The shadow of the Mosque

   No shadow of a doubt: an acceleration is taking place. Rip crunch crack-while road surfaces split in the awesome heat, I, too, am being hurried towards disintegration. What-gnaws-on-bones (which, as I have been regularly obliged to explain to the too many women around me, is far beyond the powers of medicine men to discern, much less to cure) will not be denied for long; and still so much remains to be told… Uncle Mustapha is growing inside me, and the pout of Parvati-the-witch; a certain lock of hero's hair is waiting in the wings; and also a labour of thirteen days, and history as an analogue of a prime minister's hair-style; there is to be treason, and fare-dodging, and the scent (wafting on breezes heavy with the ululations of widows) of something frying in an iron skillet… so that I, too, am forced to accelerate, to make a wild dash for the finishing line; before memory cracks beyond hope of re-assembly, I must breast the tape. (Although already, already there are fadings, and gaps; it will be necessary to improvise on occasion.)
   Twenty-six pickle-jars stand gravely on a shelf; twenty-six special blends, each with its identifying label, neatly inscribed with familiar phrases: 'Movements Performed by Pepperpots', for instance, or 'Alpha and Omega', or 'Commander Sabarmati's Baton'. Twenty-six rattle eloquently when local trains go yellow-and-browning past; on my desk, five empty jars tinkle urgently, reminding me of my uncompleted task. But now I cannot linger over empty pickle-jars; the night is for words, and green chutney must wait its turn.
   … Padma is wistful: 'O, mister, how lovely Kashmir must be in August, when here it is hot like a chilli!' I am obliged to reprove my plump-yet-muscled companion, whose attention has been wandering; and to observe that our Padma Bibi, long-suffering tolerant consoling, is beginning to behave exactly like a traditional Indian wife. (And I, with my distances and self-absorption, like a husband?) Of late, in spite of my stoic fatalism about the spreading cracks, I have smelled, on Padma's breath, the dream of an alternative (but impossible) future; ignoring the implacable finalities of inner fissures, she has begun to exude the bitter-sweet fragrance of hope-for-marriage. My dung-lotus, who remained impervious for so long to the sneer-lipped barbs hurled by our workforce of downy-forearmed women; who placed her cohabitation with me outside and above all codes of social propriety, has seemingly succumbed to a desire for legitimacy… in short, although she has not said a word on the subject, she is waiting for me to make an honest woman of her. The perfume of her sad hopefulness permeates her most innocently solicitous remarks-even at this very moment, as she, 'Hey, mister, why not-finish your writery and then take rest; go to Kashmir, sit quietly for some time-and maybe you will take your Padma also, and she can look after…?' Behind this burgeoning dream of a Kashmir! holiday (which was once also the dream of Jehangir, the Mughal Emperor; of poor forgotten Ilse Lubin; and, perhaps, of Christ himself), I nose out the presence of another dream; but neither this nor that can be fulfilled. Because now the cracks, the cracks and always the cracks are narrowing my future towards its single inescapable fullpoint; and even Padma must take a back seat if I'm to finish my tales.

   Today, the papers are talking about the supposed political rebirth of Mrs. Indira Gandhi; but when I returned to India, concealed in a wicker basket, 'The Madam' was basking in the fullness of her glory. Today, perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly into the insidious clouds of amnesia; but I remember, and will set down, how I-how she-how it happened that-no, I can't say it, I must tell it in the proper order, until there is no option but to reveal… On December 16th, 1971, I tumbled out of a basket into an India in which Mrs. Gandhi's New Congress Party held a more-than-two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.
   In the basket of invisibility, a sense of unfairness turned into anger; and something else besides-transformed by rage, I had also been overwhelmed by an agonizing feeling of sympathy for the country which was not only my twin-in-birth but also joined to me (so to speak) at the hip, so that what happened to either of us, happened to us both. If I, snot-nosed stain-faced etcetera, had had a hard time of it, then so had she, my subcontinental twin sister; and now that I had given myself the right to choose a better future, I was resolved that the nation should share it, too. I think that when I tumbled out into dust, shadow and amused cheers, I had already decided to save the country.
   (But there are cracks and gaps… had I, by then, begun to see that my love for Jamila Singer had been, in a sense, a mistake? Had I already understood how I had simply transferred on to her shoulders the adoration which I now perceived to be a vaulting, all-encompassing love of country? When was it that I realized that my truly-incestuous feelings were for my true birth-sister, India herself, and not for that trollop of a crooner who had so callously shed me, like a used snake-skin, and dropped me into the metaphorical waste-basket of Army life? When when when?… Admitting defeat, I am forced to record that I cannot remember for sure.)
   … Saleem sat blinking in the dust in the shadow of the mosque. A giant was standing over him, grinning hugely, asking, 'Achha, captain, have a good trip?' And Parvati, with huge excited eyes, pouring water from a lotah into his cracked, salty mouth… Feeling! The icy touch of water kept cool in earthenware surahis, the cracked soreness of parched-raw lips, silver-and-lapis clenched in a fist… 'I can feel!' Saleem cried to the good-natured crowd.
   It was the time of afternoon called the chaya, when the shadow of the tall red-brick-and-marble Friday Mosque fell across the higgledy shacks of the slum clustered at its feet, that slum whose ramshackle tin roofs created such a swelter of heat that it was insupportable to be inside the fragile shacks except during the chaya and at night… but now conjurers and contortionists and jugglers and fakirs had gathered in the shade around the solitary stand-pipe to greet the new arrival. 'I can feel!' I cried, and then Picture Singh, 'Okay, captain-tell us, how it feels?-to be born again, falling like baby out of Parvati's basket?' I could smell amazement on Picture Singh; he was clearly astounded by Parvati's trick, but, like a true professional, would not dream of asking her how she had achieved it. In this way Parvati-the-witch, who had used her limitless powers to spirit me to safety, escaped discovery; and also because, as I later discovered, the ghetto of the magicians disbelieved, with the absolute certainty of illusionists-by-trade, in the possibility of magic. So Picture Singh told me, with amazement, 'I swear, captain-you were so light in there, like a baby!'-But he never dreamed that my weightlessness had been anything more than a trick.
   'Listen, baby sahib,' Picture Singh was crying, 'What do you say, baby-captain? Must I put you over my shoulder and make you belch?'-And now Parvati, tolerantly: 'That one, baba, always making joke shoke.' She was smiling radiantly at everyone in sight… but there followed an inauspicious event. A woman's voice began to wail at the back of the cluster of magicians: 'Ai-o-ai-o! Ai-o-o!' The crowd parted in surprise and an old woman burst through it and rushed at Saleem; I was required to defend myself against a brandished frying pan, until Picture Singh, alarmed, seized her by pan-waving arm and bellowed, 'Hey, capteena, why so much noise?' And the old woman, obstinately: 'Ai-o-ai-o!'
   'Resham Bibi,' Parvati said, crossly, 'You got ants in your brain?' And Picture Singh, 'We got a guest, capteena-what'll he do with your shouting? Arre, be quiet, Resham, this captain is known to our Parvati personal! Don't be coming crying in front of him!'
   'Ai-o-ai-o! Bad luck is come! You go to foreign places and bring it here! Ai-oooo!'
   Disturbed visages of magicians stared from Resham Bibi to me-because although they were a people who denied the supernatural, they were artistes, and like all performers had an implicit faith in luck, good-luck-and-bad-luck, luck… 'Yourself you said,' Resham Bibi wailed, 'this man is born twice, and not even from woman! Now comes desolation, pestilence and death. I am old and so I know. Arre baba,' she turned plaintively to face me, 'Have pity only; go now-go go quick!' There was a murmur-'It is true, Resham Bibi knows the old stories'-but then Picture Singh became angry. 'The captain is my honoured guest,' he said, 'He stays in my hut as long as he wishes, for short or for long. What are you all talking? This is no place for fables.'
   Saleem Sinai's first sojourn at the magicians' ghetto lasted only a matter of days; but during that short time, a number of things happened to allay the fears which had been raised by ai-o-ai-o. The plain, unadorned truth is that, in those days, the ghetto illusionists and other artistes began to hit new peaks of achievement-jugglers managed to keep one thousand and one balls in the air at a time, and a fakir's as-yet-untrained protegee strayed on to a bed of hot coals, only to stroll across it unconcerned, as though she had acquired her mentor's gifts by osmosis; I was told that the rope-trick had been successfully performed. Also, the police failed to make their monthly raid on the ghetto, which had not happened within living memory; and the camp received a constant stream of visitors, the servants of the rich, requesting the professional services of one or more of the colony at this or that gala evening's entertainment… it seemed, in fact, as though Resham Bibi had got things the wrong way round, and I rapidly became very popular in the ghetto. I was dubbed Saleem Kismeti, Lucky Saleem; Parvati was congratulated on having brought me to the slum. And finally Picture Singh brought Resham Bibi to apologize.
   'Pol'gize,' Resham said toothlessly and fled; Picture Singh added, 'It is hard for the old ones; their brains go raw and remember upside down. Captain, here everyone is saying you are our luck; but will you go from us soon?'-And Parvati, staring dumbly with saucer eyes which begged no no no; but I was obliged to answer in the affirmative.
   Saleem, today, is certain that he answered, 'Yes'; that on the selfsame morning, still dressed in shapeless robe, still inseparable from a silver spittoon, he walked away, without looking back at a girl who followed him with eyes moistened with accusations; that, strolling hastily past practising jugglers and sweetmeat-stalls which filled his nostrils with the temptations of rasgullas, past barbers offering shaves for ten paisa, past the derelict maunderings of crones and the American-accented caterwauls of shoe-shine boys who importuned bus-loads of Japanese tourists in identical blue suits and incongruous saffron turbans which had been tied around their heads by obsequiously mischievous guides, past the towering flight of stairs to the Friday Mosque, past vendors of notions and itr-essences and plaster-of-Paris replicas of the Qutb Minar and painted toy horses and fluttering unslaughtered chickens, past invitations to cockfights and empty-eyed games of cards, he emerged from the ghetto of the illusionists and found himself on Faiz Bazar, facing the infinitely-extending walls of a Red Fort from whose ramparts a prime minister had once announced independence, and in whose shadow a woman had been met by a peepshow-merchant, a Dilli-dekho man who had taken her into narrowing lanes to hear her son's future foretold amongst mongeese and vultures and broken men with leaves bandaged around their arms; that, to be brief, he turned to his right and walked away from the Old City towards the roseate palaces built by pink-skinned conquerors long ago: abandoning my saviours, I went into New Delhi on foot.
   Why? Why, ungratefully spurning the nostalgic grief of Parvati-the-witch, did I set my face against the old and journey into newness? Why, when for so many years I had found her my staunchest ally in the nocturnal congresses of my mind, did I leave her so lightly in the morning? Fighting past fissured blanks, I am able to remember two reasons; but am unable to say which was paramount, or if a third… firstly, at any rate, I had been taking stock. Saleem, analysing his prospects, had had no option but to admit to himself that they were not good. I was passport-less; in law an illegal immigrant (having once been a legal emigrant); P.O. W. camps were waiting for me everywhere. And even after setting aside my status as defeated-soldier-on-the-run, the list of my disadvantages remained formidable: I had neither funds nor a change of clothes; nor qualifications-having neither completed my education nor distinguished myself in that part of it which I had undergone; how was I to embark on my ambitious project of nation-saving without a roof over my head or a family to protect support assist… it struck me like a thunderclap that I was wrong; that here, in this very city, I had relatives-and not only relatives, but influential ones! My uncle Mustapha Aziz, a senior Civil Servant, who when last heard of had been number two in his Department; what better patron than he for my Messianic ambitions? Under his roof, I could acquire contacts as well as new clothes; under his auspices, I would seek preferment in the Administration, and, as I studied the realities of government, would certainly find the keys of national salvation; and I would have the ears of Ministers, I would perhaps be on first-name terms with the great…! It was in the clutches of this magnificent fantasy that I told Parvati-the-witch, 'I must be off; great matters are afoot!' And, seeing the hurt in her suddenly-inflamed cheeks, consoled her: 'I will come and see you often. Often often.' But she was not consoled… high-mindedness, then, was one motive for abandoning those who had helped me; but was there not something meaner, lowlier, more personal? There was. Parvati had drawn me secretly aside behind a tin-and-cratewood shack; where cockroaches spawned, where rats made love, where flies gorged themselves on pie-dog dung, she clutched me by the wrist and became incandescent of eye and sibilant of tongue; hidden in the putrid underbelly of the ghetto, she confessed that I was not the first of the midnight children to have crossed her path! And now there was a story of a Dacca procession, and magicians marching alongside heroes; there was Parvati looking up at a tank, and there were Parvati-eyes alighting on a pair of gigantic, prehensile knees… knees bulging proudly through starched-pressed uniform; there was Parvati crying, 'O you! O you…' and then the unspeakable name, the name of my guilt, of someone who should have led my life but for a crime in a nursing home; Parvati and Shiva, Shiva and Parvati, fated to meet by the divine destiny of their names, were united in the moment of victory. 'A hero, man!' she hissed proudly behind the shack. They will make him a big officer and all!' And now what was produced from a fold of her ragged attire? What once grew proudly on a hero's head and now nestled against a sorceress's breasts? 'I asked and he gave,' said Parvati-the-witch, and showed me a lock of his hair

   Did I run from that lock of fateful hair? Did Saleem, fearing a reunion with his alter ego, whom he had so-long-ago banned from the councils of the night, flee back into the bosom of that family whose comforts had been denied the war-hero? Was it high-mindedness or guilt? I can no longer say; I set down only what I remember, namely that Parvati-the-witch whispered, 'Maybe he will come when he has time; and then we will be three!' And another, repeated phrase: 'Midnight's children, yaar… that's something, no?' Parvati-the-witch reminded me of things I had tried to put out of my mind; and I walked away from her, to the home of Mustapha Aziz.

   Of my last miserable contact with the brutal intimacies of family life, only fragments remain; however, since it must all be set down and subsequently pickled, I shall attempt to piece together an account… to begin with, then, let me report that my Uncle Mustapha lived in a commodiously anonymous Civil Service bungalow set in a tidy Civil Service garden just off Rajpath in the heart of Lutyens's city; I walked along what-had-once-been-Kingsway, breathing in the numberless perfumes of the street, which blew out of State Handicraft Emporia arid the exhaust-pipes of auto-rickshaws; the aromas of banyan and deodar mingled with the ghostly scents of long-gone viceroys and mem-sahibs in gloves, and also with the rather more strident bodily odours of gaudy rich begums and tramps. Here was the giant election scoreboard around which (during the first battle-for-power between Indira and Morarji Desai) crowds had thronged, awaiting the results, asking eagerly: 'Is it a boy or a girl?'… amid ancient and modern, between India Gate and the Secretariat buildings, my thoughts teeming with vanished (Mughal and British) empires and also with my own history-because this was the city of the public announcement, of many-headed monsters and a hand, falling from the sky-I marched resolutely onwards, smelling, like everything else in sight, to high heaven. And at last, having turned left towards Dupleix Road, I arrived at an anonymous garden with a low wall and a hedge; in a corner of which I saw a signboard waving in the breeze, just as once signboards had flowered in the gardens of Methwold's Estate; but this echo of the past told a different story. Not for sale, with its three ominous vowels and four fateful consonants; the wooden flower of my uncle's garden proclaimed strangely: Mr Mustapha Aziz and Fly.
   Not knowing that the last word was my uncle's habitual, desiccated abbreviation of the throbbingly emotional noun 'family', I was thrown into confusion by the nodding signboard; after I had stayed in his household for a very short time, however, it began to seem entirely fitting, because the family of Mustapha Aziz was indeed as crushed, as insect-like, as insignificant as that mythically truncated Fly.
   With what words was I greeted when, a little nervously, I rang a doorbell, filled with hopes of beginning a new career? What face appeared behind the wire-netted outer door and scowled in angry surprise? Padma: I was greeted by Uncle Mustapha's wife, by my mad aunt Sonia, with the exclamation; 'Ptui! Allah! How the fellow stinks!'
   And although I, ingratiatingly, 'Hullo, Sonia Aunty darling,' grinned sheepishly at this wire-netting-shaded vision of my aunt's wrinkling Irani beauty, she went on, 'Saleem, is it? Yes, I remember you. Nasty little brat you were. Always thought you were growing up to be God or what. And why? Some stupid letter the P.M.'s fifteenth assistant under-secretary must have sent you.' In that first meeting I should have been able to foresee the destruction of my plans; I should have smelled, on my mad aunt, the implacable odours of Civil Service jealousy, which would thwart all my attempts to gain a place in the world. I had been sent a letter, and she never had; it made us enemies for life. But there was a door, opening; there were whiffs of clean clothes and shower-baths; and I, grateful for small mercies, failed to examine the deadly perfumes of my aunt.
   My uncle Mustapha Aziz, whose once-proudly-waxed moustache had never recovered from the paralysing dust-storm of the destruction of Methwold's Estate, had been passed over for the headship of his Department no less than forty-seven times, and had at last found consolation for his inadequacies in thrashing his children, in ranting nightly about how he was clearly the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice, in a contradictory but absolute loyalty to the government of the day, and in an obsession with genealogies which was his only hobby and whose intensity was greater even than my father Ahmed Sinai's long-ago desire to prove himself descended from Mughal emperors. In the first of these consolations he was willingly joined by his wife, the half-Irani would-be-socialite Sonia (nee Khosrovani), who had been driven certifiably insane by a life in which she had been required to begin 'being a chamcha' (literally a spoon, but idiomatically a flatterer) to forty-seven separate and successive wives of number-ones whom she had previously alienated by her manner of colossal condescension when they had been the wives of number-threes; under the joint batterings of my uncle and aunt, my cousins had by now been beaten into so thorough a pulp that I am unable to recall their number, sexes, proportions or features; their personalities, of course, had long since ceased to exist. In the home of Uncle Mustapha, I sat silently amongst my pulverized cousins listening to his nightly soliloquies which contradicted themselves constantly, veering wildly between his resentment of not having been promoted and his blind lap-dog devotion to every one of the Prime Minister's acts. If Indira Gandhi had asked him to commit suicide, Mustapha Aziz would have ascribed it to anti-Muslim bigotry but also defended the statesmanship of the request, and, naturally, performed the task without daring (or even wishing) to demur.
   As for genealogies: Uncle Mustapha spent all his spare time filling giant log-books with spider-like family trees, eternally researching into and immortalizing the bizarre lineages of the greatest families in the land; but one day during my stay my aunt Sonia heard about a rishi from Hardwar who was reputedly three hundred and ninety-five years old and had memorized the genealogies of every single Brahmin clan in the country. 'Even in that,' she screeched at my uncle, 'you end up being number two!' The existence of the Hardwar rishi completed her descent into insanity, so that her violence towards her children increased to the point at which we lived in daily expectation of murder, and in the end my uncle Mustapha was forced to have her locked away, because her excesses were embarrassing him in his work.
   This, then, was the family to which I had come. Their presence in Delhi came to seem, in my eyes, like a desecration of my own past; in a city which, for me, was forever possessed by the ghosts of the young Ahmed and Amina, this terrible Fly was crawling upon sacred soil.
   But what can never be proved for certain is that, in the years ahead, my uncle's genealogical obsession would be placed at the service of a government which was falling increasingly beneath the twin spells of power and astrology; so that what happened at the Widows' Hostel might never have happened without his help… but no, I have been a traitor, too; I do not condemn; all I am saying is that I once saw, amongst his genealogical log-books, a black leather folder labelled top secret, and titled project m.c.c.
   The end is near, and cannot be escaped much longer; but while the Indira sarkar, like her father's administration, consults daily with purveyors of occult lore; while Benarsi seers help to shape the history of India, I must digress into painful, personal recollections; because it was at Uncle Mustapha's that I learned, for certain, about the deaths of my family in the war of '65; and also about the disappearance, just a few days before my arrival, of the famous Pakistani singer Jamila Singer.
   … When mad aunt Sonia heard that I had fought on the wrong side in the war, she refused to feed me (we were at dinner), and screeched, 'God, you have a cheek, you know that? Don't you have a brain to think with? You come to a Senior Civil Servant's house-an escaped war criminal, Allah! You want to lose your uncle his job? You want to put us all out on the street? Catch your ears for shame, boy! Go-go, get out, or better, we should call the police and hand you over just now! Go, be a prisoner of war, why should we care, you are not even our departed sister's true-born son…'
   Thunderbolts, one after the other: Saleem fears for his safety, and simultaneously learns the inescapable truth about his mother's death, and also that his position is weaker than he thought, because in this part of his family the act of acceptance has not been made; Sonia, knowing what Mary Pereira confessed, is capable of anything!…
   And I, feebly, 'My mother? Departed?' And now Uncle Mustapha, perhaps feeling that his wife has gone too far, says reluctantly, 'Never mind, Saleem, of course you must stay-he must, wife, what else to do?-and poor fellow doesn't even know…'
   Then they told me.
   It occurred to me, in the heart of that crazy Fly, that I owed the dead a number of mourning periods; after I learned of the demise of my mother and father and aunts Alia and Pia and Emerald, of cousin Zafar and his Kifi princess, of Reverend Mother and my distant relative Zohra and her husband, I resolved to spend the next four hundred days in mourning, as was right and proper: ten mourning periods, of forty days each. And then, and then, there was the matter of Jamila Singer…
   She had heard about my disappearance in the turmoil of the war in Bangladesh; she, who always showed her love when it was too late, had perhaps been driven a little crazy by the news. Jamila, the Voice of Pakistan, Bulbul-of-the-Faith, had spoken out against the new rulers of truncated, moth-eaten, war-divided Pakistan; while Mr Bhutto was telling the U.N. Security Council, 'We will build a new Pakistan! A better Pakistan! My country hearkens for me!', my sister was reviling him in public; she, purest of the pure, most patriotic of patriots, turned rebel when she heard about my death. (That, at least, is how I see it; all I heard from my uncle were the bald facts; he had heard them through diplomatic channels, which do not go in for psychological theorizing.) Two days after her tirade against the perpetrators of the war, my sister had vanished off the face of the earth. Uncle Mustapha tried to speak gently: 'Very bad things are happening over there, Saleem; people disappearing all the time; we must fear the worst.'
   No! No no no! Padma: he was wrong! Jamila did not disappear into the clutches of the State; because that same night, I dreamed that she, in the shadows of darkness and the secrecy of a simple veil, not the instantly recognizable gold-brocade tent of Uncle Puffs but a common black burqa, fled by air from the capital city; and here she is, arriving in Karachi, unquestioned unarrested free, she is taking a taxi into the depths of the city, and now there is a high wall with bolted doors and a hatch through which, once, long ago, I received bread, the leavened bread of my sister's weakness, she is asking to be let in, nuns are opening doors as she cries sanctuary, yes, there she is, safely inside, doors being bolted behind her, exchanging one kind of invisibility for another, there is another Reverend Mother now, as Jamila Singer who once, as the Brass Monkey, flirted with Christianity, finds safety shelter peace in the midst of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia… yes, she is there, safe, not vanished, not in the grip of police who kick beat starve, but at rest, not in an unmarked grave by the side of the Indus, but alive, baking bread, singing sweetly to the secret nuns; I know, I know, I know. How do I know? A brother knows; that's all.
   Responsibility, assaulting me yet again: because there is no way out of it-Jamila's fall was, as usual, all my fault.

   I lived in the home of Mr Mustapha Aziz for four hundred and twenty days… Saleem was in belated mourning for his dead; but do not think for one moment that my ears were closed! Don't assume I didn't hear what was being said around me, the repeated quarrels between uncle and aunt (which may have helped him decide to consign her to the insane asylum): Sonia Aziz yelling, 'That bhangi-that dirty-filthy fellow, not even your nephew, I don't know what's got into you, we should throw him out on his ear!' And Mustapha, quietly, replying: 'Poor chap is stricken with grief, so how can we, you just have to look to see, he is not quite right in the head, has suffered many bad things.' Not quite right in the head! That was tremendous, coming from them-from that family beside which a tribe of gibbering cannibals would have seemed calm and civilized! Why did I put up with it? Because I was a man with a dream. But for four hundred and twenty days, it was a dream which failed to come true.
   Droopy-moustachioed, tall-but-stooped, an eternal number-two: my Uncle Mustapha was not my Uncle Hanif. He was the head of the family now, the only one of his generation to survive the holocaust of 1965; but he gave me no help at all… I bearded him in his genealogy-filled study one bitter evening and explained-with proper solemnity and humble but resolute gestures-my historic mission to rescue the nation from her fate; but he sighed deeply and said, 'Listen, Saleem, what would you have me do? I keep you in my house; you eat my bread and do nothing-but that is all right, you are from my dead sister's house, and I must look after-so stay, rest, get well in yourself; then let us see. You want a clerkship or so, maybe it can be fixed; but leave these dreams of God-knows-what. Our country is in safe hands. Already Indiraji is making radical reforms-land reforms, tax structures, education, birth control-you can leave it to her and her sarkar.' Patronizing me, Padma! As if I were a foolish child! O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts!
   At every turn I am thwarted; a prophet in the wilderness, like Maslama, like ibn Sinan! No matter how I try, the desert is my lot. O vile unhelpfulness of lickspittle uncles! O fettering of ambitions by second-best toadying relatives! My uncle's rejection of my pleas for preferment had one grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested her. He was, in fact, preparing me for my return to the magicians' ghetto, and for… for her… the Widow.
   Jealousy: that was it. The great jealousy of my mad aunt Sonia, dripping like poison into my uncle's ears, prevented him from doing a single thing to get me started on my chosen career. The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also: tiny madwomen.
   On the four hundred and eighteenth day of my stay, there was a change in the atmosphere of the madhouse. Someone came to dinner: someone with a plump stomach, a tapering head covered with oily .curls and a mouth as fleshy as a woman's labia. I thought I recognized him from newspaper photographs. Turning to one of my sexless ageless faceless cousins, I inquired with interest, 'Isn't it, you know, Sanjay Gandhi?' But the pulverized creature was too annihilated to be capable of replying… was it wasn't it? I did not, at that time, know what I now set down: that certain high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons of prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves… a few years later, there would be gangs of Sanjays all over India! No wonder that incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth control on the rest of us… so maybe it was, maybe it wasn't; but someone disappeared into my uncle's study with Mustapha Aziz; and that night-I sneaked a look-there was a locked black leather folder saying top secret and also project m.c.c.; and the next morning my uncle was looking at me differently, with fear almost, or with that special look of loathing which Civil Servants reserve for those who fall into official disfavour. I should have known then what was in store for me; but everything is simple with hindsight. Hindsight comes to me now, too late, now that I am finally consigned to the peripheries of history, now that the connections between my life and the nation's have broken for good and all… to avoid my uncle's inexplicable gaze, I went out into the garden; and saw Parvati-the-witch.
   She was squatting on the pavement with the basket of invisibility by her side; when she saw me her eyes brightened with reproach. 'You said you'd come, but you never, so I,' she stuttered. I bowed my head. 'I have been in mourning,' I said, lamely, and she, 'But still you could have-my God, Saleem, you don't know, in our colony I can't tell anyone about my real magic, never, not even Picture Singh who is like a father, I must bottle it and bottle it, because they don't believe in such things, and I thought, Here is Saleem come, now at last I will have one friend, we can talk, we can be together, we have both been, and known, and arre how to say it, Saleem, you don't care, you got what you wanted and went off just like that, I am nothing to you, I know…'
   That night my mad aunt Sonia, herself only days away from confinement in a strait-jacket (it got into the papers, a small piece on an inside page; my uncle's Department must have been annoyed), had one of the fierce inspirations of the profoundly insane and burst into the bedroom into which, half an hour earlier, someone-with-saucer-eyes had climbed through a ground-floor window; she found me in bed with Parvati-the-witch, and after that my Uncle Mustapha lost interest in sheltering me, saying, 'You were born from bhangis, you will remain a dirty type all your life'; on the four hundred and twentieth day after my arrival, I left my uncle's house, deprived of family ties, returned at last to that true inheritance of poverty and destitution of which I had been cheated for so long by the crime of Mary Pereira. Parvati-the-witch was waiting for me on the pavement; I did not tell her that there was a sense in which I'd been glad of the interruption, because as I kissed her in the dark of that illicit midnight I had seen her face changing, becoming the face of a forbidden love; the ghostly features of Jamila Singer replaced these of the witch-girl; Jamila who was (I know it!) safely hidden in a Karachi nunnery was suddenly also here, except that she had undergone a dark, transformation. She had begun to rot, the dread! . pustules and cankers of forbidden love were spreading across her face; just as once the ghost of Joe D'Costa had rotted in the grip of the occult leprosy of guilt, so now the rancid flowers of incest blossomed on my sister's phantasmal features, and I couldn't do it, couldn't kiss touch look upon that intolerable spectral face, I had been on the verge of jerking away with a cry of desperate nostalgia and shame when Sonia Aziz burst in upon us with electric light and screams.
   And as for Mustapha, well, my indiscretion with Parvati may also have been, in his eyes, no more than a useful pretext for getting rid of me; but that must remain in doubt, because the black folder was locked-all I have to go on is a look in his eye, a smell of fear, three initials on a label-because afterwards, when everything was finished, a fallen lady and her labia-lipped son spent two days behind locked doors, burning files; and how can we know whether-or-not one of them was labelled m.C.C.?
   I didn't want to stay, anyway. Family: an overrated idea. Don't think I was sad! Never for a moment imagine that lumps arose in my throat at my expulsion from the last gracious home open to me! I tell you-I was in fine spirits when I left… maybe there is something unnatural about me, some fundamental lack of emotional response; but my thoughts have always aspired to higher things. Hence my resilience. Hit me: I bounce back. (But no resistance is of any use against the cracks.)
   To sum up: forsaking my earlier, naive hopes of preferment in public service, I returned to the magicians' slum and the chaya of the Friday Mosque. Like Gautama, the first and true Buddha, I left my life and comfort and went like a beggar into the world. The date was February 23rd, 1973; coal-mines and the wheat market were being nationalized, the price of oil had begun to spiral up up up, would quadruple in a year, and in the Communist Party of India, the split between Dange's Moscow faction and Namboodiripad's C.P.I.(M.) had become unbridgeable; and I, Saleem Sinai, like India, was twenty-five years, six months and eight days old.

   The magicians were Communists, almost to a man. That's right: reds! Insurrectionists, public menaces, the scum of the earth-a community of the godless living blasphemously in the very shadow of the house of God! Shameless, what's more; innocently scarlet; born with the bloody taint upon their souk! And let me say at once that no sooner had I discovered this than I, who had been raised in India's other true faith, which we may term Businessism, and who had abandoned-been-abandoned-by its practitioners, felt instantly and comfortingly at home. A renegade Businessist, I began zealously to turn red and then redder, as surely and completely as my father had once turned white, so that now my mission of saving-the-country could be seen in a new light; more revolutionary methodologies suggested themselves. Down with the rule of unco-operative box-wallah uncles and their beloved leaders! Full of thoughts of direct-communication-with-the-masses, I settled into the magicians' colony, scraping a living by amusing foreign and native tourists with the marvellous perspicacities of my nose, which enabled me to smell out their simple, touristy secrets. Picture Singh asked me to share his shack. I slept on tattered sackcloth amongst baskets sibilant with snakes; but I did not mind, just as I found myself capable of tolerating hunger thirst mosquitoes and (in the beginning) the bitter cold of a Delhi winter. This Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, was also the ghetto's unquestioned chieftain; squabbles and problems were resolved beneath the shade of his ubiquitous and enormous black umbrella; and I, who could read and write as well as smell, became a sort of aide-de-camp to this monumental man who invariably added a lecture on socialism to his serpentine performances, and who was famous in the main streets and alleys of the city for more than his snake-charmer's skills. I can say, with utter certainty, that Picture Singh was the greatest man I ever met.
   One afternoon during the chaya, the ghetto was visited by another copy of that labia-lipped youth whom I'd seen at my Uncle Mustapha's. Standing on the steps of the mosque, he unfurled a banner which was then held up by two assistants. It read: abolish poverty, and bore the cow-suckling-calf symbol of the Indira Congress. His face looked remarkably like a plump calf's face, and he unleashed a typhoon of halitosis when he spoke. 'Brothers-O! Sisters-O! What does Congress say to you? This: that all men are created equal!' He got no further; the crowd recoiled from his breath of bullock dung under a hot sun, and Picture Singh began to guffaw. 'O ha ha, captain, too good, sir!' And labia-lips, foolishly: 'Okay, you, brother, won't you share the joke?' Picture Singh shook his head, clutched his sides: 'O speech, captain! Absolute master speech!' His laughter rolled out from beneath his umbrella to infect the crowd until all of us were rolling on the ground, laughing, crushing ants, getting covered in dust, and the Congress mooncalf's voice rose in panic: 'What is this? This fellow doesn't think we are equals? What a low impression he must have-' but now Picture Singh, umbrella-over-head, was striding away towards his hut. Labia-lips, in relief, continued his speech… but not for long, because Picture returned, carrying under his left arm a small circular lidded basket and under his right armpit a wooden flute. He placed the basket on the step beside the Congress-wallah's feet; removed the lid; raised flute to lips. Amid renewed laughter, the young politico leaped nineteen inches into the air as a king cobra swayed sleepily up from its home… Labia-lips is crying: 'What are you doing? Trying to kill me to death?' And Picture Singh, ignoring him, his umbrella furled now, plays on, more and more furiously, and the snake uncoils, faster faster Picture Singh plays until the flute's music fills every cranny of the slum and threatens to scale the walls of the mosque, and at last the great snake, hanging in the air, supported only by the enchantment of the tune, stands nine feet long out of the basket and dances on its tail… Picture Singh relents. Nagaraj subsides into coils. The Most Charming Man In The World offers the flute to the Congress youth: 'Okay, captain,' Picture Singh says agreeably, 'you give it a try.' But labia-lips: 'Man, you know I couldn't do it!' Whereupon Picture Singh seizes the cobra just below the head, opens his own mouth wide wide wide, displaying an heroic wreckage of teeth and gums; winking left-eyed at the Congress youth, he inserts the snake's tongue-flicking head into his hideously yawning orifice! A full minute passes before Picture Singh returns the cobra to its basket. Very kindly, he tells the youth: 'You see, captain, here is the truth of the business: some persons are better, others are less. But it may be nice for you to think otherwise.

   Watching this scene, Saleem Sinai learned that Picture Singh and the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was.
   The problems of the magicians' ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India; within the confines of the colony could be found, in miniature, the many divisions and dissensions which racked the Party in the country. Picture Singh, I hasten to add, was above it all; the patriarch of the ghetto, he was the possessor of an umbrella whose shade could restore harmony to the squabbling factions; but the disputes which were brought into the shelter of the snake-charmer's umbrella were becoming more and more bitter, as the prestidigitators, the pullers of rabbits from hats, aligned themselves firmly behind Mr Dange's Moscow-line official C.P.I., which supported Mrs Gandhi throughout the Emergency; the contortionists, however, began to lean more towards the left and the slanting intricacies of the Chinese-oriented wing. Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers applauded the guerrilla tactics of the Naxalite movement; while mesmerists and walkers-on-hot-coals espoused Namboodiripad's manifesto (neither Muscovite nor Pekinese) and deplored the Naxa-lites' violence. There were Trotskyist tendencies amongst card-sharpers, and even a Communism-through-the-ballot-box movement amongst the moderate members of the ventriloquist section. I had entered a milieu in which, while religious and regionalist bigotry were wholly absent, our ancient national gift for fissiparousness had found new outlets. Picture Singh told me, sorrowfully, that during the 1971 general election a bizarre murder had resulted from the quarrel between a Naxalite fire-eater and a Moscow-line conjurer who, incensed by the former's views, had attempted to draw a pistol from his magic hat; but no sooner had the weapon been produced than the supporter of Ho Chi Minh had scorched his opponent to death in a burst of terrifying flame.
   Under his umbrella, Picture Singh spoke of a socialism which owed nothing to foreign influences. 'Listen, captains,' he told warring ventriloquists and puppeteers, 'will you go to your villages and talk about Stalins and Maos? Will Bihari or Tamil peasants care about the killing of Trotsky?' The chaya of his magical umbrella cooled the most intemperate of the wizards; and had the effect, on me, of convincing me that one day soon the snake-charmer Picture Singh would follow in the footsteps of Mian Abdullah so many years ago; that, like the legendary Hummingbird, he would leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will; and that, unlike my grandfather's hero, he would not be stopped until he, and his cause, had won the day… but, but. Always a but but. What happened, happened. We all know that.
   Before I return to telling the story of my private life, I should like it to be known that it was Picture Singh who revealed to me that the country's corrupt, 'black' economy had grown as large as the official, 'white' variety, which he did by showing me a newspaper photograph of Mrs Gandhi. Her hair, parted in the centre, was snow-white on one side and blackasnight on the other, so that, depending on which profile she presented, she resembled either a stoat or an ermine. Recurrence of the centre-parting in history; and also, economy as an analogue of a Prime Ministerial hair-style… I owe these important perceptions to the Most Charming Man In The World. Picture Singh it was who told me that Mishra, the railway minister, was also the officially-appointed minister for bribery, through whom the biggest deals in the black economy were cleared, and who arranged for pay-offs to appropriate ministers and officials; without Picture Singh, I might never have known about the poll-fixing in the state elections in Kashmir. He was no lover of democracy, however: 'God damn this election business, captain,' he told me, 'Whenever they come, something bad happens; and our countrymen behave like clowns.' I, in the grip of my fever-for-revolution, failed to take issue with my mentor.
   There were, of course, a few exceptions to the ghetto's rules: one or two conjurers retained their Hindu faith and, in politics, espoused the Hindusectarian Jana Sangh party or the notorious Ananda Marg extremists; there were even Swatantra voters amongst the jugglers. Non-politically speaking, the old lady Resham Bibi was one of the few members of the community who remained an incurable fantasist, believing (for instance) in the superstition which forbade women to climb mango trees, because a mango tree which had once borne the weight of a woman would bear sour fruit for ever more… and there was the strange fakir named Chishti Khan, whose face was so smooth and lustrous that nobody knew whether he was nineteen or ninety, and who had surrounded his shack with a fabulous creation of bamboo-sticks and scraps of brightly-coloured paper, so that his home looked like a miniature, multi-coloured replica of the nearby Red Fort. Only when you passed through its castellated gateway did you realize that behind the meticulously hyperbolic fa9ade of bamboo-and-paper crenellations and ravelins hid a tin-and-card board hovel like all the rest. Chishti Khan had committed the ultimate solecism of permitting his illusionist expertise to infect his real life; he was not popular in the ghetto. The magicians kept their distance, lest they become diseased by his dreams.
   So you will understand why Parvati-the-witch, the possessor of truly wondrous powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her midnight-given gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community which had constantly denied such possibilities.

   On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of sight, and the only danger was from scavengers-after-scrap, from searchers-for-abandoned crates or hunters-for-corrugated-tin… that was where Parvati-the-witch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a humble shalwar-kameez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others, midnight's sorceress performed for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a child. Saucer-eye, rope-like pony-tail, fine full red lips… I would never have resisted her for so long if not for the face, the sick decaying eyes nose lips of… There seemed at first to be no limits to Parvati's abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were demons conjured? Did djinns appear, offering riches and overseas travel on levitating rugs? Were frogs turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose into jewels? Was there selling-of-souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit of it; the magic which Parvati-the-witch performed for me-the only magic she was ever willing to perform-was of the type known as 'white'. It was as though the Brahmins' 'Secret Book', the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her; she could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she permitted snakes to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, involving praying to the snake-god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the goodness of the Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reciting a spell: Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless; in a like manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected)-she could cure sores and consecrate talismans-she knew the sraktya charm and the Rite of the Tree. And all this, in a series of extraordinary night-time displays, she revealed to me beneath the walls of the Mosque-but still she was not happy.
   As ever, I am obliged to accept responsibility; the scent of mourn-fulness which hung around Parvati-the-witch was my creation. Because she was twenty-five years old, and wanted more from me than my willingness to be her audience; God knows why, but she wanted me in her bed-or, to be precise, to lie with her on the lengdi of sackcloth which served her for a bed in the hovel she shared with a family of contortionist triplets from Kerala, three girls who were orphans just like her-just like myself.
   What she did for me: under the power of her magic, hair began to grow where none had grown since Mr Zagallo pulled too hard; her wizardry caused the birthmarks on my face to fade under the healing applications of herbal poultices; it seemed that even the bandiness of my legs was diminishing under her care. (She could do nothing, however, for my one bad ear; there is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.) But no matter how much she did for me, I was unable to do for her the thing she desired most; because although we lay down together beneath the walk on the blind side of the Mosque, the moonlight showed me her night-time face turning, always turning into that of my distant, vanished sister… no, not my sister… into the putrid, vilely disfigured face of Jamila Singer. Parvati anointed her body with unguent oils imbued with erotic charm; she combed her hair a thousand times with a comb made from aphrodisiac deer-bones; and (I do not doubt it) in my absence she must have tried all manner of lovers' sorceries; but I was in the grip of an older bewitchment, and could not, it seemed, be released; I was doomed to find the faces of women who loved me turning into the features of… but you know whose crumbling features appeared, filling my nostrils with their unholy stench.
   'Poor girl,' Padma sighs, and I agree; but until the Widow drained me of past present future, I remained under the Monkey's spell.
   When Parvati-the-witch finally admitted failure, her face developed, over-night, an alarming and pronounced pout. She fell asleep in the hut of the contortionist orphans and awoke with her full lips stuck in a protruding attitude of unutterably sensuous pique. Orphaned triplets told her, giggling worriedly, what had happened to her face; she tried spiritedly to pull her features back into position, but neither muscles nor wizardry managed to restore her to her former self; at last, resigning herself to her tragedy, Parvati gave in, so that Resham Bibi told anyone who would listen: 'That poor girl-a god must have blown on her when she was making a face.'
   (That year, incidentally, the chic ladies of the cities were all wearing just such an expression with erotic deliberation; the haughty mannequins in the Eleganza-'73 fashion show all pouted as they walked their catwalks. In the awful poverty of the magicians' slum, pouting Parvati-the-witch was in the height of facial fashion.)
   The magicians devoted much of their energies to the problem of making Parvati smile again. Taking time off from their work, and also from the more mundane chores of reconstructing tin-and-cardboard huts which had fallen down in a high wind, or killing rats, they performed their most difficult tricks for her pleasure; but the pout remained in place. Resham Bibi made a green tea which smelted of camphor and forced it down Parvati's gullet. The tea had the effect of constipating her so thoroughly that she was not seen defecating behind her hovel for nine weeks. Two young jugglers conceived the notion that she might have begun grieving for her deceased father all over again, and applied themselves to the task of drawing his portrait on a shred of old tarpaulin, which they hung above her sackcloth mat. Triplets made jokes, and Picture Singh, greatly distressed, made cobras tie themselves in knots; but none of it worked, because if Parvati's thwarted love was beyond her own powers to cure, what hope could the others have had? The power of Parvati's pout created, in the ghetto, a nameless sense of unease, which all the magicians' animosity towards the unknown could not entirely dispel.
   And then Resham Bibi hit upon an idea. 'Fools that we are,' she told Picture Singh, 'we don't see what is under our noses. The poor girl is twenty-five, baba-almost an old woman! She is pining for a husband!' Picture Singh was impressed. 'Resham Bibi,' he told her approvingly, 'your brain is not yet dead.'
   After that, Picture Singh applied himself to the task of finding Parvati a suitable young man; many of the younger men in the ghetto were coaxed bullied threatened. A number of candidates were produced; but Parvati rejected them all. On the night when she told Bismillah Khan, the most promising fire-eater in the colony, to go somewhere else with his breath of hot chillies, even Picture Singh despaired. That night, he said to me, 'Captain, that girl is a trial and a grief to me; she is your good friend, you got any ideas?' Then an idea occurred to him, an idea which had had to wait until he became desperate because even Picture Singh was affected by considerations of class-automatically thinking of me as 'too good' for Parvati, because of my supposedly 'higher' birth, the ageing Communist had not thought until now that I might be… 'Tell me one thing, captain,' Picture Singh asked shyly, 'you are planning to be married some day?'
   Saleem Sinai felt panic rising up inside himself.
   'Hey, listen, captain, you like the girl, hey?'-And I, unable to deny it, 'Of course.' And now Picture Singh, grinning from ear to ear, while snakes hissed in baskets: 'Lake her a lot, captain? A lot lot?' But I was thinking of Jamila's face in the night; and made a desperate decision: 'Pictureji, I can't marry her.' And now he, frowning: 'Are you maybe married already, captain? Got wife-children waiting somewhere?' Nothing for it now; I, quietly, shamefully, said: 'I can't marry anyone, Pictureji. I can't have children.'
   The silence in the shack was punctuated by sibilant snakes and the calls of wild dogs in the night.
   'You're telling truth, captain? Is a medical fact?'
   'Yes'
   'Because one must not lie about such things, captain. To lie about one's manhood is bad, bad luck. Anything could happen, captain.
   And I, wishing upon myself the curse of Nadir Khan, which was also the curse of my uncle Hanif Aziz and, during the freeze and its long aftermath, of my father Ahmed Sinai, was goaded into lying even more angrily: 'I tell you,' Saleem cried, 'it ,s true, and that s that!'
   Then, captain,' Pictureji said tragically, smacking wrist against forehead, 'God knows what to do with that poor girl.'

A wedding

   I married Parvati-the-witch on February 23rd, 1975, the second anniversary of my outcast's return to the magicians' ghetto.
   Stiffening of Padma: taut as a washing-line, my dung-lotus inquires: 'Married? But last night only you said you wouldn't-and why you haven't told me all these days, weeks, months… ?' I look at her sadly, and remind her that I have already mentioned the death of my poor Parvati, which was not a natural death… slowly Padma uncoils, as I continue: 'Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, there's no escape from her.'
   There have been thirty-two years, in this story, during which I remained unborn; soon, I may complete thirty-one years of my own. For sixty-three years, before and after midnight, women have done their best; and also, I'm bound to say, their worst.
   In a blind landowner's house on the shores of a Kashmir! lake, Naseem Aziz doomed me to the inevitability of perforated sheets; and in the waters of that same lake, Ilse Lubin leaked into history, and I have not forgotten her deathwish;
   Before Nadir Khan hid in his underworld, my grandmother had, by becoming Reverend Mother, begun a sequence of women who changed their names, a sequence which continues even today– and which even leaked into Nadir, who became Qasim, and sat with dancing hands in the Pioneer Cafe; and after Nadir's departure, my mother Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai;
   And Alia, with the bitterness of ages, who clothed me in the baby-things impregnated with her old-maid fury; and Emerald, who laid a table on which I made pepperpots march;
   There was the Rani of Cooch Naheen, whose money, placed at the disposal of a humming man, gave birth to the optimism disease, which has recurred, at intervals, ever since; and, in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi, a distant relative called Zohra whose flirtations gave birth, in my father, to that later weakness for Fernandas and Florys; So to Bombay. Where Winkie's Vanita could not resist the centre-parting of William Methwold, and Nussie-the-duck lost a baby-race; while Mary Pereira, in the name of love, changed the baby-tags of history and became a second mother to me…
   Women and women and women: Toxy Catrack, nudging open the door which would later let in the children of midnight; the terrors of her nurse Bi-Appah; the competitive love of Amina and Mary, and what my mother showed me while I lay concealed in a washing-chest: yes, the Black Mango, which forced me to sniff, and unleashed what-were-not-Archangels!… And Evelyn Lilith Burns, cause of a bicycle-accident, who pushed me down a two-storey hillock into the midst of history.
   And the Monkey. I musn't forget the Monkey.
   But also, also, there was Masha Miovic, goading me into finger-loss, and my aunty Pia, filling my heart with revenge-lust, and Lila Sabarmati, whose indiscretions made possible my terrible, manipulating, newspaper-cut-out revenge;
   And Mrs Dubash, who found my gift of a Superman comic and built it, with the help of her son, into Lord Khusro Khusrovand;
   And Mary, seeing a ghost.
   In Pakistan, the land of submission, the home of purity, I watched the transformation of Monkey-into-Singer, and fetched bread, and fell in love; it was a woman, Tai Bibi, who told me the truth about myself. And in the heart of my inner darkness, I turned to the Puffias, and was only narrowly saved from the threat of a golden-dentured bride.
   Beginning again, as the buddha, I lay with a latrine-cleaner and was subjected to electrified urinals as a result; in the East, a farmer's wife tempted me, and Time was assassinated in consequence; and there were houris in a temple, and we only just escaped in time.
   In the shadow of a mosque, Resham Bibi issued a warning.
   And I married Parvati-the-witch.
   'Oof, mister,' Padma exclaims, 'that's too much women!'
   I do not disagree; because I have not even included her, whose dreams of marriage and Kashmir have inevitably been leaking into me, making me wish, if-only, if-only, so that, having once resigned myself to the cracks, I am now assailed by pangs of discontent, anger, fear and regret.
   But above all, the Widow.
   'I swear!' Padma slaps her knee, 'Too much, mister; too much.'
   How are we to understand my too-many women? As the multiple faces of Bharat-Mata? Or as even more… as the dynamic aspect of maya, as cosmic energy, which is represented as the female organ?
   Maya, in its dynamic aspect, is called Shakti; perhaps it is no accident that, in the Hindu pantheon, the active power of a deity is contained within his queen! Maya-Shakti mothers, but also 'muffles consciousness in its dream-web'. Too-many-women: are they all aspects of Devi, the goddess-who is Shakti, who slew the buffalo-demon, who defeated the ogre Mahisha, who is Kali Durga Chandi Chamunda Uma Sati and Parvati… and who, when active, is coloured red?
   'I don't know about that,' Padma brings me down to earth, 'They are just women, that's all.'
   Descending from my flight of fancy, I am reminded of the importance of speed; driven on by the imperatives of rip tear crack, I abandon reflections; and begin.

   This is how it came about: how Parvati took her destiny into her own hands; how a lie, issuing from my lips, brought her to the desperate condition in which, one night, she extracted from her shabby garments a lock of hero's hair, and began to speak sonorous words.
   Spurned by Saleem, Parvati remembered who had once been his arch-enemy; and, taking a bamboo stick with seven knots in it, and an improvized metal hook attached to one end, she squatted in her shack and recited; with the Hook of Indra in her right hand, and a lock of hair in her left, she summoned him to her. Parvati called to Shiva; believe don't believe, but Shiva came.
   From the beginning there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees; but throughout this narrative I've been pushing him, the other, into the background (just as once, I banned him from the councils of the Children). He can be concealed no longer, however; because one morning in May 1974-is it just my cracking memory, or am I right in thinking it was the 18th, perhaps at the very moment at which the deserts of Rajasthan were being shaken by India's first nuclear explosion? Was Shiva's explosion into my life truly synchronous with
   India's arrival, without prior warning, at the nuclear age?-he came to the magicians' slum. Uniformed, gonged-and-pipped, and a Major now, Shiva alighted from an Army motorcycle; and even through the modest khaki of his Army pants it was easy to make out the phenomenal twin bulges of his lethal knees… India's most decorated war hero, but once he led a gang of apaches in the back-streets of Bombay; once, before he discovered the legitimized violence of war, prostitutes were found throttled in gutters (I know, I know-no proof); Major Shiva now, but also Wee Willie Winkie's boy, who still remembered the words of long-silenced songs: 'Good Night, Ladies' still echoed on occasion in his ears.
   There are ironies here, which must not pass unnoticed; for had not Shiva risen as Saleem fell? Who was the slum-dweller now, and who looked down from commanding heights? There is nothing like a war for the re-invention of lives… On what may well have been May 18th, at any rate, Major Shiva came to the magicians' ghetto, and strode through the cruel streets of the slum with a strange expression on his face, which combined the infinite disdain for poverty of the recently-exalted with something more mysterious: because Major Shiva, drawn to our humble abode by the incantations of Parvati-the-witch, cannot have known what force impelled him to come.
   What follows is a reconstruction of the recent career of Major Shiva; I pieced the story together from Parvati's accounts, which I got out of her after our marriage. It seems my arch-rival was fond of boasting to her about his exploits, so you may wish to make allowances for the distortions of truth which such chest-beating creates; however, there seems no reason to believe that what he told Parvati and she repeated to me was very far removed from what-was-the-case.
   At the end of the war in the East, the legends of Shiva's awful exploits buzzed through the streets of the cities, leaped on to newspaper and into magazines, and thus insinuated themselves into the salons of the well-to-do, settling in clouds as thick as flies upon the eardrums of the country's hostesses, so that Shiva found himself elevated in social status as well as military rank, and was invited to a thousand and one different gatherings-banquets, musical soirees, bridge parties, diplomatic receptions, party political conferences, great melas and also smaller, local fetes, school sports days and fashionable balls-to be applauded and monopolized by the noblest and fairest in the land, to all of whom the legends of his exploits clung like flies, walking over their eyeballs so that they saw the young man through the mist of his legend, coating their fingertips so that they touched him through the magical film of his myth, settling on their tongues so that they could not speak to him as they would to an ordinary human being. The Indian Army, which was at that time fighting a political battle against proposed expenditure cuts, understood the value of so charismatic an ambassador, and permitted the hero to circulate amongst his influential admirers; Shiva espoused his new life with a will.

   He grew a luxuriant moustache to which his personal batman applied a daily pomade of linseed-oil spiced with coriander; always elegantly turned out in the drawing-rooms of the mighty, he engaged in political chit-chat, and declared himself a firm admirer of Mrs Gandhi, largely because of his hatred for her opponent Morarji Desai, who was intolerably ancient, drank his own urine, had skin which rustled like rice-paper, and, as Chief Minister of Bombay, had once been responsible for the banning of alcohol and the persecution of young goondas, that is to say hooligans or apaches, or, in other words, of the child Shiva himself… but such idle chatter occupied a mere fraction of his thoughts, the rest of which were entirely taken up with the ladies. Shiva, too, was besotted by too-much-women, and in those heady days after the military victory acquired a secret reputation which (he boasted to Parvati) rapidly grew to rival his official, public fame-a 'black' legend to set beside the 'white' one. What was whispered at the hen-parties and canasta-evenings of the land? What was hissed through giggles wherever two or three glittering ladies got together? This: Major Shiva was becoming a notorious seducer; a ladies'-man; a cuckolder of the rich; in short, a stud.
   There were women-he told Parvati-wherever he went: their curving bird-soft bodies quaking beneath the weight of their jewellery and lust, their eyes misted over by his legend; it would have been difficult to refuse them even had he wanted to. But Major Shiva had no intention of refusing. He listened sympathetically to their little tragedies-impotent husbands, beatings, lack-of-attention-to whatever excuses the lovely creatures wished to offer. Like my grandmother at her petrol pump (but with more sinister motives) he gave patient audience to their woes; sipping whisky in the chandeliered splendour of ballrooms, he watched them batting their eyelids and breathing suggestively while they moaned; and always, at last, they contrived to drop a handbag, or spill a drink, or knock his swagger-stick from his grasp, so that he would have to stoop to the floor to retrieve whatever-had-fallen, and then he would see the notes tucked into their sandals, sticking daintily out from under painted toes. In those days (if the Major is to be believed) the lovely scandalous begums of India became awfully clumsy, and their chap-pals spoke of rendezvous-at-midnight, of trellises of bougainvillaea outside bedroom windows, of husbands conveniently away launching ships or exporting tea or buying ball-bearings from Swedes. While these unfortunates were away, the Major visited their homes to steal their most prized possessions: their women fell into his arms. It is possible (I have divided by half the Major's own figures) that at the height of his philanderings there were no less than ten thousand women in love with him.
   And certainly there were children. The spawn of illicit midnights. Beautiful bouncing infants secure in the cradles of the rich. Strewing bastards across the map of India, the war hero went his way; but (and this, too, is what he told Parvati) he suffered from the curious fault of losing interest in anyone who became pregnant; no matter how beautiful sensuous loving they were, he deserted the bedrooms of all who bore his children; and lovely ladies with red-rimmed eyes were obliged to persuade their cuckolded husbands that yes, of course it's your baby, darling, life-of-mine, doesn't it look just like you, and of course I'm not sad, why should I be, these are tears of joy..
   One such deserted mother was Roshanara, the child-wife of the steel magnate S. P. Shetty; and at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in Bombay, she punctured the mighty balloon of his pride. He had been promenading about the paddock, stooping every few yards to return ladies' shawls and parasols, which seemed to acquire a life of their own and spring out of their owners' hands as he passed; Roshanara Shetty confronted him here, standing squarely in his path and refusing to budge, her seventeen-year-old eyes filled with the ferocious pique of childhood. He greeted her coolly, touching his Army cap, and attempted to pass; but she dug her needle-sharp nails into his arm, smiling dangerously as ice, and strolled along beside him. As they walked she poured her infantile poison into his ear, and her hatred and resentment of her former lover gave her the skill to make him believe her. Callously she whispered that it was so funny, my God, the way he strutted around in high society like some kind of rooster, while all the time the ladies were laughing at him behind his back, O yes, Major Sahib, don't fool yourself, high-class women have always enjoyed sleeping with animals peasants brutes, but that's how we think of you, my God it's disgusting just to watch you eat, gravy down your chin, don't you think we see how you never hold teacups by their handles, do you imagine we can't hear your belches and breakings of wind, you're just our pet ape, Major Sahib, very useful, but basically a clown.
   After the onslaught of Roshanara Shetty, the young war hero began to see his world differently. Now he seemed to see women giggling behind fans wherever he went; he noticed strange amused sidelong glances which he'd never noticed before; and although he tried to improve his behaviour, it was no use, he seemed to become clumsier the harder he tried, so that food flew off his plate on to priceless Kelim rugs and belches broke from his throat with the roar of a train emerging from a tunnel and he broke wind with the rage of typhoons. His glittering new life became, for him, a daily humiliation; and now he reinterpreted the advances of the beautiful ladies, understanding that by placing their love-notes beneath their toes they were obliging him to kneel demeaningly at their feet… as he learned that a man may possess every manly attribute and still be despised for not knowing how to hold a spoon, he felt an old violence being renewed in him, a hatred for these high-ups and their power, which is why I am sure-why I know-that when the Emergency offered Shiva-of-the-knees the chance of grabbing some power for himself, he did not wait to be asked a second time.
   On May 15th, 1974, Major Shiva returned to his regiment in Delhi; he claimed that, three days later, he was suddenly seized by a desire to see once more the saucer-eyed beauty whom he had first encountered long ago in the conference of the Midnight Children; the pony-tailed temptress who had asked him, in Dacca, for a single lock of his hair. Major Shiva declared to Parvati that his arrival at the magicians' ghetto had been motivated by a desire to be done with the rich bitches of Indian high society; that he had been besotted by her pouting lips the moment he laid eyes on them; and that these were the only reasons for asking her to go away with him. But I have already been overgenerous to Major Shiva-in this, my own personal version of history, I have allowed his account too much space; so I insist that, whatever the knock-kneed Major might have thought, the thing that drew him into the ghetto was quite simply and straightforwardly the magic of Parvati-the-witch.
   Saleem was not in the ghetto when Major Shiva arrived by motorcycle; while nuclear explosions rocked the Rajasthani wastes, out of sight, beneath the desert's surface, the explosion which changed my life also took place out of my sight. When Shiva grasped Parvati by the wrist, I was with Picture Singh at an emergency conference of the city's many red cells, discussing the ins and outs of the national railway strike; when Parvati, without demurring, took her place on the pillion of a hero's Honda, I was busily denouncing the government's arrests of union leaders. In short, while I was preoccupied with politics and my dream of national salvation, the powers of Parvati's witchcraft had set in motion the scheme which would end with hennaed palms, and songs, and the signing of a contract.
   … I am obliged, perforce, to reply on the accounts of others; only Shiva could tell what had befallen him; it was Resham Bibi who described Parvati's departure to me on my return, saying, 'Poor girl, let her go, so sad she has been for so long, what is to blame?'; and only Parvati could recount to me what befell her while she was away.
   Because of the Major's national status as a war hero, he was permitted to take certain liberties with military regulations; so nobody took him to task for importing a woman into what were not, after all, married men's quarters; and he, not knowing what had brought about this remarkable alteration in his life, sat down as requested in a cane chair, while she took off his boots, pressed his feet, brought him water flavoured with freshly-squeezed limes, dismissed his batman, oiled his moustache, caressed his knees and after all that produced a dinner of biriani so exquisite that he stopped wondering what was happening to him and began to enjoy it instead. Parvati-the-witch turned those simple Army quarters into a palace, a Kailasa fit for Shiva-the-god; and Major Shiva, lost in the haunted pools of her eyes, aroused beyond endurance by the erotic protrusion of her lips, devoted his undivided attentions to her for four whole months: or, to be precise, for one hundred and seventeen nights. On September 12th, however, things changed: because Parvati, kneeling at his feet, fully aware of his views on the subject, told him that she was going to have his child.
   The liaison of Shiva and Parvati now became a tempestuous business, filled with blows and broken plates: an earthly echo of that eternal marital battle-of-the-gods which their namesakes are said to perform atop Mount Kailasa in the great Himalayas… Major Shiva, at this time, began to drink; also to whore. The whoring trails of the war hero around the capital of India bore a strong resemblance to the Lambretta-travels of Saleem Sinai along the spoors of Karachi streets; Major Shiva, unmanned in the company of the rich by the revelations of Roshanara Shetty, had taken to paving for his pleasures. And such was his phenomenal fecundity (he assured Parvati while beating her) that he ruined the'careers of many a loose woman by giving them babies whom they would love too much to expose; he sired around the capital an army of street-urchins to-mirror the regiment of bastards he had fathered on the begums of the chandeliered salons.
   Dark clouds were gathering in political skies as well: in Bihar, where corruption inflation hunger illiteracy landlessness ruled the roost, Jaya-Prakash Narayan led a coalition of students and workers against the governing Indira Congress; in Gujarat, there were riots, railway trains were burned, and Morarji Desai went on a fast-unto-death to bring down the corrupt government of the Congress (under Chimanbhai Patel) in that drought-ridden state… it goes without) saying that he succeeded without being obliged to die; in short, while anger seethed in Shiva's mind, the country was getting angry, too; and what was being born while something grew in Parvati's belly? You know the answer: in late 1974, J. P. Narayan and Morarji Desai formed the opposition party known as the Janata Morcha: the people's front. While Major Shiva reeled from whore to whore, the Indira Congress was reeling too

   And at last, Parvati released him from her spell. (No other explanation will do; if he was not bewitched, why did he not cast her off the instant he heard of her pregnancy? And if the spell had not been lifted, how could he have done it at all?) Shaking his head as though awaking from a dream, Major Shiva found himself in the company of a balloon-fronted slum girl, who now seemed to him to represent everything he most feared-she became the personification of the slums of his childhood, from which he had escaped, and which now, through her, through her damnable child, were trying to drag him down down down again… dragging her by the hair, he hurled her on to his motorcycle, and in a very short time she stood, abandoned, on the fringes of the magicians' ghetto, having been returned whence she came, bringing with her only one thing which she had not owned when she left: the thing hidden inside her like an invisible man in a wicker basket, the thing which was growing growing growing, just as she had planned.
   Why do I say that?-Because it must be true; because what followed, followed; because it is my belief that Parvati-the-witch became pregnant in order to invalidate my only defence against marrying her. But I shall only describe, and leave analysis to posterity.
   On a cold day in January, when the muezzin's cries from the highest minaret of the Friday Mosque froze as they left his lips and fell upon the city as sacred snow, Parvati returned. She had waited until there could be no possible doubt about her condition; her inner basket bulged through the clean new garments of Shiva's now-defunct infatuation. Her lips, sure of their coming triumph, had lost their fashionable pout; in her saucer-eyes, as she stood on the steps of the Friday Mosque to ensure that as many people as possible saw her changed appearance, there lurked a silvered gleam of contentment. That was how I found her when I returned to the chaya of the mosque with Picture Singh. I was feeling disconsolate, and the sight of Parvati-the-witch on the steps, hands folded calmly over her swollen belly, long rope-of-hair blowing gently in the crystal air, did nothing to cheer me up.
   Pictureji! and I had gone into the tapering tenement streets behind the General Post Office, where memories of fortune-tellers peepshow-men healers hung in the breeze; and here Picture Singh had performed an act which was growing more political by the day. His legendary artistry drew large good-natured crowds; and he made his snakes enact his message under the influence of his weaving flute music. While I, in my role of apprentice, read out a prepared harangue, serpents dramatized my speech. I spoke of the gross inequities of wealth distribution; two cobras performed, in dumbshow, the mime of a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar. Police harassment, hunger disease illiteracy, were spoken of and also danced by serpents; and then Picture Singh, concluding his act, began to talk about the nature of red revolution, and promises began to fill the air, so that even before the police materialized out of the back-doors of the post office to break up the meeting with lathi-charges and tear-gas, certain wags in our audience had begun to heckle the Most Charming Man In The World. Unconvinced, perhaps, by the ambiguous mimes of the snakes, whose dramatic content was admittedly a little obscure, a youth shouted out: 'Ohe, Pictureji, you should be in the Government, man, not even Indiramata makes promises as nice as yours!'
   Then the tear-gas came and we had to flee, coughing spluttering blind, from riot police, like criminals, crying falsely as we ran. (Just as once, in Jallianwalabagh-but at least there were no bullets on this occasion.) But although the tears were the tears of gas, Picture Singh was indeed cast down into an awesome gloom by the heckler's gibe, which had questioned the hold on reality which was his greatest pride; and in the aftermath of gas and sticks, I, too, was dejected, having suddenly identified a moth of unease in my stomach, and realized that something in me objected to Picture's portrayal in snake-dance of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich; I found myself thinking, 'There is good and bad in all-and they brought me up, they looked after me, Pictureji!' After which I began to see that the crime of Mary Pereira had detached me from two worlds, not one; that having been expelled from my uncle's house I could never fully enter the world-according-to-Picture-Singh; that, in fact, my dream of saving the country was a thing of mirrors and smoke; insubstantial, the maunderings of a fool.
   And then there was Parvati, with her altered profile, in the harsh clarity of the winter day.
   It was-or am I wrong? I must rush on; things are slipping from me all the time-a day of horrors. It was then-unless it was another day-that we found old Resham Bibi dead of cold, lying in her hut which she had built out of Dalda Vanaspati packing-cases. She had turned bright blue, Krishna-blue, blue as Jesus, the blue of Kashmiri sky, which sometimes leaks into eyes; we burned her on the banks of the Jamuna amongst mud-flats and buffalo, and she missed my wedding as a result, which was sad, because like all old women she loved weddings, and had in the past joined in the preliminary henna-ceremonies with energetic glee, leading the formal singing in which the bride's friends insulted the groom and his family. On one occasion her insults had been so brilliant and finely calculated that the groom took umbrage and cancelled the wedding; but Resham had been undaunted, saying that it wasn't her fault if young men nowadays were as faint-hearted and inconstant as chickens.
   I was absent when Parvati went away; I was not present when she returned; and there was one more curious fact… unless I have forgotten, unless it was on another day… it seems to me, at any rate, that on the day of Parvati's return, an Indian Cabinet Minister was in his railway carriage, at Samastipur, when an explosion blew him into the history books; that Parvati, who had departed amid the explosions of atom bombs, returned to us when Mr L. N. Mishra, minister for railways and bribery, departed this world for good. Omens and more omens… perhaps, in Bombay, dead pomfrets were floating belly-side-up to shore.

   January 26th, Republic Day, is a good time for illusionists. When the huge crowds gather to watch elephants and fireworks, the city's tricksters go out to earn their living. For me, however, the day holds another meaning; it was on Republic Day that my conjugal fate was sealed.
   In the days after Parvati's return, the old women of the ghetto formed the habit of holding their ears for shame whenever they passed her; she, who bore her illegitimate child without any appearance of guilt, would smile innocently and walk on. But on the morning of Republic Day, she awoke to find a rope hung with tattered shoes strung up above her door, and began to weep inconsolably, her poise disintegrating under the force of this greatest of insults. Picture Singh and I, leaving our shack laden with baskets of snakes, came across her in her (calculated? genuine?) misery, and Picture Singh set his jaw in an attitude of determination. 'Come back to the hut, captain,' the Most Charming Man instructed me, 'We must talk.'
   And in the hut, 'Forgive me, captain, but I must speak. I am thinking it is a terrible thing for a man to go through life without children. To have no son, captain: how sad for you, is it not?' And I, trapped by the lie of impotence, remained silent while Pictureji suggested the marriage which would preserve Parvati's honour and simultaneously solve the problem of my self-confessed sterility; and despite my fears of the face of Jamila Singer, which, superimposed on Parvati's, had the power of driving me to distraction, I could not find it in myself to refuse.
   Parvati-just as she had planned, I'm sure-accepted me at once, said yes as easily and as often as she had said no in the past; and after that the Republic Day celebrations acquired the air of having been staged especially for our benefit, but what was in my mind was that once again destiny, inevitability, the antithesis of choice had come to rule my life, once again a child was to be born to a father who was not his father, although by a terrible irony the child would be the true grandchild of his father's parents; trapped in the web of these interweaving genealogies, it may even have occurred to me to wonder what was beginning, what was ending, and whether another secret countdown was in progress, and what would be born with my child.

   Despite the absence of Resham Bibi, the wedding went off well enough. Parvati's formal conversion to Islam (which irritated Picture Singh, but on which I found myself insisting, in another throwback to an earlier life) was performed by a red-bearded Haji who looked ill-at-ease in the presence of so many teasing, provocative members of the ungodly; under the shifting gaze of this fellow who resembled a large and bearded onion she intoned her belief that there was no God but God and that Muhammad was his prophet; she took a name which I chose for her out of the repository of my dreams, becoming Laylah, night, so that she too was caught up in the repetitive cycles of my history, becoming an echo of all the other people who have been obliged to change their names… like my own mother Amina Sinai, Parvati-the-witch became a new person in order to have a child.
   At the henna ceremony, half the magicians adopted me, performing the functions of my 'family'; the other half took Parvati's side, and happy insults were sung late into the night while intricate traceries of henna dried into the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet; and if the absence of Resham Bibi deprived the insults of a certain cutting edge, we were not overly sorry about the fact. During the nikah, the wedding proper, the happy couple were seated on a dais hastily constructed out of the Dalda-boxes of Resham's demolished shack, and the magicians filed solemnly past us, dropping coins of small denominations into our laps; and when the new Laylah Sinai fainted everyone smiled contentedly, because every good bride should faint at her wedding, and nobody mentioned the embarrassing possibility that she might have passed out because of the nausea or perhaps the kicking-pains caused by the child inside her basket. That evening the magicians put on a show so wonderful that rumours of it spread throughout the Old City, and crowds gathered to watch, Muslim businessmen from a nearby muhalla in which once a public announcement had been made and silversmiths and milk-shake vendors from Chandni Chowk, evening strollers and Japanese tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs; and there were pink Europeans discussing camera lenses with the Japanese, there were shutters clicking and flash bulbs popping, and I was told by one of the tourists that India was indeed a truly wonderful country with many remarkable traditions, and would be just fine and perfect if one did not constantly have to eat Indian food. And at the valima, the consummation ceremony (at which, on this occasion, no bloodstained sheets were held up, with or without perforations, since I had spent our nuptial night with my eyes shut tight and my body averted from my wife's, lest the unbearable features of Jamila Singer come to haunt me. in the bewilderment of the dark), the magicians surpassed their efforts of the wedding-night.
   But when all the excitement had died down, I heard (with one good and one bad ear) the inexorable sound of the future stealing up upon us: tick, tock, louder and louder, until the birth of Saleem Sinai-and also of the baby's father-found a mirror in the events of the night of the 25th of June.

   While mysterious assassins killed government officials, and narrowly failed to get rid of Mrs Gandhi's personally-chosen Chief Justice, A. N. Ray, the magicians' ghetto concentrated on another mystery: the ballooning basket of Parvati-the-witch.
   While the Janata Morcha grew in all kinds of bizarre directions, until it embraced Maoist Communists (such as our very own contortionists, including the rubber-limbed triplets with whom Parvati had lived before our marriage-since the nuptials, we had moved into a hut of our own, which the ghetto had built for us as a wedding present on the site of Resham's hovel) and extreme right-wing members of the Ananda Marg; until Left-Socialists and conservative Swatantra members joined its ranks… while the people's front expanded in this grotesque manner, I, Saleem, wondered incessantly about what might be growing behind the expanding frontage of my wife.
   While public discontent with the Indira Congress threatened to crush the government like a fly, the brand-new Laylah Sinai, whose eyes had grown wider than ever, sat as still as a stone while the weight of the baby increased until it threatened to crush her bones to powder; and Picture Singh, in an innocent echo of an ancient remark, said, 'Hey, captain! It's going to be big big: a real ten-chip whopper for sure!'
   And then it was the twelfth of June.
   History-books newspapers radio-programmes tell us that at two p.m. on June I2th, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty, by Judge Jag Mohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court, of two counts of campaign malpractice during the election campaign of 1971; what has never previously been revealed is that it was at precisely two p.m. that Parvati-the-witch (now Laylah Sinai) became sure she had entered labour.
   The labour of Parvati-Laylah lasted for thirteen days. On the first day, while the Prime Minister was refusing to resign, although her convictions carried with them a mandatory penalty barring her from public office for six years, the cervix of Parvati-the-witch, despite contractions as painful as mule-kicks, obstinately refused to dilate; Saleem Sinai and Picture Singh, barred from the hut of her torment by the contortionist triplets who had taken on the dudes of mid-wives, were obliged to listen to her useless shrieks until a steady stream of fire-eaters card-sharpers coal-walkers came up and slapped them on the back and made dirty jokes; and it was only in my ears that the ticking could be heard… a countdown to God-knows what, until I became possessed by fear, and told Picture Singh, 'I don't know what's going to come out of her, but it isn't going to be good…' And Pictureji, reassuringly: 'Don't you worry, captain! Everything will be fine! A ten-chip whopper, I swear!' And Parvati, screaming screaming, and night fading into day, and on the second day, when in Gujarat Mrs Gandhi's electoral candidates were routed by the Janata Morcha, my Parvati was in the grip of pains so intense that they made her as stiff as steel, and I refused to eat until the baby was born or whatever happened happened, I sat cross-legged outside the hovel of her agony, shaking with terror in the heat, begging don't let her die don't let her die, although I had never made love to her during all the months of our marriage; in spite of my fear of the spectre of Jamila Singer, I prayed and fasted, although Picture Singh, 'For pity's sake, captain,' I refused, and by the ninth day the ghetto had fallen into a terrible hush, a silence so absolute that not even the calls of the muezzin of the mosque could penetrate it, a soundlessness of such immense powers that it shut out the roars of the Janata Morcha demonstrations outside Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President's house, a horror-struck muteness of the same awful enveloping magic as the great silence which had once hung over my grandparents' house in Agra, so that on the ninth day we could not hear Morarji Desai calling on President Ahmad to sack the disgraced Prime Minister, and the only sounds in the entire world were the ruined whimperings of Parvati-Laylah, as the contractions piled upon her like mountains, and she sounded as though she were calling to us down a long hollow tunnel of pain, while I sat cross-legged being dismembered by her agony with the soundless sound of ticktock in my brain, and inside the hut there were the contortionist triplets pouring water over Parvati's body to replenish the moisture which was pouring out of her in fountains, forcing a stick between her teeth to prevent her from biting out her tongue, and trying to force down her eyelids over eyes which were bulging so frighteningly that the triplets were afraid they would fall out and get dirty on the floor, and then it was the twelfth day and I was half dead of starvation while elsewhere in the city the Supreme Court was informing Mrs Gandhi that she need not resign until her appeal, but must neither vote in the Lok Sabha nor draw a salary, and while the Prime Minister in her exultation at this partial victory began to abuse her opponents in language of which a Koli fishwife would have been proud, my Parvati's labour entered a phase in which despite her utter exhaustion she found the energy to issue a string of foul-smelling oaths from her colour-drained lips, so that the cesspit stink of her obscenities filled our nostrils and made us retch, and the three contortionists fled from the hut crying that she had become so stretched, so colourless that you could almost see through her, and she would surely die if the baby did not come now, and in my ears tick tock the pounding tick tock until I was sure, yes, soon soon soon, and when the triplets returned to her bedside in the evening of the thirteenth day they screamed Yes yes she has begun to push, come on Parvati, push push push, and while Parvati pushed in the ghetto, J. P. Narayan and Morarji Desai were also goading Indira Gandhi, while triplets yelled push push push the leaders of the Janata Morcha urged the police and Army to disobey the illegal orders of the disqualified Prime Minister, so in a sense they were forcing Mrs Gandhi to push, and as the night darkened towards the midnight hour, because nothing ever happens at any other time, triplets began to screech it's coming coming coming, and elsewhere the Prime Minister was giving birth to a child of her own… in the ghetto, in the hut beside which I sat cross-legged and starving to death, my son was coming coming coming, the head is out, the triplets screeched, while members of the Central Reserve Police arrested the heads of the Janata Morcha, including the impossibly ancient and almost mythological figures of Morarji Desai and J. P. Narayan, push push push, and in the heart of that terrible midnight while ticktock pounded in my ears a child was born, a ten-chip whopper all right, popping out so easily in the end that it was impossible to understand what all the trouble had been. Parvati gave a final pitiable little yelp and out he popped, while all over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches, and when the three contortionists had washed the baby and wrapped it in an old sari and brought it out for its father to see, at exactly the same moment, the word Emergency was being heard for the first time, and suspension-of-civil rights, and censorship-of-the-press, and armoured-units-on-special-alert, and arrest-of-subversive-elements; something was ending, something was being born, and at the precise instant of the birth of the new India and the beginning of a continuous midnight which would not end for two long years, my son, the child of the renewed ticktock, came out into the world.
   And there is more: because when, in the murky half-light of that endlessly prolonged midnight, Saleem Sinai saw his son for the first time, he began to laugh helplessly, his brain ravaged by hunger, yes, but also by the knowledge that his relentless destiny had played yet another of its grotesque little jokes, and although Picture Singh, scandalized by my laughter which in my weakness was like the giggling of a schoolgirl, cried repeatedly, 'Come on, captain! Don't behave mad now! It is a son, captain, be happy!', Saleem Sinai continued to acknowledge the birth by tittering hysterically at fate, because the boy, the baby boy, the-boy-my-son Aadam, Aadam Sinai was perfectly formed-except, that is, for his ears. On either side of his head flapped audient protuberances like sails, ears so colossally huge that the triplets afterwards revealed that when his head popped out they had thought, for one bad moment, that it was the head of a tiny elephant.
   … 'Captain, Saleem captain,' Picture Singh was begging, 'be nice now! Ears are not anything to go crazy for!'

   He was born in Old Delhi… once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: Aadam Sinai arrived at a night-shadowed slum on June 25th, 1975. And the time? The time matters, too. As I said: at night. No, it's important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at Emergency, he emerged. There were gasps; and, across the country, silences and fears. And owing to the occult tyrannies of that benighted hour, he was mysteriously handcuffed to history, his destinies indissolubly chained to those of his country. Unprophesied, uncelebrated, he came; no prime ministers wrote him letters; but, just the same, as my time of connection neared its end, his began. He, of course, was left entirely without a say in the matter; after all, he couldn't even wipe his own nose at the time.
   He was the child of a father who was not his father; but also the child of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again;
   He was the true great-grandson of his great-grandfather, but elephantiasis attacked him in the ears instead of the nose-because he was also the true son of Shiva-and-Parvati; he was elephant-headed Ganesh;
   He was born with ears which flapped so high and wide that they must have heard the shootings in Bihar and the screams of lathi-charged dock-workers in Bombay… a child who heard too much, and as a result never spoke, rendered dumb by a surfeit of sound, so that between then-and-now, from slum to pickle factory, I have never heard him utter a single word;
   He was the possessor of a navel which chose to stick out instead of in, so that Picture Singh, aghast, cried, 'His bimbi, captain! His bimbi, look!', and he became, from the first days, the gracious recipient of our awe;
   A child of such grave good nature that his absolute refusal to cry or whimper utterly won over his adoptive father, who gave up laughing hysterically at the grotesque ears and began to rock the silent infant gently in his arms;
   A child who heard a song as he rocked in arms, a song sung in the historical accents of a disgraced ayah: 'Anything you want to be, you kin be; you kin be just what-all you want.'
   But now that I've given birth to my flap-eared, silent son-there are questions to be answered about that other, synchronous birth. Unpalatable, awkward queries: did Saleem's dream of saving the nation leak, through the osmotic tissues of history, into the thoughts of the Prime Minister herself? Was my lifelong belief in the equation between the State and myself transmuted, in 'the Madam's' mind, into that in-those-days-famous phrase: India is Indira and Indira is India? Were we competitors for centrality-was she gripped by a lust for meaning as profound as my own-and was that, was that why… ?
   Influence of hair-styles on the course of history: there's another ticklish business. If William Methwold had lacked a centre-parting, I might not have been here today; and if the Mother of the Nation had had a coiffure of uniform pigment, the Emergency she spawned might easily have lacked a darker side. But she had white hair on one side and black on the other; the Emergency, too, had a white part-public, visible, documented, a matter for historians-and a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a matter for us.
   Mrs Indira Gandhi was born in November 1917 to Kamala and Jawaharlal Nehru. Her middle name was Priyadarshini. She was not related to 'Mahatma' M. K. Gandhi; her surname was the legacy of. her marriage, in 1952, to one Feroze Gandhi, who became known as 'the nation's son-in-law'. They had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, but in 1949 she moved back into her father's home and became his 'official hostess'. Feroze made one attempt to live there, too, but it was not a success. He became a ferocious critic of the Nehru Government, exposing the Mundhra scandal and forcing the resignation of the then Finance Minister, T. T. Krishnamachari-T.T.K.' himself. Mr Feroze Gandhi died of a heart seizure in 1960, aged forty-seven. Sanjay Gandhi, and his ex-model wife Menaka, were prominent during the Emergency. The Sanjay Youth Movement was particularly effective in the sterilization campaign.
   I have included this somewhat elementary summary just in case you had failed to realize that the Prime Minister of India was, in 1975, fifteen years a widow. Or (because the capital letter may be of use): a Widow.
   Yes, Padma: Mother Indira really had it in for me

Midnight

   No!-But I must.
   I don't want to tell it!-But I swore to tell it all.-No, I renounce, not that, surely some things are better left…?-That won't wash; what can't be cured, must be endured!-But surely not the whispering walls, and treason, and snip snip, and the women with the bruised chests?-Especially those things.-But how can I, look at me, I'm tearing myself apart, can't even agree with myself, talking arguing like a wild fellow, cracking up, memory going, yes, memory plunging into chasms and being swallowed by the dark, only fragments remain, none of it makes sense any more!-But I mustn't presume to judge; must simply continue (having once begun) until the end; sense-and-nonsense is no longer (perhaps never was) for me to evaluate.-But the horror of it, I can't won't mustn't won't can't no!-Stop this; begin.-No!-Yes.
   About the dream, then? I might be able to tell it as a dream. Yes, perhaps a nightmare: green and black the Widow's hair and clutching hand and children mmff and little balls and one-by-one and torn-in-half and little balls go flying flying green and black her hand is green her nails are black as black.-No dreams. Neither the time nor the place for. Facts, as remembered. To the best of one's ability. The way it was: Begin.-No choice?-None; when was there ever? There are imperatives, and logical-consequences, and inevitabilities, and recurrences; there are things-done-to, and accidents, and bludgeonings-of-fate; when was there ever a choice? When options? When a decision freely-made, to be this or that or the other? No choice; begin.-Yes.
   Listen:
   Endless night, days weeks months without the sun, or rather (because it's important to be precise) beneath a sun as cold as a stream-rinsed plate, a sun washing us in lunatic midnight light; I'm talking about the winter of 1975-6. In the winter, darkness; and also tuberculosis.
   Once, in a blue room overlooking the sea, beneath the pointing finger of a fisherman, I fought typhoid and was rescued by snake-poison; now, trapped in the dynastic webs of recurrence by my recognition of his sonship, our Aadam Sinai was also obliged to spend his early months battling the invisible snakes of a disease. The serpents of tuberculosis wound themselves around his neck and made him gasp for air… but he was a child of ears and silence, and when he spluttered, there were no sounds; when he wheezed, no raspings issued from his throat. In short, my son fell ill, and although his mother, Parvati or Laylah, went in search of the herbs of her magical gift-although infusions of herbs in well-boiled water were constantly administered, the wraith-like worms of tuberculosis refused to be driven away. I suspected, from the first, something darkly metaphorical in this illness-believing that, in those midnight months when the age of my connection-to-history overlapped with his, our private emergency was not unconnected with the larger, macrocosmic disease, under whose influence the sun had become as pallid and diseased as our son. Parvati-then (like Padma-now) dismissed these abstract ruminations, attacking as mere folly my growing obsession with light, in whose grip I began lighting little dia-lamps in the shack of my son's illness, filling our hut with candle-flames at noon… but I insist on the accuracy of my diagnosis; 'I tell you,' I insisted then, 'while the Emergency lasts, he will never become well.'
   Driven to distraction by her failure to cure that grave child who never cried, my Parvati-Laylah refused to believe my pessimistic theories; but she became vulnerable to every other cockeyed notion. When one of the older women in the colony of the magicians told her-as Resham Bibi might have-that the illness could not come out while the child remained dumb, Parvati seemed to find that plausible. 'Sickness is a grief of the body,' she lectured me, 'It must be shaken off in tears and groans.' That night, she returned to the hut clutching a little bundle of green powder, wrapped in newspaper and tied up with pale pink string, and told me that this was a preparation of such power that it would oblige even a stone to shriek. When she administered the medicine the child's cheeks began to bulge, as though his mouth were full of food; the long-suppressed sounds of his babyhood flooded up behind his lips, and he jammed his mouth shut in fury. It became clear that the infant was close to choking as he tried to swallow back the torrential vomit of pent-up sound which the green powder had stirred up; and this was when we realized that we were in the presence of one of the earth's most implacable wills. At the end of an hour during which my son turned first saffron, then saffron-and-green, and finally the colour of grass, I could not stand it any more and bellowed, 'Woman, if the little fellow wants so much to stay quiet, we mustn't kill him for it!' I picked up Aadam to rock him, and felt his little body becoming rigid, his knee-joints elbows neck were filling up with the held-back tumult of unexpressed sounds, and at last Parvati relented and prepared an antidote by mashing arrowroot and camomile in a tin bowl while muttering strange imprecations under her breath. After that, nobody ever tried to make Aadam Sinai do anything he did not wish to do; we watched him battling against tuberculosis and tried to find reassurance in the idea that a will so steely would surely refuse to be defeated by any mere disease.
   In those last days my wife Laylah or Parvati was also being gnawed by the interior moths of despair, because when she came towards me for comfort or warmth in the isolation of our sleeping hours, I still saw superimposed upon her features the horribly eroded physiognomy of Jamila Singer; and although I confessed to Parvati the secret of the spectre, consoling her by pointing out that at its present rate of decay it would have crumbled away entirely before long, she told me dolorously that spittoons and war had softened my brain, and despaired of her marriage which would, as it transpired, never be consummated; slowly, slowly there appeared on her lips the ominous pout of her grief… but what could I do? What solace could I offer-I, Saleem Snotnose, who had been reduced to poverty by the withdrawal of my family's protection, who had chosen (if it was a choice) to live by my olfactory gifts, earning a few paisa a day by sniffing out what people had eaten for dinner the previous day and which of them were in love; what consolation could I bring her, when I was already in the clutches of the cold hand of that lingering midnight, and could sniff finality in the air?
   Saleem's nose (you can't have forgotten) could smell stranger things than horse-dung. The perfumes of emotions and ideas, the odour of how-things-were: all these were and are nosed out by me with ease. When the Constitution was altered to give the Prime Minister well-nigh-absolute powers, I smelted the ghosts of ancient empires in the air… in that city which was littered with the phantoms of Slave Kings and Mughals, of Aurangzeb the merciless and the last, pink conquerors, I inhaled once again the sharp aroma of despotism. It smelled like burning oily rags.
   But even the nasally incompetent could have worked out that, during the winter of 1975-6, something smelled rotten in the capital; what alarmed me was a stranger, more personal stink: the whiff of personal danger, in which I discerned the presence of a pair of treacherous, retributive knees… my first intimation that an ancient conflict, which began when a love-crazed virgin switched name-tags, was shortly to end in a frenzy of treason and snippings.
   Perhaps, with such a warning pricking at my nostrils, I should have fled-tipped off by a nose, I could have taken to my heels. But there were practical objections: where would I have gone? And, burdened by wife and son, how fast could I have moved? Nor must it be forgotten that I did flee once, and look where I ended up: in the Sundarbans, the jungle of phantasms and retribution, from which I only escaped by the skin of my teeth!… At any rate, I did not run.
   It probably didn't matter; Shiva-implacable, traitorous, my enemy from our birth-would have found me in the end. Because although a nose is uniquely equipped for the purpose of sniffing-things-out, when it comes to action there's no denying the advantages of a pair of grasping, choking knees.
   I shall permit myself one last, paradoxical observation on this subject: if, as I believe, it was at the house of the wailing women that I learned the answer to the question of purpose which had plagued me all my life, then by saving myself from that palace of annihilations
   I would also have denied myself this most precious of discoveries. To put it rather more philosophically: every cloud has a silver lining.
   Saleem-and-Shiva, nose-and-knees… we shared just three things: the moment (and its consequences) of our birth; the guilt of treachery; and our son, Aadam, our synthesis, unsmiling, grave, with omni-audient ears. Aadam Sinai was in many respects the exact opposite of Saleem. I, at my beginning, grew with vertiginous speed; Aadam, wrestling with the serpents of disease, scarcely grew at all. Saleem wore an ingratiating smile from the start; Aadam had more dignity, and kept his grins to himself. Whereas Saleem had subjugated his will to the joint tyrannies of family and fate, Aadam fought ferociously, refusing to yield even to the coercion of green powder. And while Saleem had been so determined to absorb the universe that he had been, for a time, unable to blink, Aadam preferred to keep his eyes firmly closed… although when, every so often, he deigned to open them, I observed their colour, which was blue. Ice-blue, the blue of recurrence, the fateful blue of Kashmiri sky… but there is no need to elaborate further.
   We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams. How much was heard by those flapping ears which seemed, on occasion, to be burning with the heat of their knowledge? If he could have talked, would he have cautioned me against treason and bulldozers? In a country dominated by the twin multitudes of noises and smells, we could have been the perfect team; but my baby son rejected speech, and I failed to obey the dictates of my nose.
   'Arre baap,' Padma cries, 'Just tell what happened, mister! What is so surprising if a baby does not make conversations?'
   And again the rifts inside me: I can't.-You must.-Yes.

  April 1976 found me still living in the colony or ghetto of the magicians; my son Aadam was still in the grip of a slow tuberculosis that seemed unresponsive to any form of treatment. I was full of forebodings (and thoughts of flight); but if any one man was the reason for my remaining in the ghetto, that man was Picture Singh.
   Padma; Saleem threw in his lot with the magicians of Delhi partly out of a sense of fitness-a self-flagellant belief in the rectitude of his belated descent into poverty (I took with me, from my uncle's house, no more than two shirts, white, two pairs trousers, also white, onetee-shirt, decorated with pink guitars, and shoes, one pair, black); ' partly, I came out of loyalty, having been bound by knots of gratitude to my rescuer, Parvati-the-witch; but I stayed-when, as a literate young man, I might at the very least have been a bank clerk or a night-school teacher of reading and writing-because, all my life, consciously or unconsciously, I have sought out fathers. Ahmed Sinai, Hanif Aziz, Sharpsticker sahib, General Zulfikar have all been pressed into service in the absence of William Methwold; Picture Singh was the last of this noble line. And perhaps, in my dual lust for fathers and saving-the-country, I exaggerated Picture Singh; the horrifying possibility exists that I distorted him (and have distorted him again in these pages) into a dream-figment of my own imagination… it is certainly true that whenever I inquired, 'When are you going to lead us, Pictureji-when will the great day come?', he, shuffling awkwardly, replied, 'Get such things out from your head, captain; I am a poor man from Rajasthan, and also the Most Charming Man In The World; don't make me anything else.' But I, urging him on, 'There is a precedent-there was Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird…' to which Picture, 'Captain, you got some crazy notions.'
   During the early months of the Emergency, Picture Singh remained in the clutches of a gloomy silence reminiscent (once again!) of the great Boundlessness of Reverend Mother (which had also leaked into my son…), and neglected to lecture his audiences in the highways and back-streets of the Old and New cities as, in the past, he had insisted on doing; but although he, 'This is a time for silence, captain', I remained convinced that one day, one millennial dawn at midnight's end, somehow, at the head of a great jooloos or procession of the dispossessed, perhaps playing his flute and wreathed in deadly snakes, it would be Picture Singh who led us towards the light… but maybe he was never more than a snake-charmer; I do not deny the possibility. I say only that to me my last father, tall gaunt bearded, his hair swept back into a knot behind his neck, seemed the very avatar of Mian Abdullah; but perhaps it was all an illusion, born of my attempt to bind him to the threads of my history by an effort of sheer will. There have been illusions in my life; don't think I'm unaware of the fact. We are coming, however, to a time beyond illusions; having no option, I must at last set down, in black and white, the climax I have avoided all evening.
   Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, and must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin. (Once, in a blue room, Ahmed Sinai improvised endings for fairy-tales whose original conclusions he had long ago forgotten; the Brass Monkey and I heard, down the years, all kinds of different versions of the journey of Sinbad, and of the adventures of Hatim Tai… if I began again, would I, too, end in a different place?) Well then: I must content myself with shreds and scraps: as I wrote centuries ago, the trick is to fill in the gaps, guided by the few clues one is given. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence; I must be guided by the memory of a once-glimpsed file with tell-tale initials; and by the other, remaining shards of the past, lingering in my ransacked memory-vaults like broken bottles on a beach… Like scraps of memory, sheets of newsprint used to bowl through the magicians' colony in the silent midnight wind.
   Wind-blown newspapers visited my shack to inform me that my uncle, Mustapha Aziz, had been the victim of unknown assassins; I neglected to shed a tear. But there were other pieces of information; and from these, I must build reality.
   On one sheet of paper (smelling of turnips) I read that the Prime Minister of India went nowhere without her personal astrologer. In this fragment, I discerned more than turnip-whiffs; mysteriously, my nose recognized, once again, the scent of personal danger. What I am obliged to deduce from this warning aroma: soothsayers prophesied me; might not soothsayers have undone me at the end? Might not a Widow, obsessed with the stars, have learned from astrologers the secret potential of any children born at that long-ago midnight hour? And was that why a Civil Servant, expert in genealogies, was asked to trace… and why he looked at me strangely in the morning? Yes, you see, the scraps begin to fit together! Padma, does it not become clear? Indira is India and India is Indira… but might she not have read her own father's letter to a midnight child, in which her own, sloganized centrality was denied; in which the role of mirror-of-the-nation was bestowed upon me? You see? You see?… And there is more, there is even clearer proof, because here is another scrap of the Times of India, in which the Widow's own news agency Samachar quotes her when she speaks of her 'determination to combat the deep and widespread conspiracy which has been growing'. I tell you: she did not mean the Janata Morcha! No, the Emergency had a black part as well as a white, and here is the secret which has lain concealed for too long beneath the mask of those stifled days: the truest, deepest motive behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight. (Whose Conference had, of course, been disbanded years before; but the mere possibility of our re-unification was enough to trigger off the red alert.)
   Astrologers-I have no doubt-sounded the alarums; in a black folder labelled m.c.c., names were gathered from extant records; but there was more to it than that. There were also betrayals and confessions; there were knees and a nose-a nose, and also knees.

   Scraps, shreds, fragments: it seems to me that, immediately before 1 awoke with the scent of danger in my nostrils, I had dreamed that I was sleeping. I awoke, in this most unnerving of dreams, to find a stranger in my shack: a poetic-looking fellow with lank hair that wormed over his ears (but who was very thin on top). Yes: during my last sleep before what-has-to-be-described, I was visited by the shade of Nadir Khan, who was staring perplexedly at a silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, asking absurdly, 'Did you steal this?-Because otherwise, you must be-is it possible?-my Mumtaz's little boy?' And when I confirmed, 'Yes, none other, I am he-,' the dream-spectre of Nadir-Qasim issued a warning: 'Hide. There is little time. Hide while you can.'
   Nadir, who had hidden under my grandfather's carpet, came to advise me to do likewise; but too late, too late, because now I came properly awake, and smelled the scent of danger blaring like trumpets in my nose… afraid without knowing why, I got to my feet; and is it my imagination or did Aadam Sinai open blue eyes to stare gravely into mine? Were my son's eyes also filled with alarm? Had flap-ears heard what a nose had sniffed out? Did father and son commune wordlessly in that instant before it all began? I must leave the question-marks hanging, unanswered; but what is certain is that Parvati, my Laylah Sinai, awoke also and asked, 'What's up, mister? What's got your goat?'-And I, without fully knowing the reason: 'Hide; stay in here and don't come out.'
   Then I went outside.
   It must have been morning, although the gloom of the endless midnight hung over the ghetto like a fog… through the murky light of the Emergency, I saw children playing seven-tiles, and Picture Singh, with his umbrella folded under his left armpit, urinating against the walls of the Friday Mosque; a tiny bald illusionist was practising driving knives through the neck of his ten-year-old apprentice, and already a conjurer had found an audience, and was persuading large woollen balls to drop from the armpits of strangers; while in another corner of the ghetto, Chand Sahib the musician was practising his trumpet-playing, placing the ancient mouthpiece of a battered horn against his neck and playing it simply by exercising his throat-muscles… there, over there, were the three contortionist triplets, balancing surahis of water on their heads as they returned to their huts from the colony's single stand-pipe… in short, everything seemed in order. I began to chide myself for my dreams and nasal alarums; but then it started.
   The vans and bulldozers came first, rumbling along the main road; they stopped opposite the ghetto of the magicians. A loudspeaker began to blare: 'Civic beautification programme… authorized operation of Sanjay Youth Central Committee… prepare instantly for evacuation to new site… this slum is a public eyesore, can no longer be tolerated… all persons will follow orders without dissent.' And while a loudspeaker blared, there were figures descending from vans: a brightly-coloured tent was being hastily erected, and there were camp beds and surgical equipment… and now from the vans there poured a stream of finely-dressed young ladies of high birth and foreign education, and then a second river of equally-well-dressed young men: volunteers, Sanjay Youth volunteers, doing their bit for society… but then I realized no, not volunteers, because all the men had the same curly hair and lips-like-women's-labia, and the elegant ladies were all identical, too, their features corresponding precisely to those of Sanjay's Menaka, whom news-scraps had described as a 'lanky beauty', and who had once modelled nighties for a mattress company… standing in the chaos of the slum clearance programme, I was shown once again that the ruling dynasty of India had learned how to replicate itself; but then there was no time to think, the numberless labia-lips and lanky-beauties were seizing magicians and old beggars, people were being dragged towards the vans, and now a rumour spread through the colony of magicians: 'They are doing nasbandi-sterilization is being performed!'-And a second cry: 'Save your women and children!'-And a riot is beginning, children who were just now playing seven-tiles are hurling stones at the elegant invaders, and here is Picture Singh rallying the magicians to his side, waving a furious umbrella, which had once been a creator of harmony but was now transmuted into a weapon, a flapping quixotic lance, and the magicians have become a defending army, Molotov cocktails are magically produced and hurled, bricks are drawn out of conjurers' bags, the air is thick with yells and missiles and the elegant labia-lips and lanky-beauties are retreating before the harsh fury of the illusionists; and there goes Picture Singh, leading the assault against the tent of vasectomy… Parvati or Laylah, disobeying orders, is at my side now, saying, 'My God, what are they-', and at this moment a new and more formidable assault is unleashed upon the slum: troops are sent in against magicians, women and children