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

mething extraordinary sitting in my eyes and went to wake Ahmed Sinai anxi
ously, with 'Janum, please come. I don't know what's got into Saleem.'
Family and ayah assembled in the sitting room. Amid cut glass vases and plu
mp cushions, standing on a Persian rug beneath the swirling shadows of ceil
ing fans, I smiled into their anxious eyes and prepared my revelation. This
was it; the beginning of the repayment of their investment; my first divid
end first, I was sure, of many… my black mother, lip jutting father, Monkey
of a sister and crime concealing ayah waited in hot confusion.
Get it out. Straight, without frills. 'You should be the first to know,' I sa
id, trying to give my speech the cadences of adulthood. And then I told them.
'I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think
Ammi, Abboo, I really think that Archangels have started to talk to me.'
There! I thought. There! It's said! Now there will be pats on the back, sw
eetmeats, public announcements, maybe more photographs; now their chests w
ill puff up with pride. ? blind innocence of childhood! For my honesty for
my open hearted desperation to please I was set upon from all sides. Even
the Monkey: 'O God, Saleem, all this tamasha, all this performance, for o
ne of your stupid cracks?' And worse than the Monkey was Mary Pereira: 'Ch
rist Jesus! Save, us, Lord! Holy Father in Rome, such blasphemy I've heard
today!' And worse than Mary Pereira was my mother Amina Sinai: Black Mang
o concealed now, her own unnameable names still warm upon her lips, she cr
ied, 'Heaven forfend! The child will bring down the roof upon our heads!'
(Was that my fault, too?) And Amina continued: 'You black man! Goonda! ? S
aleem, has your brain gone raw? What has happened to my darling baby boy a
re you growing into a madman a torturer!?' And worse than Amina's shriekin
g was my father's silence; worse than her fear was the wild anger sitting
on his forehead; and worst of all was my father's hand, which stretched ou
t suddenly, thick fingered, heavy jointed, strong as an ox,to fetch me a m
ighty blow on the side of my head, so that I could never hear properly in
my left ear after that day; so that I fell sideways across the startled ro
om through the scandalized air and shattered a green tabletop of opaque gl
ass; so that, having been certain of myself for the first time in my life,
I was plunged into a green, glass cloudy world filled with cutting edges,
a world in which I could no longer tell the people who mattered most abou
t the goings on inside my head; green shards lacerated my hands as I enter
ed that swirling universe in which I was doomed, until it was far too late
, to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for.
In a white tiled bathroom beside a washing chest, my mother daubed me wi
th Mercurochrome; gauze veiled my cuts, while through the door my father
's voice commanded, 'Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me?
Let him enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!'
That night, Amina Sinai would dream of Ramram Seth, who was floating six in