Midnights Children

from wife and friends: “Verily,” they told him, “you are the Messenger of God”; I, suffering my punishment at nearlynine, could neither seek Brass Monkey’s assistance nor solicit softening words from Mary Pereira. Muted for an evening and a night and a morning, I struggled, alone, to understand what had happened to me; until at last I saw the shawl of genius fluttering down, like an embroidered butterfly, the mantle of greatness settling upon my shoulders.
    In the heat of that silent night (I was silent; outside me, the sea rustled like distant paper; crows squawked in the throes of their feathery nightmares; the puttering noises of tardy taxi-cabs wafted up from Warden Road; the Brass Monkey, before she fell asleep with her face frozen into a mask of curiosity, begged, “Come on, Saleem; nobody’s listening; what did you do? Tell tell tell!” … while, inside me, the voices rebounded against the walls of my skull) I was gripped by hot fingers of excitement—the agitated insects of excitement danced in my stomach—because finally, in some way I did not then fully understand, the door which Toxy Catrack had once nudged in my head had been forced open; and through it I could glimpse—shadowy still, undefined, enigmatic—my reason for having been born.
    Gabriel or Jibreel told Muhammad: “Recite!” And then began The Recitation, known in Arabic as Al-Quran: “Recite: In the Name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood …” That was on Mount Hira outside Mecca Sharif; on a two-storey hillock opposite Breach Candy Pools, voices also instructed me to recite: “Tomorrow!” I thought excitedly. “Tomorrow!”
    By sunrise, I had discovered that the voices could be controlled—I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off my newly-discovered inner ear. It was astonishing how soon fear left me; by morning, I was thinking, “Man, this is better than All-India Radio, man; better than Radio Ceylon!”
    To demonstrate the loyalty of sisters: when the twenty-four hours were up, on the dot, the Brass Monkey ran into my mother’s bedroom. (It was, I think, a Sunday: no school. Or perhaps not—that was the summer of the language marches, and the schools were often shut, because of the danger of violence on the bus-routes.)
    “The time’s up!” she exclaimed, shaking my mother out of sleep. “Amma, wake up: it’s time: can he talk now?”
    “All right,” my mother said, coming into a sky-blue room to embrace me, “you’re forgiven now. But never hide in there again …”
    “Amma,” I said eagerly, “my Ammi, please listen. I must tell you something. Something big. But please, please first of all, wake Abba.”
    And after a period of “What?” “Why?” and “Certainly not,” my mother saw something extraordinary sitting in my eyes and went to wake Ahmed Sinai anxiously, with “Janum, please come. I don’t know what’s got into Saleem.”
    Family and ayah assembled in the sitting-room. Amid cut-glass vases and plump cushions, standing on a Persian rug beneath the swirling shadows of ceiling-fans, I smiled into their anxious eyes and prepared my revelation. This was it; the beginning of the repayment of their investment; my first dividend—first, I was sure, of many … my black mother, lip-jutting father, Monkey of a sister and crime-concealing ayah waited in hot confusion.
    Get it out. Straight, without frills. “You should be the first to know,” I said, trying to give my speech the cadences of adulthood. And then I told them. “I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think—Ammi, Abboo, I really think—that Archangels have started to talk to me.”
    There! I thought. There! It’s said! Now there will be pats on the back, sweetmeats, public announcements, maybe more photographs; now their chests will puff up with pride. O blind innocence of childhood! For my honesty—for my open-hearted desperation to please—I was set upon from all sides. Even the Monkey: “O
God
, Saleem, all this tamasha, all this performance, for one of your stupid
cracks?
” And worse than the Monkey was Mary Pereira: “Christ Jesus! Save us, Lord! Holy Father in Rome, such blasphemy I’ve heard today!” And worse than Mary Pereira was my mother Amina Sinai: Black Mango concealed now, her own unnameable names still warm upon her lips, she cried, “Heaven