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

eration of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, no
t looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the imp
lacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the eyes of the child who was
simultaneously not my son and also more my heir than any child of my flesh c
ould have been, I found in his empty, limpid pupils a second mirror of humil
ity, which showed me that, from now on, mine would be as peripheral a role a
s that of any redundant oldster: the traditional function, perhaps, of remin
iscer, of teller of tales… I wondered if all over the country the bastard so
ns of Shiva were exerting similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisag
ed for the second time that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing wait
ing listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their playt
hing. (How these children may, in the future, be identified: their bimbis st
ick out instead of in.)
But it's time to get things moving: a taunt, a. last railway train heading
south south south, a final battle… on the day following the weaning of Aada
m, Saleem accompanied Picture Singh to Connaught Place, to assist him in hi
s snake charming. Durga the dhoban agreed to take my son with her to the dh
obi ghat: Aadam spent the day observing how power was thrashed out of the c
lothes of the well to do and absorbed by the succubus woman. On that fatefu
l day, when the warm weather was returning to the city like a swarm of bees
, I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed silver spittoon. Picture Sin
gh had provided me with a spittoon surrogate, an empty Dalda Vanaspati can,
but although I used this to entertain my son with my expertise in the gent
le art of spittoon hittery, sending long jets of betel juice across the gri
my air of the magicians' colony, I was not consoled. A question: why such g
rief over a mere receptacle of juices? My reply is that you should never un
derestimate a spittoon. Elegant in the salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, i
t permitted intellectuals to practise the art forms of the masses; gleaming
in a cellar, it transformed Nadir Khan's underworld into a second Taj Maha
l; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it was nevertheless present througho
ut my history, covertly assimilating incidents in washing chests, ghost vis
ions, freeze unfreeze, drainage, exiles; falling from the sky like a piece
of the moon, it perpetrated a transformation. O talismanic spittoon! O beau
teous lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle juice! What sensitive
person could fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its loss?
… Beside me at the back of a bus bulging with humanity, Picture Singh sat w
ith snake baskets coiled innocently on his lap. As we rattled and banged th
rough that city which was also filled with the resurgent ghosts of earlier,
mythological Delhis, the Most Charming Man In The World wore an air of fad
ed despondency, as if a battle in a distant darkroom were already over… unt
il my return, nobody had understood that Pictureji's real and unvoiced fear
was that he was growing old, that his powers were dimming, that he would s