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

gnarled, net mending sailor did he have a walrus moustache? whose right arm,
fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid ta
les rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh and who else? Because ther
e was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross legged in frilly c
ollar and button down tunic… and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthda
y party in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child wi
th a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor sat
in a sky blue room, beneath the pointing finger, and copied the attire of th
e English milords… 'Look, how chweet! Lila Sabarmati exclaimed to my eternal
mortification, 'It's like he's just stepped out of the picture?
In a picture hanging on a bedroom wall, I sat beside Walter Raleigh and fol
lowed a fisherman's pointing finger with my eyes; eyes straining at the hor
izon, beyond which lay what? my future, perhaps; my special doom, of which
I was aware from the beginning, as a shimmering grey presence in that sky b
lue room, indistinct at first, but impossible to ignore… because the finger
pointed even further than that shimmering horizon, it pointed beyond teak
frame, across a brief expanse of sky blue wall, driving my eyes towards ano
ther frame, in which my inescapable destiny hung, forever fixed under glass
: here was a jumbo sized baby snap with its prophetic captions, and here, b
eside it, a letter on high quality vellum, embossed with the seal of state
the lions of Sarnath stood above the dharma chakra on the Prime Minister's
missive, which arrived, via Vishwanath the post boy, one week after my phot
ograph appeared on the front page of the Times of India.
Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal Nehru
wrote: 'Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident
of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of I
ndia which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with
the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.'
And Mary Pereira, awestruck, 'The Government, Madam? It will be keeping on
e eye on the boy? But why, Madam? What's wrong with him?' And Amina, not u
nderstanding the note of panic in her ayah's voice: 'It's just a way of pu
tting things, Mary; it doesn't really mean what it says.' But Mary does no
t relax; and always, whenever she enters the baby's room, her eyes flick w
ildly towards the letter in its frame; her eyes look around her, trying to
see whether the Government is watching; wondering eyes: what do they know
? Did somebody see?… As for me, as I grew up, I didn't quite accept my mot
her's explanation, either; but it lulled me into a sense of false security
; so that, even though something of Mary's suspicions had leaked into me,
I was still taken by surprise when…
Perhaps the fisherman's finger was not pointing at the letter in the frame;
because if one followed it even further, it led one out through the window,
down the two storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy Pools,