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

y a cataclysmic a world altering an irreversible sniff. Pajama cord rises
painfully half an inch further up the nostril. But other things are rising
, too: hauled by that feverish inhalation, nasal liquids are being sucked r
elentlessly up up up, nose goo flowing upwards, against gravity, against nature. Sinus
ected to unbearable pressure… until, inside the nearlynineyearold head, som
ething bursts. Snot rockets through a breached dam into dark new channels.
Mucus, rising higher than mucus was ever intended to rise. Waste fluid, rea
ching as far, perhaps, as the frontiers of the brain… there is a shock. Som
ething electrical has been moistened.
Pain.
And then noise, deafening manytongued terrifying, inside his head!…. Insi
de a white wooden washing chest, within the darkened auditorium of my sku
ll, my nose began to sing.
But just now there isn't time to listen; because one voice is very close i
ndeed. Amina Sinai has opened the lower door of the washing chest; I am tu
mbling downdown with laundry wrapped around my head like a caul. Pajama co
rd jerks out of my nose; and now there is lightning flashing through the d
ark clouds around my mother and a refuge has been lost forever.
'I didn't look!' I squealed up through socks and sheets. I didn't see one thing
, Ammi, I swear!!'
And years later, in a cane chair among reject towels and a radio announcin
g exaggerated war victories, .Amina would remember how with thumb and fore
finger around the ear of her lying son she led him to Mary Pereira, who wa
s sleeping as usual on a cane mat in a sky blue room; how she said, 'This
young donkey; this good for nothing from nowhere is not to speak for one w
hole day.'… And, just before the roof fell in on her, she said aloud: 'It
was my fault. I brought him up too badly.' As the explosion of the bomb ri
pped through the air, she added, mildly but firmly, addressing her last wo
rds on earth to the ghost of a washing chest: 'Go away now, I've seen enou
gh On Mount Sinai, the prophet Musa or Moses heard disembodied commandment
s; on Mount Hira, the prophet Muhammad (also known as Mohammed, Mahomet, t
he Last But One, and Mahound) spoke to the Archangel. (Gabriel or Jibreel,
as you please.) And on the stage of the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' H
igh School, run 'under the auspices' of the Anglo Scottish Education Socie
ty, my friend Cyrus the great, playing a female part as usual, heard the v
oices of St Joan speaking the sentences of Bernard Shaw. But Cyrus is the
odd one out: unlike Joan, whose voices were heard in a field, but like Mus
a or Moses, like Muhammad the Penultimate, I heard voices on a hill.
Muhammad (on whose name be peace, let me add; I don't want to offend anyone
) heard a voice saying, 'Recite!' and thought he was going mad; I heard, at
first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio; and with lips