Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [124]
But there was one achievement. I was befriended by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah (the same fellow who had, in his youth, screamed silently in a corn field and helped Nadir Khan into Aadam Aziz’s toilet): taking me under his wing—and without telling my parents, who would have forbidden it so soon after my accident—he taught me how to ride a bicycle. By the time we left, I had this secret tucked away with all my others: only I didn’t intend this one to stay secret for very long.
… And on the train home, there were voices hanging on to the outside of the compartment: “Ohé, maharaj! Open up, great sir!”—fare-dodgers’ voices fighting with the ones I wanted to listen to, the new ones inside my head—and then back to Bombay Central Station, and the drive home past race-course and temple, and now Evelyn Lilith Burns is demanding that I finish her part first before concentrating on higher things.
“Home again!” the Monkey shouts. “Hurry … Back-to-Bom!” (She is in disgrace. In Agra, she incinerated the General’s boots.)
It is a matter of record that the States Reorganization Committee had submitted its report to Mr. Nehru as long ago as October 1955; a year later, its recommendations had been implemented. India had been divided anew, into fourteen states and six centrally-administered “territories.” But the boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any natural features of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words. Language divided us: Kerala was for speakers of Malayalam, the only palindromically-named tongue on earth; in Karnataka you were supposed to speak Kanarese; and the amputated state of Madras—known today as Tamil Nadu—enclosed the aficionados of Tamil. Owing to some oversight, however, nothing was done with the state of Bombay; and in the city of Mumbadevi, the language marches grew longer and noisier and finally metamorphosed into political parties, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (“United Maharashtra Party”) which stood for the Marathi language and demanded the creation of the Deccan state of Maharashtra, and the Maha Gujarat Parishad (“Great Gujarat Party”) which marched beneath the banner of the Gujarati language and dreamed of a state to the north of Bombay City, stretching all the way to the Kathiawar peninsula and the Rann of Kutch … I am warming over all this cold history, these old dead struggles between the barren angularity of Marathi which was born in the arid heat of the Deccan and Gujarati’s boggy, Kathiawari softness, to explain why, on the day in February 1957 immediately following our return from Agra, Methwold’s Estate was cut off from the city by a stream of chanting humanity which flooded Warden Road more completely than monsoon water, a parade so long that it took two days to pass, and of which it was said that the statue of Sivaji had come to life to ride stonily at its head. The demonstrators carried black flags; many of them were shopkeepers on hartal; many were striking textile-workers from Mazagaon and Matunga; but on our hillock, we knew nothing about their jobs; to us children, the endless ant-trail of language in Warden Road seemed as magnetically fascinating as a light-bulb to a moth. It was a demonstration so immense, so intense in its passions, that it made all previous marches vanish from the mind as if they had never occurred—and we had all been banned from going down the hill for even the tiniest of looks. So who was the boldest of us all? Who urged us to creep at least half-way down, to the point where the hillock-road swung round to face Warden Road in a steep U-bend? Who said, “What’s to