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

Ptui! Allah! How the fellow stinks!'
And although I, ingratiatingly, 'Hullo, Sonia Aunty darling,' grinned sheepi
shly at this wire netting shaded vision of my aunt's wrinkling Irani beauty,
she went on, 'Saleem, is it? Yes, I remember you. Nasty little brat you wer
e. Always thought you were growing up to be God or what. And why? Some stupi
d letter the P.M.'s fifteenth assistant under secretary must have sent you.'
In that first meeting I should have been able to foresee the destruction of
my plans; I should have smelled, on my mad aunt, the implacable odours of C
ivil Service jealousy, which would thwart all my attempts to gain a place in
the world. I had been sent a letter, and she never had; it made us enemies
for life. But there was a door, opening; there were whiffs of clean clothes
and shower baths; and I, grateful for small mercies, failed to examine the d
eadly perfumes of my aunt.
My uncle Mustapha Aziz, whose once proudly waxed moustache had never recove
red from the paralysing dust storm of the destruction of Methwold's Estate,
had been passed over for the headship of his Department no less than forty
seven times, and had at last found consolation for his inadequacies in thr
ashing his children, in ranting nightly about how he was clearly the victim
of anti Muslim prejudice, in a contradictory but absolute loyalty to the g
overnment of the day, and in an obsession with genealogies which was his on
ly hobby and whose intensity was greater even than my father Ahmed Sinai's
long ago desire to prove himself descended from Mughal emperors. In the fir
st of these consolations he was willingly joined by his wife, the half Iran
i would be socialite Sonia (nee Khosrovani), who had been driven certifiabl
y insane by a life in which she had been required to begin 'being a chamcha
' (literally a spoon, but idiomatically a flatterer) to forty seven separat
e and successive wives of number ones whom she had previously alienated by
her manner of colossal condescension when they had been the wives of number
threes; under the joint batterings of my uncle and aunt, my cousins had by
now been beaten into so thorough a pulp that I am unable to recall their n
umber, sexes, proportions or features; their personalities, of course, had
long since ceased to exist. In the home of Uncle Mustapha, I sat silently a
mongst my pulverized cousins listening to his nightly soliloquies which con
tradicted themselves constantly, veering wildly between his resentment of n
ot having been promoted and his blind lap dog devotion to every one of the
Prime Minister's acts. If Indira Gandhi had asked him to commit suicide, Mu
stapha Aziz would have ascribed it to anti Muslim bigotry but also defended
the statesmanship of the request, and, naturally, performed the task witho
ut daring (or even wishing) to demur.
As for genealogies: Uncle Mustapha spent all his spare time filling giant l
og books with spider like family trees, eternally researching into and immo
rtalizing the bizarre lineages of the greatest families in the land; but on