Midnights Children

antibodies. And my mother, crying, crying-crying, crying … “I don’t understand. A doctor’s daughter, and I don’t understand.”
    Have Alpha and Omega unmasked me? Is rhesus pointing its unanswerable finger? And will Mary Pereira be obliged to … I wake up in a cool, white, Venetian-blinded room with All-India Radio for company. Tony Brent is singing: “Red Sails In The Sunset.”
    Ahmed Sinai, his face ravaged by whisky and now by something worse, stands beside the Venetian blind. Amina, speaking in whispers. Again, snatches across the million miles of distance. Janumplease. Ibegyou. No, what are you saying. Of course it was. Of course you are the. How could you think I would. Who could it have. O God don’t just stand and look. I swear Iswearonmymother’shead. Now shh he is …
    A new song from Tony Brent, whose repertoire today is uncannily similar to Wee Willie Winkie’s: “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?” hangs in the air, floating on radio waves. My father advances on my bed, towers over me, I’ve never seen him look like this before. “Abba …” And he, “I should have known. Just look, where am I in that face. That nose, I should have …” He turns on his heel and leaves the room; my mother follows him, too distraught to whisper now: “No, janum, I won’t let you believe such things about me! I’ll kill myself! I’ll,” and the door swings shut behind them. There is a noise outside: like a clap. Or a slap. Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
    Tony Brent begins crooning his latest hit into my good ear: and assures me, melodiously, that “The Clouds Will Soon Roll By.”
    … And now I, Saleem Sinai, intend briefly to endow myself-then with the benefits of hindsight; destroying the unities and conventions of fine writing, I make him cognizant of what was to come, purely so that he can be permitted to think the following thoughts: “O eternal opposition of inside and outside! Because a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. The body, on the other hand, is homogeneous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, a sacred temple, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness. But the loss of my finger (which was conceivably foretold by the pointing digit of Raleigh’s fisherman), not to mention the removal of certain hairs from my head, has undone all that. Thus we enter into a state of affairs which is nothing short of revolutionary; and its effect on history is bound to be pretty damn startling. Uncork the body, and God knows what you permit to come tumbling out. Suddenly you are forever other than you were; and the world becomes such that parents can cease to be parents, and love can turn to hate. And these, mark you, are only the effects on private life. The consequences for the sphere of public action, as will be shown, are—were—will be no less profound.”
    Finally, withdrawing my gift of foreknowledge, I leave you with the image of a ten-year-old boy with a bandaged finger, sitting in a hospital bed, musing about blood and noises-like-claps and the expression on his father’s face; zooming out slowly into long shot, I allow the sound-track music to drown my words, because Tony Brent is reaching the end of his medley, and his finale, too, is the same as Winkie’s: “Good Night, Ladies” is the name of the song. Merrily it rolls along, rolls along, rolls along …
    (Fade-out.)

The Kolynos Kid
    F ROM AYAH TO WIDOW , I’ve been the sort of person
to whom things have been done;
but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing himself as protagonist. Despite Mary’s crime; setting aside typhoid and snake-venom; dismissing two accidents, in washing-chest and circus-ring (when Sonny Ibrahim, master lock-breaker, permitted my budding horns of temples to invade his forcep-hollows, and through this combination unlocked the door to the midnight children); disregarding the effects of Evie’s push and my mother’s infidelity; in spite of losing my hair to the bitter violence of Emil Zagallo and my finger to the lip-licking goads of Masha Miovic; setting my face against all indications to the contrary, I shall now amplify, in the manner and with the proper solemnity of a man of science, my claim to a place at the center of things.
    “… Your life, which will be, in a sense, the