Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

What, pickled in brine, sat for sixteen years in my father's almirah, awaiting just such a day? What, floating like a water-snake in an old pickle-jar, accompanied us on our sea-journey and ended up buried in hard, barren Karachi-earth? What had once nourished life in a womb-what now infused earth with miraculous life, and gave birth to a split-level, American-style modern bungalow?… Eschewing these cryptic questions, I explain that, on my sixteenth birthday, my family (including Alia aunty) assembled on our plot of Korangi Road earth; watched by the eyes of a team of labourers and the beard of a mullah, Ahmed handed Saleem a pickaxe; I drove it inaugurally into the ground. 'A new beginning,' Amina said, 'Inshallah, we shall all be new people now.' Spurred on by her noble and unattainable desire, a workman rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a pickle-jar was produced. Brine was discarded on the thirsty ground; and what-was-left-inside received the mullah's blessings. After which, an umbilical cord-was it mine? Or Shiva's?-was implanted in the earth; and at once, a house began to grow. There were sweetmeats and soft drinks; the mullah, displaying remarkable hunger, consumed thirty-nine laddoos; and Ahmed Sinai did not once complain of the expense. The spirit of the buried cord inspired the workmen; but although the foundations were dug very deep, they would not prevent the house from falling down before we ever lived in it.

What I surmised about umbilical cords: although they possessed the power of growing houses, some were evidently better at the job than others. The city of Karachi proved my point; clearly constructed on top of entirely unsuitable cords, it was full of deformed houses, the stunted hunchback children of deficient lifelines, houses growing mysteriously blind, with no visible windows, houses which looked like radios or air-conditioners or jail-cells, crazy top-heavy edifices which fell over with monotonous regularity, like drunks; a wild proliferation of mad houses, whose inadequacies as living quarters were exceeded only by their quite exceptional ugliness. The city obscured the desert; but either the cords, or the infertility of the soil, made it grow into something grotesque.

Capable of smelling sadness and joy, of sniffing out intelligence and stupidity with my eyes closed, I arrived at Karachi, and adolescence-understanding, of course, that the subcontinent's new nations and I had all left childhood behind; that growing pains and strange awkward alterations of voice were in store for us all. Drainage censored my inner life; my sense of connection remained undrained.

Saleem invaded Pakistan armed only with a hypersensitive nose; but, worst of all, he invaded from the wrong direction! All successful conquests of that part of the world have begun in the north; all conquerors have come by land. Sailing ignorantly against the winds of history, I reached Karachi from the south-east, and by sea. What followed should not, I suppose, have surprised me.

With hindsight, the advantages of sweeping down from the north are self-evident. From the north came the Umayyad generals, Hajjaj bin Yusuf and Muhammad bin Qasim; also the Ismailis. (Honeymoon Lodge, where it is said Aly Khan sojourned with Rita Hayworth, overlooked our plot of umbilicized earth; rumour has it that the film-star created much scandal by wandering in the grounds dressed in a series of fabulous, gauzy, Hollywood negligees.) O ineluctable superiority of northernness! From which direction did Mahmud of Ghazni descend upon these Indus plains, bringing with him a language boasting no fewer than three forms of the letter S? The inescapable answer: se, sin and swad were northern intruders. And Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, who overthrew the Ghaznavids and established the Delhi Caliphate? Sam Ghuri's son, too, moved southwards on his progress.

And Tughlaq, and the Mughal Emperors… but I've made my point. It remains only to add that ideas, as well as armies, swept south south south from the northern heights: the legend of Sikandar But-Shikan, the Iconoclast of Kashmir, who at the end of the fourteenth century destroyed every Hindu temple in the Valley (establishing a precedent for my grandfather), travelled down from the hills to the river-plains; and five hundred years later the mujahideen movement of Syed Ahmad Barilwi followed the well-trodden trail. Barilwi's ideas: self-denial, hatred-of-Hindus, holy war… philosophies as well as kings (to cut this short) came from the opposite direction to me.

Saleem's parents said, 'We must all become new people'; in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah's (like India's first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country whose population of deities rivalled the numbers of its people, so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body was to show a marked preference for the impure. Mopla-like, I was doomed to be a misfit; but, in the end, purity found me out, and even I, Saleem, was cleansed of my misdeeds.

After my sixteenth birthday, I studied history at my aunt Alia's college; but not even learning could make me feel a part of this country devoid of midnight children, in which my fellow-students took out processions to demand a stricter, more Islamic society-proving that they had contrived to become the antitheses of students everywhere else on earth, by demanding more-rules-not-less. My parents, however, were determined to put down roots; although Ayub Khan and Bhutto were forging an alliance with China (which had so recently been our enemy), Ahmed and Amina would listen to no criticisms of their new home; and my father bought a towel factory.

There was a new brilliance about my parents in those days; Amina had lost her guilt-fog, her verrucas seemed not to be playing up any more; while Ahmed, although still whitened, had felt the freeze of his loins thawing under the heat of his newfound love for his wife. On some mornings, Amina had toothmarks on her neck; she giggled uncontrollably at times, like a schoolgirl. 'You two, honestly,' her sister Alia said, 'Like honeymooners or I don't know what.' But I could smell what was hidden behind Alia's teeth; what stayed inside when the friendly words came out… Ahmed Sinai named his towels after his wife: Amina Brand.

'Who are these multi-multis? These Dawoods, Saigols, Haroons?' he cried gaily, dismissing the richest families in the land. 'Who are Valikas or Zulfikars? I could eat them ten at a time. You wait!', he promised, 'In two years the whole world will be wiping itself on an Amina Brand cloth. The finest terry-cloth! The most modern machines! We shall make the whole world clean and dry; Dawoods and Zulfikars will beg to know my secret; and I will say, yes, the towels are high-quality; but the secret is not in the manufacturing; it was love that conquered all.' (I discerned, in my father's speech, the lingering effects of the optimism virus.)

Did Amina Brand conquer the world in the name of cleanliness (which is next to…)? Did Valikas and Saigols come to ask Ahmed Sinai, 'God, we're stumped, yaar, how'd you do it?' Did high-quality terry-cloth, in patterns devised by Ahmed himself-a little gaudy, but never mind, they were born of love-wipe away the moist-ness of Pakistanis and export-markets alike? Did Russians Englishmen Americans wrap themselves in my mother's immortalized name?… The story of Amina Brand must wait awhile; because the career of Jamila Singer is about to take off; the mosque-shadowed house on Clayton Road has been visited by Uncle Puffs.

His real name was Major (Retired) Alauddin Latif; he had heard about my sister's voice from 'my darn good friend General Zulfikar; use to be with him in the Border Patrol Force back in '47.' He turned up at Alia Aziz's house shortly after Jamila's fifteenth birthday, beaming and bouncing, revealing a mouth filled with solid gold teeth. 'I'm a simple fellow,' he explained, 'like our illustrious President. I keep my cash where it's safe.' Like our illustrious President, the Major's head was perfectly spherical; unlike Ayub Khan, Latif had left the Army and entered show-business. 'Pakistan's absolute number-one impresario, old man,' he told my father. 'Nothing to it but organization; old Army habit, dies darn hard.' Major Latif had a proposition: he wanted to hear Jamila sing, 'And if she's two per cent as good as I'm told, my good sir, I'll make her famous! Oh, yes, overnight, certainly! Contacts: that's all it takes; contacts and organization; and yours truly Major (Retired) Latif has the lot. Alauddin Latif,' he stressed, flashing goldly at Ahmed Sinai, 'Know the story? I just rub my jolly old lamp and out pops the genie bringing fame and fortune. Your girl will be in darn good hands. Dam good.'