Midnights Children

understand that he would be joining the Army as soon as he was of age. “I want to see you prove you’re not a woman,” his father told him.
    And Bonzo died; General Zulfikar shed manly tears.
    And Mary’s confession faded until, because nobody spoke of it, it came to feel like a bad dream; to everyone except me.
    And (without any assistance from me) relations between India and Pakistan grew worse; entirely without my help, India conquered Goa—“the Portuguese pimple on the face of Mother India”; I sat on the sidelines and played no part in the acquisition of large-scale U.S. aid for Pakistan, nor was I to blame for Sino-India border skirmishes in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh; the Indian census of 1961 revealed a literacy level of 23.7 percent, but I was not entered in its records. The untouchable problem remained acute; I did nothing to alleviate it; and in the elections of 1962, the All-India Congress won 361 out of 494 seats in the Lok Sabha, and over 61 per cent of all State Assembly seats. Not even in this could my unseen hand be said to have moved; except, perhaps, metaphorically: the
status quo
was preserved in India; in my life, nothing changed either.
    Then, on September 1st, 1962, we celebrated the Monkey’s fourteenth birthday. By this time (and despite my uncle’s continued fondness for me) we were well-established as social inferiors, the hapless poor relations of the great Zulfikars; so the party was a skimpy affair. The Monkey, however, gave every appearance of enjoying herself. “It’s my duty, brother,” she told me. I could hardly believe my ears … but perhaps my sister had an intuition of her fate; perhaps she knew the transformation which lay in store for her; why should I assume that I alone have had the powers of secret knowledge?
    Perhaps, then, she guessed that when the hired musicians began to play (shehnai and vina were present; sarangi and sarod had their turns; tabla and sitar performed their virtuosic cross-examinations), Emerald Zulfikar would descend on her with callous elegance, demanding, “Come on, Jamila, don’t sit there like a melon, sing us a song like any good girl would!”
    And that with this sentence my emerald-icy aunt would have begun, quite unwittingly, my sister’s transformation from monkey into Singer; because although she protested with the sullen clumsiness of fourteen-year-olds, she was hauled unceremoniously on to the musicians’ dais by my organizing aunt; and although she looked as if she wished the floor would open up beneath her feet, she clasped her hands together; seeing no escape, the Monkey began to sing.
    I have not, I think, been good at describing emotions—believing my audience to be capable of
joining in;
of imagining for themselves what I have been unable to re-imagine, so that my story becomes yours as well … but when my sister began to sing, I was certainly assailed by an emotion of such force that I was unable to understand until, much later, it was explained to me by the oldest whore in the world. Because, with her first note, the Brass Monkey sloughed off her nick-name; she, who had talked to birds (just as, long ago in a mountain valley, her great-grandfather used to do), must have learned from songbirds the arts of song. With one good ear and one bad ear, I listened to her faultless voice, which at fourteen was the voice of a grown woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God; a voice which was afterwards compared to that of Muhammed’s muezzin Bilal, issuing from the lips of a somewhat scrawny girl.
    What I did not understand must wait to be told; let me record here that my sister earned her name at her fourteenth birthday party, and was known after that as Jamila Singer; and that I knew, as I listened to “My Red Dupatta Of Muslin” and “Shahbaz Qalandar,” that the process which had begun during my first exile was nearing completion in my second; that, from now on, Jamila was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to her talent for ever.
    Jamila sang—I, humbly, bowed my head. But before she could enter fully into her kingdom, something else had to happen: I had to be properly finished off.

Drainage and the Desert
    W HAT-CHEWS-ON-BONES refuses to pause … it’s only a matter of time. This is what keeps me going: I hold on to Padma. Padma is what