Midnights Children

on.
    “You will kindly specify which portion of my daughter it is necessary to inspect. I will then issue her with my instructions to place the required segment against that hole which you see there. And so, in this fashion the thing may be achieved.”
    “But what, in any event, does the lady complain of?”—my grandfather, despairingly. To which Mr. Ghani, his eyes rising upwards in their sockets, his smile twisting into a grimace of grief, replied: “The poor child! She has a terrible, a too dreadful stomach-ache.”
    “In that case,” Doctor Aziz said with some restraint, “will she show me her stomach, please.”

Mercurochrome
    P ADMA—OUR PLUMP PADMA —is sulking magnificently. (She can’t read and, like all fish-lovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she doesn’t. Padma: strong, jolly, a consolation for my last days. But definitely a bitch-in-the-manger.) She attempts to cajole me from my desk: “Eat, na, food is spoiling.” I remain stubbornly hunched over paper. “But what is so precious,” Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air up-downup in exasperation, “to need all this writing-shiting?” I reply: now that I’ve let out the details of my birth, now that the perforated sheet stands between doctor and patient, there’s no going back. Padma snorts. Wrist smacks against forehead. “Okay, starve starve, who cares two pice?” Another louder, conclusive snort … but I take no exception to her attitude. She stirs a bubbling vat all day for a living; something hot and vinegary has steamed her up tonight. Thick of waist, somewhat hairy of forearm, she flounces, gesticulates, exits. Poor Padma. Things are always getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told her, when she was only small, that she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is “The One Who Possesses Dung.”
    In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a little of turmeric, ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air—just as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten up by curiosity, used to do night after night! I’ll begin at once: by revealing that my grandfather’s premonitions in the corridor were not without foundation. In the succeeding months and years, he fell under what I can only describe as the sorcerer’s spell of that enormous—and as yet unstained—perforated cloth.
    “Again?” Aadam’s mother said, rolling her eyes. “I tell you, my child, that girl is so sickly from too much soft living only. Too much sweetmeats and spoiling, because of the absence of a mother’s firm hand. But go, take care of your invisible patient, your mother is all right with her little nothing of a headache.”
    In those years, you see, the landowner’s daughter Naseem Ghani contracted a quite extraordinary number of minor illnesses, and each time a shikara-wallah was despatched to summon the tall young Doctor Sahib with the big nose who was making such a reputation for himself in the valley. Aadam Aziz’s visits to the bedroom with the shaft of sunlight and the three lady wrestlers became weekly events; and on each occasion he was vouchsafed a glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of the young woman’s body. Her initial stomach-ache was succeeded by a very slightly twisted right ankle, an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of the left foot, a tiny cut on the lower left calf. (“Tetanus is a killer, Doctor Sahib,” the landowner said, “My Naseem must not die for a scratch.”) There was the matter of her stiff right knee, which the Doctor was obliged to manipulate through the hole in the sheet … and after a time the illnesses leapt upwards, avoiding certain unmentionable zones, and began to proliferate around her upper half. She suffered from something mysterious which her father called Finger Rot, which made the skin flake off her hands; from weakness of the wrist-bones, for which Aadam prescribed calcium tablets; and from attacks of constipation, for which he gave her a course of laxatives, since there was no question of being permitted to administer an enema. She had fevers and she also had subnormal temperatures. At these times his thermometer would be placed under her armpit and he would hum and haw about the relative inefficiency of the method. In the opposite armpit