Midnights Children

the sensitivity of a nose cannot be drained away … but as for the rest of them, for all those who had come to the palace of the wailing windows with their magical gifts intact, the awakening from anesthesia was cruel indeed, and whispering through the wall came the tale of their undoing, the tormented cry of children who had lost their magic: she had cut it out of us, gorgeously with wide rolling hips she had devised the operation of our annihilation, and now we were nothing, who were we, a mere 0.00007 per cent, now fishes could not be multiplied nor base metals transmuted; gone forever, the possibilities of flight and lycanthropy and the originally-one-thousand-and-one marvelous promises of a numinous midnight.
    Drainage below: it was not a reversible operation
    Who were we? Broken promises; made to be broken.
    And now I must tell you about the smell.
    Yes, you must have all of it: however overblown, however Bombay-talkie-melodramatic, you must let it sink in, you must
see!
What Saleem smelled in the evening of January 18th, 1977: something frying in an iron skillet, soft unspeakable somethings spiced with turmeric coriander cumin and fenugreek … the pungent inescapable fumes of what-had-been-excised, cooking over a low, slow fire.
    When four-hundred-and-twenty suffered ectomies, an avenging Goddess ensured that certain ectomized parts were curried with onions and green chillies, and fed to the pie-dogs of Benares. (There were four hundred and twenty-one ectomies performed: because one of us, whom we called Narada or Markandaya, had the ability of changing sex; he, or she, had to be operated on twice.)
    No, I can’t prove it, not any of it. Evidence went up in smoke: some was fed to pie-dogs, and later, on March 20th, files were burned by a mother with particolored hair and her beloved son.
    But Padma knows what I can no longer do; Padma, who once, in her anger, cried out: “But what use are
you
, my God, as a
lover?
” That part, at least, can be verified: in the hovel of Picture Singh, I cursed myself with the lie of impotence; I cannot say I was not warned, because he told me: “Anything could happen, captain.” It did.
    Sometimes I feel a thousand years old: or (because I cannot, even now, abandon form), to be exact, a thousand and one.
    The Widow’s Hand had rolling hips and once owned a jewelery boutique. I began among jewels: in Kashmir, in 1915, there were rubies and diamonds. My great-grandparents ran a gemstone store. Form—once again, recurrence and shape!—no escape from it.
    In the walls, the hopeless whispers of the stunned four-hundred-and-nineteen; while the four-hundred-and-twentieth gives vent—just once; one moment of ranting is permissible—to the following petulant question … at the top of my voice, I shriek: “What about him? Major Shiva, the traitor? Don’t you care about him?” And the reply, from gorgeous-with-big-rolling-hips: “The Major has undergone voluntary vasectomy.”
    And now, in his sightless cell, Saleem begins to laugh, wholeheartedly, without stinting: no, I was not laughing cruelly at my archrival, nor was I cynically translating the word “voluntary” into another word; no, I was remembering stories told me by Parvati or Laylah, the legendary tales of the war hero’s philandering, of the legions of bastards swelling in the unectomied bellies of great ladies and whores; I laughed because Shiva, destroyer of the midnight children, had also fulfilled the other role lurking in his name, the function of Shivalingam, of Shiva-the-procreator, so that at this very moment, in the boudoirs and hovels of the nation, a new generation of children, begotten by midnight’s darkest child, was being raised towards the future. Every Widow manages to forget something important.
    Late in March 1977, I was unexpectedly released from the palace of the howling widows, and stood blinking like an owl in the sunlight, not knowing how what why. Afterwards, when I had remembered how to ask questions, I discovered that on January 18th (the very day of the end of snip-snip, and of substances fried in an iron skillet: what further proof would you like that we, the four hundred and twenty, were what the Widow feared most of all?) the Prime Minister had, to the astonishment of all, called a general election. (But now that you know about us, you may find it easier to understand her over-confidence.) But on that day, I knew nothing about her crushing defeat, nor about burning files; it