins under straw umbrellas at Dasashwamedh-ghat, dressed in saffron, dispensing blessings… and now it becomes audible, a strange sound, like the baying of distant hounds… follow follow follow the sound, and it takes shape, you understand that it is a mighty, ceaseless wailing, emanating from the blinded windows of a riverside palace: the Widows' Hostel! Once upon a time, it was a maharajah's residence; but India today is a modern country, and such places have been expropriated by the State. The palace is a home for bereaved women now; they, understanding that their true lives ended with the death of their husbands, but no longer permitted to seek the release of sati, come to the holy city to pass their worthless days in heartfelt ululations. In the palace of the widows lives a tribe of women whose chests are irremediably bruised by the power of their continual pummellings, whose hair it torn beyond repair, and whose voices are shredded by the constant, keening expressions of their grief. It is a vast building, a labyrinth of tiny rooms on the upper storeys giving way to the great halls of lamentation below; and yes, that was where it happened, the Widow sucked me into the private heart of her terrible empire, I was locked away in a tiny upper room and the bereaved women brought me prison food. But I also had other visitors: the war hero invited two of his colleagues along, for purposes of conversation. In other words: I was encouraged to talk. By an ill-matched duo, one fat, one thin, whom I named Abbott-and-Costello because they never succeeded in making me laugh.

Here I record a merciful blank in my memory. Nothing can induce me to remember the conversational techniques of that humourless, uniformed pair; there is no chutney or pickle capable of unlocking the doors behind which I have locked those days! No, I have forgotten, I cannot will not say how they made me spill the beans-but I cannot escape the shameful heart of the matter, which is that despite absence-of-jokes and the generally unsympathetic manner of my two-headed inquisitor, I did most certainly talk. And more than talk: under the influence of their unnamable-forgotten-pressures, I became loquacious in the extreme. What poured, blubbering, from my lips (and will not do so now): names addresses physical descriptions. Yes, I told them everything, I named all five hundred and seventy-eight (because Parvati, they informed me courteously, was dead, and Shiva gone over to the enemy, and the five-hundred-and-eighty-first was doing the talking…)-forced into treachery by the treason of another, I betrayed the children of midnight. I, the Founder of the Conference, presided over its end, while Abbott-and-Costello, unsmilingly, interjected from time to time: 'Aha! Very good! Didn't know about her!' or, 'You are being most co-operative; this fellow is a new one on us!'

Such things happen. Statistics may set my arrest in context; although there is considerable disagreement about the number of 'political' prisoners taken during the Emergency, either thirty thousand or a quarter of a million persons certainly lost their freedom. The Widow said: 'It is only a small percentage of the population of India.' All sorts of things happen during an Emergency: trains run on time, black-money hoarders are frightened into paying taxes, even the weather is brought to heel, and bumper harvests are reaped; there is, I repeat, a white part as well as a black. But in the black part, I sat bar-fettered in a tiny room, on a straw palliasse which was the only article of furniture I was permitted, sharing my daily bowl of rice with cockroaches and ants. And as for the children of midnight-that fearsome conspiracy which had to be broken at all costs-that gang of cut-throat desperadoes before whom an astrology-ridden Prime Minister trembled in terror-the grotesque aberrational monsters of independence, for whom a modern nation-state could have neither time nor compassion-twenty-nine years old now, give or take a month or two, they were brought to the Widows' Hostel, between April and December they were rounded up, and their whispers began to fill the walls. The walls of my cell (paper-thin, peeling-plastered, bare) began to whisper, into one bad ear and one good ear, the consequences of my shameful confessions. A cucumber-nosed prisoner, festooned with iron rods and rings which made various natural functions impossible-walking, using the tin chamber-pot, squatting, sleeping-lay huddled against peeling plaster and whispered to a wail.

It was the end; Saleem gave way to his grief. All my life, and through the greater part of these reminiscences, I have tried to keep my sorrows under lock and key, to prevent them from staining my sentences with their salty, maudlin fluidities; but no more. I was given no reason (until the Widow's Hand…) for my incarceration: but who, of all the thirty thousand or quarter of a million, was told why or wherefore? Who needed to be told? In the walls, I heard the muted voices of the midnight children: needing no further footnotes, I blubbered over peeling plaster.

What Saleem whispered to the wall between April and December 1976:

… Dear Children. How can I say this? What is there to say? My guilt my shame. Although excuses are possible: I wasn't to blame about Shiva. And all manner of folk are being locked up, so why not us? And guilt is a complex matter, for are we not all, each of us in some sense responsible for-do we not get the leaders we deserve? But no such excuses are offered. I did it, I. Dear children: and my Parvati is dead. And my Jamila, vanished. And everyone. Vanishing seems to be yet another of those characteristics which recur throughout my history: Nadir Khan vanished from an underworld, leaving a note behind; Aadam Aziz vanished, too, before my grandmother got up to feed the geese; and where is Mary Pereira? I, in a basket, disappeared; but Laylah or Parvati went phutt without the assistance of spells. And now here we are, disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth. The curse of vanishment, dear children, has evidently leaked into you. No, as to the question of guilt, I refuse absolutely to take the larger view; we are too close to what-is-happening, perspective is impossible, later perhaps analysts will say why and wherefore, will adduce underlying economic trends and political developments, but right now we're too close to the cinema-screen, the picture is breaking up into dots, only subjective judgments are possible. Subjectively, then, I hang my head in shame. Dear children: forgive. No, I do not expect you to forgive.

Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can't be helped. What can't be cured must be endured.

Good question, children: what must be endured? Why are we being amassed here like this, one by one, why are rods and rings hanging from our necks? And stranger confinements (if a whispering wall is to be believed): who-has-the-gift-of-levitation has been tied by the ankles to rings set in the floor, and a werewolf is obliged to wear a muzzle; who-can-escape-through-mirrors must drink water through a hole in a lidded can, so that he cannot vanish through the reflective surface of the drink; and she-whose-looks-can-kill has her head in a sack, and the bewitching beauties of Baud are likewise bag-headed. One of us can eat metal; his head is jammed in a brace, unlocked only at mealtimes… what is being prepared for us? Something bad, children. I don't know what as yet, but it's coming. Children: we, too, must prepare.