Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

To demonstrate the loyalty of sisters: when the twenty-four hours were up, on the dot, the Brass Monkey ran into my mother's bedroom. (It was, I think, a Sunday: no school. Or perhaps not-that was the summer of the language marches, and the schools were often shut, because of the danger of violence on the bus-routes.)

'The time's up!' she exclaimed, shaking my mother out of sleep. 'Amma, wake up: it's time: can he talk now?'

'All right,' my mother said, coming into a sky-blue room to embrace me, 'you're forgiven now. But never hide in there again…'

'Amma,' I said eagerly, 'my Ammi, please listen. I must tell you something. Something big. But please, please first of all, wake Abba.'

And after a period of 'What?' 'Why?' and 'Certainly not,' my mother saw something extraordinary sitting in my eyes and went to wake Ahmed Sinai anxiously, with 'Janum, please come. I don't know what's got into Saleem.'

Family and ayah assembled in the sitting-room. Amid cut-glass vases and plump cushions, standing on a Persian rug beneath the swirling shadows of ceiling-fans, I smiled into their anxious eyes and prepared my revelation. This was it; the beginning of the repayment of their investment; my first dividend-first, I was sure, of many… my black mother, lip-jutting father, Monkey of a sister and crime-concealing ayah waited in hot confusion.

Get it out. Straight, without frills. 'You should be the first to know,' I said, trying to give my speech the cadences of adulthood. And then I told them. 'I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think-Ammi, Abboo, I really think-that Archangels have started to talk to me.'

There! I thought. There! It's said! Now there will be pats on the back, sweetmeats, public announcements, maybe more photographs; now their chests will puff up with pride. О blind innocence of childhood! For my honesty-for my open-hearted desperation to please-I was set upon from all sides. Even the Monkey: 'O God, Saleem, all this tamasha, all this performance, for one of your stupid cracks?' And worse than the Monkey was Mary Pereira: 'Christ Jesus! Save, us, Lord! Holy Father in Rome, such blasphemy I've heard today!' And worse than Mary Pereira was my mother Amina Sinai: Black Mango concealed now, her own unnameable names still warm upon her lips, she cried, 'Heaven forfend! The child will bring down the roof upon our heads!' (Was that my fault, too?) And Amina continued: 'You black man! Goonda! О Saleem, has your brain gone raw? What has happened to my darling baby boy-are you growing into a madman-a torturer!?' And worse than Amina's shrieking was my father's silence; worse than her fear was the wild anger sitting on his forehead; and worst of all was my father's hand, which stretched out suddenly, thick-fingered, heavy-jointed, strong-as-an-ox,to fetch me a mighty blow on the side of my head, so that I could never hear properly in my left ear after that day; so that I fell sideways across the startled room through the scandalized air and shattered a green tabletop of opaque glass; so that, having been certain of myself for the first time in my life, I was plunged into a green, glass-cloudy world filled with cutting edges, a world in which I could no longer tell the people who mattered most about the goings-on inside my head; green shards lacerated my hands as I entered that swirling universe in which I was doomed, until it was far too late, to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for.

In a white-tiled bathroom beside a washing-chest, my mother daubed me with Mercurochrome; gauze veiled my cuts, while through the door my father's voice commanded, 'Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me? Let him enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!'

That night, Amina Sinai would dream of Ramram Seth, who was floating six inches above the ground, his eye-sockets filled with egg-whites, intoning: 'Washing will hide him… voices will guide him'… but when, after several days in which the dream sat upon her shoulders wherever she went, she plucked up the courage to ask her disgraced son a little more about his outrageous claim, he replied in a voice as restrained as the unwept tears of his childhood: 'It was just fooling, Amma. A stupid joke, like you said.'

She died, nine years later, without discovering the truth.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems-but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars' faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves-or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality… we have come from 1915 to 1956, so we're a good deal closer to the screen… abandoning my metaphor, then, I reiterate, entirely without a sense of shame, my unbelievable claim: after a curious accident in a washing-chest, I became a sort of radio.

… But today, I feel confused. Padma has not returned-should I alert the police? Is she a Missing Person?-and in her absence, my certainties are falling apart. Even my nose has been playing tricks on me-by day, as I stroll between the pickle-vats tended by our army of strong, hairy-armed, formidably competent women, I have found myself failing to distinguish lemon-odours from lime. The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor sahib has been crossed in-what?-surely not love?… Padma, and the cracks spreading all over me, radiating like a spider's web from my navel; and the heat… a little confusion is surely permissible in these circumstances. Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.

Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything-to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began…

Ye Akashvani hai. This is All-India Radio.

Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani cafe, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light with only a cheap transistor for company. A hot night; bubbling air filled with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle-vats; voices in the dark. Pickle-fumes, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then… it was hot then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat… it was not the voices (then or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea-the idea that his parents' outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their love; that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deformity… while I, now, Padma-less, send these words into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he… I no longer have his gift; he never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost… he had no cracks. No spiders' webs spread through him in the heat.

Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook.