Midnights Children

Who do you think I am? Some common ignorant lying pie-dog? Go, get out of the boat now, your nose makes it too heavy to row; also your father is waiting to beat my gas out of you, and your mother to boil off your skin.”
    In the brandy bottle of the boatman Tai I see, foretold, my own father’s possession by djinns … and there will be another bald foreigner … and Tai’s gas prophesies another kind, which was the consolation of my grandmother’s old age, and taught her stories, too … and pie-dogs aren’t far away … Enough. I’m frightening myself.
    Despite beating and boiling, Aadam Aziz floated with Tai in his shikara, again and again, amid goats hay flowers furniture lotus-roots, though never with the English sahibs, and heard again and again the miraculous answers to that single terrifying question: “But Taiji, how old are you,
honestly
?”
    From Tai, Aadam learned the secrets of the lake—where you could swim without being pulled down by weeds; the eleven varieties of water-snake; where the frogs spawned; how to cook a lotus-root; and where the three English women had drowned a few years back. “There is a tribe of feringhee women who come to this water to drown,” Tai said. “Sometimes they know it, sometimes they don’t, but I know the minute I smell them. They hide under the water from God knows what or who—but they can’t hide from me, baba!” Tai’s laugh, emerging to infect Aadam—a huge, booming laugh that seemed macabre when it crashed out of that old, withered body, but which was so natural in my giant grandfather that nobody knew, in later times, that it wasn’t really his (my uncle Hanif inherited this laugh; so until he died, a piece of Tai lived in Bombay). And, also from Tai, my grandfather heard about noses.
    Tai tapped his left nostril. “You know what this is, nakkoo? It’s the place where the outside world meets the world inside you. If they don’t get on, you feel it here. Then you rub your nose with embarrassment to make the itch go away. A nose like that, little idiot, is a great gift. I say: trust it. When it warns you, look out or you’ll be finished. Follow your nose and you’ll go far.” He cleared his throat; his eyes rolled away into the mountains of the past. Aziz settled back on the straw. “I knew one officer once—in the army of that Iskandar the Great. Never mind his name. He had a vegetable just like yours hanging between his eyes. When the army halted near Gandhara, he fell in love with some local floozy. At once his nose itched like crazy. He scratched it, but that was useless. He inhaled vapors from crushed boiled eucalyptus leaves. Still no good, baba! The itching sent him wild; but the damn fool dug in his heels and stayed with his little witch when the army went home. He became—what?—a stupid thing, neither this nor that, a half-and-halfer with a nagging wife and an itch in the nose, and in the end he pushed his sword into his stomach. What do you think of that?”
    … Doctor Aziz in 1915, whom rubies and diamonds have turned into a half-and-halfer, remembers this story as Tai enters hailing distance. His nose is itching still. He scratches, shrugs, tosses his head; and then Tai shouts.
    “Ohé! Doctor Sahib! Ghani the landowner’s daughter is sick.”
    The message, delivered curtly, shouted unceremoniously across the surface of the lake although boatman and pupil have not met for half a decade, mouthed by woman’s lips that are not smiling in longtime-no-see greeting, sends time into a speeding, whirligig, blurry fluster of excitement …
    … “Just think, son,” Aadam’s mother is saying as she sips fresh lime water, reclining on a takht in an attitude of resigned exhaustion, “how life does turn out. For so many years even my ankles were a secret, and now I must be stared at by strange persons who are not even family members.”
    … While Ghani the landowner stands beneath a large oil painting of Diana the Huntress, framed in squiggly gold. He wears thick dark glasses and his famous poisonous smile, and discusses art. “I purchased it from an Englishman down on his luck, Doctor Sahib. Five hundred rupees only—and I did not trouble to beat him down. What are five hundred chips? You see, I am a lover of culture.”
    … “See, my son,” Aadam’s mother is saying as he begins to examine her, “what a mother will not do for her child. Look how I suffer. You are a doctor … feel these rashes, these blotchy bits,