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

choed on occasion in his ears.
There are ironies here, which must not pass unnoticed; for had not Shiva r
isen as Saleem fell? Who was the slum dweller now, and who looked down fro
m commanding heights? There is nothing like a war for the re invention of
lives… On what may well have been May 18th, at any rate, Major Shiva came
to the magicians' ghetto, and strode through the cruel streets of the slum
with a strange expression on his face, which combined the infinite disdai
n for poverty of the recently exalted with something more mysterious: beca
use Major Shiva, drawn to our humble abode by the incantations of Parvati
the witch, cannot have known what force impelled him to come.
What follows is a reconstruction of the recent career of Major Shiva; I piec
ed the story together from Parvati's accounts, which I got out of her after
our marriage. It seems my arch rival was fond of boasting to her about his e
xploits, so you may wish to make allowances for the distortions of truth whi
ch such chest beating creates; however, there seems no reason to believe tha
t what he told Parvati and she repeated to me was very far removed from what
was the case.
At the end of the war in the East, the legends of Shiva's awful exploits buz
zed through the streets of the cities, leaped on to newspaper and into magaz
ines, and thus insinuated themselves into the salons of the well to do, sett
ling in clouds as thick as flies upon the eardrums of the country's hostesse
s, so that Shiva found himself elevated in social status as well as military
rank, and was invited to a thousand and one different gatherings banquets,
musical soirees, bridge parties, diplomatic receptions, party political conf
erences, great melas and also smaller, local fetes, school sports days and f
ashionable balls to be applauded and monopolized by the noblest and fairest
in the land, to all of whom the legends of his exploits clung like flies, wa
lking over their eyeballs so that they saw the young man through the mist of
his legend, coating their fingertips so that they touched him through the m
agical film of his myth, settling on their tongues so that they could not sp
eak to him as they would to an ordinary human being. The Indian Army, which
was at that time fighting a political battle against proposed expenditure cu
ts, understood the value of so charismatic an ambassador, and permitted the
hero to circulate amongst his influential admirers; Shiva espoused his new l
ife with a will.
He grew a luxuriant moustache to which his personal batman applied a daily p
omade of linseed oil spiced with coriander; always elegantly turned out in t
he drawing rooms of the mighty, he engaged in political chit chat, and decla
red himself a firm admirer of Mrs Gandhi, largely because of his hatred for
her opponent Morarji Desai, who was intolerably ancient, drank his own urine
, had skin which rustled like rice paper, and, as Chief Minister of Bombay,
had once been responsible for the banning of alcohol and the persecution of