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

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no ot
her activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you cli
mb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder
will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot and stick affair;
because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the dualit
y of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders ba
lances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase
and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha ag
ainst Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and th
e polarities of knees and nose… but I found, very early in my life, that the
game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity beca use, as events ar
e about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to t
riumph on the venom of a snake… Keeping things simple for the moment, howeve
r, I record that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory re
presented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of t
he country were still teeming with snakes.
Amina's brother Hanif had not gone to Pakistan. Following the childhood dre
am which he had whispered to Rashid the rickshaw boy in an Agra cornfield,
he had arrived in Bombay and sought employ, ment in the great film studios.
Precociously confident, he had not only succeeded in becoming the youngest
man ever to be given a film to direct in the history of the Indian cinema;
he had also wooed and married one of the brightest stars of that celluloid
heaven, the divine Pia, whose face was her fortune, and whose saris were m
ade of fabrics whose designers had clearly set out to prove that it was pos
sible to incorporate every colour known to man in a single pattern. Reveren
d Mother did not approve of the divine Pia, but Hanif of all my family was
the one who was free of her confining influence; a jolly, burly man with th
e booming laugh of the boatman Tai and the explosive, innocent anger of his
father Aadam Aziz, he took her to live simply in a small, un filmi apartme
nt on Marine Drive, telling her, 'Plenty of time to live like Emperors afte
r I've made my name.' She acquiesced; she starred in his first feature, whi
ch was partly financed by Homi Catrack and partly by D. W. Rama Studios (Pv
t.) Ltd it was called The Lovers of Kashmir, and one evening in the midst o
f her racing days Amina Sinai went to the premiere. Her parents did not com
e, thanks to Reverend Mother's loathing of the cinema, against which Aadam
Aziz no longer had the strength to struggle just as he, who had fought with
Mian Abdullah against Pakistan, no longer argued with her when she praised
the country, retaining just enough strength to dig in his heels and refuse
to emigrate; but Ahmed Sinai, revived by his mother in law's cookery, but
resentful of her continued presence, got to his feet and accompanied his wi
fe. They took their seats, next to Hanif and. Pia and the male star of the
film, one of India's most successful 'lover boys', I. S. Nayyar. And, altho