Midnights Children

the Mexican Hat Dance with the girls from our sister institution—such as Masha Miovic the champion breast-stroker (“Hee hee,” said Glandy Keith Colaco) and Elizabeth Purkiss and Janey Jackson—European girls, my God, with loose skirts and kissing ways!—in short, my attention was continually seized by the painful, engrossing torture of growing up.
    Even a symbolic gander must come down, at last, to earth; so it isn’t nearly enough for me now (as it was not then) to confine my story to its miraculous aspects; I must return (as I used to return) to the quotidian; I must permit blood to spill.
    The first mutilation of Saleem Sinai, which was rapidly followed by the second, took place one Wednesday early in 1958—the Wednesday of the much-anticipated Social—under the auspices of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society. That is, it happened at school.
    Saleem’s assailant: handsome, frenetic, with a barbarian’s shaggy moustache: I present the leaping, hair-tearing figure of Mr. Emil Zagallo, who taught us geography and gymnastics, and who, that morning, unintentionally precipitated the crisis of my life. Zagallo claimed to be Peruvian, and was fond of calling us jungle-Indians, bead-lovers; he hung a print of a stern, sweaty soldier in a pointy tin hat and metal pantaloons above his blackboard and had a way of stabbing a finger at it in times of stress and shouting, “You see heem, you savages? Thees man eez civilization! You show heem respect: he’s got a
sword!
” And he’d swish his cane through the stone-walled air. We called him Pagal-Zagal, crazy Zagallo, because for all his talk of llamas and conquistadores and the Pacific Ocean we knew, with the absolute certainty of rumor, that he’d been in a Mazagaon tenement and his Goanese mother had been abandoned by a decamped shipping agent; so he was not only an “Anglo” but probably a bastard as well. Knowing this, we understood why Zagallo affected his Latin accent, and also why he was always in a fury, why he beat his fists against the stone walls of the classroom; but the knowledge didn’t stop us being afraid. And this Wednesday morning, we knew we were in for trouble, because Optional Cathedral had been cancelled.
    The Wednesday morning double period was Zagallo’s geography class; but only idiots and boys with bigoted parents attended it, because it was also the time when we could choose to troop off to St. Thomas’s Cathedral in crocodile formation, a long line of boys of every conceivable religious denomination, escaping from school into the bosom of the Christians’ considerately optional God. It drove Zagallo wild, but he was helpless; today, however, there was a dark glint in his eye, because the Croaker (that is to say, Mr. Crusoe the headmaster) had announced at morning Assembly that Cathedral was cancelled. In a bare, scraped voice emerging from his face of an anesthetized frog, he sentenced us to double geography and Pagal-Zagal, taking us all by surprise, because we hadn’t realized that God was permitted to exercise an option, too. Glumly we trooped into Zagallo’s lair; one of the poor idiots whose parents never allowed them to go to Cathedral whispered viciously into my ear, “You jus’ wait: he’ll really get you guys today.”
    Padma: he really did.
    Seated gloomily in class: Glandy Keith Colaco, Fat Perce Fishwala, Jimmy Kapadia the scholarship boy whose father was a taxi-driver, Hairoil Sabarmati, Sonny Ibrahim, Cyrus-the-great and I. Others, too, but there’s no time now, because with eyes narrowing in delight, crazy Zagallo is calling us to order.
    “Human geography,” Zagallo announces. “Thees ees
what?
Kapadia?”
    “Please sir don’t know sir.” Hands fly into the air—five belong to church-banned idiots, the sixth inevitably to Cyrus-the-great. But Zagallo is out for blood today: the godly are going to suffer. “Feelth from the jongle,” he buffets Jimmy Kapadia, then begins to twist an ear casually, “Stay in class sometimes and find out!”
    “Ow ow ow yes sir sorry sir …” Six hands are waving but Jimmy’s ear is in danger of coming off. Heroism gets the better of me … “Sir please stop sir he has a heart condition sir!” Which is true; but the truth is dangerous, because now Zagallo is rounding on me: “So, a leetle arguer, ees eet?” And I am being led by my hair to the front of the class. Under the relieved eyes of my fellow-pupils—
thank God it’s him not us
—I writhe in agony