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

whore. The whoring trails of the war hero around the capital of India bore
a strong resemblance to the Lambretta travels of Saleem Sinai along the spo
ors of Karachi streets; Major Shiva, unmanned in the company of the rich by
the revelations of Roshanara Shetty, had taken to paving for his pleasures
. And such was his phenomenal fecundity (he assured Parvati while beating h
er) that he ruined the'careers of many a loose woman by giving them babies
whom they would love too much to expose; he sired around the capital an arm
y of street urchins to mirror the regiment of bastards he had fathered on t
he begums of the chandeliered salons.
Dark clouds were gathering in political skies as well: in Bihar, where corr
uption inflation hunger illiteracy landlessness ruled the roost, Jaya Praka
sh Narayan led a coalition of students and workers against the governing In
dira Congress; in Gujarat, there were riots, railway trains were burned, an
d Morarji Desai went on a fast unto death to bring down the corrupt governm
ent of the Congress (under Chimanbhai Patel) in that drought ridden state…
it goes without) saying that he succeeded without being obliged to die; in
short, while anger seethed in Shiva's mind, the country was getting angry,
too; and what was being born while something grew in Parvati's belly? You k
now the answer: in late 1974, J. P. Narayan and Morarji Desai formed the op
position party known as the Janata Morcha: the people's front. While Major
Shiva reeled from whore to whore, the Indira Congress was reeling too.
And at last, Parvati released him from her spell. (No other explanation wi
ll do; if he was not bewitched, why did he not cast her off the instant he
heard of her pregnancy? And if the spell had not been lifted, how could h
e have done it at all?) Shaking his head as though awaking from a dream, M
ajor Shiva found himself in the company of a balloon fronted slum girl, wh
o now seemed to him to represent everything he most feared she became the
personification of the slums of his childhood, from which he had escaped,
and which now, through her, through her damnable child, were trying to dra
g him down down down again… dragging her by the hair, he hurled her on to
his motorcycle, and in a very short time she stood, abandoned, on the frin
ges of the magicians' ghetto, having been returned whence she came, bringi
ng with her only one thing which she had not owned when she left: the thin
g hidden inside her like an invisible man in a wicker basket, the thing wh
ich was growing growing growing, just as she had planned.
Why do I say that? Because it must be true; because what followed, followed;
because it is my belief that Parvati the witch became pregnant in order to
invalidate my only defence against marrying her. But I shall only describe,
and leave analysis to posterity.
On a cold day in January, when the muezzin's cries from the highest minaret
of the Friday Mosque froze as they left his lips and fell upon the city as s
acred snow, Parvati returned. She had waited until there could be no possibl