Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [282]
Parvati-the-witch, by marrying me, fell victim to the curse of violent death that hangs over all my people … I do not know whether Shiva, having locked me in a blind dark van, went in search of her, or whether he left her to the bulldozers … because now the machines of destruction were in their element, and the little hovels of the shanty-town were slipping sliding crazily beneath the force of the irresistible creatures, huts snapping like twigs, the little paper parcels of the puppeteers and the magic baskets of the illusionists were being crushed into a pulp; the city was being beautified, and if there were a few deaths, if a girl with eyes like saucers and a pout of grief upon her lips fell beneath the advancing juggernauts, well, what of it, an eyesore was being removed from the face of the ancient capital … and rumor has it that, during the death-throes of the ghetto of the magicians, a bearded giant wreathed in snakes (but this may be an exaggeration) ran—FULL-TILT!—through the wreckage, ran wildly before the advancing bulldozers, clutching in his hand the handle of an irreparably shattered umbrella, searching searching, as though his life depended on the search.
By the end of that day, the slum which clustered in the shadow of the Friday Mosque had vanished from the face of the earth; but not all the magicians were captured; not all of them were carted off to the barbed-wire camp called Khichripur, hotch-potch-town, on the far side of the Jamura River; they never caught Picture Singh, and it is said that the day after the bulldozing of the magicians’ ghetto, a new slum was reported in the heart of the city, hard by the New Delhi railway station. Bulldozers were rushed to the scene of the reported hovels; they found nothing. After that the existence of the moving slum of the escaped illusionists became a fact known to all the inhabitants of the city, but the wreckers never found it. It was reported at Mehrauli; but when vasectomists and troops went there, they found the Qutb Minar unbesmirched by the hovels of poverty. Informers said it had appeared in the gardens of the Jantar Mantar, Jai Singh’s Mughal observatory; but the machines of destruction, rushing to the scene, found only parrots and sun-dials. Only after the end of the Emergency did the moving slum come to a standstill; but that must wait for later, because it is time to talk, at long last, and without losing control, about my captivity in the Widows’ Hostel in Benares.
Once Resham Bibi had wailed, “Ai-o-ai-o!”—and she was right: I brought destruction down upon the ghetto of my saviors; Major Shiva, acting no doubt upon the explicit instructions of the Widow, came to the colony to seize me; while the Widow’s son arranged for his civic-beautification and vasectomy programs to carry out a diversionary maneuver. Yes, of course it was all planned that way; and (if I may say so) most efficiently. What was achieved during the riot of the magicians: no less a feat than the unnoticed capture of the one person on earth who held the key to the location of every single one of the children of midnight—for had I not, night after night, tuned in to each and every one of them? Did I not carry, for all time, their names addresses faces in my mind? I will answer that question: I did. And I was captured.
Yes, of course it was all planned that way. Parvati-the-witch had told me all about my rival; is it likely that she would not have mentioned me to him? I will answer that question, too: it is not likely at all. So our war hero knew where, in the capital, lurked the one person his masters wanted most (not even my uncle Mustapha knew where I went after I left him; but Shiva knew!)—and, once he had turned traitor, bribed, I have no doubt, by everything from promises of preferment to guarantees of personal safety,