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

Pass it on: some of us have escaped. I sniff absences through the walls. Good
news, children! They cannot get us all. Soumitra, the time traveller, for in
stance O youthful folly! O stupid we, to disbelieve him so! is not here; wand
ering, perhaps, in some happier time of his life, he has eluded search partie
s for ever. No, do not envy him; although I, too, long on occasion to escape
backwards, perhaps to the time when I, the apple of the universal eye, made a
triumphant tour as a baby of the palaces of William Mcthwold O insidious nos
talgia for times of greater possibility, before history, like a street behind
the General Post Office in Delhi, narrowed down to this final full point! bu
t we are here now; such retrospection saps the spirit; rejoice, simply, that
some of us are free!
And some of us are dead. They told me about my Parvati. Across whose featur
es, to the last, there fell the crumbling ghost face of. No, we are no long
er five hundred and eighty one. Shivering in the December cold, how many of
us sit walled in and waiting? I ask my nose; it replies, four hundred and
twenty, the number of trickery and fraud. Four hundred and twenty, imprison
ed by widows; and there is one more, who struts booted around the Hostel I
smell his stink approaching receding, the spoor of treachery! Major Shiva,
war hero, Shiva of the knees, supervises our captivity. Will they be conten
t with four hundred and twenty? Children: I don't know how long they'll wai
t.
… No, you're making fun of me, stop, do not joke. Why whence how on earth t
his good nature, this bonhomie in your passed on whisperings? No, you must
condemn me, out of hand and without appeal do not torture me with your chee
ry greetings as one by one you are locked in cells; what kind of time or pl
ace is this for salaams, namaskars, how you beens? Children, don't you unde
rstand, they could do anything to us, anything no, how can you say that, wh
at do you mean with your what could they do? Let me tell you, my friends, s
teel rods are painful when applied to the ankles; rifle butts leave bruises
on foreheads. What could they do? Live electric wires up your anuses, chil
dren; and that's not the only possibility, there is also hanging by the fee
t, and a candle ah, the sweet romantic glow of candlelight! is less than co
mfortable when applied, lit, to the skin! Stop it now, cease all this frien
dship, aren't you afraid! Don't you want to kick stamp trample me to smithe
reens? Why these constant whispered reminiscences, this nostalgia for old q
uarrels, for the war of ideas and things, why are you taunting me with your
calmness, your normality, your powers of rising above the crisis? Frankly,
I'm puzzled, children: how can you, aged twenty nine, sit whispering flirt
atiously to each other in your cells? Goddamnit, this is not a social reunion!
Children, children, I'm sorry. I admit openly I have not been myself of late
. I have been a buddha, and a basketed ghost, and a would be saviour of the
nation… Saieem has been rushing down blind alleys, has had considerable prob