Midnights Children

forest fire. (Because this time, you see, she gave me proof.)
    And now, at last, it is time for dirty laundry. Mary Pereira was fond of telling me, “If you want to be a big man, baba, you must be very clean. Change clothes,” she advised, “take regular baths. Go, baba, or I’ll send you to the washerman and he’ll wallop you on his stone.” She also threatened me with bugs: “All right, stay filthy, you will be nobody’s darling except the flies’. They will sit on you while you sleep; eggs they’ll lay under your skin!” In part, my choice of hiding-place was an act of defiance. Braving dhobis and houseflies, I concealed myself in the unclean place; I drew strength and comfort from sheets and towels; my nose ran freely into the stone-doomed linens; and always, when I emerged into the world from my wooden whale, the sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.
    One afternoon in June, I tiptoed down the corridors of the sleeping house towards my chosen refuge; sneaked past my sleeping mother into the white-tiled silence of her bathroom; lifted the lid off my goal; and plunged into its soft continuum of (predominantly white) textiles, whose only memories were of my earlier visits. Sighing softly, I pulled down the lid, and allowed pants and vests to massage away the pains of being alive, purposeless and nearly nine years old.
    Electricity in the air. Heat, buzzing like bees. A mantle, hanging somewhere in the sky, waiting to fall gently around my shoulders … somewhere, a finger reaches towards a dial; a dial whirs around and around, electrical pulses dart along cable, seven, zero, five, six, one. The telephone rings. Muffled shrilling of a bell penetrates the washing-chest, in which a nearlynineyearold boy lies uncomfortably concealed … I, Saleem, became stiff with the fear of discovery, because now more noises entered the chest; squeak of bedsprings; soft clatter of slippers along corridor; the telephone, silenced in mid-shrill; and—or is this imagination? Was her voice too soft to hear?—the words, spoken too late as usual: “Sorry. Wrong number.”
    And now, hobbling footsteps returning to the bedroom; and the worst fears of the hiding boy are fulfilled. Doorknobs, turning, scream warnings at him; razor-sharp steps cut him deeply as they move across cool white tiles. He stays frozen as ice, still as a stick; his nose drips silently into dirty clothes, a pajama-cord—snake-like harbinger of doom!—inserts itself into his left nostril. To sniff would be to die: he refuses to think about it.
    … Clamped tight in the grip of terror, he finds his eye looking through a chink in dirty washing … and sees a woman crying in a bathroom. Rain dropping from a thick black cloud. And now more sound, more motion: his mother’s voice has begun to speak, two syllables, over and over again; and her hands have begun to move. Ears muffled by underwear strain to catch the sounds—that one:
dir? Bir? Dil?
—and the other:
Ha? Ra?
No—Na. Ha and Ra are banished; Dil and Bir vanish forever; and the boy hears, in his ears, a name which has not been spoken since Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai: Nadir. Nadir. Na. Dir. Na.
    And her hands are moving. Lost in their memory of other days, of what happened after games of hit-the-spittoon in an Agra cellar, they flutter gladly at her cheeks; they hold her bosom tighter than any brassieres; and now they caress her bare midriff, they stray below decks … yes, this is what we used to do, my love, it was enough, enough for me, even though my father made us, and you ran, and now the telephone, Nadirnadirnadirnadirnadirnadir … hands which held telephone now hold flesh, while in another place what does another hand do? To what, after replacing receiver, is another hand getting up? … No matter; because here, in her spied-out privacy, Amina Sinai repeats an ancient name, again and again, until finally she bursts out with, “Arré Nadir Khan, where have you come from now?”
    Secrets. A man’s name. Never-before-glimpsed motions of the hands. A boy’s mind filled with thoughts which have no shape, tormented by ideas which refuse to settle into words; and in a left nostril, a pajama-cord is snaking up up up, refusing to be ignored …
    And now—O shameless mother! Revealer of duplicity, of emotions which have no place in family life; and more: O brazen