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

lord?' but she only succeeded in awaking my puzzled mother. Joseph's ghost
plagued Mary wordlessly; and the worst of it was that she found herself gro
wing accustomed to him, she found forgotten sensations of fondness nudging
at her insides, and although she told herself it was a crazy thing to do sh
e began to be filled with a kind of nostalgic love for the spirit of the de
ad hospital porter.
But the love was not returned; Joseph's egg white eyes remained expression
less; his lips remained set in an accusing, sardonic grin; and at last she
realized that this new manifestation was no different from her old dream
Joseph (although it never assaulted her), and that if she was ever to be f
ree of him she would have to do the unthinkable thing and confess her crim
e to the world. But she didn't confess, which was probably my fault becaus
e Mary loved me like her own unconceived and inconceivable son, and to mak
e her confession would have hurt me badly, so for my sake she suffered the
ghost of her conscience and stood haunted in the kitchen (my father had s
acked the cook one djinn soaked evening) cooking our dinner and becoming,
accidentally, the embodiment of the opening line of my Latin textbook, Ora
Maritima: 'By the side of the sea, the ayah cooked the meal.' Ora maritim
a, ancilla cenam parat. Look into the eyes of a cooking ayah, and you will
see more than textbooks ever know.
On my tenth birthday, many chickens were coming home to roost. On my tenth
birthday, it was clear that the freak weather storms, floods, hailstones fr
om a cloudless sky which had succeeded the intolerable heat of 1956, had ma
naged to wreck the second Five Year Plan. The government had been forced al
though the elections were just around the corner to announce to the world t
hat it could accept no more development loans unless the lenders were willi
ng to wait indefinitely for repayment. (But let me not overstate the case:
although the production of finished steel reached only 2.4 million tons by
the Plan's end in 1961, and although, during those five years, the number o
f landless and unemployed masses actually increased, so that it was greater
than it had ever been under the British Raj, there were also substantial g
ains. The production of iron ore was almost doubled; power capacity did dou
ble; coal production leaped from thirty eight million to fifty four million
tons. Five billion yards of cotton textiles were produced each year. Also
large numbers of bicycles, machine tools, diesel engines, power pumps and c
eiling fans. But I can't help ending on a downbeat: illiteracy survived uns
cathed; the population continued to mushroom.)
On my tenth birthday, we were visited by my uncle Hanif, who made himsel
f excessively unpopular at Methwold's Estate by booming cheerily, 'Elect
ions coming! Watch out for the Communists!'
On my tenth birthday, when my uncle Hanif made his gaffe, my mother (who