Midnights Children

destroyed by the economic vagaries of the times; his touch in financial matters had begun to desert him … he fell prey, too, to strange fears. When the Chinese road in the Aksai Chin region was discovered, he became convinced that the yellow hordes would be arriving at Methwold’s Estate in a matter of days; and it was Alice who comforted him with ice-cold Coca-Cola, saying, “No good worrying. Those Chinkies are too little to beat our jawans. Better you drink your Coke; nothing is going to change.”
    In the end he wore her out; she stayed with him, finally, only because she demanded and received large pay increases, and sent much of the money to Goa, for the support of her sister Mary; but on September 1st, she, too, succumbed to the blandishments of the telephone.
    By then, she spent as much time on the instrument as her employer, particularly when the Narlikar women called up. The formidable Narlikars were, at that time, besieging my father, telephoning him twice a day, coaxing and persuading him to sell, reminding him that his position was hopeless, flapping around his head like vultures around a burning go-down … on September 1st, like a long-ago vulture, they flung down an arm which slapped him in the face, because they bribed Alice Pereira away from him. Unable to stand him any more, she cried, “Answer your own telephone! I’m off.”
    That night, Ahmed Sinai’s heart began to bulge. Overfull of hate resentment self-pity grief, it became swollen like a balloon, it beat too hard, skipped beats, and finally felled him like an ox; at the Breach Candy Hospital the doctors discovered that my father’s heart had actually changed shape—a new swelling had pushed lumpily out of the lower left ventricle. It had, to use Alice’s word, “booted.”
    Alice found him the next day, when, by chance, she returned to collect a forgotten umbrella; like a good secretary, she enlisted the power of telecommunications, telephoning an ambulance and telegramming us. Owing to censorship of the mails between India and Pakistan, the “heartboot cable” took a full week to reach Amina Sinai.
    “Back-to-Bom!” I yelled happily, alarming airport coolies. “Back-to-Bom!” I cheered, despite everything, until the newly-sober Jamila said, “Oh, Saleem,
honestly, shoo!
” Alice Pereira met us at the airport (a telegram had alerted her); and then we were in a real Bombay black-and-yellow taxi, and I was wallowing in the sounds of hot-channa-hot hawkers, the throng of camels bicycles and people people people, thinking how Mumbadevi’s city made Rawalpindi look like a village, rediscovering especially the colors, the forgotten vividness of gulmohr and bougainvillaea, the livid green of the waters of the Mahalaxmi Temple “tank,” the stark black-and-white of the traffic policemen’s sun umbrellas and the blue-and-yellowness of their uniforms; but most of all the blue blue blue of the sea … only the gray of my father’s stricken face distracted me from the rainbow riot of the city, and made me sober up.
    Alice Pereira left us at the hospital and went off to work for the Narlikar women; and now a remarkable thing happened. My mother Amina Sinai, jerked out of lethargy and depression and guilt-fogs and verruca-pain by the sight of my father, seemed miraculously to regain her youth; with all her old gifts of assiduity restored, she set about the rehabilitation of Ahmed, driven by an unstoppable will. She brought him home to the first-floor bedroom in which she had nursed him through the freeze; she sat with him day and night, pouring her strength into his body. And her love had its reward, because not only did Ahmed Sinai make a recovery so complete as to astound Breach Candy’s European doctors, but also an altogether more wonderful change occurred, which was that, as Ahmed came to himself under Amina’s care, he returned not to the self which had practiced curses and wrestled djinns, but to the self he might always have been, filled with contrition and forgiveness and laughter and generosity and the finest miracle of all, which was love. Ahmed Sinai had, at long last, fallen in love with my mother.
    And I was the sacrificial lamb with which they anointed their love.
    They had even begun to sleep together again; and although my sister—with a flash of her old Monkey-self—said, “In the same bed, Allah,
chhi-chhi
, how dirty!”, I was happy for them; and even, briefly, happier for myself, because I was back in the