Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [111]
With the eclectic spirit of my nine years spurring me on, I leaped into the heads of film stars and cricketers—I learned the truth behind the Filmfare gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala, and I was at the crease with Polly Umrigar at the Brabourne Stadium; I was Lata Mangeshkar the playback singer and Bubu the clown at the circus behind Civil Lines … and inevitably, through the random processes of my mind-hopping, I discovered politics.
At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my pajama-cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire … at another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage as usual: I was two months old and my mother had run out of breast-milk. I occupied, briefly, the mind of a Congress Party worker, bribing a village schoolteacher to throw his weight behind the party of Gandhi and Nehru in the coming election campaign; also the thoughts of a Keralan peasant who had decided to vote Communist. My daring grew: one afternoon I deliberately invaded the head of our own State Chief Minister, which was how I discovered, over twenty years before it became a national joke, that Morarji Desai “took his own water” daily … I was inside him, tasting the warmth as he gurgled down a frothing glass of urine. And finally I hit my highest point: I became Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister and author of framed letters: I sat with the great man amongst a bunch of gap-toothed, stragglebeard astrologers and adjusted the Five Year Plan to bring it into harmonic alignment with the music of the spheres … the high life is a heady thing. “Look at me!” I exulted silently. “I can go any place I want!” In that tower which had once been filled choc-à-block with the explosive devices of Joseph D’Costa’s hatred, this phrase (accompanied by appropriate ticktock sound effects) plopped fully-formed into my thoughts: “I am the bomb in Bombay … watch me explode!”
Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen … which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. “I can find out any damn thing!” I triumphed, “There isn’t a thing I cannot know!”
Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the spirit of self-aggrandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an instinct for self-preservation. If I had not believed myself in control of the flooding multitudes, their massed identities would have annihilated mine … but there in my clocktower, filled with the cockiness of my glee, I became Sin, the ancient moon-god (no, not Indian: I