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

er newly acquired heroines, the Walsingham School for Girls' swimming and d
iving team… that is to say, when circumstances permitted, I entered my secr
et hideout, stretched out on the straw mat I'd stolen from the servants' qu
arters, closed my eyes, and let my newly awakened inner ear (connected, lik
e all ears, to my nose) rove freely around the city and further, north and
south, east and west listening in to all manner of things. To escape the in
tolerable pressures of eavesdropping on people I knew, I practised my art u
pon strangers. Thus my entry into public affairs of India occurred for enti
rely ignoble reasons upset by too much intimacy, I used the world outside o
ur hillock for light relief.
The world as discovered from a broken down clocktower: at first, I was no m
ore than a tourist, a child peeping through the miraculous peepholes of a p
rivate 'Dilli dekho' machine. Dugdugee drums rattled in my left (damaged) e
ar as I gained my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the eyes of a fat
Englishwoman suffering from the tummy runs; after which, to balance south a
gainst north, I hopped down to Madurai's Meenakshi temple and nestled among
st the woolly, mystical perceptions of a chanting priest. I toured Connaugh
t Place in New Delhi in the guise of an auto rickshaw driver, complaining b
itterly to my fares about the rising price of gasoline; in Calcutta I slept
rough in a section of drainpipe. By now thoroughly bitten by the travel bu
g, I zipped down to Cape Comorin and became a fisher woman whose sari was a
s tight as her morals were loose… standing on red sands washed by three sea
s, I flirted with Dravidian beachcombers in a language I couldn't understan
d; then up into the Himalayas, into the neanderthal moss covered hut of a G
oojar tribal, beneath the glory of a completely circular rainbow and the tu
mbling moraine of the Kolahoi glacier. At the golden fortress of Jaisalmer
I sampled the inner life of a woman making mirrorwork dresses and at Khajur
aho I was an adolescent village boy, deeply embarrassed by the erotic, Taht
ric carvings on the Chandela temples standing in the fields, but unable to
tear away my eyes… in the exotic simplicities of travel I was able to find
a modicum of peace. But, in the end, tourism ceased to satisfy; curiosity b
egan to niggle; 'Let's find out,' I told myself, 'what really goes on around here.'
With the eclectic spirit of my nine years spurring me on, I leaped into the
heads of film stars and cricketers I learned the truth behind the Filmfare
gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala, and I was at the crease with Polly
Umrigar at the Brabourne Stadium; I was Lata Mangeshkar the playback singer
and Bubu the clown at the circus behind Civil Lines… and inevitably, throu
gh the ramdom processes of my mind hopping, I discovered politics.
At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my paj
ama cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire… at another mom
ent I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage as u
sual: I was two months old and my mother had run out of breast milk. I occu