Midnights Children

Expecting one type of two-headed child, she is peeved at being offered another. Nevertheless, whether she is listening or not, I have things to record.
    Three days after my birth, Mary Pereira was consumed by remorse. Joseph D’Costa, on the run from the searching police cars, had clearly abandoned her sister Alice as well as Mary; and the little plump woman—unable, in her fright, to confess her crime—realized that she had been a fool. “Donkey from somewhere!” she cursed herself; but she kept her secret. She decided, however, to make amends of a kind. She gave up her job at the Nursing Home and approached Amina Sinai with, “Madam, I saw your baby just one time and fell in love. Are you needing an ayah?” And Amina, her eyes shining with motherhood, “Yes.” Mary Pereira (“You might as well call
her
your mother,” Padma interjects, proving she is still interested, “She made you, you know”), from that moment on, devoted her life to bringing me up, thus binding the rest of her days to the memory of her crime.
    On August 20th, Nussie Ibrahim followed my mother into the Pedder Road clinic, and little Sonny followed me into the world—but he was reluctant to emerge; forceps were obliged to reach in and extract him; Doctor Bose, in the heat of the moment, pressed a little too hard, and Sonny arrived with little dents beside each of his temples, shallow forcep-hollows which would make him as irresistibly attractive as the hairpiece of William Methwold had made the Englishman. Girls (Evie, the Brass Monkey, others) reached out to stroke his little valleys … it would lead to difficulties between us.
    But I’ve saved the most interesting snippet for the last. So let me reveal now that, on the day after I was born, my mother and I were visited in a saffron and green bedroom by two persons from the
Times of India
(Bombay edition). I lay in a green crib, swaddled in saffron, and looked up at them. There was a reporter, who spent his time interviewing my mother; and a tall, aquiline photographer who devoted his attentions to me. The next day, words as well as pictures appeared in newsprint …
    Quite recently, I visited a cactus-garden where once, many years back, I buried a toy tin globe, which was badly dented and stuck together with Scotch Tape; and extracted from its insides the things I had placed there all those years ago. Holding them in my left hand now, as I write, I can still see—despite yellowing and mildew—that one is a letter, a personal letter to myself, signed by the Prime Minister of India; but the other is a newspaper cutting.
    It has a headline: MIDNIGHT’S CHILD.
    And a text: “A charming pose of Baby Saleem Sinai, who was born last night at the exact moment of our Nation’s independence—the happy Child of that glorious Hour!”
    And a large photograph: an A-l top-quality front-page jumbo-sized baby-snap, in which it is still possible to make out a child with birthmarks staining his cheeks and a runny and glistening nose. (The picture is captioned:
Photo by Kalidas Gupta
.)
    Despite headline, text and photograph, I must accuse our visitors of the crime of trivialization; mere journalists, looking no further than the next day’s paper, they had no idea of the importance of the event they were covering. To them, it was no more than a human-interest drama.
    How do I know this? Because, at the end of the interview, the photographer presented my mother with a cheque—for one hundred rupees.
    One hundred rupees! Is it possible to imagine a more piffling, derisory sum? It is a sum by which one could, were one of a mind to do so, feel insulted. I shall, however, merely thank them for celebrating my arrival, and forgive them for their lack of a genuine historical sense.
    “Don’t be vain,” Padma says grumpily. “One hundred rupees is not so little; after all, everybody gets born, it’s not such a big big thing.”

BOOK TWO

The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger
    I S IT POSSIBLE to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival? I can think of no other reason for Padma’s bizarre behavior; and this explanation at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading aloud) a word which should not have been spoken … ever since the episode of the quack doctor’s visit, I have sniffed out a strange discontent in Padma, exuding its