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

y accident he taught me how to ride a bicycle. By the time we left, I had t
his secret tucked away with all my others: only I didn't intend this one to
stay secret for very long.
… And on the train home, there were voices hanging on to the outside of the
compartment: 'Ohe, maharaj! Open up, great sir!' fare dodgers' voices figh
ting with the ones I wanted to listen to, the new ones inside my head and t
hen back to Bombay Central Station, and the drive home past racecourse and
temple, and now Evelyn Lilith Burns is demanding that I finish her part fir
st before concentrating on higher things.
'Home again!' the Monkey shouts. 'Hurray… Back to Bom!' (She is in disgrac
e. In Agra, she incinerated the General's boots.)
It is a matter of record that the States Reorganization Committee had subm
itted its report to Mr Nehru as long ago as October 1955; a year later, it
s recommendations had been implemented. India had been divided anew, into
fourteen states and six centrally administered 'territories'. But the boun
daries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any nat
ural features of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words. Language
divided us: Kerala was for speakers of Malayalam, the only palindromicall
y named tongue on earth; in Karnataka you were supposed to speak Kanarese;
and the amputated state of Madras known today as Tamil Nadu enclosed the
aficionados of Tamil. Owing to some oversight, however, nothing was done w
ith the state of Bombay; and in the city of Mumbadevi, the language marche
s grew longer and noisier and finally metamorphosed into political parties
, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti ('United Maharashtra Party') which stood
for the Marathi language and demanded the creation of the Deccan state of
Maharashtra, and the Maha Gujarat Parishad ('Great Gujarat Party') which
marched beneath the banner of the Gujarati language and dreamed of a state
to the north of Bombay City, stretching all the way to the Kathiawar peni
nsula and the Rann of Kutch… I am warming over all this cold history, thes
e old dead struggles between the barren angularity of Marathi which was bo
rn in the arid heat of the Deccan and Gujarati's boggy, Kathiawari softnes
s, to explain why, on the day in February 1957 immediately following our r
eturn from Agra, Methwold's Estate was cut off from the city by a stream o
f chanting humanity which flooded Warden Road more completely than monsoon
water, a parade so long that it took two days to pass, and of which it wa
s said that the statue of Sivaji had come to life to ride stonily at its h
ead. The demonstrators carried black flags; many of them were shopkeepers
on hartal; many were striking textile workers from Mazagaon and Matunga; b
ut on our hillock, we knew nothing about their jobs; to us children, the endless ant trai
as magnetically fascinating as a light bulb to a moth. It was a demonstrat
ion so immense, so intense in its passions, that it made all previous march