Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [107]
Pain.
And then noise, deafening manytongued terrifying, inside his head! … Inside a white wooden washing-chest, within the darkened auditorium of my skull, my nose began to sing.
But just now there isn’t time to listen; because one voice is very close indeed. Amina Sinai has opened the lower door of the washing-chest; I am tumbling downdown with laundry wrapped around my head like a caul. Pajama-cord jerks out of my nose; and now there is lightning flashing through the dark clouds around my mother—and a refuge has been lost for ever.
“I didn’t look!” I squealed up through socks and sheets. “I didn’t see one thing, Ammi, I swear!!”
And years later, in a cane chair among reject towels and a radio announcing exaggerated war victories, Amina would remember how with thumb and forefinger around the ear of her lying son she led him to Mary Pereira, who was sleeping as usual on a cane mat in a sky-blue room; how she said, “This young donkey; this good-for-nothing from nowhere is not to speak for one whole day.” … And, just before the roof fell in on her, she said aloud: “It was my fault. I brought him up too badly.” As the explosion of the bomb ripped through the air, she added, mildly but firmly, addressing her last words on earth to the ghost of a washing-chest: “Go away now. I’ve seen enough of you.”
On Mount Sinai, the prophet Musa or Moses heard disembodied commandments; on Mount Hira, the prophet Muhammad (also known as Mohammed, Mahomet, the Last-But-One, and Mahound) spoke to the Archangel. (Gabriel or Jibreel, as you please.) And on the stage of the Cathedral and John Connon Boys’ High School, run “under the auspices” of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society, my friend Cyrus-the-great, playing a female part as usual, heard the voices of St Joan speaking the sentences of Bernard Shaw. But Cyrus is the odd one out: unlike Joan, whose voices were heard in a field, but like Musa or Moses, like Muhammad the Penultimate, I heard voices on a hill.
Muhammad (on whose name be peace, let me add; I don’t want to offend anyone) heard a voice saying, “Recite!” and thought he was going mad; I heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio; and with lips sealed by maternal command, I was unable to ask for comfort. Muhammad, at forty, sought and received reassurance from wife and friends: “Verily,” they told him, “you are the Messenger of God”; I, suffering my punishment at nearlynine, could neither seek Brass Monkey’s assistance nor solicit softening words from Mary Pereira. Muted for an evening and a night and a morning, I struggled, alone, to understand what had happened to me; until at last I saw the shawl of genius fluttering down, like an embroidered butterfly, the mande of greatness settling upon my shoulders.
In the heat of that silent night (I was silent; outside me, the sea rustled like distant paper; crows squawked in the throes of their feathery nightmares; the puttering noises of tardy taxi-cabs wafted up from Warden Road; the Brass Monkey, before she fell asleep with her face frozen into a mask of curiosity, begged, “Come on, Saleem; nobody’s listening; what did you do? Tell tell tell!” … while, inside me, the voices rebounded against the walls of my skull) I was gripped by hot fingers of excitement—the agitated insects of excitement danced in my stomach—because finally, in some way I did not then fully understand, the door which Toxy Catrack had once nudged in my head had been forced open; and through it I could glimpse—shadowy still, undefined, enigmatic—my reason for having been born.
Gabriel or Jibreel told Muhammad: “Recite!” And then began The Recitation, known in Arabic as Al-Quran: “Recite: In the Name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood …” That was on Mount Hira outside Mecca Sharif; on a two-storey hillock opposite Breach Candy Pools, voices also instructed me to recite: “Tomorrow!” I thought excitedly. “Tomorrow!”
By sunrise, I had discovered that the voices could be controlled—I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or