Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

And more press headlines, stinging as mosquitoes: state government FLOUTS LAW! SABARMATI SCANDAL NOW A PUBLIC DISGRACE !… When I realized that the press had turned against the Commander, I knew he was done for.

The Supreme Court verdict: 'Guilty.'

Ismail Ibrahim said: 'Pardon! We appeal for pardon to the President of India!'

And now great matters are to be weighed in Rashtrapati Bhavan-behind the gates of President House, a man must decide if any man can be set above the law; whether the assassination of a wife's fancy-man should be set aside for the sake of a Naval career; and still higher things-is India to give her approval to the rule of law, or to the ancient principle of the overriding primacy of heroes? If Rama himself were alive, would we send him to prison for slaying the abductor of Sita? Great matters; my vengeful irruption into the history of my age was certainly no trivial affair.

The President of India said, 'I shall not pardon this man.'

Nussie Ibrahim (whose husband had lost his biggest case) wailed, 'Hai! Ai-hai!' And repeated an earlier observation: 'Amina sister, that good man going to prison-I tell you, it is the end of the world!'

A confession, trembling just beyond my lips: 'It was all my doing, Amma; I wanted to teach you a lesson. Amma, do not go to see other men, with Lucknow-work on their shirt; enough, my mother, of teacup-kissery! I am in long trousers now, and may speak to you as a man.' But it never spilled out of me; there was no need, because I heard my mother answering a wrong-number telephone call-and with a strange, subdued voice, speak into the mouthpiece as follows: 'No; nobody by that name here; please believe what I am telling you, and never call me again.'

Yes, I had taught my mother a lesson; and after the Sabarmati affair she never saw her Nadir-Qasim in the flesh, never again, not as long as she lived; but, deprived of him, she fell victim to the fate of all women in our family, namely the curse of growing old before her time; she began to shrink, and her hobble became more pronounced, and there was the emptiness of age in her eyes.

My revenge brought in its wake a number of unlooked-for developments; perhaps the most dramatic of these was the appearance in the gardens of Methwold's Estate of curious flowers, made out of wood and tin, and hand-painted with bright red lettering… the fatal signboards erected in all the gardens except our own, evidence that my powers exceeded even my own understanding, and that, having once been exiled from my two-storey hillock, I had now managed to send everyone else away instead.

Signboards in the gardens of Versailles Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci; signboards nodding to each other in the sea-breeze of the cocktail hour. On each signboard could be discerned the same seven letters, all bright red, all twelve inches high: for sale. That was the signboards' message. for sale-Versailles Villa, its owner dead on a toilet seat; the sale was handled by the ferocious nurse Bi-Appah on behalf of poor idiot Toxy; once the sale was complete, nurse and nursed vanished forever, and Bi-Appah held, on her lap, a bulging suitcase filled with banknotes… I don't know what happened to Toxy, but considering the avarice of her nurse, I'm sure it was nothing good… for sale, the Sabarmati apartment in Escorial Villa; Lila Sabarmati was denied custody of her children and faded out of our lives, while Eyeslice and Hairoil packed their bags and departed into the care of the Indian Navy, which had placed itself in loco parentis until their father completed his thirty years in jail… for sale, too, the Ibrahims' Sans Souci, because Ishaq Ibrahim's Embassy Hotel had been burned down by gangsters on the day of Commander Sabarmati's final defeat, as though the criminal classes of the city were punishing the lawyer's family for his failure; and then Ismail Ibrahim was suspended from practice, owing to certain proofs of professional misconduct (to quote the Bombay Bar Commission's report); financially 'embarrassed', the Ibrahims also passed out of our lives; and, finally forsale, the apartment of Cyrus Dubash and his mother, because during the hue and cry of the Sabarmati affair, and almost entirely unnoticed, the nuclear physicist had died his orange-pip-choking death, thus unleashing upon Cyrus the religious fanaticism of his mother and setting in motion the wheels of the period of revelations which will be the subject of my next little piece.

The signboards nodded in the gardens, which were losing their memories of goldfish and cocktail-hours and invading cats; and who took them down? Who were the heirs of the heirs of William Methwold?… They came swarming out of what had once been the residence of Dr Narlikar: fat-bellied and grossly competent women, grown fatter and more competent than ever on their tetrapod-given wealth (because those were the years of the great land reclamations) . The Narlikar women-from the Navy they bought Commander Sabarmati's flat, and from the departing Mrs Dubash her Cyrus's home; they paid Bi-Appah in used banknotes, and the Ibrahims' creditors were appeased by Narlikar cash.

My father, alone of all the residents, refused to sell; they offered him vast sums, but he shook his head. They explained their dream-a dream of razing the buildings to the ground and erecting on the two-storey hillock a mansion which would soar thirty stories into the skies, a triumphant pink obelisk, a signpost of their future; Ahmed Sinai, lost in abstractions, would have none of it. They told him, 'When you're surrounded by rubble you'll have to sell for a song'; he (remembering their tetrapodal perfidy) was unmoved.

Nussie-the-duck said, as she left, 'I told you so, Amina sister-the end! The end of the world!' This time she was right and wrong; after August 1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had, indeed, come to an end.

Padma-did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin orb, on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two cheap metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No, of course not; but I did. It was a world full of labels: Atlantic Ocean and Amazon and Tropic of Capricorn. And, at the North Pole, it bore the legend: made as england. By the August of the nodding signboards and the rapaciousness of the Narlikar women, this tin world had lost its stand; I found Scotch Tape and stuck the earth together at the Equator, and then, my urge for play overcoming my respect, began to use it as a football. In the aftermath of the Sabarmati affair, when the air was filled with the repentance of my mother and the private tragedies of Methwold's heirs, I clanked my tin sphere around the Estate, secure in the knowledge that the world was still in one piece (although held together by adhesive tape) and also at my feet… until, on the day of Nussie-the-duck's last eschatological lament-on the day Sonny Ibrahim ceased to be Sonny-next-door-my sister the Brass Monkey descended on me in an inexplicable rage, yelling, 'O God, stop your kicking, brother; you don't feel even a little bad today?' And jumping high in the air, she landed with both feet on the North Pole, and crushed the world into the dust of our driveway under her furious heels.

It seems the departure of Sonny Ibrahim, her reviled adorer, whom she had stripped naked in the middle of the road, had affected the Brass Monkey, after all, despite her lifelong denial of the possibility of love.

От Hare Khusro Hare Khusrovand От

Know, О unbleivers, that in the dark Midnights of celestial space in a time before Time lay the sphere of Blessed khusrovand!!! Even modern scientists now affirm that for generations they have lied to conceal from the People whose right it is to know of the Unquestionabel true existance of this holy home of truth!!! Leading Intellectuals the World Over, also in America, speak of the anti-religious conspiracy of reds, jews, etc., to hide these vital news! The Veil lifts now. Blessed lord khusro comes with Irrefutable Proofs. Read and believe!