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

girl with big rolling hips saying, 'After all, you can't complain, you wo
n't deny that you once made assertions of Prophethood?', because they knew
everything, Padma, everything everything, they put me down on the table a
nd the mask coming down over my face and count to ten and numbers pounding
seven eight nine…
Ten.
And 'Good God he's still conscious, be a good fellow, go on to twenty…'
… Eighteen nineteen twen
They were good doctors: they left nothing to chance. Not for us the simple
vas and tubectomies performed on the teeming nasses; because there was a
chance, just a chance that such operations could be reversed… ectomies wer
e performed, but irreversibly: testicles were removed from sacs, and wombs
vanished for ever.
Test and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibil
ity of reproducing themselves… but that was only a side effect, because the
y were truly extraordinary doctors, and they drained us of more than that:
hope, too, was excised, and I don't know how it was done, because the numbe
rs had marched over me, I was out for the count, and all I can tell you is
that at the end of eighteen days on which the stupefying operations were ca
rried out at a mean rate of 23.33 per day, we were not only missing little
balls and inner sacs, but other things as well: in this respect, I came off
better than most, because drainage above had robbed me of my midnight give
n telepathy, I had nothing to lose, the sensitivity of a nose cannot be dra
ined away… but as for the rest of them, for all those who had come to the p
alace of the wailing widows with their magical gifts intact, the awakening
from anaesthesia was cruel indeed, and whispering through the wall came the
tale of their undoing, the tormented cry of children who had lost their ma
gic: she had cut it out of us, gorgeously with wide rolling hips she had de
vised the operation of our annihilation, and now we were nothing, who were
we, a mere 0.00007 per cent, now fishes could not be multiplied nor base me
tals transmuted; gone forever, the possibilities of flight and lycanthropy
and the originally one thousand and one marvellous promises of a numinous midnight
Drainage below: it was not a reversible operation.
Who were we? Broken promises; made to be broken.
And now I must tell you about the smell.
Yes, you must have all of it: however overblown, however Bombay talkie me
lodramatic, you must let it sink in, you must see! What Saleem smelled in
the evening of January 18th, 1977: something frying in an iron skillet,
soft unspeakable somethings spiced with turmeric coriander cumin and fenu
greek… the pungent inescapable fumes of what had been excised, cooking ov
er a low, slow fire.