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

ves; but inevitably our problems, when they arose, were the everyday, huma
n problems which arise from character and environment; in our quarrels, we
were just a bunch of kids.
One remarkable fact: the closer to midnight our birth times were, the greate
r were our gifts. Those children born in the last seconds of the hour were (
to be frank) little more than circus freaks: bearded girls, a boy with the f
ully operative gills of a freshwater mahaseer trout, Siamese twins with two
bodies dangling off a single head and neck the head could speak in two voice
s, one male, one female, and every language and dialect spoken in the subcon
tinent; but for all their mar vellousness, these were the unfortunates, the
living casualties of that numinous hour. Towards the half hour came more int
eresting and useful faculties in the Gir Forest lived a witch girl with the
power of healing by the laying on of hands, and there was a wealthy tea plan
ter's son in Shillong who had the blessing (or possibly the curse) of being
incapable of forgetting anything he ever saw or heard. But the children born
in the first minute of all for these children the hour had reserved the hig
hest talents of which men had ever dreamed. If you, Padma, happened to posse
ss a register of births in which times were noted down to the exact second,
you, too, would know what scion of a great Lucknow family (born at twenty on
e seconds past midnight) had completely mastered, by the age of ten, the los
t arts of alchemy, with which he regenerated the fortunes of his ancient but
dissipated house; and which dhobi's daughter from Madras (seventeen seconds
past) could fly higher than any bird simply by closing her eyes; and to whi
ch Benarsi silversmith's son (twelve seconds after midnight) was given the g
ift of travelling in time and thus prophesying the future as well as clarify
ing the past… a gift which, children that we were, we trusted implicitly whe
n it dealt with things gone and forgotten, but derided when he warned us of
our own ends… fortunately, no such records exist; and, for my part, I shall
not reveal or else, in appearing to reveal, shall falsify their names and ev
en their locations; because, although such evidence would provide absolute proof of m
verything, to be left alone; perhaps to forget; but I hope (against hope) to
remember…
Parvati the witch was born in Old Delhi in a slum which clustered around th
e steps of the Friday mosque. No ordinary slum, this, although the huts bui
lt out of old packing cases and pieces of corrugated tin and shreds of jute
sacking which stood higgledy piggledy in the shadow of the mosque looked n
o different from any other shanty town… because this was the ghetto of the
magicians, yes, the very same place which had once spawned a Hummingbird wh
om knives had pierced and pie dogs had failed to save… the conjurers' slum,
to which the greatest fakirs and prestidigitators and illusionists in the
land continually flocked, to seek their fortune in the capital city. They f