Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [242]
Anything you want to be, you kin be,
You kin be just what-all you want.
Tonight, as I recall my rage, I remain perfectly calm; the Widow drained anger out of me along with everything else. Remembering my basket-born rebellion against inevitability, I even permit myself a wry, understanding smile. “Boys,” I mutter tolerantly across the years to Saleem-at-twenty-four, “will be boys.” In the Widows’ Hostel, I was taught, harshly, once-and-for-all, the lesson of No Escape; now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.
Although now, as the pouring-out of what-was-inside-me nears an end; as cracks widen within—I can hear and feel the rip tear crunch—I begin to grow thinner, translucent almost; there isn’t much of me left, and soon there will be nothing at all. Six hundred million specks of dust, and all transparent, invisible as glass …
But then I was angry. Glandular hyper-activity in a wicker amphora: eccrine and apocrine glands poured forth sweat and stink, as if I were trying to shed my fate through my pores; and, in fairness to my wrath, I must record that it claimed one instant achievement—that when I tumbled out of the basket of invisibility into the shadow of the mosque, I had been rescued by rebellion from the abstraction of numbness; as I bumped out on to the dirt of the magicians’ ghetto, silver spittoon in hand, I realized that I had begun, once again, to feel.
Some afflictions, at least, are capable of being conquered.
The Shadow of the Mosque
NO SHADOW OF A DOUBT: an acceleration is taking place. Rip crunch crack—while road surfaces split in the awesome heat, I, too, am being hurried towards disintegration. What-gnaws-on-bones (which, as I have been regularly obliged to explain to the too many women around me, is far beyond the powers of medicine men to discern, much less to cure) will not be denied for long; and still so much remains to be told … Uncle Mustapha is growing inside me, and the pout of Parvati-the-witch; a certain lock of hero’s hair is waiting in the wings; and also a labor of thirteen days, and history as an analogue of a prime minister’s hair-style; there is to be treason, and fare-dodging, and the scent (wafting on breezes heavy with the ululations of widows) of something frying in an iron skillet … so that I, too, am forced to accelerate, to make a wild dash for the finishing line; before memory cracks beyond hope of reassembly, I must breast the tape. (Although already, already there are fadings, and gaps; it will be necessary to improvise on occasion.)
Twenty-six pickle-jars stand gravely on a shelf; twenty-six special blends, each with its identifying label, neatly inscribed with familiar phrases: “Movements Performed by Pepperpots,” for instance, or “Alpha and Omega,” or “Commander Sabarmati’s Baton.” Twenty-six rattle eloquently when local trains go yellow-and-browning past; on my desk, five empty jars tinkle urgently, reminding me of my uncompleted task. But now I cannot linger over empty pickle-jars; the night is for words, and green chutney must wait its turn.
… Padma is wistful: “O, mister, how lovely Kashmir must be in August, when here it is hot like a chilli!” I am obliged to reprove my plump-yet-muscled companion, whose attention has been wandering; and to observe that our Padma Bibi, long-suffering tolerant consoling, is beginning to behave exactly like a traditional Indian wife. (And I, with my distances and self-absorption, like a husband?) Of late, in spite of my stoic fatalism about the spreading cracks, I have smelled, on Padma