Midnights Children

scarcely grew at all. Saleem wore an ingratiating smile from the start; Aadam had more dignity, and kept his grins to himself. Whereas Saleem had subjugated his will to the joint tyrannies of family and fate, Aadam fought ferociously, refusing to yield even to the coercion of green powder. And while Saleem had been so determined to absorb the universe that he had been, for a time, unable to blink, Aadam preferred to keep his eyes firmly closed … although when, every so often, he deigned to open them, I observed their color, which was blue. Ice-blue, the blue of recurrence, the fateful blue of Kashmiri sky … but there is no need to elaborate further.
    We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams.
    How much was heard by those flapping ears which seemed, on occasion, to be burning with the heat of their knowledge? If he could have talked, would he have cautioned me against treason and bulldozers? In a country dominated by the twin multitudes of noises and smells, we could have been the perfect team; but my baby son rejected speech, and I failed to obey the dictates of my nose.
    “Arré baap,” Padma cries, “Just tell what happened, mister! What is so surprising if a baby does not make conversations?”
    And again the rifts inside me: I can’t.—You must.—Yes.
    April 1976 found me still living in the colony or ghetto of the magicians; my son Aadam was still in the grip of a slow tuberculosis that seemed unresponsive to any form of treatment. I was full of forebodings (and thoughts of flight); but if any one man was the reason for my remaining in the ghetto, that man was Picture Singh.
    Padma: Saleem threw in his lot with the magicians of Delhi partly out of a sense of fitness—a self-flagellant belief in the rectitude of his belated descent into poverty (I took with me, from my uncle’s house, no more than two shirts, white, two pairs trousers, also white, one tee-shirt, decorated with pink guitars, and shoes, one pair, black); partly, I came out of loyalty, having been bound by knots of gratitude to my rescuer, Parvati-the-witch; but I stayed—when, as a literate young man, I might at the very least have been a bank clerk or a night-school teacher of reading and writing—because, all my life, consciously or unconsciously, I have sought out fathers. Ahmed Sinai, Hanif Aziz, Sharpsticker Sahib, General Zulfikar have all been pressed into service in the absence of William Methwold; Picture Singh was the last of this noble line. And perhaps, in my dual lust for fathers and saving-the-country, I exaggerated Picture Singh; the horrifying possibility exists that I distorted him (and have distorted him again in these pages) into a dream-figment of my own imagination … it is certainly true that whenever I inquired, “When are you going to lead us, Pictureji—when will the great day come?”, he, shuffling awkwardly, replied, “Get such things out from your head, captain; I am a poor man from Rajasthan, and also the Most Charming Man In The World; don’t make me anything else.” But I, urging him on, “There is a precedent—there was Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird …” to which Picture, “Captain, you got some crazy notions.”
    During the early months of the Emergency, Picture Singh remained in the clutches of a gloomy silence reminiscent (once again!) of the great soundlessness of Reverend Mother (which had also leaked into my son …), and neglected to lecture his audiences in the highways and back-streets of the Old and New cities as, in the past, he had insisted on doing; but although he, “This is a time for silence, captain,” I remained convinced that one day, one millennial dawn at midnight’s end, somehow, at the head of a great jooloos or procession of the dispossessed, perhaps playing his flute and wreathed in deadly snakes, it would be Picture Singh who led us towards the light … but maybe he was never more than a snake-charmer; I do not deny the possibility. I say only that to me my last father, tall gaunt bearded, his hair swept back into a knot behind his neck, seemed the very avatar of Mian Abdullah; but perhaps it was all an