Midnights Children

Dung; who is Honey-Like, and Made of Gold; whose sons are Moisture and Mud …
    “You must be fevered still,” she expostulates, giggling. “How made of gold, mister? And you know I have no chil …”
    … Padma, who along with the yaksa genii, who represent the sacred treasure of the earth, and the sacred rivers, Ganga Yamuna Sarasvati, and the tree goddesses, is one of the Guardians of Life, beguiling and comforting mortal men while they pass through the dream-web of Maya … Padma, the Lotus calyx, which grew out of Vishnu’s navel, and from which Brahma himself was born; Padma the Source, the mother of Time! …
    “Hey,” she is sounding worried now, “let me feel your forehead!”
    … And where, in this scheme of things, am I? Am I (beguiled and comforted by her return) merely mortal—or something more? Such as—yes, why not—mammoth-trunked, Ganesh-nosed as I am—perhaps, the Elephant. Who, like Sin the moon, controls the waters, bringing the gift of rain … whose mother was Ira, queen consort of Kashyap, the Old Tortoise Man, lord and progenitor of all creatures on the earth … the Elephant who is also the rainbow, and lightning, and whose symbolic value, it must be added, is highly problematic and unclear.
    Well, then: elusive as rainbows, unpredictable as lightning, garrulous as Ganesh, it seems I have my own place in the ancient wisdom, after all.
    “My God,” Padma is rushing for a towel to wet in cold water, “your forehead is on fire! Better you lie down now; too soon for all this writing! The sickness is talking; not you.”
    But I’ve already lost a week; so, fever or no fever, I must press on; because, having (for the moment) exhausted this strain of old-time fabulism, I am coming to the fantastic heart of my own story, and must write in plain unveiled fashion, about the midnight children.
    Understand what I’m saying: during the first hour of August 15th, 1947—between midnight and one a.m.—no less than one thousand and one children were born within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India. In itself, that is not an unusual fact (although the resonances of the number are strangely literary)—at the time, births in our part of the world exceeded deaths by approximately six hundred and eighty-seven an hour. What made the event noteworthy (noteworthy! There’s a dispassionate word, if you like!) was the nature of these children, every one of whom was, through some freak of biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the moment, or just conceivably by sheer coincidence (although synchronicity on such a scale would stagger even C. G. Jung), endowed with features, talents or faculties which can only be described as miraculous. It was as though—if you will permit me one moment of fancy in what will otherwise be, I promise, the most sober account I can manage—as though history, arriving at a point of the highest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time.
    If a similar miracle was worked across the border, in the newly-partitioned-off Pakistan, I have no knowledge of it; my perceptions were, while they lasted, bounded by the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Himalaya mountains, but also by the artificial frontiers which pierced Punjab and Bengal.
    Inevitably, a number of these children failed to survive. Malnutrition, disease and the misfortunes of everyday life had accounted for no less than four hundred and twenty of them by the time I became conscious of their existence; although it is possible to hypothesize that these deaths, too, had their purpose, since 420 has been, since time immemorial, the number associated with fraud, deception and trickery. Can it be, then, that the missing infants were eliminated because they had turned out to be somehow inadequate, and were not the true children of that midnight hour? Well, in the first place, that’s another excursion into fantasy; in the second, it depends on a view of life which is both excessively theological and barbarically cruel. It is also an unanswerable question; any further examination of it is therefore profitless.
    By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all nearing their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant, for the most part, of one another’s existence—although there were certainly exceptions. In the town of Baud, on the Mahanadi river in Orissa,