Midnights Children

ai-o-ai-ooo!”
    Salt water washes the confessional floor … and now, is there a new dilemma for the young father? Is he, despite the agonies of an unsettled stomach, weighing in invisible scales the sanctity of the confessional against the danger to civilized society of a man like Joseph D’Costa? Will he, in fact, ask Mary for her Joseph’s address, and then reveal … In short, would this bishop-ridden, stomach-churned young father have behaved like, or unlike, Montgomery Clift in
I Confess
? (Watching it some years ago at the New Empire cinema, I couldn’t decide.)—But no; once again, I must stifle my baseless suspicions. What happened to Joseph would probably have happened anyway. And in all likelihood the young father’s only relevance to my history is that he was the first outsider to hear about Joseph D’Costa’s virulent hatred of the rich, and of Mary Pereira’s desperate grief.
    Tomorrow I’ll have a bath and shave; I am going to put on a brand new kurta, shining and starched, and pajamas to match. I’ll wear mirrorworked slippers curling up at the toes, my hair will be neatly brushed (though not parted in the center), my teeth gleaming … in a phrase, I’ll look my best. (“Thank God” from pouting Padma.)
    Tomorrow, at last, there will be an end to stories which I (not having been present at their birth) have to drag out of the whirling recesses of my mind; because the metronome music of Mountbatten’s countdown calendar can be ignored no longer. At Methwold’s Estate, old Musa is still ticking like a timebomb; but he can’t be heard, because another sound is swelling now, deafening, insistent; the sound of seconds passing, of an approaching, inevitable midnight.

Tick, Tock
    P ADMA CAN HEAR IT: there’s nothing like a countdown for building suspense. I watched my dung-flower at work today, stirring vats like a whirlwind, as if that would make the time go faster. (And perhaps it did; time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay’s electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don’t believe me—tied to electricity, it’s usually a few hours wrong. Unless we’re the ones who are wrong … no people whose word for “yesterday” is the same as their word for “tomorrow” can be said to have a firm grip on the time.)
    But today, Padma heard Mountbatten’s ticktock … English-made, it beats with relentless accuracy. And now the factory is empty; fumes linger, but the vats are still; and I’ve kept my word. Dressed up to the nines, I greet Padma as she rushes to my desk, flounces down on the floor beside me, commands: “Begin.” I give a little satisfied smile; feel the children of midnight queueing up in my head, pushing and jostling like Koli fishwives; I tell them to wait, it won’t be long now; I clear my throat, give my pen a little shake; and start.
    Thirty-two years before the transfer of power, my grandfather bumped his nose against Kashmiri earth. There were rubies and diamonds. There was the ice of the future, waiting beneath the water’s skin. There was an oath: not to bow down before god or man. The oath created a hole, which would temporarily be filled by a woman behind a perforated sheet. A boatman who had once prophesied dynasties lurking in my grandfather’s nose ferried him angrily across a lake. There were blind landowners and lady wrestlers. And there was a sheet in a gloomy room. On that day, my inheritance began to form—the blue of Kashmiri sky which dripped into my grandfather’s eyes; the long sufferings of my great-grandmother which would become the forbearance of my own mother and the late steeliness of Naseem Aziz; my great-grandfather’s gift of conversing with birds which would descend through meandering bloodlines into the veins of my sister the Brass Monkey; the conflict between grandpaternal scepticism and grandmaternal credulity; and above all the ghostly essence of that perforated sheet, which doomed my mother to learn to love a man in segments, and which condemned me to see my own life—its meanings, its structures—in fragments also; so that by the time I understood it, it was far too late.
    Years ticking away—and my inheritance grows, because now I have the mythical golden teeth of the boatman Tai, and his brandy bottle which foretold my father’s alcoholic djinns; I have Ilse Lubin for suicide and pickled snakes for virility; I have Tai-for-changelessness opposed to Aadam-for-progress;