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

The skin on his face hung in folds which revealed that he had once been ove
rweight; his teeth were stained with paan. He wore a clean white kurta with
Lucknow work around the buttonholes. He had long hair, poetically long, ha
nging lankly over his ears; but the top of his head was bald and shiny. For
bidden syllables echoed in my ears: Na. Dir. Nadir. I realized that I wishe
d desperately that I'd never resolved to come.
Once upon a time there was an underground husband who fled, leaving lovin
g messages of divorce; a poet whose verses didn't even rhyme, whose life
was saved by pie dogs. After a lost decade he emerged from goodness knows
where, his skin hanging loose in memory of his erstwhile plumpness; and,
like his once upon a time wife, he had acquired a new name… Nadir Khan w
as now Qasim Khan, official candidate of the official Communist Party of
India. Lal Qasim. Qasim the Red. Nothing is without meaning: not without
reason are blushes red. My uncle Hanif said, 'Watch out for the Communist
s!' and my mother turned scarlet; politics and emotions were united in he
r cheeks… through the dirty, square, glassy cinema screen of the Pioneer
Gate's window, I watched Amina Sinai and the no longer Nadir play out the
ir love scene; they performed with the ineptitude of genuine amateurs.
On the reccine topped table, a packet of cigarettes: State Express 555. Numb
ers, too, have significance: 420, the name given to frauds; 1001, the number
of night, of magic, of alternative realities a number beloved of poets and
detested by politicians, for whom all alternative versions of the world are
threats; and 555, which for years I believed to be the most sinister of numb
ers, the cipher of the Devil, the Great Beast, Shaitan himself! (Cyrus the g
reat told me so, and I didn't contemplate the possibility of his being wrong
. But he was: the true daemonic number is not 555, but 666: yet, in my mind,
a dark aura hangs around the three fives to this day.)… But I am getting ca
rried away. Suffice to say that Nadir Qasim's preferred brand was the afores
aid State Express; that the figure five was repeated three times on the pack
et; and that its manufacturers were W.D. & H.O. Wills. Unable to look into m
y mother's face, I concentrated on the cigarette packet, cutting from two sh
ot of lovers to this extreme close up of nicotine.
But now hands enter the frame first the hands of Nadir Qasim, their poetic s
oftness somewhat callused these days; hands flickering like candle flames, c
reeping forward across reccine, then jerking back; next a woman's hands, bla
ck as jet, inching forwards like elegant spiders; hands lifting up, off recc
ine tabletop, hands hovering above three fives, beginning the strangest of d
ances, rising, falling, circling one another, weaving in and out between eac
h other, hands longing for touch, hands outstretching tensing quivering dema
nding to be but always at last jerking back, fingertips avoiding fingertips,
because what I'm watching here on my dirty glass cinema screen is, after ai