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

t: fantasy, irrationality, lust. There was a clocktower refuge, and cheate
ry in class. And love in Bombay caused a bicycle accident; horn temples en
tered forcep hollows, and five hundred and eighty one children visited my
head. Midnight's children: who may have been the embodiment of the hope of
freedom, who may also have been freaks who ought to be finished off. Parv
ati the witch, most loyal of all, and Shiva, who became a principle of lif
e. There was a question of purpose, and the debate between ideas and thing
s. There were knees and nose and nose and knees.
Quarrels, began, and the adult world infiltrated the children's; there was s
elfishness and snobbishness and hate. And the impossibility of a third princ
iple; the fear of coming to nothing after all began to grow. And what nobody
said: that the purpose of the five hundred and eighty one lay in their dest
ruction; that they had come, in order to come to nothing. Prophecies were ig
nored when they spoke to this effect.
And revelations, and the closing of a mind; and exile, and four years after
return; suspicions growing, dissension breeding, departures in twenties and
tens. And, at the end, just one voice left; but optimism lingered what we ha
d in common retained the possibility of overpowering what forced us apart.
Until:
Silence outside me. A dark room (blinds down). Can't see anything (nothing t
here to see).
Silence inside me. A connection broken (for ever). Can't hear anything (noth
ing there to hear).
Silence, like a desert. And a clear, free nose (nasal passages full of air). Air
, like a vandal, invading my private places.
Drained. I have been drained. The parahamsa, grounded.
(For good.)
O, spell it out, spell it out: the operation whose ostensible purpose was t
he draining of my inflamed sinuses and the once and for all clearing of my
nasal passages had the effect of breaking whatever connection had been made
in a washing chest; of depriving me of nose given telepathy; of banishing
me from the possibility of midnight children.
Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not
acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than mere soun
ds, we are also the victims of our titles. Sinai contains Ibn Sina, master m
agician, Sufi adept; and also Sin the moon, the ancient god of Hadhramaut, w
ith his own mode of connection, his powers of action at a distance upon the
tides of the world. But Sin is also the letter S, as sinuous as a snake; ser
pents lie coiled within the name. And there is also the accident of translit
eration Sinai, when in Roman script, though not in Nastaliq, is also the nam