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

ere coming to an end, the story of Amina and her long ago underworld husban
d and her assiduity and public announcement and her son who was not her son
and her luck with horses and verrucas and dancing hands in the pioneer Caf
e and last defeat by her sister, and of Ahmed who always lost his way and h
ad a lower lip which stuck out and a squashy belly and went white in a free
ze and succumbed to abstraction and burst dogs open in the street and fell
in love too late and died because of his vulnerability of what falls out of
the sky; flatter than pancakes now, and around them the house exploding collapsing,
of destruction of such vehemence that things which had been buried deep in
forgotten tin trunks flew upward into the air while other things people m
emories were buried under rubble beyond hope of salvation; the fingers of
the explosion reaching down down to the bottom of an almirah and unlocking
a green tin trunk, the clutching hand of the explosion flinging trunk con
tents into air, and now something which has hidden unseen for many years i
s circling in the night like a whirligig piece of the moon, something catc
hing the light of the moon and falling now falling as I pick myself up diz
zily after the blast, something twisting turning somersaulting down, silve
r as moonlight, a wondrously worked silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazu
li, the past plummeting towards me like a vulture dropped hand to become w
hat purifies and sets me free, because now as I look up there is a feeling
at the back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite m
oment of utter clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before
my parents' funeral pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, befo
re I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting, b
ut also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in t
he necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free, because all the Sa
leems go pouring out of me, from the baby who appeared in jumbo sized fron
tpage baby snaps to the eighteen year old with his filthy dirty love, pour
ing out goes shame and guilt and wanting to please and needing to be loved
and determined to find a historical role and growing too fast, I am free
of Snotnose and Stainface and Baldy and Sniffer and Mapface and washing ch
ests and Evie Burns and language marches, liberated from Kolynos Kid and t
he breasts of Pia mumani and Alpha and Omega, absolved of the multiple mur
ders of Homi Catrack and Hanif and Aadam Aziz and Prime Minister Jawaharla
l Nehru, I have shaken off five hundred year old whores and confessions of love at dea
rashing on to tarmac, restored to innocence and purity by a tumbling piece
of the moon, wiped clean as a wooden writing chest, brained (just as prophe
sied) by my mother's silver spittoon.
On the morning of September 23rd, the United Nations announced the end of h
ostilities between India and Pakistan. India had occupied less than 500 squ