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

e of standing between the opposing forces and giving them a piece of his mi
nd. Kashmiri for the Kashmiris: that was his line. Naturally, they shot him
. Oskar Lubin would probably have approved of his rhetorical gesture; R. E.
Dyer might have commended his murderers' rifle skills. I must go to bed. P
adma is waiting; and I need a little warmth.
Hit the spittoon
Please believe that I am falling apart.
I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some mel
odramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have
begun to crack all over like an old jug that my poor body, singular, unlove
ly, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage b
elow, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at
the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, a
lthough there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have
accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred
and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust. T
his is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a n
ation of forgetters.)
There are moments of terror, but they go away. Panic like a bubbling sea bea
st conies up for air, boils on the surface, but eventually returns to the de
ep. It is important for me to remain calm. I chew betel nut and expectorate
in the direction of a cheap brassy bowl, playing the ancient game of hit the
spittoon: Nadir Khan's game, which he learned from the old men in Agra… and
these days you can buy 'rocket paans' in which, as well as the gum reddenin
g paste of the betel, the comfort of cocaine lies folded in a leaf. But that
would be cheating.
… Rising from my pages comes the unmistakable whiff of chutney. So let me o
bfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately gift
ed olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large s
cale preparation of condiments. But now, 'A cook?' you gasp in horror, 'A k
hansama merely? How is it possible?' And, I grant, such mastery of the mult
iple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You ar
e amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200 rupees a month cooker
y johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the saffron and green winkin
g of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after al
l, connected to my nocturnal scribblings by day amongst the pickle vats, by
night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving
. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.
But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear nar
rative, the universe of what happened next: 'At this rate,' Padma complains,