"Midnight's Children" Post 6b

In this section, Saleem describes the pickle factory where he is currently living. One isn't really certain what he is doing there, but you get the feeling that he is the owner. A pickle factory doesn't seem like a very appealing place, but he includes one description of it that, if it isn't a beautiful place, is at least a beautiful description of it: "I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what has remained undescribed: through green-tinged glass windows, my room looks out on to an iron catwalk and then down to the cooking-floor, where copper vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps, working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle fumes; while (looking the other way, through a green-tinged window on the world) railway tracks shine dully in the morning sun, bridged over at regular intervals by the messy gantries of the electrification system. In daylight, our saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance above the factory floors... Human flies hang in thick white-trousered clusters from the trains; I do not deny that, within the factory walls, you may also see some flies. But there are also compensating lizards, hanging stilly upside down on the ceiling... sounds too, have been waiting to be heard: bubbling of vats, loud singing, coarse imprecations, bawdy humor of fuzz-armed women; the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped admonitions of overseers; the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the adjacent bottling-works; and rush of trains, and the buzzing (infrequent, but inevitable) of flies" (240).  I really loved this description: the area was covered so fully yet not systematically, more in a rambling way but you still got a feeling and view of the space: the image of the copper vats bubbling and seething was perfect, and the comparison of the human flies upon the trains to the flies inside the room was so well done: it just showed how a simple description of a pickle-factory is beautiful and unique in the author's words.