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

to feign innocence when someone broke wind which landed me in a certain amo
unt of parental trouble; more important, however, was my nasal freedom to in
hale a very great deal more than the scents of purely physical origin with w
hich the rest of the human race has chosen to be content. So, from the earli
est days of my Pakistani adolescence, I began to learn the secret aromas of
the world, the heady but quick fading perfume of new love, and also the deep
er, longer lasting pungency of hate. (It was not long after my arrival in th
e 'Land of the Pure' that I discovered within myself the ultimate impurity o
f sister love; and the slow burning fires of my aunt filled my nostrils from
the start.) A nose will give you knowledge, but not power over events; my i
nvasion of Pakistan, armed (if that's the right word) only with a new manife
station of my nasal inheritance, gave me the powers of sniffing out the trut
h, of smelling what was in the air, of following trails; but not the only po
wer an invader needs the strength to conquer my foes.
I won't deny it: I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay. Set between
the desert and bleakly saline creeks whose shores were littered with stun
ted mangroves, my new city seemed to possess an ugliness which eclipsed ev
en my own; having grown too fast its population had quadrupled since 1947
it had acquired the misshapen lumpiness of a gigantic dwarf. On my sixteen
th birthday, I was given a Lambretta motor scooter; riding the city street
s on my windowless vehicle, I breathed in the fatalistic hopelessness of t
he slum dwellers and the smug defensiveness of the rich; I was sucked alon
g the smell trails of dispossession and also fanaticism, lured down a long
underworld corridor at whose end was the door to Tai Bibi, the oldest who
re in the world… but I'm running away with myself. At the heart of my Kara
chi was Alia Aziz's house, a large old building on Clayton Road (she must
have wandered in it for years like a ghost with nobody to haunt), a place
of shadows and yellowed paint, across which there fell, every afternoon, t
he long accusing shadow of the minaret of the local mosque. Even when, yea
rs later in the magicians' ghetto, I lived in another mosque's shade, a sh
ade which was, at least for a time, a protective, unmenacing penumbra, I n
ever lost my Karachi born view of mosque shadows, in which, it seemed to m
e, I could sniff the narrow, clutching, accusative odour of my aunt. Who b
ided her time; but whose vengeance, when it came, was crushing.
It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not w
holly succeeded in destroying the desert's power. Oases shone in the tarmac
of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst the ho
vels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city (whose only
common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had started life
as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient powers of appa
rition mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest
of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders fo