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

ce, 'We would have had children in the end; only then it wasn't right, that's
all.' Mumtaz Aziz loved children all her life.
Meanwhile, Reverend Mother moved sluggishly through the months in the grip
of a silence which had become so absolute that even the servants received t
heir instructions in sign language, and once the cook Daoud had been starin
g at her, trying to understand her somnolently frantic signalling, and as a
result had not been looking in the direction of the boiling pot of gravy w
hich fell upon his foot and fried it like a five toed egg; he opened his mo
uth to scream but no sound emerged, and after that he became convinced that
the old hag had the power of witchery, and became too scared to leave her
service. He stayed until his death, hobbling around the courtyard and being
attacked by the geese.
They were not easy years. The drought led to rationing, and what with the
proliferation of meatless days and riceless days it was hard to feed an
extra, hidden mouth. Reverend Mother was forced to dig deep into her pant
ry, which thickened her rage like heat under a sauce. Hairs began to grow
out of the moles on her face. Mumtaz noticed with concern that her mothe
r was swelling, month by month. The unspoken words inside her were blowin
g her up… Mumtaz had the impression that her mother's skin was becoming d
angerously stretched.
And Doctor Aziz spent his days out of the house, away from the deadening si
lence, so Mumtaz, who spent her nights underground, saw very little in thos
e days of the father whom she loved; and Emerald kept her promise, telling
the Major nothing about the family secret; but conversely, she told her fam
ily nothing about her relationship with him, which was fair, she thought; a
nd in the cornfield Mustapha and Hanif and Rashid the rickshaw boy became i
nfected with the listlessness of the times; and finally the house on Cornwa
llis Road drifted as far as August 9th, 1945, and things changed.
Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to sw
allow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the pa
st, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stor
ies less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my famil
y to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the ta
le, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.
What happened in August 1945? The Rani of Cooch Naheen died, but that's no
t what I'm after, although when she went she had become so sheetly white t
hat it was difficult to see her against the bed clothes; having fulfilled
her function by bequeathing my story a silver spittoon, she had the grace
to exit quickly… also in 1945, the monsoons did not fail. In the Burmese j
ungle, Orde Wingate and his Chindits, as well as the army of Subhas Chandr
a Bose, which was fighting on the Japanese side, were drenched by the retu