Midnights Children

the seemingly immutable order of his family turned upside down, his mother going out to work while his father sat hidden behind the veil which the stroke had dropped over his brain … in a wooden chair, in a darkened room, he sat and made bird-noises. Thirty different species of birds visited him and sat on the sill outside his shuttered window conversing about this and that. He seemed happy enough.
    (… And already I can see the repetitions beginning; because didn’t my grandmother also find enormous … and the stroke, too, was not the only … and the Brass Monkey had her birds … the curse begins already, and we haven’t even got to the noses yet!)
    The lake was no longer frozen over. The thaw had come rapidly, as usual; many of the small boats, the shikaras, had been caught napping, which was also normal. But while these sluggards slept on, on dry land, snoring peacefully beside their owners, the oldest boat was up at the crack as old folk often are, and was therefore the first craft to move across the unfrozen lake. Tai’s shikara … this, too, was customary.
    Watch how the old boatman, Tai, makes good time through the misty water, standing stooped over at the back of his craft! How his oar, a wooden heart on a yellow stick, drives jerkily through the weeds! In these parts he’s considered very odd because he rows standing up … among other reasons. Tai, bringing an urgent summons to Doctor Aziz, is about to set history in motion … while Aadam, looking down into the water, recalls what Tai taught him years ago: “The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba, just under the water’s skin.” Aadam’s eyes are a clear blue, the astonishing blue of mountain sky, which has a habit of dripping into the pupils of Kashmiri men; they have not forgotten how to look. They see—there! like the skeleton of a ghost, just beneath the surface of Lake Dal!—the delicate tracery, the intricate crisscross of colorless lines, the cold waiting veins of the future. His German years, which have blurred so much else, haven’t deprived him of the gift of seeing. Tai’s gift. He looks up, sees the approaching V of Tai’s boat, waves a greeting. Tai’s arm rises—but this is a command. “Wait!” My grandfather waits; and during this hiatus, as he experiences the last peace of his life, a muddy, ominous sort of peace, I had better get round to describing him.
    Keeping out of my voice the natural envy of the ugly man for the strikingly impressive, I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. Pressed flat against a wall of his family home, he measured twenty-five bricks (a brick for each year of his life), or just over six foot two. A strong man also. His beard was thick and red—and annoyed his mother, who said only Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had said, “They went mad with the colors when they made your face.” But the central feature of my grandfather’s anatomy was neither color nor height, neither strength of arm nor straightness of back. There it was, reflected in the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face … Aadam Aziz, waiting for Tai, watches his rippling nose. It would have dominated less dramatic faces than his easily; even on him, it is what one sees first and remembers longest. “A cyranose,” Ilse Lubin said, and Oskar added, “A proboscissimus.” Ingrid announced, “You could cross a river on that nose.” (Its bridge was wide.)
    My grandfather’s nose: nostrils flaring, curvaceous as dancers. Between them swells the nose’s triumphal arch, first up and out, then down and under, sweeping in to his upper lip with a superb and at present red-tipped flick. An easy nose to hit a tussock with. I wish to place on record my gratitude to this mighty organ—if not for it, who would ever have believed me to be truly my mother’s son, my grandfather’s grandson?—this colossal apparatus which was to be my birthright, too. Doctor Aziz’s nose—comparable only to the trunk of the elephant-headed god Ganesh—established incontrovertibly his right to be a patriarch. It was Tai who taught him that, too. When young Aadam was barely past puberty the dilapidated boatman said, “That’s a nose to start a family on, my princeling. There’d be no mistaking whose brood they were. Mughal Emperors would have given their right hands for noses like that one. There are