Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

'Shh, mumani, shh,' I beg, 'Hanif mamu will hear!'

'Let him hear!' she stormed, weeping copiously now; 'Let his mother hear also, in Agra; they will make me die for shame!'

Reverend Mother had never liked her actress daughter-in-law. I overheard her once telling my mother: 'To marry an actress, whatsits-name, my son has made his bed in the gutter, soon, whatsitsname, she will be making him drink alcohol and also eat some pig.' Eventually, she accepted the inevitability of the match with bad grace; but she took to writing improving epistles to Pia. 'Listen, daughter,' she wrote, 'don't do this actressy thing. Why to do such shameless behaviour? Work, yes, you girls have modern ideas, but to dance naked on the screen! When for a small sum only you could acquire the concession on a good petrol pump. From my own pocket I would get it for you in two minutes. Sit in an office, hire attendants; that is proper work.' None of us ever knew whence Reverend Mother acquired her dream of petrol pumps, which would be the growing obsession of her old age; but she bombarded Pia with it, to the actress's disgust.

'Why that woman doesn't ask me to be shorthand typist?' Pia wailed to Hanif and Mary and me at breakfast. 'Why not taxi-driver, or handloom weaver? I tell you, this pumpery-shumpery makes me wild.'

My uncle quivered (for once in his life) on the edge of anger. 'There is a child present,' he said, 'and she is your mother; show her respect.'

'Respect she can have,' Pia flounced from the room, 'but she wants gas'… And my most-treasured bit-part of all was played out when during Pia and Hanif's regular card-games with friends, I was promoted to occupy the sacred place of the son she never had. (Child of an unknown union, I have had more mothers than most mothers have children; giving birth to parents has been one of my stranger talents-a form of reverse fertility beyond the control of contraception, and even of the Widow herself.) In the company of visitors, Pia Aziz would cry: 'Look, friends, here's my own crown prince! The jewel in my ring! The pearl in my necklace!' And she would draw me towards her, cradling my head so that my nose was pushed down against her chest and nestled wonderfully between the soft pillows of her indescribable… unable to cope with such delights, I pulled my head away. But I was her slave; and I know now why she permitted herself such familiarity with me. Prematurely testicled, growing rapidly, I nevertheless wore (fraudulently) the badge of sexual innocence: Saleem Sinai, during his sojourn at his uncle's home, was still in shorts. Bare knees proved my childishness to Pia; deceived by ankle-socks, she held my face against her breasts while her sitar-perfect voice whispered in my good ear: 'Child, child, don't fear; your clouds will soon roll by.'

For my uncle, as well as my histrionic aunt, I acted out (with growing polish) the part of the surrogate son. Hanif Aziz was to be found during the day on the striped sofa, pencil and exercise book in hand, writing his pickle epic. He wore his usual lungi wound loosely around his waist and fastened with an enormous safety-pin; his legs protruded hairily from its folds. His fingernails bore the stains of a lifetime of Gold Flakes; his toenails seemed similarly discoloured. I imagined him smoking cigarettes with his toes. Highly impressed by the vision, I asked him if he could, in fact, perform this feat; and without a word, he inserted Gold Flake between big toe and its sidekick and wound himself into bizarre contortions. I clapped wildly, but he seemed to be in some pain for the rest of the day.

I ministered to his needs as a good son should, emptying ashtrays, sharpening pencils, bringing water to drink; while he, who after his fabulist beginnings had remembered that he was his father's son and dedicated himself against everything which smacked of the unreal, scribbled out his ill-fated screenplay.

'Sonny Jim,' he informed me, 'this damn country has been dreaming for five thousand years. It's about time it started waking up.' Hanif was fond of railing against princes and demons, gods and heroes, against, in fact, the entire iconography of the Bombay film; in the temple of illusions, he had become the high priest of reality; while I, conscious of my miraculous nature, which involved me beyond all mitigation in the (Hanif-despised) myth-life of India, bit my lip and didn't know where to look.

Hanif Aziz, the only realistic writer working in the Bombay film industry, was writing the story of a pickle-factory created, run and worked in entirely by women. There were long scenes describing the formation of a trade union; there were detailed descriptions of the pickling process. He would quiz Mary Pereira about recipes; they would discuss, for hours, the perfect blend of lemon, lime and garam masala. It is ironic that this arch-disciple of naturalism should have been so skilful (if unconscious) a prophet of his own family's fortunes; in the indirect kisses of the Lovers of Kashmir he foretold my mother and her Nadir-Qasim's meetings at the Pioneer Cafe; and in his unfilmed chutney scenario, too, there lurked a prophecy of deadly accuracy.

He besieged Homi Catrack with scripts. Catrack produced none of them; they sat in the small Marine Drive apartment, covering every available surface, so that you had to pick them off the toilet seat before you could lift it; but Catrack (out of charity? Or for another, soon-to-be-revealed reason?) paid my uncle a studio salary. That was how they survived, Hanif and Pia, on the largess of the man who would, in time, become the second human being to be murdered by mushrooming Saleem.

Homi Catrack begged him, 'Maybe just one love scene?' And Pia, 'What do you think, village people are going to give their rupees to see women pickling Alfonsos?' But Hanif, obdurately: 'This is a film about work, not kissing. And nobody pickles Alfonsos. You must use mangoes with bigger stones.'

The ghost of Joe D'Costa did not, so far as I know, follow Mary Pereira into exile; however, his absence only served to increase her anxiety. She began, in these Marine Drive days, to fear that he would become visible to others besides herself, and reveal, during her absence, the awful secrets of what happened at Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home on Independence night. So each morning she left the apartment in a state of jelly-like worry, arriving at Buckingham Villa in near-collapse; only when she found that Joe had remained both invisible and silent did she relax. But after she returned to Marine Drive, laden with samosas and cakes and chutneys, her anxiety began to mount once again… but за I had resolved (having troubles enough of my Own) to keep out of all heads except the Children's, I did not understand why.

Panic attracts panic; on her journeys, sitting in jam-packed buses (the trams had just been discontinued), Mary heard all sorts of rumours and tittle-tattle, which she relayed to me as matters of absolute fact. According to Mary, the country was in the grip of a sort of supernatural invasion. 'Yes, baba, they say in Kurukshetra an old Sikh woman woke up in her hut and saw the old-time war of the Kurus and Pandavas happening right outside! It was in the papers and all, she pointed to the place where she saw the chariots of Arjun and Kama, and there were truly wheel-marks in the mud! Baap-re-baap, such so-bad things: at Gwalior they have seen the ghost of the Rani of Jhansi; rakshasas have been seen many-headed like Ravana, doing things to women and pulling down trees with one finger. I am good Christian woman, baba; but it gives me fright when they tell that the tomb of Lord Jesus is found in Kashmir. On the tombstones are carved two pierced feet and a local fisherwoman has sworn she saw them bleeding-real blood, God save us!-on Good Friday… what is happening, baba, why these old things can't stay dead and not plague honest folk?' And I, wide-eyed, listening; and although my uncle Hanif roared with laughter, I remain, today, half-convinced that in that time of accelerated events and diseased hours the past of India rose up to confound her present; the new-born, secular state was being given an awesome reminder of its fabulous antiquity, in which democracy and votes for women were irrelevant… so that people were seized by atavistic longings, and forgetting the new myth of freedom reverted to their old ways, their old regionalist loyalties and prejudices, and the body politic began to crack. As I said: lop off just one ringer-tip and you never know what fountains of confusion you will unleash.