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

essionals gave references.
Two men in business suits, one in pajamas, ran through the narrow gullies o
f the Muslim muhalla to the taxi waiting on Chandni Chowk. They attracted c
urious glances: not only because of their varied attire, but because they w
ere trying not to run. 'Don't show panic,' Mr Kemal said, 'Look calm.' But
their feet kept getting out of control and rushing on. Jerkily, in little r
ushes of speed followed by a few badly disciplined steps at walking pace, t
hey left the muhalla; and passed, on their way, a young man with a black me
tal peepshow box on wheels, a man holding a dugdugee drum: Lifafa Das, on h
is way to the scene of the important annunciation which gives this episode
its name. Lifafa Pas was rattling his drum and calling: 'Come see everythin
g, come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi, come see India, come see!
Come see, come see!'
But Ahmed Sinai had other things to look at.
The children of the muhalla had their own names for most of the local inha
bitants. One group of three neighbours was known as the 'fighting cock peo
ple', because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose
homes were separated by one of the muhalla's few Hindu residences. The Sin
dhi and the Bengali had very little in common they didn't speak the same l
anguage or cook the same food; but they were both Muslims, and they both d
etested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from their
rooftops. They hurled multilingual abuse at him from their windows. They
flung scraps of meat at his door… while he, in turn, paid urchins to throw
stones at their windows, stones with messages wrapped round them: 'Wait,'
the messages said, 'Your turn will come'… the children of the muhalla did
not call my father by his right name. They knew him as 'the man who can't
follow his nose'.
Ahmed Sinai was the possessor of a sense of direction so inept that, left t
o his own devices, he could even get lost in the winding gullies of his own
neighbourhood. Many times the street arabs in the lanes had come across hi
m, wandering forlornly, and been offered a four anna chavanni piece to esco
rt him home. I mention this because I believe that my father's gift for tak
ing wrong turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it was a
lso a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir Kha
n, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what's more
, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clou
ding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for
year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road… But that's enough fo
r now, because I've given the three businessmen enough time to get to the i
ndustrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct conseque
nce of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over whom, eve