Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [141]
Shiva and I were born under Capricorn rising; the constellation left me alone, but it gave Shiva its gift. Capricorn, as any astrologer will tell you, is the heavenly body with power over the knees.
On election day, 1957, the All-India Congress was badly shocked. Although it won the election, twelve million votes made the Communists the largest single opposition party; and in Bombay, despite the efforts of Boss Patil, large numbers of electors failed to place their crosses against the Congress symbol of sacred-cow-and-suckling-calf, preferring the less emotive pictograms of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti and Maha Gujarat Parishad. When the Communist peril was discussed on our hillock, my mother continued to blush; and we resigned ourselves to the partition of the state of Bombay.
One member of the Midnight Children’s Conference played a minor role in the elections. Winkie’s supposed son Shiva was recruited by—well, perhaps I will not name the party; but only one party had really large sums to spend—and on polling day, he and his gang, who called themselves Cowboys, were to be seen standing outside a polling station in the north of the city, some holding long stout sticks, others juggling with stones, still others picking their teeth with knives, all of them encouraging the electorate to use its vote with wisdom and care … and after the polls closed, were seals broken on ballot-boxes? Did ballot-stuffing occur? At any rate, when the votes were counted, it was discovered that Qasim the Red had narrowly failed to win the seat; and my rival’s paymasters were well pleased.
… But now Padma says, mildly, “What date was it?” And, without thinking, I answer: “Some time in the spring.” And then it occurs to me that I have made another error—that the election of 1957 took place before, and not after, my tenth birthday; but although I have racked my brains, my memory refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events. This is worrying. I don’t know what’s gone wrong
She says, trying uselessly to console me: “What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!”
But if small things go, will large things be close behind?
Alpha and Omega
THERE WAS TURMOIL in Bombay in the months after the election; there is turmoil in my thoughts as I recall those days. My error has upset me badly; so now, to regain my equilibrium, I shall place myself firmly on the familiar ground of Methwold’s Estate; leaving the history of the Midnight Children’s Conference to one side, and the pain of the Pioneer Café to another, I shall tell you about the fall of Evie Burns.
I have titled this episode somewhat oddly. “Alpha and Omega” stares back at me from the page, demanding to be explained—a curious heading for what will be my story’s halfway point, one that reeks of beginnings and ends, when you could say it should be more concerned with middles; but, unrepentantly, I have no intention of changing it, although there are many alternative titles, for instance “From Monkey to Rhesus,” or “Finger Redux,” or—in a more allusive style—“The Gander,” a reference, obviously, to the mythical bird, the hamsa or parahamsa, symbol of the ability to live in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the world of land-and-water and the world of air, of flight. But “Alpha and Omega”