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

While my temperature came down, my sister was being born at Narlikar's Nur
sing Home. It was September ist; and the birth was so uneventful, so effor
tless that it passed virtually unnoticed on Methwold's Estate; because on
the same day Ismail Ibrahim visited my parents at the clinic and announced
that the case had been won… While Ismail celebrated, I was grabbing the b
ars of my cot; while he cried, 'So much for freezes! Your assets are your
own again! By order of the High Court!', I was heaving red faced against g
ravity; and while Ismail announced, with a straight face, 'Sinai bhai, the
rule of law has won a famous victory,' and avoided my mother's delighted,
triumphant eyes, I, Baby Saleem, aged exactly one year, two weeks and one
day, hauled myself upright in my cot.
The effects of the events of that day were twofold: I grew up with legs that
were irretrievably bowed, because I had got to my feet too early; and the B
rass Monkey (so called because of her thick thatch of red gold hair, which w
ould not darken until she was nine) learned that, if she was going to get an
y attention in her life, she would have to make plenty of noise.
Accident in a washing chest
It has been two whole days since Padma stormed out of my life. For two day
s, her place at the vat of mango kasaundy has been taken by another woman
also thick of waist, also hairy of forearm; but, in my eyes, no replacemen
t at all! while my own dung lotus has vanished into I don't know where. A
balance Mas been upset; I feel.cracks widening down the length of my body;
because suddenly I am alone, without my necessary ear, and it isn't enoug
h. I am seized by a sudden fist of anger: why should I be so unreasonably
treated by my one disciple? Other men have recited stories before me; othe
r men were not so impetuously abandoned. When Valmiki, the author of the R
amayana, dictated his masterpiece to elephant headed Ganesh, did the god w
alk out on him halfway? He certainly did not. (Note that, despite my Musli
m background, I'm enough of a Bombayite to be well up in Hindu stories, an
d actually I'm very fond of the image of trunk nosed, flap eared Ganesh so
lemnly taking dictation!)
How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, ne
cessary counterweights to my miracle laden omniscience? How to do without
her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps kept? my feet on the gro
und? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, sup
ported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus godde
ss of the present… but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one dime
nsionality of a straight line?
I am, perhaps, hiding behind all these questions. Yes, perhaps that's right. I
should speak plainly, without the cloak of a question mark: our Padma has gon