Midnights Children

understand that my head aches morning noon and night. Refill my glass, child.”
    … But the young Doctor has entered the throes of a most unhippocratic excitement at the boatman’s cry, and shouts, “I’m coming just now! Just let me bring my things!” The shikara’s prow touches the garden’s hem. Aadam is rushing indoors, prayer-mat rolled like cheroot under one arm, blue eyes blinking in the sudden interior gloom; he has placed the cheroot on a high shelf on top of stacked copies of
Vorwärts
and Lenin’s
What Is To Be Done?
and other pamphlets, dusty echoes of his half-faded German life; he is pulling out, from under his bed, a second-hand leather case which his mother called his “doctori-attaché,” and as he swings it and himself upwards and runs from the room, the word HEIDELBERG is briefly visible, burned into the leather on the bottom of the bag. A landowner’s daughter is good news indeed to a doctor with a career to make, even if she is ill. No:
because
she is ill.
    … While I sit like an empty pickle-jar in a pool of Anglepoised light, visited by this vision of my grandfather sixty-three years ago, which demands to be recorded, filling my nostrils with the acrid stench of his mother’s embarrassment which has brought her out in boils, with the vinegary force of Aadam Aziz’s determination to establish a practice so successful that she’ll never have to return to the gem-stone-shop, with the blind mustiness of a big shadowy house in which the young Doctor stands, ill-at-ease, before a painting of a plain girl with lively eyes and a stag transfixed behind her on the horizon, speared by a dart from her bow. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air … everything, and not just the few clues one stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed.
    … Aadam refills his mother’s glass and continues, worriedly, to examine her. “Put some cream on these rashes and blotches, Amma. For the headache, there are pills. The boils must be lanced. But maybe if you wore purdah when you sat in the store … so that no disrespectful eyes could … such complaints often begin in the mind …”
    … Slap of oar in water. Plot of spittle in lake. Tai clears his throat and mutters angrily, “A fine business. A wet-head nakkoo child goes away before he’s learned one damned thing and he comes back a big doctor sahib with a big bag full of foreign machines, and he’s still as silly as an owl. I swear: a too bad business.”
    … Doctor Aziz is shifting uneasily, from foot to foot, under the influence of the landowner’s smile, in whose presence it is not possible to feel relaxed; and is waiting for some tic of reaction to his own extraordinary appearance. He has grown accustomed to these involuntary twitches of surprise at his size, his face of many colors, his nose … but Ghani makes no sign, and the young Doctor resolves, in return, not to let his uneasiness show. He stops shifting his weight. They face each other, each suppressing (or so it seems) his view of the other, establishing the basis of their future relationship. And now Ghani alters, changing from art-lover to tough-guy. “This is a big chance for you, young man,” he says. Aziz’s eyes have strayed to Diana. Wide expanses of her blemished pink skin are visible.
    … His mother is moaning, shaking her head. “No, what do you know, child, you have become a big-shot doctor but the gemstone business is different. Who would buy a turquoise from a woman hidden inside a black hood? It is a question of establishing trust. So they must look at me; and I must get pains and boils. Go, go, don’t worry your head about your poor mother.”
    … “Big shot,” Tai is spitting into the lake, “big bag, big shot. Pah! We haven’t got enough bags at home that you must bring back that thing made of a pig’s skin that makes one unclean just by looking at it? And inside, God knows what all.” Doctor Aziz, seated amongst flowery curtains and the smell of incense, has his thoughts wrenched away from the patient waiting across the lake. Tai’s bitter monologue breaks into his consciousness, creating a sense of dull shock, a smell like a casualty ward overpowering