Midnights Children

and wanted more from me than my willingness to be her audience; God knows why, but she wanted me in her bed—or, to be precise, to lie with her on the length of sackcloth which served her for a bed in the hovel she shared with a family of contortionist triplets from Kerala, three girls who were orphans just like her—just like myself.
    What she did for me: under the power of her magic, hair began to grow where none had grown since Mr. Zagallo pulled too hard; her wizardry caused the birthmarks on my face to fade under the healing applications of herbal poultices; it seemed that even the bandiness of my legs was diminishing under her care. (She could do nothing, however, for my one bad ear; there is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one’s parents.) But no matter how much she did for me, I was unable to do for her the thing she desired most; because although we lay down together beneath the walls on the blind side of the Mosque, the moonlight showed me her night-time face turning, always turning into that of my distant, vanished sister … no, not my sister … into the putrid, vilely disfigured face of Jamila Singer. Parvati anointed her body with unguent oils imbued with erotic charm; she combed her hair a thousand times with a comb made from aphrodisiac deer-bones; and (I do not doubt it) in my absence she must have tried all manner of lovers’ sorceries; but I was in the grip of an older bewitchment, and could not, it seemed, be released; I was doomed to find the faces of women who loved me turning into the features of … but you know whose crumbling features appeared, filling my nostrils with their unholy stench.
    “Poor girl,” Padma sighs, and I agree; but until the Widow drained me of past present future, I remained under the Monkey’s spell.
    When Parvati-the-witch finally admitted failure, her face developed, overnight, an alarming and pronounced pout. She fell asleep in the hut of the contortionist orphans and awoke with her full lips stuck in a protruding attitude of unutterably sensuous pique. Orphaned triplets told her, giggling worriedly, what had happened to her face; she tried spiritedly to pull her features back into position, but neither muscles nor wizardry managed to restore her to her former self; at last, resigning herself to her tragedy, Parvati gave in, so that Resham Bibi told anyone who would listen: “That poor girl—a god must have blown on her when she was making a face.”
    (That year, incidentally, the chic ladies of the cities were all wearing just such an expression with erotic deliberation; the haughty mannequins in the Eleganza-’73 fashion show all pouted as they walked their catwalks. In the awful poverty of the magicians’ slum, pouting Parvati-the-witch was in the height of facial fashion.)
    The magicians devoted much of their energies to the problem of making Parvati smile again. Taking time off from their work, and also from the more mundane chores of reconstructing tin-and-cardboard huts which had fallen down in a high wind, or killing rats, they performed their most difficult tricks for her pleasure; but the pout remained in place. Resham Bibi made a green tea which smelled of camphor and forced it down Parvati’s gullet. The tea had the effect of constipating her so thoroughly that she was not seen defecating behind her hovel for nine weeks. Two young jugglers conceived the notion that she might have begun grieving for her deceased father all over again, and applied themselves to the task of drawing his portrait on a shred of old tarpaulin, which they hung above her sackcloth mat. Triplets made jokes, and Picture Singh, greatly distressed, made cobras tie themselves in knots; but none of it worked, because if Parvati’s thwarted love was beyond her own powers to cure, what hope could the others have had? The power of Parvati’s pout created, in the ghetto, a nameless sense of unease, which all the magicians’ animosity towards the unknown could not entirely dispel.
    And then Resham Bibi hit upon an idea. “Fools that we are,” she told Picture Singh, “we don’t see what is under our noses. The poor girl is twenty-five, baba—almost an old woman! She is pining for a husband!” Picture Singh was impressed. “Resham Bibi,” he told her approvingly, “your brain is not yet dead.”
    After that, Picture Singh applied himself to the task of finding Parvati a suitable young man; many of the younger men in the ghetto were coaxed