MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN 精彩片段：
A wedding
I married Parvati the witch on February 23rd, 1975, the second anniversary of my outcasts return to the magicians ghetto.
Stiffening of Padma: taut as a washing line, my dung lotus inquires: Married? But last night only you said you wouldnt and why you havent told me all these days, weeks, months… ? I look at her sadly, and remind her that I have already mentioned the death of my poor Parvati, which was not a natural death… slowly Padma uncoils, as I continue: Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, theres no escape from her.
There have been thirty two years, in this story, during which I remained unborn; soon, I may complete thirty one years of my own. For sixty three years, before and after midnight, women have done their best; and also, Im bound to say, their worst.
In a blind landowners house on the shores of a Kashmir! lake, Naseem Aziz doomed me to the inevitability of perforated sheets; and in the waters of that same lake, Ilse Lubin leaked into history, and I have not forgotten her deathwish;
Before Nadir Khan hid in his underworld, my grandmother had, by becoming Reverend Mother, begun a sequence of women who changed their names, a sequence which continues even today– and which even leaked into Nadir, who became Qasim, and sat with dancing hands in the Pioneer Cafe; and after Nadirs departure, my mother Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai;
And Alia, with the bitterness of ages, who clothed me in the baby things impregnated with her old maid fury; and Emerald, who laid a table on which I made pepperpots march;
There was the Rani of Cooch Naheen, whose money, placed at the disposal of a humming man, gave birth to the optimism disease, which has recurred, at intervals, ever since; and, in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi, a distant relative called Zohra whose flirtations gave birth, in my father, to that later weakness for Fernandas and Florys; So to Bombay. Where Winkies Vanita could not resist the centre parting of William Methwold, and Nussie the duck lost a baby race; while Mary Pereira, in the name of love, changed the baby tags of history and became a second mother to me…
Women and women and women: Toxy Catrack, nudging open the door which would later let in the children of midnight; the terrors of her nurse Bi Appah; the competitive love of Amina and Mary, and what my mother showed me while I lay concealed in a washing chest: yes, the Black Mango, which forced me to sniff, and unleashed what were not Archangels!… And Evelyn Lilith Burns, cause of a bicycle accident, who pushed me down a two storey hillock into the midst of history.
And the Monkey. I musnt forget the Monkey.
But also, also, there was Masha Miovic, goading me into finger loss, and my aunty Pia, filling my heart with revenge lust, and Lila Sabarmati, whose indiscretions made possible my terrible, manipulating, newspaper cut out revenge;
And Mrs Dubash, who found my gift of a Superman comic and built it, with the help of her son, into Lord Khusro Khusrovand;
And Mary, seeing a ghost.
In Pakistan, the land of submission, the home of purity, I watched the transformation of Monkey into Singer, and fetched bread, and fell in love; it was a woman, Tai Bibi, who told me the truth about myself. And in the heart of my inner darkness, I turned to the Puffias, and was only narrowly saved from the threat of a golden dentured bride.
Beginning again, as the buddha, I lay with a latrine cleaner and was subjected to electrified urinals as a result; in the East, a farmers wife tempted me, and Time was assassinated in consequence; and there were houris in a temple, and we only just escaped in time.