Midnights Children

sense, the mirror of our own.”
    And Mary Pereira, awestruck, “The Government, Madam? It will be keeping one eye on the boy? But why, Madam? What’s wrong with him?”—And Amina, not understanding the note of panic in her ayah’s voice: “It’s just a way of putting things, Mary; it doesn’t really mean what it says.” But Mary does not relax; and always, whenever she enters the baby’s room, her eyes flick wildly towards the letter in its frame; her eyes look around her, trying to see whether the Government is watching; wondering eyes: what do they know? Did somebody see? … As for me, as I grew up, I didn’t quite accept my mother’s explanation, either; but it lulled me into a sense of false security; so that, even though something of Mary’s suspicions had leaked into me, I was still taken by surprise when …
    Perhaps the fisherman’s finger was not pointing at the letter in the frame; because if one followed it even further, it led one out through the window, down the two-storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy Pools, and out to another sea which was not the sea in the picture; a sea on which the sails of Koli dhows glowed scarlet in the setting sun … an accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at the city’s dispossessed.
    Or maybe—and this idea makes me feel a little shivery despite the heat—it was a finger of warning, its purpose to draw attention to
itself;
yes, it could have been, why not, a prophecy of another finger, a finger not dissimilar from itself, whose entry into my story would release the dreadful logic of Alpha and Omega … my God, what a notion! How much of my future hung above my crib, just waiting for me to understand it? How many warnings was I given—how many did I ignore? … But no. I will not be a “madman from somewhere,” to use Padma’s eloquent phrase. I will not succumb to cracked digressions; not while I have the strength to resist the cracks.
    When Amina Sinai and Baby Saleem arrived home in a borrowed Studebaker, Ahmed Sinai brought a manila envelope along for the ride. Inside the envelope: a pickle-jar, emptied of lime kasaundy, washed, boiled, purified—and now, refilled. A well-sealed jar, with a rubber diaphragm stretched over its tin lid and held in place by a twisted rubber band. What was sealed beneath rubber, preserved in glass, concealed in manila? This: travelling home with father, mother and baby was a quantity of briny water in which, floating gently, hung an umbilical cord. (But was it mine or the Other’s? That’s something I can’t tell you.) While the newly-hired ayah, Mary Pereira, made her way to Methwold’s Estate by bus, an umbilical cord travelled in state in the glove compartment of a film magnate’s Studey. While Baby Saleem grew towards manhood, umbilical tissue hung unchanging in bottled brine, at the back of a teak almirah. And when, years later, our family entered its exile in the Land of the Pure, when I was struggling towards purity, umbilical cords would briefly have their day.
    Nothing was thrown away; baby and afterbirth were both retained; both arrived at Methwold’s Estate; both awaited their time.
    I was not a beautiful baby. Baby-snaps reveal that my large moon-face was too large; too perfectly round. Something lacking in the region of the chin. Fair skin curved across my features—but birthmarks disfigured it; dark stains spread down my western hairline, a dark patch colored my eastern ear. And my temples: too prominent: bulbous Byzantine domes. (Sonny Ibrahim and I were born to be friends—when we bumped our foreheads, Sonny’s forcep-hollows permitted my bulby temples to nestle within them, as snugly as carpenter’s joints.) Amina Sinai, immeasurably relieved by my single head, gazed upon it with redoubled maternal fondness, seeing it through a beautifying mist, ignoring the ice-like eccentricity of my sky-blue eyes, the temples like stunted horns, even the rampant cucumber of the nose.
    Baby Saleem’s nose: it was monstrous; and it ran.
    Intriguing features of my early life: large and unbeautiful as I was, it appears I was not content. From my very first days I embarked upon an heroic program of self-enlargement. (As though I knew that, to carry the burdens of my future life, I’d need to be pretty big.) By mid-September I had drained my mother’s not inconsiderable breasts of milk. A wet-nurse was briefly employed but she retreated, dried-out as a desert after only a