Midnights Children

Inspector Johnny Vakeel. “Come on, own up now”—lathistick tapping against his leg—“or you’ll see what we can’t do to you. You want to stand on one leg all day and night? You want water thrown over you, sometimes boiling hot, sometimes freezing cold? We have many methods in the Police Force …” And now a cacophony of noise from servants, Not me, Inspector Sahib, I am honest boy; for pity’s sake, search my things, Sahib! And Amina: “This is too much, sir, you go too far. My Mary I know, anyway, is innocent. I will not have her questioned.” Suppressed irritation of police officer. A search of belongings is instituted—“Just in case, Madam. These fellows have limited intelligence—and maybe you discovered the theft too soon for the felon to abscond with the booty!”
    The search succeeds. In the bedroll of Musa the old bearer: a silver spittoon. Wrapped in his puny bundle of clothes: gold coins, a silver samovar. Secreted under his charpoy bed: a missing tea-service. And now Musa has thrown himself at Ahmed Sinai’s feet; Musa is begging, “Forgive, Sahib! I was mad; I thought you were going to throw me into the street!” but Ahmed Sinai will not listen; the freeze is upon him; “I feel so weak,” he says, and leaves the room; and Amina, aghast, asks: “But, Musa, why did you make that terrible oath?”
    … Because, in the interim, between line-up in passageway and discoveries in servants’ quarters, Musa had said to his master: “It was not me, Sahib. If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper! May my old skin run with sores!”
    Amina, with horror on her face, awaits Musa’s reply. The bearer’s old face twists into a mask of anger; words are spat out. “Begum Sahiba, I only took your precious possessions, but you, and your sahib, and his father, have taken my whole life; and in my old age you have humiliated me with Christian ayahs.”
    There is silence in Buckingham Villa—Amina has refused to press charges, but Musa is leaving. Bedroll on his back, he descends a spiral iron staircase, discovering that ladders can go down as well as up; he walks away down hillock, leaving a curse upon the house.
    And (was it the curse that did it?) Mary Pereira is about to discover that even when you win a battle; even when staircases operate in your favor, you can’t avoid a snake.
    Amina says, “I can’t get you any more money, Ismail; have you had enough?” And Ismail, “I hope so—but you never know—is there any chance of …” But Amina: “The trouble is, I’ve got so big and all, I can’t get in the car any more. It will just have to do.”
    … Time is slowing down for Amina once more; once again, her eyes look through leaded glass, on which red tulips, green-stemmed, dance in unison; for a second time, her gaze lingers on a clocktower which has not worked since the rains of 1947; once again, it is raining. The racing season is over.
    A pale blue clocktower: squat, peeling, inoperational. It stood on black-tarred concrete at the end of the circus-ring—the flat roof of the upper storey of the buildings along Warden Road, which abutted our two-storey hillock, so that if you climbed over Buckingham Villa’s boundary wall, flat black tar would be under your feet. And beneath black tar, Breach Candy Kindergarten School, from which, every afternoon during term, there rose the tinkling music of Miss Harrison’s piano playing the unchanging tunes of childhood; and below that, the shops, Reader’s Paradise, Fatbhoy Jewellery, Chimalker’s Toys and Bombelli’s, with its windows filled with One Yards of Chocolates. The door to the clocktower was supposed to be locked, but it was a cheap lock of a kind Nadir Khan would have recognized: made in India. And on three successive evenings immediately before my first birthday, Mary Pereira, standing by my window at night, noticed a shadowy figure floating across the roof, his hands full of shapeless objects, a shadow which filled her with an unidentifiable dread. After the third night, she told my mother; the police were summoned; and Inspector Vakeel returned to Methwold’s Estate, accompanied by a special squad of crack officers—“all deadeye shots, Begum Sahiba; just you leave it all to us!”—who, disguised, as sweepers, with guns concealed under their rags, kept the clocktower under surveillance while sweeping up the dust in the circus-ring.
    Night fell. Behind curtains and chick-blinds, the inhabitants of Methwold’s