Midnights Children

like a beacon, becomes philosophical. “Just so, brother Ahmed; just so. Land and sea; sea and land; the eternal struggle, not so?” Ahmed, puzzled, remains silent. “Once there were seven islands,” Narlikar reminds him, “Worli, Mahim, Salsette, Matunga, Colaba, Mazagaon, Bombay. The British joined them up. Sea, brother Ahmed, became land. Land arose, and did not sink beneath the tides!” Ahmed is anxious for his whisky; his lip begins to jut while pilgrims scurry off the narrowing path. “The point,” he demands. And Narlikar, dazzling with effulgence: “The point, Ahmed bhai, is
this!
”
    It comes out of his pocket: a little plaster-of-paris model two inches high: the tetrapod! Like a three-dimensional Mercedes-Benz sign, three legs standing on his palm, a fourth rearing lingam-fashion into the evening air, it transfixes my father. “What is it?” he asks; and now Narlikar tells him: “This is the baby that will make us richer than Hyderabad, bhai! The little gimmick that will make you, you and me, the masters of
that!
” He points outwards to where sea is rushing over deserted cement pathway—“The land beneath the sea, my friend! We must manufacture these by the thousand—by tens of thousands! We must tender for reclamation contracts; a fortune is waiting; don’t miss it, brother, this is the chance of a lifetime!”
    Why did my father agree to dream a gynecologist’s entrepreneurial dream? Why, little by little, did the vision of full-sized concrete tetrapods marching over sea walls, four-legged conquerors triumphing over the sea, capture him as surely as it had the gleaming doctor? Why, in the following years, did Ahmed dedicate himself to the fantasy of every island-dweller—the myth of conquering the waves? Perhaps because he was afraid of missing yet another turning; perhaps for the fellowship of games of shatranj; or maybe it was Narlikar’s plausibility—“Your capital and my contacts, Ahmed bhai, what problem can there be? Every great man in this city has a son brought into the world by me; no doors will close. You manufacture; I will get the contract! Fifty-fifty; fair is fair!” But, in my view, there is a simpler explanation. My father, deprived of wifely attention, supplanted by his son, blurred by whisky and djinn, was trying to restore his position in the world; and the dream of tetrapods offered him the chance. Whole-heartedly, he threw himself into the great folly; letters were written, doors knocked upon, black money changed hands; all of which served to make Ahmed Sinai a name known in the corridors of the Sachivalaya—in the passageways of the State Secretariat they got the whiff of a Muslim who was throwing his rupees around like water. And Ahmed Sinai, drinking himself to sleep, was unaware of the danger he was in.
    *   *   *
    Our lives, at this period, were shaped by correspondence. The Prime Minister wrote to me when I was just seven days old—before I could even wipe my own nose I was receiving fan letters from
Times of India
readers; and one morning in January Ahmed Sinai, too, received a letter he would never forget.
    Red eyes at breakfast were followed by the shaven chin of the working day; footsteps down the stairs; alarmed giggles of Coca-Cola girl. The squeak of a chair drawn up to a desk topped with green leathercloth. Metallic noise of a metal paper-cutter being lifted, colliding momentarily with telephone. The brief rasp of metal slicing envelope; and one minute later, Ahmed was running back up the stairs, yelling for my mother, shouting:
    “Amina! Come here, wife! The bastards have shoved my balls in an ice-bucket!”
    In the days after Ahmed received the formal letter informing him of the freezing of all his assets, the whole world was talking at once … “For pity’s sake, janum, such language!” Amina is saying—and is it my imagination, or does a baby blush in a sky-blue crib?
    And Narlikar, arriving in a lather of perspiration, “I blame myself entirely; we made ourselves too public. These are bad times, Sinai bhai—freeze a Muslim’s assets, they say, and you make him run to Pakistan, leaving all his wealth behind him. Catch the lizard’s tail and he’ll snap it off! This so-called secular state gets some damn clever ideas.”
    “Everything,” Ahmed Sinai is saying, “bank account; savings bonds; the rents from the Kurla properties—all blocked, frozen. By order, the letter says. By order they will not let me have four annas,