Midnights Children

turned him into a man of property and not leathercloth; and the piece of Ahmed which Amina could not love. To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.
    And fishermen, and Catharine of Braganza, and Mumbadevi coconuts rice; Sivaji’s stature and Methwold’s Estate; a swimming pool in the shape of British India and a two-storey hillock; a center-parting and a nose from Bergerac; an inoperative clock tower and a little circus-ring; an Englishman’s lust for an Indian allegory and the seduction of an accordionist’s wife. Budgerigars, ceiling-fans, the
Times of India
are all part of the luggage I brought into the world … do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child? Blue Jesus leaked into me; and Mary’s desperation, and Joseph’s revolutionary wildness, and the flightiness of Alice Pereira … all these made me, too.
    If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance … perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
    “At last,” Padma says with satisfaction, “you’ve learned how to tell things really fast.”
    August 13th, 1947: discontent in the heavens. Jupiter, Saturn and Venus are in quarrelsome vein; moreover, the three crossed stars are moving into the most ill-favored house of all. Benarsi astrologers name it fearfully: “Karamstan! They enter Karamstan!”
    While astrologers make frantic representations to Congress Party bosses, my mother lies down for her afternoon nap. While Earl Mountbatten deplores the lack of trained occultists on his General Staff, the slowly turning shadows of a ceiling-fan caress Amina into sleep. While M. A. Jinnah, secure in the knowledge that his Pakistan will be born in just eleven hours, a full day before independent India, for which there are still thirty-five hours to go, is scoffing at the protestations of horoscope-mongers, shaking his head in amusement, Amina’s head, too, is moving from side to side.
    But she is asleep. And in these days of her boulder-like pregnancy, an enigmatic dream of flypaper has been plaguing her sleeping hours … in which she wanders now, as before, in a crystal sphere filled with dangling strips of the sticky brown material, which adhere to her clothing and rip it off as she stumbles through the impenetrable papery forest; and now she struggles, tears at paper, but it grabs at her, until she is naked, with the baby kicking inside her, and long tendrils of flypaper stream out to seize her by her undulating womb, paper glues itself to her hair nose teeth breasts thighs, and as she opens her mouth to shout a brown adhesive gag falls across her parting lips …
    “Amina Begum!” Musa is saying. “Wake up! Bad dream, Begum Sahiba!”
    Incidents of those last few hours—the last dregs of my inheritance: when there were thirty-five hours to go, my mother dreamed of being glued to brown paper like a fly. And at the cocktail hour (thirty hours to go) William Methwold visited my father in the garden of Buckingham Villa. Center-parting strolling beside and above big toe, Mr. Methwold reminisced. Tales of the first Methwold, who had dreamed the city into existence, filled the evening air in that penultimate sunset. And my father—aping Oxford drawl, anxious to impress the departing Englishman—responded with, “Actually, old chap, ours is a pretty distinguished family, too.” Methwold listening: head cocked, red rose in cream lapel, wide-brimmed hat concealing parted hair, a veiled hint of amusement in his eyes … Ahmed Sinai, lubricated by whisky, driven on by self-importance, warms to his theme. “Mughal blood, as a matter of fact.” To which Methwold, “No! Really? You’re pulling my leg.” And Ahmed, beyond the point of no return, is obliged to press on. “Wrong side of the blanket, of course; but Mughal, certainly.”
    That was how, thirty hours before my birth, my father demonstrated that he, too, longed for fictional ancestors … how he came to invent a family pedigree that, in later years, when whisky had blurred the edges of his memory and djinn-bottles came to confuse him, would obliterate all traces of reality … and how, to hammer his point home, he introduced into our lives the idea of the family curse.
    “Oh yes,” my father said as Methwold cocked a grave unsmiling head, “many old families possessed such curses. In our line, it is handed down from eldest son to eldest son—in