Midnights Children

dinner. It was a peaceful little family scene; but the peace was shattered, abruptly, by the crash of a slamming door. Hanif dropped his pencil as Pia, having slammed the front door, flung open the living-room door with equal force. Then he boomed cheerfully, “So, wife: what’s the drama?” … But Pia was not to be defused. “Scribble,” she said, her hand slicing air, “Allah, don’t stop for me! So much talent, a person cannot go to the pot in this house without finding your genius. Are you happy, husband? We are making much money? God is good to you?” Still Hanif remained cheerful. “Come Pia, our little guest is here. Sit, have tea …” Actress Pia froze in an attitude of disbelief. “O God! Such a family I have come to! My life is in ruins, and you offer tea; your mother offers petrol! All is madness …” And Uncle Hanif, frowning now: “Pia, the boy …” A shriek. “Ahaaa! The boy—but the boy has suffered; he is suffering now; he knows what it is to lose, to feel forlorn! I, too, have been abandoned: I am great actress, and here I sit surrounded by tales of bicycle-postmen and donkey-cart drivers! What do you know of a woman’s grief? Sit, sit, let some fat rich Parsee film-producer give you charity, never mind that your wife wears paste jewels and no new saris for two years; a woman’s back is broad, but, beloved husband, you have made my days into deserts! Go, ignore me now, just leave me in peace to jump from the window! I will go into the bedroom now,” she concluded, “and if you hear no more from me it is because my heart is broken and I am dead.” More doors slammed: it was a terrific exit.
    Uncle Hanif broke a pencil, absent-mindedly, into two halves. He shook his head wonderingly: “What’s got into her?” But I knew. I, bearer of secrets, threatened by policemen, I knew and bit my lip. Because, trapped as I was in the crisis of the marriage of my uncle and aunt, I had broken my recently-made rule and entered Pia’s head; I had seen her visit to Homi Catrack and knew that, for years now, she had been his fancy-woman; I had heard him telling her that he had tired of her charms, and there was somebody else now; and I, who would have hated him enough just for seducing my beloved aunt, found myself hating him twice as passionately for doing her the dishonor of discarding her.
    “Go to her,” my uncle was saying, “Maybe you can cheer her up.”
    The boy Saleem moves through repeatedly-slammed doors to the sanctum of his tragic aunt; and enters, to find her loveliest of bodies splayed out in wondrous abandon across the marital bed—where, only last night, bodies nestled against bodies—where paper passed from hand to hand … a hand flutters at her heart; her chest heaves; and the boy Saleem stammers, “Aunt, O Aunt, I’m sorry.”
    A banshee-wail from the bed. Tragedienne’s arms, flying outwards towards me. “Hai! Hai, hai!
Ai
-hai-hai!” Needing no further invitation, I fly towards those arms; I fling myself between them, to lie atop my mourning aunt. The arms close around me, tightertighter, nails digging through my school-white shirt, but I don’t care!—Because something has started twitching below my S-buckled belt. Aunty Pia thrashes about beneath me in her despair and I thrash with her, remembering to keep my right hand clear of the action. I hold it stiffly out above the fray. One-handed, I begin to caress her, not knowing what I’m doing, I’m only ten years old and still in shorts, but I’m crying because she’s crying, and the room is full of the noise—and on the bed as two bodies begin to acquire a kind of rhythm, unnameable unthinkable, hips pushing up towards me, while she yells, “O! O God, O God, O!” And maybe I am yelling too, I can’t say, something is taking over from grief here, while my uncle snaps pencils on a striped sofa, something getting stronger, as she writhes and twists beneath me, and at last in the grip of a strength greater than my strength I am bringing down my right hand, I have forgotten my finger, and when it touches her breast, wound presses against skin …
    “Yaaaouuuu!” I scream with the pain; and my aunt, snapping out of the macabre spell of those few moments, pushes me off her and delivers a resounding wallop to my face. Fortunately, it is the left cheek; there is no danger of damage to my remaining good ear.
“Badmaash!
” my aunty screams, “A family of maniacs and perverts, woe is me, what woman ever