Midnights Children

to just blurt it out, all crazy-sounding, just like that.”
    “O, mister,” Padma blubbers helplessly, “O, mister, mister!”
    “Come on now,” I say, “It’s an old story.”
    But her tears aren’t for me; for the moment, she’s forgotten about what-chews-at-bones-beneath-the-skin; she’s crying over Mary Pereira, of whom, as I’ve said, she has become excessively fond.
    “What happened to her?” she says with red eyes. “That Mary?”
    I am seized by an irrational anger. I shout: “You ask her!”
    Ask her how she went home to the city of Panjim in Goa, how she told her ancient mother the story of her shame! Ask how her mother went wild with the scandal (appropriately enough; it was a time for old folk to lose their wits)! Ask: did daughter and old mother go into the streets to seek forgiveness? Was that not the one time in each ten years when the mummified corpse of St. Francis Xavier (as holy a relic as the Prophet’s hair) is taken from its vault in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus and carried around the town? Did Mary and old distraught Mrs. Pereira find themselves pressing up against the catafalque; was the old lady beside herself with grief for her daughter’s crime? Did old Mrs. Pereira, shouting, “Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai”, clamber up on to the bier to kiss the foot of the Holy One? Amidst uncountable crowds, did Mrs. Pereira enter a holy frenzy? Ask! Did she or didn’t she, in the clutches of her wild spirit, place her lips around the big toe on St. Francis’s left foot? Ask for yourself: did Mary’s mother
bite the toe right off?
    “How?” Padma wails, unnerved by my wrath. “How,
ask
?”
    … And is this also true: were the papers making it up when they wrote that the old lady had been miraculously punished; when they quoted Church sources and eye-witnesses, who described how the old woman was turned into solid stone? No? Ask her if it’s true that the Church sent a stone-statue figure of an old woman around the towns and the villages of Goa, to show what happened to those who misbehave with the saints? Ask: was this statue not seen in several villages simultaneously—and does that prove fraud, or a further miracle?
    “You know I can’t ask anyone,” Padma howls … but I, feeling my fury subside, am making no more revelations tonight.
    Baldly, then: Mary Pereira left us, and went to her mother in Goa. But Alice Pereira stayed; Alice remained in Ahmed Sinai’s office, and typed, and fetched snacks and fizzy drinks.
    As for me—at the end of the mourning period for my uncle Hanif, I entered my second exile.

Movements Performed by Pepperpots
    I WAS OBLIGED TO COME to the conclusion that Shiva, my rival, my changeling brother, could no longer be admitted into the forum of my mind; for reasons which were, I admit, ignoble. I was afraid he would discover what I was sure I could not conceal from him—the secrets of our birth. Shiva, for whom the world was things, for whom history could only be explained as the continuing struggle of oneself-against-the-crowd, would certainly insist on claiming his birthright; and, aghast at the very notion of my knock-kneed antagonist replacing me in the blue room of my childhood while I, perforce, walked morosely off the two-storey hillock to enter the northern slums; refusing to accept that the prophecy of Ramram Seth had been intended for Winkie’s boy, that it was to Shiva that Prime Ministers had written, and for Shiva that fishermen pointed out to sea … placing, in short, a far higher value on my eleven-year-old sonship than on mere blood, I resolved that my destructive, violent alter ego should never again enter the increasingly fractious councils of the Midnight Children’s Conference; that I would guard my secret—which had once been Mary’s—with my very life.
    There were nights, at this time, when I avoided convening the Conference at all—not because of the unsatisfactory turn it had taken, but simply because I knew it would take time, and cool blood, to erect a barrier around my new knowledge which could deny it to the Children; eventually, I was confident, I would manage this … but I was afraid of Shiva. Most ferocious and powerful of the Children, he would penetrate where others could not go … At any rate, I avoided my fellow-Children; and then suddenly it was too late, because, having exiled Shiva, I found myself hurled into an exile from which I was incapable of contacting my more-than-five-hundred colleagues: I was