Midnights Children

at distinguishing, until I could tell apart the infinite varieties of betel-nut and (with my eyes shut) the twelve different available brands of fizzy drink. (Long before the American commentator Herbert Feldman came to Karachi to deplore the existence of a dozen aerated waters in a city which had only three suppliers of bottled milk, I could sit blindfolded and tell Pakola from Hoffman’s Mission, Citra Cola from Fanta. Feldman saw these drinks as a manifestation of capitalist imperialism; I, sniffing out which was Canada Dry and which 7-Up, unerringly separating Pepsi from Coke, was more interested in passing their subtle olfactory test. Double Kola and Kola Kola, Perri Cola and Bubble Up were blindly identified and named.) Only when I was sure of my mastery of physical scents did I move on to those other aromas which only I could smell: the perfumes of emotions and all the thousand and one drives which make us human: love and death, greed and humility, have and have-not were labelled and placed in neat compartments of my mind.
    Early attempts at ordering: I tried to classify smells by color—boiling underwear and the printer’s ink of the
Daily Jang
shared a quality of blueness, while old teak and fresh farts were both dark brown. Motor-cars and graveyards I jointly classified as gray … there was, too, classification-by-weight: flyweight smells (paper), bantam odors (soap-fresh bodies, grass), welterweights (perspiration, queen-of-the-night); shahi-korma and bicycle-oil were light-heavyweight in my system, while anger, patchouli, treachery and dung were among the heavyweight stinks of the earth. And I had a geometric system also: the roundness of joy and the angularity of ambition; I had elliptical smells, and also ovals and squares … a lexicographer of the nose, I travelled Bunder Road and the P.E.C.H.S.; a lepidopterist, I snared whiffs like butterflies in the net of my nasal hairs. O wondrous voyages before the birth of philosophy! … Because soon I understood that my work must, if it was to have any value, acquire a moral dimension; that the only important divisions were the infinitely subtle gradations of good and evil smells. Having realized the crucial nature of morality, having sniffed out that smells could be sacred or profane, I invented, in the isolation of my scooter-trips, the science of nasal ethics.
    Sacred: purdah-veils, halal meat, muezzins’ towers, prayer-mats; profane: Western records, pig-meat, alcohol. I understood now why mullahs (sacred) refused to enter aeroplanes (profane) on the night before Id-ul-Fitr, not even willing to enter vehicles whose secret odor was the antithesis of godliness in order to make sure of seeing the new moon. I learned the olfactory incompatibility of Islam and socialism, and the inalienable opposition existing between the after-shave of Sind Club members and the poverty-reek of the street-sleeping beggars at the Club gates … more and more, however, I became convinced of an ugly truth—namely that the sacred, or good, held little interest for me, even when such aromas surrounded my sister as she sang; while the pungency of the gutter seemed to possess a fatally irresistible attraction. Besides, I was sixteen; things were stirring beneath my belt, behind my duck-white pants; and no city which locks women away is ever short of whores. While Jamila sang of holiness and love-of-country, I explored profanity and lust. (I had money to burn; my father had become generous as well as loving.)
    At the eternally unfinished Jinnah Mausoleum I picked up the women of the street. Other youths came here to seduce American girls away, taking them off to hotel rooms or swimming pools; I preferred to retain my independence and pay. And eventually I nosed out the whore of whores, whose gifts were a mirror for my own. Her name was Tai Bibi, and she claimed to be five hundred and twelve.
    But her smell! The richest spoor he, Saleem, had ever sniffed; he felt bewitched by something in it, some air of historic majesty … he found himself saying to the toothless creature: “I don’t care about your age; the smell’s the thing.”
    (“My God,” Padma interrupts, “Such a thing—how could you?”)
    Though she never hinted at any connection with a Kashmiri boatman, her name exerted the strongest of pulls; although she may have been humoring Saleem when she said, “Boy, I am five hundred and twelve,” his sense of history was nevertheless aroused. Think of me what you