Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 82
82 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi hand for any incriminations that may ensue. In this way he was able to express his views or the views of those who were paying him (!) on diverse subjects including religion and politics. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie has also tried to convey a po- litical message against the corrupt Pakistani Government. He has tried to expose all that is bad in Pakistani politics to the delight of the West. The political message is, however, dealt with more thoroughly in his next novel Shame. As stated while discussing his first novel Grimus, his destiny had been pre-ordained and fore-doomed in his own writing. So similarly, in Midnight’s Children, there is the sense of doom in the final words of the last chapter which could well be a fitting epitaph for the author : ‘Yes, they will trample me underfoot,. . . . reducing me to specks of voiceless dust,. . . because it is the privilege and the curse of mid- night’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. ’ (p. 446). How chillingly this has proved to be the case of Salman Rushdie. It was almost as if he had dug his own grave. This comparable study of Rushdie’s work can easily lead a read- er to ascertain for himself the long-term plan and ploy to present Rushdie as an author of great talent and repute in granting him the ultimate recognition by bestowing endless literary awards upon him, including the grandest of them all, the Booker Prize for Literature for Fiction. But when you look at his work more closely, you cannot help but wonder who the books were aimed at. Surely it could not be for the benefit of the Western reader as the books are interspersed with so many Hindi and Urdu words that someone without any basic knowledge of these languages would struggle to comprehend its relevance, e. g. ‘sabkuch ticktack hai, Gai-wallah, cooch naheen’, etc. Almost every other page is littered with Hindi words that would certainly be off-putting for those who