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

pied, briefly, the mind of a Congress Party worker, bribing a village schoo
lteacher to throw his weight behind the party of Gandhi and Nehru in the co
ming election campaign; also the thoughts of a Keralan peasant who had deci
ded to vote Communist. My daring grew: one afternoon I deliberately invaded
the head of our own State Chief Minister, which was how I discovered, over
twenty years before it became a national joke, that Morarji Desai 'took hi
s own water' daily… I was inside him, tasting the warmth as he gurgled down
a frothing glass of urine. And finally I hit my highest point: I became Ja
waharlal Nehru, Prime Minister and author of framed letters: I sat with the
great man amongst a bunch of gaptoothed, stragglebeard astrologers and adj
usted the Five Year Plan to bring it into harmonic alignment with the music
of the spheres… the high life is a heady thing. 'Look at me!' I exulted si
lently. 'I can go any place I want!' In that tower which had once been fill
ed choc a bloc with the explosive devices of Joseph D'Costa's hatred, this
phrase (accompanied by appropriate ticktock sound effects) plopped fully fo
rmed into my thoughts: 'I am the tomb in Bombay .. .watch me explode!'
Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; th
at the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted
at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variet
y of a first class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them h
appen… which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and t
hought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped materi
al of my gift. 'I can find out any damn thing!' I triumphed, 'There isn't a
thing I cannot know!'
Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the spiri
t of self aggrandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an insti
nct for self preservation. If I had not believed myself in control of the fl
ooding multitudes, their massed identities would have annihilated mine… but
there in my clocktower, filled with the cockiness of my,glee, I became Sin,
the ancient moon god (no, not Indian: I've imported him from Hadhramaut of o
ld), capable of acting at a distance and shifting the tides of the world.
But death, when it visited Methwold's Estate, still managed to take me by su
rprise.
Even though the freezing of his assets had ended many years ago, the zone b
elow Ahmed Sinai's waist had remained as cold as ice. Ever since the day he
had cried out, 'The bastards are shoving my balls in an ice bucket!', and
Amina had taken them in her hands to warm them so that her fingers got glue
d to them by the cold, his sex had lain dormant, a woolly elephant in an ic
eberg, like the one they found in Russia in '56. My mother Amina, who had m
arried for children, felt the uncreated lives rotting in her womb and blame
d herself for becoming unattractive to him, what with her corns and all. Sh