Midnights Children

but she and I were close-as-close, in spite of framed letters from Delhi and sadhu-under-the-tap. From the beginning, I decided to treat her as an ally, not a competitor; and, as a result, she never once blamed me for my preeminence in our household, saying, “What’s to blame? Is it your fault if they think you’re so great?” (But when, years later, I made the same mistake as Sonny, she treated me just the same.)
    And it was Monkey who, by answering a certain wrong-number telephone call, began the process of events which led to my accident in a white washing-chest made of slatted wood.
    Already, at the age of nearlynine, I knew this much: everybody was waiting for me. Midnight and baby-snaps, prophets and prime ministers had created around me a glowing and inescapable mist of expectancy … in which my father pulled me into his squashy belly in the cool of the cocktail hour to say, “Great things! My son: what is not in store for you? Great deeds, a great life!” While I, wriggling between jutting lip and big toe, wetting his shirt with my eternally leaking nose-goo, turned scarlet and squealed, “Let me go, Abba! Everyone will
see!
” And he, embarrassing me beyond belief, bellowed, “Let them look! Let the whole world see how I love my son!” … and my grandmother, visiting us one winter, gave me advice, too: “Just pull up your socks, whatsitsname, and you’ll be better than anyone in the whole wide world!” … Adrift in this haze of anticipation, I had already felt within myself the first movings of that shapeless animal which still, on these Padmaless nights, champs and scratches in my stomach: cursed by a multitude of hopes and nicknames (I had already acquired Sniffer and Snotnose), I became afraid that everyone was wrong—that my much-trumpeted existence might turn out to be utterly useless, void, and without the shred of a purpose. And it was to escape from this beast that I took to hiding myself, from an early age, in my mother’s large white washing-chest; because although the creature was inside me, the comforting presence of enveloping soiled linen seemed to lull it into sleep.
    Outside the washing-chest, surrounded by people who seemed to possess a devastatingly clear sense of purpose, I buried myself in fairytales. Hatim Tai and Batman, Superman and Sinbad helped to get me through the nearlynine years. When I went shopping with Mary Pereira—overawed by her ability to tell a chicken’s age by looking at its neck, by the sheer determination with which she stared dead pomfrets in the eyes—I became Aladdin, voyaging in a fabulous cave; watching servants dusting vases with a dedication as majestic as it was obscure, I imagined Ali Baba’s forty thieves hiding in the dusted urns; in the garden, staring at Purushottam the sadhu being eroded by water, I turned into the genie of the lamp, and thus avoided, for the most part, the terrible notion that I, alone in the universe, had no idea of what I should be, or how I should behave. Purpose: it crept to behind me when I stood staring down from my window at European girls cavorting in the map-shaped pool beside the sea. “Where do you get it?” I yelped aloud; the Brass Monkey, who shared my sky-blue room, jumped half-way out of her skin. I was then nearlyeight; she was almostseven. It was a very early age at which to be perplexed by meaning.
    But servants are excluded from washing-chests; school buses, too, are absent. In my nearlyninth year I had begun to attend the Cathedral and John Connon Boys’ High School on Outram Road in the Old Fort district; washed and brushed every morning, I stood at the foot of our two-storey hillock, white-shorted, wearing a blue-striped elastic belt with a snake-buckle, satchel over my shoulder, my mighty cucumber of a nose dripping as usual; Eyeslice and Hairoil, Sonny Ibrahim and precocious Cyrus-the-great waited too. And on the bus, amid rattling seats and the nostalgic cracks of the window-panes, what certainties! What nearlynine-year-old certitudes about the future! A boast from Sonny: “I’m going to be a bullfighter; Spain! Chiquitas! Hey, toro, toro!” His satchel held before him like the muleta of Manolete, he enacted his future while the bus rattled around Kemp’s Corner, past Thomas Kemp and Co. (Chemists), beneath the Air-India rajah’s poster (“See you later, alligator! I’m off to London on Air-India!”) and the other hoarding, on which, throughout my childhood, the Kolynos Kid, a