Midnights Children

children’s clothes, into whose seams she had sewn her old maid’s bile; the Brass Monkey and I were clothed in her gifts, wearing at first the baby-things of bitterness, then the rompers of resentment; I grew up in white shorts starched with the starch of jealousy, while the Monkey wore the pretty flowered frocks of Alia’s undimmed envy … unaware that our wardrobe was binding us in the webs of her revenge, we led our well-dressed lives.) My nose: elephantine as the trunk of Ganesh, it should, I thought, have been a superlative breather; a smeller without an answer, as we say; instead, it was permanently bunged-up, and as useless as a wooden sikh-kabab.
    Enough. I sat in the washing-chest and forgot my nose; forgot about the climbing of Mount Everest in 1953—when grubby Eyeslice giggled, “Hey, men! You think that Tenzing could climb up Sniffer’s face?”—and about the quarrels between my parents over my nose, for which Ahmed Sinai never tired of blaming Amina’s father: “Never before in my family has there been a nose like it! We have excellent noses; proud noses; royal noses, wife!” Ahmed Sinai had already begun, at that time, to believe in the fictional ancestry he had created for the benefit of William Methwold; djinn-sodden, he saw Mughal blood running in his veins … Forgotten, too, the night when I was eight and a half, and my father, djinns on his breath, came into my bedroom to rip the sheets off me and demanded: “What are you up to? Pig! Pig from somewhere?” I looked sleepy; innocent; puzzled. He roared on
“Chhi-chhi!
Filthy! God punishes boys who do that! Already he’s made your nose as big as poplars. He’ll stunt your growth; he’ll make your soo-soo shrivel up!” And my mother, arriving nightdressed in the startled room, “Janum, for pity’s sake; the boy was only sleeping.” The djinn roared through my father’s lips, possessing him completely: “Look on his face! Whoever got a nose like that from sleeping?”
    There are no mirrors in a washing-chest; rude jokes do not enter it, nor pointing fingers. The rage of fathers is muffled by used sheets and discarded brassieres. A washing-chest is a hole in the world, a place which civilization has put outside itself, beyond the pale; this makes it the finest of hiding-places. In the washing-chest, I was like Nadir Khan in his underworld, safe from all pressures, concealed from the demands of parents and history …
    … My father, pulling me into his squashy belly, speaking in a voice choked with instant emotion: “All right, all right, there, there, you’re a good boy; you can be anything you want; you just have to want it enough! Sleep now …” And Mary Pereira, echoing him in her little rhyme: “Anything you want to be, you can be; You can be just what-all you want!” It had already occurred to me that our family believed implicitly in good business principles; they expected a handsome return for their investment in me. Children get food shelter pocketmoney longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it’s a sort of compensation for having been born. “There are no strings on me!” they sing; but I, Pinocchio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive—nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness. Don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t mind. I was, at that time, a dutiful child. I longed to give them what they wanted, what soothsayers and framed letters had promised them; I simply did not know how. Where did greatness come from? How did you get some?
When?
… When I was seven years old, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother came to visit us. On my seventh birthday, dutifully, I permitted myself to be dressed up like the boys in the fisherman picture; hot and constricted in the outlandish garb, I smiled and smiled. “See, my little piece-of-the-moon!” Amina cried cutting a cake covered with candied farmyard animals, “So
chweet!
Never takes out one tear!” Sandbagging down the floods of tears lurking just beneath my eyes, the tears of heat discomfort and the absence of One Yard Of Chocolates in my pile of presents, I took a slice of cake to Reverend Mother, who was ill in bed. I had been given a doctor’s stethoscope; it was around my neck. She gave me permission to examine her; I prescribed more exercise. “You must walk across the room, to the almirah and back, once a day. You may lean