Midnights Children

washing-chest it was probably Toxy who made it possible.
    That’s enough for the moment, about the first days of Baby Saleem—already my very presence is having an effect on history; already Baby Saleem is working changes on the people around him; and, in the case of my father, I am convinced that it was I who pushed him into the excesses which led, perhaps inevitably, to the terrifying time of the freeze.
    Ahmed Sinai never forgave his son for breaking his toe. Even after the splint was removed, a tiny limp remained. My father leaned over my crib and said, “So, my son: you’re starting as you mean to go on. Already you’ve started bashing your poor old father!” In my opinion, this was only half a joke. Because, with my birth, everything changed for Ahmed Sinai. His position in the household was undermined by my coming. Suddenly Amina’s assiduity had acquired different goals; she never wheedled money out of him any more, and the napkin in his lap at the breakfast-table felt sad pangs of nostalgia for the old days. Now it was, “Your son needs so-and-so,” or “Janum, you must give money for such-and-such.” Bad show, Ahmed Sinai thought. My father was a self-important man.
    And so it was my doing that Ahmed Sinai fell, in those days after my birth, into the twin fantasies which were to be his undoing, into the unreal worlds of the djinns and of the land beneath the sea.
    A memory of my father in a cool-season evening, sitting on my bed (I was seven years old) and telling me, in a slightly thickened voice, the story of the fisherman who found the djinn in a bottle washed up on a beach … “Never believe in a djinn’s promises, my son! Let them out of the bottle and they’ll eat you up!” And I, timidly—because I could smell danger on my father’s breath: “But, Abba, can a djinn really live inside a bottle?” Whereupon my father, in a mercurial change of mood, roared with laughter and left the room, returning with a dark green bottle with a white label. “Look,” he said sonorously, “Do you want to see the djinn in here?” “No!” I squealed in fright; but “Yes!” yelled my sister the Brass Monkey from the neighboring bed … and cowering together in excited terror we watched him unscrew the cap and dramatically cover the bottleneck with the palm of his hand; and now, in the other hand, a cigarette-lighter materialized. “So perish all evil djinns!” my father cried; and, removing his palm, applied the flame to the neck of the bottle. Awestruck, the Monkey and I watched an eerie flame, blue-green-yellow, move in a slow circle down the interior walls of the bottle; until, reaching the bottom, it flared briefly and died. The next day I provoked gales of laughter when I told Sonny, Eyeslice and Hairoil, “My father fights with djinns; he beats them; it’s true! …” And it was true. Ahmed Sinai, deprived of wheedles and attention, began, soon after my birth, a life-long struggle with djinn-bottles. But I was mistaken about one thing: he didn’t win.
    Cocktail-cabinets had whetted his appetite; but it was my arrival that drove him to it … In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry state. The only way to get a drink was to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up, djinn-doctors, one of whom, Doctor Sharabi, was introduced to my father by Homi Catrack next door. After that, on the first of every month, my father and Mr. Catrack and many of the city’s most respectable men queued up outside Doctor Sharabi’s mottled-glass surgery door, went in, and emerged with the little pink chitties of alcoholism. But the permitted ration was too small for my father’s needs; and so he began to send his servants along, too, and gardeners, bearers, drivers (we had a motorcar now, a 1946 Rover with running-boards, just like William Methwold’s), even old Musa and Mary Pereira, brought my father back more and more pink chitties, which he took to Vijay Stores opposite the circumzising barbershop in Gowalia Tank Road and exchanged for the brown paper bags of alcoholism, inside which were the chinking green bottles, full of djinn. And whisky, too: Ahmed Sinai blurred the edges of himself by drinking the green bottles and red labels of his servants. The poor, having little else to peddle, sold their identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father turned them into liquid and drank them down.
    At six o’clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the