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

t intention of following her husband into the camphor garden reserved for t
he righteous; she seemed to have more in common with the methuselah leaders
of her abandoned India. She grew, with alarming rapidity, wider and wider;
until builders were summoned to expand her glassed in booth. 'Make it big
big,' she instructed them, with a rare flash of humour, 'Maybe I'll still b
e here after a century, whatsitsname, and Allah knows how big I'll have bec
ome; I don't want to be troubling you every ten twelve years.'
Pia Aziz, however, was not content with 'pumpery shumpery'. She began a seri
es of liaisons with colonels cricketers polo players diplomats, which were e
asy to conceal from a Reverend Mother who had lost interest in the doings of
everyone except strangers; but which were otherwise the talk of what was, a
fter all, a small town. My aunt Emerald took Pia to task; she replied: 'You
want me to be forever howling and pulling hair? I'm still young; young folk
should gad a little.' Emerald, thin lipped: 'But be a little respectable… th
e family name…' At which Pia tossed her head. 'You be respectable, sister,'
she said, 'Me, I'll be alive.'
But it seems to me that there was something hollow in Pia's self assertion;
that she, too, felt her personality draining away with the years; that her
feverish romancing was a last desperate attempt to behave 'in character' i
n the way a woman like her was supposed to do. Her heart wasn't in it; some
where inside, she, too, was waiting for an end… In my family, we have alway
s been vulnerable to things which fall from the skies, ever since Ahmed Sin
ai was slapped by a vulture dropped hand; and bolts from the blue were only
a year away.
After the news of my grandfather's death and the arrival of Reverend Mother
in Pakistan, I began to dream repeatedly of Kashmir; although I had never
walked in Shalimar bagh, I did so at night; I floated in shikaras and climb
ed Sankara Acharya's hill as my grandfather had; I saw lotus roots and moun
tains like angry jaws. This, too, may be seen as an aspect of the detachmen
t which came to afflict us all (except Jamila, who had God and country to k
eep her going) a reminder of my family's separateness from both India and P
akistan. In Rawalpindi, my grandmother drank pink Kashmiri tea; in Karachi,
her grandson was washed by the waters of a lake he had never seen. It woul
d not be long before the dream of Kashmir spilled over into the minds of th
e rest of the population of Pakistan; connection to history refused to aban
don me, and I found my dream becoming, in 1965, the common property of the
nation, and a factor of prime importance in the coming end, when all manner
of things fell from the skies, and I was purified at last.
Saleem could sink no lower: I could smell, on myself, the cess pit stink of
my iniquities. I had come to the Land of the Pure, and sought the company of
whores when I should have been forging a new, upright life for myself, I ga