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

the grasping thumb and forefinger, it unleashes a weapon of its own… a larg
e blob of shining goo emerges from the left nostril, to plop into Mr Zagall
o's palm. Fat Perce Fishwala yells, 'Lookit that, sir! The drip from his no
se, sir! Is that supposed to be Ceylon?'
His palm smeared with goo, Zagallo loses his jokey mood. 'Animal,' he curs
es me, 'You see what you do?' Zagallo's hand releases my nose; returns to
hair. Nasal refuse is wiped into my neatly parted locks. And now, once aga
in, my hair is seized; once again, the hand is pulling… but upwards now, a
nd my head has jerked upright, my feet are moving on to tiptoe, and Zagall
o, 'What are you? Tell me what you are!'
'Sir an animal sir!'
The hand pulls harder higher. 'Again.' Standing on my toenails now, I yelp: '
Aiee sir an animal an animal please sir aiee!'
And still harder and still higher… 'Once more!' But suddenly it ends; my feet
are flat on the ground again; and the class has fallen into a deathly hush.
'Sir,' Sonny Ibrahim is saying, 'you pulled his hair out, sir.'
And now the cacophony: 'Look sir, blood.' 'He's bleeding sir.1 'Please sir sha
ll I take him to the nurse?'
Mr Zagallo stood like a statue with a clump of my hair in his fist. While I
too shocked to feel any pain felt the patch on my head where Mr Zagallo ha
d created a monkish tonsure, a circle where hair would never grow again, an
d realized that the curse of my birth, which connected me to my country, ha
d managed to find yet one more unexpected expression of itself.
Two days later, Croaker Crusoe announced that, unfortunately, Mr Emil Zagal
lo was leaving the staff for personal reasons; but I knew what the reasons
were. My uprooted hairs had stuck to his hands, like bloodstains that would
n't wash out, and nobody wants a teacher with hair on Ids palms, 'The first
sign of madness,' as Glandy Keith was fond of saying, 'and the second sign
is looking for them.'
Zagallo's legacy: a monk's tonsure; and, worse than that, a whole set of new
taunts, which my classmates flung at me while we waited for school buses to t
ake us home to get dressed for the Social: 'Snot nose is a bal die!' and, 'Sn
iffer's got a map face!' When Cyrus arrived in the bus queue, I tried to turn
the crowd against him, by attempting to set up a chant of'Cyrus the great, B
orn on a plate, In nineteen hundred and forty eight,' but nobody took up the
offer.
So we come to the events of the Cathedral School Social. At which bullies
became instruments of destiny, and fingers were transmuted into fountains,
and Masha Miovic, the legendary breast stroker, fell into a dead faint… I
arrived at the Social with the nurse's bandage still on my head. I was la
te, because it hadn't been easy to persuade my mother to let me come; so b
y the time I stepped into the Assembly Hall, beneath streamers and balloon