Midnights Children

Indis,
    Gateway to India,
    Star of the East
    With her face to the West.
    Our Bombay, Padma! It was very different then, there were no night-clubs or pickle factories or Oberoi-Sheraton Hotels or movie studios; but the city grew at breakneck speed, acquiring a cathedral and an equestrian statue of the Mahratta warrior-king Sivaji which (we used to think) came to life at night and galloped awesomely through the city streets—right along Marine Drive! On Chowpatty sands! Past the great houses on Malabar Hill, round Kemp’s Corner, giddily along the sea to Scandal Point! And yes, why not, on and on, down my very own Warden Road, right alongside the segregated swimming pools at Breach Candy, right up to huge Mahalaxmi Temple and the old Willingdon Club … Throughout my childhood, whenever bad times came to Bombay, some insomniac night-walker would report that he had seen the statue moving; disasters, in the city of my youth, danced to the occult music of a horse’s gray, stone hooves.
    And where are they now, the first inhabitants? Coconuts have done best of all. Coconuts are still beheaded daily on Chowpatty Beach; while on Juhu Beach, under the languid gaze of film stars at the Sun ‘n’ Sand hotel, small boys still shin up coconut palms and bring down the bearded fruit. Coconuts even have their own festival, Coconut Day, which was celebrated a few days before my synchronistic birth. You may feel reassured about coconuts. Rice has not been so lucky; rice-paddies lie under concrete now; tenements tower where once rice wallowed within sight of the sea. But still, in the city, we are great rice-eaters. Patna rice, Basmati, Kashmiri rice travels to the metropolis daily; so the original, ur-rice has left its mark upon us all, and cannot be said to have died in vain. As for Mumbadevi—she’s not so popular these days, having been replaced by elephant-headed Ganesh in the people’s affections. The calendar of festivals reveals her decline: Ganesh—“Ganpati Baba”—has his day of Ganesh Chaturthi, when huge processions are “taken out” and march to Chowpatty bearing plaster effigies of the god, which they hurl into the sea. Ganesh’s day is a rain-making ceremony, it makes the monsoon possible, and it, too, was celebrated in the days before my arrival at the end of the ticktock countdown—but where is Mumbadevi’s day? It is not on the calendar. Where the prayers of pomfret folk, the devotions of crab-catchers? … Of all the first inhabitants, the Koli fishermen have come off worst of all. Squashed now into a tiny village in the thumb of the hand-like peninsula, they have admittedly given their name to a district—Colaba. But follow Colaba Causeway to its tip—past cheap clothes shops and Irani restaurants and the second-rate flats of teachers, journalists and clerks—and you’ll find them, trapped between the naval base and the sea. And sometimes Koli women, their hands stinking of pomfret guts and crabmeat, jostle arrogantly to the head of a Colaba bus-queue, with their crimson (or purple) saris hitched brazenly up between their legs, and a smarting glint of old defeats and dispossessions in their bulging and somewhat fishy eyes. A fort, and afterwards a city, took their land; pile-drivers stole (tetrapods would steal) pieces of their sea. But there are still Arab dhows, every evening, spreading their sails against the sunset … in August 1947, the British, having ended the dominion of fishing-nets, coconuts, rice and Mumbadevi, were about to depart themselves; no dominion is everlasting.
    And on June 19th, two weeks after their arrival by Frontier Mail, my parents entered into a curious bargain with one such departing Englishman. His name was William Methwold.
    The road to Methwold’s Estate (we are entering my kingdom now, coming into the heart of my childhood; a little lump has appeared in my throat) turns off Warden Road between a bus-stop and a little row of shops. Chimalker’s Toyshop; Reader’s Paradise; the Chimanbhoy Fatbhoy jewelery store; and, above all, Bombelli’s the Confectioners, with their Marquis cake, their One Yard of Chocolates! Names to conjure with; but there’s no time now. Past the saluting cardboard bellboy of the Band Box Laundry, the road leads us home. In those days the pink skyscraper of the Narlikar women (hideous echo of Srinagar’s radio mast!) had not even been thought of; the road mounted a low hillock, no higher than a two-storey building; it curved round to