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

l an old and ruthless great aunt took her into her bony arms and slashed he
r face nine times with a kitchen knife. At the time when I became aware of
her, Sundari was earning a healthy living, because nobody who looked at her
could fail to pity a girl who had clearly once been too beautiful to look
at and was now so cruelly disfigured; she received more alms than any other
member of her family.
Because none of the children suspected that their time of birth had anything
to do with what they were, it took me a while to find it out. At first, aft
er the bicycle accident (and particularly once language marchers had purged
me of Evie Burns), I contented myself with discovering, one by one, the secr
ets of the fabulous beings who had suddenly arrived in my mental field of vi
sion, collecting them ravenously, the way some boys collect insects, and oth
ers spot railway trains; losing interest in autograph books and all other ma
nifestations of the gathering instinct, I plunged whenever possible into the
separate, and altogether brighter reality of the five hundred and eighty on
e. (Two hundred and sixty six of us were boys; and we were outnumbered by ou
r female counterparts three hundred and fifteen of them, including Parvati.
Parvati the witch.)
Midnight's children!… From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping i
nto mirrors and re emerging through any reflective surface in the land thr
ough lakes and (with greater difficulty) the polished metal bodies of auto
mobiles… and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish… and childre
n with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri Hills, and fr
om the great watershed of the Vindhyas, a boy who could increase or reduce
his size at will, and had already (mischievously) been the cause of wild
panic and rumours of the return of Giants… from Kashmir, there was a blue
eyed child of whose original sex I was never certain, since by immersing h
erself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased. Some of
us called this child Narada, others Markandaya, depending on which old fa
iry story of sexual change we had heard… near Jalna in the heart of the pa
rched Deccan I found a water divining youth, and at Budge Budge outside Ca
lcutta a sharp tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflictin
g physical wounds, so that after a few adults had found themselves bleedin
g freely as a result of some barb flung casually from her lips, they had d
ecided to lock her in a bamboo cage and float her off down the Ganges to t
he Sundarbans jungles (which are the rightful home of monsters and phantas
ms); but nobody dared approach her, and she moved through the town surroun
ded by a vacuum of fear; nobody had the courage to deny her food. There wa
s a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that sh
e could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert; and more and more and mo
re… overwhelmed by their numbers, and by the exotic multiplicity of their
gifts, I paid little attention, in those early days, to their ordinary sel