Midnights Children

first Five Year Plan, which had concentrated on building up commerce … businessmen who had become or were becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destinies had drained the color from their cheeks … in which case, perhaps my father was a late victim of a widespread, though generally unremarked phenomenon. The businessmen of India were turning white.
    That’s enough to chew on for one day. But Evelyn Lilith Burns is coming; the Pioneer Café is getting painfully close; and—more vitally—midnight’s other children, including my alter ego Shiva, he of the deadly knees, are pressing extremely hard. Soon the cracks will be wide enough for them to escape …
    By the way: some time around the end of 1956, in all probability, the singer and cuckold Wee Willie Winkie also met his death.

Love in Bombay
    D URING RAMZÀN , the month of fasting, we went to the movies as often as we could. After being shaken awake at five a.m. by my mother’s assiduous hand; after pre-dawn breakfasts of melon and sugared lime-water, and especially on Sunday mornings, the Brass Monkey and I took it in turns (or sometimes called out in unison) to remind Amina: “The ten-thirty-in-the-morning show! It’s Metro Cub Club day, Amma, pleeeese!” Then the drive in the Rover to the cinema where we would taste neither Coca-Cola nor potato crisps, neither Kwality ice-cream nor samosas in greasy paper; but at least there was air-conditioning, and Cub Club badges pinned to our clothes, and competitions, and birthday-announcements made by a compère with an inadequate moustache; and finally, the film, after the trailers with their introductory titles, “Next Attraction” and “Coming Soon,” and the cartoon (“In A Moment, The Big Film; But First … !”):
Quentin Durward
, perhaps, or
Scaramouche
. “Swashbuckling!” we’d say to one another afterwards, playing movie critic; and, “A rumbustious, bawdy romp!”—although we were ignorant of swashbuckles and bawdiness. There was not much praying in our family (except on Eid-ul-Fitr, when my father took me to the Friday mosque to celebrate the holiday by tying a handkerchief around my head and pressing my forehead to the ground) … but we were always willing to fast, because we liked the cinema.
    Evie Burns and I agreed: the world’s greatest movie star was Robert Taylor. I also liked Jay Silverheels as Tonto; but his kemosabay, Clayton Moore, was too fat for the Lone Ranger, in my view.
    Evelyn Lilith Burns arrived on New Year’s Day, 1957, to take up residence with her widower father in an apartment in one of the two squat, ugly concrete blocks which had grown up, almost without our noticing them, on the lower reaches of our hillock, and which were oddly segregated: Americans and other foreigners lived (like Evie) in Noor Ville; arriviste Indian success-stories ended up in Laxmi Vilas. From the heights of Methwold’s Estate, we looked down on them all, on white and brown alike; but nobody ever looked down on Evie Burns—except once. Only once did anyone get on top of her.
    Before I climbed into my first pair of long pants, I fell in love with Evie; but love was a curious, chain-reactive thing that year. To save time, I shall place all of us in the same row at the Metro cinema; Robert Taylor is mirrored in our eyes as we sit in flickering trances—and also in symbolic sequence: Saleem Sinai is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Evie Burns who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Sonny Ibrahim who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with the Brass Monkey who is sitting next to the aisle and feeling starving hungry … I loved Evie for perhaps six months of my life; two years later, she was back in America, knifing an old woman and being sent to reform school.
    A brief expression of my gratitude is in order at this point: if Evie had not come to live amongst us, my story might never have progressed beyond tourism-in-a-clocktower and cheating in class … and then there would have been no climax in a Widows’ Hostel, no clear proof of my meaning, no coda in a fuming factory over which there presides the winking, saffron-and-green dancing figure of the neon goddess Mumbadevi. But Evie Burns (was she snake or ladder? The answer’s obvious:
both
) did come, complete with the silver bicycle which enabled me not only to discover the midnight children, but also to ensure the