Midnights Children

Pereira had stirred her fears into chutneys and pickles, massacring the verandah where my mother had sat with the child in her belly like a stone, I also had an image of a mighty, swinging ball crashing into the domain of Sharpsticker Sahib, and of the old crazy man himself, pale wasted flick-tongued, being exposed there on top of a crumbling house, amid falling towers and red-tiled roof, old Schaapsteker shrivelling ageing dying in the sunlight which he hadn’t seen for so many years. But perhaps I’m dramatizing; I may have got all this from an old film called
Lost Horizon
, in which beautiful women shrivelled and died when they departed from Shangri-La.
    For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake. We arrived in Karachi on February 9th—and within months, my sister Jamila had been launched on the career which would earn her the names of “Pakistan’s Angel” and “Bulbul-of-the-Faith”; we had left Bombay, but we gained reflected glory. And one more thing: although I had been drained—although no voices spoke in my head, and never would again—there was one compensation: namely that, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the astonishing delights of possessing a sense of smell.

Jamila Singer
    I T TURNED OUT to be a sense so acute as to be capable of distinguishing the glutinous reek of hypocrisy behind the welcoming smile with which my spinster aunt Alia greeted us at the Karachi docks. Irremediably embittered by my father’s years-ago defection into the arms of her sister, my headmistress aunt had acquired the heavy-footed corpulence of undimmed jealousy; the thick dark hairs of her resentment sprouted through most of the pores of her skin. And perhaps she succeeded in deceiving my parents and Jamila with her spreading arms, her waddling run towards us, her cry of “Ahmed bhai, at last! But better late than never!” her spider-like—and inevitably accepted—offers of hospitality; but I, who had spent much of my babyhood in the bitter mittens and soured pom-pom hats of her envy, who had been unknowingly infected with failure by the innocent-looking baby-things into which she had knitted her hatred, and who, moreover, could clearly remember what it was like to be possessed by revenge-lust, I, Saleem-the-drained, could smell the vengeful odors leaking out of her glands. I was, however, powerless to protest; we were swept into the Datsun of her vengeance and driven away down Bunder Road to her house at Guru Mandir—like flies, only more foolish, because we celebrated our captivity.
    … But what a sense of smell it was! Most of us are conditioned, from the cradle onwards, into recognizing the narrowest possible spectrum of fragrances; I, however, had been incapable of smelling a thing all my life, and was accordingly ignorant of all olfactory taboos. As a result, I had a tendency not to feign innocence when someone broke wind—which landed me in a certain amount of parental trouble; more important, however, was my nasal freedom to inhale a very great deal more than the scents of purely physical origin with which the rest of the human race has chosen to be content. So, from the earliest days of my Pakistani adolescence, I began to learn the secret aromas of the world, the heady but quick-fading perfume of new love, and also the deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate. (It was not long after my arrival in the “Land of the Pure” that I discovered within myself the ultimate impurity of sister-love; and the slow burning fires of my aunt filled my nostrils from the start.) A nose will give you knowledge, but not power-over-events; my invasion of Pakistan, armed (if that’s the right word) only with a new manifestation of my nasal inheritance, gave me the powers of sniffing-out-the-truth, of smelling-what-was-in-the-air, of following trails; but not the only power an invader needs—the strength to conquer my foes.
    I won’t deny it: I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay. Set between the desert and bleakly saline creeks whose shores were littered with stunted mangroves, my new city seemed to possess an ugliness which eclipsed even my own; having grown too fast—its population had quadrupled since 1947—it had acquired the misshapen lumpiness of a gigantic dwarf. On my sixteenth birthday, I was given a Lambretta motor-scooter; riding the city streets on my windowless vehicle, I breathed in the fatalistic hopelessness of the slum dwellers and the smug defensiveness