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

ound tin huts, and police harassment, and rats… Parvati's father had once b
een the greatest conjurer in Oudh; she had grown up amid ventriloquists who
could make stones tell jokes and contortionists who could swallow their ow
n legs and fire eaters who exhaled flames from their arseholes and tragic c
lowns who could extract glass tears from the corners of their eyes; she had
stood mildly amid gasping crowds while her father drove spikes through her
neck; and all the time she had guarded her own secret, which was greater t
han any of the illusionist flummeries surrounding her; because to Parvati t
he witch, born a mere seven seconds after midnight on August 15th, had been
given the powers of the true adept, the illuminatus, the genuine gifts of
conjuration and sorcery, the art which required no artifice.
So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation,
flight, prophecy and wizardry… but two of us were born on the stroke of
midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees an
d nose… to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could
draw the undrawable.bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kur
us and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!)… and to me, the greatest ta
lent of all the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.
But it is Kali Yuga; the children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afra
id, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to
be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.
There; now I've said it. That is who I was who we were.
Padma is looking as if her mother had died her face, with its opening shuttin
g mouth, is the face of a beached pomfret. 'O baba!' she says at last. 'O bab
a! You are sick; what have you said?'
No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don't make th
e mistake of dismissing what I've unveiled as mere delirium; or even as the i
nsanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated before t
hat I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and read alou
d to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal, by the hairs of my moth
er's head truth.
Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. A t
housand and one children were born; there were a thousand and one possibili
ties which had never been present in one place at one time before; and ther
e were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children can be made to rep
resent many things, according to your point of view: they can be seen as th
e last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth ridden
nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing
, twentieth century economy; or as the true hope of freedom, which is now f
orever extinguished; but what they must not become is the bizarre creation
of a rambling, diseased mind. No: illness is neither here nor there.
'All right, all right, baba,' Padma attempts to placate me. 'Why become so cr