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

in which Mary Pereira had stirred her fears into chutneys and pickles, mas
sacring the verandah where my mother had sat with the child in her belly li
ke a stone, I ako had an image of a mighty, swinging ball crashing into the
domain of Sharpsticker sahib, and of the old crazy man himself, pale waste
d flick tongued, being exposed there on top of a crumbling house, amid fall
ing towers and red tiled roof, old Schaapsteker shrivelling ageing dying in
the sunlight which he hadn't seen for so many years. But perhaps I'm drama
tizing; I may have got all this from an old film called Lost Horizon, in wh
ich beautiful women shrivelled and died when they departed from Shangri La.
For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake. We arrived i
n Karachi on February 9th and within months, my sister Jamila had been laun
ched on the career which would earn her the names of 'Pakistan's Angel' and
'Bulbul of the Faith'; we had left Bombay, but we gained reflected glory.
And one more thing: although I had been drained although no voices spoke in
my head, and never would again there was one compensation: namely that, fo
r the first time in my life, I was discovering the astonishing delights of
possessing a sense of smell.
Jamila Singer
It turned out to be a sense so acute as to be capable of distinguishing the
glutinous reek of hypocrisy behind the welcoming smile with which my spins
ter aunt Alia greeted us at the Karachi docks. Irremediably embittered by m
y father's years ago defection into the arms of her sister, my headmistress
aunt had acquired the heavy footed corpulence of undimmed jealousy; the th
ick dark hairs of her resentment sprouted through most of the pores of her
skin. And perhaps she succeeded in deceiving my parents and Jamila with her
spreading arms, her waddling run towards us, her cry of 'Ahmed bhai, at la
st! But better late than never!', her spider like and inevitably accepted o
ffers of hospitality; but I, who had spent much of my babyhood in the bitte
r mittens and soured pom pom hats of her envy, who had been unknowingly inf
ected with failure by the innocent looking baby things into which she had k
nitted her hatred, and who, moreover, could clearly remember what it was li
ke to be possessed by revenge lust, I, Saleem the drained, could smell the
vengeful odours leaking out of her glands. I was, however, powerless to pro
test; we were swept into the Datsun of her vengeance and driven away down B
under Road to her house at Guru Mandir like flies, only more foolish, becau
se we celebrated our captivity.
… But what a sense of smell it was! Most of us are conditioned, from the cra
dle onwards, into recognizing the narrowest possible spectrum of fragrances;
I, however, had been incapable of smelling a thing all my life, and was acc
ordingly ignorant of all olfactory taboos. As a result, I had a tendency not