Midnights Children

I said at length, hugging Aadam to my chest, “Let’s go where we’re going and be done with it; the city has been changed.”
    What can I say about the Midnite-Confidential Club? That its location is underground, secret (although known to omniscient paan-wallahs); its door, unmarked; its clientèle, the cream of Bombay society. What else? Ah, yes: managed by one Anand “Andy” Shroff, businessman-playboy, who is to be found on most days tanning himself at the Sun ’n’ Sand Hotel on Juhu Beach, amid film-stars and disenfranchised princesses. I ask you: an Indian, sunbathing? But apparently it’s quite normal, the international rules of playboydom must be obeyed to the letter, including, I suppose, the one stipulating daily worshipping of the sun.
    How innocent I am (and I used to think that Sonny, forcep-dented, was the simple one!)—I never suspected that places like the Midnite-Confidential existed! But of course they do; and clutching flutes and snake-baskets, the three of us knocked on its doors.
    Movements visible through a small iron eye-level grille: a low mellifluous female voice asked us to state our business. Picture Singh announced: “I am the Most Charming Man In The World. You are employing here one other snake-charmer as cabaret; I will challenge him and prove my superiority. For this I do not ask to be paid. It is, capteena, a question of honor.”
    It was evening; Mr. Anand “Andy” Shroff was, by good fortune, on the premises. And, to cut a long story short, Picture Singh’s challenge was accepted, and we entered that place whose name had already unnerved me somewhat, because it contained the word
midnight
, and because its initials had once concealed my own, secret world: M.C.C., which stands for Metro Cub Club, once also stood for the Midnight Children’s Conference, and had now been usurped by the secret night-spot. In a word: I felt invaded.
    Twin problems of the city’s sophisticated, cosmopolitan youth: how to consume alcohol in a dry state; and how to romance girls in the best Western tradition, by taking them out to paint the town red, while at the same time preserving total secrecy, to avoid the very Oriental shame of a scandal? The Midnite-Confidential was Mr. Shroff’s solution to the agonizing difficulties of the city’s gilded youth. In that underground of licentiousness, he had created a world of Stygian darkness, black as hell; in the secrecy of midnight darkness, the city’s lovers met, drank imported liquor, and romanced; cocooned in the isolating, artificial night, they canoodled with impunity. Hell is other people’s fantasies: every saga requires at least one descent into Jahan-num, and I followed Picture Singh into the inky negritude of the Club, holding an infant son in my arms.
    We were led down a lush black carpet—midnight-black, black as lies, crow-black, anger-black, the black of “hai-yo, black man!”; in short, a dark rug—by a female attendant of ravishing sexual charms, who wore her sari erotically low on her hips, with a jasmine in her navel; but as we descended into the darkness, she turned towards us with a reassuring smile, and I saw that her eyes were closed; unearthly luminous eyes had been painted on her lids. I could not help but ask, “Why …“To which she, simply: “I am blind; and besides, nobody who comes here wants to be seen. Here you are in a world without faces or names; here people have no memories, families or past; here is for
now
, for nothing except right now.”
    And the darkness engulfed us; she guided us through that nightmare pit in which light was kept in shackles and bar-fetters, that place outside time, that negation of history … “Sit here,” she said, “The other snake-man will come soon. When it is time, one light will shine on you; then begin your contest.”
    We sat there for—what? minutes, hours, weeks?—and there were the glowing eyes of blind women leading invisible guests to their seats; and gradually, in the dark, I became aware of being surrounded by soft, amorous susurrations, like the couplings of velvet mice; I heard the chink of glasses held by twined arms, and gentle brushings of lips; with one good ear and one bad ear, I heard the sounds of illicit sexuality filling the midnight air … but no, I did not want to know what was happening; although my nose was able to smell, in the susurrating silence of the Club, all manner of new stories and beginnings, of exotic and forbidden loves, and