Midnights Children

writing only, because merely to speak it is to unleash its power, you know.” Now Methwold: “Amazing! And you know the words?” My father nods, lip jutting, toe still as he taps his forehead for emphasis. “All in here; all memorized. Hasn’t been used since an ancestor quarrelled with the Emperor Babar and put the curse on his son Humayun … terrible story, that—every schoolboy knows.”
    And the time would come when my father, in the throes of his utter retreat from reality, would lock himself in a blue room and try to remember a curse which he had dreamed up one evening in the gardens of his house while he stood tapping his temple beside the descendant of William Methwold.
    Saddled now with flypaper-dreams and imaginary ancestors, I am still over a day away from being born … but now the remorseless ticktock reasserts itself: twenty-nine hours to go, twenty-eight, twenty-seven …
    What other dreams were dreamed on that last night? Was it then—yes, why not—that Doctor Narlikar, ignorant of the drama that was about to unfold at his Nursing Home, first dreamed of tetrapods? Was it on that last night—while Pakistan was being born to the north and west of Bombay—that my uncle Hanif, who had come (like his sister) to Bombay, and who had fallen in love with an actress, the divine Pia (“Her face is her fortune!” the
Illustrated Weekly
once said), first imagined the cinematic device which would soon give him the first of his three hit pictures? … It seems likely; myths, nightmares, fantasies were in the air. This much is certain: on that last night, my grandfather Aadam Aziz, alone now in the big old house in Cornwallis Road—except for a wife whose strength of will seemed to increase as Aziz was ground down by age, and for a daughter, Alia, whose embittered virginity would last until a bomb split her in two over eighteen years later—was suddenly imprisoned by great metal hoops of nostalgia, and lay awake as they pressed down upon his chest; until finally, at five o’clock in the morning of August 14th—nineteen hours to go—he was pushed out of bed by an invisible force and drawn towards an old tin trunk. Opening it, he found: old copies of German magazines; Lenin’s
What Is To Be Done?;
a folded prayer-mat; and at last the thing which he had felt an irresistible urge to see once more—white and folded and glowing faintly in the dawn—my grandfather drew out, from the tin trunk of his past, a stained and perforated sheet, and discovered that the hole had grown; that there were other, smaller holes in the surrounding fabric; and in the grip of a wild nostalgic rage he shook his wife awake and astounded her by yelling, as he waved her history under her nose:
    “Moth-eaten! Look, Begum: moth-eaten! You forgot to put in any naphthalene balls!”
    But now the countdown will not be denied … eighteen hours; seventeen; sixteen … and already, at Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home, it is possible to hear the shrieks of a woman in labor. Wee Willie Winkie is here; and his wife Vanita; she had been in a protracted, unproductive labor for eight hours now. The first pangs hit her just as, hundreds of miles away, M. A. Jinnah announced the midnight birth of a Muslim nation … but still she writhes on a bed in the Narlikar Home’s “charity ward” (reserved for the babies of the poor) … her eyes are standing half-way out of her head, her body glistens with sweat, but the baby shows no signs of coming, nor is its father present; it is eight o’clock in the morning, but there is still the possibility that, given the circumstances, the baby could be waiting for midnight.
    Rumors in the city: “The statue galloped last night!” … “And the stars are unfavorable!” … But despite these signs of ill-omen, the city was poised, with a new myth glinting in the corners of its eyes. August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna’s birthday and Coconut Day; and this year—fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve—there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream