Midnights Children

angels do not fly in through the window: the lad is just Flexing his muscles. I shall not see his miracles …. Amid Mary’s celebrations of Aadam’s achievement, I go back to Padma, and the factory; my son’s enigmatic first incursion into language has left a worrying fragrance in my nostrils.
    Abracadabra: not an Indian word at all, a cabbalistic formula derived from the name of the supreme god of the Basilidan gnostics, containing the number 365, the number of the days of the year, and of the heavens, and of the spirits emanating from the god Abraxas. “Who,” I am wondering, not for the first time, “does the boy imagine he
is?
”
    My special blends: I’ve been saving them up. Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! I, however, have pickled chapters. Tonight, by screwing the lid firmly on to a jar bearing the legend
Special Formula No. 30: “Abracadabra,”
I reach the end of my long-winded autobiography; in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfection.
    These days, I manage the factory for Mary. Alice—“Mrs. Fernandes”—controls the finances; my responsibility is for the creative aspects of our work. (Of course I have forgiven Mary her crime; I need mothers as well as fathers, and a mother is beyond blame.) Amid the wholly-female workforce of Braganza Pickles, beneath the saffron-and-green winking of neon Mumbadevi, I choose mangoes tomatoes limes from the women who come at dawn with baskets on their heads. Mary, with her ancient hatred of “the mens,” admits no males except myself into her new, comfortable universe … myself, and of course my son. Alice, I suspect, still has her little liaisons; and Padma fell for me from the first, seeing in me an outlet for her vast reservoir of pent-up solicitude; I cannot answer for the rest of them, but the formidable competence of the Narlikar females is reflected, on this factory floor, in the strong-armed dedication of the vat-stirrers.
    What is required for chutnification? Raw materials, obviously—fruit, vegetables, fish, vinegar, spices. Daily visits from Koli women with their saris hitched up between their legs. Cucumbers aubergines mint. But also: eyes, blue as ice, which are undeceived by the superficial blandishments of fruit—which can see corruption beneath citrus-skin; fingers which, with featheriest touch, can probe the secret inconstant hearts of green tomatoes; and above all a nose capable of discerning the hidden languages of what-must-be-pickled, its humors and messages and emotions … at Braganza Pickles, I supervise the production of Mary’s legendary recipes; but there are also my special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans … believe don’t believe but it’s true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation.
    (And beside them, one jar stands empty.)
    The process of revision should be constant and endless; don’t think I’m satisfied with what I’ve done! Among my unhappinesses: an overly-harsh taste from those jars containing memories of my father; a certain ambiguity in the love-flavor of “Jamila Singer” (Special Formula No. 22), which might lead the unperceptive to conclude that I’ve invented the whole story of the baby-swap to justify an incestuous love; vague implausibilities in the jar labeled “Accident in a Washing-chest”—the pickle raises questions which are not fully answered, such as: Why did Saleem need an accident to acquire his powers? Most of the other children didn’t … Or again, in “All-India Radio” and others, a discordant note in the orchestrated flavors: would Mary’s confession have come as a shock to a true telepath? Sometimes, in the pickles’ version of history, Saleem appears to have known too