Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [149]
We were as motley, as raucous, as undisciplined as any bunch of five hundred and eighty-one ten-year-olds; and on top of our natural exuberance, there was the excitement of our discovery of each other. After one hour of top-volume yelling jabbering arguing giggling, I would fall exhausted into a sleep too deep for nightmares, and still wake up with a headache; but I didn’t mind. Awake I was obliged to face the multiple miseries of maternal perfidy and paternal decline, of the fickleness of friendship and the varied tyrannies of school; asleep, I was at the center of the most exciting world any child had ever discovered. Despite Shiva, it was nicer to be asleep.
Shiva’s conviction that he (or he-and-I) was the natural leader of our group by dint of his (and my) birth on the stroke of midnight had, I was bound to admit, one strong argument in its favor. It seemed to me then—it seems to me now—that the midnight miracle had indeed been remarkably hierarchical in nature, that the children’s abilities declined dramatically on the basis of the distance of their time of birth from midnight; but even this was a point of view which was hotly contested … “Whatdoyoumeanhowcanyousaythat,” they chorused, the boy from the Gir forest whose face was absolutely blank and featureless (except for eyes noseholes spaceformouth) and could take on any features he chose, and Harilal who could run at the speed of the wind, and God knows how many others … “Who says it’s better to do one thing or another?” And, “Can you fly? I can fly!” And, “Yah, and me, can you turn one fish into fifty?” And, “Today I went to visit tomorrow. You can do that? Well then—” … in the face of such a storm of protest, even Shiva changed his tune; but he was to find a new one, which would be much more dangerous—dangerous for the Children, and for me.
Because I had found that I was not immune to the lure of leadership. Who found the Children, anyway? Who formed the Conference? Who gave them their meeting-place? Was I not the joint-eldest, and should I not receive the respect and obeisances merited by my seniority? And didn’t the one who provided the club-house run the club? … To which Shiva, “Forget all that, man. That club-shub stuff is only for you rich boys!” But—for a time—he was overruled. Parvati-the-witch, the conjurer’s daughter from Delhi, took my part (just as, years later, she would save my life), and announced, “No, listen now, everybody: without Saleem we are nowhere, we can’t talk or anything, he is right. Let him be the chief!” And I, “No, never mind chief, just think of me as a … a big brother, maybe. Yes; we’re a family, of a kind. I’m just the oldest, me.” To which Shiva replied, scornful, but unable to argue: “Okay, big brother: so now tell us what we do?”
At this point I introduced the Conference to the notions which plagued me all this time: the notions of purpose, and meaning. “We must think,” I said, “what we are for.”
I record, faithfully, the views of a typical selection of the Conference members (excepting the circus-freaks, and the ones who, like Sundari the beggar-girl with the knife-scars, had lost their powers, and tended to remain silent in our debates, like poor relations at a feast): among the philosophies and aims suggested were collectivism—“We should all get together and live somewhere, no? What would we need from anyone else?”—and individualism—“You say we; but we together are unimportant; what matters is that each of us has a gift to use for his or her own good”—filial duty—“However we can help our father-mother, that is what it is for us to do”—and infant revolution—“Now at last we must show all kids that it is possible to get rid of parents!”—capitalism—“Just think what businesses we could do! How rich, Allah, we could be!”—and altruism—“Our country needs gifted people; we must ask the government how it wishes to use our skills”—science—“We must allow ourselves to be studied”—and religion—“Let us declare ourselves to the world, so that all may glory in God”—courage—“We should invade Pakistan!