Midnights Children

the press had turned against the Commander, I knew he was done for.
    The Supreme Court verdict: “Guilty.”
    Ismail Ibrahim said: “Pardon! We appeal for pardon to the President of India!”
    And now great matters are to be weighed in Rashtrapati Bhavan—behind the gates of President House, a man must decide if any man can be set above the law; whether the assassination of a wife’s fancy-man should be set aside for the sake of a Naval career; and still higher things—is India to give her approval to the rule of law, or to the ancient principle of the overriding primacy of heroes? If Rama himself were alive, would we send him to prison for slaying the abductor of Sita? Great matters; my vengeful irruption into the history of my age was certainly no trivial affair.
    The President of India said, “I shall not pardon this man.”
    Nussie Ibrahim (whose husband had lost his biggest case) wailed, “Hai! Ai-hai!” And repeated an earlier observation: “Amina sister, that good man going to prison—I tell you, it is the end of the world!”
    A confession, trembling just beyond my lips: “It was all my doing, Amma; I wanted to teach you a lesson. Amma, do not go to see other men, with Lucknow-work on their shirt; enough, my mother, of teacup-kissery! I am in long trousers now, and may speak to you as a man.” But it never spilled out of me; there was no need, because I heard my mother answering a wrong-number telephone call—and with a strange, subdued voice, speak into the mouthpiece as follows: “No, nobody by that name here; please believe what I am telling you, and never call me again.”
    Yes, I had taught my mother a lesson; and after the Sabarmati affair she never saw her Nadir-Qasim in the flesh, never again, not as long as she lived; but, deprived of him, she fell victim to the fate of all women in our family, namely the curse of growing old before her time; she began to shrink, and her hobble became more pronounced, and there was the emptiness of age in her eyes.
    My revenge brought in its wake a number of unlooked-for developments; perhaps the most dramatic of these was the appearance in the gardens of Methwold’s Estate of curious flowers, made out of wood and tin, and hand-painted with bright red lettering … the fatal signboards erected in all the gardens except our own, evidence that my powers exceeded even my own understanding, and that, having once been exiled from my two-storey hillock, I had now managed to send everyone else away instead.
    Signboards in the gardens of Versailles Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci; signboards nodding to each other in the sea-breeze of the cocktail hour. On each signboard could be discerned the same seven letters, all bright red, all twelve inches high: FOR SALE . That was the signboards’ message.
    FOR SALE —Versailles Villa, its owner dead on a toilet seat; the sale was handled by the ferocious nurse Bi-Appah on behalf of poor idiot Toxy; once the sale was complete, nurse and nursed vanished forever, and Bi-Appah held, on her lap, a bulging suitcase filled with banknotes … I don’t know what happened to Toxy, but considering the avarice of her nurse, I’m sure it was nothing good … FOR SALE , the Sabarmati apartment in Escorial Villa; Lila Sabarmati was denied custody of her children and faded out of our lives, while Eyeslice and Hairoil packed their bags and departed into the care of the Indian Navy, which had placed itself
in loco parentis
until their father completed his thirty years in jail … FOR SALE , too, the Ibrahims’ Sans Souci, because Ishaq Ibrahim’s Embassy Hotel had been burned down by gangsters on the day of Commander Sabarmati’s final defeat, as though the criminal classes of the city were punishing the lawyer’s family for his failure; and then Ismail Ibrahim was suspended from practice,
owing to certain proofs of professional misconduct
(to quote the Bombay Bar Commission’s report); financially “embarrassed,” the Ibrahims also passed out of our lives; and, finally FOR SALE , the apartment of Cyrus Dubash and his mother, because during the hue and cry of the Sabarmati affair, and almost entirely unnoticed, the nuclear physicist had died his orange-pip-choking death, thus unleashing upon Cyrus the religious fanaticism of his mother and setting in motion the wheels of the period of revelations which will be the subject of my next little piece.
    The signboards nodded in the gardens, which were losing their memories of