Midnights Children

… and sheets of flame rose from a Rawalpindi bungalow, perforated sheets at whose center hung a mysterious dark hole, which grew into the smoke-image of an old wide woman with moles on her cheeks … and one by one the war eliminated my drained, hopeless family from the earth.
    But now the countdown was at an end.
    And at last I turned my Lambretta homewards, so that I was at the Guru Mandir roundabout with the roar of aircraft overhead, mirages and mysteries, while my father in the idiocy of his stroke was switching on lights and opening windows even though a Civil Defense official had just visited them to make sure the blackout was complete; and when Amina Sinai was saying to the wraith of an old white washing-chest, “Go away now—I’ve seen enough of you,” I was scooting past Civil Defense jeeps from which angry fists saluted me; and before bricks and stones could extinguish the lights in my aunt Alia’s house, the whining came, and I should have known there was no need to go looking elsewhere for death, but I was still in the street in the midnight shadow of the mosque when it came, plummeting towards the illuminated windows of my father’s idiocy, death whining like pie-dogs, transforming itself into falling masonry and sheets of flame and a wave of force so great that it sent me spinning off my Lambretta, while within the house of my aunt’s great bitterness my father mother aunt and unborn brother or sister who was only a week away from starting life, all of them all of them all squashed flatter than rice-pancakes, the house crashing in on their heads like a waffle-iron, while over on Korangi Road a last bomb, meant for the oil-refinery, landed instead on a split-level American-style residence which an umbilical cord had not quite managed to complete; but at Guru Mandir many stories were coming to an end, the story of Amina and her long-ago underworld husband and her assiduity and public announcement and her son-who-was-not-her-son and her luck with horses and verrucas and dancing hands in the Pioneer Café and last defeat by her sister, and of Ahmed who always lost his way and had a lower lip which stuck out and a squashy belly and went white in a freeze and succumbed to abstraction and burst dogs open in the street and fell in love too late and died because of his vulnerability to what-falls-out-of-the-sky; flatter than pancakes now, and around them the house exploding collapsing, an instant of destruction of such vehemence that things which had been buried deep in forgotten tin trunks flew upward into the air while other things people memories were buried under rubble beyond hope of salvation; the fingers of the explosion reaching down down to the bottom of an almirah and unlocking a green tin trunk, the clutching hand of the explosion flinging trunk-contents into air, and now something which has hidden unseen for many years is circling in the night like a whirligig piece of the moon, something catching the light of the moon and falling now falling as I pick myself up dizzily after the blast, something twisting turning somersaulting down, silver as moonlight, a wondrously worked silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazuli, the past plummeting towards me like a vulture-dropped hand to become what-purifies-and-sets-me-free, because now as I look up there is a feeling at the back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite moment of utter clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before my parents’ funeral pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, before I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free, because all the Saleems go pouring out of me, from the baby who appeared in jumbo-sized front-page baby-snaps to the eighteen-year-old with his filthy dirty love, pouring out goes shame and guilt and wanting-to-please and needing-to-be-loved and determined-to-find-a-historical-role and growing-too-fast, I am free of Snotnose and Stainface and Baldy and Sniffer and Mapface and washing-chests and Evie Burns and language marches, liberated from Kolynos Kid and the breasts of Pia mumani and Alpha-and-Omega, absolved from the multiple murders of Homi Catrack and Hanif and Aadam Aziz and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, I have shaken off five-hundred-year-old whores and confessions of love at dead of night, free now, beyond