Midnights Children

pall of dust, was the ghost of Joe D’Costa, walking towards the ground-floor office of Ahmed Sinai! As if it hadn’t been enough to show himself to Aadam Aziz … “Arré, Joseph,” Mary screamed, dropping her duster, “you go away now! Don’t come here now! Don’t be bothering the sahibs with your troubles! O God, Joseph, go, go na, you will kill me today!” But the ghost walked on down the driveway.
    Mary Pereira, abandoning chick-blinds, leaving them hanging askew, rushes into the heart of the house to throw herself at the feet of my mother—small fat hands joined in supplication—“Begum Sahiba! Begum Sahiba, forgive me!” And my mother astounded: “What is this, Mary? What has got your goat?” But Mary is beyond dialogue, she is weeping uncontrollably, crying “O God my hour has come, my darling Madam, only let me go peacefully, do not put me in the jailkhana!” And also, “Eleven years, my Madam, see if I haven’t loved you all, O Madam, and that boy with his face like the moon; but now I am killed, I am no-good woman, I shall burn in hell!
Funtoosh!
” cried Mary, and again, “It’s finished;
funtoosh!
”
    Still I did not guess what was coming; not even when Mary threw herself upon me (I was taller than her now; her tears wet my neck): “O baba, baba; today you must learn a thing, such a thing I have done; but come now …” and the little woman drew herself up with immense dignity, “… I will tell you all before that Joseph does. Begum, children, all you other great sirs and madams, come now to sahib’s office, and I will tell.”
    Public announcements have punctuated my life; Amina in a. Delhi gully, and Mary in a sunless office … with my whole family trooping amazedly behind us, I went downstairs with Mary Pereira, who would not let go of my hand.
    What was in the room with Ahmed Sinai? What had given my father a face from which djinns and money had been chased away and replaced by a look of utter desolation? What sat huddled up in the corner of the room, filling the air with a sulphurous stench? What, shaped like a man, lacked fingers and toes; whose face seemed to bubble like the hot springs of New Zealand (which I’d seen in the
Wonder Book of Wonders
)? … No time to explain, because Mary Pereira has begun to talk, gabbling out a secret which has been hidden for over eleven years, pulling us all out of the dream-world she invented when she changed name-tags, forcing us into the horror of the truth. And all the time she held on to me; like a mother protecting her child, she shielded me from my family. (Who were learning … as I was … that they were not …)
    … It was just after midnight and in the streets there were fireworks and crowds, the many-headed monster roaring, I did it for my Joseph, Sahib, but please don’t send me to jail, look the boy is a good boy, Sahib, I am a poor woman, Sahib, one mistake, one minute in so many years, not jailkhana Sahib, I will go, eleven years I gave but I will go now, Sahib, only this is a good boy, Sahib, you must not send him, Sahib, after eleven years he is your son … O, you boy with your face like the sun coming out, O Saleem my piece-of-the-moon, you must know that your father was Winkie and your mother is also dead …
    Mary Pereira ran out of the room.
    Ahmed Sinai said, in a voice as faraway as a bird: “That, in the corner, is my old servant Musa, who tried to rob me once.”
    (Can any narrative stand so much so soon? I glance towards Padma; she appears to be stunned, like a fish.)
    Once upon a time there was a servant who robbed my father; who swore he was innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should prove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I told you then he was a time-bomb, and he had returned to explode. Musa had, indeed, contracted leprosy; and had returned across the silence of the years to beg for my father’s forgiveness, so that he could be released from his self-inflicted curse.
    … Someone was called God who was not God; someone else was taken for a ghost, and was not a ghost; and a third person discovered that although his name was Saleem Sinai, he was not his parents’ son …
    “I forgive you,” Ahmed Sinai said to the leper. After that day, he was cured of one of his obsessions; he never tried again to discover his own (and wholly imaginary) family curse.
    “I couldn’t tell it any other way,” I say to Padma. “Too painful; I had