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

inging:
@@@Anything you want to be, you kin be,
You kin be just what all you want.
Tonight, as I recall my rage, I remain perfectly calm; the Widow drained an
ger out of me along with everything else. Remembering my basket born rebell
ion against inevitability, I even permit myself a wry, understanding smile.
'Boys,' I mutter tolerantly across the years to Saleem at twenty four, 'wi
ll be boys.' In the Widows' Hostel, I was taught, harshly, once and for all
, the lesson of No Escape; now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Angl
epoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who wh
at am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, o
f all I have been seen done, of everything done to me. I am everyone everyt
hing whose being in the world affected was affected by mine. I am anything
that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not com
e. Nor am I particulary exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of
the now six hundred million plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I rep
eat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.
Although now, as the pouring out of what was inside me nears an end; as crack
s widen within I can hear and feel the rip tear crunch I begin to grow thinne
r, translucent almost; there isn't much of me left, and soon there will be no
thing at all. Six hundred million specks of dust, and all transparent, invisi
ble as glass…
But then I was angry. Glandular hyper activity in a wicker amphora: eccrine
and apocrine glands poured forth sweat and stink, as if I were trying to she
d my fate through my pores; and, in fairness to my wrath, I must record that
it claimed one instant achievement that when I tumbled out of the basket of
invisibility into the shadow of the mosque, I had been rescued by rebellion
from the abstraction of numbness; as I bumped out on to the dirt of the mag
icians' ghetto, silver spittoon in hand, I realized that I had begun, once a
gain, to feel.
Some afflictions, at least, are capable of being conquered.
The shadow of the Mosque
No shadow of a doubt: an acceleration is taking place. Rip crunch crack whil
e road surfaces split in the awesome heat, I, too, am being hurried towards
disintegration. What gnaws on bones (which, as I have been regularly obliged
to explain to the too many women around me, is far beyond the powers of med
icine men to discern, much less to cure) will not be denied for long; and st
ill so much remains to be told… Uncle Mustapha is growing inside me, and the