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

, who called herself Mrs Braganza, was of course my erstwhile ayah, the cr
iminal of midnight, Miss Mary Pereira, the only mother I had left in the w
orld.
Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrel
la walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops,
squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taki
ng offence at my voyeurism, calls: 'Watch this!' and proceeds to extrude th
e longest turd I have ever seen. 'Fifteen inches!' he calls, 'How long can
you make yours?' Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to te
ll his life story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have
been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into
my life, and I have no doubt that I'd have finished by proving his indispen
sability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times; bu
t now I'm disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write. So, wa
ving at the champion defecator, I call back: 'Seven on a good day,' and forget him.
Tomorrow. Or the day after. The cracks will be waiting for August 15th. There
is still a little time: I'll finish tomorrow.
Today I gave myself the day off and visited Mary. A long hot dusty bus rid
e through streets beginning to bubble with the excitement of the coming In
dependence Day, although I can smell other, more tarnished perfumes: disil
lusion, venality, cynicism… the nearly thirty one year old myth of freedom
is no longer what it was. New myths are needed; but that's none of my bus
iness.
Mary Pereira, who now calls herself Mrs Braganza, lives with her sister Ali
ce, now Mrs Fernandas, in an apartment in the pink obelisk of the Narlikar
women on the two storey hillock where once, in a demolished palace, she sle
pt on a servant's mat. Her bedroom occupies more or less the same cube of a
ir in which a fisherman's pointing finger led a pair of boyish eyes out tow
ards the horizon; in a teak rocking chair, Mary rocks my son, singing 'Red
Sails In The Sunset'. Red dhow sails spread against the distant sky.
A pleasant enough day, on which old days are recalled. The day when I reali
zed that an old cactus bed had survived the revolution of the Narlikar wome
n, and borrowing a spade from the mail, dug up a long buried world: a tin g
lobe containing yellowed ant eaten jumbo size baby snap, credited to Kalida
s Gupta, and a Prime Minister's letter. And days further off: for the dozen
th time we chatter about the change in Mary Pereira's fortunes. How she owe
d it all to her dear Alice. Whose poor Mr Fernandes died of colour blindnes
s, having become confused, in his old Ford Prefect, at one of the city's th
en few traffic lights. How Alice visited her in Goa with the news that her
employers, the fearsome and enterprising Narlikar women, were willing to pu