Midnights Children

bubbling air filled with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle-vats; voices in the dark. Pickle-fames, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then … it was hot then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat … it was not the voices (then or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea—the idea that his parents’ outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their love; that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deformity … while I, now, Padma-less, send these words into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he … I no longer have his gift; he never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost … he had no cracks. No spiders’ webs spread through him in the heat.
    Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook.
    And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive through the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize impotence—ever since the notorious free-transistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented what men could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied) … then, the nearlynineyearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines.
    Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat-haze, then and now, blurs his then-time into mine … my confusion, travelling across the heat-waves, is also his.
    What grows best in the heat: cane-sugar; the coconut palm; certain millets such as bajra, ragi and jowar; linseed, and (given water) tea and rice. . Our hot land is also the world’s second largest producer of cotton—at least, it was when I learned geography under the mad eye of Mr. Emil Zagallo, and the steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador. But the tropical summer grows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom, to fill the close perspiring nights with odors as heavy as musk, which give men dark dreams of discontent … then as now, unease was in the air. Language marchers demanded the partition of the state of Bombay along linguistic boundaries—the dream of Maharashtra was at the head of some processions, the mirage of Gujarat led the others forward. Heat, gnawing at the mind’s divisions between fantasy and reality, made anything seem possible; the half-waking chaos of afternoon siestas fogged men’s brains, and the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires.
    What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.
    In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through the daytime streets; by night, they rioted in my head.
We shall be watching your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.
    It’s time to talk about the voices.
    But if only our Padma were here …
    I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father’s hand—walloping my ear in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another, bodiless hand, which once hit him full in the face—at least had one salutary effect: it obliged me to reconsider and finally to abandon my original, Prophet-aping position. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I withdrew deep inside myself, despite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue room with her pesterings: “But what did you do it
for
, Saleem? You who’re always too good and all?” … until she fell into dissatisfied sleep with her mouth still working silently, and I was alone with the echoes of my father’s violence, which buzzed in my left ear, which whispered, “Neither Michael nor Anael; not Gabriel; forget Cassiel, Sachiel and Samael! Archangels no longer speak to mortals; the Recitation was completed in Arabia long ago; the last prophet will come only to announce the End.” That night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not after all been chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far from being sacred, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust.
    Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you’re always reading about in the