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

' he insisted stubbornly. Before he died he lost his voice completely; doct
ors revised his diagnosis to throat cancer; but they were wrong, too, because Winkie d
isease but of the bitterness of losing a wife whose infidelity he never sus
pected. His son, named Shiva after the god of procreation and destruction,
sat at his feet in those early days, silently bearing the burden of being t
he cause (or so he thought) of his father's slow decline; and gradually, do
wn the years, we watched his eyes filling with an anger which could not be
spoken; we watched his fists close around pebbles and hurl them, ineffectua
lly at first, more dangerously as he grew, into the surrounding emptiness.
When Lila Sabarmati's elder son was eight, he took it upon himself to tease
young Shiva about his surliness, his unstarched shorts, his knobbly knees;
whereupon the boy whom Mary's crime had doomed to poverty and accordions h
urled a sharp flat stone, with a cutting edge like a razor, and blinded his
tormentor in the right eye. After Eyeslice's accident, Wee Willie Winkie c
ame to Methwold's Estate alone, leaving his son to enter the dark labyrinth
s from which only a war would save him.
Why Methwold's Estate continued to tolerate Wee Willie Winkie despite the dec
ay of his voice and the violence of his son: he had, once, given them an impo
rtant clue about their lives. 'The first birth,' he had said, 'will make you
real.'
As a direct result of Winkie's clue, I was, in my early days, highly in dem
and. Amina and Mary vied for my attention; but in every house on the Estate
, there were people who wanted to know me; and eventually Amina, allowing h
er pride in my popularity to overcome her reluctance to let me out of her s
ight, agreed to lend me, on a kind of rota basis, to the various families o
n the hill. Pushed by Mary Pereira in a sky blue pram, I began a triumphal
progress around the red tiled palaces, gracing each in turn with my presenc
e, and making them seem real to their owners. And so, looking back now thro
ugh the eyes of Baby Saleem, I can reveal most of the secrets of my neighbo
urhood, because the grown ups lived their lives in my presence without fear
of being observed, not knowing that, years later, someone would look back
through baby eyes and decide to let the cats out of their bags.
So here is old man Ibrahim, dying with worry because, back in Africa, gover
nments are nationalizing his sisal plantations; here is his elder son Ishaq
fretting over Ms hotel business, which is running into debt, so that he is
obliged to borrow money from local gangsters; here are Ishaq's eyes, covet
ing his brother's wife, though why Nussie the duck should have aroused sexu
al interest in anyone is a mystery to me; and here is Nussie's husband, Ism
ail the lawyer, who has learned an important lesson from Ms son's forcep bi
rth: 'Nothing comes out right in life,' he tells his duck of a wife, 'unles
s it's forced out.' Applying this philosophy to his legal career, he embark