And fishermen, and Catharine of Braganza, and Mumbadevi coconuts rice; Sivaji's statue and Methwold's Estate; a swimming pool in the shape of British India and a two-storey hillock; a centre-parting and a nose from Bergerac; an inoperative clocktower and a little circus-ring; an Englishman's lust for an Indian allegory and the seduction of an accordionist's wife. Budgerigars, ceiling fans, the Times of India are all part of the luggage I brought into the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child? Blue Jesus leaked into me; and Mary's desperation, and Joseph's revolutionary wildness, and the flightiness of Alice Pereira ... all these made me, too.

If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance ...



perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.



'At last,' Padma says with satisfaction, 'you've learned how to tell things really fast.'



August I3th, 1947: discontent in the heavens. Jupiter, Saturn and Venus are in quarrelsome vein; moreover, the three crossed stars are moving into the most ill-favoured house of all. Benarsi astrologers name it fearfully: 'Karamstan! They enter Karamstan!'



While astrologers make frantic representations to Congress Party bosses, my mother lies down for her afternoon nap. While Earl Mountbatten deplores the lack of trained occultists on his General Staff, the slowly turning shadows of a ceiling fan caress Amina into sleep. While M. A. Jinnah, secure in the knowledge that his Pakistan will be born in just eleven hours, a full day before independent India, for which there are still thirty-five hours to go, is scoffing at the protestations of horoscope-mongers, shaking his head in amusement, Amina's head, too, is moving from side to side.



But she is asleep. And in these days of her boulder-like Pregnancy, an enigmatic dream of flypaper has been plaguing her sleeping hours ... in which she wanders now, as before, in a crystal sphere filled with dangling strips of the sticky brown material, which adhere to her clothing and rip it off as she stumbles through the impenetrable papery forest; and now she struggles, tears at paper, but it grabs at her, until she is naked, with the baby kicking inside her, and long tendrils of flypaper stream out to seize her by her undulating womb, paper glues itself to her hair nose teeth breasts thighs, and as she opens her mouth to shout a brown adhesive gag falls across her parting lips ...



'Amina Begum!' Musa is saying. 'Wake up! Bad dream, Begum Sahiba!'



Incidents of those last few hours - the last dregs of my inheritance: when there were thirty-five hours to go, my mother dreamed of being glued to brown paper like a fly. And at the cocktail hour (thirty hours to go) William Methwold visited my father in the garden of Buckingham Villa. Centre-parting strolling beside and above big toe, Mr Methwold reminisced. Tales of the first Methwold, who had dreamed the city into existence, filled the evening air in that penultimate sunset. And my father - apeing Oxford drawl, anxious to impress the departing Englishman - responded with, 'Actually, old chap, ours is a pretty distinguished family, too.' Methwold listening: head cocked, red rose in cream lapel, wide-brimmed hat concealing parted hair, a veiled hint of amusement in his eyes ... Ahmed Sinai, lubricated by whisky, driven on by self-importance, warms to his theme. 'Mughal blood, as a matter of fact.' To which Methwold, 'No! Really? You're pulling my leg.' And Ahmed, beyond the point of no return, is obliged to press on. 'Wrong side of the blanket, of course; but Mughal, certainly.'



That was how, thirty hours before my birth, my father de-monstrated that he, too, longed for fictional ancestors... how he came to invent a family pedigree that, in later years, when whisky had blurred the edges of his memory and djinn-bottles came to confuse him, would obliterate all traces of reality ...



and how, to hammer his point Home, he introduced into our lives the idea of the family curse.



'Oh yes.' my father said as Methwold cocked a grave unsmiling head, 'many old families possessed such curses. In our line, it is handed down from eldest son to eldest son - in writing only, because merely to speak it is to unleash its power, you know.' Now Methwold: 'Amazing! And you know the words?' My father nods, lip jutting, toe still as he taps his forehead for emphasis. 'All in here; all memorized. Hasn't been used since an ancestor quarrelled with the Emperor Babar and put the curse on his son Humayun ... terrible story, that - every schoolboy knows.'



And the time would come when my father, in the throes of his utter retreat from reality, would lock himself in a blue room and try to remember a curse which he had dreamed up one evening in the gardens of his house while he stood tapping his temple beside the descendant of William Methwold.



Saddled now with flypaper-dreams and imaginary ancestors, I am still over a day away from being born ... but now the remorseless ticktock reasserts itself: twenty-nine hours to go, twenty-eight, twenty-seven ...



What other dreams were dreamed on that last night? Was it then -yes, why not - that Dr Narlikar, ignorant of the drama that was about to unfold at his Nursing Home, first dreamed of tetrapods? Was it on that last night - while Pakistan was being born to the north and west of Bombay - that my uncle Hanif, who had come (like his sister) to Bombay, and who had fallen in love with an actress, the divine Pia ('Her face is her fortune!' the Illustrated Weekly once said), first imagined the cinematic device which would soon give him the first of his three hit pictures? ... It seems likely; myths, nightmares, fantasies were in the air.

This much is certain: on that last night, my grandfather Aadam Aziz, alone now in the big old house in Cornwallis Road -except for a wife whose strength of will seemed to increase as Aziz was ground down by age, and for a daughter, Alia, whose embittered virginity would last until a bomb split her in two over eighteen years later - was suddenly imprisoned by great metal hoops of nostalgia, and lay awake as they pressed down upon his chest; until finally, at five o'clock in the morning of August I4th - nineteen hours to go - he was pushed out of bed by an invisible force and drawn towards an old tin trunk.



Opening it, he found: old copies of German magazines; Lenin's What Is To Be Done?; a folded prayer-mat; and at last the thing which he had felt an irresistible urge to see once more - white and folded and glowing faintly in the dawn - my grandfather drew out, from the tin trunk of his past, a stained and perforated sheet, and discovered that the hole had grown; that there were other, smaller holes in the surrounding fabric; and in the grip of a wild nostalgic rage he shook his wife awake and astounded her by yelling, as he waved her history under her nose: 'Moth-eaten! Look, Begum: moth-eaten! You forgot to put in any naphthalene balk!'



But now the countdown will not be denied ... eighteen hours; seventeen; sixteen... and already, at Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, it is possible to hear the shrieks of a woman in labour. Wee Willie Winkie is here; and his wife Vanita; she has been in a protracted, unproductive labour for eight hours now.



The first pangs hit her just as, hundreds of miles away, M. A. Jinnah announced the midnight birth of a Muslim nation... but still she writhes on a bed in the Narlikar Home's 'charity ward' (reserved for the babies of the poor) ... her eyes are standing halfway out of her head; her body glistens with sweat, but the baby shows no signs of coming, nor is its father present; it is eight o'clock in the morning, but there is still the possibility that, given the circumstances, the baby could be waiting for midnight.



Rumours in the city: The statue galloped last night!'... 'And the stars are unfavourable!'... But despite these signs of ill-omen, the city was poised, with a new myth glinting in the corners of its eyes. August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna's birthday and Coconut Day; and this year - fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve -there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will - except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth - a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.



I have been, in my time, the living proof of the fabulous nature of this collective dream; but for the moment, I shall turn away from these generalized, macrocosmic notions to concentrate upon a more private ritual; I shall not describe the mass blood-letting in progress on the frontiers of the divided Punjab (where the partitioned nations are washing themselves in one another's blood, and a certain punchinello-faced Major Zulfikar is buying refugee property at absurdly low prices, laying the foundations of a fortune that will rival the Nizam of Hyderabad's); I shall avert my eyes from the violence in Bengal and the long pacifying walk of Mahatma Gandhi. Selfish? Narrow-minded? Well, perhaps; but excusably so, in my opinion. After all, one is not born every day.



Twelve hours to go. Amina Sinai, having awakened from her flypaper nightmare, will not sleep again until after... Ramram Seth is filling her head, she is adrift in a turbulent sea jn which waves of excitement alternate with deep, giddying, dark, watery hollows of fear. But something else is in operation, too, Watch her hands - as, without any conscious instructions, they press down, hard, upon her womb; watch her lips, muttering without her knowledge: 'Come on, slowpoke, you don't want to be late for the newspapers!'



Eight hours to go ... at four o'clock that afternoon, William Methwold drives up the two-storey hillock in his black 1946 Rover. He parks in the circus-ring between the four noble villas; but today he visits neither goldfish-pond nor cactus-garden; he does not greet Lila Sabarmati with his customary, 'How goes the pianola? Everything tickety-boo?' - nor does he salute old man Ibrahim who sits in the shade of a ground-floor verandah, rocking in a rocking-chair and musing about sisal; looking neither towards Catrack nor Sinai, he takes up his position in the exact centre of the circus-ring. Rose in lapel, cream hat held stiffly against his chest, centre-parting glinting in afternoon light, William Methwold stares straight ahead, past clock-tower and Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy's map-shaped pool, across the golden four o'clock waves, and salutes; while out there, above the horizon, the sun begins its long dive towards the sea.



Six hours to go. The cocktail hour. The successors of William Methwold are in their gardens - except that Amina sits in her tower-room, avoiding the mildly competitive glances being flung in her direction by Nussie-next-door, who is also, perhaps, urging her Sonny down and out between her legs; curiously they watch the Englishman, who stands as still and stiff as the ramrod to which we have previously compared his centre-parting; until they are distracted by a new arrival. A long, stringy man, wearing three rows of beads around his neck, and a belt of chicken-bones around his waist; his dark skin stained with ashes, his hair loose and long - naked except for beads and ashes, the sadhu strides up amongst the red-tiled mansions. Musa, the old bearer, descends upon him to shoo him away; but hangs back, not knowing how to command a holy man. Cleaving through the veils of Musa's indecision, the sadhu enters the garden of Buckingham Villa; walks straight past my astonished father; seats himself, cross-legged, beneath the dripping garden tap.



'What do you want here, sadhuji?' - Musa, unable to avoid deference; to which the sadhu, calm as a lake: 'I have come to await the coming of the One. The Mubarak - He who is Blessed. It will happen very soon.'



Believe it or not: I was prophesied twice! And on that day on which everything was so remarkably well-timed, my mother's sense of timing did not fail her; no sooner had the sadhu's last word left his lips than there issued, from a first-floor tower-room with glass tulips dancing in the windows, a piercing yell, a cocktail containing equal proportions of panic, excitement and triumph... 'Arre Ahmed!' Amina Sinai yelled, 'Janum, the baby! It's coming - bang on time!'



Ripples of electricity through Methwold's Estate... and here comes Homi Catrack, at a brisk emaciated sunken-eyed trot, offering: 'My Studebaker is at your disposal, Sinai Sahib; take it now - go at once!'... and when there are still five hours and thirty minutes left, the Sinais, husband and wife, drive away down the two-storey hillock in the borrowed car; there is my father's big toe pressing down on the accelerator; there are my mother's hands pressing down on her moon-belly; and they are out of sight now, around the bend, past Band Box Laundry and Reader's Paradise, past Fatbhoy jewels and Chimalker toys, past One Yard of Chocolates and Breach Candy gates, driving towards Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home where, in a charity ward, Wee Willie's Vanita still heaves and strains, spine curving, eyes popping, and a midwife called Mary Pereira is waiting for her time, too ... so that neither Ahmed of the jutting lip and squashy belly and fictional ancestors, nor dark-skinned prophecy-ridden Amina were present when the sun finally set over Methwold's Estate, and at the precise instant of its last disappearance - five hours and two minutes to go -William Methwold raised a long white arm above his head. White hand dangled above brilliantined black hair; long tapering white fingers twitched towards centre-parting, and the second and final secret was revealed, because fingers curled, and seized hair; drawing away from his head, they failed to release their prey; and in the moment after the disappearance of the sun Mr Methwold stood in the afterglow of his Estate with his hairpiece in his hand.



'A baldie!' Padma exclaims. 'That slicked-up hair of his ... I knew it; too good to be true!'



Bald, bald; shiny-pated! Revealed: the deception which had tricked an accordionist's wife. Samson-like, William Methwold's power had resided in his hair; but now, bald patch glowing in the dusk, he flings his thatch through the window of his motor-car; distributes, with what looks like carelessness, the signed title-deeds to his palaces; and drives away. Nobody at Methwold's Estate ever saw him again; but I, who never saw him once, find him impossible to forget.



Suddenly everything is saffron and green. Amina Sinai in a room with saffron walls and green woodwork. In a neighbouring room, Wee Willie Winkie's Vanita, green-skinned, the whites of her eyes shot with saffron, the baby finally beginning its descent through inner passages that are also, no doubt, similarly colourful. Saffron minutes and green seconds tick away on the clocks on the walls. Outside Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, there are fireworks and crowds, also conforming to the colours of the night - saffron rockets, green sparkling rain; the men in shirts of zafaran hue, the women in saris of lime. On a saffron-and-green carpet, Dr Narlikar talks to Ahmed Sinai. 'I shall see to your Begum personally,' he says, in gentle tones the colour of the evening, 'Nothing to worry about. You wait here; plenty of room to pace.' Dr Narlikar, who dislikes babies, is nevertheless an expert gynaecologist. In his spare time he lectures writes pamphlets berates the nation on the subject of contraception.



'Birth Control,' he says, 'is Public Priority Number One. The day will come when I get that through people's thick heads, and then I'll be out of a job.' Ahmed Sinai smiles, awkward, nervous. 'Just for tonight,' my father says, 'forget lectures -deliver my child.'



It is twenty-nine minutes to midnight. Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home is running on a skeleton staff; there are many absentees, many employees who have preferred to celebrate the imminent birth of the nation, and will not assist tonight at the births of children. Saffron-shirted, green-skirted, they throng in the illuminated streets, beneath the infinite balconies of the city on which little dia-lamps of earthenware have been filled with mysterious oik; wicks float in the lamps which line every balcony and rooftop, and these wicks, too, conform to our two-tone colour scheme: half the lamps burn saffron, the others flame with green.



Threading its way through the many-headed monster of the crowd is a police car, the yellow and blue of its occupants' uniforms transformed by the unearthly lamplight into saffron and green. (We are on Colaba Causeway now, just for a moment, to reveal that at twenty-seven minutes to midnight, the police are hunting for a dangerous criminal. His name: Joseph D'Costa. The orderly is absent, has been absent for several days, from his work at the Nursing Home, from his room near the slaughterhouse, and from the life of a distraught virginal Mary.)



Twenty minutes pass, with aaahs from Amina Sinai, coming harder and faster by the minute, and weak tiring aaahs from Vanita in the next room. The monster in the streets has already begun to celebrate; the new myth courses through its veins, replacing its blood with corpuscles of saffron and green. And in Delhi, a wiry serious man sits in the Assembly Hall and prepares to make a speech. At Methwold's Estate goldfish hang stilly in ponds while the residents go from house to house bearing pistachio sweetmeats, embracing and kissing one another - green pistachio is eaten, and saffron laddoo-balls. Two children move down secret passages while in Agra an ageing doctor sits with his wife, who has two moles on her face like witchnipples, and in the midst of sleeping geese and moth-eaten memories they are somehow struck silent, and can find nothing to say.



And in all the cities all the towns all the villages the little dia-lamps burn on window-sills porches verandahs, while trains burn in the Punjab, with the green flames of blistering paint and the glaring saffron of fired fuel, like the biggest dias in the world.



And the city of Lahore, too, is burning.



The wiry serious man is getting to his feet. Anointed with holy water from the Tanjore River, he rises; his forehead smeared with sanctified ash, he clears his throat. Without written speech in hand, without having memorized any prepared words, Jawaharlal Nehru begins:'... Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge - not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially ...'



It is two minutes to twelve. At Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home, the dark glowing doctor, accompanied by a midwife called Flory, a thin kind lady of no importance, encourages Amina Sinai: 'Push! Harder! ... I can see the head!...'



while in the neighbouring room one Dr Bose - with Miss Mary Pereira by his side - presides over the terminal stages of Vanita's twenty-four-hour labour ...



'Yes; now; just one last try, come on; at last, and then it will be over!...'



Women wail and shriek while in another room men are silent. Wee Willie Winkie - incapable of song - squats in a corner, rocking back and forth, back and forth... and Ahmed Sinai is looking for a chair. But there are no chairs in this room; it is a room designated for pacing; so Ahmed Sinai opens a door, finds a chair at a deserted receptionist's desk, lifts it, carries it back into the pacing room, where Wee Willie Winkie rocks, rocks, his eyes as empty as a blind man's... will she live? won't she? ... and.now, at last, it is midnight.



The monster in the streets has begun to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man is saying,'... At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India awakens to life and freedom ...' And beneath the roar of the monster there are two more yells, cries, bellows, the howls of children arriving in the world, their unavailing protests mingling with the din of independence which hangs saffron-and-green in the night sky - 'A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance ...' while in a room with saffron-and-green carpet Ahmed Sinai is still clutching a chair when Dr Narlikar enters to inform him: 'On the stroke of midnight, Sinai brother, your Begum Sahiba gave birth to a large, healthy child: a son!' Now my father began to think about me (not knowing...); with the image of my face filling his thoughts he forgot about the chair; possessed by the love of me (even though...), filled with it from top of head to fingertips, he let the chair fall.



Yes, it was my fault (despite everything) ... it was the power of my face, mine and nobody else's, which caused Ahmed Sinai's hands to release the chair; which caused the chair to drop, accelerating at thirty-two feet per second, and as Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly Hall, 'We end today a period of ill-fortune,'



as conch-sheik blared out the news of freedom, it was on my account that my father cried out too, because the falling chair shattered his toe.



And now we come to it: the noise brought everyone running; my father and his injury grabbed a brief moment of limelight from the two aching mothers, the two, synchronous midnight births - because Vanita had finally been delivered of a baby of remarkable size: 'You wouldn't have believed it,' Dr Bose said, 'It just kept on coming, more and more of the boy forcing its way out, it's a real ten-chip whopper all right!' And Narlikar, washing himself: 'Mine, too.' But that was a little later - just now Narlikar and Bose were tending to Ahmed Sinai's toe; midwives had been instructed to wash and swaddle the new-born pair; and now Miss Mary Pereira made her contribution.



'Go, go,' she said to poor Flory, 'see if you can help. I can do all right here.'



And when she was alone - two babies in her hands - two lives in her power - she did it for Joseph, her own private revolutionary act, thinking He will certainly love me for this, as she changed name-tags on the two huge infants, giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich-born child to accordions and poverty ... 'Love me, Joseph!' was in Mary Pereira's mind, and then it was done. On the ankle of a ten-chip whopper with eyes as blue as Kashmiri sky - which were also eyes as blue as Methwold's - and a nose as dramatic as a Kashmiri grandfather's - which was also the nose of a grandmother from France - she placed this name: Sinai.

Saffron swaddled me as, thanks to the crime of Mary Pereira, I became the chosen child of midnight, whose parents were not his parents, whose son would not be his own... Mary took the child of my mother's womb, who was not to be her son, another ten-chip pomfret, but with eyes which were already turning brown, and knees as knobbly as Ahmed Sinai's, wrapped it in green, and brought it to Wee Willie Winkie - who was staring at her blind-eyed, who hardly saw his new son, who never knew about centre-partings ... Wee Willie Winkie, who had just learned that Vanita had not managed to survive her childbearing. At three minutes past midnight, while doctors fussed over broken toe, Vanita had haemorrhaged and died.

So I was brought to my mother; and she never doubted my authenticity for an instant. Ahmed Sinai, toe in splint, sat on her bed as she said: 'Look, janum, the poor fellow, he's got his grandfather's nose.' He watched mystified as she made sure there was only one head; and then she relaxed completely, understanding that even fortune-tellers have only limited gifts.



'Janum,' my mother said excitedly, 'you must call the papers. Call them at the Times of India. What did I tell you? I won.'



'... This is no time for petty or destructive criticism,' Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly. 'No time for ill-will. We have to build the noble mansion of free India, where all her children may dwell.' A flag unfurls: it is saffron, white and green.



'An Anglo?' Padma exclaims in horror. 'What are you telling me? You are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?'



'I am Saleem Sinai,' I told her, 'Snotnose, Stainface, Sniffer, Baldy, Piece-of-the-Moon. Whatever do you mean - not my own?'



'All the time,' Padma wails angrily, 'you tricked me. Your mother, you called her; your father, your grandfather, your aunts. What thing are you that you don't even care to tell the truth about who your parents were? You don't care that your mother died giving you life? That your father is maybe still alive somewhere, penniless, poor? You are a monster or what?'



No: I'm no monster. Nor have I been guilty of trickery. I provided clues ... but there's something more important than that. It's this: when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference!.



I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts... if you had asked my father (even him, despite all that happened!) who his son was, nothing on earth would have induced him to point in the direction of the accordionist's knock-kneed, unwashed boy. Even though he would grow up, this Shiva, to be something of a hero.



So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents - the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.



'Enough,' Padma sulks. 'I don't want to listen.' Expecting one type of two-headed child, she is peeved at being offered another. Nevertheless, whether she is listening or not, I have tilings to record.



Three days after my birth, Mary Pereira was consumed by remorse. Joseph D'Costa, on the run from the searching police cars, had clearly abandoned her sister Alice as well as Mary; and the little plump woman - unable, in her fright, to confess her crime - realized that she had been a fool. 'Donkey from somewhere!'



she cursed herself; but she kept her secret. She decided, however, to make amends of a kind. She gave up her job at the Nursing Home and approached Amina Sinai with, 'Madam, I saw your baby just one time and fell in love. Are you needing an ayah?' And Amina, her eyes shining with motherhood, 'Yes.' Mary Pereira ('You might as well call her your mother,' Padma interjects, proving she is still interested, 'She made you, you know'), from that moment on, devoted her life to bringing me up, thus binding the rest of her days to the memory of her crime.



On August 20th, Nussie Ibrahim followed my mother into the Pedder Road clinic, and little Sonny followed me into the world - but he was reluctant to emerge; forceps were obliged to reach in and extract him; Dr Bose, in the heat of the moment, pressed a little too hard, and Sonny arrived with little dents beside each of his temples, shallow forcep-hollows which would make him as irresistibly attractive as the hairpiece of William Methwold had made the Englishman. Girls (Evie, the Brass Monkey, others) reached out to stroke his little valleys ... it would lead to difficulties between us.



But I've saved the most interesting snippet for the last. So let me reveal now that, on the day after I was born, my mother and I were visited in a saffron and green bedroom by two persons from the Times of India (Bombay edition). I lay in a green crib, swaddled in saffron, and looked up at them. There was a reporter, who spent his time interviewing my mother; and a tall, aquiline photographer who devoted his attentions to me. The next day, words as well as pictures appeared in newsprint ...



Quite recently, I visited a cactus-garden where once, many years back, I buried a toy tin globe, which was badly dented and stuck together with Scotch Tape; and extracted from its insides the things I had placed there all those years ago.



Holding them in my left hand now, as I write, I can still see - despite yellowing and mildew - that one is a letter, a personal letter to myself, signed by the Prime Minister of India; but the other is a newspaper cutting.



It has a headline: MIDNIGHT'S CHILD.



And a text: 'A charming pose of Baby Saleem Sinai, who was born last night at the exact moment of our Nation's independence - the happy Child of that glorious Hour!'



And a large photograph: an A-1 top-quality front-page jumbo-sized baby-snap, in which it is still possible to make out a child with birthmarks staining his cheeks and a runny and glistening nose. (The picture is captioned: Photo by Kalidas Gupta.)



Despite headline, text and photograph, I must accuse our visitors of the crime of trivialization; mere journalists, looking no further than the next day's paper, they had no idea of the importance of the event they were covering. To them, it was no more than a human-interest drama.



How do I know this? Because, at the end of the interview, the photographer presented my mother with a cheque - for one hundred rupees.



One hundred rupees! Is it possible to imagine a more piffling, derisory sum? It is a sum by which one could, were one of a mind to do so, feel insulted. I shall, however, merely thank them for celebrating my arrival, and forgive them for their lack of a genuine historical sense.



'Don't be vain,' Padma says grumpily. 'One hundred rupees is not so little; after all, everybody gets born, it's not such a big big thing.'

Is it possible to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival? I can think of no other reason for Padma's bizarre behaviour; and this explanation at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading aloud) a word which should not have been spoken ... ever since the episode of the quack doctor's visit, I have sniffed out a strange discontent in Padma, exuding its enigmatic spoor from her eccrine (or apocrine) glands. Distressed, perhaps, by the futility of her midnight attempts at resuscitating my 'other pencil', the useless cucumber hidden in my pants, she has been waxing grouchy. (And then there was her ill-tempered reaction, last night, to my revelation of the secrets of my birth, and her irritation at my low opinion of the sum of one hundred rupees.) I blame myself: immersed in my autobiographical enterprise, I failed to consider her feelings, and began tonight on the most unfortunate of false notes.

'Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,' I wrote and read aloud, 'I have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because while Aadam Aziz remained the sheet's victim, I have become its master - and Padma is the one who is now under its spell. Sitting in my enchanted shadows, I vouchsafe daily glimpses of myself- while she, my squatting glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose frozen into immobility by the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralysed - yes! - by love.'

That was the word: love. Written-and-spoken, it raised her voice to an unusually shrill pitch; it unleashed from her lips a violence which would have wounded me, were I still vulnerable to words. 'Love you?' our Padma piped scornfully, 'What for, my God? What use are you, little princeling,' - and now came her attempted coup de grace - 'as a lover?' Arm extended, its hairs glowing in the lamplight, she jabbed a contemptuous index finger in the direction of my admittedly nonfunctional loins; a long, thick digit, rigid with jealousy, which unfortunately served only to remind me of another, long-lost finger...

so that she, seeing her arrow miss its mark, shrieked, 'Madman from somewhere! That doctor was right!' and rushed distractedly from the room. I heard footsteps clattering down the metal stairs to the factory floor; feet rushing between the dark-shrouded pickle vats; and a door, first unbolted and then slammed.



Thus abandoned, I have returned, having no option, to my work.

The fisherman's pointing finger: unforgettable focal point of the picture which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above the sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight's child, I spent my earliest days. The young Raleigh - and who else? - sat, framed in teak, at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor - did he have a walrus moustache? - whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh - and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic ... and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child with a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor sat in a sky-blue room, beneath the pointing finger, and copied the attire of the English milords ...

'Look, how chweet! Lila Sabarmati exclaimed to my eternal mortification, 'It's like he's just stepped out of the picture?



In a picture hanging on a bedroom wall, I sat beside Walter Raleigh and followed a fisherman's pointing finger with my eyes; eyes straining at the horizon, beyond which lay - what? - my future, perhaps; my special doom, of which I was aware from the beginning, as a shimmering grey presence in that sky-blue room, indistinct at first, but impossible to ignore ... because the finger pointed even further than that shimmering horizon, it pointed beyond teak frame, across a brief expanse of sky-blue wall, driving my eyes towards another frame, in which my inescapable destiny hung, forever fixed under glass: here was a jumbo-sized baby-snap with its prophetic captions, and here, beside it, a letter on high-quality vellum, embossed with the seal of state - the lions of Sarnath stood above the dharma-chakra on the Prime Minister's missive, which arrived, via Vishwanath the post-boy, one week after my photograph appeared on the front page of the Times of India.

Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: 'Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.'

And Mary Pereira, awestruck, 'The Government, Madam? It will be keeping one eye on the boy? But why, Madam? What's wrong with him?' -And Amina, not understanding the note of panic in her ayah's voice: 'It's just a way of putting things, Mary; it doesn't really mean what it says.' But Mary does not relax; and always, whenever she enters the baby's room, her eyes flick wildly towards the letter in its frame; her eyes look around her, trying to see whether the Government is watching; wondering eyes: what do they know? Did somebody see? ...

As for me, as I grew up, I didn't quite accept my mother's explanation, either; but it lulled me into a sense of false security; so that, even though something of Mary's suspicions had leaked into me, I was still taken by surprise when ...



Perhaps the fisherman's finger was not pointing at the letter in the frame; because if one followed it even further, it led one out through the window, down the two-storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy Pools, and out to another sea which was not the sea in the picture; a sea on which the sails of Koli dhows glowed scarlet in the setting sun... an accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at the city's dispossessed.



Or maybe - and this idea makes me feel a little shivery despite the heat - it was a finger of warning, its purpose to draw attention to itself; yes, it could have been, why not, a prophecy of another finger, a finger not dissimilar from itself, whose entry into my story would release the dreadful logic of Alpha and Omega ... my God, what a notion! How much of my future hung above my crib, just waiting for me to understand it? How many warnings was I given - how many did I ignore? ... But no. I will not be a 'madman from somewhere', to use Padma's eloquent phrase. I will not succumb to cracked digressions; not while I have the strength to resist the cracks.



When Amina Sinai and Baby Saleem arrived home in a borrowed Studebaker, Ahmed Sinai brought a manila envelope along for the ride. Inside the envelope: a pickle-jar, emptied of lime kasaundy, washed, boiled, purified - and now, refilled. A well-sealed jar, with a rubber diaphragm stretched over its tin lid and held in place by a twisted rubber band. What was sealed beneath rubber, preserved in glass, concealed in manila? This: travelling Home with father, mother and baby was a quantity of briny water in which, floating gently, hung an umbilical cord. (But was it mine or the Other's? That's something I can't tell you.) While the newly-hired ayah, Mary Pereira, made her way to Methwold's Estate by bus, an umbilical cord travelled in state in the glove compartment of a film magnate's Studey. While Baby Saleem grew towards manhood, umbilical tissue hung unchanging in bottled brine, at the back of a teak almirah. And when, years later, our family entered its exile in the Land of the Pure, when I was struggling towards purity, umbilical cords would briefly have their day.



Nothing was thrown away; baby and afterbirth were both retained; both arrived at Methwold's Estate; both awaited their time.



I was not a beautiful baby. Baby-snaps reveal that my large moon-face was too large; too perfectly round. Something lacking in the region of the chin. Fair skin curved across my features - but birthmarks disfigured it; dark stains spread down my western hairline, a dark patch coloured my eastern ear. And my temples: too prominent: bulbous Byzantine domes. (Sonny Ibrahim and I were born to be friends - when we bumped our foreheads, Sonny's forcep-hollows permitted my bulby temples to nestle within them, as snugly as carpenter's joints.) Amina Sinai, immeasurably relieved by my single head, gazed upon it with redoubled maternal fondness, seeing it through a beautifying mist, ignoring the ice-like eccentricity of my sky-blue eyes, the temples like stunted horns, even the rampant cucumber of the nose.



Baby Saleem's nose: it was monstrous; and it ran.



Intriguing features of my early life: large and unbeautiful as I was, it appears I was not content. From my very first days I embarked upon an heroic programme of self-enlargement. (As though I knew that, to carry the burdens of my future life, I'd need to be pretty big.) By mid-September I had drained my mother's not inconsiderable breasts of milk. A wet-nurse was briefly employed but she retreated, dried-out as a desert after only a fortnight, accusing Baby Saleem of trying to bite off her nipples with his toothless gums. I moved on to the bottle and downed vast quantities of compound: the bottle's nipples suffered, too, vindicating the complaining wet-nurse. Baby-book records were meticulously kept; they reveal that I expanded almost visibly, enlarging day by day; but unfortunately no nasal measurements were taken so I cannot say whether my breathing apparatus grew in strict proportion, or faster than the rest. I must say that I had a healthy metabolism. Waste matter was evacuated copiously from the appropriate orifices; from my nose there flowed a shining cascade of goo.



Armies of handkerchiefs, regiments of nappies found their way into the large washing-chest in my mother's bathroom ... shedding rubbish from various apertures, I kept my eyes quite dry. 'Such a good baby, Madam,' Mary Pereira said, 'Never takes out one tear.'



Good baby Saleem was a quiet child; I laughed often, but soundlessly. (Like my own son, I began by taking stock, listening before I rushed into gurgles and, later, into speech.) For a time Amina and Mary became afraid that the boy was dumb; but, just when they were on the verge of telling his father (from whom they had kept their worries secret - no father wants a damaged child), he burst into sound, and became, in that respect at any rate, utterly normal, 'It's as if,' Amina whispered to Mary, 'he's decided to put our minds at rest.'



There was one more serious problem. Amina and Mary took a few days to notice it.



Busy with the mighty, complex processes of turning themselves into a two-headed mother, their vision clouded by a fog of stenchy underwear, they failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids. Amina, remembering how, during her Pregnancy, the weight of her unborn child had held time as still as a dead green pond, began to wonder whether the reverse might not be taking place now - whether the baby had some magical power over all the time in his immediate vicinity, and was speeding it up, so that mother-and-ayah never had enough time to do everything that needed doing, so that the baby could grow at an apparently fantastic rate; lost in such chronological daydreams, she didn't notice my problem. Only when she shrugged the idea off, and told herself I was just a good strapping boy with a big appetite, an early developer, did the veils of maternal love part sufficiently for her and Mary to yelp, in unison: 'Look, baap-re-baap! Look, Madam! See, Mary! The little chap never blinks!'



The eyes were too blue: Kashmiri-blue, changeling-blue, blue with the weight of unspilled tears, too blue to blink. When I was fed, my eyes did not flutter; when virginal Mary set me across her shoulder, crying, 'Oof, so heavy, sweet Jesus!' I burped without nictating. When Ahmed Sinai limped splint-toed to my crib, I yielded to jutting lips with keen and batless gaze ... 'Maybe a mistake, Madam,' Mary suggested. 'Maybe the little sahib is copying us - blinking when we blink.' And Amina: 'We'll blink in turn and watch.' Their eyelids opening-and-closing alternately, they observed my icy blueness; but there was not the slightest tremor; until Amina took matters into her own hands and reached into the cradle to stroke my eyelids downwards. They closed: my breathing altered, instantly, to the contented rhythms of sleep. After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids.



'He'll learn, Madam,' Mary comforted Amina, 'He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure.' I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.



Now, looking back through baby eyes, I can see it all perfectly - it's amazing how much you can remember when you try. What I can see: the city, basking like a bloodsucker lizard in the summer heat. Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it's really a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India. A glamorous leech, producing nothing except films bush-shirts fish ... in the aftermath of Partition, I see Vishwanath the postboy bicycling towards our two-storey hillock, vellum envelope in his saddlebag, riding his aged Arjuna Indiabike past a rotting bus -abandoned although it isn't the monsoon season, because its driver suddenly decided to leave for Pakistan, switched off the engine and departed, leaving a full busload of stranded passengers, hanging off the windows, clinging to the roof-rack, bulging through the doorway... I can hear their oaths, son-of-a-pig, brother-of-a-jackass; but they will cling to their hard-won places for two hours before they leave the bus to its fate. And, and: here is India's first swimmer of the English Channel, Mr Pushpa Roy, arriving at the gates of the Breach Candy Pools. Saffron bathing-cap on his head, green trunks wrapped in flag-hued towel, this Pushpa has declared war on the whites-only policy of the baths. He holds a cake of Mysore sandalwood soap; draws himself up; marches through the gate ... whereupon hired Pathans seize him, Indians save Europeans from an Indian mutiny as usual, and out he goes, struggling valiantly, frogmarched into Warden Road and flung into the dust. Channel swimmer dives into the street, narrowly missing camels taxis bicycles (Vishwanath swerves to avoid his cake of soap) ... but he is not deterred; picks himself up; dusts himself down; and promises to be back tomorrow. Throughout my childhood years, the days were punctuated by the sight of Pushpa the swimmer, in saffron cap and flag-tinted towel, diving unwillingly into Warden Road. And in the end his indomitable campaign won a victory, because today the Pools permit certain Indians - 'the better sort' - to step into their map-shaped waters. But Pushpa does not belong to the better sort; old now and forgotten, he watches the Pools from afar ... and now more and more of the multitudes are flooding into me - such as Bano Devi, the famous lady wrestler of those days, who would only wrestle men and threatened to marry anyone who beat her, as a result of which vow she never lost a bout; and (closer to Home now)



the sadhu under our garden tap, whose name was Purushottam and whom we (Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus and I) would always call Puru-the-guru - believing me to be the Mubarak, the Blessed One, he devoted his life to keeping an eye on me, and filled his days teaching my father palmistry and witching away my mother's verrucas; and then there is the rivalry of the old bearer Musa and the new ayah Mary, which will grow until it explodes; in short, at the end of 1947, life in Bombay was as teeming, as manifold, as multitudinously shapeless as ever...



except that I had arrived; I was already beginning to take my place at the centre of the universe; and by the time I had finished, I would give meaning to it all. You don't believe me? Listen: at my cradle-side, Mary Pereira is singing a little song: Anything you want to be, you can be: You can be just what-all you want.



By the time of my circumcision by a barber with a cleft palate from the Royal Barber House on Gowalia Tank Road (I was just over two months old), I was already much in demand at Methwold's Estate. (Incidentally, on the subject of the circumcision: I still swear that I can remember the grinning barber, who held me by the foreskin while my member waggled frantically like a slithering snake; and the razor descending, and the pain; but I'm told that, at the time, I didn't even blink.)



Yes, I was a popular little fellow: my two mothers, Amina and Mary, couldn't get enough of me. In all practical matters, they were the most intimate of allies.



After my circumcision, they bathed me together; and giggled together as my mutilated organ waggled angrily in the bathwater. 'We better watch this boy, Madam,' Mary said naughtily, 'His thing has a life of its own!' And Amina, 'Tch, tch, Mary, you're terrible, really ...' But then amid sobs of helpless laughter, 'Just see, Madam, his poor little soo-soo!' Because it was wiggling again, thrashing about, like a chicken with a slitted gullet... Together, they cared for me beautifully; but in the matter of emotion, they were deadly rivals. Once, when they took me for a pram-ride through the Hanging gardens on Malabar Hill, Amina overheard Mary telling the other ayahs, 'Look: here's my own big son' - and felt oddly threatened. Baby Saleem became, after that, the battleground of their loves; they strove to outdo one another in demonstrations of affection; while he, blinking by now, gurgling aloud, fed on their emotions, using it to accelerate his growth, expanding and swallowing infinite hugs kisses chucks-under-the-chin, charging towards the moment when he would acquire the essential characteristic of human beings: every day, and only in those rare moments when I was left alone with the fisherman's pointing finger, I tried to heave myself erect in my cot.



(And while I made unavailing efforts to get to my feet, Amina, too, was in the grip of a useless resolve - she was trying to expel from her mind the dream of her unnameable husband, which had replaced the dream of flypaper on the night after I was born; a dream of such overwhelming reality that it stayed with her throughout her waking hours. In it, Nadir Khan came to her bed and impregnated her; such was the mischievous perversity of the dream that it confused Amina about the parentage of her child, and provided me, the child of midnight, with a fourth father to set beside Winkie and Methwold and Ahmed Sinai. Agitated but helpless in the clutches of the dream, my mother Amina began at that time to form the fog of guilt which would, in later years, surround her head like a dark black wreath.)



I never heard Wee Willie Winkie in his prime. After his blind-eyed bereavement, his sight gradually returned; but something harsh and bitter crept into his voice. He told us it was asthma, and continued to arrive at Methwold's Estate once a week to sing songs which were, like himself, relics of the Methwold era.



'Good Night, Ladies,' he sang; and, keeping up to date, added 'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By' to his repertoire, and, a little later, 'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' Placing a sizeable infant with menacingly knocking knees on a small mat beside him in the circus-ring, he sang songs filled with nostalgia, and nobody had the heart to turn him away. Winkie and the fisherman's finger were two of the few survivals of the days of William Methwold, because after the Englishman's disappearance his successors emptied his palaces of their abandoned contents. Lila Sabarmati preserved her pianola; Ahmed Sinai kept his whisky-cabinet; old man Ibrahim came to terms with ceiling-fans; but the goldfish died, some from starvation, others as a result of being so colossally overfed that they exploded in little clouds of scales and undigested fish-food; the dogs ran wild, and eventually ceased to roam the Estate; and the fading clothes in the old almirahs were distributed amongst the sweeper-women and other servants on the Estate, so that for years afterwards the heirs of William Methwold were cared for by men and women wearing the increasingly ragged shirts and cotton print dresses of their erstwhile masters. But Winkie and the picture on my wall survived; singer and fisherman became institutions of our lives, like the cocktail hour, which was already a habit too powerful to be broken. 'Each little tear and sorrow,' Winkie sang, 'only brings you closer to me...' And his voice grew worse and worse, until it sounded like a sitar whose resonating drum, made out of lacquered pumpkin, had been eaten away by mice; 'It's asthma,' he insisted stubbornly. Before he died he lost his voice completely; doctors revised his diagnosis to throat cancer; but they were wrong, too, because Winkie died of no disease but of the bitterness of losing a wife whose infidelity he never suspected. His son, named Shiva after the god of procreation and destruction, sat at his feet in those early days, silently bearing the burden of being the cause (or so he thought) of his father's slow decline; and gradually, down the years, we watched his eyes filling with an anger which could not be spoken; we watched his fists close around pebbles and hurl them, ineffectually at first, more dangerously as he grew, into the surrounding emptiness. When Lila Sabarmati's elder son was eight, he took it upon himself to tease young Shiva about his surliness, his unstarched shorts, his knobbly knees; whereupon the boy whom Mary's crime had doomed to poverty and accordions hurled a sharp flat stone, with a cutting edge like a razor, and blinded his tormentor in the right eye. After Eyeslice's accident, Wee Willie Winkie came to Methwold's Estate alone, leaving his son to enter the dark labyrinths from which only a war would save him.

Why Methwold's Estate continued to tolerate Wee Willie Winkie despite the decay of his voice and the violence of his son: he had, once, given them an important clue about their lives. 'The first birth,' he had said, 'will make you real.'



As a direct result of Winkie's clue, I was, in my early days, highly in demand.



Amina and Mary vied for my attention; but in every house on the Estate, there were people who wanted to know me; and eventually Amina, allowing her pride in my popularity to overcome her reluctance to let me out of her sight, agreed to lend me, on a kind of rota basis, to the various families on the hill. Pushed by Mary Pereira in a sky-blue pram, I began a triumphal progress around the red-tiled palaces, gracing each in turn with my presence, and making them seem real to their owners. And so, looking back now through the eyes of Baby Saleem, I can reveal most of the secrets of my neighbourhood, because the grown-ups lived their lives in my presence without fear of being observed, not knowing that, years later, someone would look back through baby-eyes and decide to let the cats out of their bags.



So here is old man Ibrahim, dying with worry because, back in Africa, governments are nationalizing his sisal plantations; here is his elder son Ishaq fretting over Ms hotel Business, which is running into debt, so that he is obliged to borrow money from local gangsters; here are Ishaq's eyes, coveting his brother's wife, though why Nussie-the-duck should have aroused sexual interest in anyone is a mystery to me; and here is Nussie's husband, Ismail the lawyer, who has learned an important lesson from Ms son's forcep-birth: 'Nothing comes out right in life,' he tells his duck of a wife, 'unless it's forced out.'



Applying this philosophy to his legal career, he embarks on a career of bribing judges and fixing juries; all children have the power to change their parents, and Sonny turned Ms father into a highly successful crook. And, moving across to Versailles Villa, here is Mrs Dubash with her shrine to the god Ganesh, stuck in the corner of an apartment of such supernatural untidiness that, in our house, the word 'dubash' became a verb meaning 'to make a mess' ... 'Oh, Saleem, you've dubashed your room again, you black man!' Mary would cry. And now the cause of the mess, leaning over the hood of my pram to chuck me under the chin: Adi Dubash, the physicist, genius of atoms and litter. His wife, who is already carrying Cyrus-the-great within her, hangs back, growing her child, with something fanatical gleaming in the inner corners of her eyes, biding its time; it will not emerge until Mr Dubash, whose daily life was spent working with the most dangerous substances in the world, dies by choking on an orange from which his wife forgot to remove the pips. I was never invited into the flat of Dr Narlikar, the child-hating gynaecologist; but in the Homes of Lila Sabarmati and Homi Catrack I became a voyeur, a tiny party to Lila's thousand and one infidelities, and eventually a witness to the beginnings of the liaison between the naval officer's wife and the film-magnate-and-racehorse-owner; which, all in good time, would serve me well when I planned a certain act of revenge.



Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I'm bound to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views on the subject, being a Blessed One to a guru under a tap, a voyeur to Lola Sabarmati; in the eyes of Nussie-the-duck I was a rival, and a more successful rival, to her own Sonny (although, to her credit, she never showed her resentment, and asked to borrow me just like everyone else); to my two-headed mother I was all kinds of babyish things - they called me joonoo-moonoo, and putch-putch, and little-piece-of-the-moon.



But what, after all, can a baby do except swallow all of it and hope to make sense of it later? Patiently, dry-eyed, I imbibed Nehru-letter and Winkle's prophecy; but the deepest impression of all was made on the day when Homi Catrack's idiot daughter sent her thoughts across the circus-ring and into my infant head.



Toxy Catrack, of the outsize head and dribbling mouth; Toxy, who stood at a barred top-floor window, stark naked, masturbating with motions of consummate self-disgust; who spat hard and often through her bars, and sometimes hit us on the head ... she was twenty-one years old, a gibbering half-wit, the product of years of inbreeding; but inside my head she was beautiful, because she had not lost the gifts with which every baby is born and which life proceeds to erode. I can't remember anything Toxy said when she sent her thoughts to whisper to me; probably nothing except gurgles and spittings; but she gave a door in my mind a little nudge, so that when an accident took place in a washing-chest it was probably Toxy who made it possible.



That's enough for the moment, about the first days of Baby Saleem -already my very presence is having an effect on history; already Baby Saleem is working changes on the people around him; and, in the case of my father, I am convinced that it was I who pushed him into the excesses which led, perhaps inevitably, to the terrifying time of the freeze.



Ahmed Sinai never forgave his son for breaking his toe. Even after the splint was removed, a tiny limp remained. My father leaned over my crib and said, 'So, my son: you're starting as you mean to go on. Already you've started bashing your poor old father!' In my opinion, this was only half a joke. Because, with my birth, everything changed for Ahmed Sinai. His position in the household was undermined by my coming. Suddenly Amina's assiduity had acquired different goals; she never wheedled money out of him any more, and the napkin in his lap at the breakfast-table felt sad pangs of nostalgia for the old days. Now it was, 'Your son needs so-and-so,' or 'Janum, you must give money for such-and-such.'



Bad show, Ahmed Sinai thought. My father was a self-important man.



And so it was my doing that Ahmed Sinai fell, in those days after my birth, into the twin fantasies which were to be his undoing, into the unreal worlds of the djinns and of the land beneath the sea.



A memory of my father in a cool-season evening, sitting on my bed (I was seven years old) and telling me, in a slightly thickened voice, the story of the fisherman who found the djinn in a bottle washed up on the beach... 'Never believe in a djinn's promises, my son! Let them out of the bottle and they'll eat you up!' And I, timidly - because I could smell danger on my father's breath: 'But, Abba, can a djinn really live inside a bottle?' Whereupon my father, in a mercurial change of mood, roared with laughter and left the room, returning with a dark green bottle with a white label. 'Look,' he said sonorously, 'Do you want to see the djinn in here?' 'No!' I squealed in fright; but 'Yes!' yelled my sister the Brass Monkey from the neighbouring bed ... and cowering together in excited terror we watched him unscrew the cap and dramatically cover the bottleneck with the palm of his hand; and now, in the other hand, a cigarette-lighter materialized. 'So perish all evil djinns!' my father cried; and, removing his palm, applied the flame to the neck of the bottle. Awestruck, the Monkey and I watched an eerie flame, blue-green-yellow, move in a slow circle down the interior walls of the bottle; until, reaching the bottom, it flared briefly and died. The next day I provoked gales of laughter when I told Sonny, Eyeslice and Hairoil, 'My father fights with djinns; he beats them; it's true!... And it was true. Ahmed Sinai, deprived of wheedles and attention, began, soon after my birth, a life-long struggle with djinn-bottles.



But I was mistaken about one thing: he didn't win.



Cocktail-cabinets had whetted his appetite; but it was my arrival that drove him to it... In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry stare. The only way to get a drink was to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up, djinn-doctors, one of whom, Dr Sharabi, was introduced to my father by Homi Catrack next door. After that, on the first of every month, my father and Mr Catrack and many of the city's most respectable men queued up outside Dr Sharabi's mottled-glass surgery door, went in, and emerged with the little pink chitties of alcoholism. But the permitted ration was too small for my father's needs; and so he began to send his servants along, too, and gardeners, bearers, drivers (we had a motor-car now, a 1946 Rover with running-boards, just like William Methwold's), even old Musa and Mary Pereira, brought my father back more and more pink chitties, which he took to Vijay Stores opposite the circumcising barbershop .in Gowalia Tank Road and exchanged for the brown paper bags of alcoholism, inside which were the chinking green bottles, full of djinn. And whisky, too: Ahmed Sinai blurred the edges of himself by drinking the green bottles and red labels of his servants. The poor, having little else to peddle, sold their identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father turned them into liquid and drank them down.



At six o'clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.



After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever, and he didn't relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother's preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door - Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries. After nights in which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language - 'What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse - what difference?" And then tears, and Amina, 'Oh, janum - don't torture me!' which, in turn, provoked, 'Torture my foot! You think it's torture for a man to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!' - my father limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while Amina began to notice how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left suddenly, flouncing down our drive without any notice; and you must judge whether she chose to be blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but she did nothing about it, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act of recognition was to give the girls a collective name. 'Those Anglos,' she said to Mary, revealing a touch of snobbery, 'with their funny names, Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I don't know what. What should I care about them? Cheap type females. I call them all his Coca-Cola girls - that's what they all sound like.'



While Ahmed pinched bottoms, Amina became long-suffering; but he might have been glad if she had appeared to care.



Mary Pereira said, 'They aren't so funny names, Madam; beg your pardon, but they are good Christian words.' And Amina remembered Ahmed's cousin Zohra making fun of dark skin - and, falling over herself to apologize, tumbled into Zohra's mistake: 'Oh, notion, Mary, how could you think I was making fun of you?'



Horn-templed, cucumber-nosed, I lay in my crib and listened; and everything that happened, happened because of me ... One day in January 1948, at five in the afternoon, my father was visited by Dr Narlikar. There were embraces as usual, and slaps on the back. 'A little chess?' my father asked, ritually, because these visits were getting to be a habit. They would play chess in the old Indian way, the game of shatranj, and, freed by the simplicities of the chess-board from the convolutions of his life, Ahmed would daydream for an hour about the re-shaping of the Quran; and then it would be six o'clock, cocktail hour, time for the djinns ... but this evening Narlikar said, 'No.' And Ahmed, 'No? What's this no? Come, sit, play, gossip ...' Narlikar, interrupting: 'Tonight, brother Sinai, there is something I must show you.' They are in a 1946 Rover now, Narlikar working the crankshaft and jumping in; they are driving north along Warden Road, past Mahalaxmi Temple on the left and Willingdon Club golf-course on the right, leaving the race-track behind them, cruising along Hornby Vellard beside the sea wall; Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium is in sight, with its giant cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, Bano Devi the Invincible Woman and Dara Singh, mightiest of all... there are channa-vendors and dog-walkers promenading by the sea. 'Stop,' Narlikar commands, and they get out. They stand facing the sea; sea-breeze cools their faces; and out there, at the end of a narrow cement path in the midst of the waves, is the island on which stands the tomb of Haji Ali the mystic. Pilgrims are strolling between Vellard and tomb.