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

erfidious mother, a lust which had faded in the brilliant glare of my exi
le, but which now returned and was united with my new born loathing of Ho
mi Catrack. This two headed lust was the demon which possessed me, and dr
ove me into doing the worst thing I ever did… 'Everything will be all rig
ht,' my mother was saying, 'You just wait and see.' Yes, mother.
It occurs to me that I have said nothing, in this entire piece, about the Mid
night Children's Conference; but then, to tell the truth, they didn't seem ve
ry important to me in those days. I had other things on my mind.
Commander Sabarmati's baton
A few months later, when Mary Pereira finally confessed her crime, and revea
led the secrets of her eleven year long haunting by the ghost of Joseph D'Co
sta, we learned that, after her return from exile, she was badly shocked by
the condition into which the ghost had fallen in her absence. It had begun t
o decay, so that now bits of it were missing: an ear, several toes on each f
oot, most of its teeth; and there was a hole in its stomach larger than an e
gg. Distressed by this crumbling spectre, she asked it (when she was sure no
body else was within earshot): 'O God, Joe, what you been doing to yourself?
' He replied that the responsibility of her crime had been placed squarely o
n his shoulders until she confessed, and it was playing hell with his system
. From that moment it became inevitable that she would confess; but each tim
e she looked at me she found herself prevented from doing so. Still, it was
only a matter of time.
In the meanwhile, and utterly ignorant of how close I was to being exposed
as a fraud, I was attempting to come to terms with a Methwold's Estate in
which, too, a number of transformations had occurred. In the first place,
my father seemed to want nothing more to do with me, an attitude of mind
which I found hurtful but (considering my mutilated body) entirely underst
andable. In the second place, there was the remarkable change in the fortu
nes of the Brass Monkey. 'My position in this household,' I was obliged to
admit to myself, 'has been usurped.' Because now it was the Monkey whom m
y father admitted into the abstract sanctum of his office, the Monkey whom
he smothered in his squashy belly, and who was obliged to bear the burden
s of his dreams about the future. I even heard Mary Pereira singing to the
Monkey the little ditty which had been my theme song all my days: 'Anythi
ng you want to be,' Mary sang, 'you can be; You can be just what all you w
ant!' Even my mother seemed to have caught the mood; and now it was my sis
ter who always got the biggest helping of chips at the dinner table, and t
he extra nargisi kofta, and the choicest pasanda. While I whenever anyone
in the house chanced to look at me was conscious of a deepening furrow bet
ween their eyebrows, and an atmosphere of confusion and distrust. But how