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

I listened to her faultless voice, which at fourteen was the voice of a gr
own woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the fl
ying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody of bulbuls and t
he glorious omnipresence of God; a voice which was afterwards compared to t
hat of Muhammed's muezzin Bilal, issuing from the lips of a somewhat scrawny girl.
What I did not understand must wait to be told; let me record here that my
sister earned her name at her fourteenth birthday party, and was known afte
r that as Jamila Singer; and that I knew, as I listened to 'My Red Dupatta
Of Muslin' and 'Shahbaz Qalandar', that the process which had begun during
my first exile was nearing completion in my second; that, from now on, Jami
la was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to her tal
ent for ever.
Jamila sang I, humbly, bowed my head. But before she could enter fully into
her kingdom, something else had to happen: I had to be properly finished o
ff.
Drainage and the desert
What chews on bones refuses to pause… it's only a matter of time. This i
s what keeps me going: I hold on to Padma. Padma is what matters Padma m
uscles, Padma's hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus… who, embarrasse
d, commands: 'Enough. Start. Start now.'
Yes, it must start with the cable. Telepathy set me apart; telecommunicat
ions dragged me down…
Amina Sinai was cutting verrucas out of her feet when the telegram arrived…
once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date
: my mother, right ankle on left knee, was scooping corn tissue out of the
sole of her foot with a sharp ended nail file on September 9th, 1962. And t
he time? The time matters, too. Well, then: in the afternoon. No, it's impo
rtant to be more… At the stroke of three o'clock, which, even in the north,
is the hottest time of day, a bearer brought her an envelope on a silver d
ish. A few seconds later, far away in New Delhi, Defence Minister Krishna M
enon (acting on his own initiative, during Nehru's absence at the Commonwea
lth Prime Ministers' Conference) took the momentous decision to use force i
f necessary against the Chinese army on the Himalayan frontier. The Chinese
must be ejected from the Thag La ridge,' Mr Menon said while my mother tor
e open a telegram. 'No weakness will be shown.' But this decision was a mer
e trifle when set beside the implications of my mother's cable; because whi
le the eviction operation, code named leghorn, was doomed to fail, and even
tually to turn India into that most macabre of theatres, the Theatre of War
, the cable was to plunge me secretly but surely towards the crisis which w
ould end with my final eviction from my own inner world. While the Indian X