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

Intriguing features of my early life: large and unbeautiful as I was, it ap
pears I was not content. From my very first days I embarked upon an heroic
programme of self enlargement. (As though I knew that, to carry the burdens
of my future life, I'd need to be pretty big.) By mid September I had drai
ned my mother's not inconsiderable breasts of milk. A wet nurse was briefly
employed but she retreated, dried out as a desert after only a fortnight,
accusing Baby Saleem of trying to bite off her nipples with his toothless g
ums. I moved on to the bottle and downed vast quantities of compound: the b
ottle's nipples suffered, too, vindicating the complaining wet nurse. Baby
book records were meticulously kept; they reveal that I expanded almost vis
ibly, enlarging day by day; but unfortunately no nasal measurements were ta
ken so I cannot say whether my breathing apparatus grew in strict proportio
n, or faster than the rest. I must say that I had a healthy metabolism. Was
te matter was evacuated copiously from the appropriate orifices; from my no
se there flowed a shining cascade of goo. Armies of handkerchiefs, regiment
s of nappies found their way into the large washing chest in my mother's ba
throom… shedding rubbish from various apertures, I kept my eyes quite dry.
'Such a good baby, Madam,' Mary Pereira said, 'Never takes out one tear.'
Good baby Saleem was a quiet child; I laughed often, but soundlessly. (Like
my own son, I began by taking stock, listening before I rushed into gurgles
and, later, into speech.) For a time Amina and Mary became afraid that the b
oy was dumb; but, just when they were on the verge of telling his father (fr
om whom they had kept their worries secret no father wants a damaged child),
he burst into sound, and became, in that respect at any rate, utterly norma
l, 'It's as if,' Amina whispered to Mary, 'he's decided to put our minds at
rest.'
There was one more serious problem. Amina and Mary took a few days to noti
ce it. Busy with the mighty, complex processes of turning themselves into
a two headed mother, their vision clouded by a fog of stenchy underwear, t
hey failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids. Amina, remembering how,
during her pregnancy, the weight of her unborn child had held time as sti
ll as a dead green pond, began to wonder whether the reverse might not be
taking place now whether the baby had some magical power over all the time
in his immediate vicinity, and was speeding it up, so that mother and aya
h never had enough time to do everything that needed doing, so that the ba
by could grow at an apparently fantastic rate; lost in such chronological
daydreams, she didn't notice my problem. Only when she shrugged the idea o
ff, and told herself I was just a good strapping boy with a big appetite,
an early developer, did the veils of maternal love part sufficiently for h
er and Mary to yelp, in unison: 'Look, baap re baap! Look, Madam! See, Mar
y! The little chap never blinks!'
The eyes were too blue: Kashmiri blue, changeling blue, blue with the weight