Midnights Children

no doubt that I’d have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times; but now I’m disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write. So, waving at the champion defecator, I call back: “Seven on a good day,” and forget him.
    Tomorrow. Or the day after. The cracks will be waiting for August 15th. There is still a little time: I’ll finish tomorrow.
    Today I gave myself the day off and visited Mary. A long hot dusty bus-ride through streets beginning to bubble with the excitement of the coming Independence Day, although I can smell other, more tarnished perfumes: disillusion, venality, cynicism … the nearly-thirty-one-year-old myth of freedom is no longer what it was. New myths are needed; but that’s none of my business.
    Mary Pereira, who now calls herself Mrs. Braganza, lives with her sister Alice, now Mrs. Fernandes, in an apartment in the pink obelisk of the Narlikar women on the two-storey hillock where once, in a demolished palace, she slept on a servant’s mat. Her bedroom occupies more or less the same cube of air in which a fisherman’s pointing finger led a pair of boyish eyes out towards the horizon; in a teak rocking-chair, Mary rocks my son, singing “Red Sails In The Sunset.” Red dhow-sails spread against the distant sky.
    A pleasant enough day, on which old days are recalled. The day when I realized that an old cactus-bed had survived the revolution of the Narlikar women, and borrowing a spade from the mali, dug up a long-buried world: a tin globe containing yellowed ant-eaten jumbo-size baby-snap, credited to Kalidas Gupta, and a Prime Minister’s letter. And days further off: for the dozenth time we chatter about the change in Mary Pereira’s fortunes. How she owed it all to her dear Alice. Whose poor Mr. Fernandes died of color-blindness, having become confused, in his old Ford Prefect, at one of the city’s then-few traffic lights. How Alice visited her in Goa with the news that her employers, the fearsome and enterprising Narlikar women, were willing to put some of their tetrapod-money into a pickle firm. “I told them, nobody makes achar-chutney like our Mary,” Alice had said, with perfect accuracy, “because she puts her feelings inside them.” So Alice turned out to be a good girl in the end. And baba, what do you think, how could I believe the whole world would want to eat my poor pickles, even in England they eat. And now, just think, I sit here where your dear house used to be, while God-knows what-all has happened to you, living like a beggar so long, what a world, baapu-ré!
    And bitter-sweet lamentations: O, your poor mummy-daddy! That fine madam, dead! And the poor man, never knowing who loved him or how to love! And even the Monkey … but I interrupt, no, not dead: no, not true, not dead. Secretly, in a nunnery, eating bread.
    Mary, who has stolen the name of poor Queen Catharine who gave these islands to the British, taught me the secrets of the pickling process. (Finishing an education which began in this very air-space when I stood in a kitchen as she stirred guilt into green chutney.) Now she sits at home, retired in her white-haired old-age, once more happy as an ayah with a baby to raise. “Now you finished your writing-writing, baba, you should take more time for your son.” But Mary, I did it for him. And she, switching the subject, because her mind makes all sorts of flea-jumps these days: “O baba, baba, look at you, how old you got already!”
    Rich Mary, who never dreamed she would be rich, is still unable to sleep on beds. But drinks sixteen Coca-Colas a day, unworried about teeth, which have all fallen out anyway. A flea-jump: “Why you getting married so sudden sudden?” Because Padma wants. No, she is not in trouble, how could she, in my condition? “Okay, baba, I only asked.”
    And the day would have wound down peacefully, a twilight day near the end of time, except that now, at last, at the age of three years, one month and two weeks, Aadam Sinai uttered a sound.
    “Ab …” Arré, O my God, listen, baba, the boy is saying something! And Aadam, very carefully: “Abba …” Father. He is calling me father. But no, he has not finished, there is strain on his face, and finally my son, who will have to be a magician to cope with the world I’m leaving him, completes his awesome first word: “. . . cadabba.”
    Abracadabra! But nothing happens, we do not turn into toads,