Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

'An Anglo?' Padma exclaims in horror. 'What are you telling me? You are
an Anglo Indian? Your name is not your own?'
'I am Saleem Sinai,' I told her, 'Snotnose, Stainface, Sniffer, Baldy, Piec
e of the Moon. Whatever do you mean not my own?'
'All the time,' Padma wails angrily, 'you tricked me. Your mother, you calle
d her; your father, your grandfather, your aunts. What thing are you that yo
u don't even care to tell the truth about who your parents were? You don't c
are that your mother died giving you life? That your father is maybe still a
live somewhere, penniless, poor? You are a monster or what?'
No: I'm no monster. Nor have I been guilty of trickery. I provided clues… b
ut there's something more important than that. It's this: when we eventuall
y discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no differ
ence!. I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collec
tive failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our
way out of our pasts… if you had asked my father (even him, despite all tha
t happened!) who his son was, nothing on earth would have induced him to po
int in the direction of the accordionist's knock kneed, unwashed boy. Even
though he would grow up, this Shiva, to be something of a hero.
So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new
India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partia
lly the offspring of their parents the children of midnight were also the chi
ldren of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Espec
ially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.
'Enough,' Padma sulks. 'I don't want to listen.' Expecting one type of two hea
ded child, she is peeved at being offered another. Nevertheless, whether she i
s listening or not, I have tilings to record.
Three days after my birth, Mary Pereira was consumed by remorse. Joseph D'
Costa, on the run from the searching police cars, had clearly abandoned he
r sister Alice as well as Mary; and the little plump woman unable, in her
fright, to confess her crime realized that she had been a fool. 'Donkey fr
om somewhere!' she cursed herself; but she kept her secret. She decided, h
owever, to make amends of a kind. She gave up her job at the Nursing Home
and approached Amina Sinai with, 'Madam, I saw your baby just one time and
fell in love. Are you needing an ayah?' And Amina, her eyes shining with
motherhood, 'Yes.' Mary Pereira ('You might as well call her your mother,'
Padma interjects, proving she is still interested, 'She made you, you kno
w'), from that moment on, devoted her life to bringing me up, thus binding
the rest of her days to the memory of her crime.
On August 20th, Nussie Ibrahim followed my mother into the Pedder Road clin
ic, and little Sonny followed me into the world but he was reluctant to eme
rge; forceps were obliged to reach in and extract him; Dr Bose, in the heat