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

Capable of smelling sadness and joy, of sniffing out intelligence and stupid
ity with my eyes closed, I arrived at Karachi, and adolescence understanding
, of course, that the subcontinent's new nations and I had all left childhoo
d behind; that growing pains and strange awkward alterations of voice were i
n store for us all. Drainage censored my inner life; my sense of connection
remained undrained.
Saleem invaded Pakistan armed only with a hypersensitive nose; but, worst o
f all, he invaded from the wrong direction! All successful conquests of tha
t part of the world have begun in the north; all conquerors have come by la
nd. Sailing ignorantly against the winds of history, I reached Karachi from
the south east, and by sea. What followed should not, I suppose, have surp
rised me.
With hindsight, the advantages of sweeping down from the north are self e
vident. From the north came the Umayyad generals, Hajjaj bin Yusuf and Mu
hammad bin Qasim; also the Ismailis. (Honeymoon Lodge, where it is said A
ly Khan sojourned with Rita Hayworth, overlooked our plot of umbilicized
earth; rumour has it that the film star created much scandal by wandering
in the grounds dressed in a series of fabulous, gauzy, Hollywood neglige
es.) O ineluctable superiority of northernness! From which direction did
Mahmud of Ghazni descend upon these Indus plains, bringing with him a lan
guage boasting no fewer than three forms of the letter S? The inescapable
answer: se, sin and swad were northern intruders. And Muhammad bin Sam G
huri, who overthrew the Ghaznavids and established the Delhi Caliphate? S
am Ghuri's son, too, moved southwards on his progress.
And Tughlaq, and the Mughal Emperors… but I've made my point. It remains on
ly to add that ideas, as well as armies, swept south south south from the n
orthern heights: the legend of Sikandar But Shikan, the Iconoclast of Kashm
ir, who at the end of the fourteenth century destroyed every Hindu temple i
n the Valley (establishing a precedent for my grandfather), travelled down
from the hills to the river plains; and five hundred years later the mujahi
deen movement of Syed Ahmad Barilwi followed the well trodden trail. Barilw
i's ideas: self denial, hatred of Hindus, holy war… philosophies as well as
kings (to cut this short) came from the opposite direction to me.
Saleem's parents said, 'We must all become new people'; in the land of the p
ure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness
, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah's (like India
's first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country
whose population of deities rivalled the numbers of its people, so that, in
unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family
had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body was to show a
marked preference for the impure. Mopla like, I was doomed to be a misfit; b