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

g in my ransacked memory vaults like broken bottles on a beach… Like scraps
of memory, sheets of newsprint used to bowl through the magicians' colony
in the silent midnight wind.
Wind blown newspapers visited my shack to inform me that my uncle, Mustaph
a Aziz, had been the victim of unknown assassins; I neglected to shed a te
ar. But there were other pieces of information; and from these, I must bui
ld reality.
On one sheet of paper (smelling of turnips) I read that the Prime Minister
of India went nowhere without her personal astrologer. In this fragment, I
discerned more than turnip whiffs; mysteriously, my nose recognized, once a
gain, the scent of personal danger. What I am obliged to deduce from this w
arning aroma: soothsayers prophesied me; might not soothsayers have undone
me at the end? Might not a Widow, obsessed with the stars, have learned fro
m astrologers the secret potential of any children born at that long ago mi
dnight hour? And was that why a Civil Servant, expert in genealogies, was a
sked to trace… and why he looked at me strangely in the morning? Yes, you s
ee, the scraps begin to fit together! Padma, does it not become clear? Indi
ra is India and India is Indira… but might she not have read her own father
's letter to a midnight child, in which her own, sloganized centrality was
denied; in which the role of mirror of the nation was bestowed upon me? You
see? You see?… And there is more, there is even clearer proof, because her
e is another scrap of the Times of India, in which the Widow's own news age
ncy Samachar quotes her when she speaks of her 'determination to combat the
deep and widespread conspiracy which has been growing'. I tell you: she di
d not mean the Janata Morcha! No, the Emergency had a black part as well as
a white, and here is the secret which has lain concealed for too long bene
ath the mask of those stifled days: the truest, deepest motive behind the d
eclaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the i
rreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight. (Whose Conference
had, of course, been disbanded years before; but the mere possibility of o
ur re unification was enough to trigger off the red alert.)
Astrologers I have no doubt sounded the alarums; in a black folder labelled
m.c.c., names were gathered from extant records; but there was more to it
than that. There were also betrayals and confessions; there were knees and
a nose a nose, and also knees.
Scraps, shreds, fragments: it seems to me that, immediately before 1 awoke w
ith the scent of danger in my nostrils, I had dreamed that I was sleeping. I
awoke, in this most unnerving of dreams, to find a stranger in my shack: a
poetic looking fellow with lank hair that wormed over his ears (but who was
very thin on top). Yes: during my last sleep before what has to be described
, I was visited by the shade of Nadir Khan, who was staring perplexedly at a