Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [139]
The legendary Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid, is said to have enjoyed moving incognito amongst the people of Baghdad; I, Saleem Sinai, have also travelled in secret through the byways of my city, but I can’t say I had much fun.
Matter of fact descriptions of the outré and bizarre, and their reverse, namely heightened, stylized versions of the everyday—these techniques, which are also attitudes of mind, I have lifted—or perhaps absorbed—from the most formidable of the midnight children, my rival, my fellow-changeling, the supposed son of Wee Willie Winkie: Shiva-of-the-knees. They were techniques which, in his case, were applied entirely without conscious thought, and their effect was to create a picture of the world of startling uniformity, in which one could mention casually, in passing as it were, the dreadful murders of prostitutes which began to fill the gutter-press in those days (while the bodies filled the gutters), while lingering passionately on the intricate details of a particular hand of cards. Death, and defeat at rummy were all of a piece to Shiva; hence his terrifying, nonchalant violence, which in the end … but to begin with beginnings:
Although, admittedly, it’s my own fault, I’m bound to say that if you think of me purely as a radio, you’ll only be grasping half the truth. Thought is as often pictorial or purely emblematic as verbal; and anyway, in order to communicate with, and understand, my colleagues in the Midnight Children’s Conference, it was necessary for me quickly to advance beyond the verbal stage. Arriving in their infinitely various minds, I was obliged to get beneath the surface veneer of front-of-mind thoughts in incomprehensible tongues, with the obvious (and previously demonstrated) effect that they became aware of my presence. Remembering the dramatic effect such an awareness had had on Evie Burns, I went to some pains to alleviate the shock of my entry. In all cases, my standard first transmission was an image of my face, smiling in what I trusted was a soothing, friendly, confident and leader-like fashion, and of a hand stretched out in friendship. There were, however, teething troubles.
It took me a little while to realize that my picture of myself was heavily distorted by my own self-consciousness about my appearance; so that the portrait I sent across the thought-waves of the nation, grinning like a Cheshire cat, was about as hideous as a portrait could be, featuring a wondrously enlarged nose, a completely non-existent chin and giant stains on each temple. It’s no wonder that I was often greeted by yelps of mental alarm. I, too, was often similarly frightened by the self-images of my ten-year-old fellows. When we discovered what was happening, I encouraged the membership of the Conference, one by one, to go and look into a mirror, or a patch of still water; and then we did manage to find out what we really looked like. The only problems were that our Keralan member (who could, you remember, travel through mirrors) accidentally ended up emerging through a restaurant mirror in the smarter part of New Delhi, and had to make a hurried retreat; while the blue-eyed member for Kashmir fell into a lake and accidentally changed sex, entering as a girl and emerging as a beautiful boy.
When I first introduced myself to Shiva, I saw in his mind the terrifying image of a short, rat-faced youth with filed-down teeth and two of the biggest knees the world has ever seen.
Faced with a picture of such grotesque proportions, I allowed the smile on my own beaming image to wither a little; my outstretched hand began to falter and twitch. And Shiva, feeling my presence, reacted at first with utter rage; great boiling waves of anger scalded the inside of my head; but then, “Hey—look—I know you! You’re the rich kid from Methwold’s Estate, isn’t it?” And I, equally astonished,