Midnights Children

disadvantage, of course, having seen nothing but his hands … Aadam began to hope with an illicit desperation for Naseem Ghani to develop a migraine or graze her unseen chin, so they could look each other in the face. He knew how unprofessional his feelings were; but did nothing to stifle them. There was not much he could do. They had acquired a life of their own. In short: my grandfather had fallen in love, and had come to think of the perforated sheet as something sacred and magical, because through it he had seen the things which had filled up the hole inside him which had been created when he had been hit on the nose by a tussock and insulted by the boatman Tai.
    On the day the World War ended, Naseem developed the longed-for headache. Such historical coincidences have littered, and perhaps befouled, my family’s existence in the world.
    He hardly dared to look at what was framed in the hole in the sheet. Maybe she was hideous; perhaps that explained all this performance … he looked. And saw a soft face that was not at all ugly, a cushioned setting for her glittering, gemstone eyes, which were brown with flecks of gold: tiger’s-eyes. Doctor Aziz’s fall was complete. And Naseem burst out, “But Doctor, my God, what a
nose
!” Ghani, angrily, “Daughter, mind your …” But patient and doctor were laughing together, and Aziz was saying, “Yes, yes, it is a remarkable specimen. They tell me there are dynasties waiting in it …” And he bit his tongue because he had been about to add, “… like snot.”
    And Ghani, who had stood blindly beside the sheet for three long years, smiling and smiling and smiling, began once again to smile his secret smile, which was mirrored in the lips of the wrestlers.
    Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai chose to stink. For three years now, he had neither bathed nor washed himself after answering calls of nature. He wore the same clothes, unwashed, year in, year out; his one concession to winter was to put his chugha-coat over his putrescent pajamas. The little basket of hot coals which he carried inside the chugha, in the Kashmiri fashion, to keep him warm in the bitter cold, only animated and accentuated his evil odors. He took to drifting slowly past the Aziz household, releasing the dreadful fumes of his body across the small garden and into the house. Flowers died; birds fled from the ledge outside old Father Aziz’s window. Naturally, Tai lost work; the English in particular were reluctant to be ferried about by a human cesspit. The story went around the lake that Tai’s wife, driven to distraction by the old man’s sudden filthiness, pleaded for a reason. He had answered: “Ask our foreign-returned doctor, ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz.” Was it, then, an attempt to offend the Doctor’s hypersensitive nostrils (in which the itch of danger had subsided somewhat under the anaesthetizing ministrations of love)? Or a gesture of unchangingness in defiance of the invasion of the doctori-attaché from Heidelberg? Once Aziz asked the ancient, straight out, what it was all for; but Tai only breathed on him and rowed away. The breath nearly felled Aziz; it was sharp as an axe.
    In 1918, Doctor Aziz’s father, deprived of his birds, died in his sleep; and at once his mother, who had been able to sell the gemstone business thanks to the success of Aziz’s practice, and who now saw her husband’s death as a merciful release for her from a life filled with responsibilities, took to her own deathbed and followed her man before the end of his own forty-day mourning period. By the time the Indian regiments returned at the end of the war, Doctor Aziz was an orphan, and a free man—except that his heart had fallen through a hole some seven inches across.
    Desolating effect of Tai’s behavior: it ruined Doctor Aziz’s good relations with the lake’s floating population. He, who as a child had chatted freely with fishwives and flower-sellers, found himself looked at askance. “Ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz.” Tai had branded him as an alien, and therefore a person not completely to be trusted. They didn’t like the boatman, but they found the transformation which the Doctor had evidently worked upon him even more disturbing. Aziz found himself suspected, even ostracized, by the