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

And we all lived happily… at any rate, even without the traditional last sen
tence fiction of fairy tales, my story does indeed end in fantasy; because w
hen Basic Democrats had done their duty, the newspapers Jang, Dawn, Pakistan
Times announced a crushing victory for the President's Muslim League over t
he Mader i Millat's Combined Opposition Party; thus proving to me that I hav
e been only the humblest of jugglers with facts; and that, in a country wher
e the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases t
o exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the
case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Paki
stani adolescence that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternativ
e realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equall
y infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.
A little bird whispers in my ear: 'Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a mono
poly of untruth.' I accept the criticism; I know, I know. And, years later
, the Widow knew. And Jamila: for whom what had been sanctified as truth (
by Time, by habit, by a grandmother's pronouncement, by lack of imaginatio
n, by a father's acquiescence) proved more believable than what she knew t
o be so.
How Saleem achieved purity
What is waiting to be told: the return of ticktock. But now time is counting
down to an end, not a birth; there is, too, a weariness to be mentioned, a ge
neral fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will be the only solut
ion, because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply
run out of steam, and then there's nothing for it but to finish with them.
How a piece fell out of the moon, and Saleem achieved purity… the clock is
ticking now; and because all countdowns require a zero, let me state that t
he end came on September 22nd, 1965; and that the precise instant of the ar
rival at zero was, inevitably, the stroke of midnight. Although the old gra
ndfather clock in my aunt Alia's house, which kept accurate time but always
chimed two minutes late, never had a chance to strike.
My grandmother Naseem Aziz arrived in Pakistan in mid 1964, leaving behind
an India in which Nehru's death had precipitated a bitter power struggle. M
orarji Desai, the Finance Minister, and Jagjivan Ram, most powerful of the
untouchables, united in their determination to prevent the establishment of
a Nehru dynasty; so Indira Gandhi was denied the leadership. The new Prime
Minister was Lal Bahadur Shastri, another member of that generation of pol
iticians who seemed to have been pickled in immortality; in the case of Sha
stri, however, this was only maya, illusion. Nehru and Shastri have both fu
lly proved their mortality; but there are still plenty of the others left,
clutching Time in their mummified fingers and refusing to let it move… in P