After the shocking attack on Salman Rushdie, the pain kept cropping up throughout my scrollhazed days. There was the fear of loss. A brilliant storyteller, whose mercurial play with words, conjures vast, magical lands to share the worlds he has inhabited with us less gifted imaginers - Salman Rushdie is a personal deity to me. Midnight's Children was the first Rushdie book I came across on the sidewalks of Kothi and Abids - the secondhand stores that sold books from all over the world - from the communist publications of the USSR to sheet music, and the main draw for the many secretly wild teenage girls - the Mills and Boon doses of heartaches and fantasies. This colossal tome usually with its front cover ripped off would be there and I forget how I actually got my hands on it. Perhaps I borrowed it from the school library in my father's school. The beautiful long hall in the basement with windows high up near the ceiling, a couple of rows of narrow, slanted desks, benches along the walls, bookcases lining the walls, neatly filled with well-curated gems of World Literature. I read Tagore and Satyajit Ray, and a couple of fun reads set in exotic places like Sardinia. I think this is where I found Midnight's Children. Or maybe not. I remember it was a paperback so maybe I made my dad pay the 100 rupees it took to buy it on the sidewalk.
But no matter. What a book it was! Gloriously expansive, it took as much space it needed as the subject of that vast land and its people took with no apologies. It didn't make any sense, at least for the first couple of pages - flowery words, dense and filthy descriptions leading one nowhere in circles. But once I got a feel of the historical bones scattered in that brume, I kept treading water, gulped some courage, and took a few dives deep into the strange, fantastical saga. Even today, some 35 years later, I vividly remember the beginnings in Kashmir, torn sheet, Laxmi's hairy legs, the Breach Candy land of Tick-Tock perfection, the singing nightingales on the other side of the border, the blackouts and air raids, the contemptible coteries and vasectomies, oh what a voyage into that time and space. Curiously I don't remember Shiva, till I saw the name again in a recent TedEd video. I have to read the book again. Many times have I read it over tea and biscuits, lunch and dinner.
I think my 9-year-old may be too young and too busy to deal with the graphic history of the subcontinent. So I have chosen Luka and the Fire of Life instead, to give him a taste of Rushdie. We had attempted Haroun and the Sea of Stories a few years ago but it didn't go down well, probably because the wordplay in Hindustani was out of reach for them. Luka, Rashid, Soraya, and big brother Haroun on the other hand took off uproariously well, I am properly chuffed to report. The surprise of it all was the older 14-year-old who took to it - my sweet little sensitive gruff monstrous teenager - that "huge triangle with a grin on top" so to speak lay in the dark and listened in along with the 9-year-old and absorbed it. Never saying no to being read to from this tale. Thanks, Rushdie! You brought back storytelling into our lives. Your words brought us back to sharing thoughts with each other. And we breathe together now. May you live your wordy life to its fullest!
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