Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Blood, then, was spilled in the circus-ring. Another rejected title for these pages-you may as well know-was 'Thicker Than Water'. In those days of water shortages, something thicker than water ran down the face of Evie Burns; the loyalties of blood motivated the Brass Monkey; and in the streets of the city, rioters spilled each other's blood. There were bloody murders, and perhaps it is not appropriate to end this sanguinary catalogue by mentioning, once again, the rushes of blood to my mother's cheeks. Twelve million votes were coloured red that year, and red is the colour of blood. More blood will flow soon: the types of blood, A and O, Alpha and Omega-and another, a third possibility-must be kept in mind. Also other factors: zygosity, and Kell antibodies, and that most mysterious of sanguinary attributes, known as rhesus, which is also a type of monkey.

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

But before blood has its day, I shall take wing (like the parahamsa gander who can soar out of one element into another) and return, briefly, to the affairs of my inner world; because although the fall of Evie Burns ended my ostracism by the hilltop children, still I found it difficult to forgive; and for a time, holding myself solitary and aloof, I immersed myself in the events inside my head, in the early history of the association of the midnight children.

To be honest: I didn't like Shiva. I disliked the roughness of his tongue, the crudity of his ideas; and I was beginning to suspect him of a string of terrible crimes-although I found it impossible to find any evidence in his thoughts, because he, alone of the children of midnight, could close off from me any part of his thoughts he chose to keep to himself-which, in itself, increased my growing dislike and suspicion of the rat-faced fellow. However, I was nothing if not fair; and it would not have been fair to have kept him apart from the other members of the Conference.

I should explain that as my mental facility increased, I found that it was possible not only to pick up the children's transmissions; not only to broadcast my own messages; but also (since I seem to be stuck with this radio metaphor) to act as a sort of national network, so that by opening my transformed mind to all the children I could turn it into a kind of forum in which they could talk to one another, through me. So, in the early days of 1958, the five hundred and eighty-one children would assemble, for one hour, between midnight and one a.m., in the lok sabha or parliament of my brain.

We were as motley, as raucous, as undisciplined as any bunch of five hundred and eighty-one ten year olds; and on top of our natural exuberance, there was the excitement of our discovery of each other. After one hour of top-volume yelling jabbering arguing giggling, I would fall exhausted into a sleep too deep for nightmares, and still wake up with a headache; but I didn't mind. Awake I was obliged to face the multiple miseries of maternal perfidy and paternal decline, of the fickleness of friendship and the varied tyrannies of school; asleep, I was at the centre of the most exciting world any child had ever discovered. Despite Shiva, it was nicer to be asleep.

Shiva's conviction that he (or he-and-I) was the natural leader of our group by dint of his (and my) birth on the stroke of midnight had, I was bound to admit, one strong argument in its favour. It seemed to me then-it seems to me now-that the midnight miracle had indeed been remarkably hierarchical in nature, that the children's abilities declined dramatically on the basis of the distance of their time of birth from midnight; but even this was a point of view which was hotly contested… 'Whatdoyoumeanhowcanyousaythat,' they chorused, the boy from the Gir forest whose face was absolutely blank and featureless (except for eyes noseholes spaceformouth) and could take on any features he chose, and Harilal who could run at the speed of the wind, and God knows how many others… 'Who says it's better to do one thing or another?' And, 'Can you fly? I can fly!' And, 'Yah, and me, can you turn one fish into fifty?' And, 'Today I went to visit tomorrow. You can do that? Well then-'… in the face of such a storm of protest, even Shiva changed his tune; but he was 'to find a new one, which would be much more dangerous-dangerous for the Children, and for me.

Because I had found that I was not immune to the lure of leadership. Who found the Children, anyway? Who formed the Conference? Who gave them their meeting-place? Was I not the joint-eldest, and should I not receive the respect and obeisances merited by my senior-ity? And didn't the one who provided the club-house run the club?… To which Shiva, 'Forget all that, man. That club-shub stuff is only for you rich boys!' But-for a time-he was overruled. Parvati-the-witch, the conjurer's daughter from Delhi, took my part (just as, years later, she would save my life), and announced, 'No, listen now, every, body: without Saleem we are nowhere, we can't talk or anything, he is right. Let him be the chief!' And I, 'No, never mind chief, just think of me as a… a big brother, maybe. Yes; we're a family, of a kind. I'm just the oldest, me.' To which Shiva replied, scornful, but unable to argue: 'Okay, big brother: so now tell us what we do?'

At this point I introduced the Conference to the notions which plagued me all this time: the notions of purpose, and meaning. 'We must think,' I said, 'what we are for.'

I record, faithfully, the views of a typical selection of the Conference members (excepting the circus-freaks, and the ones who, like Sundari the beggar-girl with the knife-scars, had lost their powers, and tended to remain silent in our debates, like poor relations at a feast): among the philosophies and aims suggested were collectivism-'We should all get together and live somewhere, no? What would we need from anyone else?'-and individualism-'You say we; but we together are unimportant; what matters is that each of us has a gift to use for his or her own good'-filial duty-'However we can help our father-mother, that is what it is for us to do'-and infant revolution-'Now at last we must show all kids that it is possible to get rid of parents!'-capitalism-'Just mink what businesses we could do! How rich, Allah, we could be!'-and altruism-'Our country needs gifted people; we must ask the government how it wishes to use our skills'-science-'We must allow ourselves to be studied*-and religion-'Let us declare ourselves to the world, so that all may glory in God'-courage-'We should invade Pakistan!'-and cowardice-'O heavens, we must stay secret, just mink what they will do to us, stone us for witches or what-all!'; there were declarations of women's rights and pleas for the improvement of the lot of untouchables; landless children dreamed of land and tribals from the hills, of Jeeps; and there were, also, fantasies of power. 'They can't stop us, man! We can bewitch, and fly, and read minds, and turn them into frogs, and make gold and fishes, and they will fall in love with us, and we can vanish through mirrors and change our sex… how will they be able to fight?'

I won't deny I was disappointed. I shouldn't have been; there was nothing unusual about the children except for their gifts; their heads were full of all the usual things, fathers mothers money food land possessions fame power God. Nowhere, in the thoughts .of the Conference, could I find anything as new as ourselves… but then I was on the wrong track, too; I could not see any more clearly than anyone else; and even when Soumitra the time-traveller said, 'I'm telling you-all this is pointless-they'll finish us before we start!' we all ignored him; with the optimism of youth-which is a more virulent form of the same disease that once infected my grandfather Aadam Aziz-we refused to look on the dark side, and not a single one of us suggested that the purpose of Midnight's Children might be annihilation; that we would have no meaning until we were destroyed.