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

preparations to do so, intending to leave for Suffolk in England, where s
he was to stay with her husband's old commanding officer, Brigadier Dodson
, who had begun, in his dotage, to spend his time in the company of equall
y old India hands, watching old films of the Delhi Durbar and the arrival
of George V at the Gateway of India… she was looking forward to the empty
oblivion of nostalgia and the English winter when the war came and settled
all our problems.
On the first day of the 'false peace' which would last a mere thirty seven
days, the stroke hit Ahmed Sinai. It left him paralysed all the way down hi
s left side, and restored him to the dribbles and giggles of his infancy; h
e, too, mouthed nonsense words, showing a marked preference for the naughty
childhood names of excreta. Giggling 'Caeca!' and 'Soo soo!' my father cam
e to the end of his chequered career, having once more, and for the last ti
me, lost his way, and also his battle with the djinns. He sat, stunned and
cackling, amid the faulty towels of his life; amid faulty towels, my mother
, crushed beneath the weight of her monstrous pregnancy, inclined her head
gravely as she was visited by Lila Sabarmati's pianola, or the ghost of her
brother Hanif, or a pair of hands which danced, moths around a flame, arou
nd and around her own… Commander Sabarmati came to see her with his curious
baton in his hand, and Nussie the duck whispered, 'The end, Amina sister!
The end of the world!' in my mother's withering ear… and now, having fought
my way through the diseased reality of my Pakistan years, having struggled
to make a little sense out of what seemed (through the mist of my aunt Ali
a's revenge) like a terrible, occult series of reprisals for tearing up our
Bombay roots, I have reached the point at which I must tell you about ends.
Let me state this quite unequivocally: it is my firm conviction that the hid
den purpose of the Indo Pakistani war of 1965 was nothing more nor less than
the elimination of my benighted family from the face of the earth. In order
to understand the recent history of our times, it is only necessary to exam
ine the bombing pattern of that war with an analytical, unprejudiced eye.
Even ends have beginnings; everything must be told in sequence. (I have Pad
ma, after all, squashing all my attempts to put the cart before the bullock
.) By August 8th, 1965, my family history had got itself into a condition f
rom which what .was achieved by bombing patterns provided a merciful relief
. No: let me use the important word: if we were to be purified, something o
n the scale of what followed was probably necessary.
Alia Aziz, sated with her terrible revenge; my aunt Emerald, widowed and aw
aiting exile; the hollow lasciviousness of my aunt Pia and the glass boothe
d withdrawal of my grandmother Naseem Aziz; my cousin Zafar, with his etern
ally pre pubertal princess and his future of wetting mattresses in jail cel
ls; the retreat into childishness of my father and the haunted, accelerated