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

Tick, tock… In January 1965, my mother Amina Sinai discovered that she was
pregnant again, after a gap of seventeen years. When she was sure, she told
her good news to her big sister Alia, giving my aunt the opportunity of pe
rfecting her revenge. What Alia said to my mother is not known; what she st
irred into her cooking must remain a matter for conjecture; but the effect
on Amina was devastating. She was plagued by dreams of a monster child with
a cauliflower instead of a brain; she was beset by phantoms of Ramram Seth
, and the old prophecy of a child with two heads began to drive her wild al
l over again. My mother was forty two years old; and the fears (both natura
l and Alia induced) of bearing a child at such an age tarnished the brillia
nt aura which had hung around her ever since she nursed her husband into hi
s loving autumn; under the influence of the kormas of my aunt's vengeance s
piced with forebodings as well as cardamoms my mother became afraid of her
child. As the months passed, her forty two years began to take a terrible t
oll; the weight of her four decades grew daily, crushing her beneath her ag
e. In her second month, her hair went white. By the third, her face had shr
ivelled like a rotting mango. In her fourth month she was already an old wo
man, lined and thick, plagued by verrucas once again, with the inevitabilit
y of hair sprouting all over her face; she seemed shrouded once more in a f
og of shame, as though the baby were a scandal in a lady of her evident ant
iquity. As the child of those confused days grew within her, the contrast b
etween its youth and her age increased; it was at this point that she colla
psed into an old cane chair and received visits from the spectres of her pa
st. The disintegration of my mother was appalling in its suddenness; Ahmed
Sinai, observing helplessly, found himself, all of a sudden, unnerved, adri
ft, unmanned.
Even now, I find it hard to write about those days of the end of possibilit
y, when my father found his towel factory crumbling in his hands. The effec
ts of Alia's culinary witchcraft (which operated both through his stomach,
when he ate, and his eyes, when he saw his wife) were now all too apparent
in him: he became slack at factory management, and irritable with his work
force.
To sum up the ruination of Amina Brand Towels: Ahmed Sinai began treating h
is workers as peremptorily as once, in Bombay, he had mis treated servants,
and sought to inculcate, in master weavers and assistant packers alike, th
e eternal verities of the master servant relationship. As a result his work
force walked out on him in droves, explaining, for instance, 'I am not you
r latrine cleaner, sahib; I am qualified Grade One weaver,' and in general
refusing to show proper gratitude for his beneficence in having employed th
em. In the grip of the befuddling wrath of my aunt's packed lunches, he let
them all go, and hired a bunch of ill favoured slackers who pilfered cotto
n spools and machine parts but were willing to bow and scrape whenever requ