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

on the Mahanadi river in Orissa, there was a pair of twin sisters who were
already a legend in the region, because despite their impressive plainness
they both possessed the ability of making every man who saw them fall hope
lessly and often suicidally in love with them, so that their bemused parent
s were endlessly pestered by a stream of men offering their hands in marria
ge to either or even both of the bewildering children; old men who had fors
aken the wisdom of their beards and youths who ought to have been becoming
besotted with the actresses in the travelling picture show which visited Ba
ud once a month; and there was another, more disturbing procession of berea
ved families cursing the twin girls for having bewitched their sons into co
mmitting acts of violence against themselves, fatal mutilations and scourgi
ngs and even (in one case) self immolation. With the exception of such rare
instances, however, the children of midnight had grown up quite unaware of
their true siblings, their fellow chosen ones across the length and breadt
h of India's rough and badly proportioned diamond.
And then, as a result of a jolt received in a bicycle accident, I, Saleem Sina
i, became aware of them all.
To anyone whose personal cast of mind is too inflexible to accept these fac
ts, I have this to say: That's how it was; there can be no retreat from the
truth. I shall just have to shoulder the burden of the doubter's disbelief
. But no literate person in this India of ours can be wholly immune from th
e type of information I am in the process of unveiling no reader of our nat
ional press can have failed to come across a series of admittedly lesser ma
gic children and assorted freaks. Only last week there was that Bengali boy
who announced himself as the reincarnation of Rabindranath Tagore and bega
n to extemporize verses of remarkable quality, to the amazement of his pare
nts; and I can myself remember children with two heads (sometimes one human
, one animal), and other curious features such as bullock's horns.
I should say at once that not all the children's gifts were desirable, or e
ven desired by the children themselves; and, in some cases, the children ha
d survived but been deprived of their midnight given qualities. For example
(as a companion piece to the story of the Baudi twins) let me mention a De
lhi beggar girl called Sundari, who was born in a street behind the General
Post Office, not far from the rooftop on which Amina Sinai had listened to
Ramram Seth, and whose beauty was so intense that within moments of her bi
rth it succeeded in blinding her mother and the neighbouring women who had
been assisting at her delivery; her father, rushing into the room when he h
eard the women's screams, had been warned by them just in time; but his one
fleeting glimpse of his daughter so badly impaired his vision that he was
unable, afterwards, to distinguish between Indians and foreign tourists, a
handicap which greatly affected his earning power as a beggar. For some tim
e after that Sundari was obliged to have a rag placed across her face; unti