Midnights Children

father in Jallianwala Bagh; and you couldn’t see a mark on her.
    “So, gloomy sis, you managed to enjoy yourself after all.”
    In June that year, Mumtaz remarried. Her sister—taking her cue from their mother—would not speak to her until, just before they both died, she saw her chance of revenge. Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Alia that these things happen, it was better to find out now than later, and Mumtaz had been badly hurt and needed a man to help her recover … besides, Alia had brains, she would be all right.
    “But, but,” Alia said, “nobody ever married a book.”
    “Change your name,” Ahmed Sinai said. “Time for a fresh start. Throw Mumtaz and her Nadir Khan out of the window, I’ll choose you a new name. Amina. Amina Sinai: you’d like that?”
    “Whatever you say, husband,” my mother said.
    “Anyway,” Alia, the wise child, wrote in her diary, “who wants to get landed with this marrying business? Not me; never; no.”
    Mian Abdullah was a false start for a lot of optimistic people; his assistant (whose name could not be spoken in my father’s house) was my mother’s wrong turning. But those were the years of the drought; many crops planted at that time ended up by coming to nothing.
    “What happened to the plumpie?” Padma asks, crossly. “You don’t mean you aren’t going to
tell?
”

A Public Announcement
    T HERE FOLLOWED AN illusionist January, a time so still on its surface that 1947 seemed not to have begun at all. (While, of course, in fact …) In which the Cabinet Mission—old Pethick-Lawrence, clever Cripps, military A. V. Alexander—saw their scheme for the transfer of power fail. (But of course, in fact it would only be six months until …) In which the viceroy, Wavell, understood that he was finished, washed-up, or in our own expressive word, funtoosh. (Which, of course, in fact only speeded things up, because it let in the last of the viceroys, who …) In which Mr. Attlee seemed too busy deciding the future of Burma with Mr. Aung Sam. (While, of course, in fact he was briefing the last viceroy, before announcing his appointment; the last-viceroy-to-be was visiting the King and being granted plenipotentiary powers; so that soon, soon …) In which the Constituent Assembly stood self-adjourned, without having settled on a Constitution. (But, of course, in fact Earl Mountbatten, the last viceroy, would be with us any day, with his inexorable ticktock, his soldier’s knife that could cut subcontinents in three, and his wife who ate chicken breasts secretly behind a locked lavatory door.) And in the midst of the mirror-like stillness through which it was impossible to see the great machineries grinding, my mother, the brand-new Amina Sinai, who also looked still and unchanging although great things were happening beneath her skin, woke up one morning with a head buzzing with insomnia and a tongue thickly coated with unslept sleep and found herself saying aloud, without meaning to at all, “What’s the sun doing here, Allah? It’s come up in the wrong place.”
    … I must interrupt myself. I wasn’t going to today, because Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings; but I simply must register a protest. So, breaking into a chapter which, by a happy chance, I have named “A Public Announcement,” I issue (in the strongest possible terms) the following general medical alert: “A certain Doctor N. Q. Baligga,” I wish to proclaim—from the rooftops! Through the loud-hailers of minarets!—“is a quack. Ought to be locked up, struck off, defenestrated. Or worse: subjected to his own quackery, brought out in leprous boils by a mis-prescribed pill. Damn fool,” I underline my point, “can’t see what’s under his nose!”
    Having let off steam, I must leave my mother to worry for a further moment about the curious behavior of the sun, to explain that our Padma, alarmed by my references to cracking up, has confided covertly in this Baligga—this ju-ju man! this green-medicine wallah!—and as a result, the charlatan, whom I will not deign to glorify with a description, came to call. I, in all innocence and for Padma’s sake, permitted him to examine me. I should have feared the worst; the worst is what he did. Believe this if you can: the fraud has pronounced me whole! “I see no cracks,” he