Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

There was a giant bed with a floating mosquito-net caught in a stream of colourless light from the maddening, midnight moon; Saleem moved towards it, and then stopped, because he had seen, at the window, the figure of a man trying to climb into the room. Mutasim the Handsome, made shameless by his infatuation and the hashashin wind, had resolved to look at Jamila's face, no matter what the cost .. .And Saleem, invisible in the shadows of the room cried out: 'Hands up! Or I shoot!' Saleem was bluffing; but Mutasim, whose hands were on the window sill, supporting his full weight, did not know that, and was placed in a quandary: to hang on and be shot, or let go and fall? He attempted to argue back, 'You shouldn't be here yourself,' he said, 'I'll tell Amina Begum.' He had recognized the voice of his oppressor; but Saleem pointed out the weakness of his position, and Mutasim, pleading, 'Okay, only don't fire,' was permitted to descend the way he'd come. After that day, Mutasim persuaded his father to make a formal proposal of marriage to Jamila's parents; but she, who had been born and raised without love, retained her old hatred of all who claimed to love her, and turned him down. He left Kif and came to Karachi, but she would not entertain his importunate proposals; and eventually he joined the Army and became a martyr in the war of 1965.

The tragedy of Mutasim the Handsome, however, is only a subplot in our story; because now Saleem and his sister were alone, and she awakened by the exchange between the two youths, asked, 'Saleem? What is happening?'

Saleem approached his sister's bed; his hand sought hers; and parchment was pressed against skin. Only now did Saleem, his tongue loosened by the moon and the lust-drenched breeze, abandon all notions of purity and confess his own love to his open-mouthed sister.

There was a silence; then she cried, 'Oh, no, how can you-', but the magic of the parchment was doing battle with the strength of her hatred of love; so although her body grew stiff and jerky as a wrestler's, she listened to him explaining that there was no sin, he had worked it all out, and after all, they were not truly brother and sister; the blood in his veins was not the blood in hers; in the breeze of that insane night he attempted to undo all the knots which not even Mary Pereira's confession had succeeded in untying; but even as he spoke he could hear his words sounding hollow, and realized that although what he was saying was the literal truth, there were other truths which had become more important because they had been sanctified by time; and although there was no need for shame or horror, he saw both emotions on her forehead, he smelt them on her skin, and, what was worse, he could feel and smell them in and upon himself. So, in the end, not even the magic parchment of Mutasim the Handsome was powerful enough to bring Saleem Sinai and Jamila Singer together; he left her room with bowed head, followed by her deer-startled eyes; and in time the effects of the spell faded altogether, and she took a dreadful revenge. As he left the room the corridors of the palace were suddenly filled with the shriek of a newly-affianced princess, who had awoken from a dream of her wedding-night in which her marital bed had suddenly and unaccountably become awash in rancid yellow liquid; afterwards, she made inquiries, and when she learned the prophetic truth of her dream, resolved never to reach puberty while Zafar was alive, so that she could stay in her palatial bedroom and avoid the foul-smelling horror of his weakness.

The next morning, the two badmashes of the Combined Opposition Party awoke to find themselves back in their own beds; but when they had dressed, they opened the door of their chamber to find two of the biggest soldiers in Pakistan outside it, standing peacefully with crossed rifles, barring the exit. The badmashes shouted and wheedled, but the soldiers stayed in position until the polls were closed; then they quietly disappeared. The badmashes sought out the Nawab, finding him in his exceptional rose-garden; they waved their arms and raised their voices; travesty-of-justice was mentioned, and electoral-jiggery-pokery; also chicanery; but the Nawab showed them thirteen new varieties of Kin rose, crossbred by himself. They ranted on-death-of-democracy, autocratic-tyranny-until he smiled gently, gently, and said, 'My friends, yesterday my daughter was betrothed to Zafar Zulfikar; soon, I hope, my other girl will wed our President's own dear son. Think, then-what dishonour for me, what scandal on my name, if even one vote were cast in Kif against my future relative! Friends, I am a man to whom honour is of concern; so stay in my house, eat, drink; only do not ask for what I cannot give.'

And we all lived happily… at any rate, even without the traditional last-sentence fiction of fairy-tales, my story does indeed end in fantasy; because when Basic Democrats had done their duty, the newspapers-Jang, Dawn, Pakistan Times-announced a crushing victory for the President's Muslim League over the Mader-i-Millat's Combined Opposition Party; thus proving to me that I have been only the humblest of jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence-that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

A little bird whispers in my ear: 'Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth.' I accept the criticism; I know, I know. And, years later, the Widow knew. And Jamila: for whom what-had-been-sanctified-as-truth (by Time, by habit, by a grandmother's pronouncement, by lack of imagination, by a father's acquiescence) proved more believable than what she knew to be so.

What is waiting to be told: the return of ticktock. But now time is counting down to an end, not a birth; there is, too, a weariness to be mentioned, a general fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will be the only solution, because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply run out of steam, and then there's nothing for it but to finish with them.

How a piece fell out of the moon, and Saleem achieved purity… the clock is ticking now; and because all countdowns require a zero, let me state that the end came on September 22nd, 1965; and that the precise instant of the arrival-at-zero was, inevitably, the stroke of midnight. Although the old grandfather clock in my aunt Alia's house, which kept accurate time but always chimed two minutes late, never had a chance to strike.

My grandmother Naseem Aziz arrived in Pakistan in mid-1964, leaving behind an India in which Nehru's death had precipitated a bitter power struggle. Morarji Desai, the Finance Minister, and Jagjivan Ram, most powerful of the untouchables, united in their determination to prevent the establishment of a Nehru dynasty; so Indira Gandhi was denied the leadership. The new Prime Minister was Lal Bahadur Shastri, another member of that generation of politicians who seemed to have been pickled in immortality; in the case of Shastri, however, this was only maya, illusion. Nehru and Shastri have both fully proved their mortality; but there are still plenty of the others left, clutching Time in their mummified fingers and refusing to let it move… in Pakistan, however, the clocks ticked and locked.

Reverend Mother did not overtly approve of my sister's career; it smacked too much of film-stardom. 'My family, whatsitsname,' she sighed to Pia mumani, 'is even less controllable than the price of gas.' Secretly, however, she may have been impressed, because she respected power and position and Jamila was now so exalted as to be welcome in the most powerful and best-placed houses in the land… my grandmother settled in Rawalpindi; however, with a strange show of independence, she chose not to live in the house of General Zulfikar. She and my aunt Pia moved into a modest bungalow in the old part of town; and by pooling their savings, purchased a concession on the long-dreamed-of petrol pump.