Midnights Children

admit—led me inexorably towards my fall. (But I hold nothing against her; because my fall led to a rise.)
    Privately, in my clocktower, I took time off from my trans-subcontinental rambles to consider the wooing of my freckled Eve. “Forget middlemen,” I advised myself, “You’ll have to do this personally.” Finally, I formed my scheme: I would have to share her interests, to make her passions mine … guns have never appealed to me. I resolved to learn how to ride a bike.
    Evie, in those days, had given in to the many demands of the hillock-top children that she teach them her bicycle-arts; so it was a simple matter for me to join the queue for lessons. We assembled in the circus-ring; Evie, ring-mistress supreme, stood in the center of five wobbly, furiously concentrating cyclists … while I stood beside her, bikeless. Until Evie’s coming I’d shown no interest in wheels, so I’d never been given any … humbly, I suffered the lash of Evie’s tongue.
    “Where’ve you been
living
, fat nose? I suppose you wanna borrow mine?”
    “No,” I lied penitently, and she relented. “Okay, okay,” Evie shrugged, “Get in the saddle and lessee whatchou’re made of.”
    Let me reveal at once that, as I climbed on to the silver Arjuna Indiabike, I was filled with the purest elation; that, as Evie walked roundandround, holding the bike by the handlebars, exclaiming, “Gotcha balance yet?
No?
Geez, nobody’s got all year!”—as Evie and I perambulated, I felt … what’s the word? … happy.
    Roundandroundand … Finally, to please her, I stammered, “Okay … I think I’m … let me,” and instantly I was on my own, she had given me a farewell shove, and the silver creature flew gleaming and uncontrollable across the circus-ring … I heard her shouting: “The brake! Use the goddamn brake, ya dummy!”—but my hands couldn’t move, I had gone rigid as a plank, and there LOOK OUT in front of me was the blue two-wheeler of Sonny Ibrahim, collision course, OUTA THE WAY YA CRAZY , Sonny in the saddle, trying to swerve and miss, but still blue streaked towards silver, Sonny swung right but I went the same way EEYAH MY BIKE and silver wheel touched blue, frame kissed frame, I was flying up and over handlebars towards Sonny who had embarked on an identical parabola towards me CRASH bicycles fell to earth beneath us, locked in an intimate embrace CRASH suspended in mid-air Sonny and I met each other, Sonny’s head greeted mine … Over nine years ago I had been born with bulging temples, and Sonny had been given hollows by forceps; everything is for a reason, it seems, because now my bulging temples found their way into Sonny’s hollows. A perfect fit. Heads fitting together, we began our descent to earth, falling clear of the bikes, fortunately, WHUMMP and for a moment the world went away.
    Then Evie with her freckles on fire, “O ya little creep, ya pile of snot, ya wrecked my …” But I wasn’t listening, because circus-ring accident had completed what washing-chest calamity had begun, and they were there in my head, in the front now, no longer a muffled background noise I’d never noticed, all of them, sending their here-I-am signals, from north south east west … the other children born during that midnight hour, calling “I,” “I,” “I” and “I.”
    “Hey! Hey, snothead! You okay? … Hey, where’s his
mother?
”
    Interruptions, nothing but interruptions! The different parts of my somewhat complicated life refuse, with a wholly unreasonable obstinacy, to stay neatly in their separate compartments. Voices spill out of their clocktower to invade the circus-ring, which is supposed to be Evie’s domain … and now, at the very moment when I should be describing the fabulous children of ticktock, I’m being whisked away by Frontier Mail—spirited off to the decaying world of my grandparents, so that Aadam Aziz is getting in the way of the natural unfolding of my tale. Ah well.
What can’t be cured must be endured.
    That January, during my convalescence from the severe concussion I received in my bicycling accident, my parents took us off to Agra for a family reunion that turned out worse than the notorious (and arguably fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta. For two weeks we were obliged to listen to Emerald and Zulfikar (who was now a Major-General and insisted on being called a General) dropping names, and also hints of their fabulous wealth, which had by now grown into the