Midnights Children

world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.
    After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever, and he didn’t relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother’s preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door—Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries; After nights in which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language—“What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse—what difference?” And then tears, and Amina, “Oh, janum—don’t torture me!” which, in turn, provoked, “Torture my foot! You think it’s torture for a man to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!”—my father limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while Amina began to notice how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left suddenly, flouncing down our drive without any notice; and you must judge whether she chose to be blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but she did nothing about it, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act of recognition was to give the girls a collective name. “Those Anglos,” she said to Mary, revealing a touch of snobbery, “with their funny names, Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I don’t know what. What should I care about them? Cheap type females. I call them all his Coca-Cola girls—that’s what they all sound like.”
    While Ahmed pinched bottoms, Amina became long-suffering; but he might have been glad if she had appeared to care.
    Mary Pereira said, “They aren’t so funny names, Madam; beg your pardon, but they are good Christian words.” And Amina remembered Ahmed’s cousin Zohra making fun of dark skin—and, falling over herself to apologize, tumbled into Zohra’s mistake: “Oh, not
you
, Mary, how could you think I was making fun of you?”
    Horn-templed, cucumber-nosed, I lay in my crib and listened; and everything that happened, happened because of me … One day in January 1948, at five in the afternoon, my father was visited by Doctor Narlikar. There were embraces as usual, and slaps on the back. “A little chess?” my father asked, ritually, because these visits were getting to be a habit. They would play chess in the old Indian way, the game of shatranj, and, freed by the simplicities of the chess-board from the convolutions of his life, Ahmed would daydream for an hour about the reshaping of the Quran; and then it would be six o’clock, cocktail hour, time for the djinns … but this evening Narlikar said, “No.” And Ahmed, “No? What’s this
no
? Come, sit, play, gossip …” Narlikar, interrupting: “Tonight, brother Sinai, there is something I must show you.” They are in a 1946 Rover now, Narlikar working the crankshaft and jumping in; they are driving north along Warden Road, past Mahalaxmi Temple on the left and Willingdon Club golf-course on the right, leaving the race-track behind them, cruising along Hornby Vellard beside the sea wall; Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium is in sight, with its giant cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, Bano Devi the Invincible Woman and Dara Singh, mightiest of all … there are channa-vendors and dog-walkers promenading by the sea. “Stop,” Narlikar commands, and they get out. They stand facing the sea; sea-breeze cools their faces; and out there, at the end of a narrow cement path in the midst of the waves, is the island on which stands the tomb of Haji Ali the mystic. Pilgrims are strolling between Vellard and tomb.
    “There,” Narlikar points, “What do you see?” And Ahmed, mystified, “Nothing. The tomb. People. What’s this about, old chap?” And Narlikar, “None of that.
There!
” And now Ahmed sees that Narlikar’s pointing finger is aimed at the cement path … “The promenade?” he asks, “What’s that to you? In some minutes the tide will come and cover it up, everybody knows …” Narlikar, his skin glowing