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

He was the possessor of a navel which chose to stick out instead of in, so th
at Picture Singh, aghast, cried, 'His bimbi, captain! His bimbi, look!', and
he became, from the first days, the gracious recipient of our awe;
A child of such grave good nature that his absolute refusal to cry or whimper
utterly won over his adoptive father, who gave up laughing hysterically at t
he grotesque ears and began to rock the silent infant gently in his arms;
A child who heard a song as he rocked in arms, a song sung in the historical
accents of a disgraced ayah: 'Anything you want to be, you kin be; you kin
be just what all you want.'
But now that I've given birth to my flap eared, silent son there are questi
ons to be answered about that other, synchronous birth. Unpalatable, awkwar
d queries: did Saleem's dream of saving the nation leak, through the osmoti
c tissues of history, into the thoughts of the Prime Minister herself? Was
my lifelong belief in the equation between the State and myself transmuted,
in 'the Madam's' mind, into that in those days famous phrase: India is Ind
ira and Indira is India? Were we competitors for centrality was she gripped
by a lust for meaning as profound as my own and was that, was that why… ?
Influence of hair styles on the course of history: there's another ticklish
business. If William Methwold had lacked a centre parting, I might not have
been here today; and if the Mother of the Nation had had a coiffure of unifo
rm pigment, the Emergency she spawned might easily have lacked a darker side
. But she had white hair on one side and black on the other; the Emergency,
too, had a white part public, visible, documented, a matter for historians a
nd a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a matter for us.
Mrs Indira Gandhi was born in November 1917 to Kamala and Jawaharlal Nehr
u. Her middle name was Priyadarshini. She was not related to 'Mahatma' M.
K. Gandhi; her surname was the legacy of. her marriage, in 1952, to one
Feroze Gandhi, who became known as 'the nation's son in law'. They had tw
o sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, but in 1949 she moved back into her father's ho
me and became his 'official hostess'. Feroze made one attempt to live the
re, too, but it was not a success. He became a ferocious critic of the Ne
hru Government, exposing the Mundhra scandal and forcing the resignation
of the then Finance Minister, T. T. Krishnamachari T.T.K.' himself. Mr Fe
roze Gandhi died of a heart seizure in 1960, aged forty seven. Sanjay Gan
dhi, and his ex model wife Menaka, were prominent during the Emergency. T
he Sanjay Youth Movement was particularly effective in the sterilization
campaign.
I have included this somewhat elementary summary just in case you had faile
d to realize that the Prime Minister of India was, in 1975, fifteen years a
widow. Or (because the capital letter may be of use): a Widow.
Yes, Padma: Mother Indira really had it in for me.