Midnights Children

flee, coughing spluttering blind, from riot police, like criminals, crying falsely as we ran. (Just as once, in Jallianwala Bagh—but at least there were no bullets on this occasion.) But although the tears were the tears of gas, Picture Singh was indeed cast down into an awesome gloom by the heckler’s gibe, which had questioned the hold on reality which was his greatest pride; and in the aftermath of gas and sticks, I, too, was dejected, having suddenly identified a moth of unease in my stomach, and realized that something in me objected to Picture’s portrayal in snake-dance of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich; I found myself thinking, “There is good and bad in all—and they brought me up, they looked after me, Pictureji!” After which I began to see that the crime of Mary Pereira had detached me from two worlds, not one; that having been expelled from my uncle’s house I could never fully enter the world-according-to-Picture-Singh; that, in fact, my dream of saving the country was a thing of mirrors and smoke; insubstantial, the maunderings of a fool.
    And then there was Parvati, with her altered profile, in the harsh clarity of the winter day.
    It was—or am I wrong? I must rush on; things are slipping from me all the time—a day of horrors. It was then—unless it was another day—that we found old Resham Bibi dead of cold, lying in her hut which she had built out of Dalda Vanaspati packing-cases. She had turned bright blue, Krishna-blue, blue as Jesus, the blue of Kashmiri sky, which sometimes leaks into eyes; we burned her on the banks of the Jamuna amongst mudflats and buffalo, and she missed my wedding as a result, which was sad, because like all old women she loved weddings, and had in the past joined in the preliminary henna-ceremonies with energetic glee, leading the formal singing in which the bride’s friends insulted the groom and his family. On one occasion her insults had been so brilliant and finely calculated that the groom took umbrage and cancelled the wedding; but Resham had been undaunted, saying that it wasn’t her fault if young men nowadays were as fainthearted and inconstant as chickens.
    I was absent when Parvati went away; I was not present when she returned; and there was one more curious fact … unless I have forgotten, unless it was on another day … it seems to me, at any rate, that on the day of Parvati’s return, an Indian Cabinet Minister was in his railway carriage, at Samastipur, when an explosion blew him into the history books; that Parvati, who had departed amid the explosions of atom bombs, returned to us when Mr. L. N. Mishra, minister for railways and bribery, departed this world for good. Omens and more omens … perhaps, in Bombay, dead pomfrets were floating belly-side-up to shore.
    January 26th, Republic Day, is a good time for illusionists. When the huge crowds gather to watch elephants and fireworks, the city’s tricksters go out to earn their living. For me, however, the day holds another meaning; it was on Republic Day that my conjugal fate was sealed.
    In the days after Parvati’s return, the old women of the ghetto formed the habit of holding their ears for shame whenever they passed her; she, who bore her illegitimate child without any appearance of guilt, would smile innocently and walk on. But on the morning of Republic Day, she awoke to find a rope hung with tattered shoes strung up above her door, and began to weep inconsolably, her poise disintegrating under the force of this greatest of insults. Picture Singh and I, leaving our shack laden with baskets of snakes, came across her in her (calculated? genuine?) misery, and Picture Singh set his jaw in an attitude of determination. “Come back to the hut, captain,” the Most Charming Man instructed me, “We must talk.”
    And in the hut, “Forgive me, captain, but I must speak. I am thinking it is a terrible thing for a man to go through life without children. To have no son, captain; how sad for you, is it not?” And I, trapped by the lie of impotence, remained silent while Pictureji suggested the marriage which would preserve Parvati’s honor and simultaneously solve the problem of my self-confessed sterility; and despite my fears of the face of Jamila Singer, which, superimposed on Parvati’s, had the power of driving me to distraction, I could not find it in myself to refuse.
    Parvati—just as she had planned, I’m sure—accepted me at once, said yes as easily and as often