Midnights Children

of preferment in public service, I returned to the magicians’ slum and the chaya of the Friday Mosque. Like Gautama, the first and true Buddha, I left my life of comfort and went like a beggar into the world. The date was February 23 rd, 1973; coal-mines and the wheat market were being nationalized, the price of oil had begun to spiral up up up, would quadruple in a year, and in the Communist Party of India, the split between Dange’s Moscow faction and Namboodiripad’s C.P.I.(M.) had become unbridgeable; and I, Saleem Sinai, like India, was twenty-five years, six months and eight days old.
    The magicians were Communists, almost to a man. That’s right: reds! Insurrectionists, public menaces, the scum of the earth—a community of the godless living blasphemously in the very shadow of the house of God! Shameless, what’s more; innocently scarlet; born with the bloody taint upon their souls! And let me say at once that no sooner had I discovered this than I, who had been raised in India’s other true faith, which we may term Businessism, and who had abandoned-been-abandoned-by its practitioners, felt instantly and comfortingly at home. A renegade Businessist, I began zealously to turn red and then redder, as surely and completely as my father had once turned white, so that now my mission of saving-the-country could be seen in a new light; more revolutionary methodologies suggested themselves. Down with the rule of uncooperative box-wallah uncles and their beloved leaders! Full of thoughts of direct-communication-with-the-masses, I settled into the magicians’ colony, scraping a living by amusing foreign and native tourists with the marvellous perspicacities of my nose, which enabled me to smell out their simple, touristy secrets. Picture Singh asked me to share his shack. I slept on tattered sackcloth amongst baskets sibilant with snakes; but I did not mind, just as I found myself capable of tolerating hunger thirst mosquitoes and (in the beginning) the bitter cold of a Delhi winter. This Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, was also the ghetto’s unquestioned chieftain; squabbles and problems were resolved beneath the shade of his ubiquitous and enormous black umbrella; and I, who could read and write as well as smell, became a sort of aide-de-camp to this monumental man who invariably added a lecture on socialism to his serpentine performances, and who was famous in the main streets and alleys of the city for more than his snake-charmer’s skills. I can say, with utter certainty, that Picture Singh was the greatest man I ever met.
    One afternoon during the chaya, the ghetto was visited by another copy of that labia-lipped youth whom I’d seen at my Uncle Mustapha’s. Standing on the steps of the mosque, he unfurled a banner which was then held up by two assistants. It read: ABOLISH POVERTY , and bore the cow-suckling-calf symbol of the Indira Congress. His face looked remarkably like a plump calf’s face, and he unleashed a typhoon of halitosis when he spoke. “Brothers-O! Sisters-O! What does Congress say to you? This: that all men are created equal!” He got no further; the crowd recoiled from his breath of bullock dung under a hot sun, and Picture Singh began to guffaw. “O ha ha, captain, too good, sir!” And labia-lips, foolishly: “Okay, you, brother, won’t you share the joke?” Picture Singh shook his head, clutched his sides: “O speech, captain! Absolute master speech!” His laughter rolled out from beneath his umbrella to infect the crowd until all of us were rolling on the ground, laughing, crushing ants, getting covered in dust, and the Congress mooncalf’s voice rose in panic: “What is this? This fellow doesn’t think we are equals? What a low impression he must have—” but now Picture Singh, umbrella-over-head, was striding away towards his hut. Labia-lips, in relief, continued his speech … but not for long, because Picture returned, carrying under his left arm a small circular lidded basket and under his right armpit a wooden flute. He placed the basket on the step beside the Congress-wallah’s feet; removed the lid; raised flute to lips. Amid renewed laughter, the young politico leaped nineteen inches into the air as a king cobra swayed sleepily up from its home … Labia-lips is crying: “What are you doing? Trying to kill me to death?” And Picture Singh, ignoring him, his umbrella furled now, plays on, more and more furiously, and the snake uncoils,