Midnights Children

as Nadir stepped inside, Rashid hissed, “Count on me completely, Sahib. Mum’s the word! I swear on my mother’s gray hairs.”
    He replaced the lock on the outside. To have actually saved the Hummingbird’s right-hand man! … But from what? Whom? … Well, real life was better than the pictures, sometimes.
    “Is that him?” Padma asks, in some confusion. “That fat soft cowardly plumpie? Is he going to be your father?”

Under the Carpet
    T HAT WAS THE END of the optimism epidemic. In the morning a sweeper-woman entered the offices of the Free Islam Convention and found the Hummingbird, silenced, on the floor, surrounded by paw-prints and the shreds of his murderers. She screamed; but later, when the authorities had been and gone, she was told to clean up the room. After clearing away innumerable dog-hairs, swatting countless fleas and extracting from the carpet the remnants of a shattered glass eye, she protested to the University’s comptroller of works that, if this sort of thing was going to keep happening, she deserved a small pay raise. She was possibly the last victim of the optimism bug, and in her case the illness didn’t last long, because the comptroller was a hard man, and gave her the boot.
    The assassins were never identified, nor were their pay-masters named. My grandfather was called to the campus by Major Zulfikar, Brigadier Dodson’s A.D.C., to write his friend’s death certificate. Major Zulfikar promised to call on Doctor Aziz to tie up a few loose ends; my grandfather blew his nose and left. At the maidan, tents were coming down like punctured hopes; the Convocation would never be held again. The Rani of Cooch Naheen took to her bed. After a lifetime of making light of her illnesses she allowed them to claim her, and lay still for years, watching herself turn the color of her bedsheets. Meanwhile, in the old house on Cornwallis Road, the days were full of potential mothers and possible fathers. You see, Padma: you’re going to find out now.
    Using my nose (because, although it has lost the powers which enabled it, so recently, to make history, it has acquired other, compensatory gifts)—turning it inwards, I’ve been sniffing out the atmosphere in my grandfather’s house in those days after the death of India’s humming hope; and wafting down to me through the years comes a curious mélange of odors, filled with unease, the whiff of things concealed mingling with the odors of burgeoning romance and the sharp stink of my grandmother’s curiosity and strength … while the Muslim League rejoiced, secretly of course, at the fall of its opponent, my grandfather could be found (my nose finds him) seated every morning on what he called his “thunderbox,” tears standing in his eyes. But these are not tears of grief; Aadam Aziz has simply paid the price of being Indianized, and suffers terribly from constipation. Balefully, he eyes the enema contraption hanging on the toilet wall.
    Why have I invaded my grandfather’s privacy? Why, when I might have described how, after Mian Abdullah’s death, Aadam buried himself in his work, taking upon himself the care of the sick in the shanty-towns by the railway tracks—rescuing them from quacks who injected them with pepperwater and thought that fried spiders could cure blindness—while continuing to fulfill his duties as university physician; when I might have elaborated on the great love that had begun to grow between my grandfather and his second daughter, Mumtaz, whose dark skin stood between her and the affections of her mother, but whose gifts of gentleness, care and fragility endeared her to her father with his inner torments which cried out for her form of unquestioning tenderness; why, when I might have chosen to describe the by-now-constant itch in his nose, do I choose to wallow in excrement? Because this is where Aadam Aziz was, on the afternoon after his signing of a death certificate, when all of a sudden a voice—soft, cowardly, embarrassed, the voice of a rhymeless poet—spoke to him from the depths of the large old laundry-chest standing in the corner of the room, giving him a shock so profound that it proved laxative, and the enema contraption did not have to be unhooked from its perch. Rashid the rickshaw boy had let Nadir Khan into the thunderbox-room by way of the sweeper’s entrance, and he had taken refuge in the washing-chest. While my grandfather’s astonished sphincter relaxed, his ears heard a request for