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

sket on the step beside the Congress wallah's feet; removed the lid; raised
flute to lips. Amid renewed laughter, the young politico leaped nineteen inc
hes into the air as a king cobra swayed sleepily up from its home… Labia lip
s is crying: 'What are you doing? Trying to kill me to death?' And Picture S
ingh, ignoring him, his umbrella furled now, plays on, more and more furious
ly, and the snake uncoils, faster faster Picture Singh plays until the flute
's music fills every cranny of the slum and threatens to scale the walls of
the mosque, and at last the great snake, hanging in the air, supported only by the encha
and dances on its tail… Picture Singh relents. Nagaraj subsides into coils.
The Most Charming Man In The World offers the flute to the Congress youth:
'Okay, captain,' Picture Singh says agreeably, 'you give it a try.' But labi
a lips: 'Man, you know I couldn't do it!' Whereupon Picture Singh seizes the
cobra just below the head, opens his own mouth wide wide wide, displaying a
n heroic wreckage of teeth and gums; winking left eyed at the Congress youth
, he inserts the snake's tongue flicking head into his hideously yawning ori
fice! A full minute passes before Picture Singh returns the cobra to its bas
ket. Very kindly, he tells the youth: 'You see, captain, here is the truth o
f the business: some persons are better, others are less. But it may be nice
for you to think otherwise.'
Watching this scene, Saleem Sinai learned that Picture Singh and the magicia
ns were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerf
ully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, b
ut they never forgot what it was.
The problems of the magicians' ghetto were the problems of the Communist m
ovement in India; within the confines of the colony could be found, in min
iature, the many divisions and dissensions which racked the Party in the c
ountry. Picture Singh, I hasten to add, was above it all; the patriarch of
the ghetto, he was the possessor of an umbrella whose shade could restore
harmony to the squabbling factions; but the disputes which were brought i
nto the shelter of the snake charmer's umbrella were becoming more and mor
e bitter, as the prestidigitators, the pullers of rabbits from hats, align
ed themselves firmly behind Mr Dange's Moscow line official C.P.I., which
supported Mrs Gandhi throughout the Emergency; the contortionists, however
, began to lean more towards the left and the slanting intricacies of the
Chinese oriented wing. Fire eaters and sword swallowers applauded the guer
rilla tactics of the Naxalite movement; while mesmerists and walkers on ho
t coals espoused Namboodiripad's manifesto (neither Muscovite nor Pekinese
) and deplored the Naxa lites' violence. There were Trotskyist tendencies
amongst card sharpers, and even a Communism through the ballot box movemen
t amongst the moderate members of the ventriloquist section. I had entered
a milieu in which, while religious and regionalist bigotry were wholly ab