Midnights Children

she once developed a slight case of tineachloris and he dusted her with yellow powder; after this treatment—which required him to rub the powder in, gently but firmly, although the soft secret body began to shake and quiver and he heard helpless laughter coming through the sheet, because Naseem Ghani was very ticklish—the itching went away, but Naseem soon found a new set of complaints. She waxed anemic in the summer and bronchial in the winter. (“Her tubes are most delicate,” Ghani explained, “like little flutes.”) Far away the Great War moved from crisis to crisis, while in the cobwebbed house Doctor Aziz was also engaged in a total war against his sectioned patient’s inexhaustible complaints. And, in all those war years, Naseem never repeated an illness. “Which only shows,” Ghani told him, “that you are a good doctor. When you cure, she is cured for good. But alas!”—he struck his forehead—“She pines for her late mother, poor baby, and her body suffers. She is a too loving child.”
    So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination, she accompanied him on all his rounds, she moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of the ankles; he could smell her scent of lavender and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little girl; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face.
    His mother lay on her bed, spreadeagled on her stomach. “Come, come and press me,” she said, “my doctor son whose fingers can soothe his old mother’s muscles. Press, press, my child with his expression of a constipated goose.” He kneaded her shoulders. She grunted, twitched, relaxed. “Lower now,” she said, “now higher. To the right. Good. My brilliant son who cannot see what that Ghani landowner is doing. So clever, my child, but he doesn’t guess why that girl is forever ill with her piffling disorders. Listen, my boy: see the nose on your face for once: that Ghani thinks you are a good catch for her. Foreign-educated and all. I have worked in shops and been undressed by the eyes of strangers so that you should marry that Naseem! Of course I am right; otherwise why would he look twice at our family?” Aziz pressed his mother. “O God, stop now, no need to kill me because I tell you the truth!”
    By 1918, Aadam Aziz had come to live for his regular trips across the lake. And now his eagerness became even more intense, because it became clear that, after three years, the landowner and his daughter had become willing to lower certain barriers. Now, for the first time, Ghani said, “A lump in the right chest. Is it worrying, Doctor? Look. Look well.” And there, framed in the hole, was a perfectly-formed and lyrically lovely … “I must touch it,” Aziz said, fighting with his voice. Ghani slapped him on the back. “Touch, touch!” he cried, “The hands of the healer! The curing touch, eh, Doctor?” And Aziz reached out a hand … “Forgive me for asking; but is it the lady’s time of the month?” … Little secret smiles appearing on the faces of the lady wrestlers. Ghani, nodding affably: “Yes. Don’t be so embarrassed, old chap. We are family and doctor now.” And Aziz, “Then don’t worry. The lumps will go when the time ends.” … And the next time, “A pulled muscle in the back of her thigh, Doctor Sahib. Such pain!” And there, in the sheet, weakening the eyes of Aadam Aziz, hung a superbly rounded and impossible buttock … And now Aziz: “Is it permitted that …” Whereupon a word from Ghani; an obedient reply from behind the sheet; a drawstring pulled; and pajamas fall from the celestial rump, which swells wondrously through the hole. Aadam Aziz forces himself into a medical frame of mind … reaches out … feels. And swears to himself, in amazement, that he sees the bottom reddening in a shy, but compliant blush.
    That evening, Aadam contemplated the blush. Did the magic of the sheet work on both sides of the hole? Excitedly, he envisaged his headless Naseem tingling beneath the scrutiny of his eyes, his thermometer, his stethoscope, his fingers, and trying to build a picture in her mind of
him
. She was at a