Midnights Children

(accompanied by appropriate ticktock sound effects) plopped fully-formed into my thoughts: “I am the bomb in Bombay … watch me explode!”
    Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were
mine
, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow
making them happen
… which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. “I can find out any damn thing!” I triumphed, “There isn’t a thing I cannot know!”
    Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the spirit of self-aggrandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an instinct for self-preservation. If I had not believed myself in control of the flooding multitudes, their massed identities would have annihilated mine … but there in my clocktower, filled with the cockiness of my glee, I became Sin, the ancient moon-god (no, not Indian: I’ve imported him from Hadhramaut of old), capable of acting-at-a-distance and shifting the tides of the world.
    But death, when it visited Methwold’s Estate, still managed to take me by surprise.
    Even though the freezing of his assets had ended many years ago, the zone below Ahmed Sinai’s waist had remained as cold as ice. Ever since the day he had cried out, “The bastards are shoving my balls in an ice-bucket!”, and Amina had taken them in her hands to warm them so that her fingers got glued to them by the cold, his sex had lain dormant, a woolly elephant in an iceberg, like the one they found in Russia in ’56. My mother Amina, who had married for children, felt the uncreated lives rotting in her womb and blamed herself for becoming unattractive to him, what with her corns and all. She discussed her unhappiness with Mary Pereira, but the ayah only told her that there was no happiness to be gained from “the mens”; they made pickles together as they talked, and Amina stirred her disappointments into a hot lime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes.
    Although Ahmed Sinai’s office hours were filled with fantasies of secretaries taking dictation in the nude, visions of his Fernandas or Poppys strolling around the room in their birthday suits with crisscross cane-marks on their rumps, his apparatus refused to respond; and one day, when the real Fernanda or Poppy had gone home, he was playing chess with Doctor Narlikar, his tongue (as well as his game) made somewhat loose by djinns, and he confided awkwardly, “Narlikar, I seem to have lost interest in you-know-what.”
    A gleam of pleasure radiated from the luminous gynecologist; the birth-control fanatic in the dark, glowing doctor leaped out through his eyes and made the following speech: “Bravo!” Doctor Narlikar cried, “Brother Sinai,
damn good show!
You—and, may I add, myself—yes, you and I, Sinai bhai, are persons of rare spiritual worth! Not for us the panting humiliations of the flesh—is it not a finer thing, I ask you, to eschew procreation—to avoid adding one more miserable human life to the vast multitudes which are presently beggaring our country—and, instead, to bend our energies to the task of giving them
more land to stand on?
I tell you, my friend: you and I and our tetrapods: from the very oceans we shall bring forth soil!” To consecrate this oration, Ahmed Sinai poured drinks; my father and Doctor Narlikar drank a toast to their four-legged concrete dream.
    “Land, yes! Love, no!” Doctor Narlikar said, a little unsteadily; my father refilled his glass.
    By the last days of 1956, the dream of reclaiming land from the sea with the aid of thousands upon thousands of large concrete tetrapods—that same dream which had been the cause of the freeze—and which was now, for my father, a sort of surrogate for the sexual activity which the aftermath of the freeze denied him—actually seemed to be coming close to fruition. This time, however, Ahmed Sinai was spending money cautiously; this time he remained hidden in the background, and his name appeared on no documents; this time, he had learned the lessons of the freeze and was determined to draw as little attention to himself as possible; so that when Doctor Narlikar betrayed him by dying, leaving behind him no record of my father’s