Midnights Children

turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it was also a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir Khan, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what’s more, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road … But that’s enough for now, because I’ve given the three businessmen enough time to get to the industrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct consequence of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future failure, the odor of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths. Mr. Kemal, who smelled it, would say privately to S. P. Butt, “These Kashmiri types, old boy: well-known fact they never wash.” This slander connects my father to the boatman Tai … to Tai in the grip of the self-destructive rage which made him give up being clean.
    At the industrial estate, night-watchmen were sleeping peacefully through the noise of the fire-engines. Why? How? Because they had made a deal with the Ravana mob, and, when tipped off about the gang’s impending arrival, would take sleeping draughts and pull their charpoy beds away from the buildings of the estate. In this way the gang avoided violence, and the night-watchmen augmented their meager wages. It was an amicable and not unintelligent arrangement.
    Amid sleeping night-watchmen, Mr. Kemal, my father and S. P. Butt watched cremated bicycles rise up into the sky in thick black clouds. Butt father Kemal stood alongside fire-engines, as relief flooded through them, because it was the Arjuna Indiabike godown that was burning—the Arjuna brand-name, taken from a hero of Hindu mythology, had failed to disguise the fact that the company was Muslim-owned. Washed by relief, father Kemal Butt breathed air filled with incendiarized bicycles, coughing and spluttering as the fumes of incinerated wheels, the vaporized ghosts of chains bells saddlebags handlebars, the transubstantiated frames of Arjuna Indiabikes moved in and out of their lungs. A crude cardboard mask had been nailed to a telegraph pole in front of the flaming godown—a mask of many faces—a devil’s mask of snarling faces with broad curling lips and bright red nostrils. The faces of the many-headed monster, Ravana the demon king, looking angrily down at the bodies of the night-watchmen who were sleeping so soundly that no one, neither the firemen, nor Kemal, nor Butt, nor my father, had the heart to disturb them; while the ashes of pedals and inner tubes fell upon them from the skies.
    “Damn bad business,” Mr. Kemal said. He was not being sympathetic. He was criticizing the owners of the Arjuna Indiabike Company.
    Look: the cloud of the disaster (which is also a relief) rises and gathers like a ball in the discolored morning sky. See how it thrusts itself westward into the heart of the old city; how it is pointing, good lord, like a finger, pointing down at the Muslim muhalla near Chandni Chowk! … Where, right now, Lifafa Das is crying his wares in the Sinais’ very own gully.
    “Come see everything, see the whole world, come see!”
    *   *   *
    It’s almost time for the public announcement. I won’t deny I’m excited: I’ve been hanging around in the background of my own story for too long, and although it’s still a little while before I can take over, it’s nice to get a look in. So, with a sense of high expectation, I follow the pointing finger in the sky and look down on my parents’ neighborhood, upon bicycles, upon street-vendors touting roasted gram in twists of paper, upon the hip-jutting, hand-holding street loafers, upon flying scraps of paper and little clustered whirlwinds of flies around the sweetmeat stalls … all of it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view. And there are children, swarms of them, too, attracted into the street by the magical rattle of Lifafa Das’s dugdugee drum and his voice, “Dunya dekho,” see the whole world! Boys without shorts on, girls without vests, and other, smarter infants in school whites, their shorts held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped snake-buckles, fat little boys with pudgy fingers; all flocking to the black box on wheels, including this