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

Already, at the age of nearlynine, I knew this much: everybody was waiting
for me. Midnight and baby snaps, prophets and prime ministers had created a
round me a glowing and inescapable mist of expectancy… in which my father p
ulled me into his squashy belly in the cool of the cocktail hour to say, 'G
reat things! My son: what is not in store for you? Great deeds, a great lif
e!' While I, wriggling between jutting lip and big toe, wetting his shirt w
ith my eternally leaking nose goo, turned scarlet and squealed, 'Let me go,
Abba! Everyone will see!' And he, embarrassing me beyond belief, bellowed,
'Let them look! Let the whole world see how I love my son!'… and my grandm
other, visiting us one winter, gave me advice, too: 'Just pull up your sock
s, whatsitsname, and you'll be better than anyone in the whole wide world!'
… Adrift in this haze of anticipation, I had already felt within myself the
first movings of that shapeless animal which still, on these Padmaless nig
hts, champs and scratches in my stomach: cursed by a multitude of hopes and
nicknames (I had already acquired Sniffer and Snotnose), I became afraid t
hat everyone was wrong that my much trumpeted existence might turn out to b
e utterly useless, void, and without the shred of a purpose. And it was to
escape from this beast that I took to hiding myself, from an early age, in
my mother's large white washing chest; because although the creature was in
side me, the comforting presence of enveloping soiled linen seemed to lull
it into sleep.
Outside the washing chest, surrounded by people who seemed to possess a dev
astatingly clear sense of purpose, I buried myself in fairy tales. Hatim Ta
i and Batman, Superman and Sinbad helped to get me through the nearlynine y
ears. When I went shopping with Mary Pereira overawed by her ability to tel
l a chicken's age by looking at its neck, by the sheer determination with w
hich she stared dead pomfrets in the eyes I became Aladdin, voyaging in a f
abulous cave; watching servants dusting vases with a dedication as majestic
as it was obscure, I imagined Ali Baba's forty thieves hiding in the duste
d urns; in the garden, staring at Purushottam the sadhu being eroded by wat
er, I turned into the genie of the lamp, and thus avoided, for the most par
t, the terrible notion that I, alone in the universe, had no idea what I sh
ould be, or how I should behave. Purpose: it crept up behind me when I stoo
d staring down from my window at European girls cavorting in the map shaped
pool beside the sea. 'Where do you get it?' I yelped aloud; the Brass Monk
ey, who shared my sky blue room, jumped half way out of her skin. I was the
n nearlyeight; she was almostseven. It was a very early age at which to be
perplexed by meaning.
But servants are excluded from washing chests; school buses, too, are absen
t. In my nearlyninth year I had begun to attend the Cathedral and John Conn
on Boys' High School on Outram Road in the old Fort district; washed and br
ushed every morning, I stood at the foot of our two storey hillock, white s