Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

We left Bombay, finally, in February 1963; and on the day of our departure I took an old tin globe down to the garden and buried it amongst the cacti. Inside it: a Prime Minister's-letter, and a jumbo-sized front-page baby-snap, captioned 'Midnight's Child'… They may not be holy relics-I do not presume to compare the trivial memorabilia of my life with the Hazratbal hair of the Prophet, or the body of St Francis Xavier in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus-but they are all that has survived of my past: a squashed tin globe, a mildewed letter, a photograph. Nothing else, not even a silver spittoon. Apart from a Monkey-crushed planet, the only records are sealed in the closed books of heaven, Sidjeen and Illiyun, the Books of Evil and Good; at any rate, that's the story.

… Only when we were aboard S.S. Sabarmati, and anchored off the Rann of Kutch, did I remember old Schaapsteker; and wondered, suddenly, if anyone had told him we were going. I didn't dare to ask, for fear that the answer might be no; so as I thought of the demolition crew getting to work, and pictured the machines of destruction smashing into my father's office and my own blue room, pulling down the servants' spiral iron staircase and the kitchen in which Mary Pereira had stirred her fears into chutneys and pickles, massacring the verandah where my mother had sat with the child in her belly like a stone, I ako had an image of a mighty, swinging ball crashing into the domain of Sharpsticker sahib, and of the old crazy man himself, pale wasted flick-tongued, being exposed there on top of a crumbling house, amid falling towers and red-tiled roof, old Schaapsteker shrivelling ageing dying in the sunlight which he hadn't seen for so many years. But perhaps I'm dramatizing; I may have got all this from an old film called Lost Horizon, in which beautiful women shrivelled and died when they departed from Shangri-La.

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake. We arrived in Karachi on February 9th-and within months, my sister Jamila had been launched on the career which would earn her the names of 'Pakistan's Angel' and 'Bulbul-of-the-Faith'; we had left Bombay, but we gained reflected glory. And one more thing: although I had been drained-although no voices spoke in my head, and never would again-there was one compensation: namely that, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the astonishing delights of possessing a sense of smell.

It turned out to be a sense so acute as to be capable of distinguishing the glutinous reek of hypocrisy behind the welcoming smile with which my spinster aunt Alia greeted us at the Karachi docks. Irremediably embittered by my father's years-ago defection into the arms of her sister, my headmistress aunt had acquired the heavy-footed corpulence of undimmed jealousy; the thick dark hairs of her resentment sprouted through most of the pores of her skin. And perhaps she succeeded in deceiving my parents and Jamila with her spreading arms, her waddling run towards us, her cry of 'Ahmed bhai, at last! But better late than never!', her spider-like-and inevitably accepted-offers of hospitality; but I, who had spent much of my babyhood in the bitter mittens and soured pom-pom hats of her envy, who had been unknowingly infected with failure by the innocent-looking baby-things into which she had knitted her hatred, and who, moreover, could clearly remember what it was like to be possessed by revenge-lust, I, Saleem-the-drained, could smell the vengeful odours leaking out of her glands. I was, however, powerless to protest; we were swept into the Datsun of her vengeance and driven away down Bunder Road to her house at Guru Mandir-like flies, only more foolish, because we celebrated our captivity.

… But what a sense of smell it was! Most of us are conditioned, from the cradle onwards, into recognizing the narrowest possible spectrum of fragrances; I, however, had been incapable of smelling a thing all my life, and was accordingly ignorant of all olfactory taboos. As a result, I had a tendency not to feign innocence when someone broke wind-which landed me in a certain amount of parental trouble; more important, however, was my nasal freedom to inhale a very great deal more than the scents of purely physical origin with which the rest of the human race has chosen to be content. So, from the earliest days of my Pakistani adolescence, I began to learn the secret aromas of the world, the heady but quick-fading perfume of new love, and also the deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate. (It was not long after my arrival in the 'Land of the Pure' that I discovered within myself the ultimate impurity of sister-love; and the slow burning fires of my aunt filled my nostrils from the start.) A nose will give you knowledge, but not power-over-events; my invasion of Pakistan, armed (if that's the right word) only with a new manifestation of my nasal inheritance, gave me the powers of sniffing-out-the-truth, of smelling-what-was-in-the-air, of following trails; but not the only power an invader needs-the strength to conquer my foes.

I won't deny it: I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay. Set between the desert and bleakly saline creeks whose shores were littered with stunted mangroves, my new city seemed to possess an ugliness which eclipsed even my own; having grown too fast-its population had quadrupled since 1947-it had acquired the misshapen lumpiness of a gigantic dwarf. On my sixteenth birthday, I was given a Lambretta motor-scooter; riding the city streets on my windowless vehicle, I breathed in the fatalistic hopelessness of the slum dwellers and the smug defensiveness of the rich; I was sucked along the smell-trails of dispossession and also fanaticism, lured down a long underworld corridor at whose end was the door to Tai Bibi, the oldest whore in the world… but I'm running away with myself. At the heart of my Karachi was Alia Aziz's house, a large old building on Clayton Road (she must have wandered in it for years like a ghost with nobody to haunt), a place of shadows and yellowed paint, across which there fell, every afternoon, the long accusing shadow of the minaret of the local mosque. Even when, years later in the magicians' ghetto, I lived in another mosque's shade, a shade which was, at least for a time, a protective, unmenacing penumbra, I never lost my Karachi-born view of mosque-shadows, in which, it seemed to me, I could sniff the narrow, clutching, accusative odour of my aunt. Who bided her time; but whose vengeance, when it came, was crushing.

It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert's power. Oases shone in the tarmac of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst the hovels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city (whose only common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had started life as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient powers of apparition-mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by illusionary sand-dunes and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant 'submission', my new fellow-citizens exuded the flat boiled odours of acquiescence, which were depressing to a nose which had smelt-at the very last, and however briefly-the highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay.

Soon after our arrival-and, perhaps, oppressed by the mosque-shadowed air of the Clayton Road house-my father resolved to build us a new home. He bought a. plot of land in the smartest of the 'societies', the new housing development zones; and on my sixteenth birthday, Saleem acquired more than a Lambretta-I learned the occult powers of umbilical cords.