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

ve birth, instead, to an unspeakable (and also unrequited) love. Possessed b
y the beginnings of the great fatalism which was to overwhelm me, I rode the
city streets on my Lambretta; Jamila and I avoided each, other as much as p
ossible, unable, for the first time in our lives, to say a word to one anoth
er.
Purity that highest of ideals! that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was
named, and which dripped from every note of my sister's songs! seemed very
far away; how could I have known that history which has the power of pard
oning sinners was at that moment counting down towards a moment in which i
t would manage, at one stroke, to cleanse me from head to foot?
In the meantime, other forces were spending themselves; Alia Aziz had begu
n to wreak her awful spinster's revenge.
Guru Mandir days: paan smells, cooking smells, the languorous odour of the s
hadow of the minaret, the mosque's long pointing finger: while my aunt Alia'
s hatred of the man who had abandoned her and of the sister who had married
him grew into a tangible, visible thing, it sat on her living room rug like
a great gecko, reeking of vomit; but it seemed I was the only one to smell i
t, because Alia's skill at dissimulation had grown as rapidly as the hairine
ss of her chin and her adeptness with the plasters with which, each evening,
she ripped her beard out by the roots.
My aunt Alia's contribution to the fate of nations through her school and c
ollege must not be minimized. Having allowed her old maid frustrations to l
eak into the curricula, the bricks and also the students at her twin educat
ional establishments, she had raised a tribe of children and young adults w
ho felt themselves possessed by an ancient vengefulness, without fully know
ing why. O omnipresent aridity of maiden aunts! It soured the paintwork of
her home; her furniture was made lumpy by the harsh stuffing of bitterness;
old maid repressions were sewn into curtain seams. As once long ago into b
aby things of. Bitterness, issuing through the fissures of the earth.
What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the lonel
y madness of the years, raised to the level of an art form: the impregnatio
n of food with emotions. To whom she remained second in her achievements in
this field: my old ayah, Mary Pereira. By whom, today, both old cooks have
been outdone: Saleem Sinai, pickler in chief at the Braganza pickle works…
nevertheless, while we lived in her Guru Mandir mansion, she fed us the bi
rianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord; and little by littl
e, even the harmonies of my parents' autumnal love went out of tune.
But good things must also be said about my aunt. In politics, she spoke out
vociferously against government by military say so; if she had not had a G
eneral for a brother in law, her school and college might well have been ta
ken out of her hands. Let me not show her entirely through the dark glass o