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

ied together, wings clipped, fluttery pecky birds invading my hidey hole?
Will she see, my God, I'll have to be silent for a week!' My knees drawn i
n beneath my chin which was protected against knee bumps by an old faded c
ushion I voyaged into the unknown in the vehicle of maternal perfidy. My m
other was a cautious driver; she went slowly, and turned corners with care
; but afterwards I was bruised black and blue and Mary Pereira berated me
soundly for getting into fights: 'Arre God what a thing it's a wonder they
didn't smash you to pieces completely my God what will you grow up into y
ou bad black boy you haddi phaelwan you skin and bone wrestler!'
To take my mind off the jolting darkness I entered, with extreme caution, th
at part of my mother's mind which was in charge of driving operations, and a
s a result was able to follow our route. (And, also, to discern in my mother
's habitually tidy mind an alarming degree of disorder. I was already beginn
ing, in those days, to classify people by their degree of internal tidiness,
and to discover that I preferred the messier type, whose thoughts, spilling
constantly into one another so that anticipatory images of food interfered
with the serious business of earning a living and sexual fantasies were supe
rimposed upon their political musings, bore a closer relationship to my own
pell mell tumble of a brain, in which everything ran into everything else an
d the white dot of consciousness jumped about like a wild flea from one thin
g to the next… Amina Sinai, whose assiduous ordering instincts had provided
her with a brain of almost abnormal neatness, was a curious recruit to the r
anks of confusion.)
We headed north, past Breach Candy Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north al
ong Horaby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali's island to
mb, north off what had once been (before the dream of the first William Me
thwold became a reality) the island of Bombay. We were heading towards the
anonymous mass of tenements and fishing villages and textile plants and f
ilm studios that the city became in these northern zones (not far from her
e! Not at all far from where I sit within view of local trains!)… an area
which was, in those days, utterly unknown to me; I rapidly became disorien
ted and was then obliged to admit to myself that I was lost. At last, down
an unprepossessing side street full of drainpipe sleepers and bicycle rep
air shops and tattered men and boys, we stopped. Clusters of children assa
iled my mother as she descended; she, who could never shoo away a fly, han
ded out small coins, thus enlarging the crowd enormously. Eventually, she
struggled away from them and headed down the street; there was a boy plead
ing, 'Gib the car poliss, Begum? Number one A class poliss, Begum? I watch
car until you come, Begum? I very fine watchman, ask anyone!'… In some pa
nic, I listened in for her reply. How could I get out of this boot under t
he eyes of a guardian urchin? There was the embarrassment of it; and besid
es, my emergence would have created a sensation in the street… my mother s