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

on, or class origins; Mary Pereira would have called it my 'brought up'. By
my show of erudition and by the purity of my accents, I shamed them into f
eeling unworthy of judging me; not a very noble deed, but when the ambulanc
e is waiting round the corner, all's fair. (It was: I smelled it.) Still I'
ve had a valuable warning. It's a dangerous business to try and impose one'
s view of things on others.
Padma: if you're a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little uncertai
nty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.
Meanwhile, I am ten years old, and working out how to hide in the boot of m
y mother's car.
That was the month when Purushottam the sadhu (whom I had never told about m
y inner life) finally despaired of his stationary existence and contracted t
he suicidal hiccups which assailed him for an entire year, frequently liftin
g him bodily several inches off the ground so that his water balded head cra
cked alarmingly against the garden tap, and finally killed him, so that one
evening at the cocktail hour he toppled sideways with his legs still locked
in the lotus position, leaving my mother's verrucas without any hope of salv
ation; when I would often stand in the garden of Buckingham Villa in the eve
nings, watching the Sputniks cross the sky, and feeling as simultaneously ex
alted and isolated as little Laika, the first and still the only dog to be s
hot into space (the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, shortly to contract syphi
lis, sat beside me following the bright pinprick of Sputnik II with her Alsa
tian eyes it was a time of great canine interest in the space race); when Ev
ie Burns and her gang occupied my clocktower, and washing chests had been bo
th forbidden and outgrown, so that for the sake of secrecy and sanity I was
obliged to limit my visits to the midnight children to our private, silent h
our I communed with them every midnight, and only at midnight, during that h
our which is reserved for miracles, which is somehow outside time; and when
to get to the point I resolved to prove, with the evidence of my own eyes, t
he terrible thing I had glimpsed sitting in the front of my mother's thought
s. Ever since I lay hidden in a washing chest and heard two scandalous sylla
bles, I had been suspecting my mother of secrets; my incursions into her tho
ught processes confirmed my suspicions; so it was with a hard glint in my ey
e, and a steely determination, that I visited Sonny Ibrahim one afternoon af
ter school, with the intention of enlisting his help.
I found Sonny in his room, surrounded by posters of Spanish bullfights, m
orosely playing Indoor Cricket by himself. When he saw me he cried unhapp
ily, 'Hey man I'm damn sorry about Evie man she won't listen to anyone ma
n what the hell'd you do to her anyway?'… But I held up a dignified hand,
commanding and being accorded silence.
'No time for that now, man,' I said. 'The thing is, I need to know how to ope
n locks without keys.'