Midnights Children

MARCH past Bank Box Laundry, past Noor Ville and Laxmi Vilas, AAAAA and down into the mouth of the march, heads feet bodies, the waves of the march parting as I arrive, yelling blue murder, crashing into history on a runaway, young-girl’s bike.
    Hands grabbing handlebars as I slow down in the impassioned throng. Smiles filled with good teeth surround me. They are not friendly smiles. “Look look, a little laad-sahib comes down to join us from the big rich hill!” In Marathi which I hardly understand, it’s my worst subject at school, and the smiles asking, “You want to join S.M.S., little princeling?” And I, just about knowing what’s being said, but dazed into telling the truth, shake my head No. And the smiles, “Oho! The young nawab does not like our tongue! What does he like?” And another smile, “Maybe Gujarati! You speak Gujarati, my lord?” But my Gujarati was as bad as my Marathi; I only knew one thing in the marshy tongue of Kathiawar; and the smiles, urging, and the fingers, prodding, “Speak, little master! Speak some Gujarati!”—so I told them what I knew, a rhyme I’d learned from Glandy Keith Colaco at school, which he used when he was bullying Gujarati boys, a rhyme designed to make fun of the speech rhythms of the language:
    Soo ché? Saru ché!
    Danda lé ké maru ché!
    How are you?—I am well!—I’ll take a stick and thrash you to hell!
A nonsense; a nothing; nine words of emptiness … but when I’d recited them, the smiles began to laugh; and then voices near me and then further and further away began to take up my chant, HOW ARE YOU? I AM WELL !, and they lost interest in me, “Go go with your bicycle, masterji,” they scoffed, I’LL TAKE A STICK AND THRASH YOU TO HELL , I fled away up the hillock as my chant rushed forward and back, up to the front and down to the back of the two-day-long procession, becoming, as it went, a song of war.
    That afternoon, the head of the procession of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti collided at Kemp’s Corner, with the head of a Maha Gujarat Parishad demonstration; S.M.S. voices chanted “Soo ché? Saru ché!” and M.G.P. throats were opened in fury; under the posters of the Air-India rajah and of the Kolynos Kid, the two parties fell upon one another with no little zeal, and to the tune of my little rhyme the first of the language riots got under way, fifteen killed, over three hundred wounded.
    In this way I became directly responsible for triggering off the violence which ended with the partition of the state of Bombay, as a result of which the city became the capital of Maharashtra—so at least I was on the winning side.
    What was it in Evie’s head? Crime or dream? I never found out; but I had learned something else: when you go deep inside someone’s head,
they can feel you in there.
    Evelyn Lilith Burns didn’t want much to do with me after that day; but, strangely enough, I was cured of her. (Women have always been the ones to change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch must answer for who I am; and the Widow, who I’m keeping for the end; and after the end, Padma, my goddess of dung. Women have fixed me all right, but perhaps they were never central—perhaps the place which they should have filled, the hole in the center of me which was my inheritance from my grandfather Aadam Aziz, was occupied for too long by my voices. Or perhaps—one must consider all possibilities—they always made me a little afraid.)

My Tenth Birthday
    “O H MISTER, WHAT to say? Everything is my own poor fault!” Padma is back. And, now that I have recovered from the poison and am at my desk again, is too overwrought to be silent. Over and over, my returned lotus castigates herself, beats her heavy breasts, wails at the top of her voice. (In my fragile condition, this is fairly distressing; but I don’t blame her for anything.)
    “Only believe, mister, how much I have your well-being at heart! What creatures we are, we women, never for one moment at peace when our men lie sick and low … I am so happy you are well, you don’t know!”
    Padma’s story (given in her own words, and read back to her for eye-rolling, high-wailing, mammary-thumping confirmation): “It was my own foolish pride and vanity, Saleem baba, from which cause I did run from you, although the job here is good, and you so much needing a looker-after! But in a short time only I was dying to return.
    “So then I thought, how to go