Midnights Children

night-watchmen?”—asleep, Padma, asleep. Warned in advance to take their sleeping draughts just in case … Those brave lalas, warrior Pathans who, city-born, had never seen the Khyber, unwrapped little paper packets, poured rust-colored powders into their bubbling cauldron of tea. They pulled their charpoys well away from my father’s godown to avoid falling beams and showering sparks; and lying on their rope-beds they sipped their tea and entered the bittersweet declensions of the drug. At first they became raucous, shouting the praises of their favorite whores in Pushtu; then they fell into wild giggling as the soft fluttering fingers of the drug tickled their ribs … until the giggling gave way to dreams and they roamed in the frontier passes of the drug, riding the horses of the drug, and finally reached a dreamless oblivion from which nothing on earth could awaken them until the drug had run its course.
    Ahmed, Butt and Kemal arrived by taxi—the taxi-driver, unnerved by the three men who clutched wads of crumpled banknotes which smelled worse than hell on account of the unpleasant substances they had encountered in the ditch, would not have waited, except that they refused to pay him. “Let me go, big sirs,” he pleaded, “I am a little man; do not keep me here …” but by then their backs were moving away from him, towards the fire. He watched them as they ran, clutching their rupees that were stained by tomatoes and dogshit; open-mouthed he stared at the burning godown, at the clouds in the night sky, and like everyone else on the scene he was obliged to breathe air filled with leathercloth and matchsticks and burning rice. With his hands over his eyes, watching through his fingers, the little taxi-driver with his incompetent moustache saw Mr. Kemal, thin as a demented pencil, lashing and kicking at the sleeping bodies of night-watchmen; and he almost gave up his fare and drove off in terror at the instant when my father shouted, “Look out!” … but, staying despite it all, he saw the godown as it burst apart under the force of the licking red tongues, he saw pouring out of the godown an improbable lava flow of molten rice lentils chick-peas waterproof jackets matchboxes and pickle, he saw the hot red flowers of the fire bursting skywards as the contents of the warehouse spilled on to the hard yellow ground like a black charred hand of despair. Yes, of course the godown was burned, it fell on their heads from the sky in cinders, it plunged into the open mouths of the bruised, but still snoring, watchmen … “God save us,” said Mr. Butt, but Mustapha Kemal, more pragmatically, answered: “Thank God we are well insured.”
    “It was right then,” Ahmed Sinai told his wife later, “right at that moment that I decided to get out of the leathercloth business. Sell the office, the goodwill, and forget everything I know about the reccine trade. Then—not before, not afterwards—I made up my mind, also, to think no more about this Pakistan claptrap of your Emerald’s Zulfy. In the heat of that fire,” my father revealed—unleashing a wifely tantrum—“I decided to go to Bombay, and enter the property business. Property is dirt cheap there now,” he told her before her protests could begin, “Narlikar knows.”
    (But in time, he would call Narlikar a traitor.)
    In my family, we always go when we’re pushed—the freeze of ’48 being the only exception to this rule. The boatman Tai drove my grandfather from Kashmir; Mercurochrome chased him out of Amritsar; the collapse of her life under the carpets led directly to my mother’s departure from Agra; and many-headed monsters sent my father to Bombay, so that I could be born there. At the end of that January, history had finally, by a series of shoves, brought itself to the point at which it was almost ready for me to make my entrance. There were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I stepped on to the scene … the mystery, for example, of Shri Ramram’s most enigmatic remark: “There will be a nose and knees: knees and a nose.”
    The insurance money came; January ended; and in the time it took to close down their affairs in Delhi and move to the city in which—as Doctor Narlikar the gynecologist knew—property was temporarily as cheap as dirt, my mother concentrated on her segmented scheme for learning to love her husband. She came to feel a deep affection for the question marks of his ears; for the remarkable depth of