By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all nearing their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant, for the most part, of one another's existence-although there were certainly exceptions. In the town of Baud, on the Mahanadi river in Orissa, there was a pair of twin sisters who were already a legend in the region, because despite their impressive plainness they both possessed the ability of making every man who saw them fall hopelessly and often suicidally in love with them, so that their bemused parents were endlessly pestered by a stream of men offering their hands in marriage to either or even both of the bewildering children; old men who had forsaken the wisdom of their beards and youths who ought to have been becoming besotted with the actresses in the travelling picture-show which visited Baud once a month; and there was another, more disturbing procession of bereaved families cursing the twin girls for having bewitched their sons into committing acts of violence against themselves, fatal mutilations and scourgings and even (in one case) self-immolation. With the exception of such rare instances, however, the children of midnight had grown up quite unaware of their true siblings, their fellow-chosen-ones across the length and breadth of India's rough and badly-proportioned diamond.
   And then, as a result of a jolt received in a bicycle-accident, I, Saleem Sinai, became aware of them all.
   To anyone whose personal cast of mind is too inflexible to accept these facts, I have this to say: That's how it was; there can be no retreat from the truth. I shall just have to shoulder the burden of the doubter's disbelief. But no literate person in this India of ours can be wholly immune from the type of information I am in the process of unveiling-no reader of our national press can have failed to come across a series of-admittedly lesser-magic children and assorted freaks. Only last week there was that Bengali boy who announced himself as the reincarnation of Rabindranath Tagore and began to extemporize verses of remarkable quality, to the amazement of his parents; and I can myself remember children with two heads (sometimes one human, one animal), and other curious features such as bullock's horns.
   I should say at once that not all the children's gifts were desirable, or even desired by the children themselves; and, in some cases, the children had survived but been deprived of their midnight-given qualities. For example (as a companion piece to the story of the Baudi twins) let me mention a Delhi beggar-girl called Sundari, who was born in a street behind the General Post Office, not far from the rooftop on which Amina Sinai had listened to Ramram Seth, and whose beauty was so intense that within moments of her birth it succeeded in blinding her mother and the neighbouring women who had been assisting at her delivery; her father, rushing into the room when he heard the women's screams, had been warned by them just in time; but his one fleeting glimpse of his daughter so badly impaired his vision that he was unable, afterwards, to distinguish between Indians and foreign tourists, a handicap which greatly affected his earning power as a beggar. For some time after that Sundari was obliged to have a rag placed across her face; until an old and ruthless great-aunt took her into her bony arms and slashed her face nine times with a kitchen knife. At the time when I became aware of her, Sundari was earning a healthy living, because nobody who looked at her could fail to pity a girl who had clearly once been too beautiful to look at and was now so cruelly disfigured; she received more alms than any other member of her family.
   Because none of the children suspected that their time of birth had anything to do with what they were, it took me a while to find it out. At first, after the bicycle accident (and particularly once language marchers had purged me of Evie Burns), I contented myself with discovering, one by one, the secrets of the fabulous beings who had suddenly arrived in my mental field of vision, collecting them ravenously, the way some boys collect insects, and others spot railway trains; losing interest in autograph books and all other manifestations of the gathering instinct, I plunged whenever possible into the separate, and altogether brighter reality of the five hundred and eighty-one. (Two hundred and sixty-six of us were boys; and we were outnumbered by our female counterparts-three hundred and fifteen of them, including Parvati. Parvati-the-witch.)
   Midnight's children!… From Kerala, a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any reflective surface in the land-through lakes and (with greater difficulty) the polished metal bodies of automobiles… and a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish… and children with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri Hills, and from the great watershed of the Vindhyas, a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will, and had already (mischievously) been the cause of wild panic and rumours of the return of Giants… from Kashmir, there was a blue-eyed child of whose original sex I was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased. Some of us called this child Narada, others Markandaya, depending on which old fairy story of sexual change we had heard… near Jalna in the heart of the parched Deccan I found a water-divining youth, and at Budge-Budge outside Calcutta a sharp-tongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting physical wounds, so that after a few adults had found themselves bleeding freely as a result of some barb flung casually from her lips, they had decided to lock her in a bamboo cage and float her off down the Ganges to the Sundarbans jungles (which are the rightful home of monsters and phantasms); but nobody dared approach her, and she moved through the town surrounded by a vacuum of fear; nobody had the courage to deny her food. There was a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert; and more and more and more… overwhelmed by their numbers, and by the exotic multiplicity of their gifts, I paid little attention, in those early days, to their ordinary selves; but inevitably our problems, when they arose, were the everyday, human problems which arise from character-and-environment; in our quarrels, we were just a bunch of kids.
   One remarkable fact: the closer to midnight our birth-times were, the greater were our gifts. Those children born in the last seconds of the hour were (to be frank) little more than circus freaks: bearded girls, a boy with the fully-operative gills of a freshwater mahaseer trout, Siamese twins with two bodies dangling off a single head and neck-the head could speak in two voices, one male, one female, and every language and dialect spoken in the subcontinent; but for all their mar-vellousness, these were the unfortunates, the living casualties of that numinous hour. Towards the half-hour came more interesting and useful faculties-in the Gir Forest lived a witch-girl with the power of healing by the laying-on of hands, and there was a wealthy tea-planter's son in Shillong who had the blessing (or possibly the curse) of being incapable of forgetting anything he ever saw or heard. But the children born in the first minute of all-for these children the hour had reserved the highest talents of which men had ever dreamed. If you, Padma, happened to possess a register of births in which times were noted down to the exact second, you, too, would know what scion of a great Lucknow family (born at twenty-one seconds past midnight) had completely mastered, by the age of ten, the lost arts of alchemy, with which he regenerated the fortunes of his ancient but dissipated house; and which dhobi's daughter from Madras (seventeen seconds past) could fly higher than any bird simply by closing her eyes; and to which Benarsi silversmith's son (twelve seconds after midnight) was given the gift of travelling in time and thus prophesying the future as well as clarifying the past… a gift which, children that we were, we trusted implicitly when it dealt with things gone and forgotten, but derided when he warned us of our own ends… fortunately, no such records exist; and, for my part, I shall not reveal-or else, in appearing to reveal, shall falsify-their names and even their locations; because, although such evidence would provide absolute proof of my claims, still the children of midnight deserve, now, after everything, to be left alone; perhaps to forget; but I hope (against hope) to remember…
   Parvati-the-witch was born in Old Delhi in a slum which clustered around the steps of the Friday mosque. No ordinary slum, this, although the huts built out of old packing cases and pieces of corrugated tin and shreds of jute sacking which stood higgledy-piggledy in the shadow of the mosque looked no different from any other shanty-town… because this was the ghetto of the magicians, yes, the very same place which had once spawned a Hummingbird whom knives had pierced and pie-dogs had failed to save… the conjurers' slum, to which the greatest fakirs and prestidigitators and illusionists in the land continually flocked, to seek their fortune in the capital city. They found tin huts, and police harassment, and rats… Parvati's father had once been the greatest conjurer in Oudh; she had grown up amid ventriloquists who could make stones tell jokes and contortionists who could swallow their own legs and fire-eaters who exhaled flames from their arseholes and tragic clowns who could extract glass tears from the corners of their eyes; she had stood mildly amid gasping crowds while her father drove spikes through her neck; and all the time she had guarded her own secret, which was greater than any of the illusionist flummeries surrounding her; because to Parvati-the-witch, born a mere seven seconds after midnight on August 15th, had been given the powers of the true adept, the illuminatus, the genuine gifts of conjuration and sorcery, the art which required no artifice.
   So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry… but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose… to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could draw the undrawable.bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!)… and to me, the greatest talent of all-the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.
   But it is Kali-Yuga; the children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.

   There; now I've said it. That is who I was-who we were.
   Padma is looking as if her mother had died-her face, with its opening-shutting mouth, is the face of a beached pomfret. 'O baba!' she says at last. 'O baba! You are sick; what have you said?'
   No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don't make the mistake of dismissing what I've unveiled as mere delirium; or even as the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated before that I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and read aloud to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother's-head truth.
   Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. A thousand and one children were born; there were a thousand and one possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time before; and there were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children can be made to represent many things, according to your point of view: they can be seen as the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing, twentieth-century economy; or as the true hope of freedom, which is now forever extinguished; but what they must not become is the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind. No: illness is neither here nor there.
   'All right, all right, baba,' Padma attempts to placate me. 'Why become so cross? Rest now, rest some while, that is all I am asking.'

   Certainly it was a hallucinatory time in the days leading up to my tenth birthday; but the hallucinations were not in my head. My father, Ahmed Sinai, driven by the traitorous death of Dr Narlikar and by the increasingly powerful effect of djinns-and-tonics, had taken flight into a dream-world of disturbing unreality; and the most insidious aspect of his slow decline was that, for a very long time, people mistook it for the very opposite of what it was… Here is Sonny's mother, Nussie-the-duck, telling Amina one evening in our garden: 'What great days for you all, Amina sister, now that your Ahmed is in his prime! Such a fine man, and so much he is prospering for his family's sake!' She says it loud enough for him to hear; and although he pretends to be telling the gardener what to do about the ailing bougainvillaea, although he assumes an expression of humble self-deprecation, it's utterly unconvincing, because his bloated body has begun, without his knowing it, to puff up and strut about. Even Purushottam, the dejected sadhu under the garden tap, looks embarrassed.
   My fading father… for almost ten years he had always been in a good mood at the breakfast table, before he shaved his chin; but as his facial hairs whitened along with his fading skin, this fixed point of happiness ceased to be a certainty; and the day came when he lost his temper at breakfast for the first time. That was the day on which taxes were raised and tax thresholds simultaneously lowered; my father flung down the Times of India with a violent gesture and glared around him with the red eyes I knew he only wore in his tempers. 'It's like going to the bathroom!' he exploded, cryptically; egg toast tea shuddered in the blast of his wrath. 'You raise your shirt and lower your trousers! Wife, this government is going to the bathroom all over us!' And my mother, blushing pink through the black, 'Janum, the children, please,' but he had stomped off, leaving me with a clear understanding of what people meant when they said the country was going to pot.
   In the following weeks my father's morning chin continued to fade, and something more than the peace of the breakfast table was lost: he began to forget what sort of man he'd been in the old days before Narlikar's treason. The rituals of our home life began to decay. He began to stay away from the breakfast table, so that Amina could not wheedle money out of him; but, to compensate, he became careless with his cash, and his discarded clothes were full of rupee notes and coins, so that by picking his pockets she could make ends meet. But a more depressing indication of his withdrawal from family life was that he rarely told us bedtime stories any more, and when he did we didn't enjoy them, because they had become ill-imagined and unconvincing. Their subject-matter was still the same, princes goblins flying horses and adventures in magic lands, but in his perfunctory voice we could hear the creaks and groans of a rustling, decayed imagination.
   My father had succumbed to abstraction. It seems that Narlikar's death and the end of his tetrapod dream had shown Ahmed Sinai the unreliable nature of human relationships; he had decided to divest himself of all such ties. He took to rising before dawn and locking himself with his current Fernanda or Flory in his downstairs office, outside whose windows the two evergreen trees he planted to commemorate my birth and the Monkey's had already grown tall enough to keep out most of the daylight when it arrived. Since we hardly ever dared disturb him, my father entered a deep solitude, a condition so unusual in our overcrowded country as to border on abnormality; he began to refuse food from our kitchen and to live on cheap rubbish brought daily by his girl in a tiffin-carrier, lukewarm parathas and soggy vegetable samosas and bottles of fizzy drinks. A strange perfume wafted out from under his office door; Amina took it for the odour of stale air and second-rate food; but it's my belief that an old scent had returned in a stronger form, the old aroma of failure which had hung about him from the earliest days.
   He sold off the many tenements or chawls which he'd bought cheaply on his arrival in Bombay, and on which our family's fortunes had been based. Freeing himself from all business connections with human beings-even his anonymous tenants in Kurla and Worli, in Matunga and Mazagaon and Mahim-he liquefied his assets, and entered the rarefied and abstract air of financial speculation. Locked in his office, in those days, his one contact with the outside world (apart from his poor Fernandas) was his telephone. He spent his day deep in conference with this instrument, as it put his money into such-andsuch shares or soandso stocks, as it invested in government bonds or bear market equities, selling long or short as he commanded… and invariably getting the best price of the day. In a streak of good fortune comparable only to my mother's success on the horses all those years previously, my father and his telephone took the stock exchange by storm, a feat made more remarkable by Ahmed Sinai's constantly-worsening drinking habits. Djinn-sodden, he nevertheless managed to ride high on the abstract undulations of the money market, reacting to its emotional, unpredictable shifts and changes the way a lover does to his beloved's slightest whim… he could sense when a share would rise, when the peak would come; and he always got out before the fall. This was how his plunge into the abstract solitude of his telephonic days was disguised, how his financial coups obscured his steady divorce from reality; but under cover of his growing riches, his condition was getting steadily worse.
   Eventually the last of his calico-skirted secretaries quit, being unable to tolerate life in an atmosphere so thin and abstract as to make breathing difficult; and now my father sent for Mary Pereira and coaxed her with, 'We're friends, Mary, aren't we, you and I?', to which the poor woman replied, 'Yes, sahib, I know; you will look after me when I'm old,' and promised to find him a replacement. The next day she brought him her sister, Alice Pereira, who had worked for all kinds of bosses and had an almost infinite tolerance of men. Alice and Mary had long since made up their quarrel over Joe D'Costa; the younger woman was often upstairs with us at the end of the day, bringing her qualities of sparkle and sauciness into the somewhat oppressive air of our home. I was fond of her, and it was through her that we learned of my father's greatest excesses, whose victims were a budgerigar and a mongrel dog.
   By July Ahmed Sinai had entered an almost permanent state of intoxication; one day, Alice reported, he had suddenly gone off for a drive, making her fear for his life, and returned somehow or other with a shrouded bird-cage in which, he said, was his new acquisition, a bulbul or Indian nightingale. 'For God knows how long,' Alice confided, 'he tells me all about bulbuls; all fairy stories of its singing and what-all; how this Calipha was captivated by its song, how the singing could make longer the beauty of the night; God knows what the poor man was babbling, quoting Persian and Arabic, I couldn't make top or bottom of it. But then he took off the cover, and in the cage is nothing but a talking budgie, some crook in Chor Bazaar must have painted the feathers! Now how could I tell the poor man, him so excited with his bird and all, sitting there calling out, 'Sing, little bulbul! Sing!'… and it's so funny, just before it died from the paint it just repeated his line back at him, straight out like that-not squawky like a bird, you know, but in his own self-same voice: Sing! Little bulbul, sing!'
   But there was worse on the way. A few days later I was sitting with Alice on the servants' spiral iron staircase when she said, 'Baba, I don't know what got into your daddy now. All day sitting down there cursing curses at the dog!'
   The mongrel bitch we named Sherri had strolled up to the two-storey hillock earlier that year and simply adopted us, not knowing that life was a dangerous business for animals on Methwold's Estate; and in his cups Ahmed Sinai made her the guinea-pig for his experiments with the family curse.

  This was that same fictional curse which he'd dreamed up to impress William Methwold, but now in the liquescent chambers of his mind the djinns persuaded him that it was no fiction, that he'd just forgotten the words; so he spent long hours in his insanely solitary office experimenting with formulae… 'Such things he is cursing the poor creature with!' Alice said, 'I wonder she don't drop down dead straight off!'
   But Sherri just sat there in a corner and grinned stupidly back at him, refusing to turn purple or break out in boils, until one evening he erupted from his office and ordered Amina to drive us all to Hornby Vellard. Sherri came too. We promenaded, wearing puzzled expressions, up and down the Vellard, and then he said, 'Get in the car, all of you.' Only he wouldn't let Sherri in… as the Rover accelerated away with my father at the wheel she began to chase after us, while the Monkey yelled Daddydaddy and Amina pleaded Janumplease and I sat in mute horror, we had to drive for miles, almost all the way to Santa Cruz airport, before he had his revenge on the bitch for refusing to succumb to his sorceries… she burst an artery as she ran and died spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of a hungry cow.
   The Brass Monkey (who didn't even like dogs) cried for a week; my mother became worried about dehydration and made her drink gallons of water, pouring it into her as if she were a lawn, Mary said; but I liked the new puppy my father bought me for my tenth birthday, out of some flicker of guilt perhaps: her name was the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, and she had a pedigree chock-full of champion Alsatians, although in time my mother discovered that that was as false as the mock-bulbul, as imaginary as my father's forgotten curse and Mughal ancestry; and after six months she died of venereal disease. We had no pets after that.

   My father was not the only one to approach my tenth birthday with his head lost in the clouds of his private dreams; because here is Mary Pereira, indulging in her fondness for making chutneys, kasaundies and pickles of all descriptions, and despite the cheery presence of her sister Alice there is something haunted in her face.
   'Hullo, Mary!' Padma-who seems to have developed a soft spot for my criminal ayah-greets her return to centre-stage. 'So what's eating her?'
   This, Padma: plagued by her nightmares of assaults by Joseph D'Costa, Mary was finding it harder and harder to get sleep. Knowing what dreams had in store for her, she forced herself to stay awake; dark rings appeared under her eyes, which were covered in a thin, filmy glaze; and gradually the blurriness of her perceptions merged waking and dreaming into something very like each other… a dangerous condition to get into, Padma. Not only does your work suffer but things start escaping from your dreams.. .Joseph D'Costa had, in fact, managed to cross the blurred frontier, and now appeared in Buckingham Villa not as a nightmare, but as a full-fledged ghost. Visible (at this time) only to Mary Pereira, he began haunting her in all the rooms of our home, which, to her horror and shame, he treated as casually as if it were his own. She saw him in the drawing-room amongst cut-glass vases and Dresden figurines and the rotating shadows of ceiling fans, lounging in soft armchairs with his long raggedy legs sprawling over the arms; his eyes were filled up with egg-whites and there were holes in his feet where the snake had bitten him. Once she saw him in Amina Begum's bed in the afternoon, lying down cool as cucumber right next to my sleeping mother, and she burst out, 'Hey, you! Go on out from there! What do you think, you're some sort of lord?'-but she only succeeded in awaking my puzzled mother. Joseph's ghost plagued Mary wordlessly; and the worst of it was that she found herself growing accustomed to him, she found forgotten sensations of fondness nudging at her insides, and although she told herself it was a crazy thing to do she began to be filled with a kind of nostalgic love for the spirit of the dead hospital porter.
   But the love was not returned; Joseph's egg-white eyes remained expressionless; his lips remained set in an accusing, sardonic grin; and at last she realized that this new manifestation was no different from her old dream-Joseph (although it never assaulted her), and that if she was ever to be free of him she would have to do the unthinkable thing and confess her crime to the world. But she didn't confess, which was probably my fault-because Mary loved me like her own unconceived and inconceivable son, and to make her confession would have hurt me badly, so for my sake she suffered the ghost of her conscience and stood haunted in the kitchen (my father had sacked the cook one djinn-soaked evening) cooking our dinner and becoming, accidentally, the embodiment of the opening line of my Latin textbook, Ora Maritima: 'By the side of the sea, the ayah cooked the meal.' Ora maritima, ancilla cenam parat. Look into the eyes of a cooking ayah, and you will see more than textbooks ever know.

   On my tenth birthday, many chickens were coming home to roost. On my tenth birthday, it was clear that the freak weather-storms, floods, hailstones from a cloudless sky-which had succeeded the intolerable heat of 1956, had managed to wreck the second Five Year Plan. The government had been forced-although the elections were just around the corner-to announce to the world that it could accept no more development loans unless the lenders were willing to wait indefinitely for repayment. (But let me not overstate the case: although the production of finished steel reached only 2.4 million tons by the Plan's end in 1961, and although, during those five years, the number of landless and unemployed masses actually increased, so that it was greater than it had ever been under the British Raj, there were also substantial gains. The production of iron ore was almost doubled; power capacity did double; coal production leaped from thirty-eight million to fifty-four million tons. Five billion yards of cotton textiles were produced each year. Also large numbers of bicycles, machine tools, diesel engines, power pumps and ceiling fans. But I can't help ending on a downbeat: illiteracy survived unscathed; the population continued to mushroom.)
   On my tenth birthday, we were visited by my uncle Hanif, who made himself excessively unpopular at Methwold's Estate by booming cheerily, 'Elections coming! Watch out for the Communists!'
   On my tenth birthday, when my uncle Hanif made his gaffe, my mother (who had begun disappearing on mysterious 'shopping trips') dramatically and unaccountably blushed.
   On my tenth birthday, I was given an Alsatian puppy with a false pedigree who would shortly die of syphilis.
   On my tenth birthday, everyone at Methwold's Estate tried hard to be cheerful, but beneath this thin veneer everyone was possessed by the same thought: 'Ten years, my God! Where have they gone? What have we done?'
   On my tenth birthday, old man Ibrahim announced his support for the Maha Gujarat Parishad; as far as possession of the city of Bombay was concerned, he nailed his colours to the losing side.
   On my tenth birthday, my suspicions aroused by a blush, I spied on my mother's thoughts; and what I saw there led to my beginning to follow her, to my becoming a private eye as daring as Bombay's legendary Dom Minto, and to important discoveries at and in the vicinity of the Pioneer Cafe.
   On my tenth birthday, I had a party, which was attended by my family, which had forgotten how to be gay, by classmates from the Cathedral School, who had been sent by their parents, and by a number of mildly bored girl swimmers from the Breach Candy Pools, who permitted the Brass Monkey to fool around with them and pinch their bulging musculatures; as for adults, there were Mary and Alice Pereira, and the Ibrahims and Homi Catrack and Uncle
   Hanif and Pia Aunty, and Lila Sabarmati to whom the eyes of every schoolboy (and also Homi Catrack) remained firmly glued, to the considerable irritation of Pia. But the only member of the hilltop gang to attend was loyal Sonny Ibrahim, who had defied an embargo placed upon the festivities by an embittered Evie Burns. He gave me a message: 'Evie says to tell you you're out of the gang.'
   On my tenth birthday, Evie, Eyeslice, Hairoil and even Cyrus-the-great stormed my private hiding-place; they occupied the clock-tower, and deprived me of its shelter.
   On my tenth birthday, Sonny looked upset, and the Brass Monkey detached herself from her swimmers and became utterly furious with Evie Burns. Til teach her,' she told me. 'Don't you worry, big brother; I'll show that one, all right.'
   On my tenth birthday, abandoned by one set of children, I learned that five hundred and eighty-one others were celebrating their birthdays, too; which was how I understood the secret of my original hour of birth; and, having been expelled from one gang, I decided to form my own, a gang which was spread over the length and breadth of the country, and whose headquarters were behind my eyebrows.
   And on my tenth birthday, I stole the initials of the Metro Cub Club-which were also the initials of the touring English cricket team-and gave them to the new Midnight Children's Conference, my very own M.C.C.
   That's how it was when I was ten: nothing but trouble outside my head, nothing but miracles inside it.

At the Pioneer Cafe

   No colours except green and black the walls are green the sky is black (there is no roof) the stars are green the Widow is green but her hair is black as black. The Widow sits on a high high chair the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's hair has a centre-parting it is green on the left and on the right black. High as the sky the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's arm is long as death its skin is green the fingernails are long and sharp and black. Between the walls the children green the walls are green the Widow's arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow's arm is hunting see the children run and scream the Widow's hand curls round them green and black. Now one by one the children mmff are stifled quiet the Widow's hand is lifting one by one the children green their blood is black unloosed by cutting fingernails it splashes black on walls (of green) as one by one the curling hand lifts children high as sky the sky is black there are no stars the Widow laughs her tongue is green but her teeth are black. And children torn in two in Widow hands which rolling rolling halves of children roll them into little balls the balls are green the night is black. And little balls fly into night between the walls the children shriek as one by one the Widow's hand. And in a corner the Monkey and I (the walls are green the shadows black) cowering crawling wide high walls green fading into black there is no roof and Widow's hand comes onebyone the children scream and mmff and little balls and hand and scream and mmff and splashing stains of black. Now only she and I and no more screams the Widow's hand comes hunting hunting the skin is green the nails are black towards the corner hunting hunting while we shrink closer into the corner our skin is green our fear is black and now the Hand comes reaching reaching and she my sister pushes me out out of the corner while she stays cowering staring the hand the nails are curling scream and mmff and splash of black and up into the high as sky and laughing Widow tearing I am rolling into little balls the balls are green and out into the night the night is black…
   The fever broke today. For two days (I'm told) Padma has been sitting up all night, placing cold wet flannels on my forehead, holding me through my shivers and dreams of Widow's hands; for two days she has been blaming herself for her potion of unknown herbs. 'But,' I reassure her, 'this time, it wasn't anything to do with that.' I recognize this fever; it's come up from inside me and from nowhere else; like a bad stink, it's oozed through my cracks. I caught exactly such a fever on my tenth birthday, and spent two days in bed; now, as my memories return to leak out of me, this old fever has come back, too. 'Don't worry,' I say, 'I caught these germs almost twenty-one years ago.'
   We are not alone. It is morning at the pickle-factory; they have brought my son to see me. Someone (never mind who) stands beside Padma at my bedside, holding him in her arms. 'Baba, thank God you are better, you don't know what you were talking in your sickness.' Someone speaks anxiously, trying to force her way into my story ahead of time; but it won't work… someone, who founded this pickle-factory and its ancillary bottling works, who has been looking after my impenetrable child, just as once… wait on! She nearly wormed it out of me then, but fortunately I've still got my wits about me, fever or no fever! Someone will just have to step back and remain cloaked in anonymity until it's her turn; and that won't be until the very end. I turn my eyes away from her to look at Padma. 'Do not think,' I admonish her, 'that because I had a fever, the things I told you were not completely true. Everything happened just as I described.'
   'O God, you and your stories,' she cries, 'all day, all night-you have made yourself sick! Stop some time, na, what will it hurt?' I set my lips obstinately; and now she, with a sudden change of mood: 'So, tell me now, mister: is there anything you want7'
   'Green chutney,' I request, 'Bright green-green as grasshoppers.' And someone who cannot be named remembers and tells Padma (speaking in the soft voice which is only used at sickbeds and funerals), 'I know what he means.'
   … Why, at this crucial instant, when all manner of things were . waiting to be described-when the Pioneer Cafe was so close, and the rivalry of knees and nose-did I introduce a mere condiment into the conversation? (Why do I waste time, in this account, on a humble preserve, when I could be describing the elections of 1957-when all India is waiting, twenty-one years ago, to vote?) Because I sniffed the air; and scented, behind the solicitous expressions of my visitors, a sharp whiff of danger. I intended to defend myself; but I required the assistance of chutney…
   I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what has remained undescribed: through green-tinged glass windows, my room looks out on to an iron catwalk and then down to the cooking-floor, where copper vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps, working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle fumes; while (looking the other way, through a green-tinged window on the world) railway tracks shine dully in morning sun, bridged over at regular intervals by the messy gantries of the electrification system. In daylight, our saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance above the factory doors; we switch her off to save power. But electric trains are using power: yellow-and-brown local trains clatter south towards Churchgate Station from Dadar and Borivli, from Kurla and Bassein Road. Human flies hang in thick white-trousered dusters from the trains; I do not deny that, within the factory walls, you may also see some flies. But there are also compensating lizards, hanging stilly upside-down on the ceiling, their jowls reminiscent of the Kathiawar peninsula… sounds, too, have been waiting to be heard: bubbling of vats, loud singing, coarse imprecations, bawdy humour of fuzz-armed women; the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped admonitions of overseers; the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the adjacent bottling-works; and rush of trains, and the buzzing (infrequent, but inevitable) of flies… while grasshopper-green chutney is being extracted from its vat, to be brought on a wiped-clean plate with saffron and green stripes around the rim, along with another plate piled high with snacks from the local Irani shop; while what-has-now-been-shown goes on as usual, and what-can-now-be-heard fills the air (to say nothing of what can be smelled), I, alone in bed in my office realize with a start of alarm that outings are being suggested.
   '… When you are stronger,' someone who cannot be named is saying, 'a day at Elephanta, why not, a nice ride in a motor-launch, and all those caves with so-beautiful carvings; or Juhu Beach, for swimming and coconut-milk and camel-races; or Aarey Milk Colony, even!…' And Padma: 'Fresh air, yes, and the little one will like to be with his father.' And someone, patting my son on his head: 'There, of course, we will all go. Nice picnic; nice day out. Baba, it will do you good…'
   As chutney arrives, bearer-borne, in my room, I hasten to put a stop to these suggestions. 'No,' I refuse. 'I have work to do.' And I see a look pass between Padma and someone; and I see that I've been right to be suspicious. Because I've been tricked by offers of picnics once before! Once before, false smiles and offers of Aarey Milk Colony have fooled me into going out of doors and into a motor car; and then before I knew it there were hands seizing me, there were hospital corridors and doctors and nurses holding me in place while over my nose a mask poured anaesthetic over me and a voice said, Count now, count to ten… I know what they are planning. 'Listen,' I tell them, 'I don't need doctors.'
   And Padma, 'Doctors? Who is talking about…' But she is fooling nobody; and with a little smile I say, 'Here: everybody: take some chutney. I must tell you some important things.'
   And while chutney-the same chutney which, back in 1957, my ayah Mary Pereira had made so perfectly; the grasshopper-green chutney which is forever associated with those days-carried them back into the world of my past, while chutney mellowed them and made them receptive, I spoke to them, gently, persuasively, and by a mixture of condiment and oratory kept myself out of the hands of the pernicious green-medicine men. I said: 'My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I'm telling my story for him, so that afterwards, when I've lost my struggle against cracks, he will know. Morality, judgment, character… it all starts with memory… and I am keeping carbons.'
   Green chutney on chilli-pakoras, disappearing down someone's gullet; grasshopper-green on tepid chapatis, vanishing behind Padma's lips. I see them begin to weaken, and press on. 'I told you the truth,' I say yet again, 'Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.'
   Yes: I said 'sane'. I knew what they were thinking: 'Plenty of children invent imaginary friends; but one thousand and one! That's just crazy!' The midnight children shook even Padma's faith in my narrative; but I brought her round, and now there's no more talk of outings.
   How I persuaded them: by talking about my son, who needed to know my story; by shedding light on the workings of memory; and by other devices, some naively honest, others wily as foxes. 'Even Muhammad,' I said, 'at first believed himself insane: do you think the notion never crossed my mind? But the Prophet had his Khadija, his Abu-Bakr, to reassure him of the genuineness of his Calling; nobody betrayed him into the hands of asylum-doctors.' By now, the green chutney was filling them with thoughts of years ago; I saw guilt appear on their faces, and shame. 'What is truth?' I waxed rhetorical, 'What is sanity? Did Jesus rise up from the grave? Do Hindus not accept-Padma-that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma dreamed, is dreaming the universe; that we only see dimly through that dream-web, which is Maya. Maya,' I adopted a haughty, lecturing tone, 'may be defined as all that is illusory; as trickery, artifice and deceit. Apparitions, phantasms, mirages, sleight-of-hand, the seeming form of things: all these are parts of Maya. If I say that certain things took place which you, lost in Brahma's dream, find hard to believe, then which of us is right? Have some more chutney,' I added graciously, taking a generous helping myself. 'It tastes very good.

   Padma began to cry. 'I never said I didn't believe, she wept. 'Of course, every man must tell his story in his own true way; but…'
   'But,' I interrupted conclusively, 'you also-don't you-want to know what happens? About the hands that danced without touching, and the knees? And later, the curious baton of Commander Sabarmati, and of course the Widow? And the Children-what became of them?'
   And Padma nodded. So much for doctors and asylums; I have been left to write. (Alone, except for Padma at my feet.) Chutney and oratory, theology and curiosity: these are the things that saved me. And one more-call it education, or class-origins; Mary Pereira would have called it my 'brought-up'. By my show of erudition and by the purity of my accents, I shamed them into feeling unworthy of judging me; not a very noble deed, but when the ambulance is waiting round the corner, all's fair. (It was: I smelled it.) Still-I've had a valuable warning. It's a dangerous business to try and impose one's view of things on others.
   Padma: if you're a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.
   Meanwhile, I am ten years old, and working out how to hide in the boot of my mother's car.
   That was the month when Purushottam the sadhu (whom I had never told about my inner life) finally despaired of his stationary existence and contracted the suicidal hiccups which assailed him for an entire year, frequently lifting him bodily several inches off the ground so that his water-balded head cracked alarmingly against the garden tap, and finally killed him, so that one evening at the cocktail hour he toppled sideways with his legs still locked in the lotus position, leaving my mother's verrucas without any hope of salvation; when I would often stand in the garden of Buckingham Villa in the evenings, watching the Sputniks cross the sky, and feeling as simultaneously exalted and isolated as little Laika, the first and still the only dog to be shot into space (the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, shortly to contract syphilis, sat beside me following the bright pinprick of Sputnik II with her Alsatian eyes-it was a time of great canine interest in the space race); when Evie Burns and her gang occupied my clocktower, and washing-chests had been both forbidden and outgrown, so that for the sake of secrecy and sanity I was obliged to limit my visits to the midnight children to our private, silent hour-I communed with them every midnight, and only at midnight, during that hour which is reserved for miracles, which is somehow outside time; and when-to get to the point-I resolved to prove, with the evidence of my own eyes, the terrible thing I had glimpsed sitting in the front of my mother's thoughts. Ever since I lay hidden in a washing-chest and heard two scandalous syllables, I had been suspecting my mother of secrets; my incursions into her thought processes confirmed my suspicions; so it was with a hard glint in my eye, and a steely determination, that I visited Sonny Ibrahim one afternoon after school, with the intention of enlisting his help.
   I found Sonny in his room, surrounded by posters of Spanish bullfights, morosely playing Indoor Cricket by himself. When he saw me he cried unhappily, 'Hey man I'm damn sorry about Evie man she won't listen to anyone man what the hell'd you do to her anyway?'… But I held up a dignified hand, commanding and being accorded silence.
   'No time for that now, man,' I said. 'The thing is, I need to know how to open locks without keys.'
   A true fact about Sonny Ibrahim: despite all his bullfighting dreams, his genius lay in the realm of mechanical things. For some time now, he had taken on the job of maintaining all the bikes on Methwold's Estate in return for gifts of comic-books and a free supply of fizzy drinks. Even Evelyn Lilith Burns gave her beloved Indiabike into his care. All machines, it seemed, were won over by the innocent delight with which he caressed their moving parts; no contraption could resist his ministrations. To put it another way: Sonny Ibrahim had become (out of a spirit of pure inquiry) an expert at picking locks.
   Now offered a chance of demonstrating his loyalty to me, his eyes brightened. 'Jus' show me the lock, man! Lead me to the thing!'
   When we were sure we were unobserved, we crept along the driveway between Buckingham Villa and Sonny's Sans Souci; we stood behind my family's old Rover; and I pointed at the boot. 'That's the one,' I stated. 'I need to be able to open it from the outside, and the inside also.'
   Sonny's eyes widened. 'Hey, what're you up to, man? You running away from home secretly and all?'
   Finger to lips, I adopted a mysterious expression. 'Can't explain, Sonny,' I said solemnly, 'Top-drawer classified information.'
   'Wow, man,' Sonny said, and showed me in thirty seconds how to open the boot with the aid of a strip of thin pink plastic. 'Take it, man,' said Sonny Ibrahim, 'You need it more than me.'

   Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could never manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers… shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips. But now, hidden in the boot of the Rover, there travelled with her a stowaway, who lay hidden and protected by stolen cushions, clutching a thin strip of pink plastic in his hand.
   O, the suffering one undergoes in the name of righteousness! The bruising and the bumps! The breathing-in of rubbery boot-air through jolted teeth! And constantly, the fear of discovery… 'Suppose she really does go shopping? Will the boot suddenly fly open? Will live chickens be flung in, feet tied together, wings clipped, fluttery pecky birds invading my hidey-hole? Will she see, my God, I'll have to be silent for a week!' My knees drawn in beneath my chin-which was protected-against knee-bumps by an old faded cushion-I voyaged into the unknown in the vehicle of maternal perfidy. My mother was a cautious driver; she went slowly, and turned corners with care; but afterwards I was bruised black and blue and Mary Pereira berated me soundly for getting into fights: 'Arre God what a thing it's a wonder they didn't smash you to pieces completely my God what will you grow up into you bad black boy you haddi-phaelwan you skin-and-bone wrestler!'
   To take my mind off the jolting darkness I entered, with extreme caution, that part of my mother's mind which was in charge of driving operations, and as a result was able to follow our route. (And, also, to discern in my mother's habitually tidy mind an alarming degree of disorder. I was already beginning, in those days, to classify people by their degree of internal tidiness, and to discover that I preferred the messier type, whose thoughts, spilling constantly into one another so that anticipatory images of food interfered with the serious business of earning a living and sexual fantasies were superimposed upon their political musings, bore a closer relationship to my own pell-mell tumble of a brain, in which everything ran into everything else and the white dot of consciousness jumped about like a wild flea from one thing to the next… Amina Sinai, whose assiduous ordering-instincts had provided her with a brain of almost abnormal neatness, was a curious recruit to the ranks of confusion.)
   We headed north, past Breach Candy Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north along Horaby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali's island tomb, north off what had once been (before the dream of the first William Methwold became a reality) the island of Bombay. We were heading towards the anonymous mass of tenements and fishing-villages and textile-plants and film-studios that the city became in these northern zones (not far from here! Not at all far from where I sit within view of local trains!)… an area which was, in those days, utterly unknown to me; I rapidly became disoriented and was then obliged to admit to myself that I was lost. At last, down an unprepossessing side-street full of drainpipe-sleepers and bicycle-repair shops and tattered men and boys, we stopped. Clusters of children assailed my mother as she descended; she, who could never shoo away a fly, handed out small coins, thus enlarging the crowd enormously. Eventually, she struggled away from them and headed down the street; there was a boy pleading, 'Gib the car poliss, Begum? Number one A-class poliss, Begum? I watch car until you come, Begum? I very fine watchman, ask anyone!'… In some panic, I listened in for her reply. How could I get out of this boot under the eyes of a guardian-urchin? There was the embarrassment of it; and besides, my emergence would have created a sensation in the street… my mother said, 'No.' She was disappearing down the street; the would-be polisher and watchman gave up eventually; there was a moment when all eyes turned to watch the passing of a second car, just in case it, too, stopped to disgorge a lady who gave away coins as if they were nuts; and in that instant (I had been looking through several pairs of eyes to help me choose my moment) I performed my trick with the pink plastic and was out in the street beside a closed car-boot in a flash. Setting my lips grimly, and ignoring all outstretched palms, I set off in the direction my mother had taken, a pocket-sized sleuth with the nose of a bloodhound and a loud drum pounding in the place where my heart should have been… and arrived, a few minutes later, at the Pioneer Cafe.
   Dirty glass in the window; dirty glasses on the tables-the Pioneer Cafe was not much when compared to the Gaylords and Kwalitys of the city's more glamorous parts; a real rutputty joint, with painted boards proclaiming lovely lassi and funtabulous falooda and bhel-puribombay fashion, with filmi playback music blaring out from a cheap radio by the cash-till, a long narrow greeny room lit by flickering neon, a forbidding world in which broken-toothed men sat at reccine-covered tables with crumpled cards and expressionless eyes. But for all its grimy decrepitude, the Pioneer Cafe was a repository of many dreams. Early each morning, it would be full of the best-looking ne'er-do-wells in the city, all the goondas and taxi-drivers and petty smugglers and racecourse tipsters who had once, long ago, arrived in the city dreaming of film stardom, of grotesquely vulgar homes and black money payments; because every morning at six, the major studios would send minor functionaries to the Pioneer Cafe to rope in extras for the day's shooting. For half an hour each morning, when D. W. Rama Studios and Filmistan Talkies and R К Films were taking their pick, the Pioneer was the focus of all the city's ambitions and hopes; then the studio scouts left, accompanied by the day's lucky ones, and the Cafe emptied into its habitual, neon-lit torpor. Around lunchtime, a different set of dreams walked into the Cafe, to spend the afternoon hunched over cards and Lovely Lassi and rough bins-different men with different hopes: I didn't know it then, but the afternoon Pioneer was a notorious Communist Party hangout

   It was afternoon; I saw my mother enter the Pioneer Cafe; not daring to follow her, I stayed in the street, pressing my nose against a spider-webbed corner of the grubby window-pane; ignoring the curious glances I got-because my whites, although boot-stained, were nevertheless starched; my hair, although boot-rumpled, was well-oiled; my shoes, scuffed as they were, were still the plimsolls of a prosperous child-I followed her with my eyes as she went hesitantly and verruca-hobbled past rickety tables and hard-eyed men; I saw my mother sit down at a shadowed table at the far end of the narrow cavern; and then I saw the man who rose to greet her.
   The skin on his face hung in folds which revealed that he had once been overweight; his teeth were stained with paan. He wore a clean white kurta with Lucknow-work around the buttonholes. He had long hair, poetically long, hanging lankly over his ears; but the top of his head was bald and shiny. Forbidden syllables echoed in my ears: Na. Dir. Nadir. I realized that I wished desperately that I'd never resolved to come.

   Once upon a time there was an underground husband who fled, leaving loving messages of divorce; a poet whose verses didn't even rhyme, whose life was saved by pie-dogs. After a lost decade he emerged from goodness-knows-where, his skin hanging loose in memory of his erstwhile plumpness; and, like his once-upon-a-time wife, he had acquired a new name… Nadir Khan was now Qasim Khan, official candidate of the official Communist Party of India. Lal Qasim. Qasim the Red. Nothing is without meaning: not without reason are blushes red. My uncle Hanif said, 'Watch out for the Communists!' and my mother turned scarlet; politics and emotions were united in her cheeks… through the dirty, square, glassy cinema-screen of the Pioneer Gate's window, I watched Amina Sinai and the no-longer-Nadir play out their love scene; they performed with the ineptitude of genuine amateurs.
   On the reccine-topped table, a packet of cigarettes: State Express 555. Numbers, too, have significance: 420, the name given to frauds; 1001, the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities-a number beloved of poets and detested by politicians, for whom all alternative versions of the world are threats; and 555, which for years I believed to be the most sinister of numbers, the cipher of the Devil, the Great Beast, Shaitan himself! (Cyrus-the-great told me so, and I didn't contemplate the possibility of his being wrong. But he was: the true daemonic number is not 555, but 666: yet, in my mind, a dark aura hangs around the three fives to this day.)… But I am getting carried away. Suffice to say that Nadir-Qasim's preferred brand was the aforesaid State Express; that the figure five was repeated three times on the packet; and that its manufacturers were W.D. & H.O. Wills. Unable to look into my mother's face, I concentrated on the cigarette-packet, cutting from two-shot of lovers to this extreme close-up of nicotine.
   But now hands enter the frame-first the hands of Nadir-Qasim, their poetic softness somewhat callused these days; hands flickering like candle-flames, creeping forward across reccine, then jerking back; next a woman's hands, black as jet, inching forwards like elegant spiders; hands lifting up, off reccine tabletop, hands hovering above three fives, beginning the strangest of dances, rising, falling, circling one another, weaving in and out between each other, hands longing for touch, hands outstretching tensing quivering demanding to be-but always at last jerking back, fingertips avoiding fingertips, because what I'm watching here on my dirty glass cinema-screen is, after ail, an Indian movie, in which physical contact is forbidden lest it corrupt the watching flower of Indian youth; and there are feet beneath the table and faces above it, feet advancing towards feet, faces tumbling softly towards faces, but jerking away all of a sudden in a cruel censor's cut… two strangers, each bearing a screen-name which is not the name of their birth, act out their half-unwanted roles. I left the movie before the end, to slip back into the boot of the unpolished unwatched Rover, wishing I hadn't gone to see it, unable to resist wanting to watch it all over again.
   What I saw at the very end: my mother's hands raising a half-empty glass of Lovely Lassi; my mother's lips pressing gently, nostalgically against the mottled glass; my mother's hands handing the glass to her Nadir-Qasim; who also applied, to the opposite side of the glass, his own, poetic mouth. So it was that life imitated bad art, and my uncle Hanif's sister brought the eroticism of the indirect kiss into the green neon dinginess of the Pioneer Cafe.
   To sum up: in the high summer of 1957, at the peak of an election campaign, Amina Sinai blushed inexplicably at a chance mention of the Communist Party of India. Her son-in whose turbulent thoughts there was still room for one more obsession, because a ten-year-old brain can accommodate any number of fixations-followed her into the north of the city, and spied on a pain-filled scene of impotent love. (Now that Ahmed Sinai was frozen up, Nadir-Qasim didn't even have a sexual disadvantage; torn between a husband who locked himself in an office and cursed mongrels, and an ex-husband who had once, lovingly, played games of hit-the-spittoon, Amina Sinai was reduced to glass-kissery and hand-dances.)
   Questions: did I ever, after that time, employ the services of pink plastic? Did I return to the cafe of extras and Marxists? Did I confront my mother with the heinous nature of her offence-because what mother has any business to-never mind about what once-upon-a-time-in full view of her only son, how could she how could she how could she? Answers: I did not; I did not; I did not.
   What I did: when she went on 'shopping trips', I lodged myself in her thoughts. No-longer anxious to gain the evidence of my own eyes, I rode in my mother's head, up to the north of the city; in this unlikely incognito, I sat in the Pioneer Cafe and heard conversations about the electoral prospects of Qasim the Red; disembodied but wholly present, I trailed my mother as she accompanied Qasim on his rounds, up and down the tenements of the district (were they the same chawls which my father had recently sold, abandoning his tenants to their fate?), as she helped him to get water-taps fixed and pestered landlords to initiate repairs and disinfections. Amina Sinai moved amongst the destitute on behalf of the Communist Party-a fact which never failed to leave her amazed. Perhaps she did it because of the growing impoverishment of her own life; but at the age of ten I wasn't disposed to be sympathetic; and in my own way, I began to dream dreams of revenge.
   The legendary Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid, is said to have enjoyed moving incognito amongst the people of Baghdad; I, Saleem Sinai, have also travelled in secret through the byways of my city, but I can't say I had much fun.

   Matter of fact descriptions of the outre and bizarre, and their reverse, namely heightened, stylized versions of the everyday-these techniques, which are also attitudes of mind, I have lifted-or perhaps absorbed-from the most formidable of the midnight children, my rival, my fellow-changeling, the supposed son of Wee Willie Winkie: Shiva-of-the-knees. They were techniques which, in his case, were applied entirely without conscious thought, and their effect was to create a picture of the world of startling uniformity, in which one could mention casually, in passing as it were, the dreadful murders of prostitutes which began to fill the gutter-press in those days (while the bodies filled the gutters), while lingering passionately on the intricate details of a particular hand of cards. Death, and defeat at rummy were all of a piece to Shiva; hence his terrifying, nonchalant violence, which in the end… but to begin with beginnings:
   Although, admittedly, it's my own fault, I'm bound to say that if you think of me purely as a radio, you'll only be grasping half the truth. Thought is as often pictorial or purely emblematic as verbal; and anyway, in order to communicate with, and understand, my colleagues in the Midnight Children's Conference, it was necessary for me quickly to advance beyond the verbal stage. Arriving in their infinitely various minds, I was obliged to get beneath the surface veneer of front-of-mind thoughts in incomprehensible tongues, with the obvious (and previously demonstrated) effect that they became aware of my presence. Remembering the dramatic effect such an awareness had had on Evie Burns, I went to some pains to alleviate the shock of my entry. In all cases, my standard first transmission was an image of my face, smiling in what I trusted was a soothing, friendly, confident and leader-like fashion, and of a hand stretched out in friendship. There were, however, teething troubles.
   It took me a little while to realize that my picture of myself was heavily distorted by my own self-consciousness about my appearance; so that the portrait I sent across the thought-waves of the nation, grinning like a Cheshire cat, was about as hideous as a portrait could be, featuring a wondrously enlarged nose, a completely non-existent chin and giant stains on each temple. It's no wonder that I was often greeted by yelps of mental alarm. I, too, was often similarly frightened by the self-images of my ten-year-old fellows. When we discovered what was happening, I encouraged the membership of the Conference, one by one, to go and look into a mirror, or a patch of still water; and then we did manage to find out what we really looked like. The only problems were that our Keralan member (who could, you remember, travel through mirrors) accidentally ended up emerging through a restaurant mirror in the smarter part of New Delhi, and had to make a hurried retreat; while the blue-eyed member for Kashmir fell into a lake and accidentally changed sex, entering as a girl and emerging as a beautiful boy.
   When I first introduced myself to Shiva, I saw in his mind the certifying image of a short, rat-faced youth with filed-down teeth and two of the biggest knees the world has ever seen

   Faced with a picture of such grotesque proportions, I allowed the smile on my own beaming image to wither a little; my outstretched hand began to falter and twitch. And Shiva, feeling my presence, reacted at first with utter rage; great boiling waves of anger scalded the inside of my head; but then, 'Hey-look-I know you! You're the rich kid from Methwold's Estate, isn't it?' And I, equally astonished, 'Winkle's son-the one who blinded Eyeslice!' His self-image puffed up with pride. 'Yah, yaar, that's me. Nobody messes with me, man!' Recognition reduced me to banalities: 'So! How's your father, anyway? He doesn't come round…' And he, with what felt very like relief: 'Him, man? My father's dead.'
   A momentary pause; then puzzlement-no anger now-and Shiva, 'Lissen, yaar, this is damn good-how you doin' it?' I launched into my standard explanation, but after a few instants he interrupted, 'So! Lissen, my father said I got born at exactly midnight also-so don't you see, that makes us joint bosses of this gang of yours! Midnight is best, agreed? So-those other kids gotta do like we tell them!' There rose before my eyes the image of a second, and more potent, Evelyn Lilith Burns… dismissing this unkind notion, I explained, 'That wasn't exactly my idea for the Conference; I had in mind something more like a, you know, sort of loose federation of equals, all points of view given free expression…' Something resembling a violent snort echoed around the walls of my head. 'That, man, that's only rubbish. What we ever goin' to do with a gang like that? Gangs gotta have gang bosses. You take me-' (the puff of pride again) 'I been running a gang up here in Matunga for two years now. Since I was eight. Older kids and all. What d'you think of that?' And I, without meaning to, 'What's it do, your gang-does it have rules and all?' Shiva-laughter in my ears… 'Yah, little rich boy: one rule. Everybody does what I say or I squeeze the shit outa them with my knees!' Desperately, I continued to try and win Shiva round to my point of view: 'The thing is, we must be here for a purpose, don't you think? I mean, there has to be a reason, you must agree? So what I thought, we should try and work out what it is, and then, you know, sort of dedicate our lives to…' 'Rich kid,' Shiva yelled, 'you don't know one damn thing! What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you-you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind!'
   And now I, in my midnight bed, begin to shake… 'But history,' I say, 'and the Prime Minister wrote me a letter… and don't you even believe in… who knows what we might…' He, my alter ego, Shiva, butted in: 'Lissen, little boy-you're so full of crazy stuff, I can see I'm going to have to take this thing over. You tell that to all these other freak kids!'
   Nose and knees and knees and nose… the rivalry that began that night would never be ended, until two knives slashed, downdown-down… whether the spirits of Mian Abdullah, whom knives killed years before, had leaked into me, imbuing me with the notion of loose federalism and making me vulnerable to knives, I cannot say; but at that point I found a measure of courage and told Shiva, 'You can't run the Conference; without me, they won't even be able to listen to you!'
   And he, confirming the declaration of war: 'Rich kid, they'll want to know about me; you just try and stop me!'
   'Yes,' I told him, I'll try.'

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

   On election day, 1957, the All-India Congress was badly shocked. Although it won the election, twelve million votes made the Communists the largest single opposition party; and in Bombay, despite the efforts of Boss Patil, large numbers of electors failed to place their crosses against the Congress symbol of sacred-cow-and-suckling-calf, preferring the less emotive pictograms of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti and Maha Gujarat Parishad. When the Communist peril was discussed on our hillock, my mother continued to blush; and we resigned ourselves to the partition of the state of Bombay.
   One member of the Midnight Children's Conference played a minor role in the elections. Winkle's supposed son Shiva was recruited by-well, perhaps I will not name the party; but only one party had really large sums to spend-and on polling day, he and his gang, who called themselves Cowboys, were to be seen standing outside a polling station in the north of the city, some holding long stout sucks, others juggling with stones, still others picking their teeth with knives, all of them encouraging the electorate to use its vote with wisdom and care… and after the polls closed, were seals broken on ballot-boxes? Did ballot-stuffing occur? At any rate, when the votes were counted, it was discovered that Qasim the Red had narrowly failed to win the seat; and my rival's paymasters were well pleased.
   … But now Padma says, mildly, 'What date was it?' And, without thinking, I answer: 'Some time in the spring.' And then it occurs to me that I have made another error-that the election of 1957 took place before, and not after, my tenth birthday; but although I have racked my brains, my memory refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events. This is worrying. I don't know what's gone wrong.
   She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!'
   But if small things go, will large things be close behind?

Alpha and Omega

   There was turmoil in Bombay in the months after the election; there is turmoil in my thoughts as I recall those days. My error has upset me badly; so now, to regain my equilibrium, I shall place myself firmly on the familiar ground of Methwold's Estate; leaving the history of the Midnight Children's Conference to one side, and the pain of the Pioneer Cafe to another, I shall tell you about the fall of Evie Burns.
   I have titled this episode somewhat oddly. 'Alpha and Omega' stares back at me from the page, demanding to be explained-a curious heading for what will be my story's half-way point, one that reeks of beginnings and ends, when you could say it should be more concerned with middles; but, unrepentantly, I have no intention of changing it, although there are many alternative titles, for instance 'From Monkey to Rhesus', or 'Finger Redux', or-in a more allusive style-'The Gander', a reference, obviously, to the mythical bird, the hamsa or parahamsa, symbol of the ability to live in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the world of land-and-water and the world of air, of flight. But 'Alpha and Omega' it is; 'Alpha and Omega' it remains. Because there are beginnings here, and all manner of ends; but you'll soon see what I mean.
   Padma clicks her tongue in exasperation. 'You're talking funny again,' she criticizes, 'Are you going to tell about Evie or not?'
   … After the general election, the Central Government continued to shilly-shally about the future of Bombay. The State was to be partitioned; then not to be partitioned; then partition reared its head again. And as for the city itself-it was to be the capital of Maharashtra; or of both Maharashtra and Gujarat; or an independent state of its own… while the government tried to work out what on earth to do, the city's inhabitants decided to encourage it to be quick. Riots proliferated (and you could still hear the old battle-song of the Mahrattas-How are you? I am well! I'll take a stick and thrash you to hell!-rising above the fray); and to make things worse, the weather joined in the melee. There was a severe drought; roads cracked; in the villages, peasants were being forced to kill their cows; and on Christmas Day (of whose significance no boy who attended a mission school and was attended upon by a Catholic ayah could fail to be aware) there was a series of loud explosions at the Wal-keshwar Reservoir and the main fresh-water pipes which were the city's lifelines began to blow fountains into the air like giant steel whales. The newspapers were full of talk of saboteurs; speculation over the criminals' identities and political affiliation jostled for space against reports of the continuing wave of whore-murders. (I was particularly interested to learn that the murderer had his own curious 'signature'. The corpses of the ladies of the night were all strangled to death; there were bruises on their necks, bruises too large to be thumbprints, but wholly consistent with the marks which would be left by a pair of giant, preternaturally powerful knees.)
   But I digress. What, Padma's frown demands, does all this have to do with Evelyn Lilith Burns? Instantly, leaping to attention, as it were, I provide the answer: in the days after the destruction of the city's fresh-water supply, the stray cats of Bombay began to congregate in those areas of the city where water was still relatively plentiful; that is to say, the better-off areas, in which each house owned its own overhead or underground water-tank. And, as a result, the two-storey hillock of Methwold's Estate was invaded by an army of thirsting felines; cats swarming all over the circus-ring, cats climbing bougainvillaea creepers and leaping into sitting-rooms, cats knocking over flower-vases to drink the plant-stale water, cats bivouacked in bathrooms, slurping liquid out of water-closets, cats rampant in the kitchens of the palaces of William Methwold. The Estate's servants were vanquished in their attempts to repel the great cat invasion; the ladies of the Estate were reduced to helpless exclamations of horror. Hard dry worms of cat-excrement were everywhere; gardens were ruined by sheer feline force of numbers: and at night sleep became an impossibility as the army found voice, and sang its thirst at the moon. (The Baroness Simki von der Heiden refused to fight the cats; she was already showing signs of the disease which would shortly lead to her extermination.)
   Nussie Ibrahim rang my mother to announce, 'Amina sister, it is the end of the world.'
   She was wrong; because on the third day after the great cat invasion, Evelyn Lilith Burns visited each Estate household in turn, carrying her Daisy air-gun casually in one hand, and offered, in return for bounty money, to end the plague of pussies double-quick.
   All that day, Methwold's Estate echoed with the sounds of Evie's air-gun and the agonized wauls of the cats, as Evie stalked the entire army one by one and made herself rich. But (as history so often demonstrates) the moment of one's greatest triumph also contains the seeds of one's final downfall; and so it proved, because Evie's persecution of the cats was,' as far as the Brass Monkey was concerned, absolutely the last straw.
   'Brother,' the Monkey told me grimly, 'I told you I'd get that girl; now, right now, the time has come.'
   Unanswerable questions: was it true that my sister had acquired the languages of cats as well as birds? Was it her fondness for feline life which pushed her over the brink?… by the time of the great cat invasion, the Monkey's hair had faded into brown; she had broken her habit of burning shoes; but still, and for whatever reason, there was a fierceness in her which none of the rest of us ever possessed; and she went down into the circus-ring and yelled at the top of her voice: 'Evie! Evie Burns! You come out here, this minute, wherever you are!'
   Surrounded by fleeing cats, the Monkey awaited Evelyn Burns. I went out on to the first-floor verandah to watch; from their verandahs, Sonny and Eyeslice and Hairoil and Cyrus were watching too. We saw Evie Burns appear from the direction of the Versailles Villa kitchens; she was blowing the smoke away from the barrel of her gun.
   'You Indians c'n thank your stars you got me around,' Evie declared, 'or you'd just've got eaten by these cats!'
   We saw Evie fall silent as she saw the thing sitting tensely in the Monkey's eyes; and then like a blur the Monkey descended on Evie and a battle began which lasted for what seemed like several hours (but it can only have been a few minutes). Shrouded in the dust of the circus-ring they rolled kicked scratched bit, small tufts of hair flew out of the dust-cloud and there were elbows and feet in dirtied white socks and knees and fragments of frock flying out of the cloud; grown-ups came running, servants couldn't pull them apart, and in the end Homi Catrack's gardener turned his hose on them to separate them… the Brass Monkey stood up a little crookedly and shook the sodden hem of her dress, ignoring the cries of retribution proceeding from the lips of Amina Sinai and Mary Pereira; because there in the hose-wet dirt of the circus-ring lay Evie Burns, her tooth-braces broken, her hair matted with dust and spittle, her spirit and her dominion over us broken for once and for all.
   A few weeks later her father sent her home for good, 'To get a decent education away from these savages,' he was heard to remark; I only heard from her once, six months later, when right out of the blue she wrote me the letter which informed me that she had knifed an old lady who had objected to her assault on a cat. 'I gave it to her all right,' Evie wrote, 'Tell your sister she just got lucky.' I salute that unknown old woman: she paid the Monkey's bill.
   More interesting than Evie's last message is a thought which occurs to me now, as I look back down the tunnel of time. Holding before my eyes the image of Monkey and Evie rolling in the dirt, I seem to discern the driving force behind their battle to the death, a motive far deeper than the mere persecution of cats: they were fighting over me. Evie and my sister (who were, in many ways, not at all dissimilar) kicked and scratched, ostensibly over the fate of a few thirsty strays; but perhaps Evie's kicks were aimed at me, perhaps they were the violence of her anger at my invasion of her head; and then maybe the strength of the Monkey was the strength of sibling-loyalty, and her act of war was actually an act of love.

   Blood, then, was spilled in the circus-ring. Another rejected title for these pages-you may as well know-was 'Thicker Than Water'. In those days of water shortages, something thicker than water ran down the face of Evie Burns; the loyalties of blood motivated the Brass Monkey; and in the streets of the city, rioters spilled each other's blood. There were bloody murders, and perhaps it is not appropriate to end this sanguinary catalogue by mentioning, once again, the rushes of blood to my mother's cheeks. Twelve million votes were coloured red that year, and red is the colour of blood. More blood will flow soon: the types of blood, A and O, Alpha and Omega-and another, a third possibility-must be kept in mind. Also other factors: zygosity, and Kell antibodies, and that most mysterious of sanguinary attributes, known as rhesus, which is also a type of monkey.
   Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
   But before blood has its day, I shall take wing (like the parahamsa gander who can soar out of one element into another) and return, briefly, to the affairs of my inner world; because although the fall of Evie Burns ended my ostracism by the hilltop children, still I found it difficult to forgive; and for a time, holding myself solitary and aloof, I immersed myself in the events inside my head, in the early history of the association of the midnight children.

   To be honest: I didn't like Shiva. I disliked the roughness of his tongue, the crudity of his ideas; and I was beginning to suspect him of a string of terrible crimes-although I found it impossible to find any evidence in his thoughts, because he, alone of the children of midnight, could close off from me any part of his thoughts he chose to keep to himself-which, in itself, increased my growing dislike and suspicion of the rat-faced fellow. However, I was nothing if not fair; and it would not have been fair to have kept him apart from the other members of the Conference.
   I should explain that as my mental facility increased, I found that it was possible not only to pick up the children's transmissions; not only to broadcast my own messages; but also (since I seem to be stuck with this radio metaphor) to act as a sort of national network, so that by opening my transformed mind to all the children I could turn it into a kind of forum in which they could talk to one another, through me. So, in the early days of 1958, the five hundred and eighty-one children would assemble, for one hour, between midnight and one a.m., in the lok sabha or parliament of my brain.
   We were as motley, as raucous, as undisciplined as any bunch of five hundred and eighty-one ten year olds; and on top of our natural exuberance, there was the excitement of our discovery of each other. After one hour of top-volume yelling jabbering arguing giggling, I would fall exhausted into a sleep too deep for nightmares, and still wake up with a headache; but I didn't mind. Awake I was obliged to face the multiple miseries of maternal perfidy and paternal decline, of the fickleness of friendship and the varied tyrannies of school; asleep, I was at the centre of the most exciting world any child had ever discovered. Despite Shiva, it was nicer to be asleep.
   Shiva's conviction that he (or he-and-I) was the natural leader of our group by dint of his (and my) birth on the stroke of midnight had, I was bound to admit, one strong argument in its favour. It seemed to me then-it seems to me now-that the midnight miracle had indeed been remarkably hierarchical in nature, that the children's abilities declined dramatically on the basis of the distance of their time of birth from midnight; but even this was a point of view which was hotly contested… 'Whatdoyoumeanhowcanyousaythat,' they chorused, the boy from the Gir forest whose face was absolutely blank and featureless (except for eyes noseholes spaceformouth) and could take on any features he chose, and Harilal who could run at the speed of the wind, and God knows how many others… 'Who says it's better to do one thing or another?' And, 'Can you fly? I can fly!' And, 'Yah, and me, can you turn one fish into fifty?' And, 'Today I went to visit tomorrow. You can do that? Well then-'… in the face of such a storm of protest, even Shiva changed his tune; but he was 'to find a new one, which would be much more dangerous-dangerous for the Children, and for me.
   Because I had found that I was not immune to the lure of leadership. Who found the Children, anyway? Who formed the Conference? Who gave them their meeting-place? Was I not the joint-eldest, and should I not receive the respect and obeisances merited by my senior-ity? And didn't the one who provided the club-house run the club?… To which Shiva, 'Forget all that, man. That club-shub stuff is only for you rich boys!' But-for a time-he was overruled. Parvati-the-witch, the conjurer's daughter from Delhi, took my part (just as, years later, she would save my life), and announced, 'No, listen now, every, body: without Saleem we are nowhere, we can't talk or anything, he is right. Let him be the chief!' And I, 'No, never mind chief, just think of me as a… a big brother, maybe. Yes; we're a family, of a kind. I'm just the oldest, me.' To which Shiva replied, scornful, but unable to argue: 'Okay, big brother: so now tell us what we do?'
   At this point I introduced the Conference to the notions which plagued me all this time: the notions of purpose, and meaning. 'We must think,' I said, 'what we are for.'
   I record, faithfully, the views of a typical selection of the Conference members (excepting the circus-freaks, and the ones who, like Sundari the beggar-girl with the knife-scars, had lost their powers, and tended to remain silent in our debates, like poor relations at a feast): among the philosophies and aims suggested were collectivism-'We should all get together and live somewhere, no? What would we need from anyone else?'-and individualism-'You say we; but we together are unimportant; what matters is that each of us has a gift to use for his or her own good'-filial duty-'However we can help our father-mother, that is what it is for us to do'-and infant revolution-'Now at last we must show all kids that it is possible to get rid of parents!'-capitalism-'Just mink what businesses we could do! How rich, Allah, we could be!'-and altruism-'Our country needs gifted people; we must ask the government how it wishes to use our skills'-science-'We must allow ourselves to be studied*-and religion-'Let us declare ourselves to the world, so that all may glory in God'-courage-'We should invade Pakistan!'-and cowardice-'O heavens, we must stay secret, just mink what they will do to us, stone us for witches or what-all!'; there were declarations of women's rights and pleas for the improvement of the lot of untouchables; landless children dreamed of land and tribals from the hills, of Jeeps; and there were, also, fantasies of power. 'They can't stop us, man! We can bewitch, and fly, and read minds, and turn them into frogs, and make gold and fishes, and they will fall in love with us, and we can vanish through mirrors and change our sex… how will they be able to fight?'
   I won't deny I was disappointed. I shouldn't have been; there was nothing unusual about the children except for their gifts; their heads were full of all the usual things, fathers mothers money food land possessions fame power God. Nowhere, in the thoughts .of the Conference, could I find anything as new as ourselves… but then I was on the wrong track, too; I could not see any more clearly than anyone else; and even when Soumitra the time-traveller said, 'I'm telling you-all this is pointless-they'll finish us before we start!' we all ignored him; with the optimism of youth-which is a more virulent form of the same disease that once infected my grandfather Aadam Aziz-we refused to look on the dark side, and not a single one of us suggested that the purpose of Midnight's Children might be annihilation; that we would have no meaning until we were destroyed.
   For the sake of their privacy, I am refusing to distinguish the voices from one another; and for other reasons. For one thing, my narrative could not cope with five hundred and eighty-one fully-rounded personalities; for another, the children, despite their won-drously discrete and varied gifts, remained, to my mind, a sort of many-headed monster, speaking in the myriad tongues of Babel; they were the very essence of multiplicity, and I see no point in dividing them now. (But there were exceptions. In particular, there was Shiva; and there was Parvati-the-witch.)
   … Destiny, historical role, numen: these were mouthfuls too large for ten-year-old gullets. Even, perhaps, for mine; despite the ever-present admonitions of the fisherman's pointing finger and the Prime Minister's letter, I was constantly distracted from my sniff-given marvels by the tiny occurrences of everyday life, by feeling hungry or sleepy, by monkeying around with the Monkey, or going to the cinema to see Cobra Woman or Vera Cruz, by my growing longing for long trousers and by the inexplicable below-the-belt heat engendered by the approaching School Social at which we, the boys of the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School, would be permitted to dance the box-step and the Mexican Hat Dance with the girls from our sister institution-such as Masha Miovic the champion breast-stroker ('Нее hee,' said Glandy Keith Colaco) and Elizabeth Purkiss and Janey Jackson-European girls, my God, with loose skirts and kissing ways!-in short, my attention was continually seized by the painful, engrossing torture of growing up.
   Even a symbolic gander must come down, at last, to earth; so it isn't nearly enough for me now (as it was not then) to confine my story to its miraculous aspects; I must return (as I used to return) to the quotidian; I must permit blood to spill.

   The first mutilation of Saleem Sinai, which was rapidly followed by the second, took place one Wednesday early in 1958-the Wednesday of the much-anticipated Social-under the auspices of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society. That is, it happened at school.
   Saleem's assailant: handsome, frenetic, with a barbarian's shaggy moustache: I present the leaping, hair-tearing figure of Mr Emil Zagallo, who taught us geography and gymnastics, and who, that morning, unintentionally precipitated the crisis of my life. Zagallo claimed to be Peruvian, and was fond of calling us jungle-Indians, bead-lovers; he hung a print of a stern, sweaty soldier in a pointy tin hat and metal pantaloons above his blackboard and had a way of stabbing a finger at it in times of stress and shouting, 'You see heem, you savages? Thees man eez civilization! You show heem respect: he's got a sword!' And he'd swish his cane through the stonewalled air. We called him Pagal-Zagal, crazy Zagallo, because for all his talk of llamas and conquistadores and the Pacific Ocean we knew, with the absolute certainty of rumour, that he'd been born in a Mazagaon tenement and his Goanese mother had been abandoned by a decamped shipping agent; so he was not only an 'Anglo' but probably a bastard as well. Knowing this, we understood why Zagallo affected his Latin accent, and also why he was always in a fury, why he beat his fists against the stone walk of the classroom; but the knowledge didn't stop us being afraid. And this Wednesday morning, we knew we were in for trouble, because Optional Cathedral had been cancelled.
   The Wednesday morning double period was Zagallo's geography class; but only idiots and boys with bigoted parents attended it, because it was also the time when we could choose to troop off to St Thomas's Cathedral in crocodile formation, a long line of boys of every conceivable religious denomination, escaping from school into the bosom of the Christians' considerately optional God. It drove Zagallo wild, but he was helpless; today, however, there was a dark glint in his eye, because the Croaker (that is to say, Mr Crusoe the headmaster) had announced at morning Assembly that Cathedral was cancelled. In a bare, scraped voice emerging from his face of an anaesthetized frog, he sentenced us to double geography and Pagal-Zagal, taking us all by surprise, because we hadn't realized that God was permitted to exercise an option, too. Glumly we trooped into Zagallo's lair; one of the poor idiots whose parents never allowed them to go to Cathedral whispered viciously into my ear, 'You jus' wait: hell really get you guys today.'
   Padma: he really did.
   Seated gloomily in class: Glandy Keith Colaco, Fat Perce Fishwala, Jimmy Kapadia the scholarship boy whose father was a taxi-driver, Hairoil Sabarmati, Sonny Ibrahim, Cyrus-the-great and I. Others, too, but there's no time now, because with eyes narrowing in delight, crazy Zagallo is calling us to order.
   'Human geography,' Zagallo announces. 'Thees ees what? Kapadia?'
   'Please sir don't know sir.' Hands fly into the air-five belong to church-banned idiots, the sixth inevitably to Cyrus-the-great. But Zagallo is out for blood today: the godly are going to suffer. 'Feelth from the jongle,' he buffets Jimmy Kapadia, then begins to twist an ear casually, 'Stay in class sometimes and find out!'
   'Ow ow ow yes sir sorry sir…' Six hands are waving but Jimmy's ear is in danger of coming off. Heroism gets the better of me… 'Sir please stop sir he has a heart condition sir!' Which is true; but the truth is dangerous, because now Zagallo is rounding on me: 'So, a leetle arguer, ees eet?' And I am being led by my hair to the front of the class. Under the relieved eyes of my fellow-pupils-thank God it's him not us-I writhe in agony beneath imprisoned tufts.
   'So answer the question. You know what ees human geography?'

   Pain fills my head, obliterating all notions of telepathic cheatery: 'Aiee sir no sir ouch!'
   … And now it is possible to observe a joke descending on Zagallo, a joke pulling his face apart into the simulacrum of a smile; it is possible to watch his hand darting forward, thumb-and-forefinger extended; to note how thumb-and-forefinger close around the tip of my nose and pull downwards… where the nose leads, the head must follow, and finally the nose is hanging down and my eyes are obliged to stare damply at Zagallo's sandalled feet with their dirty toehails while Zagallo unleashes his wit.
   'See, boys-you see what we have here? Regard, please, the heedeous face of thees primitive creature. It reminds you of?'
   And the eager responses: 'Sir the devil sir.' 'Please sir one cousin of mine!' 'No sir a vegetable sir I don't know which.' Until Zagallo, shouting above the tumult, 'Silence! Sons of baboons! Thees object here'-a tug on my nose-'thees is human geography!'
   'How sir where sir what sir?'
   Zagallo is laughing now. 'You don't see?' he guffaws. 'In the face of thees ugly ape you don't see the whole map of India?'
   'Yes sir no sir you show us sir!'
   'See here-the Deccan peninsula hanging down!' Again ouchmy-nose.
   'Sir sir if that's the map of India what are the stains sir?' It is Glandy Keith Colaco feeling bold. Sniggers, titters from my fellows. And Zagallo, taking the question in his stride: 'These stains,' he cries, 'are Pakistan! Thees birthmark on the right ear is the East Wing; and thees horrible stained left cheek, the West! Remember, stupid boys: Pakistan ees a stain on the face of India!'
   'Ho ho,' the class laughs, 'Absolute master joke, sir!'
   But now my nose has had enough; staging its own, unprompted revolt against the grasping thumb-and-forefinger, it unleashes a weapon of its own… a large blob of shining goo emerges from the left nostril, to plop into Mr Zagallo's palm. Fat Perce Fishwala yells, 'Lookit that, sir! The drip from his nose, sir! Is that supposed to be Ceylon?'
   His palm smeared with goo, Zagallo loses his jokey mood. 'Animal,' he curses me, 'You see what you do?' Zagallo's hand releases my nose; returns to hair. Nasal refuse is wiped into my neatly-parted locks. And now, once again, my hair is seized; once again, the hand is pulling… but upwards now, and my head has jerked upright, my feet are moving on to tiptoe, and Zagallo, 'What are you? Tell me what you are!'
   'Sir an animal sir!'
   The hand pulls harder higher. 'Again.' Standing on my toenails now, I yelp: 'Aiee sir an animal an animal please sir aiee!'
   And still harder and still higher… 'Once more!' But suddenly it ends; my feet are flat on the ground again; and the class has fallen into a deathly hush.
   'Sir,' Sonny Ibrahim is saying, 'you pulled his hair out, sir.'
   And now the cacophony: 'Look sir, blood.' 'He's bleeding sir.1 'Please sir shall I take him to the nurse?'
   Mr Zagallo stood like a statue with a clump of my hair in his fist. While I-too shocked to feel any pain-felt the patch on my head where Mr Zagallo had created a monkish tonsure, a circle where hair would never grow again, and realized that the curse of my birth, which connected me to my country, had managed to find yet one more unexpected expression of itself.
   Two days later, Croaker Crusoe announced that, unfortunately, Mr Emil Zagallo was leaving the staff for personal reasons; but I knew what the reasons were. My uprooted hairs had stuck to his hands, like bloodstains that wouldn't wash out, and nobody wants a teacher with hair on Ids palms, 'The first sign of madness,' as Glandy Keith was fond of saying, 'and the second sign is looking for them.'
   Zagallo's legacy: a monk's tonsure; and, worse than that, a whole set of new taunts, which my classmates flung at me while we waited for school buses to take us home to get dressed for the Social: 'Snot-nose is a bal-die!' and, 'Sniffer's got a map-face!' When Cyrus arrived in the bus-queue, I tried to turn the crowd against him, by attempting to set up a chant of'Cyrus-the-great, Born on a plate, In nineteen hundred and forty-eight,' but nobody took up the offer.
   So we come to the events of the Cathedral School Social. At which bullies became instruments of destiny, and fingers were transmuted into fountains, and Masha Miovic, the legendary breast-stroker, fell into a dead faint… I arrived at the Social with the nurse's bandage still on my head. I was late, because it hadn't been easy to persuade my mother to let me come; so by the time I stepped into the Assembly Hall, beneath streamers and balloons and the professionally suspicious gazes of bony female chaperones, all the best girls were already box-stepping and Mexican-Hatting with absurdly smug partners. Naturally, the prefects had the pick of the ladies; I watched them with passionate envy, Guzder and Joshi and Stevenson and Rushdie and Talyarkhan and Tayabali and Jussawalla and Wagle and King; I tried butting in on them during excuse-mes but when they saw my bandage and my cucumber of a nose and the stains on my face they just laughed and turned their backs… hatred burgeoning in my bosom, I ate potato chips and drank Bubble-Up and Vimto and told myself, 'Those jerks; if they knew who I was they'd get out of my way pretty damn quick!' But still the fear of revealing my true nature was stronger than my somewhat abstract desire for the whirling European girls.
   'Hey, Saleem, isn't it? Hey, man, what happened to you?' I was dragged out of my bitter, solitary reverie (even Sonny had someone to dance with; but then, he had his forcep-hollows, and he didn't wear underpants-there were reasons for his attractiveness) by a voice behind my left shoulder, a low, throaty voice, full of promises-but also of menace. A girl's voice. I turned with a sort of jump and found myself staring at a vision with golden hair and a prominent and famous chest… my God, she was fourteen years old, why was she talking to me?… 'My name is Masha Miovic,' the vision said, 'I've met your sister.'
   Of course! The Monkey's heroines, the swimmers from Walsingham School, would certainly know the Schools champion breast-stroker!… 'I know…' I stuttered, 'I know your name.'
   'And I know yours,' she straightened my tie, 'so that's fair.' Over her shoulder, I saw Glandy Keith and Fat Perce watching us in drooling paroxysms of envy. I straightened my back and pushed out my shoulders. Masha Miovic asked again about my bandage. 'It's nothing,' I said in what I hoped was a deep voice, 'A sporting accident.' And then, working feverishly to hold my voice steady, 'Would you like to… to dance?'
   'Okay,' said Masha Miovic, 'But don't try any smooching.'
   Saleem takes the floor with Masha Miovic, swearing not to smooch. Saleem and Masha, doing the Mexican Hat; Masha and Saleem, box-stepping with the best of them! I allow my face to adopt a superior expression; you see, you don't have to be a prefect to get a girl!… The dance ended; and, still on top of my wave of elation, I said, 'Would you care for a stroll, you know, in the quad?'
   Masha Miovic smiling privately. 'Well, yah, just for a sec; but hands off, okay?'
   Hands off, Saleem swears. Saleem and Masha, taking the air… man, this is fine. This is the life. Goodbye Evie, hello breast-stroke… Glandy Keith Colaco and Fat Perce Fishwala step out of the shadows of the quadrangle. They are giggling: 'Нее hee.' Masha Miovic looks puzzled as they block our path. 'Hoo hoo,' Fat Perce says, 'Masha, hoo hoo. Some date you got there.' And I, 'Shut up, you.' Whereupon Glandy Keith, 'You wanna know how he got his war-wound, Mashy?' And Fat Perce, 'Нее hoo ha.' Masha says, 'Don't be crude; he got it in a sporting accident!' Fat Perce and Glandy Keith are almost falling over with mirth; then Fishwala reveals all. 'Zagallo pulled his hair out in class!' Нее hoo. And Keith, 'Snotnose is a bal-die!' And both together, 'Sniffer's got a map-face!' There is puzzlement on Masha Miovic's face. And something more, some budding spirit of sexual mischief… 'Saleem, they're being so rude about you!'
   'Yes,' I say, 'ignore them.' I try to edge her away. But she goes on, 'You aren't going to let them get away with it?' There are beads of excitement on her upper lip; her tongue is in the corner of her mouth; the eyes of Masha Miovic say, What are you? A man or a mouse?… and under the spell of the champion breast-stroker, something else floats into my head: the image of two irresistible knees; and now I am rushing at Colaco and Fishwala; while they are distracted by giggles, my knee drives into Glandy's groin; before he's dropped, a similar genuflection has laid Fat Perce low. I turn to my mistress; she applauds, softly. 'Hey man, pretty good.'
   But now my moment has passed; and Fat Perce is picking himself up, and Glandy Keith is already moving towards me… abandoning all pretence of manhood, I turn and run. And the two bullies are after me and behind them comes Masha Miovic calling, 'Where are you running, little hero?' But there's no time for her now, mustn't let them get me, into the nearest classroom and try and shut the door, but Fat Perce's foot is in the way and now the two of them are inside too and I dash at the door, I grab it with my right hand, trying to force it open, get out if you can, they are pushing the door shut, but I'm pulling with the strength of my fear, I have it open a few inches, my hand curls around it, and now Fat Perce slams all his weight against the door and it shuts too fast for me to get my hand out of the way and it's shut. A thud. And outside, Masha