Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [107]
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.
In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through the daytime streets; by night, they rioted in my head. We shall be watching your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.
It’s time to talk about the voices.
But if only our Padma were here …
I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father’s hand—walloping my ear in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another, bodiless hand, which once hit him full in the face—at least had one salutary effect: it obliged me to reconsider and finally to abandon my original, Prophet-aping position. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I withdrew deep inside myself, despite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue room with her pesterings: “But what did you do it for, Saleem? You who’re always too good and all?” … until she fell into dissatisfied sleep with her mouth still working silently, and I was alone with the echoes of my father’s violence, which buzzed in my left ear, which whispered, “Neither Michael nor Anael; not Gabriel; forget Cassiel, Sachiel and Samael! Archangels no longer speak to mortals; the Recitation was completed in Arabia long ago; the last prophet will come only to announce the End.” That night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not after all been chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far from being sacred, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust.
Telephathy, then; the kind of thing you’re always reading about in the sensational magazines. But I ask for patience—wait. Only wait. It was telepathy; but also more than telepathy. Don’t write me off too easily.
Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience—before I began to act—there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Lucknow Urdu to the southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surface transmissions—the front-of-mind stuff which is what I’d originally been picking up—language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words … but that was after I heard, beneath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other precious signals, utterly different from everything else, most of them faint and distant, like far-off drums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke through the fish-market cacophony of my voices … those secret, nocturnal calls, like calling out to like … the unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signalling nothing more than their existence, transmitting simply: “I.” From far to the North, “I.” And the South East West: “I.” “I.” “And I.”
But I mustn’t get ahead of myself. In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening; and soon I was able to “tune” my inner ear to those voices which I could understand; nor was it long before I picked out, from the throng, the voices of my own family; and of Mary Pereira; and of friends, classmates, teachers. In the street, I learned how to identify the mind-stream of passing strangers—the law of Doppler shift continued to operate in these paranormal realms, and the voices grew and diminished as the strangers passed.
All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father