Midnights Children

births—because Vanita had finally been delivered of a baby of remarkable size: “You wouldn’t have believed it,” Doctor Bose said, “It just kept on coming, more and more of the boy forcing its way out, it’s a real ten-chip whopper all right!” And Narlikar, washing himself: “Mine, too.” But that was a little later—just now Narlikar and Bose were tending to Ahmed Sinai’s toe; midwives had been instructed to wash and swaddle the newborn pair; and now Miss Mary Pereira made her contribution.
    “Go, go,” she said to poor Flory, “see if you can help. I can do all right here.”
    And when she was alone—two babies in her hands—two lives in her power—she did it for Joseph, her own private revolutionary act, thinking He will certainly love me for this, as she changed name-tags on the two huge infants, giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich-born child to accordions and poverty … “Love me, Joseph!” was in Mary Pereira’s mind, and then it was done. On the ankle of a ten-chip whopper with eyes as blue as Kashmiri sky—which were also eyes as blue as Methwold’s—and a nose as dramatic as a Kashmiri grandfather’s—which was also the nose of grandmother from France—she placed this name:
Sinai.
    Saffron swaddled me as, thanks to the crime of Mary Pereira, I became the chosen child of midnight, whose parents were not his parents, whose son would not be his own … Mary took the child of my mother’s womb, who was not to be her son, another ten-chip pomfret, but with eyes which were already turning brown, and knees as knobbly as Ahmed Sinai’s, wrapped it in green, and brought it to Wee Willie Winkie—who was staring at her blind-eyed, who hardly saw his new son, who never knew about center-partings … Wee Willie Winkie, who had just learned that Vanita had not managed to survive her childbearing. At three minutes past midnight, while doctors fussed over broken toe, Vanita had hemorrhaged and died.
    So I was brought to my mother; and she never doubted my authenticity for an instant. Ahmed Sinai, toe in splint, sat on her bed as she said: “Look, janum, the poor fellow, he’s got his grandfather’s nose.” He watched mystified as she made sure there was only one head; and then she relaxed completely, understanding that even fortune-tellers have only limited gifts.
    “Janum,” my mother said excitedly, “you must call the papers. Call them at the
Times of India
. What did I tell you? I won.”
    “… This is no time for petty or destructive criticism,” Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly. “No time for ill-will. We have to build the noble mansion of free India, where all her children may dwell.” A flag unfurls: it is saffron, white and green.
    “An Anglo?” Padma exclaims in horror. “What are you telling me? You are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?”
    “I am Saleem Sinai,” I told her, “Snotnose, Stainface, Sniffer, Baldy, Piece-of-the-Moon. Whatever do you mean—not my own?”
    “All the time,” Padma wails angrily, “you tricked me. Your mother, you called her; your father, your grandfather, your aunts. What thing are you that you don’t even care to tell the truth about who your parents were? You don’t care that your mother died giving you life? That your father is maybe still alive somewhere, penniless, poor? You are a monster or what?”
    No: I’m no monster. Nor have I been guilty of trickery. I provided clues … but there’s something more important than that. It’s this: when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it
made no difference!
I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts … if you had asked my father (even him, despite all that happened!) who his son was, nothing on earth would have induced him to point in the direction of the accordionist’s knock-kneed, unwashed boy. Even though he would grow up, this Shiva, to be something of a hero.
    So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents—the children of midnight were also the children
of the time:
fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.
    “Enough,” Padma sulks. “I don’t want to listen.”