Midnights Children

of fortune-teller and maternal credulity and the dislocating presence of strangers’ possessions, making her imagine all manner of strange things. Trapped beneath her growing child, Amina pictured herself as a convicted murderer in Mughal times, when death by crushing beneath a boulder had been a common punishment … and in the years to come, whenever she looked back at that time which was the end of the time before she became a mother, that time in which the ticktock of countdown calendars was rushing everyone towards August 15th, she would say: “I don’t know about any of that. To me, it was like time had come to a complete stop. The baby in my stomach stopped the clocks. I’m sure of that. Don’t laugh: you remember the clocktower at the end of the hill? I’m telling you, after that monsoon it never worked again.”
    … And Musa, my father’s old servant, who had accompanied the couple to Bombay, went off to tell the other servants, in the kitchens of the red-tiled palaces, in the servants’ quarters at the backs of Versailles and Escorial and Sans Souci: “It’s going to be a real ten-rupee baby; yes, sir! A whopper of a ten-chip pomfret, wait and see!” The servants were pleased; because a birth is a fine thing and a good big baby is best of all …
    … And Amina whose belly had stopped the clocks sat immobilized in a room in a tower and told her husband, “Put your hand there and feel him … there, did you feel? … such a big strong boy; our little piece-of-the-moon.”
    Not until the rains ended, and Amina became so heavy that two manservants had to make a chair with their hands to lift her, did Wee Willie Winkie return to sing in the circus-ring between the four houses; and only then did Amina realize that she had not one, but two serious rivals (two that she knew of) for the
Times of India
’s prize, and that, prophecy or no prophecy, it was going to be a very close-run finish.
    “Wee Willie Winkie is my name; to sing for my supper is my fame!”
    Ex-conjurers and peepshow-men and singers … even before I was born, the mold was set. Entertainers would orchestrate my life.
    “I hope you are com-for-table! … Or are you come-for-tea? Oh, joke-joke, ladies and ladahs, let me see you laugh now!”
    Talldarkhandsome, a clown with an accordion, he stood in the circus-ring. In the garden of Buckingham Villa, my father’s big toe strolled (with its nine colleagues) beside and beneath the center-parting of William Methwold … sandalled, bulbous, a toe unaware of its coming doom. And Wee Willie Winkie (whose real name we never knew) cracked jokes and sang. From a first-floor verandah, Amina watched and listened; and from the neighboring verandah, felt the prick of the envious competitive gaze of Nussie-the-duck.
    … While I, at my desk, feel the sting of Padma’s impatience. (I wish, at times, for a more discerning audience, someone who would understand the need for rhythm, pacing, the subtle introduction of minor chords which will later rise, swell, seize the melody; who would know, for instance, that although baby-weight and monsoons have silenced the clock on the Estate clocktower, the steady beat of Mount-batten’s ticktock is still there, soft but inexorable, and that it’s only a matter of time before it fills our ears with its metronomic, drumming music.) Padma says: “I don’t want to know about this Winkie now; days and nights I’ve waited and still you won’t get to being born!” But I counsel patience; everything in its proper place, I admonish my dung-lotus, because Winkie, too, has his purpose and his place, here he is now teasing the pregnant ladies on their verandahs, pausing from singing to say, “You’ve heard about the prize, ladies? Me, too. My Vanita will have her time soon, soon-soon; maybe she and not you will have her picture in the paper!” … and Amina is frowning, and Methwold is smiling (is that a forced smile? Why?) beneath his center-parting, and my father’s lip is jutting judiciously as his big toe strolls and he says, “That’s a cheeky fellow; he goes too far.” But now Methwold in what looks very like embarrassment—even guilt!—reproves Ahmed Sinai, “Nonsense, old chap. The tradition of the fool, you know. Licensed to provoke and tease. Important social safety-valve.” And my father, shrugging, “Hm.” But he’s a clever type, this Winkie, because he’s pouring oil on the waters now, saying, “A birth is a fine thing; two births are