Midnights Children

suffered so badly?”
    There is a cough in the doorway. I am standing up now, shivering with pain. Pia is standing, too, her hair dripping off her head like tears. Mary Pereira is in the doorway, coughing, scarlet confusion all over her skin, holding a brown paper parcel in her hands.
    “See, baba, what I have forgotten,” she finally manages to say, “You are a big man now: look, your mother has sent you two pairs of nice, white long trousers.”
    After I got so indiscreetly carried away while trying to cheer up my aunt, it became difficult for me to remain in the apartment on Marine Drive. Long intense telephone calls were made regularly during the next few days; Hanif persuading someone, while Pia gesticulated, that perhaps now, after five weeks … and one evening after I got back from school, my mother picked me up in our old Rover, and my first exile came to an end.
    Neither during our drive home, nor at any other time, was I given any explanation for my exile. I decided, therefore, that I would not make it my business to ask. I was wearing long pants now; I was, therefore, a man, and must bear my troubles accordingly. I told my mother: “The finger is not so bad. Hanif mamu has taught me to hold the pen differently, so I can write okay.” She seemed to be concentrating very hard on the road. “It was a nice holiday,” I added, politely. “Thank you for sending me.”
    “O child,” she burst out, “with your face like the sun coming out, what can I tell you? Be good with your father; he is not happy these days.” I said I would try to be good; she seemed to lose control of the wheel and we passed dangerously near a bus. “What a world,” she said after a time, “Terrible things happen and you don’t know how.”
    “I know,” I agreed, “Ayah has been telling me.” My mother looked at me fearfully, then glared at Mary in the back seat. “You black woman,” she cried, “what have you been saying?” I explained about Mary’s stories of miraculous events, but the dire rumors seemed to calm my mother down. “What do you know,” she sighed, “You are only a child.”
    What do I know, Amma? I know about the Pioneer Café! Suddenly, as we drove home, I was filled once again with my recent lust for revenge upon my perfidious mother, a lust which had faded in the brilliant glare of my exile, but which now returned and was united with my new-born loathing of Homi Catrack. This two-headed lust was the demon which possessed me, and drove me into doing the worst thing I ever did … “Everything will be all right,” my mother was saying, “You just wait and see.”
    Yes, mother.
    It occurs to me that I have said nothing, in this entire piece, about the Midnight Children’s Conference; but then, to tell the truth, they didn’t seem very important to me in those days. I had other things on my mind.

Commander Sabarmati’s Baton
    A FEW MONTHS LATER , when Mary Pereira finally confessed her crime, and revealed the secrets of her eleven-year-long haunting by the ghost of Joseph D’Costa, we learned that, after her return from exile, she was badly shocked by the condition into which the ghost had fallen in her absence. It had begun to decay, so that now bits of it were missing: an ear, several toes on each foot, most of its teeth; and there was a hole in its stomach larger than an egg. Distressed by this crumbling spectre, she asked it (when she was sure nobody else was within earshot): “O God, Joe, what you been doing to yourself?” He replied that the responsibility for her crime had been placed squarely on his shoulders until she confessed, and it was playing hell with his system. From that moment it became inevitable that she would confess; but each time she looked at me she found herself prevented from doing so. Still, it was only a matter of time.
    In the meanwhile, and utterly ignorant of how close I was to being exposed as a fraud, I was attempting to come to terms with a Methwold’s Estate in which, too, a number of transformations had occurred. In the first place, my father seemed to want nothing more to do with me, an attitude of mind which I found hurtful but (considering my mutilated body) entirely understandable. In the second place, there was the remarkable change in the fortunes of the Brass Monkey. “My position in this household,” I was obliged to admit to myself, “has been usurped.” Because now it was the Monkey whom my father admitted into the abstract sanctum of