Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Cousins-one to four-gathering in the doorway through which the dark lady has passed, drawn like moths to the candle of her screech… watching her quietly as she advanced, guided by Lifafa Das, towards the unlikely sooth-sayer, were bone-setter cobra-wallah and monkey-man. Whispers of encouragement now (and were there also giggles behind rough hands?): 'O such a too fine fortune he will tell, Sahiba!' and, 'Come, cousinji, lady is waiting!'… But what was this Ramram? A huckster, a two-chip palmist, a giver of cute forecasts to silly women-or the genuine article, the holder of the keys? And Lifafa Das: did he see, in my mother, a woman who could be satisfied by a two-rupee fake, or did he see deeper, into the underground heart of her weakness?-And when the prophecy came, were cousins astonished too?-And the frothing at the mouth? What of that? And was it true that my mother, under the dislocating influence of that hysterical evening, relinquished her hold on her habitual self-which she had felt slipping away from her into the absorbing sponge of the lightless air in the stairwell-and entered a state of mind in which anything might happen and be believed? And there is another, more horrible possibility, too; but before I voice my suspicion, I must describe, as nearly as possible in spite of this filmy curtain of ambiguities, what actually happened: I must describe my mother, her palm slanted outwards towards the advancing palmist, her eyes wide and unblinking as a pomfret's-and the cousins (giggling?), 'What a reading you are coming to get, Sahiba!' and, 'Tell, cousinji, tell!'-but the curtain descends again, so I cannot be sure-did he begin like a cheap circus-tent man and go through the banal conjugations of life-line heart-line and children who would be multi-millionaires, while cousins cheered, 'Wah wah!' and, 'Absolute master reading, yara!'-and then, did he change?-did Ramram become stiff-eyes rolling upwards until they were white as eggs-did he, in a voice as strange as a mirror, ask, 'You permit, Madam, that I touch the place?'-while cousins fell as silent as sleeping vultures-and did my mother, just as strangely, reply, 'Yes, I permit,' so that the seer became only the third man to touch her in her life, apart from her family members?-and was it then, at that instant, that a brief sharp jolt of electricity passed between pudgy fingers and maternal skin? And my mother's face, rabbit-startled, watching the prophet in the check shirt as he began to circle, his eyes still egg-like in the softness of his face; and suddenly a shudder passing through him and again that strange high voice as the words issued through his lips (I must describe those lips, too-but later, because now…) 'A son.'

Silent cousins-monkeys on leashes, ceasing their chatter-cobras coiled in baskets-and the circling fortune-teller, finding history speaking through his lips. (Was that how?) Beginning, 'A son… such a son!' And then it comes, 'A son, Sahiba, who will never be older than his motherland-neither older nor younger.' And now, real fear amongst snake-charmer mongoose-dancer bone-setter and peepshow-wallah, because they have never heard Ramram like this, as he continues, singsong, high-pitched: 'There will be two heads-but you shall see only one-there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees.' Nose and knees and knees and nose… listen carefully, Padma; the fellow got nothing wrong! 'Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicyclists love him-but, crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep; cobra will creep…' Ramram, circling fasterfaster, while four cousins murmur, 'What is this, baba?' and, 'Deo, Shiva, guard us!' While Ramram, 'Washing will hide him-voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him-blood will betray him!' And Amina Sinai, 'What does he mean? I don't understand-Lifafa Das-what has got into him?' But, inexorably, whirling egg-eyed around her statue-still presence, goes Ramram Seth: 'Spittoons will brain him-doctors will drain him-jungle will claim him-wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him-tyrants will fry him…' While Amina begs for explanations and the cousins fall into a hand-flapping frenzy of helpless alarm because something has taken over and nobody dares touch Ramram Seth as he whirls to his climax: 'He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die… before he is dead.'

Is that how it was? Is that when Ramram Seth, annihilated by the sage through him of a power greater than his own, fell suddenly to the floor and frothed at the mouth? Was mongoose-man's stick inserted between his twitching teeth? Did Lafafa Das say, 'Begum Sahiba you must leave, please: our cousinji has become sick'?

And finally the cobra-wallah-or monkey-man, or bone-setter, or even Lifafa Das of the peepshow on wheels-saying, 'Too much prophecy, man. Our Ramram made too much damn prophecy tonight.'

Many years later, at the time of her premature dotage, when all k'nds of ghosts welled out of her past to dance before her eyes, my mother saw once again the peepshow man whom she saved by announcing my coming and who repaid her by leading her to too much prophecy, and spoke to him evenly, without rancour. 'So you're back ' she said, 'Well, let me tell you this: I wish I'd understood what your cousinji meant-about blood, about knees and nose. Because who knows? I might have had a different son.'

Like my grandfather at the beginning, in a webbed corridor in a blind man's house, and again at the end; like Mary Pereira after she lost her Joseph, and like me, my mother was good at seeing ghosts.

But now, because there are yet more questions and ambiguities, I am obliged to voice certain suspicions. Suspicion, too, is a monster with too many heads; why, then, can't I stop myself unleashing it at my own mother?… What, I ask, would be a fair description of the seer's mach? And memory-my new, all-knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother father grandfather grandmother and everyone else-answers: soft; squashy as cornflour pudding. Again, reluctantly, I ask: What was the condition of his lips? And the inevitable response: full; overfleshed; poetic. A third time I interrogate this memory of mine: what of Ms hair? The reply: thinning; dark; lank; worming over his ears. And now my unreasonable suspicions ask the ultimate question… did Amina, pure-as-pure, actually… because of her weakness for men who resembled Nadir Khan, could she have… in her odd frame of mind, and moved by the seer's illness, might she not… 'No!' Padma shouts, furiously. 'How dare you suggest? About that good woman-your own mother? That she would? You do not know one thing and still you say it?' And, of course, she is right, as always. If she knew, she would say I was only getting my revenge, for what I certainly did see Amina doing, years through the grimy windows of the Pioneer Cafe; and maybe that's where my irrational notion was born, to grow illogically backwards in time, and arrive fully mature at this earlier-and yes, almost certainly innocent-adventure. Yes, that must be it. But the monster won't lie down… 'Ah,' it says, 'but what about the matter of her tantrum-the one she threw the day Ahmed announced they were moving to Bombay?' Now it mimics her: 'You-always you decide. What about me? Suppose I don't want… I've only now got this house straight and already…!' So, Padma: was that housewifely zeal-or a masquerade?

Yes-a doubt lingers. The monster asks, 'Why did she fail, somehow or other, to tell her husband about her visit?' Reply of the accused (voiced by our Padma in my mother's absence): 'But think how angry he'd've got, my God! Even if there hadn't been all that firebug business to worry him! Strange men; a woman on her own; he'd've gone wild! Wild, completely!'

Unworthy suspicions… I must dismiss them; must save my strictures for later, when, in the absence of ambiguity, without the clouding curtain, she gave me hard, clear, irrefutable proofs.