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

ly before long, she told me dolorously that spittoons and war had softened
my brain, and despaired of her marriage which would, as it transpired, neve
r be consummated; slowly, slowly there appeared on her lips the ominous pou
t of her grief… but what could I do? What solace could I offer I, Saleem Sn
otnose, who had been reduced to poverty by the withdrawal of my family's pr
otection, who had chosen (if it was a choice) to live by my olfactory gifts
, earning a few paisa a day by sniffing out what people had eaten for dinne
r the previous day and which of them were in love; what consolation could I
bring her, when I was already in the clutches of the cold hand of that lin
gering midnight, and could sniff finality in the air?
Saleem's nose (you can't have forgotten) could smell stranger things than h
orse dung. The perfumes of emotions and ideas, the odour of how things were
: all these were and are nosed out by me with ease. When the Constitution w
as altered to give the Prime Minister well nigh absolute powers, I smelted
the ghosts of ancient empires in the air… in that city which was littered w
ith the phantoms of Slave Kings and Mughals, of Aurangzeb the merciless and
the last, pink conquerors, I inhaled once again the sharp aroma of despoti
sm. It smelled like burning oily rags.
But even the nasally incompetent could have worked out that, during the win
ter of 1975 6, something smelled rotten in the capital; what alarmed me was
a stranger, more personal stink: the whiff of personal danger, in which I
discerned the presence of a pair of treacherous, retributive knees… my firs
t intimation that an ancient conflict, which began when a love crazed virgi
n switched name tags, was shortly to end in a frenzy of treason and snippings.
Perhaps, with such a warning pricking at my nostrils, I should have fled ti
pped off by a nose, I could have taken to my heels. But there were practica
l objections: where would I have gone? And, burdened by wife and son, how f
ast could I have moved? Nor must it be forgotten that I did flee once, and
look where I ended up: in the Sundarbans, the jungle of phantasms and retri
bution, from which I only escaped by the skin of my teeth!… At any rate, I
did not run.
It probably didn't matter; Shiva implacable, traitorous, my enemy from our
birth would have found me in the end. Because although a nose is uniquely e
quipped for the purpose of sniffing things out, when it comes to action the
re's no denying the advantages of a pair of grasping, choking knees.
I shall permit myself one last, paradoxical observation on this subject: if,
as I believe, it was at the house of the wailing women that I learned the ans
wer to the question of purpose which had plagued me all my life, then by savi
ng myself from that palace of annihilations
I would also have denied myself this most precious of discoveries. To put it
rather more philosophically: every cloud has a silver lining.
Saleem and Shiva, nose and knees… we shared just three things: the moment (