Midnights Children

one voice left; but optimism lingered—what-we-had-in-common retained the possibility of overpowering what-forced-us-apart.
    Until:
    Silence outside me. A dark room (blinds down). Can’t see anything (nothing there to see).
    Silence inside me. A connection broken (for ever). Can’t hear anything (nothing there to hear).
    Silence, like a desert. And a clear, free nose (nasal passages full of air). Air, like a vandal, invading my private places.
    Drained. I have been drained. The parahamsa, grounded. (For good.)
    O, spell it out, spell it out: the operation whose ostensible purpose was the draining of my inflamed sinuses and the once-and-for-all clearing of my nasal passages had the effect of breaking whatever connection had been made in a washing-chest; of depriving me of nose-given telepathy; of banishing me from the possibility of midnight children.
    Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles.
Sinai
contains Ibn Sina, master magician, Sufi adept; and also Sin the moon, the ancient god of Hadhramaut, with his own mode of connection, his powers of action-at-a-distance upon the tides of the world. But Sin is also the letter S, as sinuous as a snake; serpents lie coiled within the name. And there is also the accident of transliteration—Sinai, when in Roman script, though not in Nastaliq, is also the name of the place-of-revelation, of put-off-thy-shoes, of commandments and golden calves; but when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert—of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end.
    In Arabia—
Arabia Deserta
—at the time of the prophet Muhammad, other prophets also preached: Maslama of the tribe of the Banu Hanifa in the Yamama, the very heart of Arabia; and Hanzala ibn Safwan; and Khalid ibn Sinan. Maslama’s God was ar-Rahman, “the Merciful”; today Muslims pray to Allah, ar-Rahman. Khalid ibn Sinan was sent to the tribe of ’Abs; for a time, he was followed, but then he was lost. Prophets are not always false simply because they are overtaken, and swallowed up, by history. Men of worth have always roamed the desert.
    “Wife,” Ahmed Sinai said, “this country is finished.” After ceasefire and drainage, these words returned to haunt him; and Amina began to persuade him to emigrate to Pakistan, where her surviving sisters already were, and to which her mother would go after her father’s death. “A fresh start,” she suggested, “Janum, it would be lovely. What is left for us on this God-forsaken hill?”
    So in the end Buckingham Villa was delivered into the clutches of the Narlikar women, after all; and over fifteen years late, my family moved to Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. Ahmed Sinai left very little behind; there are ways of transmitting money with the help of multinational companies, and my father knew those ways. And I, although sad to leave the city of my birth, was not unhappy about moving away from the city in which Shiva lurked somewhere like a carefully-concealed land-mine.
    We left Bombay, finally, in February 1963; and on the day of our departure I took an old tin globe down to the garden and buried it amongst the cacti. Inside it: a Prime Minister’s letter, and a jumbo-sized front-page baby-snap, captioned “Midnight’s Child” … They may not be holy relics—I do not presume to compare the trivial memorabilia of my life with the Hazratbal hair of the Prophet, or the body of St. Francis Xavier in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus—but they are all that has survived of my past: a squashed tin globe, a mildewed letter, a photograph. Nothing else, not even a silver spittoon. Apart from a Monkey-crushed planet, the only records are sealed in the closed books of heaven, Sidjeen and Illiyun, the Books of Evil and Good; at any rate, that’s the story.
    … Only when we were aboard S.S.
Sabarmati
, and anchored off the Rann of Kutch, did I remember old Schaapsteker; and wondered, suddenly, if anyone had told him we were going. I didn’t dare to ask, for fear that the answer might be
no;
so as I thought of the demolition crew getting to work, and pictured the machines of destruction smashing into my father’s office and my own blue room, pulling down the servants’ spiral iron staircase and the kitchen in which Mary