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

'They can't stop us, man! We can bewitch, and fly, and read minds, and turn
them into frogs, and make gold and fishes, and they will fall in love with u
s, and we can vanish through mirrors and change our sex… how will they be ab
le to fight?'
I won't deny I was disappointed. I shouldn't have been; there was nothing u
nusual about the children except for their gifts; their heads were full of
all the usual things, fathers mothers money food land possessions fame powe
r God. Nowhere, in the thoughts .of the Conference, could I find anything a
s new as ourselves… but then I was on the wrong track, too; I could not see
any more clearly than anyone else; and even when Soumitra the time travell
er said, 'I'm telling you all this is pointless they'll finish us before we
start!' we all ignored him; with the optimism of youth which is a more vir
ulent form of the same disease that once infected my grandfather Aadam Aziz
we refused to look on the dark side, and not a single one of us suggested
that the purpose of Midnight's Children might be annihilation; that we woul
d have no meaning until we were destroyed.
For the sake of their privacy, I am refusing to distinguish the voices from
one another; and for other reasons. For one thing, my narrative could not co
pe with five hundred and eighty one fully rounded personalities; for another
, the children, despite their won drously discrete and varied gifts, remaine
d, to my mind, a sort of many headed monster, speaking in the myriad tongues
of Babel; they were the very essence of multiplicity, and I see no point in
dividing them now. (But there were exceptions. In particular, there was Shi
va; and there was Parvati the witch.)
… Destiny, historical role, numen: these were mouthfuls too large for ten
year old gullets. Even, perhaps, for mine; despite the ever present admoni
tions of the fisherman's pointing finger and the Prime Minister's letter,
I was constantly distracted from my sniff given marvels by the tiny occurr
ences of everyday life, by feeling hungry or sleepy, by monkeying around w
ith the Monkey, or going to the cinema to see Cobra Woman or Vera Cruz, by
my growing longing for long trousers and by the inexplicable below the be
lt heat engendered by the approaching School Social at which we, the boys
of the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School, would be permitted to
dance the box step and the Mexican Hat Dance with the girls from our siste
r institution such as Masha Miovic the champion breast stroker ('??? hee,'
said Glandy Keith Colaco) and Elizabeth Purkiss and Janey Jackson Europea
n girls, my God, with loose skirts and kissing ways! in short, my attentio
n was continually seized by the painful, engrossing torture of growing up.
Even a symbolic gander must come down, at last, to earth; so it isn't nearly
enough for me now (as it was not then) to confine my story to its miraculous
aspects; I must return (as I used to return) to the quotidian; I must permit
blood to spill.