Midnights Children

proudly aware that my uncle had preferred my company to that of his own son.
    Midnight. Rawalpindi speeding past us at seventy m.p.h. Motorcycles in front of us beside us behind us. “Where are we going Zulfy-uncle?”
Wait and see
. Black smoked-windowed limousine pausing at darkened house. Sentries guard the door with crossed rifles; which part, to let us through. I am marching at my uncle’s side, in step, through half-lit corridors; until we burst into a dark room with a shaft of moonlight spotlighting a four-poster bed. A mosquito net hangs over the bed like a shroud.
    There is a man waking up, startled,
what the hell is going
… But General Zulfikar has a long-barrelled revolver; the tip of the gun is forced mmff between the man’s parted teeth. “Shut up,” my uncle says, superfluously. “Come with us.” Naked overweight man stumbling from his bed. His eyes, asking:
Are you going to shoot me?
Sweat rolls down ample belly, catching moonlight, dribbling on to his soo-soo; but it is bitterly cold; he is not perspiring from the heat. He looks like a white Laughing Buddha; but not laughing. Shivering. My uncle’s pistol is extracted from his mouth. “Turn. Quick march!” … And gun-barrel pushed between the cheeks of an overfed rump. The man cries, “For God’s sake be careful; that thing has the safety off!” Jawans giggle as naked flesh emerges into moonlight, is pushed into black limousine … That night, I sat with a naked man as my uncle drove him to a military airfield; I stood and watched as the waiting aircraft taxied, accelerated, flew. What began, active-metaphorically, with pepperpots, ended then; not only did I overthrow a government—I also consigned a president to exile.
    Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots … I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I—even I—had dreamed.
    “Really truly?” Padma asks. “You were truly there?” Really truly. “They say that Ayub was a good man before he became bad,” Padma says; it is a question. But Saleem, at eleven, made no such judgments. The movement of pepperpots does not necessitate moral choices. What Saleem was concerned with: not public upheaval, but personal rehabilitation. You see the paradox—my most crucial foray into history up to that moment was inspired by the most parochial of motives. Anyway, it was not “my” country—or not then. Not my country, although I stayed in it—as refugee, not citizens; entered on my mother’s Indian passport, I would have come in for a good deal of suspicion, maybe even deported or arrested as a spy, had it not been for my tender years and the power of my guardian with the Punch-like features—for four long years.
    Four years of nothing.
    Except growing into a teenager. Except watching my mother as she fell apart. Except observing the Monkey, who was a crucial year younger than me, fall under the insidious spell of that God-ridden country; the Monkey, once so rebellious and wild, adopting expressions of demureness and submission which must, at first, have seemed false even to her; the Monkey, learning how to cook and keep house, how to buy spices in the market; the Monkey, making the final break with the legacy of her grandfather, by learning prayers in Arabic and saying them at all prescribed times; the Monkey, revealing the streak of puritan fanaticism which she had hinted at when she asked for a nun’s outfit; she, who spurned all offers of worldly love, was seduced by the love of that God who had been named after a carved idol in a pagan shrine built around a giant meteorite: Al-Lah, in the Qa’aba, the shrine of the great Black Stone.
    But nothing else.
    Four years away from the midnight children; four years without Warden Road and Breach Candy and Scandal Point and the lures of One Yard of Chocolates; away from the Cathedral School and the equestrian statue of Sivaji and melon-sellers at the Gateway of India: away from Divali and Ganesh Chaturthi and Coconut Day; four years of separation from a father who sat alone in a house he would not sell; alone, except for Professor Schaapsteker, who stayed in his apartment and shunned the company of men.
    Can nothing really happen for four years? Obviously, not quite. My cousin Zafar, who had never been forgiven by his father for wetting his pants in the presence of history, was given to