Midnights Children

cups of chaloo-chai; he was fanning himself with a peacock-feather fan, and the bad luck of peacock feathers depressed Picture Singh beyond imagining. While the infinite flatness of the Indo-Gangetic plain unfolded outside the window, sending the hot insanity of the afternoon loo-wind to torment us, the shaven American lectured the occupants of the carriage on the intricacies of Hinduism and began to teach them mantras while extending a walnut begging bowl; Picture Singh was blind to this remarkable spectacle and also deaf to the abracadabra of the wheels. “It is no good, captain,” he confided mournfully, “This Bombay fellow will be young and strong, and I am doomed to be only the second most charming man from now on.” By the time we reached Kotah Station, the odors of misfortune exuded by the peacock-feather fan had possessed Pictureji utterly, had eroded him so alarmingly that although everyone in the carriage was getting out on the side farthest from the platform to urinate against the side of the train, he showed no sign of needing to go. By Ratlam Junction, while my excitement was mounting, he had fallen into a trance which was not sleep but the rising paralysis of the pessimism. “At this rate,” I thought, “he won’t even be able to challenge this rival.” Baroda passed: no change. At Surat, the old John Company depot, I realized I’d have to do something soon, because abracadabra was bringing us closer to Bombay Central by the minute, and so at last I picked up Picture Singh’s old wooden flute, and by playing it with such terrible ineptitude that all the snakes writhed in agony and petrified the American youth into silence, by producing a noise so hellish that nobody noticed the passing of Bassein Road, Kurla, Mahim, I overcame the miasma of the peacock-feathers; at last Picture Singh shook himself out of his despondency with a faint grin and said, “Better you stop, captain, and let me play that thing; otherwise some people are sure to die of pain.”
    Serpents subsided in their baskets; and then the wheels stopped singing, and we were there:
    Bombay! I hugged Aadam fiercely, and was unable to resist uttering an ancient cry: “Back-to-Bom!” I cheered, to the bewilderment of the American youth; who had never heard this mantra: and again, and again, and again: “Back! Back-to-Bom!”
    By bus down Bellasis Road, towards the Tardeo roundabout, we traveled past Parsees with sunken eyes, past bicycle-repair shops and Irani cafés; and then Hornby Vellard was on our right—where promenaders watched as Sherri the mongrel bitch was left to spill her guts! Where cardboard effigies of wrestlers still towered above the entrances to Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium!—and we were rattling and banging past traffic-cops with sun-umbrellas, past Mahalaxmi temple—and then Warden Road! The Breach Candy Swimming Baths! And there, look, the shops … but the names had changed: where was Reader’s Paradise with its stacks of Superman comics? Where, the Band Box Laundry and Bombelli’s, with their One Yard Of Chocolates? And, my God, look, atop a two-storey hillock where once the palaces of William Methwold stood wreathed in bougainvillaea and stared proudly out to sea … look at it, a great pink monster of a building, the roseate skyscraper obelisk of the Narlikar women, standing over and obliterating the circus-ring of childhood … yes, it was my Bombay, but also not-mine, because we reached Kemp’s Corner to find the hoardings of Air-India’s little rajah and of the Kolynos Kid gone, gone for good, and Thomas Kemp and Co. itself had vanished into thin air … flyovers crisscrossed where, once upon a time, medicines were dispensed and a pixie in a chlorophyll cap beamed down upon the traffic. Elegiacally, I murmured under my breath: “Keep Teeth Kleen and Keep Teeth Brite! Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White!” But despite my incantation, the past failed to reappear; we rattled on down Gibbs Road and dismounted near Chowpatty Beach.
    Chowpatty, at least, was much the same: a dirty strip of sand aswarm with pickpockets, and strollers, and vendors of hot-channa-channa-hot, of kulfi and bhel-puri and chutter-mutter; but further down Marine Drive I saw what tetrapods had achieved. On land reclaimed by the Narlikar consortium from the sea, vast monsters soared upwards to the sky, bearing strange alien names: OBEROI-SHERATON screamed at me from afar. And where was the neon Jeep sign? … “Come on, Pictureji,”