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

t, in those midnight months when the age of my connection to history overla
pped with his, our private emergency was not unconnected with the larger, m
acrocosmic disease, under whose influence the sun had become as pallid and
diseased as our son. Parvati then (like Padma now) dismissed these abstract
ruminations, attacking as mere folly my growing obsession with light, in w
hose grip I began lighting little dia lamps in the shack of my son's illnes
s, filling our hut with candle flames at noon… but I insist on the accuracy
of my diagnosis; 'I tell you,' I insisted then, 'while the Emergency lasts
, he will never become well.'
Driven to distraction by her failure to cure that grave child who never crie
d, my Parvati Laylah refused to believe my pessimistic theories; but she bec
ame vulnerable to every other cockeyed notion. When one of the older women i
n the colony of the magicians told her as Resham Bibi might have that the il
lness could not come out while the child remained dumb, Parvati seemed to fi
nd that plausible. 'Sickness is a grief of the body,' she lectured me, 'It m
ust be shaken off in tears and groans.' That night, she returned to the hut
clutching a little bundle of green powder, wrapped in newspaper and tied up
with pale pink string, and told me that this was a preparation of such power
that it would oblige even a stone to shriek. When she administered the medi
cine the child's cheeks began to bulge, as though his mouth were full of foo
d; the long suppressed sounds of his babyhood flooded up behind his lips, an
d he jammed his mouth shut in fury. It became clear that the infant was clos
e to choking as he tried to swallow back the torrential vomit of pent up sou
nd which the green powder had stirred up; and this was when we realized that
we were in the presence of one of the earth's most implacable wills. At the
end of an hour during which my son turned first saffron, then saffron and g
reen, and finally the colour of grass, I could not stand it any more and bel
lowed, 'Woman, if the little fellow wants so much to stay quiet, we mustn't
kill him for it!' I picked up Aadam to rock him, and felt his little body be
coming rigid, his knee joints elbows neck were filling up with the held back
tumult of unexpressed sounds, and at last Parvati relented and prepared an
antidote by mashing arrowroot and camomile in a tin bowl while muttering str
ange imprecations under her breath. After that, nobody ever tried to make Aa
dam Sinai do anything he did not wish to do; we watched him battling against
tuberculosis and tried to find reassurance in the idea that a will so steel
y would surely refuse to be defeated by any mere disease.
In those last days my wife Laylah or Parvati was also being gnawed by the i
nterior moths of despair, because when she came towards me for comfort or w
armth in the isolation of our sleeping hours, I still saw superimposed upon
her features the horribly eroded physiognomy of Jamila Singer; and althoug
h I confessed to Parvati the secret of the spectre, consoling her by pointi
ng out that at its present rate of decay it would have crumbled away entire