Midnights Children

guilt had begun to form around her head—her black skin exuding black clouds which hung before her eyes. (Padma would believe it; Padma would know what I mean!) And as her guilt grew, the fog thickened—yes, why not?—there were days when you could hardly see her head above her neck! … Amina had become one of those rare people who take the burdens of the world upon their own backs; she began to exude the magnetism of the willingly guilty; and from then on everyone who came into contact with her felt the most powerful of urges to confess their own, private guilts. When they succumbed to my mother’s powers, she would smile at them with a sweet sad foggy smile and they would go away, lightened, leaving their burdens on her shoulders; and the fog of guilt thickened. Amina heard about servants being beaten and officials being bribed; when my uncle Hanif and his wife the divine Pia came to call they related their quarrels in minute detail; Lila Sabarmati confided her infidelities to my mother’s graceful, inclined, long-suffering ear; and Mary Pereira had to fight constantly against the almost-irresistible temptation to confess her crime.
    Faced with the guilts of the world, my mother smiled foggily and shut her eyes tight; and by the time the roof fell in on her head her eyesight was badly impaired; but she could still see the washing-chest.
    What was really at the bottom of my mother’s guilt? I mean really, beneath verrucas and djinns and confessions? It was an unspeakable malaise, an affliction which could not even be named, and which no longer confined itself to dreams of an underworld husband … my mother had fallen (as my father would soon fall) under the spell of the telephone.
    *   *   *
    In the afternoons of that summer, afternoons as hot as towels, the telephone would ring. When Ahmed Sinai was asleep in his room, with his keys under his pillow and umbilical cords in his almirah, telephonic shrilling penetrated the buzzing of the heat insects; and my mother, verruca-hobbled, came into the hall to answer. And now, what expression is this, staining her face the color of drying blood? … Not knowing that she’s being observed, what fish-like flutterings of lips are these, what strangulated mouthings? … And why, after listening for a full five minutes, does my mother say, in a voice like broken glass, “Sorry: wrong number”? Why are diamonds glistening on her eyelids? … The Brass Monkey whispered to me, “Next time it rings, let’s find out.”
    Five days later. Once more it is afternoon; but today Amina is away, visiting Nussie-the-duck, when the telephone demands attention. “Quick! Quick or it’ll wake him!” The Monkey, agile as her name, picks up the receiver before Ahmed Sinai has even changed the pattern of his snoring … “Hullo? Yaas? This is seven zero five six one; hullo?” We listen, every nerve on edge; but for a moment there is nothing at all. Then, when we’re about to give up, the voice comes. “… Oh … yes … hullo …” And the Monkey, shouting almost, “Hullo? Who is it, please?” Silence again; the voice, which has not been able to prevent itself from speaking, considers its answer; and then, “… Hullo … This is Shanti Prasad Truck Hire Company, please? …” And the Monkey, quick as a flash: “Yes, what d’you want?” Another pause; the voice, sounding embarrassed, apologetic almost, says, “I want to rent a truck.”
    O feeble excuse of telephonic voice! O transparent flummery of ghosts! The voice on the phone was no truck-renter’s voice; it was soft, a little fleshly, the voice of a poet … but after that, the telephone rang regularly; sometimes my mother answered it, listened in silence while her mouth made fish-motions, and finally, much too late, said, “Sorry, wrong number”; at other times the Monkey and I clustered around it, two ears to ear-piece, while the Monkey took orders for trucks. I wondered: “Hey, Monkey, what d’you think? Doesn’t the guy ever wonder why the trucks don’t
arrive?
” And she, wide-eyed, flutter-voiced: “Man, do you suppose … maybe they
do!
”
    But I couldn’t see how; and a tiny seed of suspicion was planted in me, a tiny glimmering of a notion that our mother might have a secret—our Amma! Who always said, “Keep secrets and they’ll go bad inside you; don’t tell things and they’ll give you stomach-ache!”—a minute spark which my experience in the washing-chest would fan into a