Midnights Children

tumble of a brain, in which everything ran into everything else and the white dot of consciousness jumped about like a wild flea from one thing to the next … Amina Sinai, whose assiduous ordering-instincts had provided her with a brain of almost abnormal neatness, was a curious recruit to the ranks of confusion.)
    We headed north, past Breach Candy Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north along Hornby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali’s island tomb, north off what had once been (before the dream of the first William Methwold became a reality) the island of Bombay. We were heading towards the anonymous mass of tenements and fishing-villages and textile-plants and film-studios that the city became in these northern zones (not far from here! Not at all far from where I sit within view of local trains!) … an area which was, in those days, utterly unknown to me; I rapidly became disoriented and was then obliged to admit to myself that I was lost. At last, down an unprepossessing side-street full of drainpipe-sleepers and bicycle-repair shops and tattered men and boys, we stopped. Clusters of children assailed my mother as she descended; she, who could never shoo away a fly, handed out small coins, thus enlarging the crowd enormously. Eventually, she struggled away from them and headed down the street; there was a boy pleading, “Gib the car poliss, Begum? Number one A-class poliss, Begum? I watch car until you come, Begum? I very fine watchman, ask anyone!” … In some panic, I listened in for her reply. How could I get out of this boot under the eyes of a guardian-urchin? There was the embarrassment of it; and besides, my emergence would have created a sensation in the street … my mother said, “No.” She was disappearing down the street; the would-be polisher and watchman gave up eventually; there was a moment when all eyes turned to watch the passing of a second car, just in case it, too, stopped to disgorge a lady who gave away coins as if they were nuts; and in that instant (I had been looking through several pairs of eyes to help me choose my moment) I performed my trick with the pink plastic and was out in the street beside a closed car-boot in a flash. Setting my lips grimly, and ignoring all outstretched palms, I set off in the direction my mother had taken, a pocket-sized sleuth with the nose of a bloodhound and a loud drum pounding in the place where my heart should have been … and arrived, a few minutes later, at the Pioneer Café.
    Dirty glass in the window; dirty glasses on the tables—the Pioneer Café was not much when compared to the Gaylords and Kwalitys of the city’s more glamorous parts; a real rutputty joint, with painted boards proclaiming LOVELY LASSI and FUNTABULOUS FALOODA and BHEL-PURIBOMBAY FASHION , with filmi playback music blaring out from a cheap radio by the cash-till, a long narrow greeny room lit by flickering neon, a forbidding world in which broken-toothed men sat at reccine-covered tables with crumpled cards and expressionless eyes. But for all its grimy decrepitude, the Pioneer Café was a repository of many dreams. Early each morning, it would be full of the best-looking ne’er-do-wells in the city, all the goondas and taxi-drivers and petty smugglers and racecourse tipsters who had once, long ago, arrived in the city dreaming of film stardom, of grotesquely vulgar homes and black money payments; because every morning at six, the major studios would send minor functionaries to the Pioneer Café to rope in extras for the day’s shooting. For half an hour each morning, when D. W. Rama Studios and Filmistan Talkies and R K Films were taking their pick, the Pioneer was the focus of all the city’s ambitions and hopes; then the studio scouts left, accompanied by the day’s lucky ones, and the Café emptied into its habitual, neon-lit torpor. Around lunchtime, a different set of dreams walked into the Café, to spend the afternoon hunched over cards and Lovely Lassi and rough biris—different men with different hopes: I didn’t know it then, but the afternoon Pioneer was a notorious Communist Party hangout.
    It was afternoon; I saw my mother enter the Pioneer Café; not daring to follow her, I stayed in the street, pressing my nose against a spider-webbed corner of the grubby window-pane; ignoring the curious glances I got—because my whites, although boot-stained, were nevertheless starched; my hair, although boot-rumpled, was well-oiled; my shoes,