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

gynaecologist knew property was temporarily as cheap as dirt, my mother co
ncentrated on her segmented scheme for learning to love her husband. She ca
me to feel a deep affection for the question marks of his ears; for the rem
arkable depth of his navel, into which her finger could go right up to the
first joint, without even pushing; she grew to love the knobbliness of his
knees; but, try as she might (and as I'm giving her the benefit of my doubt
s I shall offer no possible reasons here), there was one part of him which
she never managed to love, although it was the one thing he possessed, in f
ull working order, which Nadir Khan had certainly lacked; on those nights w
hen he heaved himself up on top of her when the baby in her womb was no big
ger than a frog it was just no good at all.
… 'No, not so quick, janum, my life, a little longer, please,' she is saying;
and Ahmed, to spin things out, tries to think back to the fire, to the last
thing that happened on that blazing night, when just as he was turning to go
he heard a dirty screech in the sky, and, looking up, had time to register th
at a vulture at night! a vulture from the Towers of Silence was flying overhe
ad, and that it had dropped a barely chewed Parsee hand, a right hand, the sa
me hand which now! slapped him full in the face as it fell; while Amina, bene
ath him in bed, ticks herself off: Why can't you enjoy, you stupid woman, fro
m now on you must really try.
On June 4th, my ill matched parents left for Bombay by Frontier Mail. (Ther
e were hangings, voices hanging on for dear life, fists crying out, 'Mahara
j! Open, for one tick only! Ohe, from the milk of your kindness, great sir,
do us favour!' And there was also hidden beneath dowry in a green tin trun
k a forbidden, lapis lazuli encrusted, delicately wrought silver spittoon.)
On the same day, Earl Mountbatten of Burma held a press conference at whic
h he announced the Partition of India, and hung his countdown calendar on t
he wall: seventy days to go to the transfer of power… sixty nine… sixty eig
ht… tick, tock.
Methwold
The fishermen were here first. Before Mountbatten's ticktock, before monst
ers and public announcements; when underworld marriages were still unimagi
ned and spittoons were unknown; earlier than Mercurochrome; longer ago tha
n lady wrestlers who held up perfor ated sheets; and back and back, beyond
Dalhousie and Elphinstone, before the East India Company built its Fort,
before the first William Methwold; at the dawn of time, when Bombay was a
dumbbell shaped island tapering, at the centre, to a narrow shining strand
beyond which could be seen the finest and largest natural harbour in Asia
, when Mazagaon and Worli, Matunga and Mahim, Salsette and Colaba were isl
ands, too in short, before reclamation, before tetrapods and sunken piles