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

er hands are stretching down down down; and then, 'Oh my goodness, janum, I
thought you were just talking dirty but it's true! So cold, Allah, so cooo
old, like little round cubes of ice!'
Such things happen; after the State froze my father's assets, my mother beg
an to feel them growing colder and colder. On the first day, the Brass Monk
ey was conceived just in time, because after that, although Amina lay every
night with her husband to warm him, although she snuggled up tightly when
she felt him shiver as the icy fingers of rage and powerlessness spread upw
ards from his loins, she could no longer bear to stretch out her hand and t
ouch because his little cubes of ice had become too frigid to hold.
They we should have known something bad would happen. That January, Chowpa
tty Beach, and Juhu and Trombay, too, were littered with the ominous corps
es of dead pomfret, which floated, without the ghost of an explanation, be
lly side up, like scaly fingers in to shore.
Snakes and ladders
And other omens: comets were seen exploding above the Back Bay; it was repo
rted that flowers had been seen bleeding real blood; and in February the sn
akes escaped from the Schaapsteker Institute. The rumour spread that a mad
Bengali snake charmer, a Tubriwallah, was travelling the country, charming
reptiles from captivity, leading them out of snake farms (such as the Schaa
psteker, where snake venom's medicinal functions were studied, and antivene
nes devised) by the Pied Piper fascination of his flute, in retribution for
the partition of his beloved Golden Bengal. After a while the rumours adde
d that the Tubriwallah was seven feet tall, with bright blue skin. He was K
rishna come to chastise his people; he was the sky hued Jesus of the missio
naries.
It seems that, in the aftermath of my changeling birth, while I enlarged my
self at breakneck speed, everything that could possibly go wrong began to d
o so. In the snake winter of early 1948, and in the succeeding hot and rain
y seasons, events piled upon events, so that by the time the Brass Monkey w
as born in September we were all exhausted, and ready for a few years' rest.
Escaped cobras vanished into the sewers of the city; banded kraits were see
n on buses. Religious leaders described the' snake escape as a warning the
god Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation's
official renunciation of its deities. ('We are a secular State,' Nehru ann
ounced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed Sinai s
hivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary had been
asking, 'How are we going to live now, Madam?' Homi Catrack introduced us
to Dr Schaapsteker himself. He was eighty one years old; his tongue flicked