Midnights Children

Schaapsteker; who handed my grandfather a little bottle and said, “I make no bones about it: this is kill or cure. Two drops exactly; then wait and see.”
    My grandfather, sitting head in hands in the rubble of his medical learning, asked, “What is it?” And Doctor Schaapsteker, nearly eighty-two, tongue flicking at the corners of his mouth: “Diluted venene of the king cobra. It has been known to work.”
    Snakes can lead to triumph, just as ladders can be descended: my grandfather, knowing I would die anyway, administered the cobra poison. The family stood and watched while poison spread through the child’s body … and six hours later, my temperature had returned to normal. After that, my growth-rate lost its phenomenal aspects; but something was given in exchange for what was lost: life, and an early awareness of the ambiguity of snakes.
    While my temperature came down, my sister was being born at Narlikar’s Nursing Home. It was September 1st; and the birth was so uneventful, so effortless that it passed virtually unnoticed on Methwold’s Estate; because on the same day Ismail Ibrahim visited my parents at the clinic and announced that the case had been won … While Ismail celebrated, I was grabbing the bars of my cot; while he cried, “So much for freezes! Your assets are your own again! By order of the High Court!”, I was heaving red-faced against gravity; and while Ismail announced, with a straight face, “Sinai bhai, the rule of law has won a famous victory,” and avoided my mother’s delighted, triumphant eyes, I, Baby Saleem, aged exactly one year, two weeks and one day, hauled myself upright in my cot.
    The effects of the events of that day were twofold: I grew up with legs that were irretrievably bowed, because I had got to my feet too early; and the Brass Monkey (so called because of her thick thatch of red-gold hair, which would not darken until she was nine) learned that, if she was going to get any attention in her life, she would have to make plenty of noise.

Accident in a Washing-chest
    I T HAS BEEN two whole days since Padma stormed out of my life. For two days, her place at the vat of mango kasaundy has been taken by another woman—also thick of waist, also hairy of forearm; but, in my eyes, no replacement at all!—while my own dung-lotus has vanished into I don’t know where. A balance has been upset; I feel cracks widening down the length of my body; because suddenly I am alone, without my necessary ear, and it isn’t enough. I am seized by a sudden fist of anger: why should I be so unreasonably treated by my one disciple? Other men have recited stories before me; other men were not so impetuously abandoned. When Valmiki, the author of the
Ramayana
, dictated his masterpiece to elephant-headed Ganesh, did the god walk out on him half-way? He certainly did not. (Note that, despite my Muslim background, I’m enough of a Bombayite to be well up in Hindu stories, and actually I’m very fond of the image of trunk-nosed, flap-eared Ganesh solemnly taking dictation!)
    How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience? How to do without her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps—kept!—my feet on the ground? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present … but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?
    I am, perhaps, hiding behind all these questions. Yes, perhaps that’s right. I should speak plainly, without the cloak of a question-mark: our Padma has gone, and I miss her. Yes, that’s it.
    But there is still work to be done: for instance:
    In the summer of 1956, when most things in the world were still larger than myself, my sister the Brass Monkey developed the curious habit of setting fire to shoes. While Nasser sank ships at Suez, thus slowing down the movements of the world by obliging it to travel around the Cape of Good Hope, my sister was also trying to impede our progress. Obliged to fight for attention, possessed by her need to place herself at the center of events, even of unpleasant ones (she was my sister, after all; but no prime minister wrote letters to her, no sadhus watched her from their places under garden taps; unprophesied, unphotographed, her life was a struggle from the start), she carried her war into the