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

on which forbade women to climb mango trees, because a mango tree which ha
d once borne the weight of a woman would bear sour fruit for ever more… an
d there was the strange fakir named Chishti Khan, whose face was so smooth
and lustrous that nobody knew whether he was nineteen or ninety, and who
had surrounded his shack with a fabulous creation of bamboo sticks and scr
aps of brightly coloured paper, so that his home looked like a miniature,
multi coloured replica of the nearby Red Fort. Only when you passed throug
h its castellated gateway did you realize that behind the meticulously hyp
erbolic fa9ade of bamboo and paper crenellations and ravelins hid a tin an
d card board hovel like all the rest. Chishti Khan had committed the ultim
ate solecism of permitting his illusionist expertise to infect his real li
fe; he was not popular in the ghetto. The magicians kept their distance, l
est they become diseased by his dreams.
So you will understand why Parvati the witch, the possessor of truly wondro
us powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her midnight gi
ven gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community which had cons
tantly denied such possibilities.
On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of sigh
t, and the only danger was from scavengers after scrap, from searchers for a
bandoned crates or hunters for corrugated tin… that was where Parvati the wi
tch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a humble shalwar kame
ez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others, midnight's sorceress perfor
med for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a child. Saucer eye, rope like p
ony tail, fine full red lips… I would never have resisted her for so long if
not for the face, the sick decaying eyes nose lips of… There seemed at firs
t to be no limits to Parvati's abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were
demons conjured? Did djinns appear, offering riches and overseas travel on
levitating rugs? Were frogs turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose
into jewels? Was there selling of souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit
of it; the magic which Parvati the witch performed for me the only magic sh
e was ever willing to perform was of the type known as 'white'. It was as th
ough the Brahmins' 'Secret Book', the Atharva Veda, had revealed all its sec
rets to her; she could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she
permitted snakes to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, in
volving praying to the snake god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the g
oodness of the Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reci
ting a spell: Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless;
in a like manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected) she c
ould cure sores and consecrate talismans she knew the sraktya charm and the
Rite of the Tree. And all this, in a series of extraordinary night time disp
lays, she revealed to me beneath the walls of the Mosque but still she was n