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

had been cheated for so long by the crime of Mary Pereira. Parvati the witch
was waiting for me on the pavement; I did not tell her that there was a sen
se in which I'd been glad of the interruption, because as I kissed her in th
e dark of that illicit midnight I had seen her face changing, becoming the f
ace of a forbidden love; the ghostly features of Jamila Singer replaced thes
e of the witch girl; Jamila who was (I know it!) safely hidden in a Karachi
nunnery was suddenly also here, except that she had undergone a dark, transf
ormation. She had begun to rot, the dread! . pustules and cankers of forbidd
en love were spreading across her face; just as once the ghost of Joe D'Cost
a had rotted in the grip of the occult leprosy of guilt, so now the rancid f
lowers of incest blossomed on my sister's phantasmal features, and I couldn'
t do it, couldn't kiss touch look upon that intolerable spectral face, I had
been on the verge of jerking away with a cry of desperate nostalgia and sha
me when Sonia Aziz burst in upon us with electric light and screams.
And as for Mustapha, well, my indiscretion with Parvati may also have been,
in his eyes, no more than a useful pretext for getting rid of me; but that m
ust remain in doubt, because the black folder was locked all I have to go on
is a look in his eye, a smell of fear, three initials on a label because af
terwards, when everything was finished, a fallen lady and her labia lipped s
on spent two days behind locked doors, burning files; and how can we know wh
ether or not one of them was labelled m.C.C.?
I didn't want to stay, anyway. Family: an overrated idea. Don't think I was
sad! Never for a moment imagine that lumps arose in my throat at my expuls
ion from the last gracious home open to me! I tell you I was in fine spirit
s when I left… maybe there is something unnatural about me, some fundamenta
l lack of emotional response; but my thoughts have always aspired to higher
things. Hence my resilience. Hit me: I bounce back. (But no resistance is
of any use against the cracks.)
To sum up: forsaking my earlier, naive hopes of preferment in public servi
ce, I returned to the magicians' slum and the chaya of the Friday Mosque.
Like Gautama, the first and true Buddha, I left my life and comfort and we
nt like a beggar into the world. The date was February 23rd, 1973; coal mi
nes and the wheat market were being nationalized, the price of oil had beg
un to spiral up up up, would quadruple in a year, and in the Communist Par
ty of India, the split between Dange's Moscow faction and Namboodiripad's
C.P.I.(M.) had become unbridgeable; and I, Saleem Sinai, like India, was t
wenty five years, six months and eight days old.
The magicians were Communists, almost to a man. That's right: reds! Insurre
ctionists, public menaces, the scum of the earth a community of the godless
living blasphemously in the very shadow of the house of God! Shameless, wh
at's more; innocently scarlet; born with the bloody taint upon their souk!