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

innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should p
rove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I
told you then he was a time bomb, and he had returned to explode. Musa had
, indeed, contracted leprosy; and had returned across the silence of the ye
ars to beg for my father's forgiveness, so that he could be released from h
is self inflicted curse.
… Someone was called God who was not God; someone else was taken for a g
host, and was not a ghost; and a third person discovered that although h
is name was Saleem Sinai, he was not his parents' son…
'I forgive you,' Ahmed Sinai said to the leper. After that day, he was cured
of one of his obsessions; he never tried again to discover his own (and who
lly imaginary) family curse.
'I couldn't tell it any other way,' I say to Padma. Too painful; I had to just blu
rt it out, all crazy sounding, just like that.'
'O, mister,' Padma blubbers helplessly, 'O, mister, mister!'
'Come on now,' I say, 'It's an old story.'
But her tears aren't for me; for the moment, she's forgotten about what che
ws at bones beneath the skin; she's crying over Mary Pereira, of whom, as I
've said, she had become excessively fond.
'What happened to her?' she says with red eyes. 'That Mary?'
I am seized by an irrational anger. I shout: 'You ask her!'
Ask her how she went home to the city of Panjim in Goa, how she told her anc
ient mother the story of her shame! Ask how her mother went wild with the sc
andal (appropriately enough: it was a time for old folk to lose their wits)!
Ask: did daughter and old mother go into the streets to seek forgiveness? W
as that not the one time in each ten years when the mummified corpse of St F
rancis Xavier (as holy a relic as the Prophet's hair) is taken from its vaul
t in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus and carried around the town? Did Mary and ol
d distraught Mrs Pereira find themselves pressing up against the catafalque;
was the old lady beside herself with grief for her daughter's crime? Did ol
d Mrs Pereira, shouting, 'Hai! Ai hai! Ai hai hai!', clamber up on to the bi
er to kiss the foot of the Holy One? Amidst uncountable crowds, did Mrs Pere
ira enter a holy frenzy? Ask! Did she or didn't she, in the clutches of her
wild spirit, place her lips around the big toe on St Francis's left foot? As
k for yourself: did Mary's mother bite the toe right off?
'How?' Padma wails, unnerved by my wrath. 'How, ask?'
… And is this also true: were the papers making it up when they wrote that
the old lady had been miraculously punished; when they quoted Church sour
ces and eye witnesses, who described how the old woman was turned into sol
id stone? No? Ask her if it's true that the Church sent a stone statue fig
ure of an old woman around the towns and the villages of Goa, to show what