Midnights Children

things.—But how can I, look at me, I’m tearing myself apart, can’t even agree with myself, talking arguing like a wild fellow, cracking up, memory going, yes, memory plunging into chasms and being swallowed by the dark, only fragments remain, none of it makes sense any more!—But I mustn’t presume to judge; must simply continue (having once begun) until the end; sense-and-nonsense is no longer (perhaps never was) for me to evaluate.—But the horror of it, I can’t won’t mustn’t won’t can’t no!—Stop this; begin.—No!—Yes.
    About the dream, then? I might be able to tell it as a dream. Yes, perhaps a nightmare: green and black the Widow’s hair and clutching hand and children mmff and little balls and one-by-one and torn-in-half and little balls go flying flying green and black her hand is green her nails are black as black.—No dreams. Neither the time nor the place for. Facts, as remembered. To the best of one’s ability. The way it was: Begin.—No choice?—None; when was there ever? There are imperatives, and logical-consequences, and inevitabilities, and recurrences; there are things-done-to, and accidents, and bludgeonings-of-fate; when was there ever a choice? When options? When a decision freely-made, to be this or that or the other? No choice; begin.—Yes.
    Listen:
    Endless night, days weeks months without the sun, or rather (because it’s important to be precise) beneath a sun as cold as a stream-rinsed plate, a sun washing us in lunatic midnight light; I’m talking about the winter of 1975–6. In the winter, darkness; and also tuberculosis.
    Once, in a blue room overlooking the sea, beneath the pointing finger of a fisherman, I fought typhoid and was rescued by snake-poison; now, trapped in the dynastic webs of recurrence by my recognition of his sonship, our Aadam Sinai was also obliged to spend his early months battling the invisible snakes of a disease. The serpents of tuberculosis wound themselves around his neck and made him gasp for air … but he was a child of ears and silence, and when he spluttered, there were no sounds; when he wheezed, no raspings issued from his throat. In short, my son fell ill, and although his mother, Parvati or Laylah, went in search of the herbs of her magical gift—although infusions of herbs in well-boiled water were constantly administered, the wraith-like worms of tuberculosis refused to be driven away. I suspected, from the first, something darkly metaphorical in this illness—believing that, in those midnight months when the age of my connection-to-history overlapped with his, our private emergency was not unconnected with the larger, macrocosmic disease, under whose influence the sun had become as pallid and diseased as our son. Parvati-then (like Padma-now) dismissed these abstract ruminations, attacking as mere folly my growing obsession with light, in whose grip I began lighting little dia-lamps in the shack of my son’s illness, filling our hut with candle-flames at noon … but I insist on the accuracy of my diagnosis; “I tell you,” I insisted then, “while the Emergency lasts, he will never become well.”
    Driven to distraction by her failure to cure that grave child who never cried, my Parvati-Laylah refused to believe my pessimistic theories; but she became vulnerable to every other cockeyed notion. When one of the older women in the colony of the magicians told her—as Resham Bibi might have—that the illness could not come out while the child remained dumb, Parvati seemed to find that plausible. “Sickness is a grief of the body,” she lectured me, “It must be shaken off in tears and groans.” That night, she returned to the hut clutching a little bundle of green powder, wrapped in newspaper and tied up with pale pink string, and told me that this was a preparation of such power that it would oblige even a stone to shriek. When she administered the medicine the child’s cheeks began to bulge, as though his mouth were full of food; the long-suppressed sounds of his babyhood flooded up behind his lips, and he jammed his mouth shut in fury. It became clear that the infant was close to choking as he tried to swallow back the torrential vomit of pent-up sound which the green powder had stirred up; and this was when we realized that we were in the presence of one of the earth’s most implacable wills. At the end of an hour during which my son turned first saffron, then saffron-and-green, and finally the color of