Midnights Children

there are cracks and gaps … had I, by then, begun to see that my love for Jamila Singer had been, in a sense, a mistake? Had I already understood how I had simply transferred on to her shoulders the adoration which I now perceived to be a vaulting, all-encompassing love of country? When was it that I realized that my truly-incestuous feelings were for my true birth-sister, India herself, and not for that trollop of a crooner who had so callously shed me, like a used snake-skin, and dropped me into the metaphorical waste-basket of Army life? When when when? … Admitting defeat, I am forced to record that I cannot remember for sure.)
    … Saleem sat blinking in the dust in the shadow of the mosque. A giant was standing over him, grinning hugely, asking, “Achha, captain, have a good trip?” And Parvati, with huge excited eyes, pouring water from a lotah into his cracked, salty mouth … Feeling! The icy touch of water kept cool in earthenware surahis, the cracked soreness of parched-raw lips, silver-and-lapis clenched in a fist … “I can feel!” Saleem cried to the good-natured crowd.
    It was the time of afternoon called the chaya, when the shadow of the tall red-brick-and-marble Friday Mosque fell across the higgledy shacks of the slum clustered at its feet, that slum whose ramshackle tin roofs created such a swelter of heat that it was insupportable to be inside the fragile shacks except during the chaya and at night … but now conjurers and contortionists and jugglers and fakirs had gathered in the shade around the solitary stand-pipe to greet the new arrival. “I can feel!” I cried, and then Picture Singh, “Okay, captain—tell us, how it feels?—to be born again, falling like baby out of Parvati’s basket?” I could smell amazement on Picture Singh; he was clearly astounded by Parvati’s trick, but, like a true professional, would not dream of asking her how she had achieved it. In this way Parvati-the-witch, who had used her limitless powers to spirit me to safety, escaped discovery; and also because, as I later discovered, the ghetto of the magicians disbelieved, with the absolute certainty of illusionists-by-trade, in the possibility of magic. So Picture Singh told me, with amazement, “I swear, captain—you were so light in there, like a baby!”—But he never dreamed that my weightlessness had been anything more than a trick.
    “Listen, baby sahib,” Picture Singh was crying, “What do you say, baby-captain? Must I put you over my shoulder and make you belch?”—And now Parvati, tolerantly: “That one, baba, always making joke shoke.” She was smiling radiantly at everyone in sight … but there followed an inauspicious event. A woman’s voice began to wail at the back of the cluster of magicians: “Ai-o-ai-o! Ai-o-o!” The crowd parted in surprise and an old woman burst through it and rushed at Saleem; I was required to defend myself against a brandished frying pan, until Picture Singh, alarmed, seized her by pan-waving arm and bellowed, “Hey, capteena, why so much noise?” And the old woman, obstinately: “Ai-o-ai-o!”
    “Resham Bibi,” Parvati said, crossly, “You got ants in your brain?” And Picture Singh, “We got a guest, capteena—what’ll he do with your shouting? Arré, be quiet, Resham, this captain is known to our Parvati personal! Don’t be coming crying in front of him!”
    “Ai-o-ai-o! Bad luck is come! You go to foreign places and bring it here! Ai-oooo!”
    Disturbed visages of magicians stared from Resham Bibi to me—because although they were a people who denied the supernatural, they were artistes, and like all performers had an implicit faith in luck, good-luck-and-bad-luck, luck … “Yourself you said,” Resham Bibi wailed, “this man is born twice, and not even from woman! Now comes desolation, pestilence and death. I am old and so I know. Arré baba,” she turned plaintively to face me, “Have pity only; go now—go go quick!” There was a murmur—“It is true, Resham Bibi knows the old stories”—but then Picture Singh became angry. “The captain is my honored guest,” he said, “He stays in my hut as long as he wishes, for short or for long. What are you all talking? This is no place for fables.”
    Saleem Sinai’s first sojourn at the magicians’ ghetto lasted only a matter of days; but during that short time, a number of things happened to allay the fears which had been raised by ai-o-ai-o. The plain, unadorned truth is