Midnights Children

history, I was about to make my presence felt. (No: not that fraudulent tadpole in her stomach: I mean myself, in my historical role, of which prime ministers have written “… it is, in a sense, the mirror of us all.” Great forces were working that night; and all present were about to feel their power, and be afraid.)
    Cousins—one to four—gathering in the doorway through which the dark lady has passed, drawn like moths to the candle of her screech … watching her quietly as she advanced, guided by Lifafa Das, towards the unlikely soothsayer, were bone-setter and cobra-wallah and monkey-man. Whispers of encouragement now (and were there also giggles behind rough hands?): “O such a too fine fortune he will tell, Sahiba!” and, “Come, cousinji, lady is waiting!” … But what was this Ramram? A huckster, a two-chip palmist, a giver of cute forecasts to silly women—or the genuine article, the holder of the keys? And Lifafa Das: did he see, in my mother, a woman who could be satisfied by a two-rupee fake, or did he see deeper, into the underground heart of her weakness?—And when the prophecy came, were cousins astonished too?—And the frothing at the mouth? What of that? And was it true that my mother, under the dislocating influence of that hysterical evening, relinquished her hold on her habitual self—which she had felt slipping away from her into the absorbing sponge of the lightless air in the stairwell—and entered a state of mind in which anything might happen and be believed? And there is another, more horrible possibility, too; but before I voice my suspicion, I must describe, as nearly as possible in spite of this filmy curtain of ambiguities, what actually happened: I must describe my mother, her palm slanted outwards towards the advancing palmist, her eyes wide and unblinking as a pomfret’s—and the cousins (giggling?), “What a reading you are coming to get, Sahiba!” and, “Tell, cousinji, tell!”—but the curtain descends again, so I cannot be sure—did he begin like a cheap circus-tent man and go through the banal conjugations of life-line heart-line and children who would be multi-millionaires, while cousins cheered, “Wah wah!” and, “Absolute master reading, yara!”—and then, did he change?—did Ramram become stiff—eyes rolling upwards until they were white as eggs—did he, in a voice as strange as a mirror, ask, “You permit, Madam, that I touch the place?”—while cousins fell as silent as sleeping vultures—and did my mother, just as strangely, reply, “Yes, I permit,” so that the seer became only the third man to touch her in her life, apart from her family members?—and was it then, at that instant, that a brief sharp jolt of electricity passed between pudgy fingers and maternal skin? And my mother’s face, rabbit-startled, watching the prophet in the check shirt as he began to circle, his eyes still egg-like in the softness of his face; and suddenly a shudder passing through him and again that strange high voice as the words issued through his lips (I must describe those lips, too—but later, because now …) “A son.”
    Silent cousins—monkeys on leashes, ceasing their chatter—cobras coiled in baskets—and the circling fortune-teller, finding history speaking through his lips. (Was that how?) Beginning, “A son … such a son!” And then it comes, “A son, Sahiba, who will never be older than his motherland—neither older nor younger.” And now, real fear amongst snake-charmer mongoose-dancer bone-setter and peepshow-wallah, because they have never heard Ramram like this, as he continues, sing-song, high-pitched: “There will be two heads—but you shall see only one—there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees.” Nose and knees and knees and nose … listen carefully, Padma; the fellow got nothing wrong! “Newspapers praise him, two mothers raise him! Bicyclists love him—but, crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep; cobra will creep …” Ramram, circling fasterfaster, while four cousins murmur, “What is this, baba?” and, “Deo, Shiva, guard us!” While Ramram, “Washing will hide him—voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him—blood will betray him!” And Amina Sinai, “What does he mean? I don’t understand—Lifafa Das—what has got into him?” But, inexorably, whirling egg-eyed around her statue-still presence, goes Ramram Seth: “Spittoons will brain him—doctors will drain him—jungle will claim