Midnights Children

from my father’s old friend, the gynecologist Doctor Narlikar, in Bombay. “The British are leaving in droves, Sinai bhai. Property is dirt cheap! Sell up; come here; buy; live the rest of your life in luxury!” Verses of the Quran had no place in a head so full of cash … and, in the meantime, here he is, alongside S. P. Butt who will die in a train to Pakistan, and Mustapha Kemal who will be murdered by goondas in his grand Flagstaff Road house and have the words “mother-sleeping hoarder” written on his chest in his own blood … alongside these two doomed men, waiting in the secret shadow of a ruin to spy on a black-mailer coming for his money. “South-west corner,” the phone call said, “Turret. Stone staircase inside. Climb. Topmost landing. Leave money there. Go. Understood?” Defying orders, they hide in the ruined room; somewhere above them, on the topmost landing of the turret tower, three gray bags wait in the gathering dark.
    … In the gathering dark of an airless stairwell, Amina Sinai is climbing towards a prophecy. Lifafa Das is comforting her; because now that she has come by taxi into the narrow bottle of his mercy, he has sensed an alteration in her, a regret at her decision; he reassures her as they climb. The darkened stairwell is full of eyes, eyes glinting through shuttered doors at the spectacle of the climbing dark lady, eyes lapping her up like bright rough cats’ tongues; and as Lifafa talks, soothingly, my mother feels her will ebbing away, What will be, will be, her strength of mind and her hold on the world seeping out of her into the dark sponge of the staircase air. Sluggishly her feet follow his, up into the upper reaches of the huge gloomy chawl, the broken-down tenement building in which Lifafa Das and his cousins have a small corner, at the very top … here, near the top, she sees dark light filtering, down on to the heads of queueing cripples. “My number two cousin,” Lifafa Das says, “is bone-setter.” She climbs past men with broken arms, women with feet twisted backwards at impossible angles, past fallen window-cleaners and splintered bricklayers, a doctor’s daughter entering a world older than syringes and hospitals; until, at last, Lifafa Das says, “Here we are, Begum,” and leads her through a room in which the bone-setter is fastening twigs and leaves to shattered limbs, wrapping cracked heads in palm-fronds, until his patients begin to resemble artificial trees, sprouting vegetation from their injuries … then out on to a flat expanse of cemented roof. Amina, blinking in the dark at the brightness of lanterns, makes out insane shapes on the roof: monkeys dancing; mongeese leaping; snakes swaying in baskets; and on the parapet, the silhouettes of large birds, whose bodies are as hooked and cruel as their beaks: vultures.
    “Arré baap,” she cries, “where are you bringing me?”
    “Nothing to worry, Begum, please,” Lifafa Das says. “These are my cousins here. My number-three-and-four cousins. That one is monkey-dancer …”
    “Just practicing, Begum!” a voice calls. “See: monkey goes to war and dies for his country!”
    “… and there, snake-and-mongoose man.”
    “See mongoose jump, Sahiba! See cobra dance!”
    “… But the birds? …”
    “Nothing, Madam: only there is Parsee Tower of Silence just near here; and when there are no dead ones there, the vultures come. Now they are asleep; in the days, I think, they like to watch my cousins practicing.”
    A small room, on the far side of the roof. Light streams through the door as Amina enters … to find, inside, a man the same age as her husband, a heavy man with several chins, wearing white stained trousers and a red check shirt and no shoes, munching aniseed and drinking from a bottle of Vimto, sitting cross-legged in a room on whose walls are pictures of Vishnu in each of his avatars, and notices reading, WRITING TAUGHT , and SPITTING DURING VISIT IS QUITE A BAD HABIT . There is no furniture … and Shri Ramram Seth is sitting cross-legged, six inches above the ground.
    I must admit it: to her shame, my mother screamed …
    … While, at the Old Fort, monkeys scream among ramparts. The ruined city, having been deserted by people, is now the abode of langoors. Long-tailed and black-faced, the monkeys are possessed of an overriding sense of mission. Upupup they clamber, leaping to the topmost heights of the ruin, staking out territories, and thereafter dedicating themselves