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

In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through the daytime streets; by n
ight, they rioted in my head. We shall be watching your life with the closest
attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.
It's time to talk about the voices.
But if only our Padma were here…
I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father's hand walloping my e
ar in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another, bodiless hand, which
once hit him full in the face at least had one salutary effect: it obliged
me to reconsider and finally to abandon my original, Prophet apeing position
. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I withdrew deep inside myself, desp
ite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue room with her pesterings: 'But wha
t did you do it for, Saleem? You who're always too good and all?'… until she
fell into dissatisfied sleep with her mouth still working silently, and I w
as alone with the echoes of my father's violence, which buzzed in my left ea
r, which whispered, 'Neither Michael nor Anael; not Gabriel; forget Cassiel,
Sachiel and Samael! Archangels no longer speak to mortals; the Recitation w
as completed in Arabia long ago; the last prophet will come only to announce
the End.' That night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbe
red the ranks of the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not a
fter all been chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far fr
om being scared, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust.
Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you're always reading about in the sensati
onal magazines. But I ask for patience wait. Only wait. It was telepathy; but
also more than telepathy. Don't write me off too easily.
Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so called teeming millions,
of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the begin
ning, when I was content to be an audience before I began to act there was a
language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga d
ialects, from the purity of Luck now Urdu to the Southern slurrings of Tamil
. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of
my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surf
ace transmissions the front of mind stuff which is what I'd originally been
picking up language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible
thought forms which far transcended words… but that was after I heard, bene
ath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other precious signals, utterly di
fferent from everything else, most of them faint and distant, like far off d
rums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke through the fish market cacoph
ony of my voices… those secret, nocturnal calk, like calling out to like… th
e unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signalling nothing more t
han their existence, transmitting simply: 'I.' From far to the North, 'I.' A
nd the South East West: 'I.' 'I.' 'And I.'