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

ege of one hundred and twenty thousand 'B.D.s' were to elect the President
. In Kif, the 420 Basic Democrats included mullahs, road sweepers, the Naw
ab's chauffeur, numerous men who sharecropped hashish on the Nawab's estat
e, and other loyal citizens; the Nawab had invited all of these to his dau
ghter's hennaing ceremony. He had, however, also been obliged to invite tw
o real badmashes, the returning officers of the Combined Opposition Party.
These badmashes quarrelled constantly amongst themselves, but the Nawab w
as courteous and welcoming. 'Tonight you are my honoured friends,' he told
them, 'and tomorrow is another day.' The badmashes ate and drank as if th
ey had never seen food before, but everybody even Mutasim the Handsome, wh
ose patience was shorter than his father's was told to treat them well.
The Combined Opposition Party, you will not be surprised to hear, was a coll
ection of rogues and scoundrels of the first water, united only in their det
ermination to unseat the President and return to the bad old days in which c
ivilians, and not soldiers, lined their pockets from the public exchequer; b
ut for some reason they had acquired a formidable leader. This was Mistress
Fatima Jinriah, the sister of the founder of the nation, a woman of such des
iccated antiquity that the Nawab suspected she had died long ago and been st
uffed by a master taxidermist a notion supported by his son, who had seen a
movie called El Cid in which a dead man led an army into battle… but there s
he was nevertheless, goaded into electioneering by the President's failure t
o complete the marbling of her brother's mausoleum; a terrible foe, above sl
ander and suspicion. It was even said that her opposition to the President h
ad shaken the people's faith in him was he not, after all, the reincarnation
of the great Islamic heroes of yesteryear? Of Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, of Il
tutmish and the Mughals? Even in Kif itself, the Nawab had noticed C.O.P. st
ickers appearing in curious places; someone had even had the cheek to affix
one to the boot of the Rolls. 'Bad days,' the Nawab told his son. Mutasim re
plied, 'That's what elections get you latrine cleaners and cheap tailors mus
t vote to elect a ruler?'
But today was a day for happiness; in the zenana chambers, women were patte
rning the Nawab's daughter's hands and feet with delicate traceries of henn
a; soon General Zulfikar and his son Zafar would arrive. The rulers of Kif
put the election out of their heads, refusing to think of the crumbling fig
ure of Fatima Jinnah, the mader i millat or mother of the nation who had so
callously chosen to confuse her children's choosing.
In the quarters of Jamila Singer's party, too, happiness reigned supreme. H
er father, a towel manufacturer who could not seem to relinquish the soft h
and of his wife, cried, 'You see? Whose daughter is performing here? Is it
a Haroon girl? A Valika woman? Is it a Dawood of Saigol wench? Like hell!'…
But his son Saleem, an unfortunate fellow with a face like a cartoon, seem
ed to be gripped by some deep malaise, perhaps overwhelmed by his presence