During Ramzan, the month of fasting, we went to the movies as often as we could.



After being shaken awake at five a.m. by my mother's assiduous hand; after pre-dawn breakfasts of melon and sugared lime-water, and especially on Sunday mornings, the Brass Monkey and I took it in turns (or sometimes called out in unison) to remind Amina: 'The ten-thirty-in-the-morning show! It's Metro Cub Club day, Amma, pleeeese!' Then the drive in the Rover to the cinema where we would taste neither Coca-Cola nor potato crisps, neither Kwality ice-cream nor samosas in greasy paper; but at least there was air-conditioning, and Cub Club badges pinned to our clothes, and competitions, and birthday-announcements made by a compere with an inadequate moustache; and finally, the film, after the trailers with their introductory titles, 'Next Attraction' and 'Coming Soon', and the cartoon ('In A Moment, The Big Film; But First ... !'): Quentin Durward, perhaps, or Scaramouche. 'Swashbuckling!' we'd say to one another afterwards, playing movie critic; and, 'A rumbustious, bawdy romp!' - although we were ignorant of swashbuckles and bawdiness. There was not much praying in our family (except on Eid-ul-Fitr, when my father took me to the Friday mosque to celebrate the holiday by tying a handkerchief around my head and pressing my forehead to the ground) ... but we were always willing to fast, because we liked the cinema.



Evie Burns and I agreed: the world's greatest movie star was Robert Taylor. I also liked Jay Silverheels as Tonto; but his kemo-sabay, Clayton Moore, was too fat for the Lone Ranger, in my view.



Evelyn Lilith Burns arrived on New Year's Day, 1957, to take up residence with her widower father in an apartment in one of the two squat, ugly concrete blocks which had grown up, almost without pur noticing them, on the lower reaches of our hillock, and which were oddly segregated: Americans and other foreigners lived (like Evie) in Noor Ville; arriviste Indian success-stories ended up in Laxmi Vilas. From the heights of Methwold's Estate, we looked down on them all, on white and brown alike; but nobody ever looked down on Evie Burns - except once. Only once did anyone get on top of her.



Before I climbed into my first pair of long pants, I fell in love with Evie; but love was a curious, chain-reactive thing that year. To save time, I shall place all of us in the same row at the Metro cinema; Robert Taylor is mirrored in our eyes as we sit in flickering trances -and also in symbolic sequence: Saleem Sinai is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Evie Burns who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Sonny Ibrahim who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with the Brass Monkey who is sitting next to the aisle and feeling starving hungry ... I loved Evie for perhaps six months of my life; two years later, she was back in America, knifing an old woman and being sent to reform school.



A brief expression of my gratitude is in order at this point: if Evie had not come to live amongst us, my story might never have progressed beyond tourism-in-a-clocktower and cheating in class ... and then there would have been no climax in a widows' hostel, no clear proof of my meaning, no coda in a fuming factory over which there presides the winking, saffron-and-green dancing figure of the neon goddess Mumbadevi. But Evie Burns (was she snake or ladder? The answer's obvious: both) did come, complete with the silver bicycle which enabled me not only to discover the midnight children, but also to ensure the partition of the state of Bombay.



To begin at the beginning: her hair was made of scarecrow straw, her skin was peppered with freckles and her teeth lived in a metal cage. These teeth were, it seemed, the only things on earth over which she was powerless - they grew wild, in malicious crazy-paving overlaps, and stung her dreadfully when she ate ice-cream. (I permit myself this one generalization: Americans have mastered the universe, but have no dominion over their mouths; whereas India is impotent, but her children tend to have excellent teeth.)



Racked by toothaches, my Evie rose magnificently above the pain. Refusing to be ruled by bone and gums, she ate cake and drank Coke whenever they were going; and never complained. A tough kid, Evie Burns: her conquest of suffering confirmed her sovereignty over us all. It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.



Once, I shyly gave her a necklace of flowers (queen-of-the-night for my lily-of-the-eve), bought with my own pocket-money from a hawker-woman at Scandal Point. 'I don't wear flowers,' Evelyn Lilith said, and tossed the unwanted chain into the air, spearing it before it fell with a pellet from her unerring Daisy air-pistol. Destroying flowers with a Daisy, she served notice that she was not to be manacled, not even by a necklace: she was our capricious, whirligig Lill-of-the-Hill. And also Eve. The Adam's-apple of my eye.



How she arrived: Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice and Hairoil Sabarmati, Cyrus Dubash, the Monkey and I were playing French cricket in the circus-ring between Methwold's four palaces. A New Year's Day game: Toxy clapping at her barred window; even Bi-Appah was in good humour and not, for once, abusing us. Cricket - even French cricket, and even when played by children - is a quiet game: peace anointed in linseed oil. The kissing of leather and willow; sprinkled applause; the occasional cry - 'Shot! Shot, sir!' - 'Owzatt??' but Evie on her bicycle was having none of that.



'Hey, you! Alia you! Hey, whassamatter? You all deaf or what?'



I was batting (elegantly as Ranji, powerfully as Vinoo Mankad) when she charged up the hill on her two-wheeler, straw hair flying, freckles ablaze, mouth-metal flashing semaphore messages in the sunlight, a scarecrow astride a silver bullet... 'Hey, you widda leaky nose! Stop watching the schoopid ball, ya crumb! I'll showya something worth watching!'



Impossible to picture Evie Burns without also conjuring up a bicycle; and not just any two-wheeler, but one of the last of the great old-timers, an Arjuna Indiabike in mint condition, with drop-handlebars wrapped in masking tape and five gears and a seat made of reccine cheetah-skin. And a silver frame (the colour, I don't need to tell you, of the Lone Ranger's horse) ... slobby Eyeslice and neat Hairoil, Cyrus the genius and the Monkey, and Sonny Ibrahim and myself - the best of friends, the true sons of the Estate, its heirs by right of birth - Sonny with the slow innocence he had had ever since the forceps dented his brain and me with my dangerous secret knowledge - yes, all of us, future bullfighters and Navy chiefs and all, stood frozen in open-mouthed attitudes as Evie Burns began to ride her bike, fasterfasterfaster, around and around the edges of the circus-ring. 'Lookit me now: watch me go, ya dummies!'



On and off the cheetah-seat, Evie performed. One foot on the seat, one leg stretched out behind her, she whirled around us; she built up speed and then did a headstand on the seat! She could straddle the front wheel, facing the rear, and work the pedals the wrong way round ... gravity was her slave, speed her element, and we knew that a power had come among us, a witch on wheels, and the flowers of the hedgerows threw her petals, the dust of the circus-ring stood up in clouds of ovation, because the circus-ring had found its mistress, too: it was the canvas beneath the brush of her whirling wheels.



Now we noticed that our heroine packed a Daisy air-pistol on her right hip ...



'More to come, ya zeroes!' she yelled, and drew the weapon. Her pellets gave stones the gift of flight; we threw annas into the air and she gunned them down, stone-dead. 'Targets! More targets!' - and Eyeslice surrendered his beloved pack of rummy cards without a murmur, so that she could shoot the heads off the kings. Annie Oakley in tooth-braces - nobody dared question her sharp-shooting, except once, and that was the end of her reign, during the great cat invasion; and there were extenuating circumstances.



Flushed, sweating, Evie Burns dismounted and announced: 'From now on, there's a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians? Any arguments?'



No arguments; I knew then that I had fallen in love.



At Juhu Beach with Evie: she won the camel-races, could drink more coconut milk than any of us, could open her eyes under the sharp salt water of the Arabian Sea.



Did six months make such a difference? (Evie was half a year older than me.) Did it entitle you to talk to grown-ups as an equal? Evie was seen gossiping with old man Ibrahim Ibrahim; she claimed Lila Sabarmati was teaching her to put on make-up; she visited Homi Catrack to gossip about guns. (It was the tragic irony of Homi Catrack's life that he, at whom a gun would one day be pointed, was a true aficionado of firearms ... in Evie he found a fellow-creature, a motherless child who was, unlike his own Toxy, as sharp as a knife and as bright as a bottle. Incidentally, Evie Burns wasted no sympathy on poor Toxy Catrack. 'Wrong inna head,' she opined carelessly to us all, 'Oughta be put down like rats.' But Evie: rats are not weak! There was more that was rodent-like in your face than in the whole body of your despised Tox.)



That was Evelyn Lilith; and within weeks of her arrival, I had set off the chain reaction from whose effects I would never fully recover.



It began with Sonny Ibrahim, Sonny-next-door, Sonny of the forcep-hollows, who has been sitting patiently in the wings of my story, awaiting his cue. In those days, Sonny was a badly bruised fellow: more than forceps had dented him. To love the Brass Monkey (even in the nine-year-old sense of the word) was no easy thing to do.



As I've said, my sister, born second and unheralded, had begun to react violently to any declarations of affection. Although she was believed to speak the languages of birds and cats, the soft words of lovers roused in her an almost animal rage; but Sonny was too simple to be warned off. For months now, he had been pestering her with statements such as, 'Saleem's sister, you're a pretty solid type!' or, 'Listen, you want to be my girl? We could go to the pictures with your ayah, maybe ...' And for an equal number of months, she had been making him suffer for his love - telling tales to his mother; pushing him into mud-puddles accidentally-on-purpose; once even assaulting him physically, leaving him with long raking claw-marks down his face and an expression of sad-dog injury in his eyes; but he would not learn. And so, at last, she had planned her most terrible revenge.



The Monkey attended Walsingham School for Girls on Nepean Sea Road; a school full of tall, superbly muscled Europeans, who swam like fish and dived like submarines. In their spare time, they could be seen from our bedroom window, cavorting in the map-shaped pool of the Breach Candy Club, from which we were, of course, barred ... and when I discovered that the Monkey had somehow attached herself to these segregated swimmers, as a sort of mascot, I felt genuinely aggrieved with her for perhaps the first time ... but there was no arguing with her; she went her own way. Beefy fifteen-year-old white girls let her sit with them on the Walsingham school bus. Three such females would wait with her every morning at the same place where Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus-the-great and I awaited the bus from the Cathedral School.

One morning, for some forgotten reason, Sonny and I were the only boys at the stop. Maybe there was a bug going round or something. The Monkey waited until Mary Pereira had left us alone, in the care of the beefy swimmers; and then suddenly the truth of what she was planning flashed into my head as, for no particular reason, I tuned into her thoughts; and I yelled 'Hey!' - but too late. The Monkey screeched, 'You keep out of this!' and then she and the three beefy swimmers had jumped upon Sonny Ibrahim, street-sleepers and beggars and bicycling clerks were watching with open amusement, because they were ripping every scrap of clothing off his body ... 'Damn it man, are you going just to stand and watch?' -Sonny yelling for help, but I was immobilized, how could I take sides between my sister and my best friend, and he, 'I'll tell my daddy on you!', tearful now, while the Monkey, 'That'll teach you to talk shit - and that'll teach you', his shoes, off; no shirt any more; his vest, dragged off by a high-board diver, 'And that'll teach you to write your sissy love letters', no socks now, and plenty of tears, and 'There!' yelled the Monkey; the Walsingham bus arrived and the assailants and my sister jumped in and sped away, 'Ta-ta-ba-ta, lover-boy!' they yelled, and Sonny was left in the street, on the pavement opposite Chimalker's and Reader's Paradise, naked as the day he was born; his forcep-hollows glistened like rock-pools, because Vaseline had dripped into them from his hair; and his eyes were wet as well, as he, 'Why's she do it, man? Why, when I only told her I liked ...'



'Search me,' I said, not knowing where to look, 'She does things, that's all.'



Not knowing, either, that the time would come when she did something worse to me.



But that was nine years later ... meanwhile, early in 1957, election campaigns had begun: the Jan Sangh was campaigning for rest Homes for aged sacred cows; in Kerala, E. M. S. Namboodiripad was promising that Communism would give everyone food and jobs; in Madras, the Anna-D.M.K. party of C. N. Annadurai fanned the flames of regionalism; the Congress fought back with reforms such as the Hindu Succession Act, which gave Hindu women equal rights of inheritance ... in short, everybody was busy pleading his own cause; I, however, found myself tongue-tied in the face of Evie Burns, and approached Sonny Ibrahim to ask him to plead on my behalf.



In India, we've always been vulnerable to Europeans ... Evie had only been with us a matter of weeks, and already I was being sucked into a grotesque mimicry of European literature. (We had done Cyrano, in a simplified version, at school; I had also read the Classics Illustrated comic book.) Perhaps it would be fair to say that Europe repeats itself, in India, as farce ... Evie was American. Same thing.



'But hey, man, that's no-fair man, why don't you do it yourself?'



'Listen, Sonny,' I pleaded, 'you're my friend, right?'



'Yeah, but you didn't even help ...'



'That was my sister, Sonny, so how could I?'



'No, so you have to do your own dirty ...'



'Hey, Sonny, man, think. Think only. These girls need careful handling, man.



Look how the Monkey flies off the handle! You've got the experience, yaar, you've been through it. You'll know how to go gently this time. What do I know, man? Maybe she doesn't like me even. You want me to have my clothes torn off, too? That would make you feel better?'



And innocent, good-natured Sonny, '... Well, no ...'



'Okay, then. You go. Sing my praises a little. Say never mind about my nose.



Character is what counts. You can do that?'



'... Weeeelll ... I ... okay, but you talk to your sis also, yah?'



Til talk, Sonny. What can I promise? You know what she's like. But I'll talk to her for sure.'



You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke. For every victorious election campaign, there are twice as many that fail ... from the verandah of Buckingham Villa, through the slats of the chick-blind, I spied on Sonny Ibrahim as he canvassed my chosen constituency ...



and heard the voice of the electorate, the rising nasality of Evie Burns, splitting the air with scorn: 'Who? Him? Whynt'cha tell him to jus' go blow his nose? That sniffer? He can't even ride a bike!'



Which was true.



And there was worse to come; because now (although a chick-blind divided the scene into narrow slits) did I not see the expression on Evie's face begin to soften and change? - did Evie's hand (sliced lengthways by the chick) not reach out towards my electoral agent? -and weren't those Evie's fingers (the nails bitten down to the quick) touching Sonny's temple-hollows, the fingertips getting covered in dribbled Vaseline? - and did Evie say or did she not: 'Now you, Pr instance: you're cute'? Let me sadly affirm that I did; it did; they were; she did.



Saleem Sinai loves Evie Burns; Evie loves Sonny Ibrahim; Sonny is potty about the Brass Monkey; but what does the Monkey say?



'Don't make me sick, Allah,' my sister said when I tried - rather nobly, considering how he'd failed me - to argue Sonny's case. The voters had given the thumijs-down to us both.



I wasn't giving in just yet. The siren temptations of Evie Burns - who never cared about me, I'm bound to admit - led me inexorably towards my fall. (But I hold nothing against her; because my fall led to a rise.)



Privately, in my clocktower, I took time off my trans-subcontinental rambles to consider the wooing of my freckled Eve. 'Forget middlemen,' I advised myself, 'You'll have to do this personally.' Finally, I formed my scheme: I would have to share her interests, to make her passions mine ... guns have never appealed to me. I resolved to learn how to ride a bike.



Evie, in those days, had given in to the many demands of the hillock-top children that she teach them her bicycle-arts; so it was a simple matter for me to join the queue for lessons. We assembled in the circus-ring; Evie, ring-mistress supreme, stood in the centre of five wobbly, furiously concentrating cyclists ... while I stood beside her, bikeless. Until Evie's coming I'd shown no interest in wheels, so I'd never been given any ... humbly, I suffered the lash of Evie's tongue.



'Where've you been living, fat nose? I suppose you wanna borrow mine?'



'No,' I lied penitently, and she relented. 'Okay, okay,' Evieshrugged, 'Get in the saddle and lessee whatchou're made of.'



Let me reveal at once that, as I climbed on to the silver Arjuna Indiabike, I was filled with the purest elation; that, as Evie walked roundandround, holding the bike by the handlebars, exclaiming, 'Gotcha balance yet? Mo? Geez, nobody's got all year!' - as Evie and I perambulated, I felt ... what's the word? ...



happy.



Roundandroundand ... Finally, to please her, I stammered, 'Okay ... I think I'm ... let me,' and instantly I was on my own, she had given me a farewell shove, and the silver creature flew gleaming and uncontrollable across the circus-ring ... I heard her shouting: 'The brake! Use the goddamn brake, ya dummy!' - but my hands couldn't move, I had gone rigid as a plank, and there LOOK OUT in front of me was the blue two-wheeler of Sonny Ibrahim, collision course, OUTA THE WAY YA CRAZY, Sonny in the saddle, trying to swerve and miss, but still blue streaked towards silver, Sonny swung right but I went the same way EEYAH MY BIKE and silver wheel touched blue, frame kissed frame, I was flying up and over handlebars towards Sonny who had embarked on an identical parabola towards me CRASH bicycles fell to earth beneath us, locked in an intimate embrace CRASH suspended in mid-air Sonny and I met each other, Sonny's head greeted mine ...



Over nine years ago I had been born with bulging temples, and Sonny had been given hollows by forceps; everything is for a reason, it seems, because now my bulging temples found their way into Sonny's hollows. A perfect fit. Heads fitting together, we began our descent to earth, falling clear of the bikes, fortunately, WHUMMP and for a moment the world went away.



Then Evie with her freckles on fire, 'O ya little creep, ya pile of snot, ya wrecked my ...' But I wasn't listening, because circus-ring accident had completed what washing-chest calamity had begun, and they were there in my head, in the front now, no longer a muffled background noise I'd never noticed, all of them, sending their here-I-am signals, from north south east west... the other children born during that midnight hour, calling 'I,' 'I,' T and 'I.'



'Hey! Hey, snothead! You okay? ... Hey, where's his mother?'



Interruptions, nothing but interruptions! The different parts of my somewhat complicated life refuse, with a wholly unreasonable obstinacy, to stay neatly in their separate compartments. Voices spill out of their clocktower to invade the circus-ring, which is supposed to be Evie's domain ... and now, at the very moment when I should be describing the fabulous children of ticktock, I'm being whisked away by Frontier Mail - spirited off to the decaying world of my grandparents, so that Aadam Aziz is getting in the way of the natural unfolding of my tale. Ah well. What can't be cured must be endured.



That January, during my convalescence from the severe concussion I received in my bicycling accident, my parents took us off to Agra for a family reunion that turned out worse than the notorious (and arguably fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta. For two weeks we were obliged to listen to Emerald and Zulfikar (who was now a Major-General and insisted on being called a General) dropping names, and also hints of their fabulous wealth, which had by now grown into the seventh largest private fortune in Pakistan; their son Zafar tried (but only once!) to pull the Monkey's fading red pig-tails. And we were obliged to watch in silent horror while my Civil Servant uncle Mustapha and his half-Irani wife Sonia beat and bludgeoned their litter of nameless, genderless brats into utter anonymity; and the bitter aroma of Alia's spinsterhood filled the air and ruined our food; and my father would retire early to begin his secret nightly war against the djinns; and worse, and worse, and worse.

One night I awoke on the stroke of twelve to find my grandfather's dream inside my head, and was therefore unable to avoid seeing him as he saw himself - as a crumbling old man in whose centre, when the light was right, it was possible to discern a gigantic shadow. As the convictions which had given strength to his youth withered away under the combined influence of old age, Reverend Mother and the absence of like-minded friends, an old hole was reappearing in the middle of his body, turning him into just another shrivelled, empty old man, over whom the God (and other superstitions) against which he'd fought for so long was beginning to reassert His dominion ... meanwhile, Reverend Mother spent the entire fortnight finding little ways of insulting my uncle Hanif's despised film-actress wife. And that was also the time when I was cast as a ghost in a children's play, and found, in an old leather attache-case on top of my grandfather's almirah, a sheet which had been chewed by moths, but whose largest hole was man-made: for which discovery I was repaid (you will recall) in roars of grandparental rage.

But there was one achievement. I was befriended by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah (the same fellow who had, in his youth, screamed silently in a cornfield and helped Nadir Khan into Aadam Aziz's toilet): taking me under his wing - and without telling my parents, who would have forbidden it so soon after my accident - he taught me how to ride a bicycle. By the time we left, I had this secret tucked away with all my others: only I didn't intend this one to stay secret for very long.



... And on the train home, there were voices hanging on to the outside of the compartment: 'Ohe, maharaj! Open up, great sir!' -fare-dodgers' voices fighting with the ones I wanted to listen to, the new ones inside my head - and then back to Bombay Central Station, and the drive Home past racecourse and temple, and now Evelyn Lilith Burns is demanding that I finish her part first before concentrating on higher things.



'Home again!' the Monkey shouts. 'Hurray ... Back-to-Bom!' (She is in disgrace.



In Agra, she incinerated the General's boots.)



It is a matter of record that the States Reorganization Committee had submitted its report to Mr Nehru as long ago as October 1955; a year later, its recommendations had been implemented. India had been divided anew, into fourteen states and six centrally-administered 'territories'. But the boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any natural features of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words. Language divided us: Kerala was for speakers of Malayalam, the only palindromically-named tongue on earth; in Karnataka you were supposed to speak Kanarese; and the amputated state of Madras - known today as Tamil Nadu - enclosed the aficionados of Tamil. Owing to some oversight, however, nothing was done with the state of Bombay; and in the city of Mumbadevi, the language marches grew longer and noisier and finally metamorphosed into political parties, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti ('United Maharashtra Party') which stood for the Marathi language and demanded the creation of the Deccan state of Maharashtra, and the Maha Gujarat Parishad ('Great Gujarat Party') which marched beneath the banner of the Gujarati language and dreamed of a state to the north of Bombay City, stretching all the way to the Kathiawar peninsula and the Rann of Kutch ... I am warming over all this cold history, these old dead struggles between the barren angularity of Marathi which was born in the arid heat of the Deccan and Gujarati's boggy, Kathiawari softness, to explain why, on the day in February 1957 immediately following our return from Agra, Methwold's Estate was cut off from the city by a stream of chanting humanity which flooded Warden Road more completely than monsoon water, a parade so long that it took two days to pass, and of which it was said that the statue of Sivaji had come to life to ride stonily at its head.



The demonstrators carried black flags; many of them were shopkeepers on hartal; many were striking textile-workers from Mazagaon and Matunga; but on our hillock, we knew nothing about their jobs; to us children, the endless ant-trail of language in Warden Road seemed as magnetically fascinating as a light-bulb to a moth. It was a demonstration so immense, so intense in its passions, that it made all previous marches vanish from the mind as if they had never occurred - and we had all been banned from going down the hill for even the tiniest of looks. So who was the boldest of us all? Who urged us to creep at least half-way down, to the point where the hillock-road swung round to face Warden Road in a steep U-bend? Who said, 'What's to be scared of? We're only going half-way for a peek'? ... Wide-eyed, disobedient Indians followed their freckled American chief. (They lulled Dr Narlikar - marchers did,' Hairoil warned us in a shivery voice. Evie spat on his shoes.)



But I, Saleem Sinai, had other fish to fry. 'Evie,' I said with quiet offhandedness, 'how'd you like to see me bicycling?' No response. Evie was immersed in the-spectacle ... and was that her fingerprint in Sonny Ibrahim's left forcep-hollow, embedded in Vaseline for all the world to see? A second time, and with slightly more emphasis, I said, 'I can do it, Evie. I'll do it on the Monkey's cycle. You want to watch?' And now Evie, cruelly, 'I'm watching this. This is good. Why'd I wanna watch you? And me, a little snivelly now, 'But I learned, Evie, you've got to ...' Roars from Warden Road below us drown my words. Her back is to me; and Sonny's back, the backs of Eyeslice and Hairoil, the intellectual rear of Cyrus-the-great... my sister, who has seen the fingerprint too, and looks displeased, eggs me on: 'Go on. Go on, show her.



Who's she think she is?' And up on her bike ... 'I'm doing it, Evie, look!'



Bicycling in circles, round and round the little cluster of children, 'See? You see?' A moment of exultation; and then Evie, deflating impatient couldn't-care-less; 'Willya get outa my way, fer Petesake? I wanna see lhat!'



Finger, chewed-off nail and all, jabs down in the direction of the language march; I am dismissed in favour of the parade of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti! And despite the Monkey, who loyally, 'That's not fair! He's doing it really good? - and in spite of the exhilaration of the thing-in-itself- something goes haywire inside me; and I'm riding round Evie, fasterfasterfaster, crying sniffing out of control, 'So what is it with you, anyway? What do I have to do to ...' And then something else takes over, because I realize I don't have to ask her, I can just get inside that freckled mouth-metalled head and find out, for once I can really get to know what's going on... and in I go, still bicycling, but the front of her mind is all full up with Marathi language-marchers, there are American pop songs stuck in the corners of her thoughts, but nothing I'm interested in; and now, only now, now for the very first time, now driven on by the tears of unrequited love, I begin to probe ...



I find myself pushing, diving, forcing my way behind her defences ... into the secret place where there's a picture of her mother who wears a pink smock and holds up a tiny fish by the tail, and I'm ferreting deeperdeeperdeeper, where is it, what makes her tick, when she gives a sort of jerk and swings round to stare at me as I bicycle roundandroundandround-androundand ...



'Get out!' screams Evie Burns. Hands lifted to forehead. I bicycling, wet-eyed, diving ininin: to where Evie stands in the doorway of a clapboard bedroom holding a, holding a something sharp and glinty with red dripping off it, in the doorway of a, my God and on the bed a woman, who, in a pink, my God, and Evie with the, and red staining the pink, and a man coming, my God, and no no no no no ...



'GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!' Bewildered children watch as Evie screams, language march forgotten, but suddenly remembered again, because Evie has grabbed the back of the Monkey's bike WHAT'RE YOU DOING EVIE as she pushes it THERE GET OUT YA BUM THERE GET OUT TO HELL!- She's pushed me hard-as-hard, and I losing control hurtling down the slope round the end of the U-bend downdown, MY GOD THE MARCH past Band Box laundry, past Noor Ville and Laxmi Vilas, AAAAA and down into the mouth of the march, heads feet bodies, the waves of the march parting as I arrive, yelling blue murder, crashing into history on a runaway, young-girl's bike.



Hands grabbing handlebars as I slow down in the impassioned throng. Smiles filled with good teeth surround me. They are not friendly smiles. 'Look look, a little laad-sahib comes down to join us from the big rich hill!' In Marathi which I hardly understand, it's my worst subject at school, and the smiles asking, 'You want to join S.M.S., little princeling?' And I, just about knowing what's being said, but dazed into telling the truth, shake my head No. And the smiles, 'Oho! The young nawab does not like our tongue! What does he like?' And another smile, 'Maybe Gujarati! You speak Gujarati, my lord?' But my Gujarati was as bad as my Marathi; I only knew one thing in the marshy tongue of Kathiawar; and the smiles, urging, and the fingers, prodding, 'Speak, little master! Speak some Gujarati!' - so I told them what I knew, a rhyme I'd learned from Glandy Keith Colaco at school, which he used when he was bullying Gujarati boys, a rhyme designed to make fun of the speech rhythms of the language: Soo che? Saru che! Danda le ke maru che! How are you? - I am well! - 肐I take a stick and thrash you to hell! A nonsense; a nothing; nine words of emptiness... but when I'd retited them, the smiles began to laugh; and then voices near me and then further and further away began to take up my chant, HOW ARE YOU? I AM WELL!, and they lost interest in me, 'Go go with your bicycle, masterji,' they scoffed, I'LL TAKE A STICK AND THRASH YOU 蝾 HELL, I fled away up the hillock as my chant rushed forward and back, up to the front .and down to the back of the two-day-long procession, becoming, as it went, a song of war.



That afternoon, the head of the procession of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti collided at Kemp's Corner, with the head of a Maha Gujarat Parishad demonstration; S.M.S. voices chanted 'Soo che? Saru che!' and M.G.P. throats were opened in fury; under the posters of the Air-India rajah and of the Kolynos Kid, the two parties fell upon one another with no little zeal, and to the tune of my little rhyme the first of the language riots got under way, fifteen killed, over three hundred wounded.



In this way I became directly responsible for triggering off the violence which ended with the partition of the state of Bombay, as a result of which the city became the capital of Maharashtra - so at least I was on the winning side.



What was it in Evie's head? Crime or dream? I never found out; but I had learned something else: when you go deep inside someone's head, they can feel you in there.



Evelyn Lilith Burns didn't want much to do with me after that day; but, strangely enough, I was cured of her. (Women have always been the ones to change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch must answer for who I am; and the Widow, who I'm keeping for the end; and after the end, Padma, my goddess of dung. Women have fixed me all right, but perhaps they were never central - perhaps the place which they should have filled, the hole in the centre of me which was my inheritance from my grandfather Aadam Aziz, was occupied for too long by my voices. Or perhaps -one must consider all possibilities - they always made me a little afraid.)

My tenth birthday



'Oh mister, what to say? Everything is my own poor fault!'



Padma is back. And, now that I have recovered from the poison and am at my desk again, is too overwrought to be silent. Over and over, my returned lotus castigates herself, beats her heavy breasts, wails at the top of her voice. (In my fragile condition, this is fairly distressing; but I don't blame her for anything.)



'Only believe, mister, how much I have your well-being at heart! What creatures we are, we women, never for one moment at peace when our men lie sick and low ... I am so happy you are well, you don't know!'



Padma's story (given in her own words, and read back to her for ' eye-rolling, high-wailing, mammary-thumping confirmation): 'It was my own foolish pride and vanity, Saleem baba, from which cause I did run from you, although the job here is good, and you so much needing a looker-after! But in a short time only I was dying to return.



'So then I thought, how to go back to this man who will not love me and only does some foolish writery? (Forgive, Saleem baba, but I must tell it truly. And love, to us women, is the greatest thing of all.)



'So I have been to a holy man, who taught me what I must do. Then with my few pice I have taken a bus into the country to dig for herbs, with which your manhood could be awakened from its sleep ... imagine, mister, I have spoken magic with these words: "Herb thou hast been uprooted by Bulls!" Then I have ground herbs in water and milk and said, "Thou potent and lusty herb! Plant which Varuna had dug up for him by Gandharva! Give my Mr Saleem thy power. Give heat like that of Fire of Indra. Like the male antelope, ?herb, thou hast all the force that Is, thou hast powers of Indra, and the lusty force of beasts." 'With this preparation I returned to find you alone as always and as always with your nose in paper. But jealousy, I swear, I have put behind me; it sits on the face and makes it old. ?God forgive me, quietly I put the preparation in your food!... And then, hai-hai, may Heaven forgive me, but I am a simple woman, if holy men tell me, how should I argue? ... But now at least you are better, thanks be to God, and maybe you will not be angry.'



Under the influence of Padma's potion, I became delirious for a week. My dung-lotus swears (through much-gnashed teeth) that I was stiff as a board, with bubbles around my mouth. There was also a fever. In my delirium I babbled about snakes; but I know that Padma is no serpent, and never meant me harm.



'This love, mister,' Padma is wailing, 'It will drive a woman to craziness.'



I repeat: I don't blame Padma. At the feet of the Western Ghats, she searched for the herbs of virility, mucuna pruritus and the root of feronia elephantum; who knows what she found? Who knows what, mashed with milk and mingled with my food, flung my innards into that state of'churning' from which, as all students of Hindu cosmology will know, Indra created matter, by stirring the primal soup in his own great milk-churn? Never mind. It was a noble attempt; but I am beyond regeneration - the Widow has done for me. Not even the real mucuna could have put an end to my incapacity; feronia would never have engendered in me the 'lusty force of beasts'.



Still, I am at my table once again; once again Padma sits at my feet, urging me on. I am balanced once more - the base of my isosceles triangle is secure. I hover at the apex, above present and past, and feel fluency returning to my pen.



A kind of magic has been worked, then; and Padma's excursion in search of love-potions has connected me briefly with that world of ancient learning and sorcerers' lore so despised by most of us nowadays; but (despite stomach-cramps and fever and frothings at the mouth) I'm glad of its irruption into my last days, because to contemplate it is to regain a little, lost sense of proportion.



Think of this: history, in my version, entered a new phase on August 15th, 1947 - but in another version, that inescapable date is no more than one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga, in which the cow of morality has been reduced to standing, teeter-ingly, on a single leg! Kali-Yuga - the losing throw in our national dice-game; the worst of everything; the age when property gives a man rank, when wealth is equated with virtue, when passion becomes the sole bond between men and women, when falsehood brings success (is it any wonder, in such a time, that I too have been confused about good and evil?) ... began on Friday, February 18th, 3102 B.C.; and will last a mere 432,000 years! Already feeling somewhat dwarfed, I should add nevertheless that the Age of Darkness is only the fourth phase of the present Maha-Yuga cycle which is, in total, ten times as long; and when you consider that it takes a thousand Maha-Yugas to make just one Day of Brahma, you'll see what I mean about proportion.



A little humility at this point (when I'm trembling on the brink of introducing the Children) does not, I feel, come amiss.



Padma shifts her weight, embarrassed. 'What are you talking?' she asks, reddening a little. 'That is brahmin's talk; what's it to do with me?'



... Born and raised in the Muslim tradition, I find myself overwhelmed all of a sudden by an older learning; while here beside me is my Padma, whose return I had so earnestly desired... my Padma! The Lotus Goddess; the One Who Possesses Dung; who is Honey-Like, and Made of Gold; whose sons are Moisture and Mud ...



'You must be fevered still,' she expostulates, giggling. 'How made of gold, mister? And you know I have no chil ...'



... Padma, who along with the yaksa genii, who represent the sacred treasure of the earth, and the sacred rivers, Ganga Yamuna Sarasvati, and the tree goddesses, is one of the Guardians of life, beguiling and comforting mortal men while they pass through the dream-web of Maya .. Padma, the Lotus calyx, which grew out of Vishnu's navel, and from which Brahma himself was born; Padma the Source, the mother of Time! ...



'Hey,' she is sounding worried now, 'let me feel your forehead!'



... And where, in this scheme of things, am I? Am I (beguiled and comforted by her return) merely mortal - or something more? Such as - yes, why not - mammoth-trunked, Ganesh-nosed as I am -perhaps, the Elephant. Who, like Sin the moon, controls the waters, bringing the gift of rain ... whose mother was Ira, queen consort of Kashyap, the Old Tortoise Man, lord and progenitor of all creatures on the earth ... the Elephant who is also the rainbow, and lightning, and whose symbolic value, it must be added, is highly problematic and unclear.

Well, then: elusive as rainbows, unpredictable as lightning, garrulous as Ganesh, it seems I have my own place in the ancient wisdom, after all.



'My God.' Padma is rushing for a towel to wet in cold water, 'your forehead is on fire! Better you lie down now; too soon for all this writing! The sickness is talking; not you.'



But I've already lost a week; so, fever or no fever, I must press on; because, having (for the moment) exhausted this strain of old-time fabulism, I am coming to the fantastic heart of my own story, and must write in plain unveiled fashion, about the midnight children.



Understand what I'm saying: during the first hour of August 15th, 1947 - between midnight and one a.m. - no less than one thousand and one children were born within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India. In itself, that is not an unusual fact (although the resonances of the number are strangely literary) - at the time, births in our part of the world exceeded deaths by approximately six hundred and eighty-seven an hour. What made the event noteworthy (noteworthy! There's a dispassionate word, if you like!) was the nature of these children, every one of whom was, through some freak of biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the moment, or just conceivably by sheer coincidence (although synchronicity on such a scale would stagger even C. G. Jung), endowed with features, talents or faculties which can only be described as miraculous. It was as though - if you will permit me one moment of fancy in what will otherwise be, I promise, the most, sober account I can manage - as though history, arriving at a point of the highest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time.



If a similar miracle was worked across the border, in the newly-partitioned-off Pakistan, I have no knowledge of it; my perceptions were, while they lasted, bounded by the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Himalaya mountains, but also by the artificial frontiers which pierced Punjab and Bengal.



Inevitably, a number of these children failed to survive. Malnutrition, disease and the misfortunes of everyday life had accounted for no less than four hundred and twenty of them by the time I became conscious of their existence; although it is possible to hypothesize that these deaths, too, had their purpose, since 420 has been, since time immemorial, the number associated with fraud, deception and trickery. Can it be, then, that the missing infants were eliminated because they had turned out to be somehow inadequate, and were not the true children of that midnight hour? Well, in the first place, that's another excursion into fantasy; in the second, it depends on a view of life which is both excessively theological and barbarically cruel. It is also an unanswerable question; any further examination of it is therefore profitless.



By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all nearing



their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant, for the most part, of one another's existence - although there were certainly exceptions. In the town of Baud, on the Mahanadi river in Orissa, there was a pair of twin sisters who were already a legend in the region, because despite their impressive plainness they both possessed the ability of making every man who saw them fall hopelessly and often suicidally in love with them, so that their bemused parents were endlessly pestered by a stream of men offering their hands in marriage to either or even both of the bewildering children; old men who had forsaken the wisdom of their beards and youths who ought to have been becoming besotted with the actresses in the travelling picture-show which visited Baud once a month; and there was another, more disturbing procession of bereaved families cursing the twin girls for having bewitched their sons into committing acts of violence against themselves, fatal mutilations and scourgings and even (in one case)



self-immolation. With the exception of such rare instances, however, the children of midnight had grown up quite unaware of their true siblings, their fellow-chosen-ones across the length and breadth of India's rough and badly-proportioned diamond.



And then, as a result of a jolt received in a bicycle-accident, I, Saleem Sinai, became aware of them all.



To anyone whose personal cast of mind is too inflexible to accept these facts, I have this to say: That's how it was; there can be no retreat from the truth. I shall just have to shoulder the burden of the doubter's disbelief. But no literate person in this India of ours can be wholly immune from the type of information I am in the process of unveiling - no reader of our national press can have failed to come across a series of - admittedly lesser - magic children and assorted freaks. Only last week there was that Bengali boy who announced himself as the reincarnation of Rabindranath Tagore and began to extemporize verses of remarkable quality, to the amazement of his parents; and I can myself remember children with two heads (sometimes one human, one animal), and other curious features such as bullock's horns.



I should say at once that not all the children's gifts were desirable, or even desired by the children themselves; and, in some cases, the children had survived but been deprived of their midnight-given qualities. For example (as a companion piece to the story of the Baudi twins) let me mention a Delhi beggar-girl called Sundari, who was born in a street behind the General Post Office, not far from the rooftop on which Amina Sinai had listened to Ramram Seth, and whose beauty was so intense that within moments of her birth it succeeded in blinding her mother and the neighbouring women who had been assisting at her delivery; her father, rushing into the room when he heard the women's screams, had been warned by them just in time; but his one fleeting glimpse of his daughter so badly impaired his vision that he was unable, afterwards, to distinguish between Indians and foreign tourists, a handicap which greatly affected his earning power as a beggar. For some time after that Sundari was obliged to have a rag placed across her face; until an old and ruthless great-aunt took her into her bony arms and slashed her face nine times with a kitchen knife. At the time when I became aware of her, Sundari was earning a healthy living, because nobody who looked at her could fail to pity a girl who had clearly once been too beautiful to look at and was now so cruelly disfigured; she received more alms than any other member of her family.



Because none of the children suspected that their time of birth had anything to do with what they were, it took me a while to find it out. At first, after the bicycle accident (and particularly once language marchers had purged me of Evie Burns), I contented myself with discovering, one by one, the secrets of the fabulous beings who had suddenly arrived in my mental field of vision, collecting them ravenously, the way some boys collect insects, and others spot railway trains; losing interest in autograph books and all other manifestations of the gathering instinct, I plunged whenever possible into the separate, and altogether brighter reality of the five hundred and eighty-one. (Two hundred and sixty-six of us were boys; and we were outnumbered by our female counterparts - three hundred and fifteen of them, including Parvati. Parvati-the-witch.)



Midnight's children! ... From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any reflective surface in the land - through lakes and (with greater difficulty) the polished metal bodies of automobiles ...



and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish... and children with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri Hills, and from the great watershed of the Vindhyas, a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will, and had already (mischievously) been the cause of wild panic and rumours of the return of Giants ... from Kashmir, there was a blue-eyed child of whose original sex I was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased. Some of us called this child Narada, others Markandaya, depending on which old fairy story of sexual change we had heard ...



near Jalna in the heart of the parched Deccan I found a water-divining youth, and at Budge-Budge outside Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting physical wounds, so that after a few adults had found themselves bleeding freely as a result of some barb flung casually from her lips, they had decided to lock her in a bamboo cage and float her off down the Ganges to the Sundarbans jungles (which are the rightful Home of monsters and phantasms); but nobody dared approach her, and she moved through the town surrounded by a vacuum of fear; nobody had the courage to deny her food. There was a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert; and more and more and more ...



overwhelmed by their numbers, and by the exotic multiplicity of their gifts, I paid little attention, in those early days, to their ordinary selves; but inevitably our problems, when they arose, were the everyday, human problems which arise from character-and-environment; in our quarrels, we were just a bunch of kids.



One remarkable fact: the closer to midnight our birth-times were, the greater were our gifts. Those children born in the last seconds of the hour were (to be frank) little more than circus freaks: bearded girls, a boy with the fully-operative gills of a freshwater mahaseer trout, Siamese twins with two bodies dangling off a single head and neck -the head could speak in two voices, one male, one female, and every language and dialect spoken in the subcontinent; but for all their mar-vellousness, these were the unfortunates, the living casualties of that numinous hour. Towards the half-hour came more interesting and useful faculties - in the Gir Forest lived a witch-girl with the power of healing by the laying-on of hands, and there was a wealthy tea-planter's son in Shillong who had the blessing (or possibly the curse) of being incapable of forgetting anything he ever saw or heard. But the children born in the first minute of all - for these children the hour had reserved the highest talents of which men had ever dreamed. If you, Padma, happened to possess a register of births in which times were noted down to the exact second, you, too, would know what scion of a great Lucknow family (born at twenty-one seconds past midnight)



had completely mastered, by the age of ten, the lost arts of alchemy, with which he regenerated the fortunes of his ancient but dissipated house; and which dhobi's daughter from Madras (seventeen seconds past) could fly higher than any bird simply by closing her eyes; and to which Benarsi silversmith's son (twelve seconds after midnight) was given the gift of travelling in time and thus prophesying the future as well as clarifying the past ... a gift which, children that we were, we trusted implicitly when it dealt with things gone and forgotten, but derided when he warned us of our own ends... fortunately, no such records exist; and, for my part, I shall not reveal - or else, in appearing to reveal, shall falsify - their names and even their locations; because, although such evidence would provide absolute proof of my claims, still the children of midnight deserve, now, after everything, to be left alone; perhaps to forget; but I hope (against hope) to remember ...



Parvati-the-witch was born in Old Delhi in a slum which clustered around the steps of the Friday mosque. No ordinary slum, this, although the huts built out of old packing cases and pieces of corrugated tin and shreds of jute sacking which stood higgledy-piggledy in the shadow of the mosque looked no different from any other shanty-town ... because this was the ghetto of the magicians, yes, the very same place which had once spawned a Hummingbird whom knives had pierced and pie-dogs had failed to save ... the conjurers' slum, to which the greatest fakirs and prestidigitators and illusionists in the land continually flocked, to seek their fortune in the capital city. They found tin huts, and police harassment, and rats ... Parvati's father had once been the greatest conjurer in Oudh; she had grown up amid ventriloquists who could make stones tell jokes and contortionists who could swallow their own legs and fire-eaters who exhaled flames from their arseholes and tragic clowns who could extract glass tears from the corners of their eyes; she had stood mildly amid gasping crowds while her father drove spikes through her neck; and all the time she had guarded her own secret, which was greater than any of the illusionist flummeries surrounding her; because to Parvati-the-witch, born a mere seven seconds after midnight on August 15th, had been given the powers of the true adept, the illuminatus, the genuine gifts of conjuration and sorcery, the art which required no artifice.



So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry ... but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose ... to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could draw the undrawable.bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!)... and to me, the greatest talent of all -the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.



But it is Kali-Yuga; the children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.



There; now I've said it. That is who I was - who we were.



Padma is looking as if her mother had died - her face, with its opening-shutting mouth, is the face of a beached pomfret. 'O baba!' she says at last. 'O baba! You are sick; what have you said?'



No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don't make the mistake of dismissing what I've unveiled as mere delirium; or even as the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated before that I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and read aloud to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother's-head truth.



Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. A thousand and one children were born; there were a thousand and one possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time before; and there were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children can be made to represent many things, according to your point of view: they can be seen as the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing, twentieth-century economy; or as the true hope of freedom, which is now forever extinguished; but what they must not become is the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind.



No: illness is neither here nor there.

'All right, all right, baba,' Padma attempts to placate me. 'Why become so cross? Rest now, rest some while, that is all I am asking.'



Certainly it was a hallucinatory time in the days leading up to my tenth birthday; but the hallucinations were not in my head. My father, Ahmed Sinai, driven by the traitorous death of Dr Narlikar and by the increasingly powerful effect of djinns-and-tonics, had taken flight into a dream-world of disturbing unreality; and the most insidious aspect of his slow decline was that, for a very long time, people mistook it for the very opposite of what it was ... Here is Sonny's mother, Nussie-the-duck, telling Amina one evening in our garden: 'What great days for you all, Amina sister, now that your Ahmed is in his prime! Such a fine man, and so much he is prospering for his family's sake!' She says it loud enough for him to hear; and although he pretends to be telling the gardener what to do about the ailing bougainvillaea, although he assumes an expression of humble self-deprecation, it's utterly unconvincing, because his bloated body has begun, without his knowing it, to puff up and strut about. Even Purushottam, the dejected sadhu under the garden tap, looks embarrassed.



My fading father ... for almost ten years he had always been in a good mood at the breakfast table, before he shaved his chin; but as his facial hairs whitened along with his fading skin, this fixed point of Happiness ceased to be a certainty; and the day came when he lost his temper at breakfast for the first time. That was the day on which taxes were raised and tax thresholds simultaneously lowered; my father flung down the Times of India with a violent gesture and glared around him with the red eyes I knew he only wore in his tempers. 'It's like going to the bathroom!' he exploded, cryptically; egg toast tea shuddered in the blast of his wrath. 'You raise your shirt and lower your trousers! Wife, this government is going to the bathroom all over us!' And my mother, blushing pink through the black, 'Janum, the children, please,' but he had stomped off, leaving me with a clear understanding of what people meant when they said the country was going to pot.



In the following weeks my father's morning chin continued to fade, and something more than the peace of the breakfast table was lost: he began to forget what sort of man he'd been in the old days before Narlikar's treason. The rituals of our Home life began to decay. He began to stay away from the breakfast table, so that Amina could not wheedle money out of him; but, to compensate, he became careless with his cash, and his discarded clothes were full of rupee notes and coins, so that by picking his pockets she could make ends meet. But a more depressing indication of his withdrawal from family life was that he rarely told us bedtime stories any more, and when he did we didn't enjoy them, because they had become ill-imagined and unconvincing. Their subject-matter was still the same, princes goblins flying horses and adventures in magic lands, but in his perfunctory voice we could hear the creaks and groans of a rustling, decayed imagination.



My father had succumbed to abstraction. It seems that Narlikar's death and the end of his tetrapod dream had shown Ahmed Sinai the unreliable nature of human relationships; he had decided to divest himself of all such ties. He took to rising before dawn and locking himself with his current Fernanda or Flory in his downstairs office, outside whose windows the two evergreen trees he planted to commemorate my birth and the Monkey's had already grown tall enough to keep out most of the daylight when it arrived. Since we hardly ever dared disturb him, my father entered a deep solitude, a condition so unusual in our overcrowded country as to border on abnormality; he began to refuse food from our kitchen and to live on cheap rubbish brought daily by his girl in a tiffin-carrier, lukewarm parathas and soggy vegetable samosas and bottles of fizzy drinks. A strange perfume wafted out from under his office door; Amina took it for the odour of stale air and second-rate food; but it's my belief that an old scent had returned in a stronger form, the old aroma of failure which had hung about him from the earliest days.



He sold off the many tenements or chawls which he'd bought cheaply on his arrival in Bombay, and on which our family's fortunes had been based. Freeing himself from all Business connections with human beings - even his anonymous tenants in Kurla and Worli, in Matunga and Mazagaon and Mahim - he liquefied his assets, and entered the rarefied and abstract air of financial speculation.



Locked in his office, in those days, his one contact with the outside world (apart from his poor Fernandas) was his telephone. He spent his day deep in conference with this instrument, as it put his money into such-andsuch shares or soandso stocks, as it invested in government bonds or bear market equities, selling long or short as he commanded ... and invariably getting the best price of the day. In a streak of good fortune comparable only to my mother's success on the horses all those years previously, my father and his telephone took the stock exchange by storm, a feat made more remarkable by Ahmed Sinai's constantly-worsening drinking habits. Djinn-sodden, he nevertheless managed to ride high on the abstract undulations of the money market, reacting to its emotional, unpredictable shifts and changes the way a lover does to his beloved's slightest whim ... he could sense when a share would rise, when the peak would come; and he always got out before the fall. This was how his plunge into the abstract solitude of his telephonic days was disguised, how his financial coups obscured his steady divorce from reality; but under cover of his growing riches, his condition was getting steadily worse.



Eventually the last of his calico-skirted secretaries quit, being unable to tolerate life in an atmosphere so thin and abstract as to make breathing difficult; and now my father sent for Mary Pereira and coaxed her with, 'We're friends, Mary, aren't we, you and I?', to which the poor woman replied, 'Yes, sahib, I know; you will look after me when I'm old,' and promised to find him a replacement. The next day she brought him her sister, Alice Pereira, who had worked for all kinds of bosses and had an almost infinite tolerance of men.



Alice and Mary had long since made up their quarrel over Joe D'Costa; the younger woman was often upstairs with us at the end of the day, bringing her qualities of sparkle and sauciness into the somewhat oppressive air of our Home.



I was fond of her, and it was through her that we learned of my father's greatest excesses, whose victims were a budgerigar and a mongrel dog.



By July Ahmed Sinai had entered an almost permanent state of intoxication; one day, Alice reported, he had suddenly gone off for a drive, making her fear for his life, and returned somehow or other with a shrouded bird-cage in which, he said, was his new acquisition, a bulbul or Indian nightingale. 'For God knows how long,' Alice confided, 'he tells me all about bulbuls; all fairy stories of its singing and what-all; how this Calipha was captivated by its song, how the singing could make longer the beauty of the night; God knows what the poor man was babbling, quoting Persian and Arabic, I couldn't make top or bottom of it.



But then he took off the cover, and in the cage is nothing but a talking budgie, some crook in Chor Bazaar must have painted the feathers! Now how could I tell the poor man, him so excited with his bird and all, sitting there calling out, "Sing, little bulbul! Sing!" ... and it's so funny, just before it died from the paint it just repeated his line back at him, straight out like that -not squawky like a bird, you know, but in his own self-same voice: Sing! Little bulbul, sing!'



But there was worse on the way. A few days later I was sitting with Alice on the servants' spiral iron staircase when she said, 'Baba, I don't know what got into your daddy now. All day sitting down there cursing curses at the dog!'



The mongrel bitch we named Sherri had strolled up to the two-storey hillock earlier that year and simply adopted us, not knowing that life was a dangerous Business for animals on Methwold's Estate; and in his cups Ahmed Sinai made her the guinea-pig for his experiments with the family curse.



This was that same fictional curse which he'd dreamed up to impress William Methwold, but now in the liquescent chambers of his mind the djinns persuaded him that it was no fiction, that he'd just forgotten the words; so he spent long hours in his insanely solitary office experimenting with formulae ... 'Such things he is cursing the poor creature with!' Alice said, 'I wonder she don't drop down dead straight off!'



But Sherri just sat there in a corner and grinned stupidly back at him, refusing to turn purple or break out in boils, until one evening he erupted from his office and ordered Amina to drive us all to Hornby Vellard. Sherri came too. We promenaded, wearing puzzled expressions, up and down the Vellard, and then he said, 'Get in the car, all of you.' Only he wouldn't let Sherri in... as the Rover accelerated away with my father at the wheel she began to chase after us, while the Monkey yelled Daddydaddy and Amina pleaded Janumplease and I sat in mute horror, we had to drive for miles, almost all the way to Santa Cruz airport, before he had his revenge on the bitch for refusing to succumb to his sorceries... she burst an artery as she ran and died spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of a hungry cow.



The Brass Monkey (who didn't even like dogs) cried for a week; my mother became worried about dehydration and made her drink gallons of water, pouring it into her as if she were a lawn, Mary said; but I liked the new puppy my father bought me for my tenth birthday, out of some flicker of guilt perhaps: her name was the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, and she had a pedigree chock-full of champion Alsatians, although in time my mother discovered that that was as false as the mock-bulbul, as imaginary as my father's forgotten curse and Mughal ancestry; and after six months she died of venereal disease. We had no pets after that.



My father was not the only one to approach my tenth birthday with his head lost in the clouds of his private dreams; because here is Mary Pereira, indulging in her fondness for making chutneys, kasaundies and pickles of all descriptions, and despite the cheery presence of her sister Alice there is something haunted in her face.



'Hullo, Mary!' Padma - who seems to have developed a soft spot for my criminal ayah - greets her return to centre-stage. 'So what's eating her?'



This, Padma: plagued by her nightmares of assaults by Joseph D'Costa, Mary was finding it harder and harder to get sleep. Knowing what dreams had in store for her, she forced herself to stay awake; dark rings appeared under her eyes, which were covered in a thin, filmy glaze; and gradually the blurriness of her perceptions merged waking and dreaming into something very like each other ... a dangerous condition to get into, Padma. Not only does your work suffer but things start escaping from your dreams.. .Joseph D'Costa had, in fact, managed to cross the blurred frontier, and now appeared in Buckingham Villa not as a nightmare, but as a full-fledged ghost. Visible (at this time) only to Mary Pereira, he began haunting her in all the rooms of our Home, which, to her horror and shame, he treated as casually as if it were his own. She saw him in the drawing-room amongst cut-glass vases and Dresden figurines and the rotating shadows of ceiling fans, lounging in soft armchairs with his long raggedy legs sprawling over the arms; his eyes were filled up with egg-whites and there were holes in his feet where the snake had bitten him. Once she saw him in Amina Begum's bed in the afternoon, lying down cool as cucumber right next to my sleeping mother, and she burst out, 'Hey, you! Go on out from there! What do you think, you're some sort of lord?' - but she only succeeded in awaking my puzzled mother. Joseph's ghost plagued Mary wordlessly; and the worst of it was that she found herself growing accustomed to him, she found forgotten sensations of fondness nudging at her insides, and although she told herself it was a crazy thing to do she began to be filled with a kind of nostalgic love for the spirit of the dead hospital porter.



But the love was not returned; Joseph's egg-white eyes remained expressionless; his lips remained set in an accusing, sardonic grin; and at last she realized that this new manifestation was no different from her old dream-Joseph (although it never assaulted her), and that if she was ever to be free of him she would have to do the unthinkable thing and confess her crime to the world. But she didn't confess, which was probably my fault - because Mary loved me like her own unconceived and inconceivable son, and to make her confession would have hurt me badly, so for my sake she suffered the ghost of her conscience and stood haunted in the kitchen (my father had sacked the cook one djinn-soaked evening) cooking our dinner and becoming, accidentally, the embodiment of the opening line of my Latin textbook, Ora Maritima: 'By the side of the sea, the ayah cooked the meal.' Ora maritima, ancilla cenam parat. Look into the eyes of a cooking ayah, and you will see more than textbooks ever know.



On my tenth birthday, many chickens were coming Home to roost. On my tenth birthday, it was clear that the freak weather -storms, floods, hailstones from a cloudless sky - which had succeeded the intolerable heat of 1956, had managed to wreck the second Five Year Plan. The government had been forced - although the elections were just around the corner - to announce to the world that it could accept no more development loans unless the lenders were willing to wait indefinitely for repayment. (But let me not overstate the case: although the production of finished steel reached only 2.4 million tons by the Plan's end in 1961, and although, during those five years, the number of landless and unemployed masses actually increased, so that it was greater than it had ever been under the British Raj, there were also substantial gains. The production of iron ore was almost doubled; power capacity did double; coal production leaped from thirty-eight million to fifty-four million tons. Five billion yards of cotton textiles were produced each year. Also large numbers of bicycles, machine tools, diesel engines, power pumps and ceiling fans. But I can't help ending on a downbeat: illiteracy survived unscathed; the population continued to mushroom.)



On my tenth birthday, we were visited by my uncle Hanif, who made himself excessively unpopular at Methwold's Estate by booming cheerily, 'Elections coming! Watch out for the Communists!'



On my tenth birthday, when my uncle Hanif made his gaffe, my mother (who had begun disappearing on mysterious 'shopping trips') dramatically and unaccountably blushed.



On my tenth birthday, I was given an Alsatian puppy with a false pedigree who would shortly die of syphilis.



On my tenth birthday, everyone at Methwold's Estate tried hard to be cheerful, but beneath this thin veneer everyone was possessed by the same thought: 'Ten years, my God! Where have they gone? What have we done?'



On my tenth birthday, old man Ibrahim announced his support for the Maha Gujarat Parishad; as far as possession of the city of Bombay was concerned, he nailed his colours to the losing side.



On my tenth birthday, my suspicions aroused by a blush, I spied on my mother's thoughts; and what I saw there led to my beginning to follow her, to my becoming a private eye as daring as Bombay's legendary Dom Minto, and to important discoveries at and in the vicinity of the Pioneer Cafe.



On my tenth birthday, I had a party, which was attended by my family, which had forgotten how to be gay, by classmates from the Cathedral School, who had been sent by their parents, and by a number of mildly bored girl swimmers from the Breach Candy Pools, who permitted the Brass Monkey to fool around with them and pinch their bulging musculatures; as for adults, there were Mary and Alice Pereira, and the Ibrahims and Homi Catrack and Uncle Hanif and Pia Aunty, and Lila Sabarmati to whom the eyes of every schoolboy (and also Homi Catrack) remained firmly glued, to the considerable irritation of Pia.



But the only member of the hilltop gang to attend was loyal Sonny Ibrahim, who had defied an embargo placed upon the festivities by an embittered Evie Burns.



He gave me a message: 'Evie says to tell you you're out of the gang.'



On my tenth birthday, Evie, Eyeslice, Hairoil and even Cyrus-the-great stormed my private hiding-place; they occupied the clock-tower, and deprived me of its shelter.



On my tenth birthday, Sonny looked upset, and the Brass Monkey detached herself from her swimmers and became utterly furious with Evie Burns. Til teach her,'



she told me. 'Don't you worry, big brother; I'll show that one, all right.'



On my tenth birthday, abandoned by one set of children, I learned that five hundred and eighty-one others were celebrating their birthdays, too; which was how I understood the secret of my original hour of birth; and, having been expelled from one gang, I decided to form my own, a gang which was spread over the length and breadth of the country, and whose headquarters were behind my eyebrows.



And on my tenth birthday, I stole the initials of the Metro Cub Club - which were also the initials of the touring English cricket team - and gave them to the new Midnight Children's Conference, my very own M.C.C.



That's how it was when I was ten: nothing but trouble outside my head, nothing but miracles inside it.

At the Pioneer Cafe



No colours except green and black the walls are green the sky is black (there is no roof) the stars are green the Widow is green but her hair is black as black.



The Widow sits on a high high chair the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's hair has a centre-parting it is green on the left and on the right black. High as the sky the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's arm is long as death its skin is green the fingernails are long and sharp and black.



Between the walls the children green the walls are green the Widow's arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow's arm is hunting see the children run and scream the Widow's hand curls round them green and black. Now one by one the children mmff are stifled quiet the Widow's hand is lifting one by one the children green their blood is black unloosed by cutting fingernails it splashes black on walls (of green) as one by one the curling hand lifts children high as sky the sky is black there are no stars the Widow laughs her tongue is green but her teeth are black. And children torn in two in Widow hands which rolling rolling halves of children roll them into little balls the balls are green the night is black. And little balls fly into night between the walls the children shriek as one by one the Widow's hand. And in a corner the Monkey and I (the walls are green the shadows black) cowering crawling wide high walls green fading into black there is no roof and Widow's hand comes onebyone the children scream and mmff and little balls and hand and scream and mmff and splashing stains of black. Now only she and I and no more screams the Widow's hand comes hunting hunting the skin is green the nails are black towards the corner hunting hunting while we shrink closer into the corner our skin is green our fear is black and now the Hand comes reaching reaching and she my sister pushes me out out of the corner while she stays cowering staring the hand the nails are curling scream and mmff and splash of black and up into the high as sky and laughing Widow tearing I am rolling into little balls the balls are green and out into the night the night is black ...



The fever broke today. For two days (I'm told) Padma has been sitting up all night, placing cold wet flannels on my forehead, holding me through my shivers and dreams of Widow's hands; for two days she has been blaming herself for her potion of unknown herbs. 'But,' I reassure her, 'this time, it wasn't anything to do with that.' I recognize this fever; it's come up from inside me and from nowhere else; like a bad stink, it's oozed through my cracks. I caught exactly such a fever on my tenth birthday, and spent two days in bed; now, as my memories return to leak out of me, this old fever has come back, too. 'Don't worry,' I say, 'I caught these germs almost twenty-one years ago.'



We are not alone. It is morning at the pickle-factory; they have brought my son to see me. Someone (never mind who) stands beside Padma at my bedside, holding him in her arms. 'Baba, thank God you are better, you don't know what you were talking in your sickness.' Someone speaks anxiously, trying to force her way into my story ahead of time; but it won't work... someone, who founded this pickle-factory and its ancillary bottling works, who has been looking after my impenetrable child, just as once ... wait on! She nearly wormed it out of me then, but fortunately I've still got my wits about me, fever or no fever! Someone will just have to step back and remain cloaked in anonymity until it's her turn; and that won't be until the very end. I turn my eyes away from her to look at Padma. 'Do not think,' I admonish her, 'that because I had a fever, the things I told you were not completely true. Everything happened just as I described.'



'O God, you and your stories,' she cries, 'all day, all night -you have made yourself sick! Stop some time, na, what will it hurt?' I set my lips obstinately; and now she, with a sudden change of mood: 'So, tell me now, mister: is there anything you want7'



'Green chutney,' I request, 'Bright green - green as grasshoppers.' And someone who cannot be named remembers and tells Padma (speaking in the soft voice which is only used at sickbeds and funerals), 'I know what he means.'



... Why, at this crucial instant, when all manner of things were . waiting to be described - when the Pioneer Cafe was so close, and the rivalry of knees and nose - did I introduce a mere condiment into the conversation? (Why do I waste time, in this account, on a humble preserve, when I could be describing the elections of 1957 -when all India is waiting, twenty-one years ago, to vote?)



Because I sniffed the air; and scented, behind the solicitous expressions of my visitors, a sharp whiff of danger. I intended to defend myself; but I required the assistance of chutney ...



I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what has remained undescribed: through green-tinged glass windows, my room looks out on to an iron catwalk and then down to the cooking-floor, where copper vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps, working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle fumes; while (looking the other way, through a green-tinged window on the world) railway tracks shine dully in morning sun, bridged over at regular intervals by the messy gantries of the electrification system. In daylight, our saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance above the factory doors; we switch her off to save power. But electric trains are using power: yellow-and-brown local trains clatter south towards Churchgate Station from Dadar and Borivli, from Kurla and Bassein Road. Human flies hang in thick white-trousered dusters from the trains; I do not deny that, within the factory walls, you may also see some flies. But there are also compensating lizards, hanging stilly upside-down on the ceiling, their jowls reminiscent of the Kathiawar peninsula ... sounds, too, have been waiting to be heard: bubbling of vats, loud singing, coarse imprecations, bawdy humour of fuzz-armed women; the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped admonitions of overseers; the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the adjacent bottling-works; and rush of trains, and the buzzing (infrequent, but inevitable) of flies ... while grasshopper-green chutney is being extracted from its vat, to be brought on a wiped-clean plate with saffron and green stripes around the rim, along with another plate piled high with snacks from the local Irani shop; while what-has-now-been-shown goes on as usual, and what-can-now-be-heard fills the air (to say nothing of what can be smelled), I, alone in bed in my office realize with a start of alarm that outings are being suggested.



'... When you are stronger,' someone who cannot be named is saying, 'a day at Elephanta, why not, a nice ride in a motor-launch, and all those caves with so-beautiful carvings; or Juhu Beach, for swimming and coconut-milk and camel-races; or Aarey Milk Colony, even! ...' And Padma: 'Fresh air, yes, and the little one will like to be with his father.' And someone, patting my son on his head: 'There, of course, we will all go. Nice picnic; nice day out. Baba, it will do you good ...'



As chutney arrives, bearer-borne, in my room, I hasten to put a stop to these suggestions. 'No,' I refuse. 'I have work to do.' And I see a look pass between Padma and someone; and I see that I've been right to be suspicious. Because I've been tricked by offers of picnics once before! Once before, false smiles and offers of Aarey Milk Colony have fooled me into going out of doors and into a motor car; and then before I knew it there were hands seizing me, there were hospital corridors and doctors and nurses holding me in place while over my nose a mask poured anaesthetic over me and a voice said, Count now, count to ten ...



I know what they are planning. 'Listen,' I tell them, 'I don't need doctors.'



And Padma, 'Doctors? Who is talking about...' But she is fooling nobody; and with a little smile I say, 'Here: everybody: take some chutney. I must tell you some important things.'



And while chutney - the same chutney which, back in 1957, my ayah Mary Pereira had made so perfectly; the grasshopper-green chutney which is forever associated with those days - carried them back into the world of my past, while chutney mellowed them and made them receptive, I spoke to them, gently, persuasively, and by a mixture of condiment and oratory kept myself out of the hands of the pernicious green-Medicine men. I said: 'My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I'm telling my story for him, so that afterwards, when I've lost my struggle against cracks, he will know. Morality, judgment, character ... it all starts with memory ... and I am keeping carbons.'



Green chutney on chilli-pakoras, disappearing down someone's gullet; grasshopper-green on tepid chapatis, vanishing behind Padma's lips. I see them begin to weaken, and press on. 'I told you the truth,' I say yet again, 'Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.'



Yes: I said 'sane'. I knew what they were thinking: 'Plenty of children invent imaginary friends; but one thousand and one! That's just crazy!' The midnight children shook even Padma's faith in my narrative; but I brought her round, and now there's no more talk of outings.



How I persuaded them: by talking about my son, who needed to know my story; by shedding light on the workings of memory; and by other devices, some naively honest, others wily as foxes. 'Even Muhammad,' I said, 'at first believed himself insane: do you think the notion never crossed my mind? But the Prophet had his Khadija, his Abu-Bakr, to reassure him of the genuineness of his Calling; nobody betrayed him into the hands of asylum-doctors.' By now, the green chutney was filling them with thoughts of years ago; I saw guilt appear on their faces, and shame. 'What is truth?' I waxed rhetorical, 'What is sanity?



Did Jesus rise up from the grave? Do Hindus not accept - Padma - that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma dreamed, is dreaming the universe; that we only see dimly through that dream-web, which is Maya. Maya,' I adopted a haughty, lecturing tone, 'may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit. Apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya. If I say that certain things took place which you, lost in Brahma's dream, find hard to believe, then which of us is right? Have some more chutney,' I added graciously, taking a generous helping myself. 'It tastes very good.'



Padma began to cry. 'I never said I didn't believe, she wept. 'Of course, every man must tell his story in his own true way; but...'



'But,' I interrupted conclusively, 'you also - don't you - want to know what happens? About the hands that danced without touching, and the knees? And later, the curious baton of Commander Sabarmati, and of course the Widow? And the Children - what became of them?'

Faced with a picture of such grotesque proportions, I allowed the smile on my own beaming image to wither a little; my outstretched hand began to falter and twitch. And Shiva, feeling my presence, reacted at first with utter rage; great boiling waves of anger scalded the inside of my head; but then, 'Hey - look - I know you! You're the rich kid from Methwold's Estate, isn't it?' And I, equally astonished, 'Winkle's son - the one who blinded Eyeslice!' His self-image puffed up with pride. 'Yah, yaar, that's me. Nobody messes with me, man!' Recognition reduced me to banalities: 'So! How's your father, anyway? He doesn't come round ...' And he, with what felt very like relief: 'Him, man? My father's dead.'



A momentary pause; then puzzlement - no anger now - and Shiva, 'Lissen, yaar, this is damn good - how you doin' it?' I launched into my standard explanation, but after a few instants he interrupted, 'So! Lissen, my father said I got born at exactly midnight also - so don't you see, that makes us joint bosses of this gang of yours! Midnight is best, agreed? So - those other kids gotta do like we tell them!' There rose before my eyes the image of a second, and more potent, Evelyn Lilith Burns ... dismissing this unkind notion, I explained, "That wasn't exactly my idea for the Conference; I had in mind something more like a, you know, sort of loose federation of equals, all points of view given free expression..." Something resembling a violent snort echoed around the walls of my head. 'That, man, that's only rubbish. What we ever goin' to do with a gang like that? Gangs gotta have gang bosses. You take me -' (the puff of pride again) 'I been running a gang up here in Matunga for two years now. Since I was eight. Older kids and all. What d'you think of that?' And I, without meaning to, 'What's it do, your gang - does it have rules and all?' Shiva-laughter in my ears ... 'Yah, little rich boy: one rule. Everybody does what I say or I squeeze the shit outa them with my knees!' Desperately, I continued to try and win Shiva round to my point of view: 'The thing is, we must be here for a purpose, don't you think? I mean, there has to be a reason, you must agree? So what I thought, we should try and work out what it is, and then, you know, sort of dedicate our lives to...' 'Rich kid,' Shiva yelled, 'you don't know one damn thing! What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara?



For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man?



God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you - you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy.



Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind!'



And now I, in my midnight bed, begin to shake ... 'But history,' I say, 'and the Prime Minister wrote me a letter... and don't you even believe in ... who knows what we might...' He, my alter ego, Shiva, butted in: 'Lissen, little boy - you're so full of crazy stuff, I can see I'm going to have to take this thing over. You tell that to all these other freak kids!'



Nose and knees and knees and nose ... the rivalry that began that night would never be ended, until two knives slashed, downdown-down ... whether the spirits of Mian Abdullah, whom knives killed years before, had leaked into me, imbuing me with the notion of loose federalism and making me vulnerable to knives, I cannot say; but at that point I found a measure of courage and told Shiva, 'You can't run the Conference; without me, they won't even be able to listen to you!'



And he, confirming the declaration of war: 'Rich kid, they'll want to know about me; you just try and stop me!'



'Yes,' I told him, I'll try.'



Shiva, the god of destruction, who is also most potent of deities; Shiva, greatest of dancers; who rides on a bull; whom no force can resist... the boy Shiva, he told us, had to fight for survival from his earliest days. And when his father had, about a year previously, completely lost his singing voice, Shiva had had to defend himself against Wee Willie Winkie's parental zeal. 'He blindfolded me, man! He wrapped a rag around my eyes an' took me to the roof of the chawl, man! You know what was in his hand? A sister-sleeping hammer, man! A hammer! Bastard was going to smash my legs up, man - it happens, you know, rich boy, they do it to kids so they can always earn money begging - you get more if you're all broken up, man! So I'm pushed over till I'm lying down on the roof, man; and then -' And then hammer swinging down towards knees larger and knobblier than any policeman's, an easy target, but now the knees went into action, faster than lightning the knees parted - felt the breath of the down-rushing hammer and spread wide apart; and then hammer plunging between knees, still held in his father's hand; and then, the knees rushing together like fists. The hammer, clattering harmlessly on concrete. The wrist of Wee Willie Winkie, clamped between the knees of his blindfolded son. Hoarse breaths escaping from the lips of the anguished father. And still the knees, closing ininin, tighter and tighter, until there is a snap. 'Broke his goddamn wrist, man! That showed him - damn fine, no? I swear!'



Shiva and I were born under Capricorn rising; the constellation left me alone, but it gave Shiva its gift. Capricorn, as any astrologer will tell you, is the heavenly body with power over the knees.



On election day, 1957, the All-India Congress was badly shocked. Although it won the election, twelve million votes made the Communists the largest single opposition party; and in Bombay, despite the efforts of Boss Patil, large numbers of electors failed to place their crosses against the Congress symbol of sacred-cow-and-suckling-calf, preferring the less emotive pictograms of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti and Maha Gujarat Parishad. When the Communist peril was discussed on our hillock, my mother continued to blush; and we resigned ourselves to the partition of the state of Bombay.



One member of the Midnight Children's Conference played a minor role in the elections. Winkle's supposed son Shiva was recruited by - well, perhaps I will not name the party; but only one party had really large sums to spend - and on polling day, he and his gang, who called themselves Cowboys, were to be seen standing outside a polling station in the north of the city, some holding long stout sucks, others juggling with stones, still others picking their teeth with knives, all of them encouraging the electorate to use its vote with wisdom and care ... and after the polls closed, were seals broken on ballot-boxes? Did ballot-stuffing occur? At any rate, when the votes were counted, it was discovered that Qasim the Red had narrowly failed to win the seat; and my rival's paymasters were well pleased.



... But now Padma says, mildly, 'What date was it?' And, without thinking, I answer: 'Some time in the spring.' And then it occurs to me that I have made another error - that the election of 1957 took place before, and not after, my tenth birthday; but although I have racked my brains, my memory refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events. This is worrying. I don't know what's gone wrong.



She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!'



But if small things go, will large things be close behind?

So we come to the events of the Cathedral School Social. At which bullies became instruments of destiny, and fingers were transmuted into fountains, and Masha Miovic, the legendary breast-stroker, fell into a dead faint... I arrived at the Social with the nurse's bandage still on my head. I was late, because it hadn't been easy to persuade my mother to let me come; so by the time I stepped into the Assembly Hall, beneath streamers and balloons and the professionally suspicious gazes of bony female chaperones, all the best girls were already box-stepping and Mexican-Hatting with absurdly smug partners. Naturally, the prefects had the pick of the ladies; I watched them with passionate envy, Guzder and Joshi and Stevenson and Rushdie and Talyarkhan and Tayabali and Jussawalla and Wagle and King; I tried butting in on them during excuse-mes but when they saw my bandage and my cucumber of a nose and the stains on my face they just laughed and turned their backs ... hatred burgeoning in my bosom, I ate potato chips and drank Bubble-Up and Vimto and told myself, 'Those jerks; if they knew who I was they'd get out of my way pretty damn quick!' But still the fear of revealing my true nature was stronger than my somewhat abstract desire for the whirling European girls.

'Hey, Saleem, isn't it? Hey, man, what happened to you?' I was dragged out of my bitter, solitary reverie (even Sonny had someone to dance with; but then, he had his forcep-hollows, and he didn't wear underpants - there were reasons for his attractiveness) by a voice behind my left shoulder, a low, throaty voice, full of promises - but also of menace. A girl's voice. I turned with a sort of jump and found myself staring at a vision with golden hair and a prominent and famous chest ... my God, she was fourteen years old, why was she talking to me? ... 'My name is Masha Miovic,' the vision said, 'I've met your sister.'

Of course! The Monkey's heroines, the swimmers from Walsingham School, would certainly know the Schools champion breast-stroker!... 'I know ..." I stuttered, 'I know your name.'



'And I know yours,' she straightened my tie, 'so that's fair.' Over her shoulder, I saw Glandy Keith and Fat Perce watching us in drooling paroxysms of envy. I straightened my back and pushed out my shoulders. Masha Miovic asked again about my bandage. 'It's nothing,' I said in what I hoped was a deep voice, 'A sporting accident.' And then, working feverishly to hold my voice steady, 'Would you like to ... to dance?'



'Okay,' said Masha Miovic, 'But don't try any smooching.'



Saleem takes the floor with Masha Miovic, swearing not to smooch. Saleem and Masha, doing the Mexican Hat; Masha and Saleem, box- stepping with the best of them! I allow my face to adopt a superior expression; you see, you don't have to be a prefect to get a girl! ... The dance ended; and, still on top of my wave of elation, I said, 'Would you care for a stroll, you know, in the quad?'



Masha Miovic smiling privately. 'Well, yah, just for a sec; but hands off, okay?'



Hands off, Saleem swears. Saleem and Masha, taking the air ... man, this is fine. This is the life. Goodbye Evie, hello breast-stroke ... Glandy Keith Colaco and Fat Perce Fishwala step out of the shadows of the quadrangle. They are giggling: '湾?hee.' Masha Miovic looks puzzled as they block our path. 'Hoo hoo,' Fat Perce says, 'Masha, hoo hoo. Some date you got there.' And I, 'Shut up, you.' Whereupon Glandy Keith, 'You wanna know how he got his war-wound, Mashy?' And Fat Perce, '湾?hoo ha.' Masha says, 'Don't be crude; he got it in a sporting accident!' Fat Perce and Glandy Keith are almost falling over with mirth; then Fishwala reveals all. 'Zagallo pulled his hair out in class!' 湾? hoo. And Keith, 'Snotnose is a bal-die!' And both together, 'Sniffer's got a map-face!' There is puzzlement on Masha Miovic's face. And something more, some budding spirit of sexual mischief... 'Saleem, they're being so rude about you!'



'Yes,' I say, 'ignore them.' I try to edge her away. But she goes on, 'You aren't going to let them get away with it?' There are beads of excitement on her upper lip; her tongue is in the corner of her mouth; the eyes of Masha Miovic say, What are you? A man or a mouse? ... and under the spell of the champion breast-stroker, something else floats into my head: the image of two irresistible knees; and now I am rushing at Colaco and Fishwala; while they are distracted by giggles, my knee drives into Glandy's groin; before he's dropped, a similar genuflection has laid Fat Perce low. I turn to my mistress; she applauds, softly. 'Hey man, pretty good.'



But now my moment has passed; and Fat Perce is picking himself up, and Glandy Keith is already moving towards me ... abandoning all pretence of manhood, I turn and run. And the two bullies are after me and behind them comes Masha Miovic calling, 'Where are you running, little hero?' But there's no time for her now, mustn't let them get me, into the nearest classroom and try and shut the door, but Fat Perce's foot is in the way and now the two of them are inside too and I dash at the door, I grab it with my right hand, trying to force it open, get out if you can, they are pushing the door shut, but I'm pulling with the strength of my fear, I have it open a few inches, my hand curls around it, and now Fat Perce slams all his weight against the door and it shuts too fast for me to get my hand out of the way and it's shut. A thud. And outside, Masha Miovic arrives and looks down at the floor; and sees the top third of my middle finger lying there like a lump of well-chewed bubble-gum. This was the point at which she fainted.



No pain. Everything very far away. Fat Perce and Glandy Keith fleeing, to get help or to hide. I look at my hand out of pure curiosity. My finger has become a fountain: red liquid spurts out to the rhythm of my heart-beat. Never knew a finger held so much blood. Pretty. Now here's nurse, don't worry, nurse. Only a scratch. Your parents are being phoned; Mr Crusoe is getting his car keys. Nurse is putting a great wad of cotton-wool over the stump. Filling up like red candyfloss. And now Crusoe. Get in the car, Saleem, your mother is going straight to the hospital. Yes sir. And the bit, has anybody got the bit? Yes headmaster here it is. Thank you nurse. Probably no use but you never know. Hold this while I drive, Saleem ... and holding up my severed finger-dp in my unmutilated left hand, I am driven to the Breach Candy Hospital through the echoing streets of night.



At the hospital: white walls stretchers everyone talking at once. Words pour around me like fountains. 'O God preserve us, my little piece-of-the-moon, what have they done to you?' To which old Crusoe, 'Heh heh. Mrs Sinai. Accidents will happen. Boys will be.' But my mother, enraged, 'What kind of school? Mr Caruso?



I'm here with my son's finger in pieces and you tell me. Not good enough. No, sir.' And now, while Crusoe, 'Actually the name's - like Robinson, you know - heh heh,' the doctor is approaching and a question is being asked, whose answer will change the world.



'Mrs Sinai, your blood group, please? The boy has lost blood. A transfusion may be necessary.' And Amina: 'I am A; but my husband, O.' And now she is crying, breaking down, and still the doctor, 'Ah; in that case, are you aware of your son's ...' But she, the doctor's daughter, must admit she cannot answer the question: Alpha or Omega? 'Well in that case a very quick test; but on the subject of rhesus?' My mother, through her tears: 'Both my husband and I, rhesus positive.' And the doctor, 'Well, good, that at least.'



But when I am on the operating table - 'Just sit there, son, I'll give you a local anaesthetic, no, madam, he's in shock, total anaesthesia would be impossible, all right son, just hold your finger up and still, help him nurse, and it'll be over in a jiffy' - while the surgeon is sewing up the stump and performing the miracle of transplanting the roots of the nail, all of a sudden there's a fluster in the background, a million miles away, and 'Have you got a second Mrs Sinai' and I can't hear properly ... words float across the in-finite distance ... Mrs Sinai, you are sure? ?and A? A and O? And rhesus negative, both of you? Heterozygous or homozygous? No, there must be some mistake, how can he be... I'm sorry, absolutely clear... positive ... and neither A nor ...



excuse me, Madam, but is he your ... not adopted or ... The hospital nurse interposes herself between me and miles-away chatter, but it's no good, because now my mother is shrieking, 'But of course you must believe me, doctor; my God, of course he is our son!'



Neither A nor O. And the rhesus factor: impossibly negative. And zygosity offers no clues. And present in the blood, rare Kell antibodies. And my mother, crying, crying-crying, crying... 'I don't understand. A doctor's daughter, and I don't understand.'



Have Alpha and Omega unmasked me? Is rhesus pointing its unanswerable finger?



And will Mary Pereira be obliged to ... I wake up in a cool, white, Venetian-blinded room with All-India Radio for company. Tony Brent is singing: 'Red Sails In The Sunset'.



Ahmed Sinai, his face ravaged by whisky and now by something worse, stands beside the Venetian blind. Amina, speaking in whispers. Again, snatches across the million miles of distance. Janumplease. Ibegyou. No, what are you saying. Of course it was. Of course you are the. How could you think I would. Who could it have. ?God don't just stand and look. I swear Iswearonmymother'shead. Now shh he is ...



A new song from Tony Brent, whose repertoire today is uncannily similar to Wee Willie Winkie's: 'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' hangs in the air, floating on radio waves. My father advances on my bed, towers over me, I've never seen him look like this before. 'Abba...' And he, 'I should have known.



Just look, where am I in that face. That nose, I should have ...' He turns on his heel and leaves the room; my mother follows him, too distraught to whisper now: 'No, janum, I won't let you believe such things about me! I'll kill myself! I'll,' and the door swings shut behind them. There is a noise outside: like a clap. Or a slap. Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.



Tony Brent begins crooning his latest hit into my good ear: and assures me, melodiously, that 'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By'.



... And now I, Saleem Sinai, intend briefly to endow my self-then with the benefits of hindsight; destroying the unities and conventions of fine writing, I make him cognizant of what was to come, purely so that he can be permitted to think the following thoughts: 'O eternal opposition of inside and outside! Because a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. The body, on the other hand, is homogeneous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, a sacred temple, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness. But the loss of my finger (which was conceivably foretold by the pointing digit of Raleigh's fisherman), not to mention the removal of certain hairs from my head, has undone all that.



Thus we enter into a state of affairs which is nothing short of revolutionary; and its effect on history is bound to be pretty damn startling. Uncork the body, and God knows what you permit to come tumbling out. Suddenly you are forever other than you were; and the world becomes such that parents can cease to be parents, and love can turn to hate. And these, mark you, are only the effects on private life. The consequences for the sphere of public action, as will be shown, are -were - will be no less profound.'



Finally, withdrawing my gift of foreknowledge, I leave you with the image of a ten-year-old boy with a bandaged finger, sitting in a hospital bed, musing about blood and noises-like-claps and the expression on his father's face; zooming out slowly into long-shot, I allow the sound-track music to drown my words, because Tony Brent is reaching the end of his medley, and his finale, too, is the same as Winkie's: 'Good Night, Ladies' is the name of the song. Merrily it rolls along, rolls along, rolls along ...




(Fade-out.)

A few months later, when Mary Pereira finally confessed her crime, and revealed the secrets of her eleven-year-long haunting by the ghost of Joseph D'Costa, we learned that, after her return from exile, she was badly shocked by the condition into which the ghost had fallen in her absence. It had begun to decay, so that now bits of it were missing: an ear, several toes on each foot, most of its teeth; and there was a hole in its stomach-larger than an egg. Distressed by this crumbling spectre, she asked it (when she was sure nobody else was within earshot): 'O God, Joe, what you been doing to yourself?' He replied that the responsibility of her crime had been placed squarely on his shoulders until she confessed, and it was playing hell with his system. From that moment it became inevitable that she would confess; but each time she looked at me she found herself prevented from doing so. Still, it was only a matter of time.

In the meanwhile, and utterly ignorant of how close I was to being exposed as a fraud, I was attempting to come to terms with a Methwold's Estate in which, too, a number of transformations had occurred. In the first place, my father seemed to want nothing more to do with me, an attitude of mind which I found hurtful but (considering my mutilated body) entirely understandable. In the second place, there was the remarkable change in the fortunes of the Brass Monkey. 'My position in this household,' I was obliged to admit to myself, 'has been usurped.' Because now it was the Monkey whom my father admitted into the abstract sanctum of his office, the Monkey whom he smothered in his squashy belly, and who was obliged to bear the burdens of his dreams about the future. I even heard Mary Pereira singing to the Monkey the little ditty which had been my theme-song all my days: 'Anything you want to be,' Mary sang, 'you can be; You can be just what-all you want!' Even my mother seemed to have caught the mood; and now it was my sister who always got the biggest helping of chips at the dinner-table, and the extra nargisi kofta, and the choicest pasanda. While I - whenever anyone in the house chanced to look at me - was conscious of a deepening furrow between their eyebrows, and an atmosphere of confusion and distrust. But how could I complain? The Monkey had tolerated my special position for years. With the possible exception of the time I fell out of a tree in our garden after she nudged me (which could have been an accident, after all), she had accepted my primacy with excellent grace and even loyalty. Now it was my turn; long-trousered, I was required to be adult about my demotion. 'This growing up,' I told myself, 'is harder than I expected.'

The Monkey, it must be said, was no less astonished than I at her elevation to the role of favoured child. She did her best to fall from grace, but it seemed she could do no wrong. These were the days of her flirtation with Christianity, which was partly due to the influence of her European school-friends and partly to the rosary-fingering presence of Mary Pereira (who, unable to go to church because of her fear of the confessional, would regale us instead with Bible stories); mostly, however, I believe it was an attempt by the Monkey to regain her old, comfortable position in the family doghouse (and, speaking of dogs, the Baroness Simki had been put to sleep during my absence, lulled by promiscuity).