Midnights Children

seat before you could lift it; but Catrack (out of charity? Or for another, soon-to-be-revealed reason?) paid my uncle a studio salary. That was how they survived, Hanif and Pia, on the largess of the man who would, in time, become the second human being to be murdered by mushrooming Saleem.
    Homi Catrack begged him, “Maybe just one love scene?” And Pia, “What do you think, village people are going to give their rupees to see women pickling Alfonsos?” But Hanif, obdurately: “This is a film about work, not kissing. And nobody pickles Alfonsos. You must use mangoes with bigger stones.”
    The ghost of Joe D’Costa did not, so far as I know, follow Mary Pereira into exile; however, his absence only served to increase her anxiety. She began, in these Marine Drive days, to fear that he would become visible to others besides herself, and reveal, during her absence, the awful secrets of what happened at Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on Independence night. So each morning she left the apartment in a state of jelly-like worry, arriving at Buckingham Villa in near-collapse; only when she found that Joe had remained both invisible and silent did she relax. But after she returned to Marine Drive, laden with samosas and cakes and chutneys, her anxiety began to mount once again … but as I had resolved (having troubles enough of my own) to keep out of all heads except the Children’s, I did not understand why.
    Panic attracts panic; on her journeys, sitting in jam-packed buses (the trams had just been discontinued), Mary heard all sorts of rumors and tittle-tattle, which she relayed to me as matters of absolute fact. According to Mary, the country was in the grip of a sort of supernatural invasion. “Yes, baba, they say in Kurukshetra an old Sikh woman woke up in her hut and saw the old-time war of the Kurus and Pandavas happening right outside! It was in the papers and all, she pointed to the place where she saw the chariots of Arjun and Karna, and there were truly wheel-marks in the mud! Baap-re-baap, such so-bad things: at Gwalior they have seen the ghost of the Rani of Jhansi; rakshasas have been seen many-headed like Ravana, doing things to women and pulling down trees with one finger. I am good Christian woman, baba; but it gives me fright when they tell that the tomb of Lord Jesus is found in Kashmir. On the tombstones are carved two pierced feet and a local fisherwoman has sworn she saw them bleeding—real blood, God save us!—on Good Friday … what is happening, baba, why these old things can’t stay dead and not plague honest folk?” And I, wide-eyed, listening; and although my uncle Hanif roared with laughter, I remain, today, half-convinced that in that time of accelerated events and diseased hours the past of India rose up to confound her present; the new-born, secular state was being given an awesome reminder of its fabulous antiquity, in which democracy and votes for women were irrelevant … so that people were seized by atavistic longings, and forgetting the new myth of freedom reverted to their old ways, their old regionalist loyalties and prejudices, and the body politic began to crack. As I said: lop off just one fingertip and you never know what fountains of confusion you will unleash.
    “And cows, baba, have been vanishing into thin air; poof! and in the villages, the peasants must starve.”
    It was at this time that I, too, was possessed by a strange demon; but in order that you may understand me properly, I must begin my account of the episode on an innocent evening, when Hanif and Pia Aziz had a group of friends round for cards.
    My aunty was prone to exaggerate; because although
Filmfare
and
Screen Goddess
were absent, my uncle’s house was still a popular place. On card-evenings, it would burst at the seams with jazzmen gossiping about quarrels and reviews in American magazines, and singers who carried throat-sprays in their handbags, and members of the Uday Shankar dance-troupe, which was trying to form a new style of dance by fusing Western ballet with bharatanatyam; there were musicians who had been signed up to perform in the All-India Radio music festival, the Sangeet Sammelan; there were painters who argued violently amongst each other. The air was thick with political, and other, chatter. “As a matter of fact, I am the only artist in India who paints with a genuine sense of ideological commitment!”—“O, it’s too bad about Ferdy, he’ll never get another band