Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

At the hospital: white walls stretchers everyone talking at once. Words pour around me like fountains. 'O God preserve us, my little piece-of-the-moon, what have they done to you?' To which old Crusoe, 'Heh heh. Mrs Sinai. Accidents will happen. Boys will be.' But my mother, enraged, 'What kind of school? Mr Caruso? I'm here with my son's finger in pieces and you tell me. Not good enough. No, sir.' And now, while Crusoe, 'Actually the name's-like Robinson, you know-heh heh,' the doctor is approaching and a question is being asked, whose answer will change the world.

'Mrs Sinai, your blood group, please? The boy has lost blood. A transfusion may be necessary.' And Amina: 'I am A; but my husband, O.' And now she is crying, breaking down, and still the doctor, 'Ah; in that case, are you aware of your son's…' But she, the doctor's daughter, must admit she cannot answer the question: Alpha or Omega? 'Well in that case a very quick test; but on the subject of rhesus?' My mother, through her tears: 'Both my husband and I, rhesus positive.' And the doctor, 'Well, good, that at least.'

But when I am on the operating table-'Just sit there, son, I'll give you a local anaesthetic, no, madam, he's in shock, total anaesthesia would be impossible, all right son, just hold your finger up and still, help him nurse, and it'll be over in a jiffy'-while the surgeon is sewing up the stump and performing the miracle of transplanting the roots of the nail, all of a sudden there's a fluster in the background, a million miles away, and 'Have you got a second Mrs Sinai' and I can't hear properly… words float across the in-finite distance… Mrs Sinai, you are sure? О and A? A and O? And rhesus negative, both of you? Heterozygous or homozygous? No, there must be some mistake, how can he be… I'm sorry, absolutely clear… positive… and neither A nor… excuse me, Madam, but is he your… not adopted or… The hospital nurse interposes herself between me and miles-away chatter, but it's no good, because now my mother is shrieking, 'But of course you must believe me, doctor; my God, of course he is our son!'

Neither A nor O. And the rhesus factor: impossibly negative. And zygosity offers no clues. And present in the blood, rare Kell antibodies. And my mother, crying, crying-crying, crying… 'I don't understand. A doctor's daughter, and I don't understand.'

Have Alpha and Omega unmasked me? Is rhesus pointing its unanswerable finger? And will Mary Pereira be obliged to… I wake up in a cool, white, Venetian-blinded room with All-India Radio for company. Tony Brent is singing: 'Red Sails In The Sunset'.

Ahmed Sinai, his face ravaged by whisky and now by something worse, stands beside the Venetian blind. Amina, speaking in whispers. Again, snatches across the million miles of distance. Janumplease. Ibegyou. No, what are you saying. Of course it was. Of course you are the. How could you think I would. Who could it have. О God don't just stand and look. I swear Iswearonmymother'shead. Now shh he is…

A new song from Tony Brent, whose repertoire today is uncannily similar to Wee Willie Winkie's: 'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' hangs in the air, floating on radio waves. My father advances on my bed, towers over me, I've never seen him look like this before. 'Abba…' And he, 'I should have known. Just look, where am I in that face. That nose, I should have…' He turns on his heel and leaves the room; my mother follows him, too distraught to whisper now: 'No, janum, I won't let you believe such things about me! I'll kill myself! I'll,' and the door swings shut behind them. There is a noise outside: like a clap. Or a slap. Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

Tony Brent begins crooning his latest hit into my good ear: and assures me, melodiously, that 'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By'.

… And now I, Saleem Sinai, intend briefly to endow my self-then with the benefits of hindsight; destroying the unities and conventions of fine writing, I make him cognizant of what was to come, purely so that he can be permitted to think the following thoughts: 'O eternal opposition of inside and outside! Because a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. The body, on the other hand, is homogeneous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, a sacred temple, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness. But the loss of my finger (which was conceivably foretold by the pointing digit of Raleigh's fisherman), not to mention the removal of certain hairs from my head, has undone all that. Thus we enter into a state of affairs which is nothing short of revolutionary; and its effect on history is bound to be pretty damn startling. Uncork the body, and God knows what you permit to come tumbling out. Suddenly you are forever other than you were; and the world becomes such that parents can cease to be parents, and love can turn to hate. And these, mark you, are only the effects on private life. The consequences for the sphere of public action, as will be shown, are-were-will be no less profound.'

Finally, withdrawing my gift of foreknowledge, I leave you with the image of a ten-year-old boy with a bandaged finger, sitting in a hospital bed, musing about blood and noises-like-claps and the expression on his father's face; zooming out slowly into long-shot, I allow the sound-track music to drown my words, because Tony Brent is reaching the end of his medley, and his finale, too, is the same as Winkie's: 'Good Night, Ladies' is the name of the song. Merrily it rolls along, rolls along, rolls along…

(Fade-out.)

From ayah to Widow, I've been the sort of person to whom things have been done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing himself as protagonist. Despite Mary's crime; setting aside typhoid and snake-venom; dismissing two accidents, in washing-chest and circus-ring (when Sonny Ibrahim, master lock-breaker, permitted my budding horns of temples to invade his forcep-hollows, and through this combination unlocked the door to the midnight children); disregarding the effects of Evie's push and my mother's infidelity; in spite of losing my hair to the bitter violence of Emil Zagallo and my finger to the lip-licking goads of Masha Miovic; setting my face against all indications to the contrary, I shall now amplify, in the manner and with the proper solemnity of a man of science, my claim to a place at the centre of things.

'… Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,' the Prime Minister wrote, obliging me scientifically to face the question: In what sense? How, in what terms, may the career of a single . individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation? I must answer in adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term 'modes of connection' composed of dualistically-combined configurations' of the two pairs of opposed adverbs given above. This is why hyphens are necessary: ac'tively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and pas-sively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world.

Sensing Padma's unscientific bewilderment, I revert to the inexactitudes of common speech: By the combination of'active' and 'literal' I mean, of course, all actions of mine which directly-literally-affected, or altered the course of, seminal historical events, for instance the manner in which I provided the language marchers with their battle-cry. The union of 'passive' and 'metaphorical' encompasses all socio-political trends and events which, merely by existing, affected me metaphorically-for example, by reading between the lines of the episode entitled 'The Fisherman's Pointing Finger', you will perceive the unavoidable connection between the infant state's attempts at rushing towards full-sized adulthood and my own early, explosive efforts at growth… Next, 'passive' and 'literal', when hyphenated, cover all moments at which national events had a direct bearing upon the lives of myself and my family-under this heading you should file the freezing of my father's assets, and also the explosion at Walkeshwar Reservoir, which unleased the great cat invasion. And finally there is the 'mode' of the 'active-metaphorical', which groups together those occasions on which things done by or to me were mirrored in the macrocosm of public affairs, and my private existence was shown to be symbolically at one with history. The mutilation of my middle finger was a case in point, because when I was detached from my fingertip and blood (neither Alpha nor Omega) rushed out in fountains, a similar thing happened to history, and all sorts of everywhichthing began pouring out all over us; but because history operates on a grander scale than any individual, it took a good deal longer to stitch it back together and mop up the mess.