Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [286]
Children, children, I’m sorry. I admit openly I have not been myself of late. I have been a buddha, and a basketed ghost, and a would-be-savior of the nation … Saleem has been rushing down blind alleys, has had considerable problems with reality, ever since a spittoon fell like a piece-of-the-… pity me: I’ve even lost my spittoon. But I’m going wrong again, I wasn’t intending to ask for pity, I was going to say that perhaps I see—it was I, not you, who failed to understand what is happening. Incredible, children: we, who could not talk for five minutes without disagreeing: we, who as children quarrelled fought divided distrusted broke apart, are suddenly together, united, as one! O wondrous irony: the Widow, by bringing us here, to break us, has in fact brought us together! O self-fulfilling paranoia of tyrants … because what can they do to us, now that we’re all on the same side, no language-rivalries, no religious prejudices: after all, we are twenty-nine now, I should not be calling you children … ! Yes, here is optimism, like a disease: one day she’ll have to let us out and then, and then, wait and see, maybe we should form, I don’t know, a new political party, yes, the Midnight Party, what chance do politics have against people who can multiply fishes and turn base metals into gold? Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our captivity; let Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility! Children: we’ve won!
Too painful. Optimism, growing like a rose in a dung-heap: it hurts me to recall it. Enough: I forget the rest.—No!—No, very well, I remember … What is worse than rods bar-fetters candles-against-the-skin? What beats nail-tearing and starvation? I reveal the Widow’s finest, most delicate joke: instead of torturing us, she gave us hope. Which meant she had something—no, more than something: the finest thing of all!—to take away. And now, very soon now, I shall have to describe how she cut it off.
Ectomy (from, I suppose, the Greek): a cutting out. To which medical science adds a number of prefixes: appendectomy tonsillectomy mastectomy tubectomy vasectomy testectomy hysterectomy. Saleem would like to donate one further item, free gratis and for nothing, to this catalogue of excisions; it is, however, a term which properly belongs to history, although medical science is, was involved:
Sperectomy: the draining-out of hope.
On New Year’s Day, I had a visitor. Creak of door, rustle of expensive chiffon. The pattern: green and black. Her glasses, green, her shoes were black as black … In newspaper articles this woman has been called “a gorgeous girl with big rolling hips … she had run a jewelry boutique before she took up social work … during the Emergency she was, semi-officially, in charge of sterilization.” But I have my own name for her: she was the Widow’s Hand. Which one by one and children mmff and tearing tearing little balls go … greenly-blackly, she sailed into my cell. Children: it begins. Prepare, children. United we stand. Let Widow’s Hand do Widow’s work but after, after … think of then. Now does not bear thinking about … and she, sweetly, reasonably, “Basically, you see, it is all a question of God.”
(Are you listening, children? Pass it on.)
“The people of India,” the Widow’s Hand explained, “worship our Lady like a god. Indians are only capable of worshipping one God.”
But I was brought up in Bombay, where Shiva Vishnu Ganesh Ahuramazda Allah and countless others had their flocks … “What about the pantheon,” I argued, “the three hundred and thirty million gods of Hinduism alone? And Islam, and Bodhisattvas …?” And now the answer: “Oh, yes! My God, millions of gods, you are right! But all manifestations of the same OM. You are Muslim: you know what is OM? Very well. For the masses, our Lady is a manifestation of the OM.”
There are four hundred and twenty of us; a mere 0.00007 per cent of the six-hundred-million strong population of India. Statistically insignificant; even if we were considered as a percentage of the arrested thirty (or two hundred