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

is no chutney or pickle capable of unlocking the doors behind which I have
locked those days! No, I have forgotten, I cannot will not say how they ma
de me spill the beans but I cannot escape the shameful heart of the matter,
which is that despite absence of jokes and the generally unsympathetic man
ner of my two headed inquisitor, I did most certainly talk. And more than t
alk: under the influence of their unnamable forgotten pressures, I became l
oquacious in the extreme. What poured, blubbering, from my lips (and will n
ot do so now): names addresses physical descriptions. Yes, I told them ever
ything, I named all five hundred and seventy eight (because Parvati, they i
nformed me courteously, was dead, and Shiva gone over to the enemy, and the
five hundred and eighty first was doing the talking…) forced into treacher
y by the treason of another, I betrayed the children of midnight. I, the Fo
under of the Conference, presided over its end, while Abbott and Costello,
unsmilingly, interjected from time to time: 'Aha! Very good! Didn't know ab
out her!' or, 'You are being most co operative; this fellow is a new one on
us!'
Such things happen. Statistics may set my arrest in context; although there
is considerable disagreement about the number of 'political' prisoners tak
en during the Emergency, either thirty thousand or a quarter of a million p
ersons certainly lost their freedom. The Widow said: 'It is only a small pe
rcentage of the population of India.' All sorts of things happen during an
Emergency: trains run on time, black money hoarders are frightened into pay
ing taxes, even the weather is brought to heel, and bumper harvests are rea
ped; there is, I repeat, a white part as well as a black. But in the black
part, I sat bar fettered in a tiny room, on a straw palliasse which was the
only article of furniture I was permitted, sharing my daily bowl of rice w
ith cockroaches and ants. And as for the children of midnight that fearsome
conspiracy which had to be broken at all costs that gang of cut throat des
peradoes before whom an astrology ridden Prime Minister trembled in terror
the grotesque aberrational monsters of independence, for whom a modern nati
on state could have neither time nor compassion twenty nine years old now,
give or take a month or two, they were brought to the Widows' Hostel, betwe
en April and December they were rounded up, and their whispers began to fil
l the walls. The walls of my cell (paper thin, peeling plastered, bare) beg
an to whisper, into one bad ear and one good ear, the consequences of my sh
ameful confessions. A cucumber nosed prisoner, festooned with iron rods and
rings which made various natural functions impossible walking, using the t
in chamber pot, squatting, sleeping lay huddled against peeling plaster and
whispered to a wail.
It was the end; Saleem gave way to his grief. All my life, and through the g
reater part of these reminiscences, I have tried to keep my sorrows under lo
ck and key, to prevent them from staining my sentences with their salty, mau