Midnights Children

him—wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him—tyrants will fry him …” While Amina begs for explanations and the cousins fall into a hand-flapping frenzy of helpless alarm because something has taken over and nobody dares touch Ramram Seth as he whirls to his climax: “He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old!
And he will die … before he is dead.
”
    Is that how it was? Is that when Ramram Seth, annihilated by the passage through him of a power greater than his own, fell suddenly to the floor and frothed at the mouth? Was mongoose-man’s stick inserted between his twitching teeth? Did Lifafa Das say, “Begun Sahiba, you must leave, please: our cousinji has become sick”?
    And finally the cobra-wallah—or monkey-man, or bone-setter, or even Lifafa Das of the peepshow on wheels—saying, “Too much prophecy, man. Our Ramram made too much damn prophecy tonight.”
    Many years later, at the time of her premature dotage, when all kinds of ghosts welled out of her past to dance before her eyes, my mother saw once again the peepshow man whom she saved by announcing my coming and who repaid her by leading her to too much prophecy, and spoke to him evenly, without rancor. “So you’re back,” she said, “Well, let me tell you this: I wish I’d understood what your cousinji meant—about blood, about knees and nose. Because who knows? I might have had a different son.”
    Like my grandfather at the beginning, in a webbed corridor in a blind man’s house, and again at the end; like Mary Pereira after she lost her Joseph, and like me, my mother was. good at seeing ghosts.
    … But now, because there are yet more questions and ambiguities, I am obliged to voice certain suspicions. Suspicion, too, is a monster with too many heads; why, then, can’t I stop myself unleashing it at my own mother? … What, I ask, would be a fair description of the seer’s stomach? And memory—my new, all-knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother father grandfather grandmother and everyone else—answers: soft; squashy as cornflour pudding. Again, reluctantly, I ask: What was the condition of his lips? And the inevitable response: full; overfleshed; poetic. A third time I interrogate this memory of mine: what of his hair? The reply: thinning; dark; lank; worming over his ears. And now my unreasonable suspicions ask the ultimate question … did Amina, pure-as-pure, actually … because of her weakness for men who resembled Nadir Khan, could she have … in her odd frame of mind, and moved by the seer’s illness, might she not … “No!” Padma shouts, furiously. “How dare you suggest? About that good woman—your own mother? That she would? You do not know one thing and still you say it?” And, of course, she is right, as always. If she knew, she would say I was only getting my revenge, for what I certainly did see Amina doing, years later, through the grimy windows of the Pioneer Café; and maybe that’s where my irrational notion was born, to grow illogically backwards in time, and arrive fully mature at this earlier—and yes, almost certainly innocent—adventure. Yes, that must be it. But the monster won’t lie down … “Ah,” it says, “but what about the matter of her tantrum—the one she threw the day Ahmed announced they were moving to Bombay?” Now it mimics her: “You—always you decide. What about me? Suppose I don’t want … I’ve only now got this house straight and already … !” So, Padma: was that housewifely zeal—or a masquerade?
    Yes—a doubt lingers. The monster asks, “Why did she fail, somehow or other, to tell her husband about her visit?” Reply of the accused (voiced by our Padma in my mother’s absence): “But think how angry he’d’ve got, my God! Even if there hadn’t been all that firebug business to worry him! Strange men; a woman on her own; he’d’ve gone wild! Wild, completely!”
    Unworthy suspicions … I must dismiss them; must save my strictures for later, when, in the absence of ambiguity, without the clouding curtain, she gave me hard, clear, irrefutable proofs.
    … But, of course, when my father came home late that night, with a ditchy smell on him which overpowered his customary reek of future failure, his eyes and cheeks were streaked with ashy tears; there was sulphur in his nostrils and the gray dust of smoked leathercloth on his head … because of course they had burned the godown.
    “But the