Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

And Padma, 'Doctors? Who is talking about…' But she is fooling nobody; and with a little smile I say, 'Here: everybody: take some chutney. I must tell you some important things.'

And while chutney-the same chutney which, back in 1957, my ayah Mary Pereira had made so perfectly; the grasshopper-green chutney which is forever associated with those days-carried them back into the world of my past, while chutney mellowed them and made them receptive, I spoke to them, gently, persuasively, and by a mixture of condiment and oratory kept myself out of the hands of the pernicious green-medicine men. I said: 'My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I'm telling my story for him, so that afterwards, when I've lost my struggle against cracks, he will know. Morality, judgment, character… it all starts with memory… and I am keeping carbons.'

Green chutney on chilli-pakoras, disappearing down someone's gullet; grasshopper-green on tepid chapatis, vanishing behind Padma's lips. I see them begin to weaken, and press on. 'I told you the truth,' I say yet again, 'Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.'

Yes: I said 'sane'. I knew what they were thinking: 'Plenty of children invent imaginary friends; but one thousand and one! That's just crazy!' The midnight children shook even Padma's faith in my narrative; but I brought her round, and now there's no more talk of outings.

How I persuaded them: by talking about my son, who needed to know my story; by shedding light on the workings of memory; and by other devices, some naively honest, others wily as foxes. 'Even Muhammad,' I said, 'at first believed himself insane: do you think the notion never crossed my mind? But the Prophet had his Khadija, his Abu-Bakr, to reassure him of the genuineness of his Calling; nobody betrayed him into the hands of asylum-doctors.' By now, the green chutney was filling them with thoughts of years ago; I saw guilt appear on their faces, and shame. 'What is truth?' I waxed rhetorical, 'What is sanity? Did Jesus rise up from the grave? Do Hindus not accept-Padma-that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma dreamed, is dreaming the universe; that we only see dimly through that dream-web, which is Maya. Maya,' I adopted a haughty, lecturing tone, 'may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit. Apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya. If I say that certain things took place which you, lost in Brahma's dream, find hard to believe, then which of us is right? Have some more chutney,' I added graciously, taking a generous helping myself. 'It tastes very good.'

Padma began to cry. 'I never said I didn't believe, she wept. 'Of course, every man must tell his story in his own true way; but…'

'But,' I interrupted conclusively, 'you also-don't you-want to know what happens? About the hands that danced without touching, and the knees? And later, the curious baton of Commander Sabarmati, and of course the Widow? And the Children-what became of them?'

And Padma nodded. So much for doctors and asylums; I have been left to write. (Alone, except for Padma at my feet.) Chutney and oratory, theology and curiosity: these are the things that saved me. And one more-call it education, or class-origins; Mary Pereira would have called it my 'brought-up'. By my show of erudition and by the purity of my accents, I shamed them into feeling unworthy of judging me; not a very noble deed, but when the ambulance is waiting round the corner, all's fair. (It was: I smelled it.) Still-I've had a valuable warning. It's a dangerous business to try and impose one's view of things on others.

Padma: if you're a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.

Meanwhile, I am ten years old, and working out how to hide in the boot of my mother's car.

That was the month when Purushottam the sadhu (whom I had never told about my inner life) finally despaired of his stationary existence and contracted the suicidal hiccups which assailed him for an entire year, frequently lifting him bodily several inches off the ground so that his water-balded head cracked alarmingly against the garden tap, and finally killed him, so that one evening at the cocktail hour he toppled sideways with his legs still locked in the lotus position, leaving my mother's verrucas without any hope of salvation; when I would often stand in the garden of Buckingham Villa in the evenings, watching the Sputniks cross the sky, and feeling as simultaneously exalted and isolated as little Laika, the first and still the only dog to be shot into space (the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, shortly to contract syphilis, sat beside me following the bright pinprick of Sputnik II with her Alsatian eyes-it was a time of great canine interest in the space race); when Evie Burns and her gang occupied my clocktower, and washing-chests had been both forbidden and outgrown, so that for the sake of secrecy and sanity I was obliged to limit my visits to the midnight children to our private, silent hour-I communed with them every midnight, and only at midnight, during that hour which is reserved for miracles, which is somehow outside time; and when-to get to the point-I resolved to prove, with the evidence of my own eyes, the terrible thing I had glimpsed sitting in the front of my mother's thoughts. Ever since I lay hidden in a washing-chest and heard two scandalous syllables, I had been suspecting my mother of secrets; my incursions into her thought processes confirmed my suspicions; so it was with a hard glint in my eye, and a steely determination, that I visited Sonny Ibrahim one afternoon after school, with the intention of enlisting his help.

I found Sonny in his room, surrounded by posters of Spanish bullfights, morosely playing Indoor Cricket by himself. When he saw me he cried unhappily, 'Hey man I'm damn sorry about Evie man she won't listen to anyone man what the hell'd you do to her anyway?'… But I held up a dignified hand, commanding and being accorded silence.

'No time for that now, man,' I said. 'The thing is, I need to know how to open locks without keys.'

A true fact about Sonny Ibrahim: despite all his bullfighting dreams, his genius lay in the realm of mechanical things. For some time now, he had taken on the job of maintaining all the bikes on Methwold's Estate in return for gifts of comic-books and a free supply of fizzy drinks. Even Evelyn Lilith Burns gave her beloved Indiabike into his care. All machines, it seemed, were won over by the innocent delight with which he caressed their moving parts; no contraption could resist his ministrations. To put it another way: Sonny Ibrahim had become (out of a spirit of pure inquiry) an expert at picking locks.

Now offered a chance of demonstrating his loyalty to me, his eyes brightened. 'Jus' show me the lock, man! Lead me to the thing!'

When we were sure we were unobserved, we crept along the driveway between Buckingham Villa and Sonny's Sans Souci; we stood behind my family's old Rover; and I pointed at the boot. 'That's the one,' I stated. 'I need to be able to open it from the outside, and the inside also.'

Sonny's eyes widened. 'Hey, what're you up to, man? You running away from home secretly and all?'

Finger to lips, I adopted a mysterious expression. 'Can't explain, Sonny,' I said solemnly, 'Top-drawer classified information.'

'Wow, man,' Sonny said, and showed me in thirty seconds how to open the boot with the aid of a strip of thin pink plastic. 'Take it, man,' said Sonny Ibrahim, 'You need it more than me.'