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

he fisherman's finger pointed, misleadingly, out to sea.
Banned from washing chests: cries of 'Pinocchio! Cucumber nose! Goo face!'
Concealed in my hiding place, I was safe from the memory of Miss Kapadia,
the teacher at Breach Candy Kindergarten, who had, on my first day at sch
ool, turned from her blackboard to greet me, seen my nose, and dropped her
duster in alarm, smashing the nail on her big toe, in a screechy but mino
r echo of my father's famous mishap; buried amongst soiled hankies and cru
mpled pajamas, I could forget, for a time, my ugliness.
Typhoid 'attacked me; krait poison cured me; and my early, overheated grow
th rate cooled off. By the time I was nearlynine, Sonny Ibrahim was an inc
h and a half taller than I. But one piece of Baby Saleem seemed immune to
disease and extract of snakes. Between my eyes, it mushroomed outwards and
downwards, as if all my expansionist forces, driven out of the rest of my
body, had decided to concentrate on this single incomparable thrust… betw
een my eyes and above my lips, my nose bloomed like a prize marrow. (But t
hen, I was spared wisdom teeth; one should try to count one's blessings.)
What's in a nose? The usual answer: 'That's simple. A breathing apparatus;
olfactory organs; hairs.' But in my case, the answer was simpler still, a
lthough, I'm bound to admit, somewhat repellent: what was in my nose was s
not. With apologies, I must unfortunately insist on details: nasal congest
ion obliged me to breathe through my mouth, giving me the air of a gasping
goldfish; perennial blockages doomed me to a childhood without perfumes,
to days which ignored the odours of musk and chambeli and mango kasaundy a
nd home made ice cream: and dirty washing, too. A disability in the world
outside washing chests can be a positive advantage once you're in. But onl
y for the duration of your stay.
Purpose obsessed, I worried about my nose. Dressed in the bitter garments w
hich arrived regularly from my headmistress aunt Alia, I went to school, pl
ayed French cricket, fought, entered fairy tales… and worried. (In those da
ys, my aunt Alia had begun to send us an unending stream of children's clot
hes, into whose seams she had sewn her old maid's bile; the Brass Monkey an
d I were clothed in her gifts, wearing at first the baby things of bitterne
ss, then the rompers of resentment; I grew up in white shorts starched with
the starch of jealousy, while the Monkey wore the pretty flowered frocks o
f Alia's undimmed envy… unaware that our wardrobe was binding us in the web
s of her revenge, we led our well dressed lives.) My nose: elephantine as t
he trunk of Ganesh, it should, I thought, have been a superlative breather;
a smeller without an answer, as we say; instead, it was permanently bunged
up, and as useless as a wooden sikh kabab.
Enough. I sat in the washing chest and forgot my nose; forgot about the cl
imbing of Mount Everest in 1953 when grubby Eyeslice giggled, 'Hey, men! Y
ou think that Tenzing could climb up Sniffer's face?' and about the quarre