Midnights Children

what the hell’d you do to her anyway?” … But I held up a dignified hand, commanding and being accorded silence.
    “No time for that now, man,” I said. “The thing is, I need to know how to open locks without keys.”
    A true fact about Sonny Ibrahim: despite all his bullfighting dreams, his genius lay in the realm of mechanical things. For some time now, he had taken on the job of maintaining all the bikes on Methwold’s Estate in return for gifts of comic-books and a free supply of fizzy drinks. Even Evelyn Lilith Burns gave her beloved Indiabike into his care. All machines, it seemed, were won over by the innocent delight with which he caressed their moving parts; no contraption could resist his ministrations. To put it another way: Sonny Ibrahim had become (out of a spirit of pure inquiry) an expert at picking locks.
    Now offered a chance of demonstrating his loyalty to me, his eyes brightened. “Jus’ show me the lock, man! Lead me to the thing!”
    When we were sure we were unobserved, we crept along the driveway between Buckingham Villa and Sonny’s Sans Souci; we stood behind my family’s old Rover; and I pointed at the boot. “That’s the one,” I stated. “I need to be able to open it from the outside, and the inside also.”
    Sonny’s eyes widened. “Hey, what’re you up to, man? You running away from home secretly and all?”
    Finger to lips, I adopted a mysterious expression. “Can’t explain, Sonny,” I said solemnly, “Top-drawer classified information.”
    “Wow, man,” Sonny said, and showed me in thirty seconds how to open the boot with the aid of a strip of thin pink plastic. “Take it, man,” said Sonny Ibrahim, “You need it more than me.”
    Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could never manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband’s unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers … shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips. But now, hidden in the boot of the Rover, there travelled with her a stowaway, who lay hidden and protected by stolen cushions, clutching a thin strip of pink plastic in his hand.
    O, the suffering one undergoes in the name of righteousness! The bruising and the bumps! The breathing-in of rubbery boot-air through jolted teeth! And constantly, the fear of discovery … “Suppose she really does go shopping? Will the boot suddenly fly open? Will live chickens be flung in, feet tied together, wings clipped, fluttery pecky birds invading my hidey-hole? Will she see, my God, I’ll have to be silent for a week!” My knees drawn in beneath my chin—which was protected against knee-bumps by an old faded cushion—I voyaged into the unknown in the vehicle of maternal perfidy. My mother was a cautious driver; she went slowly, and turned corners with care; but afterwards I was bruised black and blue and Mary Pereira berated me soundly for getting into fights: “Arré God what a thing it’s a wonder they didn’t smash you to pieces completely my God what will you grow up into you bad black boy you haddi-phaelwan you skin-and-bone wrestler!”
    To take my mind off the jolting darkness I entered, with extreme caution, that part of my mother’s mind which was in charge of driving operations, and as a result was able to follow our route. (And, also, to discern in my mother’s habitually tidy mind an alarming degree of disorder. I was already beginning, in those days, to classify people by their degree of internal tidiness, and to discover that I preferred the messier type, whose thoughts, spilling constantly into one another so that anticipatory images of food interfered with the serious business of earning a living and sexual fantasies were superimposed upon their political musings, bore a closer relationship to my own pell-mell