Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen… which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. 'I can find out any damn thing!' I triumphed, 'There isn't a thing I cannot know!'

Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the spirit of self-aggrandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an instinct for self-preservation. If I had not believed myself in control of the flooding multitudes, their massed identities would have annihilated mine… but there in my clocktower, filled with the cockiness of my,glee, I became Sin, the ancient moon-god (no, not Indian: I've imported him from Hadhramaut of old), capable of acting-at-a-distance and shifting the tides of the world.

But death, when it visited Methwold's Estate, still managed to take me by surprise.

Even though the freezing of his assets had ended many years ago, the zone below Ahmed Sinai's waist had remained as cold as ice. Ever since the day he had cried out, 'The bastards are shoving my balls in an ice-bucket!', and Amina had taken them in her hands to warm them so that her fingers got glued to them by the cold, his sex had lain dormant, a woolly elephant in an iceberg, like the one they found in Russia in '56. My mother Amina, who had married for children, felt the uncreated lives rotting in her womb and blamed herself for becoming unattractive to him, what with her corns and all. She discussed her unhappiness with Mary Pereira, but the ayah only told her that there was no happiness to be gained from 'the mens'; they made pickles together as they talked, and Amina stirred her disappointments into a hot lime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes.

Although Ahmed Sinai's office hours were filled with fantasies of secretaries taking dictation in the nude, visions of his Fernandas or Poppys strolling around the room in their birthday suits with crisscross cane-marks on their rumps, his apparatus refused to respond; and one day, when the real Fernanda or Poppy had gone home, he was playing chess with Dr Narlikar, his tongue (as well as his game) made somewhat loose by djinns, and he confided awkwardly, 'Narlikar, I seem to have lost interest in you-know-what.'

A gleam of pleasure radiated from the luminous gynaecologist; the birth-control fanatic in the dark, glowing doctor leaped out through his eyes and made the following speech: 'Bravo!' Dr Narlikar cried, 'Brother Sinai, damn good show! You-and, may I add, myself-yes, you and I, Sinai bhai, are persons of rare spiritual worth! Not for us the panting humiliations of the flesh-is it not a finer thing, I ask you, to eschew procreation-to avoid adding one more miserable human life to the vast multitudes which are presently beggaring our country-and, instead, to bend our energies to the task of giving them more land to stand on? I tell you, my friend: you and I and our tetrapods: from the very oceans we shall bring forth soil!' To consecrate this oration, Ahmed Sinai poured drinks; my father and Dr Narlikar drank a toast to their four-legged concrete dream.

'Land, yes! Love, no!' Dr Narlikar said, a little unsteadily; my father refilled his glass.

By the last days of 1956, the dream of reclaiming land from the sea with the aid of thousands upon thousands of large concrete tetrapods-that same dream which had been the cause of the freeze-and which was now, for my father, a sort of surrogate for the sexual activity which the aftermath of the freeze denied him-actually seemed to be coming close to fruition. This time, however, Ahmed Sinai was spending his money cautiously; this time he remained hidden in the background, and his name appeared on no documents; this time, he had learned the lessons of the freeze and was determined to draw as little attention to himself as possible; so that when Dr Narlikar betrayed him by dying, leaving behind him no record of my father's involvement in the tetrapod scheme, Ahmed Sinai (who was prone, as we have seen, to react badly in the face of disaster) was swallowed up by the mouth of a long, snaking decline from which he would not emerge until, at the very end of his days, he at last fell in love with his wife.

This is the story that got back to Methwold's Estate: Dr Narlikar had been visiting friends near Marine Drive; at the end of the visit, he had resolved to stroll down to Chowpatty Beach and buy himself some bhel-puri and a little coconut milk. As he strolled briskly along the pavement by the sea-wall, he overtook the tail-end of a language march, which moved slowly along, chanting peacefully. Dr Narlikar neared the place where, with the Municipal Corporation's permission, he had arranged for a single, symbolic tetrapod to be placed upon the sea-wall, as a kind of icon pointing the way to the future; and here he noticed a thing which made him lose his reason. A group of beggar-women had clustered around the tetrapod and were performing the rite of puja. They had lighted oil-lamps at the base of the object; one of them had painted the ом-symbol on its upraised tip; they were chanting prayers as they gave the tetrapod a thorough and worshipful wash. Technological miracle had been transformed into Shiva-lingam; Doctor Narlikar, the opponent of fertility, was driven wild at this vision, in which it seemed to him that all the old dark priapic forces of ancient, procreative India had been unleashed upon the beauty of sterile twentieth-century concrete… sprinting along, he shouted his abuse at the worshipping women, gleaming fiercely in his rage; reaching them, he kicked away their little dia-lamps; it is said he even tried to push the women. And he was seen by the eyes of the language marchers.

The ears of the language marchers heard the roughness of his tongue; the marchers' feet paused, their voices rose in rebuke. Fists were shaken; oaths were oathed. Whereupon the good doctor, made incautious by anger, turned upon the crowd and denigrated its cause, its breeding and its sisters. A silence fell and exerted its powers. Silence guided marcher-feet towards the gleaming gynaecologist, who stood between the tetrapod and the wailing women. In silence the marchers' hands reached out towards Narlikar and in a deep hush he clung to four-legged concrete as they attempted to pull him towards them. In absolute soundlessness, fear gave Dr Narlikar the strength of limpets; his arms stuck to the tetrapod and would not be detached. The marchers applied themselves to the tetrapod… silently they began to rock it; mutely the force of their numbers overcame its weight. In an evening seized by a demonic quietness the tetrapod tilted, preparing to become the first of its kind to enter the waters and begin the great work of land reclamation. Dr Suresh Narlikar, his mouth opening in a voiceless A, clung to it like a phosphorescent mollusc… man and four-legged concrete fell without a sound. The splash of the waters broke the spell.

It was said that when Dr Narlikar fell and was crushed into death by the weight of his beloved obsession, nobody had any trouble locating the body because it sent light glowing upwards through the waters like a fire.

'Do you know what's happening?' 'Hey, man, what gives?'-children, myself included, clustered around the garden hedge of Escorial Villa, in which was Dr Narlikar's bachelor apartment; and a hamal of Lila Sabarmati's, taking on an air of grave dignity, informed us, 'They have brought his death home, wrapped in silk.'

I was not allowed to see the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay wreathed in saffron flowers on his hard, single bed; but I got to know all about it anyway, because the news of it spread far beyond the confines of his room. Mostly, I heard about it from the Estate servants, who found it quite natural to speak openly of a death, but rarely said much about life, because in life everything was obvious. From Dr Narlikar's own bearer I learned that the death had, by swallowing large quantities of the sea, taken on the qualities of water: it had become a fluid thing, and looked happy, sad or indifferent according to how the light hit it. Homi Catrack's gardener interjected: 'It is dangerous to look too long at death; otherwise you come away with a little of it inside you, and there are effects.' We asked: effects? what effects? which effects? how? And Purushottam the sadhu, who had left his place under the Buckingham Villa garden tap for the first time in years, said: 'A death makes the living see themselves too clearly; after they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated.' This extraordinary claim was, in fact, borne out by events, because afterwards Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi-Appah, who had helped to clean up the body, became shriller, more shrewish, more terrifying than ever; and it seemed that everyone who saw the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay in state was affected, Nussie Ibrahim became even sillier and more of a duck, and Lila Sabarmati, who lived upstairs from the death and had helped to arrange its room, afterwards gave in to a promiscuity which had always been lurking within her, and set herself on a road at whose end there would be bullets, and her husband Commander Sabarmati conducting the Colaba traffic with a most unusual baton…