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

XXIII Corps were acting on instructions passed from Menon to General Thapar
, I, too, had been placed in great danger; as if unseen forces had decided
that I had also overstepped the boundaries of what I was permitted to do or
know or be; as though history had decided to put me firmly in my place. I
was left entirely without a say in the matter; my mother read the telegram,
burst into tears and said, 'Children, we're going home!'… after which, as
I began by saying in another context, it was only a matter of time.
What the telegram said: please come quick sinaisahib suffered H
EARTBOOT GRAVELY ILL SALAAMS ALICE PEREIRA.
'Of course, go at once, my darling,' my aunt Emerald told her sister, 'But wh
at, my God, can be this heartboot?'
It is possible, even probable, that I am only the first historian to write
the story of my undeniably exceptional life and times. Those who follow in
my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work, this sour
ce book, this Hadith or Purana or Grundrisse, for guidance and inspiration.
I say to these future exegetes: when you come to examine the events which
followed on from the 'heartboot cable', remember that at the very eye of th
e hurricane which was unleashed upon me the sword, to switch metaphors, wit
h which the coup de grace was applied there lay a single unifying force. I
refer to telecommunications.
Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my undoing; generously, ho
wever, I shall accuse nobody of conspiracy; although it would be easy to be
lieve that the controllers of communication had resolved to regain their mo
nopoly of the nation's air waves…. I must return (Padma is frowning) to the
banal chain of cause and effect: we arrived at Santa Cruz airport, by Dako
ta, on September 16th; but to explain the telegram, I must go further back
in time.
If Alice Pereira had once sinned, by stealing Joseph D'Costa from her siste
r Mary, she had in these latter years gone a long way towards attaining red
emption; because for four years she had been Ahmed Sinai's only human compa
nion. Isolated on the dusty hillock which had once been Methwold's Estate,
she had borne enormous demands on her accommodating good nature. He would m
ake her sit with him until midnight while he drank djinns and ranted about
the injustices of his life; he remembered, after years of forgetfulness, hi
s old dream of translating and re ordering the Quran, and blamed his family
for emasculating him so that he didn't have the energy to begin such a tas
k; in addition, because she was there, his anger often directed itself at h
er, taking the form of long tirades filled with gutter oaths and the useles
s curses he had devised in the days of his deepest abstraction. She attempt
ed to be understanding: he was a lonely man; his once infallible relationsh
ip with the telephone had been destroyed by the economic vagaries of the ti
mes; his touch in financial matters had begun to desert him… he fell prey,