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

e atmosphere of the madhouse. Someone came to dinner: someone with a plump
stomach, a tapering head covered with oily .curls and a mouth as fleshy as
a woman's labia. I thought I recognized him from newspaper photographs. Tur
ning to one of my sexless ageless faceless cousins, I inquired with interes
t, 'Isn't it, you know, Sanjay Gandhi?' But the pulverized creature was too
annihilated to be capable of replying… was it wasn't it? I did not, at tha
t time, know what I now set down: that certain high ups in that extraordina
ry government (and also certain unelected sons of prime ministers) had acqu
ired the power of replicating themselves… a few years later, there would be
gangs of Sanjays all over India! No wonder that incredible dynasty wanted
to impose birth control on the rest of us… so maybe it was, maybe it wasn't
; but someone disappeared into my uncle's study with Mustapha Aziz; and tha
t night I sneaked a look there was a locked black leather folder saying top
secret and also project m.c.c.; and the next morning my uncle was looking
at me differently, with fear almost, or with that special look of loathing
which Civil Servants reserve for those who fall into official disfavour. I
should have known then what was in store for me; but everything is simple w
ith hindsight. Hindsight comes to me now, too late, now that I am finally c
onsigned to the peripheries of history, now that the connections between my
life and the nation's have broken for good and all… to avoid my uncle's in
explicable gaze, I went out into the garden; and saw Parvati the witch.
She was squatting on the pavement with the basket of invisibility by her sid
e; when she saw me her eyes brightened with reproach. 'You said you'd come,
but you never, so I,' she stuttered. I bowed my head. 'I have been in mourni
ng,' I said, lamely, and she, 'But still you could have my God, Saleem, you
don't know, in our colony I can't tell anyone about my real magic, never, no
t even Picture Singh who is like a father, I must bottle it and bottle it, b
ecause they don't believe in such things, and I thought, Here is Saleem come
, now at last I will have one friend, we can talk, we can be together, we ha
ve both been, and known, and arre how to say it, Saleem, you don't care, you
got what you wanted and went off just like that, I am nothing to you, I kno
w…'
That night my mad aunt Sonia, herself only days away from confinement in a s
trait jacket (it got into the papers, a small piece on an inside page; my un
cle's Department must have been annoyed), had one of the fierce inspirations
of the profoundly insane and burst into the bedroom into which, half an hou
r earlier, someone with saucer eyes had climbed through a ground floor windo
w; she found me in bed with Parvati the witch, and after that my Uncle Musta
pha lost interest in sheltering me, saying, 'You were born from bhangis, you
will remain a dirty type all your life'; on the four hundred and twentieth
day after my arrival, I left my uncle's house, deprived of family ties, retu
rned at last to that true inheritance of poverty and destitution of which I