Midnights Children

poor; and it hurt him badly. Now he understood what Tai was up to: the man was trying to chase him out of the valley.
    The story of the perforated sheet got out, too. The lady wrestlers were evidently less discreet than they looked. Aziz began to notice people pointing at him. Women giggled behind their palms …
    “I’ve decided to give Tai his victory,” he said. The three lady wrestlers, two holding up the sheet, the third hovering near the door, strained to hear him through the cotton wool in their ears. (“I made my father do it,” Naseem told him, “These chatterjees won’t do any more of their tittling and tattling from now on.”) Naseem’s eyes, hole-framed, became wider than ever.
    … Just like his own when, a few days earlier, he had been walking the city streets, had seen the last bus of the winter arrive, painted with its colorful inscriptions—on the front, GOD WILLING in green shadowed in red; on the back, blue-shadowed yellow crying THANK GOD! , and in cheeky maroon, SORRY-BYE-BYE! —and had recognized, through a web of new rings and lines on her face, Ilse Lubin as she descended …
    Nowadays, Ghani the landowner left him alone with the earplugged guardians, “To talk a little; the doctor-patient relationship can only deepen in strictest confidentiality. I see that now, Aziz Sahib—forgive my earlier intrusions.” Nowadays, Naseem’s tongue was getting freer all the time. “What kind of talk is this? What are you—a man or a mouse? To leave home because of a stinky shikara-man!” …
    “Oskar died,” Ilse told him, sipping fresh lime water on his mother’s takht. “Like a comedian. He went to talk to the army and tell them not to be pawns. The fool really thought the troops would fling down their guns and walk away. We watched from a window and I prayed they wouldn’t just trample all over him. The regiment had learned to march in step by then, you wouldn’t recognize them. As he reached the streetcorner across from the parade ground he tripped over his own shoelace and fell into the street. A staff car hit him and he died. He could never keep his laces tied, that ninny” … here there were diamonds freezing in her lashes … “He was the type that gives anarchists a bad name.”
    “All right,” Naseem conceded, “so you’ve got a good chance of landing a good job. Agra University, it’s a famous place, don’t think I don’t know. University doctor! … sounds good. Say you’re going for that, and it’s a different business.” Eyelashes drooped in the hole. “I will miss you, naturally …”
    “I’m in love,” Aadam Aziz said to Ilse Lubin. And later, “… So I’ve only seen her through a hole in a sheet, one part at a time; and I swear her bottom blushes.”
    “They must be putting something in the air up here,” Ilse said.
    “Naseem, I’ve got the job,” Aadam said excitedly. “The letter came today. With effect from April 1919. Your father says he can find a buyer for my house and the gemstone shop also.”
    “Wonderful,” Naseem pouted. “So now I must find a new doctor. Or maybe I’ll get that old hag again who didn’t know two things about anything.”
    “Because I am an orphan,” Doctor Aziz said, “I must come myself in place of my family members. But I have come nevertheless, Ghani Sahib, for the first time without being sent for. This is not a professional visit.”
    “Dear boy!” Ghani, clapping Aadam on the back. “Of course you must marry her. With an A-l fine dowry! No expense spared! It will be the wedding of the year, oh most certainly, yes!”
    “I cannot leave you behind when I go,” Aziz said to Naseem. Ghani said, “Enough of this tamasha! No more need for this sheet tomfoolery! Drop it down, you women, these are young lovers now!”
    “At last,” said Aadam Aziz, “I see you whole at last. But I must go now. My rounds … and an old friend is staying with me, I must tell her, she will be very happy for us both. A dear friend from Germany.”
    “No, Aadam baba,” his bearer said, “since the morning I have not seen Ilse Begum. She hired that old Tai to go for a shikara ride.”
    “What can be said, sir?” Tai mumbled meekly. “I am honored indeed to be summoned into the home of a so-great personage as yourself. Sir, the lady hired me for a trip to the Mughal Gardens, to do it before the lake freezes. A quiet lady, Doctor Sahib, not one word out of her all the time. So I was thinking my own unworthy private