Midnights Children

intoned mournfully, differing from Nelson at Copenhagen in that he possessed no good eye, his blindness not the choice of stubborn genius but the inevitable curse of his folly! Blindly, he impugned my state of mind, cast doubts on my reliability as a witness, and Godknowswhatelse: “I see no cracks.”
    In the end it was Padma who shooed him away. “Never mind, Doctor Sahib,” Padma said, “we will look after him ourselves.” On her face I saw a kind of recognition of her own dull guilt … exit Baligga, never to return to these pages. But good God! Has the medical profession—the calling of Aadam Aziz—sunk so low? To this cess-pool of Baliggas? In the end, if this be true, everyone will do without doctors … which brings me back to the reason why Amina Sinai awoke one morning with the sun on her lips.
    “It’s come up in the wrong place!” she yelped, by accident, and then, through the fading buzzing of her bad night’s sleep, understood how in this month of illusion she had fallen victim to a trick, because all that had happened was that she had woken up in Delhi, in the home of her new husband, which faced east towards the sun; so the truth of the matter was that the sun was in the right place, and it was her position which had changed … but even after she grasped this elementary thought, and stored it away with the many similar mistakes she had made since coming here (because her confusion about the sun had been a regular occurrence, as if her mind were refusing to accept the alteration in her circumstances, the new, above-ground position of her bed), something of its jumbling influence remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease.
    “In the end, everyone can do without fathers,” Doctor Aziz told his daughter when he said goodbye; and Reverend Mother added, “Another orphan in the family, whatsitsname, but never mind, Muhammad was an orphan too; and you can say this for your Ahmed Sinai, whatsitsname, at least he is half Kashmiri.” Then, with his own hands, Doctor Aziz had passed a green tin trunk into the railway compartment where Ahmed Sinai awaited his bride. “The dowry is neither small nor vast as these things go,” my grandfather said. “We are not crorepatis, you understand. But we have given you enough; Amina will give you more.” Inside the green tin trunk: silver samovars, brocade saris, gold coins given to Doctor Aziz by grateful patients, a museum in which the exhibits represented illnesses cured and lives saved. And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up after the dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so reinvented her, thus becoming in a sense her father as well as her new husband … he walked (with his own feet) along the platform as the train began to move. A relay runner at the end of his lap, he stood wreathed in smoke and comic-book vendors and the confusion of peacock-feather fans and hot snacks and the whole lethargic hullabaloo of squatting porters and plaster animals on trolleys as the train picked up speed and headed for the capital city, accelerating into the next lap of the race. In the compartment the new Amina Sinai sat (in mint condition) with her feet on the green tin trunk which had been an inch too high to fit under the seat. With her sandals bearing down on the locked museum of her father’s achievements she sped away into her new life, leaving Aadam Aziz behind to dedicate himself to an attempt to fuse the skills of Western and hakimi medicine, an attempt which would gradually wear him down, convincing him that the hegemony of superstition, mumbo-jumbo and all things magical would never be broken in India, because the hakims refused to co-operate; and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to do so.
    As the train pulled out of the station Ahmed Sinai jumped up and bolted the compartment door and pulled down the shutters, much to Amina’s amazement; but then suddenly there were thumps outside and hands moving the doorknobs and voices saying, “Let us in, maharaj! Maharajin, are you there, ask your husband to open.” And always, in all the trains in this story, there were these voices and these fists banging and pleading; in the Frontier Mail to Bombay and in all the expresses of the years; and it was always frightening, until at last