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Midnights Children

Midnights Children

Titel: Midnights Children Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Salman Rushdie
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his motor-car, the first ever seen in his mountain-ringed valley, he loved it almost as much as his children; it grieved him that his subjects, who had become used to using the roads of Kif for purposes of social intercourse, quarrels and games of hit-the-spittoon, refused to get out of its way. He issued a proclamation explaining that the car represented the future, and must be allowed to pass; the people ignored the notice, although it was pasted to shop-fronts and walls and even, it is said, to the sides of cows. The second notice was more peremptory, ordering the citizenry to clear the highways when they heard the horn of the car; the Kifis, however, continued to smoke and spit and argue in the streets. The third notice, which was adorned with a gory drawing, said that the car would henceforth run down anybody who failed to obey its horn. The Kifis added new, more scandalous pictures to the one on the poster; and then the Nawab, who was a good man but not one of infinite patience, actually did as he threatened. When the famous singer Jamila arrived with her family and impresario to sing at her cousin’s engagement ceremony, the car drove her without trouble from border to palace; and the Nawab said proudly, “No trouble; the car is respected now. Progress has occurred.”
    The Nawab’s son Mutasim, who had travelled abroad and wore his hair in something called a “beetle-cut,” was a source of worry to his father; because although he was so good-looking that, whenever he travelled around Kif, girls with silver nose-jewelery fainted in the heat of his beauty, he seemed to take no interest in such matters, being content with his polo-ponies and the guitar on which he picked out strange Western songs. He wore bush-shirts on which musical notation and foreign street-signs jostled against the half-clad bodies of pink-skinned girls. But when Jamila Singer, concealed within a gold-brocaded burqa, arrived at the palace, Mutasim the Handsome—who owing to his foreign travels had never heard the rumors of her disfigurement—became obsessed with the idea of seeing her face; he fell head-over-heels with the glimpses of her demure eyes he saw through her perforated sheet.
    In those days, the President of Pakistan had decreed an election; it was to take place on the day after the engagement ceremony, under a form of suffrage called Basic Democracy. The hundred million people of Pakistan had been divided up into a hundred and twenty thousand approximately equal parts, and each part was represented by one Basic Democrat. The electoral college of one hundred and twenty thousand “B.D.s” were to elect the President. In Kif, the 420 Basic Democrats included mullahs, road-sweepers, the Nawab’s chauffeur, numerous men who sharecropped hashish on the Nawab’s estate, and other loyal citizens; the Nawab had invited all of these to his daughter’s hennaing ceremony. He had, however, also been obliged to invite two real badmaashes, the returning officers of the Combined Opposition Party. These badmaashes quarrelled constantly amongst themselves, but the Nawab was courteous and welcoming. “Tonight you are my honored friends,” he told them, “and tomorrow is another day.” The badmaashes ate and drank as if they had never seen food before, but everybody—even Mutasim the Handsome, whose patience was shorter than his father’s—was told to treat them well.
    The Combined Opposition Party, you will not be surprised to hear, was a collection of rogues and scoundrels of the first water, united only in their determination to unseat the President and return to the bad old days in which civilians, and not soldiers, lined their pockets from the public exchequer; but for some reason they had acquired a formidable leader. This was Mistress Fatima Jinnah, the sister of the founder of the nation, a woman of such desiccated antiquity that the Nawab suspected she had died long ago and been stuffed by a master taxidermist—a notion supported by his son, who had seen a movie called
El Cid
in which a dead man led an army into battle … but there she was nevertheless, goaded into electioneering by the President’s failure to complete the marbling of her brother’s mausoleum; a terrible foe, above slander and suspicion. It was even said that her opposition to the President had shaken the people’s faith in him—was he not, after all, the reincarnation of the great Islamic heroes of yesteryear? Of Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, of

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