Midnights Children

seventh largest private fortune in Pakistan; their son Zafar tried (but only once!) to pull the Monkey’s fading red pig-tails. And we were obliged to watch in silent horror while my Civil Servant uncle Mustapha and his half-Irani wife Sonia beat and bludgeoned their litter of nameless, genderless brats into utter anonymity; and the bitter aroma of Alia’s spinsterhood filled the air and ruined our food; and my father would retire early to begin his secret nightly war against the djinns; and worse, and worse, and worse.
    One night I awoke on the stroke of twelve to find my grandfather’s dream inside my head, and was therefore unable to avoid seeing him as he saw himself—as a crumbling old man in whose center, when the light was right, it was possible to discern a gigantic shadow. As the convictions which had given strength to his youth withered away under the combined influence of old age, Reverend Mother and the absence of like-minded friends, an old hole was reappearing in the middle of his body, turning him into just another shrivelled, empty old man, over whom the God (and other superstitions) against which he’d fought for so long was beginning to reassert His dominion … meanwhile, Reverend Mother spent the entire fortnight finding little ways of insulting my uncle Hanif’s despised film-actress wife. And that was also the time when I was cast as a ghost in a children’s play, and found, in an old leather attaché-case on top of my grandfather’s almirah, a sheet which had been chewed by moths, but whose largest hole was man-made: for which discovery I was repaid (you will recall) in roars of grandparental rage.
    But there was one achievement. I was befriended by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah (the same fellow who had, in his youth, screamed silently in a corn field and helped Nadir Khan into Aadam Aziz’s toilet): taking me under his wing—and without telling my parents, who would have forbidden it so soon after my accident—he taught me how to ride a bicycle. By the time we left, I had this secret tucked away with all my others: only I didn’t intend this one to stay secret for very long.
    … And on the train home, there were voices hanging on to the outside of the compartment: “Ohé, maharaj! Open up, great sir!”—fare-dodgers’ voices fighting with the ones I wanted to listen to, the new ones inside my head—and then back to Bombay Central Station, and the drive home past race-course and temple, and now Evelyn Lilith Burns is demanding that I finish her part first before concentrating on higher things.
    “Home again!” the Monkey shouts. “Hurry … Back-to-Bom!” (She is in disgrace. In Agra, she incinerated the General’s boots.)
    It is a matter of record that the States Reorganization Committee had submitted its report to Mr. Nehru as long ago as October 1955; a year later, its recommendations had been implemented. India had been divided anew, into fourteen states and six centrally-administered “territories.” But the boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any natural features of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words. Language divided us: Kerala was for speakers of Malayalam, the only palindromically-named tongue on earth; in Karnataka you were supposed to speak Kanarese; and the amputated state of Madras—known today as Tamil Nadu—enclosed the
aficionados
of Tamil. Owing to some oversight, however, nothing was done with the state of Bombay; and in the city of Mumbadevi, the language marches grew longer and noisier and finally metamorphosed into political parties, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (“United Maharashtra Party”) which stood for the Marathi language and demanded the creation of the Deccan state of Maharashtra, and the Maha Gujarat Parishad (“Great Gujarat Party”) which marched beneath the banner of the Gujarati language and dreamed of a state to the north of Bombay City, stretching all the way to the Kathiawar peninsula and the Rann of Kutch … I am warming over all this cold history, these old dead struggles between the barren angularity of Marathi which was born in the arid heat of the Deccan and Gujarati’s boggy, Kathiawari softness, to explain why, on the day in February 1957 immediately following our return from Agra, Methwold’s Estate was cut off from the city by a stream of chanting humanity which flooded Warden Road more completely than monsoon water, a parade so long that it took two days to pass, and