Midnights Children

at the precise instant of the birth of the new nation, Amina Sinai, who had just awoken from a mysterious dream of flypaper, became glued to newsprint. Newsprint was thrust beneath Ahmed Sinai’s nose; and Amina’s finger, jabbing triumphantly at the page, punctuated the utter certainty of her voice.
    “See, janum?” Amina announced. “That’s going to be me.”
    There rose, before their eyes, a vision of bold headlines declaring “A Charming Pose of Baby Sinai—the Child of this Glorious Hour!”—a vision of A-l top-quality front-page jumbo-sized baby-snaps; but Ahmed began to argue, “Think of the odds against it, Begum,” until she set her mouth into a clamp of obstinacy and reiterated, “But me no buts; it’s me all right; I just know it for sure. Don’t ask me how.”
    And although Ahmed repeated his wife’s prophecy to William Methwold, as a cocktail-hour joke, Amina remained unshaken, even when Methwold laughed. “Woman’s intuition—splendid thing, Mrs. S.! But really, you can scarcely expect us to …” Even under the pressure of the peeved gaze of her neighbor Nussie-the-duck, who was also pregnant, and had also read the
Times of India
, Amina stuck to her guns, because Ramram’s prediction had sunk deep into her heart.
    To tell the truth, as Amina’s pregnancy progressed, she had found the words of the fortune-teller pressing more and more heavily down upon her shoulders, her head, her swelling balloon, so that as she became trapped in a web of worries about giving birth to a child with two heads she somehow escaped the subtle magic of Methwold’s Estate, remaining uninfected by cocktail-hours, budgerigars, pianolas and English accents … At first, then, there was something equivocal about her certainty that she could win the
Times
’s prize, because she had convinced herself that if this part of the fortune-teller’s prognostications were fulfilled, it proved that the rest would be just as accurate, whatever their meaning might be. So it was not in tones of unadulterated pride and anticipation that my mother said, “Never mind intuition, Mr. Methwold. This is guaranteed fact.”
    To herself she added: “And this, too: I’m going to have a son. But he’ll need plenty of looking after, or else.”
    It seems to me that, running deep in the veins of my mother, perhaps deeper than she knew, the supernatural conceits of Naseem Aziz had begun to influence her thoughts and behavior—those conceits which persuaded Reverend Mother that aeroplanes were inventions of the devil, and that cameras could steal your soul, and that ghosts were as obvious a part of reality as Paradise, and that it was nothing less than a sin to place certain sanctified ears between one’s thumb and forefinger, were now whispering in her daughter’s darkling head. “Even if we’re sitting in the middle of all this English garbage,” my mother was beginning to think, “this is still India, and people like Ramram Seth know what they know.” In this way the scepticism of her beloved father was replaced by the credulity of my grandmother; and, at the same time, the adventurous spark which Amina had inherited from Doctor Aziz was being snuffed out by another, and equally heavy, weight.
    By the time the rains came at the end of June, the fetus was fully formed inside her womb. Knees and nose were present; and as many heads as would grow were already in position. What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book—perhaps an encyclopedia—even a whole language … which is to say that the lump in the middle of my mother grew so large, and became so heavy, that while Warden Road at the foot of our two-storey hillock became flooded with dirty yellow rainwater and stranded buses began to rust and children swam in the liquid road and newspapers sank soggily beneath the surface, Amina found herself in a circular first-floor tower room, scarcely able to move beneath the weight of her leaden balloon.
    Endless rain. Water seeping in under windows in which stained-glass tulips danced along leaded panes. Towels, jammed against window-frames, soaked up water until they became heavy, saturated, useless. The sea: gray and ponderous and stretching out to meet the rainclouds at a narrowed horizon. Rain drumming against my mother’s ears, adding to the confusion