Midnights Children

when the flower of the Pakistan Army peeped out from inside dustbins or behind benches, it saw Bonzo picking her way daintily through the field of the lethal seeds, nose to ground, Bonzo-the-insouciant, quite at her ease. General Zulfikar flung his peaked cap in the air. “Damn marvellous!” he cried in the thin voice which squeezed between his nose and chin, “The old lady can smell the mines!” Bonzo was drafted forthwith into the armed forces as a four-legged mine-detector with the courtesy rank of sergeant-major.
    I mention Bonzo’s achievement because it gave the General a stick with which to beat us. We Sinais—and Pia Aziz—were helpless, nonproductive members of the Zulfikar household, and the General did not wish us to forget it: “Even a damn hundred-year-old beagle bitch can earn her damn living,” he was heard to mutter, “but my house is full of people who can’t get organized into one damn thing.” But before the end of October he would be grateful for (at least) my presence … and the transformation of the Monkey was not far away.
    We went to school with cousin Zafar, who seemed less anxious to marry my sister now that we were children of a broken home; but his worst deed came one weekend when we were taken to the General’s mountain cottage in Nathia Gali, beyond Murree. I was in a state of high excitement (my illness had just been declared cured): mountains! The possibility of panthers! Cold, biting air!—so that I thought nothing of it when the General asked me if I’d mind sharing a bed with Zafar, and didn’t even guess when they spread the rubber sheet over the mattress … I awoke in the small hours in a large rancid pool of lukewarm liquid and began to yell blue murder. The General appeared at our bedside and began to thrash the living daylights out of his son. “You’re a big man now! Damn it to hell! Still, and still you do it! Get yourself organized! Good for nothing! Who behaves in this damn way? Cowards, that’s who! Damn me if I’ll have a coward for a son …” The enuresis of my cousin Zafar continued, however, to be the shame of his family; despite thrashings, the liquid ran down his leg; and one day it happened when he was awake. But that was after certain movements had, with my assistance, been performed by pepperpots, proving to me that although the telepathic airwaves were jammed in this country, the modes of connection still seemed to function; active-literally as well as -metaphorically, I helped change the fate of the Land of the Pure.
    The Brass Monkey and I were helpless observers, in those days, of my wilting mother. She, who had always been assiduous in the heat, had begun to wither in the northern cold. Deprived of two husbands, she was also deprived (in her own eyes) of meaning; and there was also a relationship to rebuild, between mother and son. She held me tightly one night and said, “Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.” But there was a distance behind her gentleness, as though she were trying to persuade herself … a distance, too, in the Monkey’s midnight whispers of, “Hey, brother, why don’t we go and pour water over Zafar—they’ll only think he’s wet his bed?”—and it was my sense of this gap which showed me that, despite their use of
son
and
brother
, their imaginations were working hard to assimilate Mary’s confession; not knowing then that they would be unable to succeed in their re-imaginings of
brother
and
son
, I remained terrified of Shiva; and was accordingly driven even deeper into the illusory heart of my desire to prove myself worthy of their kinship. Despite Reverend Mother’s recognition of me, I was never at my ease until, on a more-than-three-years-distant verandah, my father said, “Come, son; come here and let me love you.” Perhaps that is why I behaved as I did on the night of October 7th, 1958.
    … An eleven-year-old boy, Padma, knew very little about the internal affairs of Pakistan; but he could see, on that October day, that an unusual dinner-party was being planned. Saleem at eleven knew nothing about the Constitution of 1956 and its gradual erosion; but his eyes were keen enough to spot the Army security officers, the military police, who arrived that afternoon to lurk secretly behind every garden bush. Faction strife and the multiple incompetences of Mr. Ghulam Mohammed were a