Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

There was applause, too, on the evening Jamila Singer (and family) was invited to President House to sing for the commander of pepper-pots. Ignoring reports in foreign magazines about embezzled money and Swiss bank accounts, we scrubbed ourselves until we shone; a family in the towel business is obliged to be spotlessly clean. Uncle Puffs gave his gold teeth an extra-careful polish; and in a large hall dominated by garlanded portraits of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Quaid-i-Azam, and of his assassinated friend and successor Liaquat Ali, a perforated sheet was held up and my sister sang. Jamila's voice fell silent at last; the voice of gold braid succeeded her brocade-bordered song. 'Jamila daughter,' we heard, 'your voice will be a sword for purity; it will be a weapon with which we shall cleanse men's souls.' President Ayub was, by his own admission, a simple soldier; he instilled in my sister the simple, soldierly virtues of faith-in-leaders and trust-in-God; and she, 'The President's will is the voice of my heart.' Through the hole in a perforated sheet, Jamila Singer dedicated herself to patriotism; and the diwan-i-khas, the hall of this private audience, rang with applause, polite now, not the wild wah-wahing of the Bambino crowd, but the regimented approbation of braided gongs-and-pips and the delighted clapping of weepy parents. 'I say!' Uncle Puffs whispered, 'Darn fine, eh?'

What I could smell, Jamila could sing. Truth beauty happiness pain: each had its separate fragrance, and could be distinguished by my nose; each, in Jamila's performances, could find its ideal voice. My nose, her voice: they were exactly complementary gifts; but they were growing apart. While Jamila sang patriotic songs, my nose seemed to prefer to linger on the uglier smells which invaded it: the bitterness of Aunt Alia, the hard unchanging sunk of my fellow-students' closed minds; so that while she rose into the clouds, I fell into the gutter.

Looking back, however, I think I was already in love with her, long before I was told… is there proof of Saleem's unspeakable sister-love? There is. Jamila Singer had one passion in common with the vanished Brass Monkey; she loved bread. Chapatis, parathas, tandoori nans? Yes, but. Well then: was yeast preferred? It was; my sister-despite patriotism-hankered constantly after leavened bread. And, in all Karachi, what was the only source of quality, yeasty loaves? Not a baker's; the best bread in the city was handed out through a hatch in an otherwise blind wall, every Thursday morning, by the sisters of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia. Each week, on my Lambretta scooter, I brought my sister the warm fresh loaves of nuns. Despite long snaking queues; making light of the overspiced, hot, dung-laden odour of the narrow streets around the nunnery; ignoring all other calls upon my time, I fetched the bread. Criticism was entirely absent from my heart; never once did I ask my sister whether this last relic of her old flirtation with Christianity might not look rather bad in her new role of Bulbul of the Faith…

Is it possible to trace the origins of unnatural love? Did Saleem, who had yearned after a place in the centre of history, become besotted with what he saw in his sister of his own hopes for life? Did much-mutilated no-longer-Snotnose, as broken a member of the Midnight Children's Conference as the knife-scarred beggar-girl Sundari, fall in love with the new wholeness of his sibling? Once the Mubarak, the Blessed One, did I adore in my sister the fulfilment of my most private dreams?… I shall say only that I was unaware of what had happened to me until, with a scooter between my sixteen-year-old thighs, I began to follow the spoors of whores.

While Alia smouldered; during the early days of Amina Brand towels; amid the apotheosis of Jamila Singer; when a split-level house, rising by command of an umbilical cord, was still far from complete; in the time of the late-flowering love of my parents; surrounded by the somehow barren certitudes of the land of the pure, Saleem Sinai came to terms with himself. I will not say he was not sad; refusing to censor my past, I admit he was as sullen, often as uncooperative, certainly as spotty as most boys of his age. His dreams, denied the children of midnight, became filled with nostalgia to the point of nausea, so that he often woke up gagging with the heavy musk of regret overpowering his senses; there were nightmares of numbers marching one two three, and of a tightening, throttling pair of prehensile knees… but there was a new gift, and a Lambretta scooter, and (though still unconscious) a humble, submissive love of his sister… jerking my narrator's eyes away from the described past, I insist that Saleem, then-as-now, succeeded in turning his attention towards the as-yet-undescribed future. Escaping, whenever possible, from a residence in which the acrid fumes of his aunt's envy made life unbearable, and also from a college filled with other equally dislikeable smells, I mounted my motorized steed and explored the olfactory avenues of my new city. And after we heard of my grandfather's death in Kashmir, I became even more determined to drown the past in the thick, bubbling scent-stew of the present… O dizzying early days before categorization! Formlessly, before I began to shape them, the fragrances poured into me: the mournful decaying fumes of animal faeces in the gardens of the Frere Road museum, the pustular body odours of young men in loose pajamas holding hands in Sadar evenings, the knife-sharpness of expectorated betel-nut and the bitter-sweet commingling of betel and opium: 'rocket paans' were sniffed out in the hawker-crowded alleys between Elphin-stone Street and Victoria Road. Camel-smells, car-smells, the gnat-like irritation of motor-rickshaw fumes, the aroma of contraband cigarettes and 'black-money', the competitive effluvia of the city's bus-drivers and the simple sweat of their sardine-crowded passengers. (One bus-driver, in those days, was so incensed at being overtaken by his rival from another company-the nauseating odour of defeat poured from his glands-that he took his bus round to his opponent's house at night, hooted until the poor fellow emerged, and ran him down beneath wheels reeking, like my aunt, of revenge.) Mosques poured over me the itr of devotion; I could smell the orotund emissions of power sent out by flag-waving Army motors; in the very hoardings of the cinemas I could discern the cheap tawdry perfumes of imported spaghetti Westerns and the most violent martial-arts films ever made. I was, for a time, like a drugged person, my head reeling beneath the complexities of smell; but then my overpowering desire for form asserted itself, and I survived.

Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorated; the borders were closed, so that we could not go to Agra to mourn my grandfather; Reverend Mother's emigration to Pakistan was also somewhat delayed. In the meantime, Saleem was working towards a general theory of smell: classification procedures had begun. I saw this scientific approach as my own, personal obeisance to the spirit of my grandfather… to begin with, I perfected my skill at distinguishing, until I could tell apart the infinite varieties of betel-nut and (with my eyes shut) the twelve different available brands of fizzy drink. (Long before the American commentator Herbert Feldman came to Karachi to deplore the existence of a dozen aerated waters in a city which had only three suppliers of bottled milk, I could sit blindfolded and tell Pakola from Hoffman's Mission, Citra Cola from Fanta. Feldman saw these drinks as a manifestation of capitalist imperialism; I, sniffing out which was Canada Dry and which 7-Up, unerringly separating Pepsi from Coke, was more interested in passing their subtle olfactory test. Double Kola and Kola Kola, Perri Cola and Bubble Up were blindly indentified and named.) Only when I was sure of my mastery of physical scents did I move on to those other aromas which only I could smell: the perfumes of emotions and all the thousand and one drives which make us human: love and death, greed and humility, have and have-not were labelled and placed in neat compartments of my mind.