Midnights Children

wife—not a chavanni to see the peepshow!”
    “It’s those photos in the paper,” Amina decides. “Otherwise how could those jumped-up clever dicks know whom to prosecute? My God, janum, it’s my fault …”
    “Not ten pice for a twist of channa,” Ahmed Sinai adds, “not one anna to give alms to a beggar. Frozen—like in the fridge!”
    “It’s my fault,” Ismail Ibrahim is saying, “I should have warned you, Sinai bhai. I have heard about these freezings—only well-off Muslims are selected, naturally. You must fight.:.”
    “… Tooth and nail!” Homi Catrack insists, “Like a lion! Like Aurangzeb—your ancestor, isn’t it?—like the Rani of Jhansi! Then let’s see what kind of country we’ve ended up in!”
    “There are lawcourts in this State,” Ismail Ibrahim adds; Nussie-the-duck smiles a bovine smile as she suckles Sonny; her fingers move, absently stroking his hollows, up and around, down and about, in a steady, unchanging rhythm … “You must accept my legal services,” Ismail tells Ahmed, “absolutely free, my good friend. No, no I won’t hear of it. How can it be? We are neighbors.”
    “Broke,” Ahmed is saying, “Frozen, like water.”
    “Come on now,” Amina interrupts him; her dedication rising to new heights, she leads him towards her bedroom … “Janum, you need to lie for some time.” And Ahmed: “What’s this, wife? A time like this—cleaned out; finished; crushed like ice—and you think about …” But she has closed the door; slippers have been kicked off; arms are reaching towards him; and some moments later her hands are stretching down down down; and then, “Oh my goodness, janum, I thought you were just talking dirty but it’s true! So cold, Allah, so coooold, like little round cubes of ice!”
    Such things happen; after the State froze my father’s assets, my mother began to feel them growing colder and colder. On the first day, the Brass Monkey was conceived—just in time, because after that, although Amina lay every night with her husband to warm him, although she snuggled up tightly when she felt him shiver as the icy fingers of rage and powerlessness spread upwards from his loins, she could no longer bear to stretch out her hand and touch because his little cubes of ice had become too frigid to hold.
    They—we—should have known something bad would happen. That January, Chowpatty Beach, and Juhu and Trombay, too, were littered with the ominous corpses of dead pomfret, which floated, without the ghost of an explanation, belly-side-up, like scaly fingers in to shore.

Snakes and Ladders
    A ND OTHER OMENS: comets were seen exploding above the Back Bay; it was reported that flowers had been seen bleeding real blood; and in February the snakes escaped from the Schaapsteker Institute. The rumor spread that a mad Bengali snake-charmer, a Tubriwallah, was travelling the country, charming reptiles from captivity, leading them out of snake farms (such as the Schaapsteker, where snake venom’s medicinal functions were studied, and antivenenes devised) by the Pied Piper fascination of his flute, in retribution for the partition of his beloved Golden Bengal. After a while the rumors added that the Tubriwallah was seven feet tall, with bright blue skin. He was Krishna come to chastise his people; he was the sky-hued Jesus of the missionaries.
    It seems that, in the aftermath of my changeling birth, while I enlarged myself at breakneck speed, everything that could possibly go wrong began to do so. In the snake winter of early 1948, and in the succeeding hot and rainy seasons, events piled upon events, so that by the time the Brass Monkey was born in September we were all exhausted, and ready for a few years’ rest.
    Escaped cobras vanished into the sewers of the city; banded kraits were seen on buses. Religious leaders described the snake escape as a warning—the good Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation’s official renunciation of its deities. (“We are a secular State,” Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary had been asking, “How are we going to live now, Madam?” Homi Catrack introduced us to Doctor Schaapsteker himself. He was eighty-one years old; his tongue flicked constantly in and out between his papery lips; and he was prepared to pay cash rent for a top-floor apartment overlooking the