Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [275]
He was born with ears which flapped so high and wide that they must have heard the shootings in Bihar and the screams of lathi-charged dock-workers in Bombay … a child who heard too much, and as a result never spoke, rendered dumb by a surfeit of sound, so that between then-and-now, from slum to pickle-factory, I have never heard him utter a single word;
He was the possessor of a navel which chose to stick out instead of in, so that Picture Singh, aghast, cried, “His bimbi, captain! His bimbi, look!”, and he became, from the first days, the gracious recipient of our awe;
A child of such grave good nature that his absolute refusal to cry or whimper utterly won over his adoptive father, who gave up laughing hysterically at the grotesque ears and began to rock the silent infant gently in his arms;
A child who heard a song as he rocked in arms, a song sung in the historical accents of a disgraced ayah: “Anything you want to be, you kin be; you kin be just what-all you want.”
But now that I’ve given birth to my flap-eared, silent son—there are questions to be answered about that other, synchronous birth. Unpalatable, awkward queries: did Saleem’s dream of saving the nation leak, through the osmotic tissues of history, into the thoughts of the Prime Minister herself? Was my life-long belief in the equation between the State and myself transmuted, in “the Madam’s” mind, into that in-those-days-famous phrase: India is Indira and Indira is India? Were we competitors for centrality—was she gripped by a lust for meaning as profound as my own—and was that, was that why …?
Influence of hair-styles on the course of history: there’s another ticklish business. If William Methwold had lacked a center-parting, I might not have been here today; and if the Mother of the Nation had had a coiffure of uniform pigment, the Emergency she spawned might easily have lacked a darker side. But she had white hair on one side and black on the other; the Emergency, too, had a white part—public, visible, documented, a matter for historians—and a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a matter for us.
Mrs. Indira Gandhi was born in November 1917 to Kamala and Jawaharlal Nehru. Her middle name was Priyadarshini. She was not related to “Mahatma” M. K. Gandhi; her surname was the legacy of her marriage, in 1952, to one Feroze Gandhi, who became known as “the nation’s son-in-law.” They had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, but in 1949 she moved back into her father’s home and became his “official hostess.” Feroze made one attempt to live there, too, but it was not a success. He became a ferocious critic of the Nehru Government, exposing the Mundhra scandal and forcing the resignation of the then Finance Minister, T. T. Krishnamachari—“T. T. K.” himself. Mr. Feroze Gandhi died of a heart seizure in 1960, aged forty-seven. Sanjay Gandhi, and his ex-model wife Menaka, were prominent during the Emergency. The Sanjay Youth Movement was particularly effective in the sterilization campaign.
I have included this somewhat elementary summary just in case you had failed to realize that the Prime Minister of India was, in 1975, fifteen years a widow. Or (because the capital letter may be of use): a Widow.
Yes, Padma: Mother Indira really had it in for me.
Midnight
NO!—BUT I MUST.
I don’t want to tell it!—But I swore to tell it all.—No, I renounce, not that, surely some things are better left …?—That won’t wash; what can’t be cured, must be endured!—But surely not the whispering walls, and treason, and snip snip, and the women with the bruised chests?—Especially those things.—But how can I, look at me, I’m tearing myself apart, can’t even agree with myself, talking arguing like a wild fellow, cracking up, memory going, yes, memory plunging into chasms and being swallowed by the dark, only fragments remain, none of it makes sense any more!—But I mustn’t presume to judge; must simply continue (having once begun) until the end; sense-and-nonsense is no longer (perhaps never was) for me to evaluate.—But the horror of it, I