Midnight's Children (36 page)

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 neighboring 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 railways 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 rumors 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 full-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 marvelousness, 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 Doctor 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 rusting, 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 odor 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.