Midnights Children

fortnight, accusing Baby Saleem of trying to bite off her nipples with his toothless gums. I moved on to the bottle and downed vast quantities of compound: the bottle’s nipples suffered, too, vindicating the complaining wet-nurse. Baby-book records were meticulously kept; they reveal that I expanded almost visibly, enlarging day by day; but unfortunately no nasal measurements were taken so I cannot say whether my breathing apparatus grew in strict proportion, or faster than the rest. I must say that I had a healthy metabolism. Waste matter was evacuated copiously from the appropriate orifices; from my nose there flowed a shining cascade of goo. Armies of handkerchiefs, regiments of nappies found their way into the large washing-chest in my mother’s bathroom … shedding rubbish from various apertures, I kept my eyes quite dry. “Such a good baby, Madam,” Mary Pereira said, “Never takes out one tear.”
    Good baby Saleem was a quiet child; I laughed often, but soundlessly. (Like my own son, I began by taking stock, listening before I rushed into gurgles and, later, into speech.) For a time Amina and Mary became afraid that the boy was dumb; but, just when they were on the verge of telling his father (from whom they had kept their worries secret—no father wants a damaged child), he burst into sound, and became, in that respect at any rate, utterly normal. “It’s as if,” Amina whispered to Mary, “he’s decided to put our minds at rest.”
    There was one more serious problem. Amina and Mary took a few days to notice it. Busy with the mighty, complex processes of turning themselves into a two-headed mother, their vision clouded by a fog of stenchy underwear, they failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids. Amina, remembering how, during her pregnancy, the weight of her unborn child had held time as still as a dead green pond, began to wonder whether the reverse might not be taking place now—whether the baby had some magical power over all the time in his immediate vicinity, and was speeding it up, so that mother-and-ayah never had enough time to do everything that needed doing, so that the baby could grow at an apparently fantastic rate; lost in such chronological daydreams, she didn’t notice my problem. Only when she shrugged the idea off, and told herself I was just a good strapping boy with a big appetite, an early developer, did the veils of maternal love part sufficiently for her and Mary to yelp, in unison: “Look, baap-re-baap! Look, Madam! See, Mary! The little chap never blinks!”
    The eyes were too blue: Kashmiri-blue, changeling-blue, blue with the weight of unspilled tears, too blue to blink. When I was fed, my eyes did not flutter; when virginal Mary set me across her shoulder, crying, “Oof, so heavy, sweet Jesus!” I burped without nictating. When Ahmed Sinai limped splint-toed to my crib, I yielded to jutting lips with keen and batless gaze … “Maybe a mistake, Madam,” Mary suggested. “Maybe the little sahib is copying us—blinking when we blink.” And Amina: “We’ll blink in turn and watch.” Their eyelids opening-and-closing alternately, they observed my icy blueness; but there was not the slightest tremor; until Amina took matters into her own hands and reached into the cradle to stroke my eyelids downwards. They closed: my breathing altered, instantly, to the contented rhythms of sleep. After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids. “He’ll learn, Madam,” Mary comforted Amina, “He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure.” I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
    Now, looking back through baby eyes, I can see it all perfectly—it’s amazing how much you can remember when you try. What I can see: the city, basking like a bloodsucker lizard in the summer heat. Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it’s really a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India. A glamorous leech, producing nothing except films bush-shirts fish … in the aftermath of Partition, I see Vishwanath the post-boy bicycling towards our two-storey hillock, vellum envelope in his saddle-bag, riding his aged Arjuna Indiabike past a rotting bus—abandoned although it isn’t the monsoon season, because its driver suddenly decided to leave for Pakistan, switched off the engine and departed, leaving a full