Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [202]
What I surmised about umbilical cords: although they possessed the power of growing houses, some were evidently better at the job than others. The city of Karachi proved my point; clearly constructed on top of entirely unsuitable cords, it was full of deformed houses, the stunted hunchback children of deficient life-lines, houses growing mysteriously blind, with no visible windows, houses which looked like radios or air-conditioners or jail-cells, crazy top-heavy edifices which fell over with monotonous regularity, like drunks; a wild proliferation of mad houses, whose inadequacies as living quarters were exceeded only by their quite exceptional ugliness. The city obscured the desert; but either the cords, or the infertility of the soil, made it grow into something grotesque.
Capable of smelling sadness and joy, of sniffing out intelligence and stupidity with my eyes closed, I arrived at Karachi, and adolescence—understanding, of course, that the subcontinent’s new nations and I had all left childhood behind; that growing pains and strange awkward alterations of voice were in store for us all. Drainage censored my inner life; my sense of connection remained undrained.
Saleem invaded Pakistan armed only with a hypersensitive nose; but, worst of all, he invaded from the wrong direction! All successful conquests of that part of the world have begun in the north; all conquerors have come by land. Sailing ignorantly against the winds of history, I reached Karachi from the south-east, and by sea. What followed should not, I suppose, have surprised me.
With hindsight, the advantages of sweeping down from the north are self-evident. From the north came the Umayyad generals, Hajjaj bin Yusuf and Muhammad bin Qasim; also the Ismailis. (Honeymoon Lodge, where it is said Aly Khan sojourned with Rita Hayworth, overlooked our plot of umbilicized earth; rumor has it that the film-star created much scandal by wandering in the grounds dressed in a series of fabulous, gauzy, Hollywood negligées.) O ineluctable superiority of northernness! From which direction did Mahmud of Ghazni descend upon these Indus plains, bringing with him a language boasting no fewer than three forms of the letter S? The inescapable answer: sé, sin and swad were northern intruders. And Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, who overthrew the Ghaznavids and established the Delhi Caliphate? Sam Ghuri’s son, too, moved southwards on his progress.
And Tughlaq, and the Mughal Emperors … but I’ve made my point. It remains only to add that ideas, as well as armies, swept south south south from the northern heights: the legend of Sikandar But-Shikan, the Iconoclast of Kashmir, who at the end of the fourteenth century destroyed every Hindu temple in the Valley (establishing a precedent for my grandfather), travelled down from the hills to the river-plains; and five hundred years later the mujahideen movement of Syed Ahmad Barilwi followed the well-trodden trail. Barilwi’s ideas: self-denial, hatred-of-Hindus, holy war … philosophies as well as kings (to cut this short) came from the opposite direction to me.
Saleem’s parents said, “We must all become new people”; in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s (like India’s first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country whose population of deities rivalled the numbers of its people, so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body