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

e doubt about her condition; her inner basket bulged through the clean new g
arments of Shiva's now defunct infatuation. Her lips, sure of their coming t
riumph, had lost their fashionable pout; in her saucer eyes, as she stood on
the steps of the Friday Mosque to ensure that as many people as possible sa
w her changed appearance, there lurked a silvered gleam of contentment. That
was how I found her when I returned to the chaya of the mosque with Picture
Singh. I was feeling disconsolate, and the sight of Parvati the witch on th
e steps, hands folded calmly over her swollen belly, long rope of hair blowi
ng gently in the crystal air, did nothing to cheer me up.
Pictureji! and I had gone into the tapering tenement streets behind the Gen
eral Post Office, where memories of fortune tellers peepshow men healers hu
ng in the breeze; and here Picture Singh had performed an act which was gro
wing more political by the day. His legendary artistry drew large good natu
red crowds; and he made his snakes enact his message under the influence of
his weaving flute music. While I, in my role of apprentice, read out a pre
pared harangue, serpents dramatized my speech. I spoke of the gross inequit
ies of wealth distribution; two cobras performed, in dumbshow, the mime of
a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar. Police harassment, hunger dis
ease illiteracy, were spoken of and also danced by serpents; and then Pictu
re Singh, concluding his act, began to talk about the nature of red revolut
ion, and promises began to fill the air, so that even before the police mat
erialized out of the back doors of the post office to break up the meeting
with lathi charges and tear gas, certain wags in our audience had begun to
heckle the Most Charming Man In The World. Unconvinced, perhaps, by the amb
iguous mimes of the snakes, whose dramatic content was admittedly a little
obscure, a youth shouted out: 'Ohe, Pictureji, you should be in the Governm
ent, man, not even Indiramata makes promises as nice as yours!'
Then the tear gas came and we had to flee, coughing spluttering blind, from
riot police, like criminals, crying falsely as we ran. (Just as once, in Jal
lianwalabagh but at least there were no bullets on this occasion.) But altho
ugh the tears were the tears of gas, Picture Singh was indeed cast down into
an awesome gloom by the heckler's gibe, which had questioned the hold on re
ality which was his greatest pride; and in the aftermath of gas and sticks,
I, too, was dejected, having suddenly identified a moth of unease in my stom
ach, and realized that something in me objected to Picture's portrayal in sn
ake dance of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich; I found myself thinking,
'There is good and bad in all and they brought me up, they looked after me,
Pictureji!' After which I began to see that the crime of Mary Pereira had d
etached me from two worlds, not one; that having been expelled from my uncle
's house I could never fully enter the world according to Picture Singh; tha
t, in fact, my dream of saving the country was a thing of mirrors and smoke;
insubstantial, the maunderings of a fool.