Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [269]
During the early months of the Emergency, Picture Singh remained in the clutches of a gloomy silence reminiscent (once again!) of the great soundlessness of Reverend Mother (which had also leaked into my son …), and neglected to lecture his audiences in the highways and back-streets of the Old and New cities as, in the past, he had insisted on doing; but although he, “This is a time for silence, captain,” I remained convinced that one day, one millennial dawn at midnight’s end, somehow, at the head of a great jooloos or procession of the dispossessed, perhaps playing his flute and wreathed in deadly snakes, it would be Picture Singh who led us towards the light … but maybe he was never more than a snake-charmer; I do not deny the possibility. I say only that to me my last father, tall gaunt bearded, his hair swept back into a knot behind his neck, seemed the very avatar of Mian Abdullah; but perhaps it was all an illusion, born of my attempt to bind him to the threads of my history by an effort of sheer will. There have been illusions in my life; don’t think I’m unaware of the fact. We are coming, however, to a time beyond illusions; having no option, I must at last set down, in black and white, the climax I have avoided all evening.
Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, and must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin. (Once, in a blue room, Ahmed Sinai improvised endings for fairy-tales whose original conclusions he had long ago forgotten; the Brass Monkey and I heard, down the years, all kinds of different versions of the journey of Sinbad, and of the adventures of Hatim Tai … if I began again, would I, too, end in a different place?) Well then: I must content myself with shreds and scraps: as I wrote centuries ago, the trick is to fill in the gaps, guided by the few clues one is given. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence; I must be guided by the memory of a once-glimpsed file with tell-tale initials; and by the other, remaining shards of the past, lingering in my ransacked memory-vaults like broken bottles on a beach … Like scraps of memory, sheets of newsprint used to bowl through the magicians’ colony in the silent midnight wind.
Wind-blown newspapers visited my shack to inform me that my uncle, Mustapha Aziz, had been the victim of unknown assassins; I neglected to shed a tear. But there were other pieces of information; and from these, I must build reality.
On one sheet of paper (smelling of turnips) I read that the Prime Minister of India went nowhere without her personal astrologer. In this fragment, I discerned more than turnip-whiffs; mysteriously, my nose recognized, once again, the scent of personal danger. What I am obliged to deduce from this warning aroma: soothsayers prophesied me; might not soothsayers have undone me at the end? Might not a Widow, obsessed with the stars, have learned from astrologers the secret potential of any children born at that long-ago midnight hour? And was that why a Civil Servant, expert in genealogies, was asked to trace