Midnights Children

Mary Pereira, in the name of love, changed the baby-tags of history and became a second mother to me …
    Women and women and women: Toxy Catrack, nudging open the door which would later let in the children of midnight; the terrors of her nurse Bi-Appah; the competitive love of Amina and Mary, and what my mother showed me while I lay concealed in a washing-chest; yes, the Black Mango, which forced me to sniff, and unleashed what-were-not-Archangels! … And Evelyn Lilith Burns, cause of a bicycle-accident, who pushed me down a two-storey hillock into the midst of history.
    And the Monkey. I mustn’t forget the Monkey.
    But also, also, there was Masha Miovic, goading me into finger-loss, and my aunty Pia, filling my heart with revenge-lust, and Lila Sabarmati, whose indiscretions made possible my terrible, manipulating, newspaper-cut-out revenge;
    And Mrs. Dubash, who found my gift of a Superman comic and built it, with the help of her son, into Lord Khusro Khusrovand;
    And Mary, seeing a ghost.
    In Pakistan, the land of submission, the home of purity, I watched the transformation of Monkey-into-Singer, and fetched bread, and fell in love; it was a woman, Tai Bibi, who told me the truth about myself. And in the heart of my inner darkness, I turned to the Puffias, and was only narrowly saved from the threat of a golden-dentured bride.
    Beginning again, as the buddha, I lay with a latrine-cleaner and was subjected to electrified urinals as a result; in the East, a farmer’s wife tempted me, and Time was assassinated in consequence; and there were houris in a temple, and we only just escaped in time.
    In the shadow of a mosque, Resham Bibi issued a warning.
    And I married Parvati-the-Witch.
    “Oof, mister,” Padma exclaims, “that’s too much women!”
    I do not disagree; because I have not even included her, whose dreams of marriage and Kashmir have inevitably been leaking into me, making me wish, if-only, if-only, so that, having once resigned myself to the cracks, I am not assailed by pangs of discontent, anger, fear and regret.
    But above all, the Widow.
    “I swear!” Padma slaps her knee, “Too much, mister; too much.”
    How are we to understand my too-many women? As the multiple faces of Bharat-Mata? Or as even more … as the dynamic aspect of maya, as cosmic energy, which is represented as the female organ?
    Maya, in its dynamic aspect, is called Shakti; perhaps it is no accident that, in the Hindu pantheon, the active power of a deity is contained within his queen! Maya-Shakti mothers, but also “muffles consciousness in its dream-web.” Too-many-women: are they all aspects of Devi, the goddess—who is Shakti, who slew the buffalo-demon, who defeated the ogre Mahisha, who is Kali Durga Chandi Chamunda Uma Sati and Parvati … and who, when active, is colored red?
    “I don’t know about that,” Padma brings me down to earth, “They are just women, that’s all.”
    Descending from my flight of fancy, I am reminded of the importance of speed; driven on by the imperatives of rip tear crack, I abandon reflections; and begin.
    This is how it came about; how Parvati took her destiny into her own hands; how a lie, issuing from my lips, brought her to the desperate condition in which, one night, she extracted from her shabby garments a lock of hero’s hair, and began to speak sonorous words.
    Spurned by Saleem, Parvati remembered who had once been his arch-enemy; and, taking a bamboo stick with seven knots in it, and an improvised metal hook attached to one end, she squatted in her shack and recited; with the Hook of Indra in her right hand, and a lock of hair in her left, she summoned him to her. Parvati called to Shiva; believe don’t believe, but Shiva came.
    From the beginning there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees; but throughout this narrative I’ve been pushing him, the other, into the background (just as once, I banned him from the councils of the Children). He can be concealed no longer, however; because one morning in May 1974—is it just my cracking memory, or am I right in thinking it was the 18th, perhaps at the very moment at which the deserts of Rajasthan were being shaken by India’s first nuclear explosion? Was Shiva’s explosion into my life truly synchronous with India’s arrival, without prior warning, at the nuclear age?—he came to the magicians’ slum. Uniformed, gonged-and-pipped, and a Major now, Shiva alighted from an Army motorcycle; and even through the modest