Midnights Children

two in Widow hands which rolling rolling halves of children roll them into little balls the balls are green the night is black. And little balls fly into night between the walls the children shriek as one by one the Widow’s hand. And in a corner the Monkey and I (the walls are green the shadows black) cowering crawling wide high walls green fading into black there is no roof and Widow’s hand comes onebyone the children scream and mmff and little balls and hand and scream and mmff and splashing stains of black. Now only she and I and no more screams the Widow’s hand comes hunting hunting the skin is green the nails are black towards the corner hunting hunting while we shrink closer into the corner our skin is green our fear is black and now the Hand comes reaching reaching and she my sister pushes me out out of the corner while she stays cowering staring the hand the nails are curling scream and mmff and splash of black and up into the high as sky and laughing Widow tearing I am rolling into little balls the balls are green and out into the night the night is black …
    The fever broke today. For two days (I’m told) Padma has been sitting up all night, placing cold wet flannels on my forehead, holding me through my shivers and dreams of Widow’s hands; for two days she has been blaming herself for her potion of unknown herbs. “But,” I reassure her, “this time, it wasn’t anything to do with that.” I recognize this fever; it’s come up from inside me and from nowhere else; like a bad stink, it’s oozed through my cracks. I caught exactly such a fever on my tenth birthday, and spent two days in bed; now, as my memories return to leak out of me, this old fever has come back, too. “Don’t worry,” I say, “I caught these germs almost twenty-one years ago.”
    We are not alone. It is morning at the pickle-factory; they have brought my son to see me. Someone (never mind who) stands beside Padma at my bedside, holding him in her arms. “Baba, thank God you are better, you don’t know what you were talking in your sickness.” Someone speaks anxiously, trying to force her way into my story ahead of time; but it won’t work … someone, who founded this pickle-factory and its ancillary bottling works, who has been looking after my impenetrable child, just as once … wait on! She nearly wormed it out of me then, but fortunately I’ve still got my wits about me, fever or no fever! Someone will just have to step back and remain cloaked in anonymity until it’s her turn; and that won’t be until the very end. I turn my eyes away from her to look at Padma. “Do not think,” I admonish her, “that because I had a fever, the things I told you were not completely true. Everything happened just as I described.”
    “Oh God, you and your stories,” she cries, “all day, all night—you have made yourself sick! Stop some time, na, what will it hurt?” I set my lips obstinately; and now she, with a sudden change of mood: “So, tell me now, mister: is there anything you want?”
    “Green chutney,” I request, “Bright green—green as grasshoppers.” And someone who cannot be named remembers and tells Padma (speaking in the soft voice which is only used at sickbeds and funerals), “I know what he means.”
    … Why, at this crucial instant, when all manner of things were waiting to be described—when the Pioneer Café was so close, and the rivalry of knees and nose—did I introduce a mere condiment into the conversation? (Why do I waste time, in this account, on a humble preserve, when I could be describing the elections of 1957—when all India is waiting, twenty-one years ago, to vote?) Because I sniffed the air; and scented, behind the solicitous expressions of my visitors, a sharp whiff of danger. I intended to defend myself; but I required the assistance of chutney …
    I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what has remained undescribed: through green-tinged glass windows, my room looks out on to an iron catwalk and then down to the cooking-floor, where copper vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps, working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle fumes; while (looking the other way, through a green-tinged window on the world) railway tracks shine dully in morning sun, bridged over at regular intervals by the messy gantries of the electrification system. In daylight, our saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance