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

, the price of pom fret, the roster of household chores, must call in the e
lectrician to mend the ceiling fan in the dining room, how she's desperatel
y concentrating on parts of her husband to love, but the unmentionable word
keeps finding room, the two syllables which leaked out of her in the bathr
oom that day, Na Dir Na Dir Na, she's finding it harder and harder to put d
own the telephone when the wrong numbers come my mother I tell you when a b
oy gets inside grown up thoughts they can really mess him up completely And
even at night, no respite, I wake up at the stroke of midnight with Mary P
ereira's dreams inside my head Night after night Always at my personal witc
hing hour, which also has meaning for her Her dreams are plagued by the ima
ge of a man who has been dead for years, Joseph D'Costa, the dream tells me
the name, it is coated with a guilt I cannot understand, the same guilt wh
ich seeps into us all every time we eat her chutneys, there is a mystery he
re but because the secret is not in the front of her mind I can't find it out, and meanwh
he's a wolf, or a snail, once a broomstick, but we (she dreaming, I looking
in) know it's him, baleful implacable accusative, cursing her in the languag
e of his incarnations, howling at her when he's wolf Joseph, covering her in
the slime trails of Joseph the snail, beating her with the business end of
his broomstick incarnation… and in the morning when she's telling me to bath
e clean up get ready for school I have to bite back the questions, I am nine
years old and lost in the confusion of other people's lives which are blurr
ing together in the heat.
To end this account of the early days of my transformed life, I must add on
e painful confession: it occurred to me that I could improve my parents' op
inion of me by using my new faculty to help out with my schoolwork in short
, I began to cheat in class. That is to say, I tuned in to the inner voices
of my schoolteachers and also of my cleverer classmates, and picked inform
ation out of their minds. I found that very few of my masters could set a t
est without rehearsing the ideal answers in their minds and I knew, too, th
at on those rare occasions when the teacher was preoccupied by other things
, his private love life or financial difficulties, the solutions could alwa
ys be found in the precocious, prodigious mind of our class genius, Cyrus t
he great. My marks began to improve dramatically but not overly so, because
I took care to make my versions different from their stolen originals; eve
n when I telepathi cally cribbed an entire English essay from Cyrus, I adde
d a number of mediocre touches of my own. My purpose was to avoid suspicion
; I did not, but I escaped discovery. Under Emil Zagallo's furious, interro
gating eyes I remained innocently seraphic; beneath the bemused, head shaki
ng perplexity of Mr Tandon the English master I worked my treachery in sile
nce knowing that they would not believe the truth even if, by chance or fol
ly, I spilled the beans.