Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "magic"
Midnight's Children
Listen: after sleeping for a scant and dreamless three hours...no, I must be precise...in June...yes, but a time is required...on June 18, then; the day Ram Manohar Loha called for Direct Action against the Portuguese in Goa...and the year?; well, the year is important too: 2014, there's no getting away from it: the season of ascending Ministers in India (Narendra Modi, a brand new mode of control as the first PM to be younger than his country's independence)...with all these names dates figures in mind, I reflect upon my conquest of Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, at dawn, on a rooftop outside of Washington, D.C. No vendors called "Cold sandwiches; sandwiches cold!", and no distinct smells wafted up from the antiseptic depths of my more-than-suburb; I, Joseph Grammer, lank-of-shank writer, unprofessional professional hack, pickler of unsalted thoughts, had only the cold, gleaming screen of sun to comfort me in the moments when I turned the last page of this Booker-winning book and found the back cover's creamy blankness inviting me to meditate further upon Indira Ghandi's tumultuous reign; yes, or the frantically fresh creation of Bangladesh as a newfangled, war-torn nation; or, even before tumult and tumbling of country, before Prime-time ministrations of promise (which I shall attend to in depth if time permits--all these voices are jostling-hostling for space in my crowded pepperpot of a brain)...before all this, during independence a la carte (freedom being not-too-smoothly eschewed from the menu), prior to the Partition of India and Pakistan;--forgive me these fragments, by the way, for memory fails even now as events tenements ventings of emotion flood back to me with all the subtlety of a club--but yes: the primary triumph and crisis (all rolled into one, because we all contain multitudes) must be this: let me say it plainly, before the cracks of my sunburnt shell give way to the pressures of blue-June-hotness Obama (the old banyan tree, Mr. Piece-of-the-Moon) monument worst-traffic-you've-ever-managed-to-find metro-heckling-politic-populace...no, enough uncharitable prevaricating; I must lay it all on the table, as they say...plainly, then: doubletime quick: what I am talking about is the birth of India as a nation.
Fame and nascency, then, served as snake and ladder, depending on the auspice of the day. Saleem Sinai, main character extraordinaire, wielder of cucumber-nose and forehead-projections and All-India-Radioplay in his brain--connecting him to every child born between midnight and 1 am (with mythical powers descending in order of temporal distance from the zero stroke) on the day of Indian independence from the Anglo sahibs. Suffice it to say this excerpt is only that--a snippet from a many-headed history, and I am leaving out most of the good bits.
I will say this, though, at least (before the cracks open wider in my sun-tamed frame, which, despite specialists homeopaths psychologists, refuse to mend or even make themselves visible to others): there is a cold tussock of earth in Kashmir, and Old Delhi prophecies, and framed pictures of Nehru letters (I told you I would speak of this if time permitted); there is hiding in a washingchest and first love and bicycle-collisions and Shiva's deadly knees; there is betrayal, and weddings with ghetto magicians...but I am getting ahead of myself. Read the tome on your own time and make your own judgment: now: doubletime quick!
Fame and nascency, then, served as snake and ladder, depending on the auspice of the day. Saleem Sinai, main character extraordinaire, wielder of cucumber-nose and forehead-projections and All-India-Radioplay in his brain--connecting him to every child born between midnight and 1 am (with mythical powers descending in order of temporal distance from the zero stroke) on the day of Indian independence from the Anglo sahibs. Suffice it to say this excerpt is only that--a snippet from a many-headed history, and I am leaving out most of the good bits.
I will say this, though, at least (before the cracks open wider in my sun-tamed frame, which, despite specialists homeopaths psychologists, refuse to mend or even make themselves visible to others): there is a cold tussock of earth in Kashmir, and Old Delhi prophecies, and framed pictures of Nehru letters (I told you I would speak of this if time permitted); there is hiding in a washingchest and first love and bicycle-collisions and Shiva's deadly knees; there is betrayal, and weddings with ghetto magicians...but I am getting ahead of myself. Read the tome on your own time and make your own judgment: now: doubletime quick!
