Midnights Children

scuffed as they were, were still the plimsolls of a prosperous child—I followed her with my eyes as she went hesitantly and verruca-hobbled past rickety tables and hard-eyed men; I saw my mother sit down at a shadowed table at the far end of the narrow cavern; and then I saw the man who rose to greet her.
    The skin on his face hung in folds which revealed that he had once been overweight; his teeth were stained with paan. He wore a clean white kurta with Lucknow-work around the buttonholes. He had long hair, poetically long, hanging lankly over his ears; but the top of his head was bald and shiny. Forbidden syllables echoed in my ears: Na. Dir. Nadir. I realized that I wished desperately that I’d never resolved to come.
    Once upon a time there was an underground husband who fled, leaving loving messages of divorce; a poet whose verses didn’t even rhyme, whose life was saved by pie-dogs. After a lost decade he emerged from goodness-knows-where, his skin hanging loose in memory of his erstwhile plumpness; and, like his once-upon-a-time wife, he had acquired a new name … Nadir Khan was now Qasim Khan, official candidate of the official Communist Party of India. Lai Qasim. Qasim the Red. Nothing is without meaning: not without reason are blushes red. My uncle Hanif said, “Watch out for the Communists!” and my mother turned scarlet; politics and emotions were united in her cheeks … through the dirty, square, glassy cinema-screen of the Pioneer Café’s window, I watched Amina Sinai and the no-longer-Nadir play out their love scene; they performed with the ineptitude of genuine amateurs.
    On the reccine-topped table, a packet of cigarettes: State Express 555. Numbers, too, have significance: 420, the name given to frauds; 1001, the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities—a number beloved of poets and detested by politicians, for whom all alternative versions of the world are threats; and 555, which for years I believed to be the most sinister of numbers, the cipher of the Devil, the Great Beast, Shaitan himself. (Cyrus-the-great told me so, and I didn’t contemplate the possibility of his being wrong. But he was: the true demonic number is not 555, but 666: yet, in my mind, a dark aura hangs around the three fives to this day.) … But I am getting carried away. Suffice to say that Nadir-Qasim’s preferred brand was the aforesaid State Express; that the figure five was repeated three times on the packet; and that its manufacturers were W.D. & H.O. Wills. Unable to look into my mother’s face, I concentrated on the cigarette-packet, cutting from two-shot of lovers to this extreme close-up of nicotine.
    But now hands enter the frame—first the hands of Nadir-Qasim, their poetic softness somewhat callused these days; hands flickering like candle-flames, creeping forward across reccine, then jerking back; next a woman’s hands, black as jet, inching forwards like elegant spiders; hands lifting up, off reccine tabletop, hands hovering above three fives, beginning the strangest of dances, rising, falling, circling one another, weaving in and out between each other, hands longing for touch, hands outstretching tensing quivering demanding to be—but always at last jerking back, fingertips avoiding fingertips, because what I’m watching here on my dirty glass cinema-screen is, after all, an Indian movie, in which physical contact is forbidden lest it corrupt the watching flower of Indian youth; and there are feet beneath the table and faces above it, feet advancing towards feet, faces tumbling softly towards faces, but jerking away all of a sudden in a cruel censor’s cut … two strangers, each bearing a screen-name which is not the name of their birth, act out their half-unwanted roles. I left the movie before the end, to slip back into the boot of the unpolished unwatched Rover, wishing I hadn’t gone to see it, unable to resist wanting to watch it all over again.
    What I saw at the very end: my mother’s hands raising a half-empty glass of Lovely Lassi; my mother’s lips pressing gently, nostalgically against the mottled glass; my mother’s hands handing the glass to her Nadir-Qasim; who also applied, to the opposite side of the glass, his own, poetic mouth. So it was that life imitated bad art, and my uncle Hanif’s sister brought the eroticism of the indirect kiss into the green neon dinginess of the Pioneer Café.
    To sum up: in the high summer of 1957, at the peak of an election