Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

… But, of course, when my father came home late that night, with a ditchy smell on him which overpowered his customary reek of future failure, his eyes and cheeks were streaked with ashy tears; there was sulphur in his nostrils and the grey dust of smoked leathercloth on Ms head… because of course they had burned the godown.

'But the night-watchmen?'-asleep, Padma, asleep. Warned in advance to take their sleeping draughts just in case… Those brave lalas, warrior Pathans who, city-born, had never seen the Khyber, unwrapped little paper packets, poured rust-coloured powders into their bubbling cauldron of tea. They pulled their charpoys well away from my father's godown to avoid falling beams and showering sparks; and lying on their rope-beds they sipped their tea and entered the bittersweet declensions of the drug. At first they became raucous, shouting the praises of their favourite whores in Pushtu; then they fell into wild giggling as the soft fluttering fingers of the drug tickled their ribs… until the giggling gave way to dreams and they roamed in the frontier passes of the drug, riding the horses of the drug, and finally reached a dreamless oblivion from which nothing on earth could awaken them until the drug had run its course.

Ahmed, Butt and Kemal arrived by taxi-the taxi-driver, unnerved by the three men who clutched wads of crumpled banknotes which smelled worse than hell on account of the unpleasant substances they had encountered in the ditch, would not have waited, except that they refused to pay him. 'Let me go, big sirs,' he pleaded, 'I am a little man; do not keep me here…' but by then their backs were moving away from him, towards the fire. He watched them as they ran, clutching their rupees that were stained by tomatoes and dogshit; open-mouthed he stared at the burning godown, at the clouds in the night sky, and like everyone else on the scene he was obliged to breathe air filled with leathercloth and matchsticks and burning rice. With his hands over his eyes, watching through his fingers, the little taxi-driver with his incompetent moustache saw Mr Kemal, thin as a demented pencil, lashing and lucking at the sleeping bodies of night-watchmen; and he almost gave up his fare and drove off in terror at the instant when my father shouted, 'Look out!'… but, staying despite it all, he saw the godown as it burst apart under the force of the licking red tongues, he saw pouring out of the godown an improbable lava flow of molten rice lentils chick-peas waterproof jackets matchboxes and pickle, he saw the hot red flowers of the fire bursting skywards as the contents of the warehouse spilled on to the hard yellow ground like a black charred hand of despair. Yes, of course the godown was burned, it fell on their heads from the sky in cinders, it plunged into the open mouths of the bruised, but still snoring, watchmen… 'God save us,' said Mr Butt, but Mustapha Kemal, more pragmatically, answered: 'Thank God we are well insured.'

'It was right then,' Ahmed Sinai told his wife later, 'right at that moment that I decided to get out of the leathercloth business. Sell the office, the goodwill, and forget everything I know about the reccine trade. Then-not before, not afterwards-I made up my mind, also, to think no more about this Pakistan claptrap of your Emerald's Zulfy. In the heat of that fire,' my father revealed-unleashing a wifely tantrum-'I decided to go to Bombay, and enter the property business. Property is dirt cheap there now,' he told her before her protests could begin, 'Narlikar knows.'

(But in time, he would call Narlikar a traitor.)

In my family, we always go when we're pushed-the freeze of '48 being the only exception to this rule. The boatman Tai drove my grandfather from Kashmir; Mercurochrome chased him out of Amritsar; the collapse of her life under the carpets led directly to my mother's departure from Agra; and many-headed monsters sent my father to Bombay, so that I could be born there. At the end of that January, history had finally, by a series of shoves, brought itself to the point at which it was almost ready for me to make my entrance. There were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I stepped on to the scene… the mystery, for example, of Shri Ramram's most enigmatic remark: 'There will be a nose and knees: knees, and a nose.'

Тhe insurance money came; January ended; and in the time it took to close down their affairs in Delhi and move to the city in which-as Dr Narlikar the gynaecologist knew-property was temporarily as cheap as dirt, my mother concentrated on her segmented scheme for learning to love her husband. She came to feel a deep affection for the question marks of his ears; for the remarkable depth of his navel, into which her finger could go right up to the first joint, without even pushing; she grew to love the knobbliness of his knees; but, try as she might (and as I'm giving her the benefit of my doubts I shall offer no possible reasons here), there was one part of him which she never managed to love, although it was the one thing he possessed, in full working order, which Nadir Khan had certainly lacked; on those nights when he heaved himself up on top of her-when the baby in her womb was no bigger than a frog-it was just no good at all.

… 'No, not so quick, janum, my life, a little longer, please,' she is saying; and Ahmed, to spin things out, tries to think back to the fire, to the last thing that happened on that blazing night, when just as he was turning to go he heard a dirty screech in the sky, and, looking up, had time to register that a vulture-at night!-a vulture from the Towers of Silence was flying overhead, and that it had dropped a barely-chewed Parsee hand, a right hand, the same hand which-now!-slapped him full in the face as it fell; while Amina, beneath him in bed, ticks herself off: Why can't you enjoy, you stupid woman, from now on you must really try.

On June 4th, my ill-matched parents left for Bombay by Frontier Mail. (There were hangings, voices hanging on for dear life, fists crying out, 'Maharaj! Open, for one tick only! Ohe, from the milk of your kindness, great sir, do us favour!' And there was also-hidden beneath dowry in a green tin trunk-a forbidden, lapis-lazuli-encrusted, delicately-wrought silver spittoon.) On the same day, Earl Mountbatten of Burma held a press conference at which he announced the Partition of India, and hung his countdown calendar on the wall: seventy days to go to the transfer of power… sixty-nine… sixty-eight… tick, tock.

The fishermen were here first. Before Mountbatten's ticktock, before monsters and public announcements; when underworld marriages were still unimagined and spittoons were unknown; earlier than Mercurochrome; longer ago than lady wrestlers who held up perfor-ated sheets; and back and back, beyond Dalhousie and Elphinstone, before the East India Company built its Fort, before the first William Methwold; at the dawn of time, when Bombay was a dumbbell-shaped island tapering, at the centre, to a narrow shining strand beyond which could be seen the finest and largest natural harbour in Asia, when Mazagaon and Worli, Matunga and Mahim, Salsette and Colaba were islands, too-in short, before reclamation, before tetrapods and sunken piles turned the Seven Isles into a long peninsula like an outstretched, grasping hand, reaching westward into the Arabian Sea; in this primeval world before clocktowers, the fishermen-who were called Kolis-sailed in Arab dhows, spreading red sails against the setting sun. They caught pomfret and crabs, and made fish-lovers of us all. (Or most of us. Padma has succumbed to their piscine sorceries; but in our house, we were infected with the alienness of Kashmiri blood, with the icy reserve of Kashmiri sky, and remained meateaters to a man.)

There were also coconuts and rice. And, above it all, the benign presiding influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, whose name-Mumbadevi, Mumbabai, Mumbai-may well have become the city's. But then, the Portuguese named the place Bom Bahia for its harbour, and not for the goddess of the pomfret folk… the Portuguese were the first invaders, using the harbour to shelter their merchant ships and their men-of-war; but then, one day in 1633, and East Indian Company Officer named Methwold saw a vision. This vision-a dream of a British Bombay, fortified, defending India's West against all comers-was a notion of such force that it set time in motion. History churned ahead; Methwold died; and in 1660, Charles II of England was betrothed to Catharine of the Portuguese House of Braganza-that same Catharine who would, all her life, play second fiddle to orange-selling Nell. But she has this consolation-that it was her marriage dowry which brought Bombay into British hands, perhaps in a green tin trunk, and brought Methwold's vision a step closer to reality. After that, it wasn't long until September 21st, 1668, when the Company at last got its hands on the island… and then off they went, with their Fort and land-reclamation, and before you could blink there was a city here, Bombay, of which the old tune sang: