Midnights Children

please …” and “… Just a little so that I can make nice food and pay the bills …” and “Such a generous man, give me what you like, I know it will be enough” … the techniques of street beggars and she’d have to do it in front of that one with her saucer eyes and giggly voice and loud chat about blackies. Feet at the door almost and Amina in the dining-room with hot khichri at the ready, so very near to Zohra’s silly head, whereupon Zohra cries, “Oh, present company excluded,
of course!
” just in case, not being sure whether she’s been overheard or not, and “Oh, Ahmed, cousinji, you are really too dreadful to think I meant our lovely Amina who really isn’t so black but only like a white lady standing in the shade!” While Amina with her pot in hand looks at the pretty head and thinks Should I? And, Do I dare? And calms herself down with: “It’s a big day for me; and at least she raised the subject of children; so now it’ll be easy for me to …” But it’s too late, the wailing of Lata on the radio has drowned the sound of the doorbell so they haven’t heard old Musa the bearer going to answer the door; Lata has obscured the sound of anxious feet clattering upstairs; but all of a sudden here they are, the feet of Mr. Mustapha Kemal and Mr. S. P. Butt, coming to a shuffling halt.
    “The rapscallions have perpetrated an outrage!” Mr. Kemal, who is the thinnest man Amina Sinai has ever seen, sets off with his curiously archaic phraseology (derived from his fondness for litigation, as a result of which he has become infected with the cadences of the law-courts) a kind of chain reaction of farcical panic, to which little, squeaky, spineless S. P. Butt, who has something wild dancing like a monkey in the eyes, adds considerably, by getting out these three words: “Yes, the firebugs!” And now Zohra in an odd reflex action clutches the radio to her bosom, muffling Lata between her breasts, screaming, “O God, O God, what firebugs, where? This house? O God I can feel the heat!” Amina stands frozen khichri-in-hand staring at the two men in their business suits as her husband, secrecy thrown to the winds now, rises shaven but as-yet-unsuited to his feet and asks, “The godown?”
    Godown, gudam, warehouse, call it what you like; but no sooner had Ahmed Sinai asked his question than a hush fell upon the room, except of course that Lata Mangeshkar’s voice still issued from Zohra’s cleavage; because these three men shared one such large edifice, located on the industrial estate at the outskirts of the city. “Not the godown, God forfend,” Amina prayed silently, because the reccine and leathercloth business was doing well—through Major Zulfikar, who was now an aide at Military G.H.Q. in Delhi, Ahmed Sinai had landed a contract to supply leathercloth jackets and waterproof table coverings to the Army itself—and large stocks of the material on which their lives depended were stored in that warehouse. “But who would do such a thing?” Zohra wailed in harmony with her singing breasts, “What mad people are loose in the world these days?” … and that was how Amina heard, for the first time, the name which her husband had hidden from her, and which was, in those times, striking terror into many hearts. “It is Ravana,” said S. P. Butt … but Ravana is the name of a many-headed demon; are demons, then, abroad in the land? “What rubbish is this?” Amina, speaking with her father’s hatred of superstition, demanded an answer; and Mr. Kemal provided it. “It is the name of a dastardly crew, Madam; a band of incendiary rogues. These are troubled days; troubled days.”
    In the godown: roll upon roll of leathercloth; and the commodities dealt in by Mr. Kemal, rice tea lentils—he hoards them all over the country in vast quantities, as a form of protection against the many-headed many-mouthed rapacious monster that is the public, which, if given its heads, would force prices so low in a time of abundance that godfearing entrepreneurs would starve while the monster grew fat … “Economics is scarcity,” Mr. Kemal argues, “therefore my hoards not only keep prices at a decent level but underpin the very structure of the economy.”—And then there is, in the godown, Mr. Butt’s stockpile, boxed in cartons bearing the words AAG BRAND . I do not need to tell you that aag means fire. S. P. Butt was a manufacturer of matches.
    “Our informations,” Mr. Kemal says,