Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

… In the gathering dark of an airless stairwell, Amina Sinai is climbing towards a prophecy. Lifafa Das is comforting her; because now that she has come by taxi into the narrow bottle of his mercy, he has sensed an alteration in her, a regret at her decision; he reassures her as they climb. The darkened stairwell is full of eyes, eyes glinting through shuttered doors at the spectacle of the climbing dark lady, eyes lapping her up like bright rough cats' tongues; and as Lifafa talks, soothingly, my mother feels her will ebbing away, What will be, will be, her strength of mind and her hold on the world seeping out of her into the dark sponge of the staircase air. Sluggishly her feet follow his, up into the upper reaches of the huge gloomy chawl, the broken-down tenement building in which Lifafa Das and his cousins have a small corner, at the very top… here, near the top, she sees dark light filtering down on to the heads of queueing cripples. 'My number two cousin,' Lifafa Das says, 'is bone-setter.' She climbs past men with broken arms, women with feet twisted backwards at impossible angles, past fallen window-cleaners and splintered bricklayers, a doctor's daughter entering a world older then syringes and hospitals; until, at last, Lifafa Das says, 'Here we are, Begum,' and leads her through a room in which the bone-setter is fastening twigs and leaves to shattered limbs, wrapping cracked heads in palm-fronds, until his patients begin to resemble artificial trees, sprouting vegetation from their injuries… then out on to a flat expanse of cemented roof. Amina, blinking in the dark at the brightness of lanterns, makes out insane shapes on the roof: monkeys dancing; mongeese leaping; snakes swaying in baskets; and on the parapet, the silhouettes of large birds, whose bodies are as hooked and cruel as their beaks: vultures.

'Arre baap,' she cries, 'where are you bringing me?'

'Nothing to worry, Begum, please,' Lifafa Das says. 'These are my cousins here. My number-three-and-four cousins. That one is monkey-dancer…'

'Just practising, Begum!' a voice calls. 'See: monkey goes to war and dies for his country!'

'… and there, snake-and-mongoose man.'

'See mongoose jump, Sahiba! See cobra dance!'

'… But the birds?…'

'Nothing, Madam: only there is Parsee Tower of Silence just near here; and when there are no dead ones there, the vultures come. Now they are asleep; in the days, I think, they like to watch my cousins practising.'

A small room, on the far side of the roof. Light streams through the door as Amina enters… to find, inside, a man the same age as her husband, a heavy man with several chins, wearing white stained trousers and a red check shirt and no shoes, munching aniseed and drinking from a bottle of Vimto, sitting cross-legged in a room on whose walls are pictures of Vishnu in each of his avatars, and notices reading, writing taught, and spitting during visit is quite a bad habit. There is no furniture… and Shri Ramram Seth is sitting cross-legged, six inches above the ground.

I must admit it: to her shame, my mother screamed…

… While, at the Old Fort, monkeys scream among ramparts. The ruined city, having been deserted by people, is now the abode of langoors. Long-tailed and black-faced, the monkeys are possessed of an overriding sense of mission. Upupup they clamber, leaping to the topmost heights of the ruin, staking out territories, and thereafter dedicating themselves to the dismemberment, stone by stone, of the entire fortress. Padma, it's true: you've never been there, never stood in the twilight watching straining, resolute, furry creatures working at the stones, pulling and rocking, rocking and pulling, working the stones loose one at a time… every day the monkeys send stones rolling down the walls, bouncing off angles and outcrops, crashing down into the ditches below. One day there will be no Old Fort; in the end, nothing but a pile of rubble surmounted by monkeys screaming in triumph… and here is one monkey, scurrying along the ramparts-I shall call him Hanuman, after the monkey god who helped Prince Rama defeat the original Ravana, Hanuman of the flying chariots… Watch him now as he arrives at this turret-his territory; as he hops chatters runs from corner to corner of his kingdom, rubbing his rear on the stones; and then pauses, sniffs something that should not be here… Hanuman races to the alcove here, on the topmost landing, in which the three men have left three soft grey alien things. And, while monkeys dance on a roof behind the post office, Hanuman the monkey dances with rage. Pounces on the grey things. Yes, they are loose enough, won't take much rocking and pulling, pulling and rocking… watch Hanuman now, dragging the soft grey stones to the edge of the long drop of the outside wall of the Fort. See him tear at them: rip! rap! гор!… Look how deftly he scoops paper from the insides of the grey things, sending it down like floating rain to bathe the fallen stones in the ditch!… Paper falling with lazy, reluctant grace, sinking like a beautiful memory into the maw of the darkness; and now, kick! thump! and again kick! the three soft grey stones go over the edge, downdown into the dark, and at last there comes a soft disconsolate plop. Hanuman, his work done, loses interest, scurries away to some distant pinnacle of his kingdom, begins to rock on a stone.

… While, down below, my father has seen a grotesque figure emerging from the gloom. Not knowing a thing about the disaster which has taken place above, he observes the monster from the shadow of his ruined room: a ragged-pajama'd creature in the head-dress of a demon, a papier-mache devil-top which has faces grinning on every side of it… the appointed representative of the Ravana gang. The collector. Hearts thumping, the three businessmen watch this spectre out of a peasant's nightmare vanish into the stairwell leading to the landing; and after a moment, in the stillness of the empty night, hear the devil's perfectly human oaths. 'Mother-sleepers! Eunuchs from somewhere!'… Uncomprehending, they see their bizarre tormentor emerge, rush away into the darkness, vanish. His imprecations… 'Sodomizers of asses! Sons of pigs! Eaters of their own excrement!'… linger on the breeze. And up they go now, confusion addling their spirits; Butt finds a torn fragment of grey cloth; Mustapha Kemal stoops over a crumpled rupee; and maybe, yes, why not, my father sees a dark flurry of monkey out of the corner of an eye… and they guess.

And now their groans and Mr Butt's shrill curses, which are echoes of the devil's oaths; and there's a battle raging, unspoken, in all their heads: money or godown or godown or money? Businessmen ponder, in mute panic, this central riddle-but then, even if they abandon the cash to the depredations of scavenging dogs and humans, how to stop the fire-raisers?-and at last, without a word having been spoken, the inexorable law of cash-in-hand wins them over; they rush down stone stairs, along grassed lawns, through ruined gates, and arrive-pell-mell!-at the ditch, to begin scooping rupees into their pockets, shovelling grabbing scrabbling, ignoring pools of urine and rotting fruit, trusting against all likelihood that tonight-by the grace of-just tonight for once, the gang will fail to wreak its promised revenge. But, of course…

… But, of course, Ramram the seer was not really floating in midair, six inches above the ground. My mother's scream faded; her eyes focused; and she noticed the little shelf, protruding from the wall. 'Cheap trick,' she told herself, and, 'What am I doing here in this godforsaken place of sleeping vultures and monkey-dancers, waiting to be told who knows what foolishness by a guru who levitates by sitting on a shelf?'

What Amina Sinai did not know was that, for the second time in history, I was about to make my presence felt. (No: not that fraudulent tadpole in her stomach: I mean myself, in my historical role, of which prime ministers have written '… it is, in a sense, the mirror of us all.' Great forces were working that night; and all present were about to feel their power, and be afraid.)