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

Once upon a time, in the far northern princedom of Kif, there lived a princ
e who had two beautiful daughters, a son of equally remarkable good looks,
a brand new Rolls Royce motor car, and excellent political contacts. This p
rince, or Nawab, believed passionately in progress, which was why he had ar
ranged the engagement of his elder daughter to the son of the prosperous an
d well known General Zulfikar; for his younger daughter he had high hopes o
f a match with the son of the President himself. As for his motor car, the
first ever seen in his mountain ringed valley, he loved it almost as much a
s his children; it grieved him that his subjects, who had become used to us
ing the roads of Kif for purposes of social intercourse, quarrels and games
of hit the spittoon, refused to get out of its way. He issued a proclamati
on explaining that the car represented the future, and must be allowed to p
ass; the people ignored the notice, although it was pasted to shop fronts a
nd walls and even, it is said, to the sides of cows. The second notice was
more peremptory, ordering the citizenry to clear the highways when they hea
rd the horn of the car; the Kifis, however, continued to smoke and spit and
argue in the streets. The third notice, which was adorned with a gory draw
ing, said that the car would henceforth run down anybody who failed to obey
its horn. The Kifis added new, more scandalous pictures to the one on the
poster; and then the Nawab, who was a good man but not one of infinite pati
ence, actually did as he threatened. When the famous singer Jamila arrived
with her family and impresario to sing at her cousin's engagement ceremony,
the car drove her without trouble from border to palace; and the Nawab sai
d proudly, 'No trouble; the car is respected now. Progress has occurred.'
The Nawab's son Mutasim, who had travelled abroad and wore his hair in some
thing called a 'beetle cut', was a source of worry to his father; because a
lthough he was so good looking that, whenever he travelled around Kif, girl
s with silver nose jewellery fainted in the heat of his beauty, he seemed t
o take no interest in such matters, being content with his polo ponies and
the guitar on which he picked out strange Western songs. He wore bush shirt
s on which musical notation and foreign street signs jostled against the ha
lf clad bodies of pink skinned girls. But when Jamila Singer, concealed wit
hin a gold brocaded burqa, arrived at the palace, Mutasim the Handsome who
owing to his foreign travels had never heard the rumours of her disfigureme
nt became obsessed with the idea of seeing her face; he fell head over heel
s with the glimpses of her demure eyes he saw through her perforated sheet.
In those days, the President of Pakistan had decreed an election; it was t
o take place on the day after the engagement ceremony, under a form of suf
frage called Basic Democracy. The hundred million people of Pakistan had b
een divided up into a hundred and twenty thousand approximately equal part
s, and each part was represented by one Basic Democrat. The electoral coll