Midnights Children

Khan’s suspicious disappearance, were much on his mind, and since he knew about Aadam Aziz’s infection by the optimism bug, he mistook the silence in the house for a hush of mourning, and did not stay for long. (In the cellar, Nadir huddled with cockroaches.) Sitting quietly in the drawing-room with the five children, his hat and stick beside him on the Telefunken radiogram, the life-size images of the young Azizes staring at him from the walls, Major Zulfikar fell in love. He was short-sighted, but he wasn’t blind, and in the impossibly adult gaze of young Emerald, the brightest of the “three bright lights,” he saw that she had understood his future, and forgiven him, because of it, for his appearance; and before he left, he had decided to marry her after a decent interval. (“Her?” Padma guesses. “That hussy is your mother?” But there are other mothers-to-be, other future fathers, wafting in and out through the silence.)
    In that marshy time without words the emotional life of grave Alia, the eldest, was also developing; and Reverend Mother, locked up in the pantry and kitchen, sealed behind her lips, was incapable—because of her vow—of expressing her distrust of the young merchant in reccine and leathercloth who came to visit her daughter. (Aadam Aziz had always insisted that his daughters be permitted to have male friends.) Ahmed Sinai—“Ahaa!” yells Padma in triumphant recognition—had met Alia at the University, and seemed intelligent enough for the bookish, brainy girl on whose face my grandfather’s nose had acquired an air of overweight wisdom; but Naseem Aziz felt uneasy about him, because he had been divorced at twenty. (“Anyone can make one mistake,” Aadam had told her, and that nearly began a fight, because she thought for a moment that there had been something overly personal in his tone of voice. But then Aadam had added, “Just let this divorce of his fade away for a year or two; then we’ll give this house its first wedding, with a big marquee in the garden, and singers and sweetmeats and all.” Which, despite everything, was an idea that appealed to Naseem.) Now, wandering through the walled-in gardens of silence, Ahmed Sinai and Alia communed without speech; but although everyone expected him to propose, the silence seemed to have got through to him, too, and the question remained unasked. Alia’s face acquired a weightiness at this time, a jowly pessimistic quality which she was never entirely to lose. (“Now then,” Padma reproves me, “that’s no way to describe your respected motherji.”)
    One more thing: Alia had inherited her mother’s tendency to put on fat. She would balloon outwards with the passing years.
    And Mumtaz, who had come out of her mother’s womb black as midnight? Mumtaz was never brilliant; nor as beautiful as Emerald; but she was good, and dutiful, and alone. She spent more time with her father than any of her sisters, fortifying him against the bad temper which was being exaggerated nowadays by the constant itch in his nose; and she took upon herself the duties of caring for the needs of Nadir Khan, descending daily into his underworld bearing trays of food, and brooms, and even emptying his personal thunderbox, so that not even a latrine cleaner could guess at his presence. When she descended, he lowered his eyes; and no words, in that dumb house, were exchanged between them.
    What was it the spittoon hitters said about Naseem Aziz? “She eavesdropped on her daughters’ dreams, just to know what they were up to.” Yes, there’s no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen in this country of ours, just pick up any newspaper and see the daily titbits recounting miracles in this village or that—Reverend Mother began to dream her daughters’ dreams. (Padma accepts this without blinking; but what others will swallow as effortlessly as a laddoo, Padma may just as easily reject. No audience is without its idiosyncrasies of belief.) So, then: asleep in her bed at night, Reverend Mother visited Emerald’s dreams, and found another dream within them—Major Zulfikar’s private fantasy, of owning a large modern house with a bath beside his bed. This was the zenith of the Major’s ambitions; and in this way Reverend Mother discovered, not only that her daughter had been meeting her Zulfy in secret, in places where speech was possible, but also that Emerald’s ambitions were greater than her man’s. And (why not?)