Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [79]
Quite recently, I visited a cactus-garden where once, many years back, I buried a toy tin globe, which was badly dented and stuck together with Scotch Tape; and extracted from its insides the things I had placed there all those years ago. Holding them in my left hand now, as I write, I can still see—despite yellowing and mildew—that one is a letter, a personal letter to myself, signed by the Prime Minister of India; but the other is a newspaper cutting.
It has a headline: MIDNIGHT’S CHILD.
And a text: “A charming pose of Baby Saleem Sinai, who was born last night at the exact moment of our Nation’s independence—the happy Child of that glorious Hour!”
And a large photograph: an A-1 top-quality front-page jumbo-sized baby-snap, in which it is still possible to make out a child with birthmarks staining his cheeks and a runny and glistening nose. (The picture is captioned: Photo by Kalidas Gupta.)
Despite headline, text and photograph, I must accuse our visitors of the crime of trivialization; mere journalists, looking no further than the next day’s paper, they had no idea of the importance of the event they were covering. To them, it was no more than a human-interest drama.
How do I know this? Because, at the end of the interview, the photographer presented my mother with a cheque—for one hundred rupees.
One hundred rupees! Is it possible to imagine a more piffling, derisory sum? It is a sum by which one could, were one of a mind to do so, feel insulted. I shall, however, merely thank them for celebrating my arrival, and forgive them for their lack of a genuine historical sense.
“Don’t be vain,” Padma says grumpily. “One hundred rupees is not so little; after all, everybody gets born, it’s not such a big big thing.”
BOOK TWO
The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger
IS IT POSSIBLE to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival? I can think of no other reason for Padma’s bizarre behavior; and this explanation at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading aloud) a word which should not have been spoken … ever since the episode of the quack doctor’s visit, I have sniffed out a strange discontent in Padma, exuding its enigmatic spoor from her eccrine (or apocrine) glands. Distressed, perhaps, by the futility of her midnight attempts at resuscitating my “other pencil,” the useless cucumber hidden in my pants, she has been waxing grouchy. (And then there was her ill-tempered reaction, last night, to my revelation of the secrets of my birth, and her irritation at my low opinion of the sum of one hundred rupees.) I blame myself: immersed in my autobiographical enterprise, I failed to consider her feelings, and began tonight on the most unfortunate of false notes.
“Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,” I wrote and read aloud, “I have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because while Aadam Aziz remained the sheet’s victim, I have become its master—and Padma is the one who is now under its spell. Sitting in my enchanted shadows, I vouchsafe daily glimpses of myself—while she, my squatting glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose frozen into immobility by the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralyzed—yes!—by love.”
That was the word: love. Written-and-spoken, it raised her voice to an unusually shrill pitch; it unleashed from her lips a violence which would have wounded me, were I still vulnerable to words. “Love you?” our Padma piped scornfully, “What for, my God? What use are you, little princeling,”—and now came her attempted coup de grâce—“as a lover?” Arm extended, its hairs glowing in the lamplight, she jabbed a contemptuous index finger in the direction of my admittedly nonfunctional loins; a long,