Midnights Children

Arabian Sea. Ahmed Sinai, in those days, had taken to his bed; the icy cold of the freeze impregnated his bedsheets; he downed vast quantities of whisky for medicinal purposes, but it failed to warm him up … so it was Amina who agreed to let the upper storey of Buckingham Villa to the old snake-doctor. At the end of February, snake poison entered our lives.
    Doctor Schaapsteker was a man who engendered wild stories. The more superstitious orderlies at his Institute swore that he had the capacity of dreaming every night about being bitten by snakes, and thus remained immune to their bites. Others whispered that he was half-snake himself, the child of an unnatural union between a woman and a cobra. His obsession with the venom of the banded krait—
bungarus fasciatus
—was becoming legendary. There is no known antivenene to the bite of
bungarus;
but Schaapsteker had devoted his life to finding one. Buying broken-down horses from the Catrack stables (among others) he injected them with small doses of the poison; but the horses, unhelpfully, failed to develop antibodies, frothed at the mouth, died standing up and had to be transformed into glue. It was said that Doctor Schaapsteker—“Sharpsticker Sahib”—had now acquired the power of killing horses simply by approaching them with a hypodermic syringe … but Amina paid no attention to these tall stories. “He is an old gentleman,” she told Mary Pereira; “What should we care about people who black-tongue him? He pays his rent, and permits us to live.” Amina was grateful to the European snake-doctor, particularly in those days of the freeze when Ahmed did not seem to have the nerve to fight.
    “My beloved father and mother,” Amina wrote, “By my eyes and head I swear I do not know why such things are happening to us … Ahmed is a good man, but this business has hit him hard. If you have advice for your daughter, she is greatly in need of it.” Three days after they received this letter, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother arrived at Bombay Central Station by Frontier Mail; and Amina, driving them home in our 1946 Rover, looked out of a side window and saw the Mahalaxmi Racecourse; and had the first germ of her reckless idea.
    “This modern decoration is all right for you young people, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother said. “But give me one old-fashioned takht to sit on. These chairs are so soft, whatsitsname, they make me feel like I’m falling.”
    “Is he ill?” Aadam Aziz asked. “Should I examine him and prescribe medicines?”
    “This is no time to hide in bed,” Reverend Mother pronounced. “Now he must be a man, whatsitsname, and do a man’s business.”
    “How well you both look, my parents,” Amina cried, thinking that her father was turning into an old man who seemed to be getting shorter with the passing years; while Reverend Mother had grown so wide that armchairs, though soft, groaned beneath her weight … and sometimes, through a trick of the light, Amina thought she saw, in the center of her father’s body, a dark shadow like a hole.
    “What is left in this India?” Reverend Mother asked, hand slicing air. “Go, leave it all, go to Pakistan. See how well that Zulfikar is doing—he will give you a start. Be a man, my son—get up and start again!”
    “He doesn’t want to speak now,” Amina said, “he must rest.”
    “Rest?” Aadam Aziz roared. “The man is a jelly!”
    “Even Alia, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother said, “all on her own, gone to Pakistan—even she is making a decent life, teaching in a fine school. They say she will be headmistress soon.”
    “Shhh, mother, he wants to sleep … let’s go next door …”
    “There is a time to sleep, whatsitsname, and a time to wake! Listen: Mustapha is making many hundreds of rupees a month, whatsitsname, in the Civil Service. What is your husband. Too good to work?”
    “Mother, he is upset. His temperature is so low …”
    “What food are you giving? From today, whatsitsname, I will run your kitchen. Young people today—like babies, whatsitsname!”
    “Just as you like, mother.”
    “I tell you whatsitsname, it’s those photos in the paper. I wrote—didn’t I write?—no good would come of that. Photos take away pieces of you. My God, whatsitsname, when I saw your picture, you had become so transparent I could see the writing from the other side coming right through your face!”
    “But that’s only …”
    “Don’t tell me your stories,