Midnights Children

control on the rest of us … so maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; but someone disappeared into my uncle’s study with Mustapha Aziz; and that night—I sneaked a look—there was a locked black leather folder saying TOP SECRET and also PROJECT M.C.C.; and the next morning my uncle was looking at me differently, with fear almost, or with that special look of loathing which Civil Servants reserve for those who fall into official disfavor. I should have known then what was in store for me; but everything is simple with hindsight. Hindsight comes to me now, too late, now that I am finally consigned to the peripheries of history, now that the connections between my life and the nation’s have broken for good and all … to avoid my uncle’s inexplicable gaze, I went out into the garden; and saw Parvati-the-witch.
    She was squatting on the pavement with the basket of invisibility by her side; when she saw me her eyes brightened with reproach. “You said you’d come, but you never, so I,” she stuttered. I bowed my head. “I have been in mourning,” I said, lamely, and she, “But still you could have—my God, Saleem, you don’t know, in our colony I can’t tell anyone about my real magic, never, not even Picture Singh who is like a father, I must bottle it and bottle it, because they don’t believe in such things, and I thought, Here is Saleem come, now at last I will have one friend, we can talk, we can be together, we have both been, and known, and arré how to say it, Saleem, you don’t care, you got what you wanted and went off just like that, I am nothing to you, I know …”
    That night my mad aunt Sonia, herself only days away from confinement in a strait-jacket (it got into the papers, a small piece on the inside page; my uncle’s Department must have been annoyed), had one of the fierce inspirations of the profoundly insane and burst into the bedroom into which, half an hour earlier, someone-with-saucer-eyes had climbed through a ground-floor window; she found me in bed with Parvati-the-witch, and after that my Uncle Mustapha lost interest in sheltering me, saying, “You were born from bhangis, you will remain a dirty type all your life”; on the four hundred and twentieth day after my arrival, I left my uncle’s house, deprived of family ties, returned at last to that true inheritance of poverty and destitution of which I had been cheated for so long by the crime of Mary Pereira. Parvati-the-witch was waiting for me on the pavement; I did not tell her that there was a sense in which I’d been glad of the interruption, because as I kissed her in the dark of that illicit midnight I had seen her face changing, becoming the face of a forbidden love; the ghostly features of Jamila Singer replaced those of the witch-girl; Jamila who was (I know it!) safely hidden in a Karachi nunnery was suddenly also here, except that she had undergone a dark transformation. She had begun to rot, the dreadful pustules and cankers of forbidden love were spreading across her face; just as once the ghost of Joe D’Costa had rotted in the grip of the occult leprosy of guilt, so now the rancid flowers of incest blossomed on my sister’s phantasmal features, and I couldn’t do it, couldn’t kiss touch look upon that intolerable spectral face, I had been on the verge of jerking away with a cry of desperate nostalgia and shame when Sonia Aziz burst in upon us with electric light and screams.
    And as for Mustapha, well, my indiscretion with Parvati may also have been, in his eyes, no more than a useful pretext for getting rid of me; but that must remain in doubt, because the black folder was locked—all I have to go on is a look in his eye, a smell of fear, three initials on a label—because afterwards, when everything was finished, a fallen lady and her labia-lipped son spent two days behind locked doors, burning files; and how can we know whether-or-not one of them was labelled M.C.C .?
    I didn’t want to stay, anyway. Family: an overrated idea. Don’t think I was sad! Never for a moment imagine that lumps arose in my throat at my expulsion from the last gracious home open to me! I tell you—I was in fine spirits when I left … maybe there is something unnatural about me, some fundamental lack of emotional response; but my thoughts have always aspired to higher things. Hence my resilience. Hit me: I bounce back. (But no resistance is of any use against the cracks.)
    To sum up: forsaking my earlier, naïve hopes