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

oss? Rest now, rest some while, that is all I am asking.'
Certainly it was a hallucinatory time in the days leading up to my tenth bi
rthday; but the hallucinations were not in my head. My father, Ahmed Sinai,
driven by the traitorous death of Dr Narlikar and by the increasingly powe
rful effect of djinns and tonics, had taken flight into a dream world of di
sturbing unreality; and the most insidious aspect of his slow decline was t
hat, for a very long time, people mistook it for the very opposite of what
it was… Here is Sonny's mother, Nussie the duck, telling Amina one evening
in our garden: 'What great days for you all, Amina sister, now that your Ah
med is in his prime! Such a fine man, and so much he is prospering for his
family's sake!' She says it loud enough for him to hear; and although he pr
etends to be telling the gardener what to do about the ailing bougainvillae
a, although he assumes an expression of humble self deprecation, it's utter
ly unconvincing, because his bloated body has begun, without his knowing it
, to puff up and strut about. Even Purushottam, the dejected sadhu under th
e garden tap, looks embarrassed.
My fading father… for almost ten years he had always been in a good mood at
the breakfast table, before he shaved his chin; but as his facial hairs whit
ened along with his fading skin, this fixed point of happiness ceased to be
a certainty; and the day came when he lost his temper at breakfast for the f
irst time. That was the day on which taxes were raised and tax thresholds si
multaneously lowered; my father flung down the Times of India with a violent
gesture and glared around him with the red eyes I knew he only wore in his
tempers. 'It's like going to the bathroom!' he exploded, cryptically; egg to
ast tea shuddered in the blast of his wrath. 'You raise your shirt and lower
your trousers! Wife, this government is going to the bathroom all over us!'
And my mother, blushing pink through the black, 'Janum, the children, pleas
e,' but he had stomped off, leaving me with a clear understanding of what pe
ople meant when they said the country was going to pot.
In the following weeks my father's morning chin continued to fade, and some
thing more than the peace of the breakfast table was lost: he began to forg
et what sort of man he'd been in the old days before Narlikar's treason. Th
e rituals of our home life began to decay. He began to stay away from the b
reakfast table, so that Amina could not wheedle money out of him; but, to c
ompensate, he became careless with his cash, and his discarded clothes were
full of rupee notes and coins, so that by picking his pockets she could ma
ke ends meet. But a more depressing indication of his withdrawal from famil
y life was that he rarely told us bedtime stories any more, and when he did
we didn't enjoy them, because they had become ill imagined and unconvincin
g. Their subject matter was still the same, princes goblins flying horses a
nd adventures in magic lands, but in his perfunctory voice we could hear th