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

ls between my parents over my nose, for which Ahmed Sinai never tired of b
laming Amina's father: 'Never before in my family has there been a nose li
ke it! We have excellent noses; proud noses; royal noses, wife!' Ahmed Sin
ai had already begun, at that time, to believe in the fictional ancestry h
e had created for the benefit of William Methwold; djinn sodden, he saw Mu
ghal blood running in his veins… Forgotten, too, the night when I was eigh
t and a half, and my father, djinns on his breath, came into my bedroom to
rip the sheets off me and demand: 'What are you up to? Pig! Pig from some
where?' I looked sleepy; innocent; puzzled. He roared on. 'Chhi chhi! Filt
hy! God punishes boys who do that! Already he's made your nose as big as p
oplars. He'll stunt your growth; he'll make your soo soo shrivel up!' And
my mother, arriving nightdressed in the startled room, 'Janum, for pity's
sake; the boy was only sleeping.' The djinn roared through my father's lip
s, possessing him completely: 'Look on his face! Whoever got a nose like t
hat from sleeping?'
There are no mirrors in a washing chest; rude jokes do not enter it, nor poin
ting fingers. The rage of fathers is muffled by used sheets and discarded bra
ssieres. A washing chest is a hole in the world, a place which civilization h
as put outside itself, beyond the pale; this makes it the finest of hiding pl
aces. In the washing chest, I was like Nadir Khan in his underworld, safe fro
m all pressures, concealed from the demands of parents and history…
… My father, pulling me into his squashy belly, speaking in a voice choked
with instant emotion: 'All right, all right, there, there, you're a good bo
y; you can be anything you want; you just have to want it enough! Sleep now
…' And Mary Pereira, echoing him in her little rhyme: 'Anything you want to
be, you can be; You can be just what all you want!' It had already occurre
d to me that our family believed implicitly in good business principles; th
ey expected a handsome return for their investment in me. Children get food
shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free grat
is, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for havi
ng been born. 'There are no strings on me!' they sing; but I, Pin( cchio, s
aw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive nothing more, not
hing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense divide
nd of greatness. Don't misunderstand m;:. I didn't mind. I was, at that tim
e, a dutiful child. I longed to give them what they wanted, what soothsayer
s and framed letters had promised them; I simply did not know how. Where di
d greatness come from? How did you get some? When?… When I was seven years
old, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother came to visit us. On my seventh birthda
y, dutifully, I permitted myself to be dressed up like the boys in the fish
erman picture; hot and constricted in the outlandish garb, I smiled and smi
led. 'See, my little piece of the moon!' Amina cried cutting a cake covered
with candied farmyard animals, 'So chweet! Never takes out one tear!' Sand