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

d brains and bad teeth; you'll have got a friend and a safe deposit box rol
led into one!' Uncle Puffs' daughters, he claimed, all conformed to the abo
ve description… I, embarrassed, smelling out that he was only half joking,
would cry, 'O, Uncle Puffs!' He knew his nick name; quite liked it, even. S
lapping my thigh, he cried, 'Playing hard to get, eh? Darn right. O.K., my
boy: you pick one of my girls, and I guarantee to have all her teeth pulled
out; by the time you marry her she'll have a million buck smile for a dowr
y!' Whereupon my mother usually contrived to change the subject; she wasn't
keen on Uncle Puffs' idea, no matter how pricey the dentures… on that firs
t night, as so often afterwards, Jamila sang to Major Alauddin Latif. Her v
oice wafted out through the window and silenced the traffic; the birds stop
ped chattering and, at the hamburger shop across the street, the radio was
switched off; the street was full of stationary people, and my sister's voi
ce washed over them… when she finished, we noticed that Uncle Puffs was crying.
'A jewel,' he said, honking into a handkerchief, 'Sir and Madam, your daugh
ter is a jewel. I am humbled, absolutely. Darn humbled. She has proved to m
e that a golden voice is preferable even to golden teeth.'
And when Jamila Singer's fame had reached the point at which she could no l
onger avoid giving a public concert, it was Uncle Puffs who started the rum
our that she had been involved in a terrible, disfiguring car crash; it was
Major (Retired) Latif who devised her famous, all concealing, white silk c
hadar, the curtain or veil, heavily embroidered in gold brocade work and re
ligious calligraphy, behind which she sat demurely whenever she performed i
n public. The chadar of Jamila Singer was held up by two tireless, muscular
figures, also (but more simply) veiled from head to foot the official stor
y was that they were her female attendants, but their sex was impossible to
determine through their burqas; and at its very centre, the Major had cut
a hole. Diameter: three inches. Circumference: embroidered in finest gold t
hread. That was how the history of our family once again became the fate of
a nation, because when Jamila sang with her lips pressed against the broca
ded aperture, Pakistan fell in love with a fifteen year old girl whom it on
ly ever glimpsed through a gold and white perforated sheet.
The accident rumour set the final seal on her popularity; her concerts pack
ed out the Bambino theatre in Karachi and filled the Shalimar bagh in Lahor
e; her records constantly topped the sales charts. And as she became public
property, 'Pakistan's Angel', 'The Voice of the Nation', the 'Bulbul e Din
' or nightingale of the faith, and began to receive one thousand and one fi
rm proposals of marriage a week; as she became the whole country's favourit
e daughter and grew into an existence which threatened to overwhelm her pla
ce in our own family, so she fell prey to the twin viruses of fame, the fir
st of which made her the victim of her own public image, because the accide
nt rumour obliged her to wear a gold and white burqa at all times, even in