Midnights Children

mood at the breakfast-table, before he shaved his chin; but as his facial hairs whitened along with his fading skin, this fixed point of happiness ceased to be a certainty; and the day came when he lost his temper at breakfast for the first time. That was the day on which taxes were raised and tax thresholds simultaneously lowered; my father flung down the
Times of India
with a violent gesture and glared around him with the red eyes I knew he only wore in his tempers. “It’s like going to the bathroom!” he exploded, cryptically; egg toast tea shuddered in the blast of his wrath. “You raise your shirt and lower your trousers! Wife, this government is going to the bathroom all over us!” And my mother, blushing pink through the black, “Janum, the children, please,” but he had stomped off, leaving me with a clear understanding of what people meant when they said the country was going to pot.
    In the following weeks my father’s morning chin continued to fade, and something more than the peace of the breakfast-table was lost: he began to forget what sort of man he’d been in the old days before Narlikar’s treason. The rituals of our home life began to decay. He began to stay away from the breakfast-table, so that Amina could not wheedle money out of him; but, to compensate, he became careless with his cash, and his discarded clothes were full of rupee notes and coins, so that by picking his pockets she could make ends meet. But a more depressing indication of his withdrawal from family life was that he rarely told us bedtime stories any more, and when he did we didn’t enjoy them, because they had become ill-imagined and unconvincing. Their subject-matter was still the same, princes goblins flying horses and adventures in magic lands, but in his perfunctory voice we could hear the creaks and groans of a rusting, decayed imagination.
    My father had succumbed to abstraction. It seems that Narlikar’s death and the end of his tetrapod dream had shown Ahmed Sinai the unreliable nature of human relationships; he had decided to divest himself of all such ties. He took to rising before dawn and locking himself with his current Fernanda or Flory in his downstairs office, outside whose windows the two evergreen trees he planted to commemorate my birth and the Monkey’s had already grown tall enough to keep out most of the daylight when it arrived. Since we hardly ever dared disturb him, my father entered a deep solitude, a condition so unusual in our overcrowded country as to border on abnormality; he began to refuse food from our kitchen and to live on cheap rubbish brought daily by his girl in a tiffin-carrier, lukewarm parathas and soggy vegetable samosas and bottles of fizzy drinks. A strange perfume wafted out from under his office door; Amina took it for the odor of stale air and second-rate food; but it’s my belief that an old scent had returned in a stronger form, the old aroma of failure which had hung about him from the earliest days.
    He sold off the many tenements or chawls which he’d bought cheaply on his arrival in Bombay, and on which our family’s fortunes had been based. Freeing himself from all business connections with human beings—even his anonymous tenants in Kurla and Worli, in Matunga and Mazagaon and Mahim—he liquefied his assets, and entered the rarefied and abstract air of financial speculation. Locked in his office, in those days, his one contact with the outside world (apart from his poor Fernandas) was his telephone. He spent his day deep in conference with this instrument, as it put his money into suchandsuch shares or soandso stocks, as it invested in government bonds or bear market equities, selling long or short as he commanded … and invariably getting the best price of the day. In a streak of good fortune comparable only to my mother’s success on the horses all those years previously, my father and his telephone took the stock exchange by storm, a feat made more remarkable by Ahmed Sinai’s constantly-worsening drinking habits. Djinn-sodden, he nevertheless managed to ride high on the abstract undulations of the money market, reacting to its emotional, unpredictable shifts and changes the way a lover does to his beloved’s slightest whim … he could sense when a share would rise, when the peak would come; and he always got out before the fall. This was how his plunge into the abstract solitude of his telephonic days was disguised, how his financial coups