Midnights Children

afterwards, she made inquiries, and when she learned the prophetic truth of her dream, resolved never to reach puberty while Zafar was alive, so that she could stay in her palatial bedroom and avoid the foul-smelling horror of his weakness.
    The next morning, the two badmaashes of the Combined Opposition Party awoke to find themselves back in their own beds; but when they had dressed, they opened the door of their chamber to find two of the biggest soldiers in Pakistan outside it, standing peacefully with crossed rifles, barring the exit. The badmaashes shouted and wheedled, but the soldiers stayed in position until the polls were closed; then they quietly disappeared. The badmaashes sought out the Nawab, finding him in his exceptional rose-garden; they waved their arms and raised their voices; travesty-of-justice was mentioned, and electoral-jiggery-pokery; also chicanery; but the Nawab showed them thirteen new varieties of Kifi rose, crossbred by himself. They ranted on—death-of-democracy, autocratic-tyranny—until he smiled gently, gently, and said, “My friends, yesterday my daughter was betrothed to Zafar Zulfikar; soon, I hope, my other girl will wed our President’s own dear son. Think, then—what dishonor for me, what scandal on my name, if even one vote were cast in Kif against my future relative! Friends, I am a man to whom honor is of concern; so stay in my house, eat, drink; only do not ask for what I cannot give.”
    And we all lived happily
… at any rate, even without the traditional last-sentence fiction of fairy-tales, my story does indeed end in fantasy; because when Basic Democrats had done their duty, the newspapers—
Fang, Dawn, Pakistan Times
—announced a crushing victory for the President’s Muslim League over the Mader-i-Millat’s Combined Opposition Party; thus proving to me that I have been only the humblest of jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence—that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.
    A little bird whispers in my ear: “Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth.” I accept the criticism; I know, I know. And, years later, the Widow knew. And Jamila: for whom what-had-been-sanctified-as-truth (by Time, by habit, by a grandmother’s pronouncement, by lack of imagination, by a father’s acquiescence) proved more believable than what she knew to be so.

How Saleem Achieved Purity
    W HAT IS WAITING to be told: the return of ticktock. But now time is counting down to an end, not a birth; there is, too, a weariness to be mentioned, a general fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will be the only solution, because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply run out of steam, and then there’s nothing for it but to finish with them.
    How a piece fell out of the moon, and Saleem achieved purity … the clock is ticking now; and because all countdowns require a zero, let me state that the end came on September 22nd, 1965; and that the precise instant of the arrival-at-zero was, inevitably, the stroke of midnight. Although the old grandfather clock in my aunt Alia’s house, which kept accurate time but always chimed two minutes late, never had a chance to strike.
    My grandmother Naseem Aziz arrived in Pakistan in mid-1964, leaving behind an India in. which Nehru’s death had precipitated a bitter power struggle. Morarji Desai, the Finance Minister, and Jagjivan Ram, most powerful of the untouchables, united in their determination to prevent the establishment of a Nehru dynasty; so Indira Gandhi was denied the leadership. The new Prime Minister was Lal Bahadur Shastri, another member of that generation of politicians who seemed to have been pickled in immortality; in the case of Shastri, however, this was only maya, illusion. Nehru and Shastri have both fully proved their mortality; but there are still plenty of the others left, clutching Time in their mummified fingers and refusing to let it move … in Pakistan, however, the clocks ticked and tocked.
    Reverend Mother did not overtly approve of my sister’s career; it smacked too much of