Midnights Children

flung across the Partition-created frontier into Pakistan.
    Late in September 1958, the mourning period of my uncle Hanif Aziz came to an end; and, miraculously, the dust-cloud which had enveloped us was settled by a merciful shower of rain. When we had bathed and put on newly-washed clothes and switched on the ceiling-fans, we emerged from bathrooms filled, briefly, with the illusory optimism of freshly-soaped cleanliness; to discover a dusty, unwashed Ahmed Sinai, whisky-bottle in his hand, his eyes rimmed with blood, swaying upstairs from his office in the manic grip of djinns. He had been wrestling, in his private world of abstraction, with the unthinkable realities which Mary’s revelations had unleashed; and owing to some cockeyed functioning of the alcohol, had been seized by an indescribable rage which he directed, neither at Mary’s departed back, nor at the changeling in his midst, but at my mother—at, I should say, Amina Sinai. Perhaps because he knew he should beg her forgiveness, and would not, Ahmed ranted at her for hours within the shocked hearing of her family; I will not repeat the names he called her, nor the vile courses of action he recommended she should take with her life. But in the end it was Reverend Mother who intervened.
    “Once before, my daughter,” she said, ignoring Ahmed’s continuing ravings, “your father and I, whatsitsname, said there was no shame in leaving an inadequate husband. Now I say again: you have, whatsitsname, a man of unspeakable vileness. Go from him; go today, and take your children, whatsitsname, away from these oaths which he spews from his lips like an animal, whatsitsname, of the gutter. Take your children, I say, whatsitsname—
both
your children,” she said, clutching me to her bosom. Once Reverend Mother had legitimized me, there was no one to oppose her; it seems to me now, across the years, that even my cursing father was affected by her support of the eleven-year-old snotnosed child.
    Reverend Mother fixed everything; my mother was like putty—like potter’s clay!—in her omnipotent hands. At that time, my grandmother (I must continue to call her that) still believed that she and Aadam Aziz would shortly be emigrating to Pakistan; so she instructed my aunt Emerald to take us all with her—Amina, the Monkey, myself, even my aunty Pia—and await her coming. “Sisters must care for sisters, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother said, “in times of trouble.” My aunt Emerald looked highly displeased; but both she and General Zulfikar acquiesced. And, since my father was in a lunatic temper which made us fear for our safety, and the Zulfikars had already booked themselves on a ship which was to sail that night, I left my life-long home that very day, leaving Ahmed Sinai alone with Alice Pereira; because when my mother left her second husband, all the other servants walked out, too.
    In Pakistan, my second period of hurtling growth came to an end. And, in Pakistan, I discovered that somehow the existence of a frontier “jammed” my thought-transmissions to the more-than-five-hundred; so that, exiled once more from my home, I was also exiled from the gift which was my truest birthright: the gift of the midnight children.
    We lay anchored off the Rann of Kutch on a heat-soaked afternoon. Heat buzzed in my bad left ear; but I chose to remain on deck, watching as small, vaguely ominous rowing boats and fishermen’s dhows ran a ferry service between our ship and the Rann, transporting objects veiled in canvas back and forth, back and forth. Below decks, the adults were playing housie-housie; I had no idea where the Monkey was. It was the first time I had ever been on a real ship (occasional visits to American warships in Bombay harbor didn’t count, being merely tourism; and there was always the embarrassment of being in the company of dozens of highly-pregnant ladies, who always came on these tour parties in the hope that they would enter labor and give birth to children who qualified, by virtue of their seaborne birth, for American citizenship). I stared through the heat-haze at the Rann.
The Rann of Kutch
… I’d always thought it a magical name, and half-feared-half-longed to visit the place, that chameleon area which was land for half the year and sea for the other half, and on which, it was said, the receding ocean would abandon all manner of fabulous debris, such as treasure-chests, white ghostly jellyfish, and even the occasional gasping,