Midnights Children

in Aadam Aziz’s dreams she saw her husband walking mournfully up a mountain in Kashmir with a hole in his stomach the size of a fist, and guessed that he was falling out of love with her, and also foresaw his death; so that years later, when she heard, she said only, “Oh, I knew it, after all.”
    … It could not be long now, Reverend Mother thought, before our Emerald tells her Major about the guest in the cellar; and then I shall be able to speak again. But then, one night, she entered the dreams of her daughter Mumtaz, the blackie whom she had never been able to love because of her skin of a South Indian fisherwoman, and realized the trouble would not stop there; because Mumtaz Aziz—like her admirer under the carpets—was also falling in love.
    There was no proof. The invasion of dreams—or a mother’s knowledge, or a woman’s intuition, call it what you like—is not something that will stand up in court, and Reverend Mother knew that it was a serious business to accuse a daughter of getting up to hanky-panky under her father’s roof. In addition to which, something steely had entered Reverend Mother; and she resolved to do nothing, to keep her silence intact, and let Aadam Aziz discover just how badly his modern ideas were ruining his children—let him find out for himself, after his life-time of telling her to be quiet with her decent old-fashioned notions. “A bitter woman,” Padma says; and I agree.
    “Well?” Padma demands. “Was it true?”
    Yes: after a fashion: true.
    “There was hankying and pankying? In the cellars? Without even chaperones?”
    Consider the circumstances—extenuating, if ever circumstances were. Things seem permissible underground that would seem absurd or even wrong in the clear light of day.
    “That fat poet did it to the poor blackie? He
did
?”
    He was down there a long time, too—long enough to start talking to flying cockroaches and fearing that one day someone would ask him to leave and dreaming of crescent knives and howling dogs and wishing and wishing that the Hummingbird were alive to tell him what to do and to discover that you could not write poetry underground; and then this girl comes with food and she doesn’t mind cleaning away your pots and you lower your eyes but you see an ankle that seems to glow with graciousness, a black ankle like the black of the underground nights …
    “I’d never have thought he was up to it.” Padma sounds admiring. “The fat old good-for-nothing!”
    And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif’s dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquely by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then
    “And then? Come on, baba, what then?”
    shyly, she smiles at him.
    “What?”
    And after that, there are smiles in the underworld, and something has begun.
    “Oh, so what? You’re telling me that’s
all
?”
    That’s all: until the day Nadir Khan asked to see my grandfather—his sentences barely audible in the fog of silence—and asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
    “Poor girl,” Padma concludes, “Kashmiri girls are normally fair like mountain snow, but she turned out black. Well, well, her skin would have stopped her making a good match, probably; and that Nadir’s no fool. Now they’ll have to let him stay, and get fed, and get a roof over his head, and all he has to do is hide like a fat earthworm under the ground. Yes, maybe he’s not such a fool.”
    My grandfather tried hard to persuade Nadir Khan that he was no longer in danger; the assassins were dead, and Mian Abdullah had been their real target; but Nadir Khan still dreamed about the singing knives, and begged, “Not yet, Doctor Sahib; please, some more time.” So that one night in the late summer of 1943—the rains had failed again—my grandfather, his