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

ing of crescent knives and howling dogs and wishing and wishing that the H
ummingbird were alive to tell Mm what to do and to discover that you could
not write poetry underground; and then this girl comes with food and she
doesn't mind cleaning away your pots and you lower your eyes but you see a
n ankle that seems to glow with graciousness, a black ankle like the black
of the underground nights…
'I'd never have thought he was up to it.' Padma sounds admiring. 'The fat ol
d good for notMng!'
And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive Mding in the
cellar from Ms faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the ro
of of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornf
ield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of t
heir members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Ha
niFs dream, which horrifies his dream invading mother, who believes the cin
ema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transm
uted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in th
e murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes str
aying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose k
urta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and
then
'And then? Come on, baba, what then?' shyly, she smiles at him.
'What?'
And after that, there are smiles in the underworld, and something has begun.
'Oh, so what? You're telling me that's all?'
That's all: until the day Nadir Khan asked to see my grandfather his sentenc
es barely audible in the fog of silence and asked for Ms daughter's hand in
marriage.
'Poor girl,' Padma concludes, 'Kashmiri girls are normally fair like mountai
n snow, but she turned out black. Well, well, her skin would have stopped he
r making a good match, probably; and that Nadir's no fool. Now they'll have
to let Mm stay, and get fed, and get a roof over Ms head, and all he has to
do is hide like a fat earthworm under the ground. Yes, maybe he's not such a
fool.'
My grandfather tried hard to persuade Nadir Khan that he was no longer in d
anger; the assassins were dead, and Mian Abdullah had been their real targe
t; but Nadir Khan still dreamed about the singing knives, and begged, 'Not
yet, Doctor Sahib; please, some more time.' So that one night in the late s
ummer of 1943 the rains had failed again my grandfather, Ms voice sounding
distant and eerie in that house in which so few words were spoken, assemble
d Ms children in the drawing room where their portraits hung. When they ent