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

'But I saw Him,' my grandfather says beneath motionless fans. 'Yes, ? can't
deny it, I surely did.'… And the apparition: 'You're the one whose son died'
; and my grandfather, with a pain in his chest: 'Why? Why did that happen?'
To which the creature, made visible only by dust: 'God has his reasons, old
man; life's like that, right?'
Reverend Mother dismissed us all. 'Old man doesn't know what he means, wh
atsitsname. Such a thing, that grey hairs should make a man blaspheme!' B
ut Mary Pereira left with her face pale as bedsheets; Mary knew whom Aada
m Aziz had seen who, decayed by his responsibility for her crime, had hol
es in hands and feet; whose heel had been penetrated by a snake; who died
in a nearby clocktower, and had been mistaken for God.
I may as well finish my grandfather's story here and now; I've gone this fa
r, and the opportunity may not present itself later on… somewhere in the de
pths of my grandfather's senility, which inevitably reminded me of the craz
iness of Professor Schaapsteker upstairs, the bitter idea took root that Go
d, by his off hand attitude to Hanif's suicide, had proved his own culpabil
ity in the affair; Aadam grabbed General Zulfikar by his military lapels an
d whispered to him: 'Because I never believed, he stole my son!' And Zulfik
ar: 'No, no, Doctor Sahib, you must not trouble yourself so…' But Aadam Azi
z never forgot his vision; although the details of the particular deity he
had seen grew blurred in his mind, leaving behind only a passionate, drooli
ng desire for revenge (which lust is also common to us both)… at the end of
the forty day mourning period, he would refuse to go to Pakistan (as Rever
end Mother had planned) because that was a country built especially for God
; and in the remaining years of his life he often disgraced himself by stum
bling into mosques and temples with his old man's stick, mouthing imprecati
ons and lashing out at any worshipper or holy man within range. In Agra, he
was tolerated for the sake of the man he had once been; the old ones at th
e Cornwallis Road paan shop played hit the spittoon and reminisced with com
passion about the Doctor Sahib's past. Reverend Mother was obliged to yield
to him for this reason if for no other the iconoclasm of his dotage would
have created a scandal in a country where he was not known.
Behind his foolishness and his rages, the cracks continued to spread; the
disease munched steadily on his bones, while hatred ate the rest of him aw
ay. He did not die, however, until 1964. It happened like this: on Wednesd
ay, December 25th, 1963 on Christmas Day! Reverend Mother awoke to find he
r husband gone. Coming out into the courtyard of her home, amid hissing ge
ese and the pale shadows of the dawn, she called for a servant; and was to
ld that the Doctor Sahib had gone by rickshaw to the railway station. By t
he time she reached the station, the train had gone; and in this way my gr
andfather, following some unknown impulse, began his last journey, so that
he could end his story where it (and mine) began, in a city surrounded by