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

eyes, and you were obliged to bang on the door and yell, 'Ohe, maharaj! Ope
n up! Let me in, great sir, maharaj!' While inside, a voice uttered familiar
words 'On' no account is anyone to open. Just fare dodgers, that's all.'
In Delhi: Saleem asks questions. Have you seen where? Do you know if the ma
gicians? Are you acquainted with Picture Singh? A postman with the memory o
f snake charmers fading in his eyes points north. And, later, a black tongu
ed paan wallah sends me back the way I came. Then, at last, the trail cease
s meandering; street entertainers put me on the scent. A Dilli dekho man wi
th a peepshow machine, a mongoose and cobra trainer wearing a paper hat lik
e a child's sailboat, a girl in a cinema box office who retains her nostalg
ia for her childhood as a sorcerer's apprentice… like fishermen, they point
with fingers. West west west, until at last Saleem arrives at the Shadipur
bus depot on the western outskirts of the city. Hungry thirsty enfeebled s
ick, skipping weakly out of the paths of buses roaring in and out of the de
pot gaily painted buses, bearing inscriptions on their bonnets such as God
Willing! and other mottoes, for instance Thank God! on their backsides he c
omes to a huddle of ragged tents clustered under a concrete railway bridge,
and sees, in the shadow of concrete, a snake charming giant breaking into
an enormous rotten toothed smile, and, in his arms, wearing a tee shirt dec
orated with pink guitars, a small boy of some twenty one months, whose ears
are the ears of elephants, whose eyes are wide as saucers and whose face i
s as serious as the grave.
Abracadabra
To tell the truth, I lied about Shiva's death. My first out and out lie alth
ough my presentation of the Emergency in the guise of a six hundred and thir
ty five day long midnight was perhaps excessively romantic, and certainly co
ntradicted by the available meteorological data. Still and all, whatever any
one may think, lying doesn't come easily to Saleem, and I'm hanging my head
in shame as I confess… Why, then, this single barefaced lie? (Because, in ac
tuality, I've no idea where my changeling rival went after the Widows' Hoste
l; he could be in hell or the brothel down the road and I wouldn't know the
difference.) Padma, try and understand: I'm still terrified of him. There is
unfinished business between us, and I spend my days quivering at the though
t that the war hero might somehow have discovered the secret of his birth wa
s he ever shown a file bearing three tell tale initials? and that, roused to
wrath by the irrecoverable loss of his past, he might come looking for me t
o exact a stifling revenge… is that how it will end, with the life being cru
shed out of me by a pair of superhuman, merciless knees?
That's why I fibbed, anyway; for the first time, I fell victim to the tempta
tion of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists onl