Midnights Children

Caught up in the illogical wonderment of her brand-new motherhood of which she had only just become certain, “Yes,” she said, “Lifafa Das, you will please meet me after some days at the gate to the Red Fort. Then you will take me to your cousin.”
    “I shall be waiting every day,” he joined his palms; and left.
    Zohra was so stunned that, when Ahmed Sinai came home, she could only shake her head and say, “You newlyweds; crazy as owls; I must leave you to each other!”
    Musa, the old bearer, kept his mouth shut, too. He kept himself in the background of our lives, always, except twice … once when he left us; once when he returned to destroy the world by accident.

Many-headed Monsters
    U NLESS, OF COURSE , there’s no such thing as chance; in which case Musa—for all his age and servility—was nothing less than a time-bomb, ticking softly away until his appointed time; in which case, we should either—optimistically—get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a
why;
or else, of course, we might—as pessimists—give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway; things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos? Was my father being opti- or pessimistic when my mother told him her news (after everyone in the neighborhood had heard it), and he replied with, “I told you so; it was only a matter of time.”? My mother’s pregnancy, it seems, was fated; my birth, however, owed a good deal to accident.
    “It was only a matter of time,” my father said, with every appearance of pleasure; but time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in Pakistan would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts … Mr. Kemal, who wanted nothing to do with Partition, was fond of saying, “Here’s proof of the folly of the scheme! Those Leaguers plan to abscond with a whole thirty minutes! Time Without Partitions,” Mr. Kemal cried, “That’s the ticket!” And S. P. Butt said, “If they can change the time just like that, what’s real any more? I ask you? What’s true?”
    It seems like a day for big questions. I reply across the unreliable years to S. P. Butt, who got his throat slit in the Partition riots and lost interest in time: “What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.”
True
, for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories Mary Pereira told me: Mary my ayah who was both more and less than a mother; Mary who knew everything about all of us.
True
was a thing concealed just over the horizon towards which the fisherman’s finger pointed in the picture on my wall, while the young Raleigh listened to his tales. Now, writing this in my Anglepoised pool of light, I measure truth against those early things: Is this how Mary would have told it? I ask. Is this what that fisherman would have said? … And by those standards it is undeniably true that, one day in January 1947, my mother heard all about me six months before I turned up, while my father came up against a demon king.
    Amina Sinai had been waiting for a suitable moment to accept Lifafa Das’s offer; but for two days after the burning of the Indiabike factory Ahmed Sinai stayed at home, never visiting his office at Con-naught Place, as if he were steeling himself for some unpleasant encounter. For two days the gray money-bag lay supposedly secret in its place under his side of their bed. My father showed no desire to talk about the reasons for the gray bag’s presence; so Amina said to herself, “Let him be like that; who cares?” because she had her secret, too, waiting patiently for her by the gates of the Red Fort at the top of Chandni Chowk. Pouting in secret petulance, my mother kept Lifafa Das to herself. “Unless-and-until he tells me what he’s up to, why should I tell him?” she argued.
    And then a cold January evening, on which “I’ve got to go out tonight,” said Ahmed Sinai; and despite her pleas of “It’s cold—you’ll get sick …” he put on his business suit and coat under which the mysterious gray bag made a ridiculously obvious lump; so finally she said, “Wrap up warm,” and sent him off wherever he was going, asking, “Will you be late?” To which he