Midnights Children

the door and Nadir answered it. Six new moons came into the room, six crescent knives held by men dressed all in black, with covered faces. Two men held Nadir while the others moved towards the Hummingbird.
    “At this point,” the betel-chewers say, “the Hummingbird’s hum became higher. Higher and higher, yara, and the assassin’s eyes became wide as their members made tents under their robes. Then—Allah, then!—the knives began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he’d never hummed before. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with red. But now—listen!—Abdullah’s humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were eating, others dying; there were some who fornicated and others who did not hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that left six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these turned and ran for the University, many of them rushing across the railway tracks from the wrong side of town. It is well known that this is true. Everyone in town saw it, except those who were asleep. They went noisily, like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair … and all the time Abdullahji was humming, humming-humming, and the knives were singing. And know this: suddenly one of the killers’ eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!”
    They say, “When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives were blunt … they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which had no glass because Abdullah’s hum had shattered it … they thudded against the door until the wood broke … and then they were everywhere, baba! … some without legs, others lacking hair, but most of them had some teeth at least, and some of these were sharp … And now see this: the assassins cannot have feared interruption, because they had posted no guards; so the dogs got them by surprise … the two men holding Nadir Khan, that spineless one, fell beneath the weight of the beasts, with maybe sixty-eight dogs on their necks … afterwards the killers were so badly damaged that nobody could say who they were.”
    “At some point,” they say, “Nadir dived out of the window and ran. The dogs and assassins were too busy to follow him.”
    Dogs? Assassins? … If you don’t believe me, check. Find out about Mian Abdullah and his Convocations. Discover how we’ve swept his story under the carpet … then let me tell how Nadir Khan, his lieutenant, spent three years under my family’s rugs.
    As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art. “Look at me,” he said before he killed himself, “I wanted to be a miniaturist and I’ve got elephantiasis instead!” The swollen events of the night of the crescent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room-mate, because life had once again, perversely, refused to remain lifesized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.
    How did Nadir Khan run across the night town without being noticed? I put it down to his being a bad poet, and as such, a born survivor. As he ran, there was a self-consciousness about him, his body appearing to apologize for behaving as if it were in a cheap thriller, of the sort hawkers sell on railway stations, or give away free with bottles of green medicine that can cure colds, typhoid, impotence, homesickness and poverty … On Cornwallis Road, it was a warm night. A coal-brazier stood empty by the deserted rickshaw rank. The paan-shop was closed and the old men were asleep on the roof, dreaming of tomorrow’s game. An insomniac cow, idly chewing a Red and White cigarette packet, strolled by a bundled street-sleeper, which meant he would wake in the morning, because a cow will ignore a sleeping man unless he’s about to die. Then it nuzzles at him thoughtfully. Sacred cows eat anything.
    My grandfather’s large old stone house, bought from the proceeds of the gemstone shops and blind Ghani’s dowry settlement, stood in the darkness, set back a dignified distance from the road. There was a walled-in garden at the rear and by the garden door was the