Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

In this way the Midnight Children's Conference fulfilled the prophecy of the Prime Minister and became, in truth, a mirror of the nation; the passive-literal mode was at work, although I railed against it, with increasing desperation, and finally with growing resignation… 'Brothers, sisters!' I broadcast, with a mental voice as uncontrollable as its physical counterpart, 'Do not let this happen! Do not permit the endless duality of masses-and-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us to come between us! We,' I cried passionately, 'must be a third principle, we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being new, can we fulfil the promise of our birth!' I had supporters, and none greater than Parvati-the-witch; but I felt them slipping away from me, each distracted by his or her own life… just as, in truth, I was being distracted by mine. It was as though our glorious congress was turning out to be more than another of the toys of childhood, as though long trousers were destroying what midnight had created… 'We must decide on a programme,' I pleaded, 'our own Five Year Plan, why not?' But I could hear, behind my anxious broadcast, the amused laughter of my greatest rival; and there was SMva in all our heads, saying scornfully, 'No, little rich boy; there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty, and have-and-lack, and right-and-left; there is only me-against-the-world! The world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams; the world, little Snotnose, is things. Things and their makers rule the world; look at Birla, and Tata, and all the powerful: they make things. For things, the country is run. Not for people. For things, America and Russia send aid; but five hundred million stay hungry. When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don't, you fight.' The Children, listening fascinatedly as we fought… or perhaps not, perhaps even our dialogue failed to hold their interest. And now I: 'But people are not tilings; if we come together, if we love each other, if we show that this, just this, this people-together, this Conference, this children-sticking-together-through-thick-and-thin, can be that third way…' But Shiva, snorting: 'Little rich boy, that's all just wind. All that importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-human-ity. Today, what people are is just another kind of thing.' And I, Saleem, crumbling: 'But… free will… hope… the great soul, otherwise known as mahatma, of mankind… and what of poetry, and art, and…' Whereupon SMva seized his victory: 'You see? I knew you'd turn out to be like that. Mushy, like overcooked rice. Sentimental as a grandmother. Go, who wants your rubbish? We all have lives to live. Hell's bells, cucumber-nose, I'm fed up with your Conference. It's got nothing to do with one single thing.'

You ask: there are ten-year-olds? I reply: Yes, but. You say: did ten-year-olds, or even almost-elevens, discuss the role of the individual in society? And the rivalry of capital and labour? Were the internal stresses of agrarian and industrialized zones made explicit? And conflicts in socio-cultural heritages? Did children of less than four thousand days discuss identity, and the inherent conflicts of capitalism? Having got through fewer than one hundred thousand hours, did they contrast Gandhi and Marxlenin, power and impotence? Was collectivity opposed to singularity? Was God killed by children? Even allowing for the truth of the supposed miracles, can we now believe that urchins spoke like old men with beards?

I say: maybe not in these words; maybe not in words at all, but in the purer language of thought; but yes, certainly, this is what was at the bottom of it all; because children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us. Poison, and after a gap of many years, a Widow with a knife.

In short: after my return to Buckingham Villa, even the salt of the midnight children lost its savour; there were nights, now, when I did not even bother to set up my nationwide network; and the demon lurking inside me (it had two heads) was free to get on with its devilment. (I never knew about Shiva's guilt or innocence of whore-murders; but such was the influence of Kali-Yuga that I, the good guy and natural victim, was certainly responsible for two deaths. First came Jimmy Kapadia; and second was Homi Catrack.)

If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it is murdered.

We all had our troubles in those, days. Homi Catrack had his idiot Toxy, and the Ibrahims had other worries: Sonny's father Ismail, after years of bribing judges and juries, was in danger of being investigated by the Bar Commission; and Sonny's uncle Ishaq, who ran the second-rate Embassy Hotel near Flora Fountain, was reputedly deep in debt to local gangsters, and worried constantly about being 'bumped off' (in those days, assassinations were becoming as quotidian as the heat)… so perhaps it isn't surprising that we had all forgotten about the existence of Professor Schaapsteker. (Indians grow larger and more powerful as they age; but Schaapsteker was a European, and his kind unfortunately fade away with the years, and,often completely disappear.)

But now, driven, perhaps, by my demon, my feet led me upstairs to the top floor of Buckingham Villa, where I found a mad old man, incredibly tiny and shrunken, whose narrow tongue darted constantly in and out between his lips-flicking, licking: the former searcher after antivenenes, assassin of horses, Sharpsticker sahib, now ninety-two and no longer of his eponymous Institute, but retired into a dark top-floor apartment filled with tropical vegetation and serpents pickled in brine. Age, failing to draw his teeth and poison-sacs, had turned him instead into the incarnation of snakehood; like other Europeans who stay too long, the ancient insanities of India had pickled his brains, so that he had come to believe the superstitions of the Institute orderlies, according to whom he was the last of a line which began when a king cobra mated with a woman who gave birth to a human (but serpentine) child… it seems that all my life I've only had to turn a corner to tumble into yet another new and fabulously transmogrified world. Climb a ladder (or even a staircase) and you find a snake awaiting you.

The curtains were always drawn; in Schaapsteker's rooms, the sun neither rose nor set, and no clocks ticked. Was it the demon, or our mutual sense of isolation which drew us together?… Because, in those days of the Monkey's ascendancy and the Conference's decline, I began to ascend the stairs whenever possible, and listen to the ravings of the crazy, sibilant old man.

His first greeting to me, when I stumbled into his unlocked lair, was: 'So, child-you have recovered from the typhoid.' The sentence stirred time like a sluggish dust-cloud and rejoined me to my one-year-old self; I remembered the story of how Schaapsteker had saved my life with snake-poison. And afterwards, for several weeks, I sat at his feet, and he revealed to me the cobra which lay coiled within myself.

Who listed, for my benefit, the occult powers of snakes? (Their shadows kill cows; if they enter a man's dreams, his wife conceives; if they are killed, the murderer's family is denied male issue for twenty generations.) And who described to me-with the aid of books and stuffed corpses-the cobra's constant foes? 'Study your enemies, child,' he hissed, 'or they will surely kill you.'… At Schaapsteker's feet, I studied the mongoose and the boar, the dagger-billed adjutant bird and the barasinha deer, which crushes snakes' heads under its feet; and the Egyptian ichneumon, and ibis; the four-feet-high secretary bird, fearless and hook-beaked, whose appearance and name made me think suspicious thoughts about my father's Alice Pereira; and the jackal buzzard, the stink cat, the honey ratel from the hills; the road runner, the peccary, and the formidable cangamba bird. Schaapsteker, from the depths of his senility, instructed me in life. 'Be wise, child. Imitate the action of the snake. Be secret; strike from the cover of a bush.'