Midnights Children

bloodying his nose. The evening ended when all the guests fell asleep at their tables; but Jamila Singer was escorted to her rooms by a sleepily-beaming Latif.
    At midnight, Saleem awoke to find that he still clutched the magical parchment of Mutasim the Handsome in his right hand; and since the wind from the north was still blowing gently through his room, he made up his mind to creep, in chappals and dressing-gown, through the darkened passages of the lovely palace, past all the accumulated debris of a decaying world, rusting suits of armor and ancient tapestries which provided centuries of food for the palace’s one billion moths, giant mahseer trout swimming in glass seas, and a profusion of hunting trophies including a tarnished golden teetar-bird on a teak plinth which commemorated the day on which an earlier Nawab, in the company of Lord Curzon and party, had shot 111, 111 teetars in a single day; he crept past the statues of dead birds into the zenana chambers where the women of the palace slept, and then, sniffing the air, he selected one door, turned the handle and went inside.
    There was a giant bed with a floating mosquito-net caught in a stream of colorless light from the maddening, midnight moon; Saleem moved towards it, and then stopped, because he had seen, at the window, the figure of a man trying to climb into the room. Mutasim the Handsome, made shameless by his infatuation and the hashashin wind, had resolved to look at Jamila’s face, no matter what the cost … And Saleem, invisible in the shadows of the room cried out: “Hands up! Or I shoot!” Saleem was bluffing; but Mutasim, whose hands were on the window-sill, supporting his full weight, did not know that, and was placed in a quandary: to hang on and be shot, or let go and fall? He attempted to argue back, “You shouldn’t be here yourself,” he said, “I’ll tell Amina Begum.” He had recognized the voice of his oppressor; but Saleem pointed out the weakness of his position, and Mutasim, pleading, “Okay, only don’t fire,” was permitted to descend the way he’d come. After that day, Mutasim persuaded his father to make a formal proposal of marriage to Jamila’s parents; but she, who had been born and raised without love, retained her old hatred of all who claimed to love her, and turned him down. He left Kif and came to Karachi, but she would not entertain his importunate proposals; and eventually he joined the Army and became a martyr in the war of 1965.
    The tragedy of Mutasim the Handsome, however, is only a subplot in our story; because now Saleem and his sister were alone, and she, awakened by the exchange between the two youths, asked, “Saleem? What is happening?”
    Saleem approached his sister’s bed; his hand sought hers; and parchment was pressed against skin. Only now did Saleem, his tongue loosened by the moon and the lust-drenched breeze, abandon all notions of purity and confess his own love to his open-mouthed sister.
    There was a silence; then she cried, “Oh, no, how can you—,” but the magic of the parchment was doing battle with the strength of her hatred of love; so although her body grew stiff and jerky as a wrestler’s, she listened to him explaining that there was no sin, he had worked it all out, and after all, they were not truly brother and sister; the blood in his veins was not the blood in hers; in the breeze of that insane night he attempted to undo all the knots which not even Mary Pereira’s confession had succeeded in untying; but even as he spoke he could hear his words sounding hollow, and realized that although what he was saying was the literal truth, there were other truths which had become more important because they had been sanctified by time; and although there was no need for shame or horror, he saw both emotions on her forehead, he smelt them on her skin, and, what was worse, he could feel and smell them in and upon himself. So, in the end, not even the magic parchment of Mutasim the Handsome was powerful enough to bring Saleem Sinai and Jamila Singer together; he left her room with bowed head, followed by her deer-startled eyes; and in time the effects of the spell faded altogether, and she took a dreadful revenge. As he left the room the corridors of the palace were suddenly filled with the shriek of a newly-affianced princess, who had awoken from a dream of her wedding-night in which her marital bed had suddenly and unaccountably become awash in rancid yellow liquid;