Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [110]
Let me sum up: at a crucial point in the history of our child-nation, at a time when Five Year Plans were being drawn up and elections were approaching and language marchers were fighting over Bombay, a nine-year-old boy named Saleem Sinai acquired a miraculous gift. Despite the many vital uses to which his abilities could have been put by his impoverished, underdeveloped country, he chose to conceal his talents, frittering them away on inconsequential voyeurism and petty cheating. This behavior—not, I confess, the behavior of a hero—was the direct result of a confusion in his mind, which invariably muddled up morality—the desire to do what is right—and popularity—the rather more dubious desire to do what is approved of. Fearing parental ostracism, he suppressed the news of his transformation; seeking parental congratulations, he abused his talents at school. This flaw in his character can partially be excused on the grounds of his tender years; but only partially. Confused thinking was to bedevil much of his career.
I can be quite tough in my self-judgments when I choose.
What stood on the flat roof of the Breach Candy Kindergarten—a roof, you will recall, which could be reached from the garden of Buckingham Villa, simply by climbing over a boundary wall? What, no longer capable of performing the function for which it was designed, watched over us that year when even the winter forgot to cool down—what observed Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice, Hairoil, and myself, as we played kabaddi, and French cricket, and seven-tiles, with the occasional participation of Cyrus-the-great and of other, visiting friends: Fat Perce Fishwala and Glandy Keith Colaco? What was present on the frequent occasions when Toxy Catrack’s nurse Bi-Appah yelled down from the top floor of Homi’s home: “Brats! Rackety good-for-nothings! Shut your noise!” … so that we all ran away, returning (when she vanished from our sight) to make mute faces at the window at which she’d stood? In short, what was it, tall and blue and flaking, which oversaw our lives, which seemed, for a while, to be marking time, waiting not only for the nearby time when we would put on long trousers, but also, perhaps, for the coming of Evie Burns? Perhaps you’d like clues: what had once hidden bombs? In what had Joseph D’Costa died of snake-bite? … When, after some months of inner torment, I at last sought refuge from grown-up voices, I found it in an old clocktower, which nobody bothered to lock; and here, in the solitude of rusting time, I paradoxically took my first tentative steps towards that involvement with mighty events and public lives from which I would never again be free … never, until the Widow …
Banned from washing-chests, I began, whenever possible, to creep unobserved into the tower of crippled hours. When the circus-ring was emptied by heat or chance or prying eyes; when Ahmed and Amina went off to the Willingdon Club for canasta evenings; when the Brass Monkey was away, hanging around her newly-acquired heroines, the Walsingham School for Girls’ swimming and diving team … that is to say, when circumstances permitted, I entered my secret hideout, stretched out on the straw mat I’d stolen from the servants’ quarters, closed my eyes, and let my newly-awakened inner ear (connected, like all ears, to my nose) rove freely around the city—and further, north and south, east and west—listening in to all manner of things. To escape the intolerable pressures of eavesdropping on people I knew, I practiced my art upon strangers. Thus my entry into the public affairs of India occurred for entirely ignoble reasons—upset by too much intimacy, I used the world outside our hillock for light relief.
The world as discovered from a broken-down clocktower: at first, I was no more than a tourist, a child peeping through the miraculous peepholes of a private “Dilli-dekho” machine. Dugdugee-drums rattled in my left (damaged) ear as I gained my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the eyes of a fat Englishwoman suffering from the tummy-runs; after which, to balance south against north, I hopped down to Madurai