Midnights Children

bullied threatened. A number of candidates were produced; but Parvati rejected them all. On the night when she told Bismillah Khan, the most promising fire-eater in the colony, to go somewhere else with his breath of hot chillies, even Picture Singh despaired. That night, he said to me, “Captain, that girl is a trial and a grief to me; she is your good friend, you got any ideas?” Then an idea occurred to him, an idea which had had to wait until he became desperate because even Picture Singh was affected by considerations of class—automatically thinking of me as “too good” for Parvati, because of my supposedly “higher” birth, the ageing Communist had not thought until now that I might be … “Tell me one thing, captain,” Picture Singh asked shyly, “you are planning to be married some day?”
    Saleem Sinai felt panic rising up inside himself.
    “Hey, listen, captain, you like the girl, hey?”—And I, unable to deny it, “Of course.” And now Picture Singh, grinning from ear to ear, while snakes hissed in baskets: “Like her a lot, captain? A
lot
lot?” But I was thinking of Jamila’s face in the night; and made a desperate decision: “Pictureji, I can’t marry her.” And now he, frowning: “Are you maybe married already, captain? Got wife-children waiting somewhere?” Nothing for it now; I, quietly, shamefully, said: “I can’t marry anyone, Pictureji. I can’t have children.”
    The silence in the shack was punctuated by sibilant snakes and the calls of wild dogs in the night.
    “You’re telling truth, captain? Is a medical fact?”
    “Yes.”
    “Because one must not lie about such things, captain. To lie about one’s manhood is bad, bad luck. Anything could happen, captain.”
    And I, wishing upon myself the curse of Nadir Khan, which was also the curse of my uncle Hanif Aziz and, during the freeze and its long aftermath, of my father Ahmed Sinai, was goaded into lying even more angrily: “I tell you,” Saleem cried, “it is true, and that’s that!”
    “Then, captain,” Pictureji said tragically, smacking wrist against forehead, “God knows what to do with that poor girl.”

A Wedding
    I MARRIED PARVATI-THE-WITCH on February 23rd, 1975, the second anniversary of my outcast’s return to the magicians’ ghetto.
    Stiffening of Padma: taut as a washing-line, my dung-lotus inquires: “Married? But last night only you said you wouldn’t—and why you haven’t told me all these days, weeks, months … ?” I look at her sadly, and remind her that I have already mentioned the death of my poor Parvati, which was not a natural death … slowly Padma uncoils, as I continue: “Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, there’s no escape from her.”
    There have been thirty-two years, in this story, during which I remained unborn; soon, I may complete thirty-one years of my own. For sixty-three years, before and after midnight, women have done their best; and also, I’m bound to say, their worst.
    In a blind landowner’s house on the shores of a Kashmiri lake, Naseem Aziz doomed me to the inevitability of perforated sheets; and in the waters of that same lake, Ilse Lubin leaked into history, and I have not forgotten her deathwish;
    Before Nadir Khan hid in his underworld, my grandmother had, by becoming Reverend Mother, begun a sequence of women who changed their names, a sequence which continues even today—and which even leaked into Nadir, who became Qasim, and sat with dancing hands in the Pioneer Café; and after Nadir’s departure, my mother Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai;
    And Alia, with the bitterness of ages, who clothed me in the baby-things impregnated with her old-maid fury; and Emerald, who laid a table on which I made pepperpots march;
    There was the Rani of Cooch Naheen, whose money, placed at the disposal of a humming man, gave birth to the optimism disease, which has recurred, at intervals, ever since; and, in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi, a distant relative called Zohra whose flirtations gave birth, in my father, to that later weakness for Fernandas and Florys;
    So to Bombay. Where Winkie’s Vanita could not resist the center-parting of William Methwold, and Nussie-the-duck lost a baby-race; while