Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Despite streaming eyes and puffed-up sinuses, I was happy; despite even the end of the Children's Conference, I was basking in the new glow of happiness which permeated Buckingham Villa; so when my mother suggested, 'Let's go and celebrate! A picnic, children, you'd like that?' I naturally agreed with alacrity. It was the morning of November 21st; we helped make sandwiches and parathas; we stopped at a fizzy-drinks shop and loaded ice in a tin tub and Cokes in a crate into the boot of our Rover; parents in the front, children in the back, we set off. Jamila Singer sang for us as we drove.

Through inflamed sinuses, I asked: 'Where are we going? Juhu? Elephanta? Marve? Where?' And my mother, smiling awkwardly: 'Surprise; wait and see.' Through streets filled with relieved, rejoicing crowds we drove… 'This is the wrong way,' I exclaimed; 'This isn't the way to a beach?' My parents both spoke at once, reassuringly, brightly: 'Just one stop first, and then we're off; promise.'

Telegrams recalled me; radiograms frightened me; but it was a telephone which booked the date time place of my undoing… and my parents lied to me.

… We halted in front of an unfamiliar building in Carnac Road. Exterior: crumbling. All its windows: blind. 'You coming with me, son?' Ahmed Sinai got out of the car; I, happy to be accompanying my father on his business, walked jauntily beside him. A brass plate on the doorway: Ear Nose Throat Clinic. And I, suddenly alarmed: 'What's this, Abba? Why have we come…' And my father's hand, tightening on my shoulder-and then a man in a white coat-and nurses-and 'Ah yes Mr. Sinai so this is young Saleem-right on time-fine, fine'; while I, 'Abba, no-what about the picnic-'; but doctors are steering me along now, my father is dropping back, the man in the coat calls to him, 'Shan't be long-damn good news about the war, no?' And the nurse, 'Please accompany me for dressing and anaesthesia.'

Tricked! Tricked, Padma! I told you: once, picnics tricked me; and then there was a hospital and a room with a hard bed and bright hanging lamps and me crying, 'No no no,' and the nurse, 'Don't be stupid now, you're almost a grown man, lie down,' and I, remembering how nasal passages had started everything in my head, how nasal fluid had been sniffed upupup into somewhere-that-nosefluid-shouldn't-go, how .the connection had been made which released my voices, was kicking yelling so that they had to hold me down, 'Honestly,' the nurse said, 'such a baby, I never saw.'

And so what began in a washing-chest ended on an operating table, because I was held down hand-and-foot and a man saying 'You won't feel a thing, easier than having your tonsils out, get those sinuses fixed in no time, complete clear-out,' and me 'No please no,' but the voice continued, 'I'll put this mask on you now, just count to ten.'

Count. The numbers marching one two three.

Hiss of released gas. The numbers crushing me four five six.

Faces swimming in fog. And still the tumultuous numbers, I was crying, I think, the numbers pounding seven eight nine.

Ten.

'Good God, the boy's still conscious. Extraordinary. We'd better try another-can you hear me? Saleem, isn't it? Good chap, just give me another ten!' Can't catch me. Multitudes have teemed inside my head. The master of the numbers, me. Here they go again 'leven twelve.

But they'll never let up until… thirteen fourteen fifteen… O God O God the fog dizzy and falling back back back, sixteen, beyond war and pepperpots, back back, seventeen eighteen nineteen.

Twen

There was a washing-chest and a boy who sniffed too hard. His mother undressed and revealed a Black Mango. Voices came, which were not the voices of Archangels. A hand, deafening the left ear. And what grew best in the heat: fantasy, irrationality, lust. There was a clocktower refuge, and cheatery-in-class. And love in Bombay caused a bicycle-accident; horn-temples entered forcep-hollows, and five hundred and eighty-one children visited my head. Midnight's children: who may have been the embodiment of the hope of freedom, who may also have been freaks-who-ought-to-be-finished-off. Parvati-the-witch, most loyal of all, and Shiva, who became a principle of life. There was a question of purpose, and the debate between ideas and things. There were knees and nose and nose and knees.

Quarrels, began, and the adult world infiltrated the children's; there was selfishness and snobbishness and hate. And the impossibility of a third principle; the fear of coming-to-nothing-after-all began to grow. And what nobody said: that the purpose of the five hundred and eighty-one lay in their destruction; that they had come, in order to come to nothing. Prophecies were ignored when they spoke to this effect.

And revelations, and the closing of a mind; and exile, and four-years-after return; suspicions growing, dissension breeding, departures in twenties and tens. And, at the end, just one voice left; but optimism lingered-what-we-had-in-common retained the possibility of overpowering what-forced-us-apart.

Until:

Silence outside me. A dark room (blinds down). Can't see anything (nothing there to see).

Silence inside me. A connection broken (for ever). Can't hear anything (nothing there to hear).

Silence, like a desert. And a clear, free nose (nasal passages full of air). Air, like a vandal, invading my private places.

Drained. I have been drained. The parahamsa, grounded.

(For good.)

O, spell it out, spell it out: the operation whose ostensible purpose was the draining of my inflamed sinuses and the once-and-for-all clearing of my nasal passages had the effect of breaking whatever connection had been made in a washing-chest; of depriving me of nose-given telepathy; of banishing me from the possibility of midnight children.

Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles. Sinai contains Ibn Sina, master magician, Sufi adept; and also Sin the moon, the ancient god of Hadhramaut, with his own mode of connection, his powers of action-at-a-distance upon the tides of the world. But Sin is also the letter S, as sinuous as a snake; serpents lie coiled within the name. And there is also the accident of transliteration-Sinai, when in Roman script, though not in Nastaliq, is also the name of the place-of-revelation, of put-off-thy-shoes, of commandments and golden calves; but when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert-of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end.

In Arabia-Arabia Deserta-at the time of the prophet Muhammad, other prophets also preached: Maslama of the tribe of the Banu Hanifa in the Yamama, the very heart of Arabia; and Hanzala ibn Safwan; and Khalid ibn Sinan. Maslama's God was ar-Rahman, 'the Merciful'; today Muslims pray to Allah, ar-Rahman. Khalid ibn Sinan was sent to the tribe of 'Abs; for a time, he was followed, but then he was lost. Prophets are not always false simply because they are overtaken, and swallowed up, by history. Men of worth have always roamed the desert.

'Wife,' Ahmed Sinai said, 'this country is finished.' After ceasefire and drainage, these words returned to haunt him; and Amina began to persuade him to emigrate to Pakistan, where her surviving sisters already were, and to which her mother would go after her father's death. 'A fresh start,' she suggested, 'Janum, it would be lovely. What is left for us on this God-forsaken hill?'

So in the end Buckingham Villa was delivered into the clutches of the Narlikar women, after all; and over fifteen years late, my family moved to Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. Ahmed Sinai left very little behind; there are ways of transmitting money with the help of multi-national companies, and my father knew those ways. And I, although sad to leave the city of my birth, was not unhappy about moving away from the city in which Shiva lurked somewhere like a carefully-concealed land-mine.