Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

In the end he wore her out; she stayed with him, finally, only because she demanded and received large pay increases, and sent much of the money to Goa, for the support of her sister Mary; but on September 1st, she, too, succumbed to the blandishments of the telephone.

By then, she spent as much time on the instrument as her employer, particularly when the Narlikar women called up. The formidable Narlikars were, at that time, besieging my father, telephoning him twice a day, coaxing and persuading him to sell, reminding him that his position was hopeless, flapping around his head like vultures around a burning godown… on September 1st, like a long-ago vulture, they flung down an arm which slapped him in the face, because they bribed Alice Pereira away from him. Unable to stand him any more, she cried, 'Answer your own telephone! I'm off.'

That night, Ahmed Sinai's heart began to bulge. Overfull of hate resentment self-pity grief, it became swollen like a balloon, it beat too hard, skipped beats, and finally felled him like an ox; at the Breach Candy Hospital the doctors discovered that my father's heart had actually changed shape-a new swelling had pushed lumpily out of the lower left ventricle. It had, to use Alice's word, 'booted'.

Alice found him the next day, when, by chance, she returned to collect a forgotten umbrella; like a good secretary, she enlisted the power of telecommunications, telephoning an ambulance and tele-gramming us. Owing to censorship of the mails between India and Pakistan, the 'heartboot cable' took a full week to reach Amina Sinai.'Back-to-Bom!' I yelled happily, alarming airport coolies. 'Back-to-Born!' I cheered, despite everything, until the newly-sober Jamila said, 'Oh, Saleem, honestly, shoo!' Alice Pereira met us at the airport (a telegram had alerted her); and then we were in a real Bombay black-and-yellow taxi, and I was wallowing in the sounds of hot-channa-hot hawkers, the throng of camels bicycles and people people people, thinking how Mumbadevi's city made Rawalpindi look like a village, rediscovering especially the colours, the forgotten vividness of gulmohr and bougainvillaea, the livid green of the waters of the Mahalaxmi Temple 'tank', the stark black-and-white of the traffic policemen's sun umbrellas and the blue-and-yellowness of their uniforms; but most of all the blue blue blue of the sea… only the grey of my father's stricken face distracted me from the rainbow riot of the city, and made me sober up.

Alice Pereira left us at the hospital and went off to work for the Narlikar women; and now a remarkable thing happened. My mother Amina Sinai, jerked out of lethargy and depression and guilt-fogs and verruca-pain by the sight of my father, seemed miraculously to regain her youth; with all her old gifts of assiduity restored, she set about the rehabilitation of Ahmed, driven by an unstoppable will. She brought him home to the first-floor bedroom in which she had nursed him through the freeze; she sat with him day and night, pouring her strength into his body. And her love had its reward, because not only did Ahmed Sinai make a recovery so complete as to astound Breach Candy's European doctors, but also an altogether more wonderful change occurred, which was that, as Ahmed came to himself under Amina's care, he returned not to the self which had practised curses and wrestled djinns, but to the self he might always have been, filled with contrition and forgiveness and laughter and generosity and the finest miracle of all, which was love. Ahmed Sinai had, at long last, fallen in love with my mother.

And I was the sacrificial lamb with which they anointed their love.

They had even begun to sleep together again; and although my sister-with a flash of her old Monkey-self-said, 'In the same bed, Allah, Mi-Mi, how dirty!', I was happy for them; and even, briefly, happier for myself, because I was back in the land of the Midnight Children's Conference. While newspaper headlines marched towards war, I renewed my acquaintance with my miraculous fellows, not knowing how many endings were in store for me.

On October 9th-indian army poised for all-out effort-I felt able to convene the Conference (time and my own efforts had erected the necessary barrier around Mary's secret). Back into my head they came; it was a happy night, a night for burying old disagreements, for making our own all-out effort at reunion. We repeated, over and over again, our joy at being back together; ignoring the deeper truth-that we were like all families, that family reunions are more delightful in prospect than in reality, and that the time comes when all families must go their separate ways. On October 15th-unprovoked attack on iNDIA-the questionsI'd been dreading and trying not to provoke began: Why is Shiva not here? And: Why have you closed off part of your mind?

On October 20th, the Indian forces were defeated-thrashed-by the Chinese at Thag La ridge. An official Peking statement announced: In self-defence, Chinese frontier guards were compelled to strike back resolutely. But when, that same night, the children of midnight launched a concerted assault on me, I had no defence. They attacked on a broad front and from every direction, accusing me of secrecy, prevarication, high-handedness, egotism; my mind, no longer a parliament chamber, became the battleground on which they annihilated me. No longer 'big brother Saleem', I listened helplessly while they tore me apart; because, despite all their sound-and-fury, I could not unblock what I had sealed away; I could not bring myself to tell them Mary's secret. Even Parvati-the-witch, for so long my fondest supporter, lost patience with me at last. 'O, Saleem,' she said, 'God knows what that Pakistan has done to you; but you are badly changed.'

Once, long ago, the death of Mian Abdullah had destroyed another Conference, which had been held together purely by the strength of his will; now, as the midnight children lost faith in me, they also lost their belief in the thing I had made for them. Between October 20th and November 2Oth, I continued to convene-to attempt to convene-our nightly sessions; but they fled from me, not one by one, but in tens and twenties; each night, less of them were willing to tune in; each week, over a hundred of them retreated into private life. In the high Himalayas, Gurkhas and Rajputs fled in disarray from the Chinese army; and in the upper reaches of my mind, another army was also destroyed by things-bickerings, prejudices, boredom, selfishness-which I had believed too small, too petty to have touched them.

(But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued to believe-I continue now-that what-we-had-in-common would finally have outweighed what-drove-us-apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate responsibility for the end of the Children's Conference; because what destroyed all possibility of renewal was the love of Ahmed and Amina Sinai.)

… And Shiva? Shiva, whom I cold-bloodedly denied his birthright? Never once, in that last month, did I send my thoughts in search of him; but his existence, somewhere in the world, nagged away at the corners of my mind. Shiva-the-destroyer, Shiva Knoc-knees… he became, for me, first a stabbing twinge of guilt; then an obsession; and finally, as the memory of his actuality grew dull, he became a sort of principle; he came to represent, in my mind, all the vengefulness and violence and simultaneous-love-and-hate-of-Things in the world; so that even now, when I hear of drowned bodies floating like balloons on the Hooghly and exploding when nudged by passing boats; or trains set on fire, or politicians killed, or riots in Orissa or Punjab, it seems to me that the hand of Shiva lies heavily over all these things, dooming us to flounder endlessly amid murder rape greed war-that Shiva, in short, has made us who we are. (He, too, was born on the stroke of midnight; he, like me, was connected to history. The modes of connection-if I'm right in thinking they applied to me-enabled him, too, to affect the passage of the days.)