Midnights Children

land of the Midnight Children’s Conference. While newspaper headlines marched towards war, I renewed my acquaintance with my miraculous fellows, not knowing how many endings were in store for me.
    On October 9th— INDIAN ARMY POISED FOR ALL-OUT EFFORT —I felt able to convene the Conference (time and my own efforts had erected the necessary barrier around Mary’s secret). Back into my head they came; it was a happy night, a night for burying old disagreements, for making our own all-out effort at reunion. We repeated, over and over again, our joy at being back together; ignoring the deeper truth—that we were like all families, that family reunions are more delightful in prospect than in reality, and that the time comes when all families must go their separate ways. On October 15th— UNPROVOKED ATTACK ON INDIA —the questions I’d been dreading and trying not to provoke began:
Why is Shiva not here?
And:
Why have you closed off part of your mind?
    On October 20th, the Indian forces were defeated—thrashed—by the Chinese at Thag La ridge. An official Peking statement announced:
In self-defense, Chinese frontier guards were compelled to strike back resolutely
. But when, that same night, the children of midnight launched a concerted assault on me, I had no defense. They attacked on a broad front and from every direction, accusing me of secrecy, prevarication, high-handedness, egotism; my mind, no longer a parliament chamber, became the battleground on which they annihilated me. No longer “big brother Saleem,” I listened helplessly while they tore me apart; because, despite all their sound-and-fury, I could not unblock what I had sealed away; I could not bring myself to tell them Mary’s secret. Even Parvati-the-witch, for so long my fondest supporter, lost patience with me at last. “O, Saleem,” she said, “God knows what that Pakistan has done to you; but you are badly changed.”
    Once, long ago, the death of Mian Abdullah had destroyed another Conference, which had been held together purely by the strength of his will; now, as the midnight children lost faith in me, they also lost their belief in the thing I had made for them. Between October 20th and November 20th, I continued to convene—to attempt to convene—our nightly sessions; but they fled from me, not one by one, but in tens and twenties; each night, less of them were willing to tune in; each week, over a hundred of them retreated into private life. In the high Himalayas, Gurkhas and Rajputs fled in disarray from the Chinese army; and in the upper reaches of my mind, another army was also destroyed by things—bickerings, prejudices, boredom, selfishness—which I had believed too small, too petty to have touched them.
    (But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued to believe—I continue now—that what-we-had-in-common would finally have outweighed what-drove-us-apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate responsibility for the end of the Children’s Conference; because what destroyed all possibility of renewal was the love of Ahmed and Amina Sinai.)
    … And Shiva? Shiva, whom I cold-bloodedly denied his birthright? Never once, in that last month, did I send my thoughts in search of him; but his existence, somewhere in the world, nagged away at the corners of my mind. Shiva-the-destroyer, Shiva Knocknees … he became, for me, first a stabbing twinge of guilt; then an obsession; and finally, as the memory of his actuality grew dull, he became a sort of principle; he came to represent, in my mind, all the vengefulness and violence and simultaneous-love-and-hate-of-Things in the world; so that even now, when I hear of drowned bodies floating like balloons on the Hooghly and exploding when nudged by passing boats; or trains set on fire, or politicians killed, or riots in Orissa or Punjab, it seems to me that the hand of Shiva lies heavily over all these things, dooming us to flounder endlessly amid murder rape greed war—that Shiva, in short, has made us who we are. (He, too, was born on the stroke of midnight; he, like me, was connected to history. The modes of connection—if I’m right in thinking they applied to me—enabled him, too, to affect the passage of the days.)
    I’m talking as if I never saw him again; which isn’t true. But that, of course, must get into the queue like everything else; I’m not strong enough to tell that tale just now.
    The disease of optimism, in those days, once again