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

s on a career of bribing judges and fixing juries; all children have the po
wer to change their parents, and Sonny turned Ms father into a highly succe
ssful crook. And, moving across to Versailles Villa, here is Mrs Dubash wit
h her shrine to the god Ganesh, stuck in the corner of an apartment of such
supernatural untidiness that, in our house, the word 'dubash' became a ver
b meaning 'to make a mess'… 'Oh, Saleem, you've dubashed your room again, y
ou black man!' Mary would cry. And now the cause of the mess, leaning over
the hood of my pram to chuck me under the chin: Adi Dubash, the physicist,
genius of atoms and litter. His wife, who is already carrying Cyrus the gre
at within her, hangs back, growing her child, with something fanatical glea
ming in the inner corners of her eyes, biding its time; it will not emerge
until Mr Dubash, whose daily life was spent working with the most dangerous
substances in the world, dies by choking on an orange from which his wife
forgot to remove the pips. I was never invited into the flat of Dr Narlikar
, the child hating gynaecologist; but in the homes of Lila Sabarmati and Ho
mi Catrack I became a voyeur, a tiny party to Lila's thousand and one infid
elities, and eventually a witness to the beginnings of the liaison between
the naval officer's wife and the film magnate and racehorse owner; which, a
ll in good time, would serve me well when I planned a certain act of revenge.
Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I'm bound to
say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was bom
barded with a confusing multiplicity of views on the subject, being a Bless
ed One to a guru under a tap, a voyeur to Lola Sabarmati; in the eyes of Nu
ssie the duck I was a rival, and a more successful rival, to her own Sonny
(although, to her credit, she never showed her resentment, and asked to bor
row me just like everyone else); to my two headed mother I was all kinds of
babyish things they called me joonoo moonoo, and putch putch, and little p
iece of the moon.
But what, after all, can a baby do except swallow all of it and hope to make
sense of it later? Patiently, dry eyed, I imbibed Nehru letter and Winkle's
prophecy; but the deepest impression of all was made on the day when Homi C
atrack's idiot daughter sent her thoughts across the circus ring and into my
infant head.
Toxy Catrack, of the outsize head and dribbling mouth; Toxy, who stood at
a barred top floor window, stark naked, masturbating with motions of consu
mmate self disgust; who spat hard and often through her bars, and sometime
s hit us on the head… she was twenty one years old, a gibbering half wit,
the product of years of inbreeding; but inside my head she was beautiful,
because she had not lost the gifts with which every baby is born and which
life proceeds to erode. I can't remember anything Toxy said when she sent
her thoughts to whisper to me; probably nothing except gurgles and spitti