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

orted spaghetti Westerns and the most violent martial arts films ever made.
I was, for a time, like a drugged person, my head reeling beneath the comp
lexities of smell; but then my overpowering desire for form asserted itself
, and I survived.
Indo Pakistani relations deteriorated; the borders were closed, so that we
could not go to Agra to mourn my grandfather; Reverend Mother's emigratio
n to Pakistan was also somewhat delayed. In the meantime, Saleem was worki
ng towards a general theory of smell: classification procedures had begun.
I saw this scientific approach as my own, personal obeisance to the spiri
t of my grandfather… to begin with, I perfected my skill at distinguishing
, until I could tell apart the infinite varieties of betel nut and (with m
y eyes shut) the twelve different available brands of fizzy drink. (Long b
efore the American commentator Herbert Feldman came to Karachi to deplore
the existence of a dozen aerated waters in a city which had only three sup
pliers of bottled milk, I could sit blindfolded and tell Pakola from Hoffm
an's Mission, Citra Cola from Fanta. Feldman saw these drinks as a manifes
tation of capitalist imperialism; I, sniffing out which was Canada Dry and
which 7 Up, unerringly separating Pepsi from Coke, was more interested in
passing their subtle olfactory test. Double Kola and Kola Kola, Perri Col
a and Bubble Up were blindly indentified and named.) Only when I was sure
of my mastery of physical scents did I move on to those other aromas which
only I could smell: the perfumes of emotions and all the thousand and one
drives which make us human: love and death, greed and humility, have and
have not were labelled and placed in neat compartments of my mind.
Early attempts at ordering: I tried to classify smells by colour boiling und
erwear and the printer's ink of the Daily Jang shared a quality of blueness,
while old teak and fresh farts were both dark brown. Motor cars and graveya
rds I jointly classified as grey… there was, too, classification by weight:
flyweight smells (paper), bantam odours (soap fresh bodies, grass), welterwe
ights (perspiration, queen of the night); shahi korma and bicycle oil were l
ight heavy weight in my system, while anger, patchouli, treachery and dung w
ere among the heavyweight stinks of the earth. And I had a geometric system
also: the roundness of joy and the angularity of ambition; I had elliptical
smells, and also ovals and squares… a lexicographer of the nose, I travelled
Bunder Road and the P.E.C.H.S.; a lepidopterist, I snared whins like butter
flies in the net of my nasal hairs. O wondrous voyages before the birth of p
hilosophy!… Because soon I understood that my work must, if it was to have a
ny value, acquire a moral dimension; that the only important divisions were
the infinitely subtle gradations of good and evil smells. Having realized th
e crucial nature of morality, having sniffed out that smells could be sacred
or profane, I invented, in the isolation of my scooter trips, the science o
f nasal ethics.