Midnights Children

face the sea, to look down on Breach Candy Swimming Club, where pink people could swim in a pool the shape of British India without fear of rubbing up against a black skin; and there, arranged nobly around a little roundabout, were the palaces of William Methwold, on which hung signs that would—thanks to me—reappear many years later, signs bearing two words; just two, but they lured my unwitting parents into Methwold’s peculiar game: FOR SALE.
    Methwold’s Estate: four identical houses built in a style befitting their original residents (conquerors’ houses! Roman mansions; three-storey homes of gods standing on a two-storey Olympus, a stunted Kailasa!)—large, durable mansions with red gabled roofs and turret towers in each corner, ivory-white corner towers wearing pointy red-tiled hats (towers fit to lock princesses in!)—houses with verandahs, with servants’ quarters reached by spiral iron staircases hidden at the back—houses which their owner, William Methwold, had named majestically after the palaces of Europe: Versailles Villa, Buckingham Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci. Bougainvillaea crept across them; goldfish swam in pale blue pools; cacti grew in rock-gardens; tiny touch-me-not plants huddled beneath tamarind trees; there were butterflies and roses and cane chairs on the lawns. And on that day in the middle of June, Mr. Methwold sold his empty palaces for ridiculously little—but there were conditions. So now, without more ado, I present him to you, complete with the center-parting in his hair … a six-foot Titan, this Methwold, his face the pink of roses and eternal youth. He had a head of thick black brilliantined hair, parted in the center. We shall speak again of this center-parting, whose ramrod precision made Methwold irresistible to women, who felt unable to prevent themselves wanting to rumple it up … Methwold’s hair, parted in the middle, has a lot to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history and sexuality moved. Like tightrope-walkers. (But despite everything, not even I, who never saw him, never laid eyes on languid gleaming teeth or devastatingly combed hair, am capable of bearing him any grudge.)
    And his nose? What did that look like? Prominent? Yes, it must have been, the legacy of a patrician French grandmother—from Bergerac!—whose blood ran aquamarinely in his veins and darkened his courtly charm with something crueller, some sweet murderous shade of absinthe.
    Methwold’s Estate was sold on two conditions: that the houses be bought complete with every last thing in them, that the entire contents be retained by the new owners; and that the actual transfer should not take place until midnight on August 15th.
    “Everything?” Amina Sinai asked. “I can’t even throw away a spoon? Allah, that lampshade … I can’t get rid of one
comb?
”
    “Lock, stock and barrel,” Methwold said, “Those are my terms. A whim, Mr. Sinai … you’ll permit a departing colonial his little game? We don’t have much left to do, we British, except to play our games.”
    “Listen now, listen, Amina,” Ahmed is saying later on, “You want to stay in this hotel room for ever? It’s a fantastic price; fantastic, absolutely. And what can he do after he’s transferred the deeds? Then you can throw out any lampshade you like. It’s less than two months …”
    “You’ll take a cocktail in the garden?” Methwold is saying, “Six o’clock every evening. Cocktail hour. Never varied in twenty years.”
    “But my God, the paint … and the cupboards are full of old clothes, janum … we’ll have to live out of suitcases, there’s nowhere to put one suit!”
    “Bad business, Mr. Sinai,” Methwold sips his Scotch amid cacti and roses, “Never seen the like. Hundreds of years of decent government, then suddenly, up and off. You’ll admit we weren’t all bad: built your roads. Schools, railway trains, parliamentary system, all worthwhile things. Taj Mahal was falling down until an Englishman bothered to see to it. And now, suddenly, independence. Seventy days to get out. I’m dead against it myself, but what’s to be done?”
    “… And look at the stains on the carpets, janum; for two months we must live like those Britishers? You’ve looked in the bathrooms? No water near the pot. I never believed, but it’s true, my God, they wipe their bottoms with paper only! …”
    “Tell me, Mr. Methwold,” Ahmed Sinai’s voice has changed,