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

ering. And now there is rip tear crunch, and a stench issuing through the f
issures, which must be the smell of death. Control: I must retain control a
s long as possible.)
Or with questions: now that I can, I swear, see the cracks on the backs o
f my hands, cracks along my hairline and between my toes, why do I not bl
eed? Am I already so emptied desiccated pickled? Am I already the mummy o
f myself?
Or dreams: because last night the ghost of Reverend Mother appeared to me,
staring down through the hole in a perforated cloud, waiting for my death
so that she could weep a monsoon for forty days… and I, floating outside
my body, looked down on the foreshortened image of my self, and saw a grey
haired dwarf who once, in a mirror, looked relieved.
No, that won't do, I shall have to write the future as I have written the p
ast, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the futur
e cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty… What cannot be p
ickled, because it has not taken place, is that I shall reach my birthday,
thirty one today, and no doubt a marriage will take place, and Padma will h
ave henna tracery on her palms and soles, and also a new name, perhaps Nase
em in honour of Reverend Mother's watching ghost, and outside the window th
ere will be fireworks and crowds, because it will be Independence Day and t
he many headed multitudes will be in the streets, and Kashmir will be waiti
ng. I will have train tickets in my pocket, there will be a taxi cab driven
by a country boy who once dreamed, at the Pioneer Cafe, of film stardom, w
e will drive south south south into the.heart of the tumultuous crowds, who
will be throwing balloons of paint at each other, at the wound up windows
of the cab, as if it were the day of the paint festival of Holi; and along
Hornby Vellard, where a dog was left to die, the crowd, the dense crowd, th
e crowd without boundaries, growing until it fills the world, will make pro
gress impossible, we will abandon our taxi cab and the dreams of its driver
, on our feet in the thronging crowd, and yes, I will be separated from Pad
ma, my dung lotus extending an arm towards me across the turbulent sea, unt
il she drowns in the crowd and I am alone in the vastness of the numbers, t
he numbers marching one two three, I am being buffeted right and left while
rip tear crunch reaches its climax, and my body is screaming, it cannot ta
ke this kind of treatment any more, but now I see familiar faces in the cro
wd, they are all here, my grandfather Aadam and his wife Naseem, and Alia a
nd Mustapha and Hanif and Emerald, and Arnina who was Mumtaz, and Nadir who
became Qasim, and Pia and Zafar who wet his bed and also General Zulfikar,
they throng around me pushing shoving crushing, and the cracks are widenin
g, pieces of my body are falling off, there is Jamila who has left her nunnery to be pre