Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [272]
O shiny buttons on a traitor’s uniform! Winking blinking like silver … why did he do it? Why did he, who had once led anarchistic apaches through the slums of Bombay, become the warlord of tyranny? Why did midnight’s child betray the children of midnight, and take me to my fate? For love of violence, and the legitimizing glitter of buttons on uniforms? For the sake of his ancient antipathy towards me? Or—I find this most plausible—in exchange for immunity from the penalties imposed on the rest of us … yes, that must be it; O birthright-denying war hero! O mess-of-pottage-corrupted rival … But no, I must stop all this, and tell the story as simply as possible: while troops chased arrested dragged magicians from their ghetto, Major Shiva concentrated on me. I, too, was pulled roughly towards a van; while bulldozers moved forwards into the slum, a door was slammed shut … in the darkness I screamed, “But my son!—And Parvati, where is she, my Laylah?—Picture Singh! Save me, Pictureji!”—But there were bulldozers now, and nobody heard me yelling.
Parvati-the-witch, by marrying me, fell victim to the curse of violent death that hangs over all my people … I do not know whether Shiva, having locked me in a blind dark van, went in search of her, or whether he left her to the bulldozers … because now the machines of destruction were in their element, and the little hovels of the shanty-town were slipping sliding crazily beneath the force of the irresistible creatures, huts snapping like twigs, the little paper parcels of the puppeteers and the magic baskets of the illusionists were being crushed into a pulp; the city was being beautified, and if there were a few deaths, if a girl with eyes like saucers and a pout of grief upon her lips fell beneath the advancing juggernauts, well, what of it, an eyesore was being removed from the face of the ancient capital … and rumor has it that, during the death-throes of the ghetto of the magicians, a bearded giant wreathed in snakes (but this may be an exaggeration) ran—FULL-TILT!—through the wreckage, ran wildly before the advancing bulldozers, clutching in his hand the handle of an irreparably shattered umbrella, searching searching, as though his life depended on the search.
By the end of that day, the slum which clustered in the shadow of the Friday Mosque had vanished from the face of the earth; but not all the magicians were captured; not all of them were carted off to the barbed-wire camp called Khichripur, hotch-potch-town, on the far side of the Jamura River; they never caught Picture Singh, and it is said that the day after the bulldozing of the magicians’ ghetto, a new slum was reported in the heart of the city, hard by the New Delhi railway station. Bulldozers were rushed to the scene of the reported hovels; they found nothing. After that the existence of the moving slum of the escaped illusionists became a fact known to all the inhabitants of the city, but the wreckers never found it. It was reported at Mehrauli; but when vasectomists and troops went there, they found the Qutb Minar unbesmirched by the hovels of poverty. Informers said it had appeared in the gardens of the Jantar Mantar, Jai Singh’s Mughal observatory; but the machines of destruction, rushing to the scene, found only parrots and sun-dials. Only after the end of the Emergency did the moving slum come to a standstill; but that must wait for later, because it is time to talk, at long last, and without losing control, about my captivity in the Widows’ Hostel in Benares.
Once Resham Bibi had wailed, “Ai-o-ai-o!”—and she was right: I brought destruction down upon the ghetto of my saviors; Major Shiva, acting no doubt upon the explicit instructions of the Widow, came to the colony to seize me; while the Widow’s son arranged for his civic-beautification and vasectomy programs to carry out a diversionary maneuver. Yes, of course it was all planned that way; and (if I may say so) most efficiently. What was achieved during the riot of the magicians: no less a feat than the unnoticed capture of the one person on earth who held the key to the location of every single one of the children of midnight