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

When four hundred and twenty suffered ectomies, an avenging Goddess ensure
d that certain ectomized parts were curried with onions and green chillies
, and fed to the pie dogs of Benares. (There were four hundred and twenty
one ectomies performed: because one of us, whom we called Narada or Markan
daya, had the ability of changing sex; he, or she, had to be operated on t
wice.)
No, I can't prove it, not any of it. Evidence went up in smoke: some was fed
to pie dogs; and later, on March 20th, files were burned by a mother with p
articoloured hair and her beloved son.
But Padma knows what I can no longer do; Padma, who once, in her anger, crie
d out: 'But what use you, my God, as a lover?' That part, at least, can be v
erified: in the hovel of Picture Singh, I cursed myself with the lie of impo
tence; I cannot say I was not warned, because he told me: 'Anything could ha
ppen, captain.' It did.
Sometimes I feel a thousand years old: or (because I cannot, even now, aban
don form), to be exact, a thousand and one.
The Widow's Hand had rolling hips and once owned a jewellery boutique. I
began among jewels: in Kashmir, in 1915, there were rubies and diamonds.
My great grandparents ran a gemstone store. Form once again, recurrence a
nd shape! no escape from it.
In the walls, the hopeless whispers of the stunned four hundred and ninetee
n; while the four hundred and twentieth gives vent just once; one moment of
ranting is permissible to the following petulant question… at the top of m
y voice, I shriek: 'What about him? Major Shiva, the traitor? Don't you car
e about him?' And the reply, from gorgeous with big rolling hips: 'The Majo
r has undergone voluntary vasectomy.'
And now, in his sightless cell, Saleem begins to laugh, wholeheartedly, with
out stinting: no, I was not laughing cruelly at my arch rival, nor was I cyn
ically translating the word 'voluntary' into another word; no, I was remembe
ring stories told me by Parvati or Laylah, the legendary tales of the war he
ro's philandering, of the legions of bastards swelling in the unectomied bel
lies of great ladies and whores; I laughed because Shiva, destroyer of the m
idnight children, had also fulfilled the other role lurking in his name, the
function of Shiva lingam, of Shiva the procreator, so that at this very mom
ent, in the boudoirs and hovels of the nation, a new generation of children,
begotten by midnight's darkest child, was being raised towards the future.
Every Widow manages to forget something important.
Late in March 1977, I was unexpectedly released from the palace of the howl
ing widows, and stood blinking like an owl in the sunlight, not knowing how