Midnights Children

Shiva-of-the-knees, supervises our captivity. Will they be content with four hundred and twenty? Children: I don’t know how long they’ll wait.
    … No, you’re making fun of me, stop, do not joke. Why whence how-on-earth this good nature, this bonhomie in your passed-on whisperings? No, you must condemn me, out of hand and without appeal—do not torture me with your cheery greetings as one-by-one you are locked in cells; what kind of time or place is this for salaams, namaskars, how-you-beens?—Children, don’t you understand, they could do anything to us, anything—no, how can you say that, what do you mean with your what-could-they-do? Let me tell you, my friends, steel rods are painful when applied to the ankles; rifle-butts leave bruises on foreheads. What could they do? Live electric wires up your anuses, children; and that’s not the only possibility, there is also hanging-by-the-feet, and a candle—ah, the sweet romantic glow of candlelight!—is less than comfortable when applied, lit, to the skin! Stop it now, cease all this friendship, aren’t you afraid! Don’t you want to kick stamp trample me to smithereens? Why these constant whispered reminiscences, this nostalgia for old quarrels, for the war of ideas and things, why are you taunting me with your calmness, your normality, your powers of rising-above-the-crisis? Frankly, I’m puzzled children: how can you, aged twenty-nine, sit whispering flirtatiously to each other in your cells? Goddamnit, this is not a social reunion!
    Children, children, I’m sorry. I admit openly I have not been myself of late. I have been a buddha, and a basketed ghost, and a would-be-savior of the nation … Saleem has been rushing down blind alleys, has had considerable problems with reality, ever since a spittoon fell like a piece-of-the- … pity me: I’ve even lost my spittoon. But I’m going wrong again, I wasn’t intending to ask for pity, I was going to say that perhaps I see—it was I, not you, who failed to understand what is happening. Incredible, children: we, who could not talk for five minutes without disagreeing: we, who as children quarrelled fought divided distrusted broke apart, are suddenly together, united, as one! O wondrous irony: the Widow, by bringing us here, to break us, has in fact brought us together! O self-fulfilling paranoia of tyrants … because what can they do to us, now that we’re all on the same side, no language-rivalries, no religious prejudices: after all, we are twenty-nine now, I should not be calling you children … ! Yes, here is optimism, like a disease: one day she’ll have to let us out and then, and then, wait and see, maybe we should form, I don’t know, a new political party, yes, the Midnight Party, what chance do politics have against people who can multiply fishes and turn base metals into gold? Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our captivity; let Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility!
Children: we’ve won!
    Too painful. Optimism, growing like a rose in a dung-heap: it hurts me to recall it. Enough: I forget the rest.—No!—No, very well, I remember … What is worse than rods bar-fetters candles-against-the-skin? What beats nail-tearing and starvation? I reveal the Widow’s finest, most delicate joke: instead of torturing us, she gave us hope. Which meant she had something—no, more than something: the finest thing of all!—to take away. And now, very soon now, I shall have to describe how she cut it off.
    Ectomy (from, I suppose, the Greek): a cutting out. To which medical science adds a number of prefixes: appendectomy tonsillectomy mastectomy tubectomy vasectomy testectomy hysterectomy. Saleem would like to donate one further item, free gratis and for nothing, to this catalogue of excisions; it is, however, a term which properly belongs to history, although medical science is, was involved:
    Sperectomy: the draining-out of hope.
    On New Year’s Day, I had a visitor. Creak of door, rustle of expensive chiffon. The pattern: green and black. Her glasses, green, her shoes were black as black … In newspaper articles this woman has been called “a gorgeous girl with big rolling hips … she had run a jewelry boutique before she took up social work … during the Emergency she was, semi-officially, in charġe of sterilization.” But I have my own name for her: she was the Widow’s Hand. Which one by one and children mmff and tearing tearing little balls go …