Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

And Bonzo died; General Zulfikar shed manly tears.

And Mary's confession faded until, because nobody spoke of it, it came to feel like a bad dream; to everyone except'me.

And (without any assistance from me) relations between India and Pakistan grew worse; entirely without my help, India conquered Goa-'the Portuguese pimple on the face of Mother India'; I sat on the sidelines and played no part in the acquisition of large-scale U.S. aid for Pakistan, nor was I to blame for Sino-India border skirmishes in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh; the Indian census of 1961 revealed a literacy level of 23.7 per cent, but I was not entered in its records. The untouchable problem remained acute; I did nothing to alleviate it; and in the elections of 1962, the All-India Congress won 361 out of 494 seats in the Lok Sabha, and over 61 per cent of all State Assembly seats. Not even in this could my unseen hand be said to have moved; except, perhaps, metaphorically: the status quo was preserved in India; in my life, nothing changed either.

Then, on September 1st, 1962, we celebrated the Monkey's fourteenth birthday. By this time (and despite my uncle's continued fondness for me) we were well-established as social inferiors, the hapless poor relations of the great Zulfikars; so the party was a skimpy affair. The Monkey, however, gave every appearance of enjoying herself. 'It's my duty, brother,' she told me. I could hardly believe my ears… but perhaps my sister had an intuition of her fate; perhaps she knew the transformation which lay in store for her; why should I assume that I alone have had the powers of secret knowledge?

Perhaps, then, she guessed that when the hired musicians began to play (shehnai and vina were present; sarangi and sarod had their turns; tabla and sitar performed their virtuosic cross-examinations) , Emerald Zulfikar would descend on her with callous elegance, demanding, 'Come on, Jamila, don't sit there like a melon, sing us a song like any good girl would!'

And that with this sentence my emerald-icy aunt would have begun, quite unwittingly, my sister's transformation from monkey into singer; because although she protested with the sullen clumsiness of fourteen-year-olds, she was hauled unceremoniously on to the musicians' dais by my organizing aunt; and although she looked as if she wished the floor would open up beneath her feet, she clasped her hands together; seeing no escape, the Monkey began to sing.

I have not, I think, been good at describing emotions-believing my audience to be capable of joining in; of imagining for themselves what I have been unable to re-imagine, so that my story becomes yours as well… but when my sister began to sing, I was certainly assailed by an emotion of such force that I was unable to understand it until, much later, it was explained to me by the oldest whore in the world. Because, with her first note, the Brass Monkey sloughed off her nick-name; she, who had talked to birds (just as, long ago in a mountain valley, her great-grandfather used to do), must have learned from songbirds the arts of song. With one good ear and one bad ear, I listened to her faultless voice, which at fourteen was the voice of a grown woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God; a voice which was afterwards compared to that of Muhammed's muezzin Bilal, issuing from the lips of a somewhat scrawny girl.

What I did not understand must wait to be told; let me record here that my sister earned her name at her fourteenth birthday party, and was known after that as Jamila Singer; and that I knew, as I listened to 'My Red Dupatta Of Muslin' and 'Shahbaz Qalandar', that the process which had begun during my first exile was nearing completion in my second; that, from now on, Jamila was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to her talent for ever.

Jamila sang-I, humbly, bowed my head. But before she could enter fully into her kingdom, something else had to happen: I had to be properly finished off.

What-chews-on-bones refuses to pause… it's only a matter of time. This is what keeps me going: I hold on to Padma. Padma is what matters-Padma-muscles, Padma's hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus… who, embarrassed, commands: 'Enough. Start. Start now.'

Yes, it must start with the cable. Telepathy set me apart; telecommunications dragged me down…

Amina Sinai was cutting verrucas out of her feet when the telegram arrived… once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: my mother, right ankle on left knee, was scooping corn-tissue out of the sole of her foot with a sharp-ended nail file on September 9th, 1962. And the time? The time matters, too. Well, then: in the afternoon. No, it's important to be more… At the stroke of three o'clock, which, even in the north, is the hottest time of day, a bearer brought her an envelope on a silver dish. A few seconds later, far away in New Delhi, Defence Minister Krishna Menon (acting on his own initiative, during Nehru's absence at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference) took the momentous decision to use force if necessary against the Chinese army on the Himalayan frontier. The Chinese must be ejected from the Thag La ridge,' Mr Menon said while my mother tore open a telegram. 'No weakness will be shown.' But this decision was a mere trifle when set beside the implications of my mother's cable; because while the eviction operation, code-named leghorn, was doomed to fail, and eventually to turn India into that most macabre of theatres, the Theatre of War, the cable was to plunge me secretly but surely towards the crisis which would end with my final eviction from my own inner world. While the Indian XXXIII Corps were acting on instructions passed from Menon to General Thapar, I, too, had been placed in great danger; as if unseen forces had decided that I had also overstepped the boundaries of what I was permitted to do or know or be; as though history had decided to put me firmly in my place. I was left entirely without a say in the matter; my mother read the telegram, burst into tears and said, 'Children, we're going home!'… after which, as I began by saying in another context, it was only a matter of time.

What the telegram said: please come quick sinaisahib suffered HEARTBOOT GRAVELY ILL SALAAMS ALICE PEREIRA.

'Of course, go at once, my darling,' my aunt Emerald told her sister, 'But what, my God, can be this heartboot?'

It is possible, even probable, that I am only the first historian to write the story of my undeniably exceptional life-and-times. Those who follow in my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work, this source-book, this Hadith or Purana or Grundrisse, for guidance and inspiration. I say to these future exegetes: when you come to examine the events which followed on from the 'heartboot cable', remember that at the very eye of the hurricane which was unleashed upon me-the sword, to switch metaphors, with which the coup de grace was applied-there lay a single unifying force. I refer to telecommunications.

Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my undoing; generously, however, I shall accuse nobody of conspiracy; although it would be easy to believe that the controllers of communication had resolved to regain their monopoly of the nation's air-waves…. I must return (Padma is frowning) to the banal chain of cause-and-effect: we arrived at Santa Cruz airport, by Dakota, on September 16th; but to explain the telegram, I must go further back in time.

If Alice Pereira had once sinned, by stealing Joseph D'Costa from her sister Mary, she had in these latter years gone a long way towards attaining redemption; because for four years she had been Ahmed Sinai's only human companion. Isolated on the dusty hillock which had once been Methwold's Estate, she had borne enormous demands on her accommodating good nature. He would make her sit with him until midnight while he drank djinns and ranted about the injustices of his life; he remembered, after years of forgetfulness, his old dream of translating and re-ordering the Quran, and blamed his family for emasculating him so that he didn't have the energy to begin such a task; in addition, because she was there, his anger often directed itself at her, taking the form of long tirades filled with gutter-oaths and the useless curses he had devised in the days of his deepest abstraction. She attempted to be understanding: he was a lonely man; his once-infallible relationship with the telephone had been destroyed by the economic vagaries of the times; his touch in financial matters had begun to desert him… he fell prey, too, to strange fears. When the Chinese road in the Aksai Chin region was discovered, he became convinced that the yellow hordes would be arriving at Methwold's Estate in a matter of days; and it was Alice who comforted him with ice-cold Coca-Cola, saying, 'No good worrying. Those Chinkies are too little to beat our jawans. Better you drink your Coke; nothing is going to change.'