Midnights Children

sensational magazines. But I ask for patience—wait. Only wait. It was telepathy; but also more than telepathy. Don’t write me off too easily.
    Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience—before I began to
act
—there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Luck-now Urdu to the southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surface transmissions—the front-of-mind stuff which is what I’d originally been picking up—language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words … but that was after I heard, beneath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other precious signals, utterly different from everything else, most of them faint and distant, like far-off drums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke through the fish-market cacophony of my voices … those secret, nocturnal calls, like calling out to like … the unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signalling nothing more than their existence, transmitting simply: “I.” From far to the North, “I.” And the South East West: “I.” “I.” “And I.”
    But I mustn’t get ahead of myself. In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening; and soon I was able to “tune” my inner ear to those voices which I could understand; nor was it long before I picked out, from the throng, the voices of my own family; and of Mary Pereira; and of friends, classmates, teachers. In the street, I learned how to identify the mind-stream of passing strangers—the law of Doppler shift continued to operate in these paranormal realms, and the voices grew and diminished as the strangers passed.
    All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father’s wrath, and anxious to keep my right ear in good working order, I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy, the difficulties of concealing knowledge are almost insurmountable; but fortunately, my nearest and dearest were as anxious to forget my outburst as I was to conceal the truth.
    “O, you Saleem! Such things you talked yesterday! Shame on you, boy: you better go wash out your mouth with soap!” … The morning after my disgrace, Mary Pereira, shaking with indignation like one of her jellies, suggested the perfect means of my rehabilitation. Bowing my head contritely, I went, without a word, into the bathroom, and there, beneath the amazed gaze of ayah and Monkey, scrubbed teeth tongue roofofmouth gums with a toothbrush covered in the sharp foul lather of Coal Tar Soap. The news of my dramatic atonement rushed rapidly around the house, borne by Mary and Monkey; and my mother embraced me, “There, good boy; we’ll say no more about it,” and Ahmed Sinai nodded gruffly at the breakfast table, “At least the boy has the grace to admit when he’s gone too far.”
    As my glass-inflicted cuts faded, it was as though my announcement was also erased; and by the time of my ninth birthday, nobody besides myself remembered anything about the day when I had taken the name of Archangels in vain. The taste of detergent lingered on my tongue for many weeks, reminding me of the need for secrecy.
    Even the Brass Monkey was satisfied by my show of contrition—in her eyes, I had returned to form, and was once more the goody-two-shoes of the family. To demonstrate her willingness to re-establish the old order, she set fire to my mother’s favorite slippers, and regained her rightful place in the family doghouse. Amongst outsiders, what’s more—displaying a conservatism you’d never have suspected in such a tomboy—she closed ranks with my parents, and kept my one aberration a secret from her friends and mine.
    In a country where any physical or mental peculiarity in a child is a source of deep family shame, my parents, who had become accustomed to facial birthmarks, cucumber-nose and bandy legs, simply refused to see any more embarrassing things in me; for my part, I did not once mention the buzzing in my ear, the occasional ringing bells of deafness, the intermittent pain. I had learned that secrets were not