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

I cannot; instead, meekly and with every appearance of gratitude, I accept
her proposal. I am, this evening, a man newly affianced; let no one think h
arshly of me for permitting myself and my betrothed lotus this last, vain,
inconsequential pleasure.
Padma, by proposing a marriage, revealed her willingness to dismiss everyt
hing I've told her about my past as just so much 'fancy talk'; and when I
returned to find Picture Singh beaming in the shadow of a railway bridge,
it rapidly became clear that the magicians, too, were losing their memorie
s. Somewhere in the many moves of the peripatetic slum, they had mislaid t
heir powers of retention, so that now they had become incapable of judgmen
t, having forgotten everything to which they could compare anything that h
appened. Even the Emergency was rapidly being consigned to the oblivion of
the past, and the magicians concentrated upon the present with the monoma
nia of snails. Nor did they notice that they had changed; they had forgott
en that they had ever been otherwise, Communism had seeped out of them and
been gulped down by the thirsty, lizard quick earth; they were beginning
to forget their skills in the confusion of hunger, disease, thirst and pol
ice harassment which constituted (as usual) the present. To me, however, t
his change in my old companions seemed nothing short of obscene. Saleem ha
d come through amnesia and been shown the extent of its immorality; in his
mind, the past grew daily more vivid while the present (from which knives
had disconnected him for ever) seemed colourless, confused, a thing of no
consequence; I, who could remember every hair on the heads of jailers and
surgeons, was deeply shocked by the magicians' unwillingness to look behi
nd them. 'People are like cats,' I told my son, 'you can't teach them anyt
hing.' He looked suitably grave, but held his tongue.
My son Aadam Sinai had, when I rediscovered the phantom colony of the illusi
onists, lost all traces of the tuberculosis which had afflicted his earliest
days. I, naturally, was certain that the disease had vanished with the fall
of the Widow; Picture Singh, however, told me that credit for the cure must
be given to a certain washerwoman, Durga by name, who had wet nursed him th
rough his sickness, giving him the daily benefit of her inexhaustibly coloss
al breasts. 'That Durga, captain,' the old snake charmer said, his voice bet
raying the fact that, in his old age, he had fallen victim to the dhoban's s
erpentine charms, 'What a woman!'
She was a woman whose biceps bulged; whose preternatural breasts unleashed
a torrent of milk capable of nourishing regiments; and who, it was rumoured
darkly (although I suspect the rumour of being started by herself) had two
wombs. She was as full of gossip and tittle tattle as she was of milk: eve
ry day a dozen new stories gushed from her lips. She possessed the boundles
s energy common to all practitioners of her trade; as she thrashed the life
out of shirts and saris on her stone, she seemed to grow in power, as if s