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

, captain: how sad for you, is it not?' And I, trapped by the lie of impotenc
e, remained silent while Pictureji suggested the marriage which would preserv
e Parvati's honour and simultaneously solve the problem of my self confessed
sterility; and despite my fears of the face of Jamila Singer, which, superimp
osed on Parvati's, had the power of driving me to distraction, I could not fi
nd it in myself to refuse.
Parvati just as she had planned, I'm sure accepted me at once, said yes as e
asily and as often as she had said no in the past; and after that the Republ
ic Day celebrations acquired the air of having been staged especially for ou
r benefit, but what was in my mind was that once again destiny, inevitabilit
y, the antithesis of choice had come to rule my life, once again a child was
to be born to a father who was not his father, although by a terrible irony
the child would be the true grandchild of his father's parents; trapped in
the web of these interweaving genealogies, it may even have occurred to me t
o wonder what was beginning, what was ending, and whether another secret cou
ntdown was in progress, and what would be born with my child.
Despite the absence of Resham Bibi, the wedding went off well enough. Parv
ati's formal conversion to Islam (which irritated Picture Singh, but on wh
ich I found myself insisting, in another throwback to an earlier life) was
performed by a red bearded Haji who looked ill at ease in the presence of
so many teasing, provocative members of the ungodly; under the shifting g
aze of this fellow who resembled a large and bearded onion she intoned her
belief that there was no God but God and that Muhammad was his prophet; s
he took a name which I chose for her out of the repository of my dreams, b
ecoming Laylah, night, so that she too was caught up in the repetitive cyc
les of my history, becoming an echo of all the other people who have been
obliged to change their names… like my own mother Amina Sinai, Parvati the
witch became a new person in order to have a child.
At the henna ceremony, half the magicians adopted me, performing the functi
ons of my 'family'; the other half took Parvati's side, and happy insults w
ere sung late into the night while intricate traceries of henna dried into
the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet; and if the absence of Res
ham Bibi deprived the insults of a certain cutting edge, we were not overly
sorry about the fact. During the nikah, the wedding proper, the happy coup
le were seated on a dais hastily constructed out of the Dalda boxes of Resh
am's demolished shack, and the magicians filed solemnly past us, dropping c
oins of small denominations into our laps; and when the new Laylah Sinai fa
inted everyone smiled contentedly, because every good bride should faint at
her wedding, and nobody mentioned the embarrassing possibility that she mi
ght have passed out because of the nausea or perhaps the kicking pains caus
ed by the child inside her basket. That evening the magicians put on a show