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

l, an Indian movie, in which physical contact is forbidden lest it corrupt t
he watching flower of Indian youth; and there are feet beneath the table and
faces above it, feet advancing towards feet, faces tumbling softly towards
faces, but jerking away all of a sudden in a cruel censor's cut… two strange
rs, each bearing a screen name which is not the name of their birth, act out
their half unwanted roles. I left the movie before the end, to slip back in
to the boot of the unpolished unwatched Rover, wishing I hadn't gone to see
it, unable to resist wanting to watch it all over again.
What I saw at the very end: my mother's hands raising a half empty glass of
Lovely Lassi; my mother's lips pressing gently, nostalgically against the mo
ttled glass; my mother's hands handing the glass to her Nadir Qasim; who als
o applied, to the opposite side of the glass, his own, poetic mouth. So it w
as that life imitated bad art, and my uncle Hanif's sister brought the eroti
cism of the indirect kiss into the green neon dinginess of the Pioneer Cafe.
To sum up: in the high summer of 1957, at the peak of an election campaign
, Amina Sinai blushed inexplicably at a chance mention of the Communist Pa
rty of India. Her son in whose turbulent thoughts there was still room for
one more obsession, because a ten year old brain can accommodate any numb
er of fixations followed her into the north of the city, and spied on a pa
in filled scene of impotent love. (Now that Ahmed Sinai was frozen up, Nad
ir Qasim didn't even have a sexual disadvantage; torn between a husband wh
o locked himself in an office and cursed mongrels, and an ex husband who h
ad once, lovingly, played games of hit the spittoon, Amina Sinai was reduc
ed to glass kissery and hand dances.)
Questions: did I ever, after that time, employ the services of pink plastic
? Did I return to the cafe of extras and Marxists? Did I confront my mother
with the heinous nature of her offence because what mother has any busines
s to never mind about what once upon a time in full view of her only son, h
ow could she how could she how could she? Answers: I did not; I did not; I
did not.
What I did: when she went on 'shopping trips', I lodged myself in her thoug
hts. No longer anxious to gain the evidence of my own eyes, I rode in my mo
ther's head, up to the north of the city; in this unlikely incognito, I sat
in the Pioneer Cafe and heard conversations about the electoral prospects
of Qasim the Red; disembodied but wholly present, I trailed my mother as sh
e accompanied Qasim on his rounds, up and down the tenements of the distric
t (were they the same chawls which my father had recently sold, abandoning
his tenants to their fate?), as she helped him to get water taps fixed and
pestered landlords to initiate repairs and disinfections. Amina Sinai moved
amongst the destitute on behalf of the Communist Party a fact which never
failed to leave her amazed. Perhaps she did it because of the growing impov
erishment of her own life; but at the age of ten I wasn't disposed to be sy