Midnights Children

outside of the basket. What Parvati-the-witch whispered through wickerwork:
    “Hey, you Saleem: just to think! You and me, mister—midnight’s children, yaar! That’s something, no?”
    That’s something
… Saleem, shrouded in wickerwork darkness, was reminded of years-ago midnights, of childhood wrestling bouts with purpose and meaning; overwhelmed by nostalgia, I still did not understand what that something was. Then Parvati whispered some other words, and, inside the basket of invisibility, I, Saleem Sinai, complete with my loose anonymous garment, vanished instantly into thin air.
    “Vanished? How vanished, what vanished?” Padma’s head jerks up; Padma’s eyes stare at me in bewilderment. I, shrugging, merely reiterate: Vanished, just like that. Disappeared. Dematerialized. Like a djinn: poof, like so.
    “So,” Padma presses me, “she really-truly was a witch?”
    Really-truly. I was in the basket, but also not in the basket; Picture Singh lifted it one-handed and tossed it into the back of the Army truck taking him and Parvati and ninety-nine others to the aircraft waiting at the military airfield; I was tossed with the basket, but also not tossed. Afterwards, Picture Singh said, “No, captain, I couldn’t feel your weight”; nor could I feel any bump thump bang. One hundred and one artistes had arrived, by I.A.F. troop transport, from the capital of India; one hundred and two persons returned, although one of them was both there and not there. Yes, magic spells can occasionally succeed. But also fail: my father, Ahmed Sinai, never succeeded in cursing Sherri, the mongrel bitch.
    Without passport or permit, I returned, cloaked in invisibility, to the land of my birth; believe, don’t believe, but even a sceptic will have to provide another explanation for my presence here. Did not the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid (in an earlier set of fabulous tales) also wander, unseen invisible anonymous, cloaked through the streets of Baghdad? What Haroun achieved in Baghdad streets, Parvati-the-witch made possible for me, as we flew through the air-lanes of the subcontinent. She did it; I was invisible;
bas. Enough.
    Memories of invisibility: in the basket, I learned what it was like, will be like, to be dead. I had acquired the characteristics of ghosts! Present, but insubstantial; actual, but without being or weight … I discovered, in the basket, how ghosts see the world. Dimly hazily faintly … it was around me, but only just; I hung in a sphere of absence at whose fringes, like faint reflections, could be seen the specters of wickerwork. The dead die, and are gradually forgotten; time does its healing, and they fade—but in Parvati’s basket I learned that the reverse is also true; that ghosts, too, begin to forget; that the dead lose their memories of the living, and at last, when they are detached from their lives, fade away—that dying, in short, continues for a long time after death. Afterwards, Parvati said, “I didn’t want to tell you—but nobody should be kept invisible that long—it was dangerous, but what else was there to do?”
    In the grip of Parvati’s sorcery, I felt my hold on the world slip away—and how easy, how peaceful not to never to return!—to float in this cloudy nowhere, wafting further further further, like a seed-spore blown on the breeze—in short, I was in mortal danger.
    What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon. Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a reminder of the outside … clutching finely-wrought silver, which glittered even in that nameless dark, I survived. Despite head-to-toe numbness, I was saved, perhaps, by the glints of my precious souvenir.
    No—there was more to it than spittoons: for, as we all know by now, our hero is greatly affected by being shut up in confined spaces. Transformations spring upon him in the enclosed dark. As a mere embryo in the secrecy of a womb (not his mother’s), did he not grow into the incarnation of the new myth of August 15th, the child of ticktock—did he not emerge as the Mubarak, the Blessed Child? In a cramped wash-room, were name-tags not switched around? Alone in a washing-chest with a drawstring up one nostril, did he not glimpse a Black Mango and sniff too hard, turning himself and his upper cucumber into a kind of supernatural ham radio? Hemmed in by doctors, nurses and anesthetic masks, did he not succumb to numbers and, having suffered