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

is last day, night is falling has fallen, there is a countdown ticktocking t
o midnight, fireworks and stars, the cardboard cut outs of wrestlers, and I
see that I shall never reach Kashmir, like Jehangir the Mughal Emperor I sha
ll die with Kashmir on my lips, unable to see the valley of delights to whic
h men go to enjoy life or to end it, or both; because now I see other figure
s in the crowd, the terrifying figure of a war hero with lethal knees, who h
as found out how I cheated him of his birth right, he is pushing towards me
through the crowd which is now wholly composed of familiar faces, there is R
ashid the rickshaw boy arm in arm with the Rani of Cooch Naheen, and Ayooba
Shaheed Farooq with Mutasim the Handsome, and from another direction, the di
rection of Haji Ali's island tomb, I see a mythological apparition approachi
ng, the Black Angel, except that as it nears me its face is green its eyes a
re black, a centre parting in its hair, on the left green and on the right b
lack, its eyes the eyes of Widows; Shiva and the Angel are closing closing,
I hear lies being spoken in the night, anything you want to be you kin be, t
he greatest lie of all, cracking now, fission of Saleem, I am the bomb in Bo
mbay, watch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful pressure
of the crowd, bag of bones falling down down down, just as once at Jallianwa
la, but Dyer seems not to be present today, no Mercurochrome, only a broken
creature spilling pieces of itself into the street, because I have been so m
any too many persons, life unlike syntax allows one more than three, and at
last somewhere the striking of a clock, twelve chimes, release.
Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, fou
r hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust,
just as, all in good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and
his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand
and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed thei
r terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is th
e privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and vict
ims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating w
hirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.