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

nce with me at last. 'O, Saleem,' she said, 'God knows what that Pakistan h
as done to you; but you are badly changed.'
Once, long ago, the death of Mian Abdullah had destroyed another Conference
, which had been held together purely by the strength of his will; now, as
the midnight children lost faith in me, they also lost their belief in the
thing I had made for them. Between October 20th and November 2Oth, I contin
ued to convene to attempt to convene our nightly sessions; but they fled fr
om me, not one by one, but in tens and twenties; each night, less of them w
ere willing to tune in; each week, over a hundred of them retreated into pr
ivate life. In the high Himalayas, Gurkhas and Rajputs fled in disarray fro
m the Chinese army; and in the upper reaches of my mind, another army was a
lso destroyed by things bickerings, prejudices, boredom, selfishness which
I had believed too small, too petty to have touched them.
(But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued to
believe I continue now that what we had in common would finally have outwei
ghed what drove us apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate responsibility
for the end of the Children's Conference; because what destroyed all possi
bility of renewal was the love of Ahmed and Amina Sinai.)
… And Shiva? Shiva, whom I cold bloodedly denied his birthright? Never once
, in that last month, did I send my thoughts in search of him; but his exis
tence, somewhere in the world, nagged away at the corners of my mind. Shiva
the destroyer, Shiva Knoc knees… he became, for me, first a stabbing twing
e of guilt; then an obsession; and finally, as the memory of his actuality
grew dull, he became a sort of principle; he came to represent, in my mind,
all the vengefulness and violence and simultaneous love and hate of Things
in the world; so that even now, when I hear of drowned bodies floating lik
e balloons on the Hooghly and exploding when nudged by passing boats; or tr
ains set on fire, or politicians killed, or riots in Orissa or Punjab, it s
eems to me that the hand of Shiva lies heavily over all these things, doomi
ng us to flounder endlessly amid murder rape greed war that Shiva, in short
, has made us who we are. (He, too, was born on the stroke of midnight; he,
like me, was connected to history. The modes of connection if I'm right in
thinking they applied to me enabled him, too, to affect the passage of the days.)
I'm talking as if I never saw him again; which isn't true. But that, of course,
must get into the queue like everything else; I'm not strong enough to tell th
at tale just now.
The disease of optimism, in those days, once again attained epidemic propor
tions; I, meanwhile, was afflicted by an inflammation of the sinuses. Curio
usly triggered off by the defeat of Thag La ridge, public optimism about th
e war grew as fat (and as dangerous) as an overfilled balloon; my long suff
ering nasal passages, however, which had been overfilled all their days, fi