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

d than I even I had dreamed.
'Really truly?' Padma asks. 'You were truly there?' Really truly. 'They say
that Ayub was a good man before he became bad,' Padma says; it is a questi
on. But Saleem, at eleven, made no such judgments. The movement of pepperpo
ts does not necessitate moral choices. What Saleem was concerned with: not
public upheaval, but personal rehabilitation. You see the paradox my most c
rucial foray into history up to that moment was inspired by the most paroch
ial of motives. Anyway, it was not 'my' country or not then. Not my country
, although I stayed in it as refugee, not citizen; entered on my mother's I
ndian passport, I would have come in for a good deal of suspicion, maybe ev
en deported or arrested as a spy, had it not been for my tender years and t
he power of my guardian with the Punch like features for four long years.
Four years of nothing.
Except growing into a teenager. Except watching my mother as she fell apart
. Except observing the Monkey, who was a crucial year younger than me, fall
under the insidious spell of that God ridden country; the Monkey, once so
rebellious and wild, adopting expressions of demureness and submission whic
h must, at first, have seemed false even to her; the Monkey, learning how t
o cook and keep house, how to buy spices in the market; the Monkey, making
the final break with the legacy of her grandfather, by learning prayers in
Arabic and saying them at all prescribed times; the Monkey, revealing the s
treak of puritan fanaticism which she had hinted at when she asked for a nu
n's outfit; she, who spurned all offers of worldly love, was seduced by the
love of that God who had been named after a carved idol in a pagan shrine
built around a giant meteorite: Al Lah, in the Qa'aba, the shrine of the gr
eat Black Stone.
But nothing else.
Four years away from the midnight children; four years without Warden Roa
d and Breach Candy and Scandal Point and the lures of One Yard of Chocola
tes; away from the Cathedral School and the equestrian statue of Sivaji a
nd melon sellers at the Gateway of India: away from Divali and Ganesh Cha
turthi and Coconut Day; four years of separation from a father who sat al
one in a house he would not sell; alone, except for Professor Schaapsteke
r, who stayed in his apartment and shunned the company of men.
Can nothing really happen for four years? Obviously, not quite. My cousin Z
afar, who had never been forgiven by his father for wetting his pants in th
e presence of history, was given to understand that he would be joining the
Army as soon as he was of age. 'I want to see you prove you're not a woman
,' his father told him.
And Bonzo died; General Zulfikar shed manly tears.
And Mary's confession faded until, because nobody spoke of it, it came to f