Midnights Children

sanctuary, a request muffled by linen, dirty underwear, old shirts and the embarrassment of the speaker. And so it was that Aadam Aziz resolved to hide Nadir Khan.
    Now comes the scent of a quarrel, because Reverend Mother Naseem is thinking about her daughters, twenty-one-year-old Alia, black Mumtaz, who is nineteen, and pretty, flighty Emerald, who isn’t fifteen yet but has a look in her eyes that’s older than anything her sisters possess. In the town, among spittoon-hitters and rickshaw-wallahs, among film-poster-trolley pushers and college students alike, the three sisters are known as the “Teen Batti,” the three bright lights … and how can Reverend Mother permit a strange man to dwell in the same house as Alia’s gravity, Mumtaz’s black, luminous skin and Emerald’s eyes? … “You are out of your mind, husband; that death has hurt your brain.” But Aziz, determinedly: “He is staying.” In the cellars … because concealment has always been a crucial architectural consideration in India, so that Aziz’s house has extensive underground chambers, which can be reached only through trap-doors in the floors, which are covered by carpets and mats … Nadir Khan hears the dull rumble of the quarrel and fears for his fate. My God (I sniff the thoughts of the clammy-palmed poet), the world is gone insane … are we men in this country? Are we beasts? And if I must go, when will the knives come for me? … And through his mind pass images of peacock-feather fans and the new moon seen through glass and transformed into a stabbing, red-stained blade … Upstairs, Reverend Mother says, “The house is full of young unmarried girls, whatsitsname; is this how you show your daughters respect?” And now the aroma of a temper lost; the great destroying rage of Aadam Aziz is unleashed, and instead of pointing out that Nadir Khan will be underground, swept under the carpet where he will scarcely be able to defile daughters; instead of paying due testimony to the verbless bard’s sense of propriety, which is so advanced that he could not even dream of making improper advances without blushing in his sleep; instead of these avenues of reason, my grandfather bellows, “Be silent, woman! The man needs our shelter; he will stay.” Whereupon an implacable perfume, a hard cloud of determination settles upon my grandmother, who says, “Very well. You ask me, whatsitsname, for silence. So not one word, whatsitsname, will pass my lips from now on.” And Aziz, groaning, “Oh, damnation, woman, spare us your crazy oaths!”
    But Reverend Mother’s lips were sealed, and silence descended. The smell of silence, like a rotting goose-egg, fills my nostrils; overpowering everything else, it possesses the earth … While Nadir Khan hid in his half-lit underworld, his hostess hid, too, behind a deafening wall of soundlessness. At first my grandfather probed the wall, looking for chinks; he found none. At last he gave up, and waited for her sentences to offer up their glimpses of her self, just as once he had lusted after the brief fragments of her body he had seen through a perforated sheet; and the silence filled the house, from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, so that the flies seemed to give up buzzing, and mosquitoes refrained from humming before they bit; silence stilling the hissing of geese in the courtyard. The children spoke in whispers at first, and then fell quiet: while in the cornfield, Rashid the rickshaw boy yelled his silent “yell of hate,” and kept his own vow of silence, which he had sworn upon his mother’s hairs.
    Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice, as a result, was thin and sharp—it had to be, to squeeze through the narrow gap between his breathing apparatus and his jaw … a man whose short sight obliged him to take life one step at a time, which gained him a reputation for thoroughness and dullness, and endeared him to his superiors by enabling them to feel well-served without feeling threatened; a man whose starched, pressed uniform reeked of Blanco and rectitude, and about whom, despite his appearance of a character out of a puppet-show, there hung the unmistakable scent of success: Major Zulfikar, a man with a future, came to call, as he had promised, to tie up a few loose ends. Abdullah’s murder, and Nadir