Midnights Children

would seek preferment in the Administration, and, as I studied the realities of government, would certainly find the keys of national salvation; and I would have the ears of Ministers, I would perhaps be on first-name terms with the great …! It was in the clutches of this magnificent fantasy that I told Parvati-the-witch, “I must be off; great matters are afoot!” And, seeing the hurt in her suddenly-inflamed cheeks, consoled her: “I will come and see you often. Often often.” But she was not consoled … high-mindedness, then, was one motive for abandoning those who had helped me; but was there not something meaner, lowlier, more personal? There was. Parvati had drawn me secretly aside behind a tin-and-cratewood shack; where cockroaches spawned, where rats made love, where flies gorged themselves on pie-dog dung, she clutched me by the wrist and became incandescent of eye and sibilant of tongue; hidden in the putrid underbelly of the ghetto, she confessed that I was not the first of the midnight children to have crossed her path! And now there was a story of a Dacca procession, and magicians marching alongside heroes; there was Parvati looking up at a tank, and there were Parvati-eyes alighting on a pair of gigantic, prehensile knees … knees bulging proudly through starched-pressed uniform; there was Parvati crying, “O you! O you …” and then the unspeakable name, the name of my guilt, of someone who should have led my life but for a crime in a nursing home; Parvati and Shiva, Shiva and Parvati, fated to meet by the divine destiny of their names, were united in the moment of victory. “A hero, man!” she hissed proudly behind the shack. “They will make him a big officer and all!” And now what was produced from a fold of her ragged attire? What once grew proudly on a hero’s head and now nestled against a sorceress’s breasts? “I asked and he gave,” said Parvati-the-witch, and showed me a lock of his hair.
    Did I run from that lock of fateful hair? Did Saleem, fearing a reunion with his alter ego, whom he had so-long-ago banned from the councils of the night, flee back into the bosom of that family whose comforts had been denied the war-hero? Was it high-mindedness or guilt? I can no longer say; I set down only what I remember, namely that Parvati-the-witch whispered, “Maybe he will come when he has time; and then we will be three!” And another, repeated phrase: “Midnight’s children, yaar … that’s something, no?” Parvati-the-witch reminded me of things I had tried to put out of my mind; and I walked away from her, to the home of Mustapha Aziz.
    Of my last miserable contact with the brutal intimacies of family life, only fragments remain; however, since it must all be set down and subsequently pickled, I shall attempt to piece together an account … to begin with, then, let me report that my Uncle Mustapha lived in a commodiously anonymous Civil Service bungalow set in a tidy Civil Service garden just off Rajpath in the heart of Lutyens’s city; I walked along what-had-once-been-Kingsway, breathing in the numberless perfumes of the street, which blew out of State Handicraft Emporia and the exhaust-pipes of auto-rickshaws; the aromas of banyan and deodar mingled with the ghostly scents of long-gone viceroys and memsahibs in gloves, and also with the rather more strident bodily odors of gaudy rich begums and tramps. Here was the giant election scoreboard around which (during the first battle-for-power between Indira and Morarji Desai) crowds had thronged, awaiting the results, asking eagerly: “Is it a boy or a girl?” … amid ancient and modern, between India Gate and the Secretariat buildings, my thoughts teeming with vanished (Mughal and British) empires and also with my own history—because this was the city of the public announcement, of many-headed monsters and a hand, falling from the sky—I marched resolutely onwards, smelling, like everything else in sight, to high heaven. And at last, having turned left towards Dupleix Road, I arrived at an anonymous garden with a low wall and a hedge; in a corner of which I saw a signboard waving in the breeze, just as once signboards had flowered in the gardens of Methwold’s Estate; but this echo of the past told a different story. Not FOR SALE , with its three ominous vowels and four fateful consonants; the wooden flower of my uncle’s garden proclaimed strangely:
Mr. Mustapha Aziz and Fly.
    Not knowing that the last word