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

tain Indians 'the better sort' to step into their map shaped waters. But Pu
shpa does not belong to the better sort; old now and forgotten, he watches
the Pools from afar… and now more and more of the multitudes are flooding i
nto me such as Bano Devi, the famous lady wrestler of those days, who would
only wrestle men and threatened to marry anyone who beat her, as a result
of which vow she never lost a bout; and (closer to home now) the sadhu unde
r our garden tap, whose name was Purushottam and whom we (Sonny, Eyeslice,
Hairoil, Cyrus and I) would always call Puru the guru believing me to be th
e Mubarak, the Blessed One, he devoted his life to keeping an eye on me, an
d filled his days teaching my father palmistry and witching away my mother'
s verrucas; and then there is the rivalry of the old bearer Musa and the ne
w ayah Mary, which will grow until it explodes; in short, at the end of 194
7, life in Bombay was as teeming, as manifold, as multitudinously shapeless
as ever… except that I had arrived; I was already beginning to take my pla
ce at the centre of the universe; and by the time I had finished, I would g
ive meaning to it all. You don't believe me? Listen: at my cradle side, Mar
y Pereira is singing a little song:
@@@Anything you want to be, you can be: You can be just what all you wa
nt.
By the time of my circumcision by a barber with a cleft palate from the Roy
al Barber House on Gowalia Tank Road (I was just over two months old), I wa
s already much in demand at Methwold's Estate. (Incidentally, on the subjec
t of the circumcision: I still swear that I can remember the grinning barbe
r, who held me by the foreskin while my member waggled frantically like a s
lithering snake; and the razor descending, and the pain; but I'm told that,
at the time, I didn't even blink.)
Yes, I was a popular little fellow: my two mothers, Amina and Mary, couldn'
t get enough of me. In all practical matters, they were the most intimate o
f allies. After my circumcision, they bathed me together; and giggled toget
her as my mutilated organ waggled angrily in the bathwater. 'We better watc
h this boy, Madam,' Mary said naughtily, 'His thing has a life of its own!'
And Amina, 'Tch, tch, Mary, you're terrible, really…' But then amid sobs o
f helpless laughter, 'Just see, Madam, his poor little soo soo!' Because it
was wiggling again, thrashing about, like a chicken with a slitted gullet…
Together, they cared for me beautifully; but in the matter of emotion, the
y were deadly rivals. Once, when they took me for a pram ride through the H
anging Gardens on Malabar Hill, Amina overheard Mary telling the other ayah
s, 'Look: here's my own big son' and felt oddly threatened. Baby Saleem bec
ame, after that, the battleground of their loves; they strove to outdo one
another in demonstrations of affection; while he, blinking by now, gurgling
aloud, fed on their emotions, using it to accelerate his growth, expanding