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

ired to do so; and the percentage of defective towels rocketed alarmingly,
contracts were not fulfilled, re orders shrank alarmingly. Ahmed Sinai bega
n bringing home mountains Himalayas! of reject towelling, because the facto
ry warehouse was full to overflowing of the sub standard product of his mis
management; he took to drink again, and by the summer of that year the hous
e in Guru Mandir was awash in the old obscenities of his battle against the
djinns, and we had to squeeze sideways past the Everests and Nanga Parbats
of badly made terrycloth which lined the passages and hall.
We had delivered ourselves into the lap of my fat aunt's long simmered wrat
h; with the single exception of Jamila, who was least affected owing to her
long absences, we all ended up with our geese well and truly cooked. It wa
s a painful and bewildering time, in which the love of my parents disintegr
ated under the joint weight of their new baby and of my aunt's age old grie
vances; and gradually the confusion and ruin seeped out through the windows
of the house and took over the hearts and minds of the nation, so that war
, when it came, was wrapped in the same fuddled haze of unreality in which
we had begun to live.
My father was heading steadily towards his stroke; but before the bomb went
off in his brain, another fuse was lit: in April 1965, we heard about the pe
culiar incidents in the Rann of Kutch.
While we thrashed like flies in the webs of my aunt's revenge, the mill of
history continued to grind. President Ayub's reputation was in decline: rum
ours of malpractice in the 1964 election buzzed about, refusing to be swatt
ed. There was, too, the matter of the President's son: Gauhar Ayub, whose e
nigmatic Gandhara Industries made him a 'multi multi' overnight. O endless
sequence of nefarious sons of the great! Gauhar, with his bullyings and ran
tings; and later, in India, Sanjay Gandhi and his Maruti Car Company and h
is Congress Youth; and most recently of all, Kami Lal Desai… the sons of th
e great unmake their parents. But I, too, have a son; Aadam Sinai, flying i
n the face of precedent, will reverse the trend. Sons can be better than th
eir fathers, as well as worse… in April 1965, however, the air buzzed with
the fallibility of sons. And whose son was it who scaled the walls of Presi
dent House on April 1st what unknown father spawned the foul smelling fello
w who ran up to the President and fired a pistol at his stomach? Some fathe
rs remain mercifully unknown to history; at any rate, the assassin failed,
because his gun miraculously jammed. Somebody's son was taken away by polic
e to have his teeth pulled out one by one, to have his nails set on fire; b
urning cigarette ends were no doubt pressed against the tip of his penis, s
o it would probably not be much consolation for that nameless, would be ass
assin to know that he had simply been carried away by a tide of history in
which sons (high and low) were frequently observed to behave exceptionally