Midnights Children

matters—Padma-muscles, Padma’s hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus … who, embarrassed, commands: “Enough. Start. Start now.”
    Yes, it must start with the cable. Telepathy set me apart; telecommunications dragged me down …
    Amina Sinai was cutting verrucas out of her feet when the telegram arrived … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: my mother, right ankle on left knee, was scooping corn-tissue out of the sole of her foot with a sharp-ended nail file on September 9th, 1962. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: in the afternoon. No, it’s important to be more … At the stroke of three o’clock, which, even in the north, is the hottest time of day, a bearer brought her an envelope on a silver dish. A few seconds later, far away in New Delhi, Defense Minister Krishna Menon (acting on his own initiative, during Nehru’s absence at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference) took the momentous decision to use force if necessary against the Chinese army on the Himalayan frontier. “The Chinese must be ejected from the Thag La ridge,” Mr. Menon said while my mother tore open a telegram. “No weakness will be shown.” But this decision was a mere trifle when set beside the implication of my mother’s cable; because while the eviction operation, code-named LEGHORN , was doomed to fail, and eventually to turn India into that most macabre of theaters, the Theater of War, the cable was to plunge me secretly but surely towards the crisis which would end with my final eviction from my own inner world. While the Indian XXXIII Corps were acting on instructions passed from Menon to General Thapar, I, too, had been placed in great danger; as if unseen forces had decided that I had also overstepped the boundaries of what I was permitted to do or know or be; as though history had decided to put me firmly in my place. I was left entirely without a say in the matter; my mother read the telegram, burst into tears and said, “Children, we’re going home!” … after which, as I began by saying in another context, it was only a matter of time.
    What the telegram said: PLEASE COME QUICK SINAI-SAHIB SUFFERED HEARTBOOT GRAVELY ILL SALAAMS ALICE PEREIRA .
    “Of course, go at once, my darling,” my aunt Emerald told her sister, “But what, my God, can be this
heartboot?
”
    It is possible, even probable, that I am only the first historian to write the story of my undeniably exceptional life-and-times. Those who follow in my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work, this source-book, this Hadith or Purana or
Grundrisse
, for guidance and inspiration. I say to these future exegetes: when you come to examine the events which followed on from the “heartboot cable,” remember that at the very eye of the hurricane which was unleashed upon me—the sword to switch metaphors, with which the
coup de grâce
was applied—there lay a single unifying force. I refer to telecommunications.
    Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my undoing; generously, however, I shall accuse nobody of conspiracy; although it would be easy to believe that the controllers of communication had resolved to regain their monopoly of the nation’s air-waves … I must return (Padma is frowning) to the banal chain of cause-and-effect: we arrived at Santa Cruz airport, by Dakota, on September 16th; but to explain the telegram, I must go further back in time.
    If Alice Pereira had once sinned, by stealing Joseph D’Costa from her sister Mary, she had in these latter years gone a long way towards attaining redemption; because for four years she had been Ahmed Sinai’s only human companion. Isolated on the dusty hillock which had once been Methwold’s Estate, she had borne enormous demands on her accommodating good nature. He would make her sit with him until midnight while he drank djinns and ranted about the injustices of his life; he remembered, after years of forgetfulness, his old dream of translating and re-ordering the Quran, and blamed his family for emasculating him so that he didn’t have the energy to begin such a task; in addition, because she was there, his anger often directed itself at her, taking the form of long tirades filled with gutter-oaths and the useless curses he had devised in the days of his deepest abstraction. She attempted to be understanding: he was a lonely man; his once-infallible relationship with the telephone had been