Midnights Children

Estate peered fearfully in the direction of the clocktower. Sweepers, absurdly, went about their duties in the dark. Johnny Vakeel took up a position on our verandah, rifle just out of sight … and, at midnight, a shadow came over the side wall of the Breach Candy school and made its way towards the tower, with a sack slung over one shoulder … “He must enter,” Vakeel had told Amina; “Must be sure we get the proper johnny.” The johnny, padding across flat tarred roof, arrived at the tower; entered.
    “Inspector Sahib, what are you waiting for?”
    “Shhh, Begum, this is police business; please go inside some way. We shall take him when he comes out; you mark my words. Caught,” Vakeel said with satisfaction, “like a rat in a trap.”
    “But who is he?”
    “Who knows?” Vakeel shrugged. “Some badmaash for sure. There are bad eggs everywhere these days.”
    … And then the silence of the night is split like silk by a single, sawn-off shriek; somebody lurches against the inside of the clocktower door; it is wrenched open; there is a crash; and something streaks out on to black tarmac. Inspector Vakeel leaps into action, swinging up his rifle, shooting from the hip like John Wayne; sweepers extract marksmen’s weapons from their brushes and blaze away … shrieks of excited women, yells of servants … silence.
    What lies, brown and black, banded and serpentine on the black tarmac? What, leaking black blood, provokes Doctor Schaapsteker to screech from his top-floor vantage-point: “You complete fools! Brothers of cockroaches! Sons of transvestites!” … what, flick-tongued, dies while Vakeel races on to tarred roof?
    And inside the clocktower door? What weight, falling, created such an almighty crash? Whose hand wrenched a door open; in whose heel are visible the two red, flowing holes, filled with a venom for which there is no known antivenene, a poison which has killed stablefuls of worn-out horses? Whose body is carried out of the tower by plain-clothes men, in a dead march, coffinless, with imitation sweepers for pallbearers. Why, when the moonlight falls upon the dead face, does Mary Pereira fall like a sack of potatoes to the floor, eyes rolling upwards in their sockets, in a sudden and dramatic faint?
    And lining the interior walls of the clocktower: what are these strange mechanisms, attached to cheap time-pieces—why are there so many bottles with rags stuffed into their necks?
    “Damn lucky you called my boys out, Begum Sahiba,” Inspector Vakeel is saying. “That was Joseph D’Costa—on our Most Wanted list. Been after him for a year or thereabouts. Absolute black-hearted badmaash. You should see the walls inside that clocktower! Shelves, filled from floor to ceiling with home-made bombs. Enough explosive power to blow this hill into the sea!”
    Melodrama piling upon melodrama; life acquiring the coloring of a Bombay talkie; snakes following ladders, ladders succeeding snakes; in the midst of too much incident, Baby Saleem fell ill. As if incapable of assimilating so many goings-on, he closed his eyes and became red and flushed. While Amina awaited the results of Ismail’s case against the State authorities; while the Brass Monkey grew in her womb; while Mary entered a state of shock from which she would fully emerge only when Joseph’s ghost returned to haunt her; while umbilical cord hung in pickle-jar and Mary’s chutneys filled our dreams with pointing fingers; while Reverend Mother ran the kitchens, my grandfather examined me and said, “I’m afraid there is no doubt; the poor lad has typhoid.”
    “O God in heaven,” Reverend Mother cried out, “What dark devil has come, whatsitsname, to sit upon this house?”
    This is how I have heard the story of the illness which nearly stopped me before I’d started: day and night, at the end of August 1948, mother and grandfather looked after me; Mary dragged herself out of her guilt and pressed cold flannels to my forehead; Reverend Mother sang lullabies and spooned food into my mouth; even my father, forgetting momentarily his own disorders, stood flapping helplessly in the doorway. But the night came when Doctor Aziz, looking as broken as an old horse, said, “There is nothing more I can do. He will be dead by morning.” And in the midst of wailing women and the incipient labor of my mother who had been pushed into it by grief and the tearing of Mary Pereira’s hair there was a knock; a servant announced Doctor