Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Know that in true-existing Khusrovand lived Saints whose Spiritual Purity-Advancement was such that they had, through meditation &c., gained powers for the good of all, powers Beyond Imagining! They saw through steel, and could BEND GIRDERS with TEETH!!!

@@@now!

For 1st Time, such powers may be used

In Your Service! LORD KHUSRO is here!

Hear of the Fall of Khusrovand: how the red devil Bhimutha (black be his name) unleashed a fearsome Hail of Meteorites (which has been well chronicled by world observatories, but not Explained)… so horrible a rain of stone, that Fair Khusrovand was ruined & its Saints destroyd.

But noble Juraell and beauteous Khalila were wise. sacrificing themselves in an ecstasy of Kundalini Art, they saved the soul of their unborn son lord khusro. Entering True Oneness in a Supreme Yogic Trance (whose powers are now accepted in whole world!) they transformed their Noble Spirits into a Flashing Beam of kundalini life force energy light, of which today's wellknown laser is a common imitation & Copy. Along this beam, Soul of unborn Khusro flew, traversing the bottomless deeps of Celestial Space-Eternity, until by our luck! it came to our own Duniya (World) & lodged in Womb of a humble Parsee matron of Good Family.

So the Child was born & was of true Goodness & Unparalleled brain (giving the lie to that lie, that we are all Born Equal! Is a Crook the equal of Saint? of course not!!) But for some Time his true nature lay Hidden, until while portraying and Earth-Saint in a drama production (of which leading critics have said, The Purity of His Performance Defied The Blief), he came awake & knew who he was. Now has he taken up his True Name,

lord khusro khusrovani

* BHAGWAN *

& is Set Forth humbly with Ash on his Ascetic's Brow to heal Disease and End Droughts & fight the Legions of Bhimutha wherever they may Come. For be afraid! Bhimutha's rain of stone will come to us also! Do not heed lies of politicos poets Reds &cetera. put your trust in Only True Lord

@@@KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO

& send Donations to POBox 555, Head Post Office, Bombay-1. blessings! beauty!! truth!!! 0m Hare Khusro Hare Khusrovand От

Cyrus-the-great had a nuclear physicist for a father and, for a mother, a religious fanatic whose faith had gone sour inside her as a result of so many years of being suppressed by the domineering rationality of her Dubash; and when Cyrus's father choked on an orange from which his mother had forgotten to remove the pips, Mrs Dubash applied herself to the task of erasing her late husband from the personality of her son-of remaking Cyrus in her own strange image, Cyrus-the-great, Ватт a plate, In nineteen hundred and forty-eight-Cyrus the school prodigy-Cyrus as Saint Joan in Shaw's play-all these Cyruses, to whom we had grown accustomed, with whom we had grown up, now disappeared; in their place there emerged the overblown, almost bovinely placid figure of Lord Khusro Khusrovand. At the age often, Cyrus vanished from the Cathedral School and the meteoric rise of India's richest guru began. (There are as many versions of India as Indians; and, when set beside Cyrus's India, my own version seems almost mundane.)

Why did he let it happen? Why did posters cover the city, and advertisements fill the newspapers, without a peep out of the child genius?… Because Cyrus (although he used to lecture us, not un-mischievously, on the Parts of a Wooman's Body) was simply the most malleable of boys, and would not have dreamed of crossing his mother. For his mother, he put on a sort of brocade skirt and a turban; for the sake of filial duty, he permitted millions of devotees to kiss his little finger. In the name of maternal love, he truly became Lord Khusro, the most successful holy child in history; in no time at all he was being hailed by crowds half a million strong, and credited with miracles; American guitarists came to sit at his feet, and they all brought their cheque-books along. Lord Khusrovand acquired accountants, and tax havens, and a luxury liner called the Khusrovand Starship, and an aircraft-Lord Khusro's Astral Plane. And somewhere inside the faintly-smiling, benediction-scattering boy… in a place which was forever hidden by his mother's frighteningly efficient shadow (she had, after all, lived in the same house as the Narlikar women; how well did she know them? How much of their awesome competence leaked into her?), there lurked the ghost of a boy who had been my friend.

'That Lord Khusro?' Padma asks, amazed. 'You mean that same mahaguru who drowned at sea last year?' Yes, Padma; he could not walk on water; and very few people who have come into contact with me have been vouchsafed a natural death… let me confess that I was somewhat resentful of Cyrus's apotheosis. 'It should have been me,' I even thought, 'I am the magic child; not only my primacy at home, but even my true innermost nature, has now been purloined.'

Padma: I never became a 'mahaguru'; millions have never seated themselves at my feet; and it was my own fault, because one day, many years ago, I had gone to hear Cyrus's lecture on the Parts of a Wooman's Body.

'What?' Padma shakes her head, puzzled. 'What's this now?'

The nuclear physicist Dubash possessed a beautiful marble statuette-a female nude-and with the help of this figurine, his son would give expert lectures on female anatomy to an audience of sniggering boys. Not free; Cyrus-the-great charged a fee. In exchange for anatomy, he demanded comic-books-and I, in all innocence, gave him a copy of that most precious of Superman comics, the one containing the frame-story, about the explosion of the planet Krypton and the rocket-ship in which Jor-El his father despatched him through space, to land on earth and be adopted by the good, mild Kents… did nobody else see it? In all those years, did no person understand that what Mrs Dubash had done was to rework and reinvent the most potent of all modern myths-the legend of the coming of the superman? I saw the hoardings trumpeting the coming of Lord Khusro Khusrovand Bhagwan; and found myself obliged, yet again, to accept responsibility for the events of my turbulent, fabulous world.

How I admire the leg-muscles of my solicitous Padma! There she squats, a few feet from my table, her sari hitched up in fisherwoman-fashion. Calf-muscles show no sign of strain; thigh-muscles, rippling through sari-folds, display their commendable stamina. Strong enough to squat forever, simultaneously defying gravity and cramp, my Padma listens unhurriedly to my lengthy tale; О mighty pickle-woman! What reassuring solidity, how comforting an air of permanence, in her biceps and triceps… for my admiration extends also to her arms, which could wrestle mine down in a trice, and from which, when they enfold me nightly in futile embraces, there is no escape. Past our crisis now, we exist in perfect harmony: I recount, she is recounted to; she ministers, and I accept her ministrations with grace. I am, in fact, entirely content with the uncomplaining thews of Padma Mangroli, who is, unaccountably, more interested in me than my tales.

Why I have chosen to expound on Padma's musculature: these days, it's to those muscles, much as to anything or-one (for instance, my son, who hasn't even learned to read as yet), that I'm telling my story. Because I am rushing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible, and overstatements, and jarring alterations in tone; I'm racing the cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have already been made, and that, as my decay accelerates (my writing speed is having trouble keeping up), the risk of unreliability grows… in this condition, I am learning to use Padma's muscles as my guides. When she's bored, I can detect in her fibres the ripples of uninterest; when she's unconvinced, there is a tic which gets going in her cheek. The dance of her musculature helps to keep me on the rails; because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe… Padma, having accepted the story of Cyrus-the-great, gives me the courage to speed on, into the worst time of my eleven-year-old life (there is, was, worse to come)-into the August-and-September when revelations flowed faster than blood.