Saleem Sinai Of Salman Rushdie Watching The Partition Spectacles Unawares Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Saleem Sinai
The mouthpiece of Salman Rushdie
Watching unawares
The Partition drama
And the stakeholders,
Directors,
Managers
And producers of it

The events and happenings
And occurrences
Happening before,
During the Partition time,
In the aftermath of it,
So full of displacement and dislocation,
Nostalgia and dismemberment,
What was all that happening?

Saleem Sinai recounts and reconnects
And tries to reconstruct
Midnighttales of freedom
With his personal anecdotes and revelation
As his birth too is coincidentally
Collides with the same time spirit
So something of that Abhimanyu must carry it,
Split, division, concord and discordof harmony.

Saleem Sinai a midnight born like latter-day Sanjaya
Hears, sees the things happening,
Taking place all around
During the midnight
When India was to make a tryst with destiny,
When Pakistan made its way with
The sectarian, theocratic, religious people
Demanding a state for them only.

Saleem Sinai just a commentator jokes it all
The drama being enacted, the stage and the theatre
Readied for the performance and the spectacle,
The artists, artistes, musicians, singers,
The folk and the enthusiasts all rehearsing
In the aftermath of joy and sorrow,
But it is to be reckoned with,
What did the fighters and dividers
Dislocating and displacing the masses
Going as caravans of refugees?

Midnight Children is really a good anecdote,
A good diary, memoir of Saleem Chinai,
The telepathic, psychic man
Through nazar-gozar, guningiri,
Hypnotic, foreseeable power,
With guesswork and prophetic vision
Seeing the past, present and future
Of the nascent democracy
After losing his consciousness, regaining it,
Taking recourse to the Sunderban for convalescing.

We do not know how the midnight people will run India,
How will they the fanatical Pakistan and Bangladesh,
How will they the astrologers and palmists,
How will they the fatalists and the superstitious people
The most inactive lethargic men,
The frenzied people,
The hypnotic and telepathic people,
I mean the psychic fellows,
Sick and feverish, weak and thin people?