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

dlin fluidities; but no more. I was given no reason (until the Widow's Hand…
) for my incarceration: but who, of all the thirty thousand or quarter of a
million, was told why or wherefore? Who needed to be told? In the walls, I h
eard the muted voices of the midnight children: needing no further footnotes
, I blubbered over peeling plaster.
What Saleem whispered to the wall between April and December 1976:
… Dear Children. How can I say this? What is there to say? My guilt my sham
e. Although excuses are possible: I wasn't to blame about Shiva. And all ma
nner of folk are being locked up, so why not us? And guilt is a complex mat
ter, for are we not all, each of us in some sense responsible for do we not
get the leaders we deserve? But no such excuses are offered. I did it, I.
Dear children: and my Parvati is dead. And my Jamila, vanished. And everyon
e. Vanishing seems to be yet another of those characteristics which recur t
hroughout my history: Nadir Khan vanished from an underworld, leaving a not
e behind; Aadam Aziz vanished, too, before my grandmother got up to feed th
e geese; and where is Mary Pereira? I, in a basket, disappeared; but Laylah
or Parvati went phutt without the assistance of spells. And now here we ar
e, disappeared off the face of the earth. The curse of vanishment, dear chi
ldren, has evidently leaked into you. No, as to the question of guilt, I re
fuse absolutely to take the larger view; we are too close to what is happen
ing, perspective is impossible, later perhaps analysts will say why and whe
refore, will adduce underlying economic trends and political developments,
but right now we're too close to the cinema screen, the picture is breaking
up into dots, only subjective judgments are possible. Subjectively, then,
I hang my head in shame. Dear children: forgive. No, I do not expect you to forgive.
Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We should have
avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the concl
usion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all
this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can't be helped. What can't
be cured must be endured.
Good question, children: what must be endured? Why are we being amassed her
e like this, one by one, why are rods and rings hanging from our necks? And
stranger confinements (if a whispering wall is to be believed): who has th
e gift of levitation has been tied by the ankles to rings set in the floor,
and a werewolf is obliged to wear a muzzle; who can escape through mirrors
must drink water through a hole in a lidded can, so that he cannot vanish
through the reflective surface of the drink; and she whose looks can kill h
as her head in a sack, and the bewitching beauties of Baud are likewise bag
headed. One of us can eat metal; his head is jammed in a brace, unlocked o
nly at mealtimes… what is being prepared for us? Something bad, children. I
don't know what as yet, but it's coming. Children: we, too, must prepare.