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

advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by illusionary sand dunes
and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the knowledge that the name of
the faith upon which the city stood meant 'submission', my new fellow citize
ns exuded the flat boiled odours of acquiescence, which were depressing to a
nose which had smelt at the very last, and however briefly the highly spice
d nonconformity of Bombay.
Soon after our arrival and, perhaps, oppressed by the mosque shadowed air
of the Clayton Road house my father resolved to build us a new home. He bo
ught a. plot of land in the smartest of the 'societies', the new housing d
evelopment zones; and on my sixteenth birthday, Saleem acquired more than
a Lambretta I learned the occult powers of umbilical cords.
What, pickled in brine, sat for sixteen years in my father's almirah, awai
ting just such a day? What, floating like a water snake in an old pickle j
ar, accompanied us on our sea journey and ended up buried in hard, barren
Karachi earth? What had once nourished life in a womb what now infused ear
th with miraculous life, and gave birth to a split level, American style m
odern bungalow?… Eschewing these cryptic questions, I explain that, on my
sixteenth birthday, my family (including Alia aunty) assembled on our plot
of Korangi Road earth; watched by the eyes of a team of labourers and the
beard of a mullah, Ahmed handed Saleem a pickaxe; I drove it inaugurally
into the ground. 'A new beginning,' Amina said, 'Inshallah, we shall all b
e new people now.' Spurred on by her noble and unattainable desire, a work
man rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a pickle jar was produced. Brine was
discarded on the thirsty ground; and what was left inside received the mu
llah's blessings. After which, an umbilical cord was it mine? Or Shiva's?
was implanted in the earth; and at once, a house began to grow. There were
sweetmeats and soft drinks; the mullah, displaying remarkable hunger, con
sumed thirty nine laddoos; and Ahmed Sinai did not once complain of the ex
pense. The spirit of the buried cord inspired the workmen; but although th
e foundations were dug very deep, they would not prevent the house from fa
lling down before we ever lived in it.
What I surmised about umbilical cords: although they possessed the power of
growing houses, some were evidently better at the job than others. The city
of Karachi proved my point; clearly constructed on top of entirely unsuitabl
e cords, it was full of deformed houses, the stunted hunchback children of d
eficient lifelines, houses growing mysteriously blind, with no visible windo
ws, houses which looked like radios or air conditioners or jail cells, crazy
top heavy edifices which fell over with monotonous regularity, like drunks;
a wild proliferation of mad houses, whose inadequacies as living quarters w
ere exceeded only by their quite exceptional ugliness. The city obscured the
desert; but either the cords, or the infertility of the soil, made it grow
into something grotesque.