Midnights Children

khaki of his Army pants it was easy to make out the phenomenal twin bulges of his lethal knees … India’s most decorated war hero, but once he led a gang of apaches in the back-streets of Bombay; once, before he discovered the legitimized violence of war, prostitutes were found throttled in gutters (I know, I know—no proof); Major Shiva now, but also Wee Willie Winkie’s boy, who still remembered the words of long-silenced songs: “Good Night, Ladies” still echoed on occasion in his ears.
    There are ironies here, which must not pass unnoticed; for had not Shiva risen as Saleem fell? Who was the slum-dweller now, and who looked down from commanding heights? There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives … On what may well have been May 18th, at any rate, Major Shiva came to the magicians’ ghetto, and strode through the cruel streets of the slum with a strange expression on his face, which combined the infinite disdain for poverty of the recently-exalted with something more mysterious: because Major Shiva, drawn to our humble abode by the incantations of Parvati-the-witch, cannot have known what force impelled him to come.
    What follows is a reconstruction of the recent career of Major Shiva; I pieced the story together from Parvati’s accounts, which I got out of her after our marriage. It seems my arch-rival was fond of boasting to her about his exploits, so you may wish to make allowances for the distortions of truth which such chest-beating creates; however, there seems no reason to believe that what he told Parvati and she repeated to me was very far removed from what-was-the-case.
    At the end of the war in the East, the legends of Shiva’s awful exploits buzzed through the streets of the cities, leaped on to newspaper and into magazines, and thus insinuated themselves into the salons of the well-to-do, settling in clouds as thick as flies upon the eardrums of the country’s hostesses, so that Shiva found himself elevated in social status as well as military rank, and was invited to a thousand and one different gatherings—banquets, musical soirees, bridge parties, diplomatic receptions, party political conferences, great melas and also smaller, local fêtes, school sports days and fashionable balls—to be applauded and monopolized by the noblest and fairest in the land, to all of whom the legends of his exploits clung like flies, walking over their eyeballs so that they saw the young man through the mist of his legend, coating their fingertips so that they touched him through the magical film of his myth, settling on their tongues so that they could not speak to him as they would to an ordinary human being. The Indian Army, which was at that time fighting a political battle against proposed expenditure cuts, understood the value of so charismatic an ambassador, and permitted the hero to circulate amongst his influential admirers; Shiva espoused his new life with a will.
    He grew a luxuriant moustache to which his personal batman applied a daily pomade of linseed-oil spiced with coriander; always elegantly turned out in the drawing-rooms of the mighty, he engaged in political chit-chat, and declared himself a firm admirer of Mrs. Gandhi, largely because of his hatred for her opponent Morarji Desai, who was intolerably ancient, drank his own urine, had skin which rustled like rice-paper, and, as Chief Minister of Bombay, had once been responsible for the banning of alcohol and the persecution of young goondas, that is to say hooligans or apaches, or, in other words, of the child Shiva himself … but such idle chatter occupied a mere fraction of his thoughts, the rest of which were entirely taken up with the ladies. Shiva, too, was besotted by too-much-women, and in those heady days after the military victory acquired a secret reputation which (he boasted to Parvati) rapidly grew to rival his official, public fame—a “black” legend to set beside the “white” one. What was whispered at the hen-parties and canasta-evenings of the land? What was hissed through giggles wherever two or three glittering ladies got together? This: Major Shiva was becoming a notorious seducer; a ladies’-man; a cuckolder of the rich; in short, a stud.
    There were women—he told Parvati—wherever he went: their curving bird-soft bodies quaking beneath the weight of their jewelery and lust, their eyes misted over by his legend; it would have been difficult to refuse them even had he wanted to. But Major