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

ches above the ground, his eye sockets filled with egg whites, intoning: 'W
ashing will hide him… voices will guide him'… but when, after several days
in which the dream sat upon her shoulders wherever she went, she plucked up
the courage to ask her disgraced son a little more about his outrageous cl
aim, he replied in a voice as restrained as the unwept tears of his childho
od: 'It was just fooling, Amma. A stupid joke, like you said.'
She died, nine years later, without discovering the truth.
All India radio
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the
more concrete and plausible it seems but as you approach the present, it in
evitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema,
sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, unti
l your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars' faces
dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the
illusion dissolves or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is
reality… we have come from 1915 to 1956, so we're a good deal closer to the
screen… abandoning my metaphor, then, I reiterate, entirely without a sense
of shame, my unbelievable claim: after a curious accident in a washing chest
, I became a sort of radio.
… But today, I feel confused. Padma has not returned should I alert the pol
ice? Is she a Missing Person? and in her absence, my certainties are fallin
g apart. Even my nose has been playing tricks on me by day, as I stroll bet
ween the pickle vats tended by our army of strong, hairy armed, formidably
competent women, I have found myself failing to distinguish lemon odours fr
om lime. The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor sahib has been cr
ossed in what? surely not love?… Padma, and the cracks spreading all over m
e, radiating like a spider's web from my navel; and the heat… a little conf
usion is surely permissible in these circumstances. Re reading my work, I h
ave discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi
occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the
actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continu
e to die at the wrong time.
Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperat
e need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything to re write the w
hole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? T
oday, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it to others. For me
, there can be no going back; I must finish what I've started, even if, inevi
tably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began…
Ye Akashvani hai. This is All India Radio.
Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani