Miovic arrives and looks down at the floor; and sees the top third of my middle finger lying there like a lump of well-chewed bubble-gum. This was the point at which she fainted.
   No pain. Everything very far away. Fat Perce and Glandy Keith fleeing, to get help or to hide. I look at my hand out of pure curiosity. My finger has become a fountain: red liquid spurts out to the rhythm of my heart-beat. Never knew a finger held so much blood. Pretty. Now here's nurse, don't worry, nurse. Only a scratch. Your parents are being phoned; Mr Crusoe is getting his car keys. Nurse is putting a great wad of cotton-wool over the stump. Filling up like red candyfloss. And now Crusoe. Get in the car, Saleem, your mother is going straight to the hospital. Yes sir. And the bit, has anybody got the bit? Yes headmaster here it is. Thank you nurse. Probably no use but you never know. Hold this while I drive, Saleem… and holding up my severed finger-dp in my unmutilated left hand, I am driven to the Breach Candy Hospital through the echoing streets of night.
   At the hospital: white walls stretchers everyone talking at once. Words pour around me like fountains. 'O God preserve us, my little piece-of-the-moon, what have they done to you?' To which old Crusoe, 'Heh heh. Mrs Sinai. Accidents will happen. Boys will be.' But my mother, enraged, 'What kind of school? Mr Caruso? I'm here with my son's finger in pieces and you tell me. Not good enough. No, sir.' And now, while Crusoe, 'Actually the name's-like Robinson, you know-heh heh,' the doctor is approaching and a question is being asked, whose answer will change the world.
   'Mrs Sinai, your blood group, please? The boy has lost blood. A transfusion may be necessary.' And Amina: 'I am A; but my husband, O.' And now she is crying, breaking down, and still the doctor, 'Ah; in that case, are you aware of your son's…' But she, the doctor's daughter, must admit she cannot answer the question: Alpha or Omega? 'Well in that case a very quick test; but on the subject of rhesus?' My mother, through her tears: 'Both my husband and I, rhesus positive.' And the doctor, 'Well, good, that at least.'
   But when I am on the operating table-'Just sit there, son, I'll give you a local anaesthetic, no, madam, he's in shock, total anaesthesia would be impossible, all right son, just hold your finger up and still, help him nurse, and it'll be over in a jiffy'-while the surgeon is sewing up the stump and performing the miracle of transplanting the roots of the nail, all of a sudden there's a fluster in the background, a million miles away, and 'Have you got a second Mrs Sinai' and I can't hear properly… words float across the in-finite distance… Mrs Sinai, you are sure? О and A? A and O? And rhesus negative, both of you? Heterozygous or homozygous? No, there must be some mistake, how can he be… I'm sorry, absolutely clear… positive… and neither A nor… excuse me, Madam, but is he your… not adopted or… The hospital nurse interposes herself between me and miles-away chatter, but it's no good, because now my mother is shrieking, 'But of course you must believe me, doctor; my God, of course he is our son!'

   Neither A nor O. And the rhesus factor: impossibly negative. And zygosity offers no clues. And present in the blood, rare Kell antibodies. And my mother, crying, crying-crying, crying… 'I don't understand. A doctor's daughter, and I don't understand.'
   Have Alpha and Omega unmasked me? Is rhesus pointing its unanswerable finger? And will Mary Pereira be obliged to… I wake up in a cool, white, Venetian-blinded room with All-India Radio for company. Tony Brent is singing: 'Red Sails In The Sunset'.
   Ahmed Sinai, his face ravaged by whisky and now by something worse, stands beside the Venetian blind. Amina, speaking in whispers. Again, snatches across the million miles of distance. Janumplease. Ibegyou. No, what are you saying. Of course it was. Of course you are the. How could you think I would. Who could it have. О God don't just stand and look. I swear Iswearonmymother'shead. Now shh he is…
   A new song from Tony Brent, whose repertoire today is uncannily similar to Wee Willie Winkie's: 'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' hangs in the air, floating on radio waves. My father advances on my bed, towers over me, I've never seen him look like this before. 'Abba…' And he, 'I should have known. Just look, where am I in that face. That nose, I should have…' He turns on his heel and leaves the room; my mother follows him, too distraught to whisper now: 'No, janum, I won't let you believe such things about me! I'll kill myself! I'll,' and the door swings shut behind them. There is a noise outside: like a clap. Or a slap. Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
   Tony Brent begins crooning his latest hit into my good ear: and assures me, melodiously, that 'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By'.

   … And now I, Saleem Sinai, intend briefly to endow my self-then with the benefits of hindsight; destroying the unities and conventions of fine writing, I make him cognizant of what was to come, purely so that he can be permitted to think the following thoughts: 'O eternal opposition of inside and outside! Because a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. The body, on the other hand, is homogeneous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, a sacred temple, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness. But the loss of my finger (which was conceivably foretold by the pointing digit of Raleigh's fisherman), not to mention the removal of certain hairs from my head, has undone all that. Thus we enter into a state of affairs which is nothing short of revolutionary; and its effect on history is bound to be pretty damn startling. Uncork the body, and God knows what you permit to come tumbling out. Suddenly you are forever other than you were; and the world becomes such that parents can cease to be parents, and love can turn to hate. And these, mark you, are only the effects on private life. The consequences for the sphere of public action, as will be shown, are-were-will be no less profound.'
   Finally, withdrawing my gift of foreknowledge, I leave you with the image of a ten-year-old boy with a bandaged finger, sitting in a hospital bed, musing about blood and noises-like-claps and the expression on his father's face; zooming out slowly into long-shot, I allow the sound-track music to drown my words, because Tony Brent is reaching the end of his medley, and his finale, too, is the same as Winkie's: 'Good Night, Ladies' is the name of the song. Merrily it rolls along, rolls along, rolls along…
   (Fade-out.)

The Kolynos Kid

   From ayah to Widow, I've been the sort of person to whom things have been done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing himself as protagonist. Despite Mary's crime; setting aside typhoid and snake-venom; dismissing two accidents, in washing-chest and circus-ring (when Sonny Ibrahim, master lock-breaker, permitted my budding horns of temples to invade his forcep-hollows, and through this combination unlocked the door to the midnight children); disregarding the effects of Evie's push and my mother's infidelity; in spite of losing my hair to the bitter violence of Emil Zagallo and my finger to the lip-licking goads of Masha Miovic; setting my face against all indications to the contrary, I shall now amplify, in the manner and with the proper solemnity of a man of science, my claim to a place at the centre of things.
   '… Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,' the Prime Minister wrote, obliging me scientifically to face the question: In what sense? How, in what terms, may the career of a single . individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation? I must answer in adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term 'modes of connection' composed of dualistically-combined configurations' of the two pairs of opposed adverbs given above. This is why hyphens are necessary: ac'tively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and pas-sively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world.
   Sensing Padma's unscientific bewilderment, I revert to the inexactitudes of common speech: By the combination of'active' and 'literal' I mean, of course, all actions of mine which directly-literally-affected, or altered the course of, seminal historical events, for instance the manner in which I provided the language marchers with their battle-cry. The union of 'passive' and 'metaphorical' encompasses all socio-political trends and events which, merely by existing, affected me metaphorically-for example, by reading between the lines of the episode entitled 'The Fisherman's Pointing Finger', you will perceive the unavoidable connection between the infant state's attempts at rushing towards full-sized adulthood and my own early, explosive efforts at growth… Next, 'passive' and 'literal', when hyphenated, cover all moments at which national events had a direct bearing upon the lives of myself and my family-under this heading you should file the freezing of my father's assets, and also the explosion at Walkeshwar Reservoir, which unleased the great cat invasion. And finally there is the 'mode' of the 'active-metaphorical', which groups together those occasions on which things done by or to me were mirrored in the macrocosm of public affairs, and my private existence was shown to be symbolically at one with history. The mutilation of my middle finger was a case in point, because when I was detached from my fingertip and blood (neither Alpha nor Omega) rushed out in fountains, a similar thing happened to history, and all sorts of everywhichthing began pouring out all over us; but because history operates on a grander scale than any individual, it took a good deal longer to stitch it back together and mop up the mess.
   'Passive-metaphorical', 'passive-literal', 'active-metaphorical': the Midnight Children's Conference was all three; but it never became what I most wanted it to be; we never operated in the first, most significant of the 'modes of connection'. The 'active-literal' passed us by.

   Transformation without end: nine-fingered Saleem has been brought to the doorway of the Breach Candy Hospital by a squat blonde nurse whose face is frozen into a smile of terrifying insincerity. He is blinking in the hot glare of the outside world, trying to focus on two swimming shadow-shapes coming towards him out of the sun; 'See?' the nurse coos, 'See who's come to get you, then?' And Saleem realizes that something terrible has gone wrong with the world, because his mother and father, who should have come to collect him, have apparently been transformed en route into his ayah Mary Pereira and his Uncle Hanif.
   Hanif Aziz boomed like the horns of ships in the harbour and smelted like an old tobacco factory. I loved him dearly, for his laughter, his unshaven chin, his air of having been put together rather loosely, his lack of co-ordination which made his every movement fraught with risk. (When he visited Buckingham Villa my mother hid the cut-glass vases.) Adults never trusted him to behave with proper decorum ('Watch out for the Communists!' he bellowed, and they blushed), which was a bond between himself and all children-other people's children, since he and Pia were childless. Uncle Hanif who would one day, without warning, take a walk off the roof of his home.
   … He wallops me in the back, toppling me forwards into Mary's arms. 'Hey, little wrestler! You look fine!' But Mary, hastily, 'But so thin, Jesus! They haven't been feeding you properly? You want cornflour pudding? Banana mashed with milk? Did they give you chips?'… while Saleem is looking round at this new world in which everything seems to be going too fast; his voice, when it comes, sounds high-pitched, as though somebody had speeded it up: 'Amma-Abba?' he asks. The Monkey?' And Hanif booms, 'Yes, tickety-boo! The boy is really ship-shape! Come on phaelwan: a ride in my Packard, okay?' And talking at the same time is Mary Pereira, 'Chocolate cake,' she is promising, 'laddoos, pista-ki-lauz, meat samosas, kulfi. So thin you got, baba, the wind will blow you away.' The Packard is driving away; it is failing to turn off Warden Road, up the two-storey hillock; and Saleem, 'Hanif mamu, where are we…' No time to get it out; Hanif roars, 'Your Pia aunty is waiting! My God, you see if we don't have a number one good time!' His voice drops conspiratorially: 'Lots,' he says darkly, 'of fun.' And Mary: 'Arre baba yes! Such steak! And green chutney!'… 'Not the dark one,' I say, captured at last; relief appears on the cheeks of my captors. 'No no no,' Mary babbles, 'light green, baba. Just like you like.' And, 'Pale green!' Hanif is bellowing, 'My God, green like grasshoppers!'
   All too fast… we are at Kemp's Corner now, cars rushing around like bullets… but one thing is unchanged. On Ids billboard, the Kolynos Kid is grinning, the eternal pixie grin of the boy in the green chlorophyll cap, the lunatic grin of the timeless Kid, who endlessly squeezes an inexhaustible tube of toothpaste on to a bright green brush: Keep Teeth Kleen And Keep Teeth Brite, Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White!… and you may wish to think of me, too, as an involuntary Kolynos Kid, squeezing crises and transformations out of a bottomless tube, extruding time on to my metaphorical toothbrush; clean, white time with green chlorophyll in the stripes.
   This, then, was the beginning of my first exile. (There will be a second, and a third.) I bore it uncomplainingly. I had guessed, of course, that there was one question I must never ask; that I had been loaned out, like a comic-book from the Scandal Point Second Hand Library, for some indefinite period; and that when my parents wanted me back, they would send for me. When, or even if: because I blamed myself not a little for my banishment. Had I not inflicted upon myself one more deformity to add to bandylegs cucumbernose horn-temples staincheeks? Was it not possible that my mutilated finger had been (as my announcement of my voices had nearly been), for my long-suffering parents, the last straw? That I was no longer a good business risk, no longer worth the investment of their love and protection?… I decided to reward my uncle and aunt for their kindness in taking in so wretched a creature as myself, to play the model nephew and await events. There were times when I wished that the Monkey would come and see me, or even call me on the phone; but dwelling on such matters only punctured the balloon of my equanimity, so I did my best to put them out of my mind. Besides, living with Hanif and Pia Aziz turned out to be exactly what my uncle had promised: lots of fun.
   They made all the fuss of me that children expect, and accept graciously, from childless adults. Their flat overlooking Marine Drive wasn't large, but there was a balcony from which I could drop monkey-nut shells on to the heads of passing pedestrians; there was no spare bedroom, but I was offered a deliciously soft white sofa with green stripes (an early proof of my transformation into the Kolynos Kid); ayah Mary, who had apparently followed me into exile, slept on the floor by my side. By day, she filled my stomach with the promised cakes and sweetmeats (paid for, I now believe, by my mother); I should have grown immensely fat, except that I had begun once again to grow in other directions, and at the end of the year of accelerated history (when I was only eleven and a half) I had actually attained my full adult height, as if someone had grasped me by the folds of my puppy-fat and squeezed them harder than any toothpaste-tube, so that inches shot out of me under the pressure. Saved from obesity by the Kolynos effect, I basked in my uncle and aunt's delight at having a child around the house. When I spilt 7-Up on the carpet or sneezed into my dinner, the worst my uncle would say was 'Hai-yo! Black man!' in his booming steamship's voice, spoiling the effect by grinning hugely. Meanwhile, my aunty Pia was becoming the next in the long series of women who have bewitched and finally undone me good and proper.
   (I should mention that, while I stayed in the Marine Drive apartment, my testicles, forsaking the protection of pelvic bone, decided prematurely and without warning to drop into their little sacs. This event, too, played its part in what followed.)
   My mumani-my aunty-the divine Pia Aziz: to live with her was to exist in the hot sticky heart of a Bombay talkie. In those days, my uncle's career in the cinema had entered a dizzy decline, and, for such is the way of the world, Pia's star had gone into decline along with his. In her presence, however, thoughts of failure were impossible. Deprived of film roles, Pia had turned her life into a feature picture, in which I was cast in an increasing number of bit-parts. I was the Faithful Body-Servant: Pia in petticoats, soft hips rounding towards my desperately-averted eyes, giggling while her eyes, bright with antimony, flashed imperiously-'Come on, boy, what are you shy for, holds these pleats in my sari while I fold.' I was her Trusted Confidant, too. While my uncle sat on chlorophyll-striped sofa pounding out scripts which nobody would ever film, I listened to the nostalgic soliloquy of my aunt, trying to keep my eyes away from two impossible orbs, spherical as melons, golden as mangoes: I refer, you will have guessed, to the adorable breasts of Pia mumani. While she, sitting on her bed, one arm flung across her brow, declaimed: 'Boy, you know, I am great actress; I have interpreted several major roles! But look, what fate will do! Once, boy, goodness knows who would beg absolutely to come to this flat; once the reporters of Filmfare and Screen Goddess would pay black-money to get inside! Yes, and dancing, and I was well-known at Venice restaurant-all of those great jazzmen came to sit at my feet, yes, even that Braz. Boy, after Lovers of Kashmir, who was a bigger star? Not Poppy; not Vyjayantimala; not one person!' And I, nodding emphatically, no-naturally-nobody, while her wondrous skin-wrapped melons heaved and… With a dramatic cry, she went on: 'But even then, in the time of our world-beating fame, every picture a golden jubilee movie, this uncle of yours wants to live in a two-room flat like a clerk! So I make no fuss; I am not like some of your cheap-type actresses; I live simply and ask for no Cadillacs or air-conditioners or Dunlopillo beds from England; no swimming pools shaped like bikinis like that Roxy Vishwanatham's! Here, like a wife of the masses, I have stayed; here, now, I am rotting! Rotting, absolutely. But I know this: my face is my fortune; after that, what riches do I need?' And I, anxiously agreeing: 'Mumani, none; none at all.' She shrieked wildly; even my slap-deafened ear was penetrated. 'Yes, of course, you also want me to be poor! All the world wants Pia to be in rags! Even that one, your uncle, writing his boring-boring scripts! О my God, I tell him, put in dances, or exotic locations! Make your villains villainous, why not, make heroes like men! But he says, no, all that is rubbish, he sees that now-although once he was not so proud! Now he must write about ordinary people and social problems! And I say, yes, Hanif, do that, that is good; but put in a little comedy routine, a little dance for your Pia to do, and tragedy and drama also; that is what the Public is wanting!' Her eyes were brimming with tears. 'So you know what he is writing now? About…' she looked as if her heart would break '… the Ordinary Life of a Pickle Factory!'
   'Shh, mumani, shh,' I beg, 'Hanif mamu will hear!'

  'Let him hear!' she stormed, weeping copiously now; 'Let his mother hear also, in Agra; they will make me die for shame!'
   Reverend Mother had never liked her actress daughter-in-law. I overheard her once telling my mother: 'To marry an actress, whatsits-name, my son has made his bed in the gutter, soon, whatsitsname, she will be making him drink alcohol and also eat some pig.' Eventually, she accepted the inevitability of the match with bad grace; but she took to writing improving epistles to Pia. 'Listen, daughter,' she wrote, 'don't do this actressy thing. Why to do such shameless behaviour? Work, yes, you girls have modern ideas, but to dance naked on the screen! When for a small sum only you could acquire the concession on a good petrol pump. From my own pocket I would get it for you in two minutes. Sit in an office, hire attendants; that is proper work.' None of us ever knew whence Reverend Mother acquired her dream of petrol pumps, which would be the growing obsession of her old age; but she bombarded Pia with it, to the actress's disgust.
   'Why that woman doesn't ask me to be shorthand typist?' Pia wailed to Hanif and Mary and me at breakfast. 'Why not taxi-driver, or handloom weaver? I tell you, this pumpery-shumpery makes me wild.'
   My uncle quivered (for once in his life) on the edge of anger. 'There is a child present,' he said, 'and she is your mother; show her respect.'
   'Respect she can have,' Pia flounced from the room, 'but she wants gas'… And my most-treasured bit-part of all was played out when during Pia and Hanif's regular card-games with friends, I was promoted to occupy the sacred place of the son she never had. (Child of an unknown union, I have had more mothers than most mothers have children; giving birth to parents has been one of my stranger talents-a form of reverse fertility beyond the control of contraception, and even of the Widow herself.) In the company of visitors, Pia Aziz would cry: 'Look, friends, here's my own crown prince! The jewel in my ring! The pearl in my necklace!' And she would draw me towards her, cradling my head so that my nose was pushed down against her chest and nestled wonderfully between the soft pillows of her indescribable… unable to cope with such delights, I pulled my head away. But I was her slave; and I know now why she permitted herself such familiarity with me. Prematurely testicled, growing rapidly, I nevertheless wore (fraudulently) the badge of sexual innocence: Saleem Sinai, during his sojourn at his uncle's home, was still in shorts. Bare knees proved my childishness to Pia; deceived by ankle-socks, she held my face against her breasts while her sitar-perfect voice whispered in my good ear: 'Child, child, don't fear; your clouds will soon roll by.'
   For my uncle, as well as my histrionic aunt, I acted out (with growing polish) the part of the surrogate son. Hanif Aziz was to be found during the day on the striped sofa, pencil and exercise book in hand, writing his pickle epic. He wore his usual lungi wound loosely around his waist and fastened with an enormous safety-pin; his legs protruded hairily from its folds. His fingernails bore the stains of a lifetime of Gold Flakes; his toenails seemed similarly discoloured. I imagined him smoking cigarettes with his toes. Highly impressed by the vision, I asked him if he could, in fact, perform this feat; and without a word, he inserted Gold Flake between big toe and its sidekick and wound himself into bizarre contortions. I clapped wildly, but he seemed to be in some pain for the rest of the day.
   I ministered to his needs as a good son should, emptying ashtrays, sharpening pencils, bringing water to drink; while he, who after his fabulist beginnings had remembered that he was his father's son and dedicated himself against everything which smacked of the unreal, scribbled out his ill-fated screenplay.
   'Sonny Jim,' he informed me, 'this damn country has been dreaming for five thousand years. It's about time it started waking up.' Hanif was fond of railing against princes and demons, gods and heroes, against, in fact, the entire iconography of the Bombay film; in the temple of illusions, he had become the high priest of reality; while I, conscious of my miraculous nature, which involved me beyond all mitigation in the (Hanif-despised) myth-life of India, bit my lip and didn't know where to look.
   Hanif Aziz, the only realistic writer working in the Bombay film industry, was writing the story of a pickle-factory created, run and worked in entirely by women. There were long scenes describing the formation of a trade union; there were detailed descriptions of the pickling process. He would quiz Mary Pereira about recipes; they would discuss, for hours, the perfect blend of lemon, lime and garam masala. It is ironic that this arch-disciple of naturalism should have been so skilful (if unconscious) a prophet of his own family's fortunes; in the indirect kisses of the Lovers of Kashmir he foretold my mother and her Nadir-Qasim's meetings at the Pioneer Cafe; and in his unfilmed chutney scenario, too, there lurked a prophecy of deadly accuracy.
   He besieged Homi Catrack with scripts. Catrack produced none of them; they sat in the small Marine Drive apartment, covering every available surface, so that you had to pick them off the toilet seat before you could lift it; but Catrack (out of charity? Or for another, soon-to-be-revealed reason?) paid my uncle a studio salary. That was how they survived, Hanif and Pia, on the largess of the man who would, in time, become the second human being to be murdered by mushrooming Saleem.
   Homi Catrack begged him, 'Maybe just one love scene?' And Pia, 'What do you think, village people are going to give their rupees to see women pickling Alfonsos?' But Hanif, obdurately: 'This is a film about work, not kissing. And nobody pickles Alfonsos. You must use mangoes with bigger stones.'

   The ghost of Joe D'Costa did not, so far as I know, follow Mary Pereira into exile; however, his absence only served to increase her anxiety. She began, in these Marine Drive days, to fear that he would become visible to others besides herself, and reveal, during her absence, the awful secrets of what happened at Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home on Independence night. So each morning she left the apartment in a state of jelly-like worry, arriving at Buckingham Villa in near-collapse; only when she found that Joe had remained both invisible and silent did she relax. But after she returned to Marine Drive, laden with samosas and cakes and chutneys, her anxiety began to mount once again… but за I had resolved (having troubles enough of my Own) to keep out of all heads except the Children's, I did not understand why.
   Panic attracts panic; on her journeys, sitting in jam-packed buses (the trams had just been discontinued), Mary heard all sorts of rumours and tittle-tattle, which she relayed to me as matters of absolute fact. According to Mary, the country was in the grip of a sort of supernatural invasion. 'Yes, baba, they say in Kurukshetra an old Sikh woman woke up in her hut and saw the old-time war of the Kurus and Pandavas happening right outside! It was in the papers and all, she pointed to the place where she saw the chariots of Arjun and Kama, and there were truly wheel-marks in the mud! Baap-re-baap, such so-bad things: at Gwalior they have seen the ghost of the Rani of Jhansi; rakshasas have been seen many-headed like Ravana, doing things to women and pulling down trees with one finger. I am good Christian woman, baba; but it gives me fright when they tell that the tomb of Lord Jesus is found in Kashmir. On the tombstones are carved two pierced feet and a local fisherwoman has sworn she saw them bleeding-real blood, God save us!-on Good Friday… what is happening, baba, why these old things can't stay dead and not plague honest folk?' And I, wide-eyed, listening; and although my uncle Hanif roared with laughter, I remain, today, half-convinced that in that time of accelerated events and diseased hours the past of India rose up to confound her present; the new-born, secular state was being given an awesome reminder of its fabulous antiquity, in which democracy and votes for women were irrelevant… so that people were seized by atavistic longings, and forgetting the new myth of freedom reverted to their old ways, their old regionalist loyalties and prejudices, and the body politic began to crack. As I said: lop off just one ringer-tip and you never know what fountains of confusion you will unleash.
   'And cows, baba, have been vanishing into thin air; poof! and in the villages, the peasants must starve.'
   It was at this time that I, too, was possessed by a strange demon; but in order that you may understand me properly, I must begin my account of the episode on an innocent evening, when Hanif and Pia Aziz had a group of friends round for cards.
   My aunty was prone to exaggerate; because although Filmfare and Screen Goddess were absent, my uncle's house was a popular place. On card-evenings, it would burst at the seams with jazzmen gossiping about quarrels and reviews in American magazines, and singers who carried throat-sprays in their handbags, and members of the Uday Shankar dance-troupe, which was trying to form a new style of dance by fusing Western ballet with bharatanatyam; there were musicians who had been signed up to perform in the All-India Radio music festival, the Sangeet Sammelan; there were painters who argued violently amongst each other. The air was thick with political, and other, chatter. 'As a matter of fact, I am the only artist in India who paints with a genuine sense of ideological commitment!'-'O, it's too bad about Ferdy, he'll never get another band after this'-'Menon? Don't talk to me about Krishna. I knew him when he had principles. I, myself, have never abandoned…''… One, Hanif yaar, why we don't see Lal Qasim here these days?' And my uncle, looking anxiously towards me: 'Shh… what Qasim? I don't know any person by that name.'

   … And mingling with the hubbub in the apartment, there was the evening colour and noise of Marine Drive: promenaders with dogs, buying chambeli and channa from hawkers; the cries of beggars and bhcl-puri vendors; and the lights coming on in a great arcing necklace, round and up to Malabar Hill… I stood on the balcony with Mary Pereira, turning my bad ear to her whispered rumours, the city at my back and the crowding, chatting card-schools before my eyes. And one day, amongst the card-players, I recognized the sunken-eyed, ascetic form of Mr Homi Catrack. Who greeted me with embarrassed heartiness: 'Hi there, young chap! Doing fine? Of course, of course you are!'
   My uncle Hanif played rummy dedicatedly; but he was in the thrall of a curious obsession-namely, that he was determined never to lay down a hand until he completed a thirteen-card sequence in hearts. Always hearts; all the hearts, and nothing but the hearts would do. In his quest for this unattainable perfection, my uncle would discard perfectly good threes-of-a-kind, and whole sequences of spades clubs diamonds, to the raucous amusement of his friends. I heard the renowned shehnai-player Ustad Changez Khan (who dyed his hair, so mat on hot evenings the tops of his ears were discoloured by running black fluid) tell my uncle: 'Come on, mister; leave this heart business, and just play like the rest of us fellows.' My uncle confronted temptation; then boomed above the din, 'No, dammit, go to the devil and leave me to my game!' He played cards like a fool; but I, who had never seen such singleness of purpose, felt like clapping.
   One of the regulars at Hanif Aziz's legendary card-evenings was a Times of India staff photographer, who was full of sharp tales and scurrilous stories. My uncle introduced me to him: 'Here's the fellow who put you on the front page, Saleem. Here is Kalidas Gupta. A terrible photographer; a really badmaash type. Don't talk to him too long; he'll make your head spin with scandal!' Kalidas had a head of silver hair and a nose like an eagle. I thought he was wonderful. 'Do you really know scandals?' I asked him; but all he said was, 'Son, if I told, they would make your ears burn.' But he never found out that the evil genius, the eminence grise behind the greatest scandal the city had ever known was none other than Saleem Snotnose… I mustn't race ahead. The affair of the curious baton of Commander Sabarmati must be recounted in its proper place. Effects must not (despite the tergiversatory nature of time in 1958) be permitted to precede causes.
   I was alone on the balcony. Mary Pereira was in the kitchen helping Pia to prepare sandwiches and cheese-pakoras; Hanif Aziz was immersed in his search for the thirteen hearts; and now Mr Homi Catrack came out to stand beside me. 'Breath of fresh air,' he said. 'Yes, sir,' I replied. 'So,' he exhaled deeply. 'So, so. Life is treating you good? Excellent little fellow. Let me shake you by the hand.' Ten-year-old hand is swallowed up by film magnate's fist (the left hand; the mutilated right hand hangs innocently by my side)… and now a shock. Left palm feels paper being thrust into it-sinister paper, inserted by dexterous fist! Catrack's grip tightens; his voice becomes low, but also cobra-like, sibilant; inaudible in the room with the green-striped sofa, his words penetrate my one good ear: 'Give this to your aunty. Secretly secretly. Can do? And keep mum; or I'll send the police to cut your tongue out.' And now, loud and cheery. 'Good! Glad to see you in such high spirits!' Homi Catrack is patting me on the head; and moving back to his game.
   Threatened by policemen, I have remained silent for two decades; but no longer. Now, everything has to come out.

   The card-school broke up early: 'The boy has to sleep,' Pia was whispering, 'Tomorrow he goes to school again.' I found no opportunity of being alone with my aunt; I was tucked up on my sofa with the note still clutched in my left fist. Mary was asleep on the floor… I decided to feign a nightmare. (Deviousness did not come unnaturally to me.) Unfortunately, however, I was so tired that I fell asleep; and, in the event, there was no need to pretend: because I dreamed the murder of my classmate Jimmy Kapadia.
   … We are playing football in the main stairwell at school, on red tiles, slipping sliding. A black cross set in the blood-red tiles. Mr Crusoe at the head of the stairs: 'Mustn't slide down the banisters boys that cross is where one boy fell.'Jimmy plays football on the cross. 'The cross is lies,' Jimmy says, 'They tell you lies to spoil your fun.' His mother calls up on the telephone. 'Don't play Jimmy your bad heart.' The bell. The telephone, replaced, and now the bell… Ink-pellets stain the classroom air. Fat Perce and Glandy Keith have fun. Jimmy wants a pencil, prods me in the ribs. 'Hey man, you got a pencil, give. Two ticks, man.' I give. Zagallo enters. Zagallo's hand is up for silence: look at my hair growing on his palm! Zagallo in pointy tin-soldier hat… I must have my pencil back. Stretching out my finger giving Jimmy a poke. 'Sir, please look sir, Jimmy fell!' 'Sir I saw sir Snotnose poked!' 'Snotnose shot Kapadia, sir!' 'Don't play Jimmy your bad heart!' 'You be quiet,' Zagallo cries, 'Jongle feelth, shut up.'
   Jimmy in a bundle on the floor. 'Sir sir please sir will they put up a cross?' He borrowed a pencil, I poked, he fell. His father is a taxi-driver. Now the taxi drives into class; a dhobi-bundle is put on the back seat, out goes Jimmy. Ding, a bell. Jimmy's father puts down the taxi flag. Jimmy's father looks at me: 'Snotnose, you'll have to pay the fare.' 'But please sir haven't got the money sir.' Arid Zagallo: 'We'll put it on your bill.' See my hair on Zagallo's hand. Flames are pouring from Zagallo's eyes. 'Five hundred meelion, what's one death?' Jimmy is dead; five hundred million still alive. I start counting: one two three. Numbers march over Jimmy's grave. One million two million three million four. Who cares if anyone, anyone dies. One hundred million and one two three. Numbers march through the classroom now. Crushing pounding two hundred million three four five. Five hundred million still alive. And only one of me…
   … In the dark of the night, I awoke from the dream of Jimmy Kapadia's death which became the dream of annihilation-by-numbers, yelling howling screaming, but still with the paper in my fist; and a door flew open, to reveal my uncle Hanif and aunt Pia. Mary Pereira tried to comfort me, but Pia was imperious, she was a divine swirl of petticoats and dupatta, she cradled me in her arms: 'Never mind! My diamond, never mind now!' And Uncle Hanif, sleepily: 'Hey, phaelwan! It's okay now; come on, you come with us; bring the boy, Pia!' And now I'm safely in Pia's arms; 'Just for tonight, my pearl, you can sleep with us!'-and there I am, nestling between aunt and uncle, huddling against my mumani's perfumed curves.
   Imagine, if you can, my sudden joy; imagine with what speed the nightmare fled from my thoughts, as I nestled against my extraordinary aunt's petticoats! As she re-arranged herself, to get comfortable, and one golden melon caressed my cheek! As Pia's hand sought out mine and grasped it firmly… now I discharged my duty. When my aunt's hand wrapped itself around mine, paper passed from palm to palm. I felt her stiffen, silently; then, although I snuggled up closer closer closer, she was lost to me; she was reading in the dark, and the stiffness of her body was increasing; and then suddenly I knew that I had been tricked, that Catrack was my enemy; and only the threat of policemen prevented me from telling my uncle.
   (At school, the next day, I was told of Jimmy Kapadia's tragic death, suddenly at home, of a heart seizure. Is it possible to kill a human being by dreaming his death? My mother always said so; and, in that case, Jimmy Kapadia was my first murder victim. Homi Catrack was to be the next.)

   When I returned from my first day back at school, having basked in the unusual sheepishness of Fat Perce and Glandy Keith ('Lissen, yaar, how did we know your finger was in the… hey, man, we got free tickets for a picture tomorrow, you want to come?') and my equally unexpected popularity ('No more Zagallo! Solid, man! You really lost your hair for something good!'), aunty Pia was out. I sat quietly with uncle Hanif while, in the kitchen, Mary Pereira prepared dinner. It was a peaceful little family scene; but the peace was shattered, abruptly, by the crash of a slamming door. Hanif dropped his pencil as Pia, having slammed the front door, flung open the living-room door with equal force. Then he boomed cheerfully, 'So, wife: what's the drama?' … But Pia was not to be defused. 'Scribble,' she said, her hand slicing air, 'Allah, don't stop for me! So much talent, a person cannot go to the pot in this house without finding your genius. Are you happy, husband? We are making much money? God is good to you?' Still Hanif remained cheerful. 'Come Pia, our little guest is here. Sit, have tea…' Actress Pia froze in an attitude of disbelief. 'O God! Such a family I have come to! My life is in ruins, and you offer tea; your mother offers petrol! All is madness…' And uncle Hanif, frowning now: 'Pia, the boy…'A shriek. 'Ahaaa! The boy-but the boy has suffered; he is suffering now; he knows what it is to lose, to feel forlorn! I, too, have been abandoned: I am great actress, and here I sit surrounded by tales of bicycle-postmen and donkey-cart drivers! What do you know of a woman's grief? Sit, sit, let some fat rich Parsee film-producer give you charity, never mind that your wife wears paste jewels and no new saris for two years; a woman's back is broad, but, beloved husband, you have made my days into deserts! Go, ignore me now, just leave me in peace to jump from the window! I will go into the bedroom now,' she concluded, 'and if you hear no more from me it is because my heart is broken and I am dead.' More doors slammed: it was a terrific exit.
   Uncle Hanif broke a pencil, absent-mindedly, into two halves. He shook his head wonderingly: 'What's got into her?' But I knew. I, bearer of secrets, threatened by policemen, I knew and bit my lip. Because, trapped as I was in the crisis of the marriage of my uncle and aunt, I had broken my recently-made rule and entered Pia's head; I had seen her visit to Homi Catrack and knew that, for years now, she had been his fancy-woman; I had heard him telling her that he had tired of her charms, and there was somebody else now; and I, who would have hated him enough just for seducing my beloved aunt, found myself hating him twice as passionately for doing her the dishonour of discarding her.
   'Go to her,' my uncle was saying, 'Maybe you can cheer her up.'
   The boy Saleem moves through repeatedly-slammed doors to the sanctum of his tragic aunt; and enters, to find her loveliest of bodies splayed out in wondrous abandon across the marital bed-where, only last night, bodies nestled against bodies-where paper passed from hand .to hand… a hand flutters at her heart; her chest heaves; and the boy Saleem stammers, 'Aunt, О aunt, I'm sorry.'
   A banshee-wail from the bed. Tragedienne's arms, flying outwards towards me. 'Hai! Hai, hai! Ai-hai-hai!' Needing no further invitation, I fly towards those arms; I fling myself between them, to lie atop my mourning aunt. The arms close around me, tightertighter, nails digging through my school-white shirt, but I don't care!-Because something has started twitching below my S-buckled belt. Aunty Pia thrashes about beneath me in her despair and I thrash with her, remembering to keep my right hand clear of the action. I hold it stiffly out above the fray. One-handed, I begin to caress her, not knowing what I'm doing, I'm only ten years old and still in shorts, but I'm crying because she's crying, and the room is full of the noise-and on the bed as two bodies thrash, two bodies begin to acquire a kind of rhythm, unnameable unthinkable, hips pushing up towards me, while she yells, 'О! О God, О God, O!' And maybe I am yelling too, I can't say, something is taking over from grief here, while my uncle snaps pencils on a striped sofa, something getting stronger, as she writhes and twists beneath me, and at last in the grip of a strength greater than my strength I am bringing down my right hand, I have forgotten my finger, and when it touches her breast, wound presses against skin…
   'Yaaaouuuu!' I scream with the pain; and my aunt, snapping out of the macabre spell of those few moments, pushes me off her and delivers a resounding wallop to my face. Fortunately, it is the left cheek; there is no danger of damage to my remaining good ear. 'Badmaash!' my aunty screams, 'A family of maniacs and perverts, woeis me, what woman ever suffered so badly?'
   There is a cough in the doorway. I am standing up now, shivering with pain. Pia is standing, too, her hair dripping off her head like tears. Mary Pereira is in the doorway, coughing, scarlet confusion all over her skin, holding a brown paper parcel in her hands.
   'See, baba, what I have forgotten,' she finally manages to say, 'You are a big man now: look, your mother has sent you two pairs of nice, white long trousers.'

   After I got so indiscreetly carried away while trying to cheer up my aunt, it became difficult foi me to remain in the apartment on Marine Drive. Long intense telephone calls were made regularly during the next few days; Hanif persuading someone, while Pia gesticulated, that perhaps now, after five weeks… and one evening after I got back from school, my mother picked me up in our old Rover, and my first exile came to an end.
   Neither during our drive home, nor at any other time, was I given any explanation for my exile. I decided, therefore, that I would not make it my business to ask. I was wearing long pants now; I was, therefore, a man, and must bear my troubles accordingly. I told my mother: 'The finger is not so bad. Hanif mamu has taught me to hold the pen differently, so I can write okay.' She seemed to be concentrating very hard on the road. 'It was a nice holiday,' I added, politely. 'Thank you for sending me.'
   'O child,' she burst out, 'with your face like the sun coming out, what can I tell you? Be good with your father; he is not happy these days.' I said I would try to be good; she seemed to lose control of the wheel and we passed dangerously near a bus. 'What a world,' she said after a time, 'Terrible things happen and you don't know how.'
   'I know,' I agreed, 'Ayah has been telling me.' My mother looked at me fearfully, then glared at Mary in the back seat. 'You black woman,' she cried, 'what have you been saying?' I explained about Mary's stories of miraculous events, but the dire rumours seemed to calm my mother down. 'What do you know,' she sighed, 'You are only a child.'
   What do I know, Amma? I know about the Pioneer Cafe! Suddenly, as we drove home, I was filled once again with my recent lust for revenge upon my perfidious mother, a lust which had faded in the brilliant glare of my exile, but which now returned and was united with my new-born loathing of Homi Catrack. This two-headed lust was the demon which possessed me, and drove me into doing the worst thing I ever did… 'Everything will be all right,' my mother was saying, 'You just wait and see.' Yes, mother.
   It occurs to me that I have said nothing, in this entire piece, about the Midnight Children's Conference; but then, to tell the truth, they didn't seem very important to me in those days. I had other things on my mind.

Commander Sabarmati's baton

   A few months later, when Mary Pereira finally confessed her crime, and revealed the secrets of her eleven-year-long haunting by the ghost of Joseph D'Costa, we learned that, after her return from exile, she was badly shocked by the condition into which the ghost had fallen in her absence. It had begun to decay, so that now bits of it were missing: an ear, several toes on each foot, most of its teeth; and there was a hole in its stomach-larger than an egg. Distressed by this crumbling spectre, she asked it (when she was sure nobody else was within earshot): 'O God, Joe, what you been doing to yourself?' He replied that the responsibility of her crime had been placed squarely on his shoulders until she confessed, and it was playing hell with his system. From that moment it became inevitable that she would confess; but each time she looked at me she found herself prevented from doing so. Still, it was only a matter of time.
   In the meanwhile, and utterly ignorant of how close I was to being exposed as a fraud, I was attempting to come to terms with a Methwold's Estate in which, too, a number of transformations had occurred. In the first place, my father seemed to want nothing more to do with me, an attitude of mind which I found hurtful but (considering my mutilated body) entirely understandable. In the second place, there was the remarkable change in the fortunes of the Brass Monkey. 'My position in this household,' I was obliged to admit to myself, 'has been usurped.' Because now it was the Monkey whom my father admitted into the abstract sanctum of his office, the Monkey whom he smothered in his squashy belly, and who was obliged to bear the burdens of his dreams about the future. I even heard Mary Pereira singing to the Monkey the little ditty which had been my theme-song all my days: 'Anything you want to be,' Mary sang, 'you can be; You can be just what-all you want!' Even my mother seemed to have caught the mood; and now it was my sister who always got the biggest helping of chips at the dinner-table, and the extra nargisi kofta, and the choicest pasanda. While I-whenever anyone in the house chanced to look at me-was conscious of a deepening furrow between their eyebrows, and an atmosphere of confusion and distrust. But how could I complain? The Monkey had tolerated my special position for years. With the possible exception of the time I fell out of a tree in our garden after she nudged me (which could have been an accident, after all), she had accepted my primacy with excellent grace and even loyalty. Now it was my turn; long-trousered, I was required to be adult about my demotion. 'This growing up,' I told myself, 'is harder than I expected.'
   The Monkey, it must be said, was no less astonished than I at her elevation to the role of favoured child. She did her best to fall from grace, but it seemed she could do no wrong. These were the days of her flirtation with Christianity, which was partly due to the influence of her European school-friends and partly to the rosary-fingering presence of Mary Pereira (who, unable to go to church because of her fear of the confessional, would regale us instead with Bible stories); mostly, however, I believe it was an attempt by the Monkey to regain her old, comfortable position in the family doghouse (and, speaking of dogs, the Baroness Simki had been put to sleep during my absence, lulled by promiscuity).
   My sister spoke highly of gentle Jesus meek and mild; my mother smiled vaguely and patted her on the head. She went around the house humming hymns; my mother took up the tunes and sang along. She requested a nun's outfit to replace her favourite nurse's dress; it was given to her. She threaded chick-peas on a string and used them as a rosary, muttering Hail-Mary-full-of-grace, and my parents praised her skill with her hands. Tormented by her failure to be punished, she mounted to extremes of religious fervour, reciting the Our Father morning and night, fasting in the weeks of Lent instead of during Ramzan, revealing an unsuspected streak of fanaticism which would, later, begin to dominate her personality; and still, it appeared, she was tolerated. Finally she discussed the matter with me. 'Well, brother,' she said, 'looks like from now on I'll just have to be the good guy, and you can have all the fun.'
   She was probably right; my parents' apparent loss of interest in me should have given me a greater measure of freedom; but I was mesmerized by the transformations which were taking place in every aspect of my life, and fun, in such circumstances, seemed hard to have.
   I was altering physically; too early, soft fuzz was appearing on my chin, and my voice swooped, out of control, up and down the vocal register. I had a strong sense of absurdity: my lengthening limbs were making me clumsy, and I must have cut a clownish figure, as I outgrew shirts and trousers and stuck gawkily and too far out of the ends of my clothes. I felt somehow conspired against, by these garments which flapped comically around my ankles and wrists; and even when I turned inwards to my secret Children, I found change, and didn't like it.
   The gradual disintegration of the Midnight Children's Conference-which finally fell apart on the day the Chinese armies came down over the Himalayas to humiliate the Indian fauj-was already well under way. When novelty wears off, boredom, and then dissension, must inevitably ensue. Or (to put it another way) when a finger is mutilated, and fountains of blood flow out, all manner of vilenesses become possible… whether or not the cracks in the Conference were the (active-metaphorical) result of my finger-loss, they were certainly widening. Up in Kashmir, Narada-Markandaya was falling into the solipsistic dreams of the true narcissist, concerned only with the erotic pleasures of constant sexual alterations; while Soumitra the time-traveller, wounded by our refusal to listen to his descriptions of a future in which (he said) the country would be governed by a urine-drinking dotard who refused to die, and people would forget everything they had ever learned, and Pakistan would split like an amoeba, and the prime ministers of each half would be assassinated by their successors, both of whom-he swore despite our disbelief-would be called by the same name… wounded Soumitra became a regular absentee from our nightly meetings, disappearing for long periods into the spidery labyrinths of Time. And the sisters from Baud were content with their ability to bewitch fools young and old. 'What can this Conference help?' they inquired. 'We already have too many lovers.' And our alchemist member was busying himself in a laboratory built for him by his father (to whom he had revealed his secret); pre-occupied with the Philosopher's Stone, he had very little time for us. We had lost him to the lure of gold.
   And there were other factors at work as well. Children, however magical, are not immune to their parents; and as the prejudices and world-views of adults began to take over their minds, I found children from Maharashtra loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners reviling Dravidian 'blackies'; there were religious rivalries; and class entered our councils. The rich children turned up their noses at being in such lowly company; Brahmins began to feel uneasy at permitting even their thoughts to touch the thoughts of untouchables; while, among the low-born, the pressures of poverty and Communism were becoming evident… and, on top of all this, there were clashes of personality, and the hundred squalling rows which are unavoidable in a parliament composed entirely of half-grown brats.
   In this way the Midnight Children's Conference fulfilled the prophecy of the Prime Minister and became, in truth, a mirror of the nation; the passive-literal mode was at work, although I railed against it, with increasing desperation, and finally with growing resignation… 'Brothers, sisters!' I broadcast, with a mental voice as uncontrollable as its physical counterpart, 'Do not let this happen! Do not permit the endless duality of masses-and-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us to come between us! We,' I cried passionately, 'must be a third principle, we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being new, can we fulfil the promise of our birth!' I had supporters, and none greater than Parvati-the-witch; but I felt them slipping away from me, each distracted by his or her own life… just as, in truth, I was being distracted by mine. It was as though our glorious congress was turning out to be more than another of the toys of childhood, as though long trousers were destroying what midnight had created… 'We must decide on a programme,' I pleaded, 'our own Five Year Plan, why not?' But I could hear, behind my anxious broadcast, the amused laughter of my greatest rival; and there was SMva in all our heads, saying scornfully, 'No, little rich boy; there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty, and have-and-lack, and right-and-left; there is only me-against-the-world! The world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams; the world, little Snotnose, is things. Things and their makers rule the world; look at Birla, and Tata, and all the powerful: they make things. For things, the country is run. Not for people. For things, America and Russia send aid; but five hundred million stay hungry. When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don't, you fight.' The Children, listening fascinatedly as we fought… or perhaps not, perhaps even our dialogue failed to hold their interest. And now I: 'But people are not tilings; if we come together, if we love each other, if we show that this, just this, this people-together, this Conference, this children-sticking-together-through-thick-and-thin, can be that third way…' But Shiva, snorting: 'Little rich boy, that's all just wind. All that importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-human-ity. Today, what people are is just another kind of thing.' And I, Saleem, crumbling: 'But… free will… hope… the great soul, otherwise known as mahatma, of mankind… and what of poetry, and art, and…' Whereupon SMva seized his victory: 'You see? I knew you'd turn out to be like that. Mushy, like overcooked rice. Sentimental as a grandmother. Go, who wants your rubbish? We all have lives to live. Hell's bells, cucumber-nose, I'm fed up with your Conference. It's got nothing to do with one single thing.

   You ask: there are ten-year-olds? I reply: Yes, but. You say: did ten-year-olds, or even almost-elevens, discuss the role of the individual in society? And the rivalry of capital and labour? Were the internal stresses of agrarian and industrialized zones made explicit? And conflicts in socio-cultural heritages? Did children of less than four thousand days discuss identity, and the inherent conflicts of capitalism? Having got through fewer than one hundred thousand hours, did they contrast Gandhi and Marxlenin, power and impotence? Was collectivity opposed to singularity? Was God killed by children? Even allowing for the truth of the supposed miracles, can we now believe that urchins spoke like old men with beards?
   I say: maybe not in these words; maybe not in words at all, but in the purer language of thought; but yes, certainly, this is what was at the bottom of it all; because children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us. Poison, and after a gap of many years, a Widow with a knife.
   In short: after my return to Buckingham Villa, even the salt of the midnight children lost its savour; there were nights, now, when I did not even bother to set up my nationwide network; and the demon lurking inside me (it had two heads) was free to get on with its devilment. (I never knew about Shiva's guilt or innocence of whore-murders; but such was the influence of Kali-Yuga that I, the good guy and natural victim, was certainly responsible for two deaths. First came Jimmy Kapadia; and second was Homi Catrack.)
   If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it is murdered.

   We all had our troubles in those, days. Homi Catrack had his idiot Toxy, and the Ibrahims had other worries: Sonny's father Ismail, after years of bribing judges and juries, was in danger of being investigated by the Bar Commission; and Sonny's uncle Ishaq, who ran the second-rate Embassy Hotel near Flora Fountain, was reputedly deep in debt to local gangsters, and worried constantly about being 'bumped off' (in those days, assassinations were becoming as quotidian as the heat)… so perhaps it isn't surprising that we had all forgotten about the existence of Professor Schaapsteker. (Indians grow larger and more powerful as they age; but Schaapsteker was a European, and his kind unfortunately fade away with the years, and,often completely disappear.)
   But now, driven, perhaps, by my demon, my feet led me upstairs to the top floor of Buckingham Villa, where I found a mad old man, incredibly tiny and shrunken, whose narrow tongue darted constantly in and out between his lips-flicking, licking: the former searcher after antivenenes, assassin of horses, Sharpsticker sahib, now ninety-two and no longer of his eponymous Institute, but retired into a dark top-floor apartment filled with tropical vegetation and serpents pickled in brine. Age, failing to draw his teeth and poison-sacs, had turned him instead into the incarnation of snakehood; like other Europeans who stay too long, the ancient insanities of India had pickled his brains, so that he had come to believe the superstitions of the Institute orderlies, according to whom he was the last of a line which began when a king cobra mated with a woman who gave birth to a human (but serpentine) child… it seems that all my life I've only had to turn a corner to tumble into yet another new and fabulously transmogrified world. Climb a ladder (or even a staircase) and you find a snake awaiting you.
   The curtains were always drawn; in Schaapsteker's rooms, the sun neither rose nor set, and no clocks ticked. Was it the demon, or our mutual sense of isolation which drew us together?… Because, in those days of the Monkey's ascendancy and the Conference's decline, I began to ascend the stairs whenever possible, and listen to the ravings of the crazy, sibilant old man.
   His first greeting to me, when I stumbled into his unlocked lair, was: 'So, child-you have recovered from the typhoid.' The sentence stirred time like a sluggish dust-cloud and rejoined me to my one-year-old self; I remembered the story of how Schaapsteker had saved my life with snake-poison. And afterwards, for several weeks, I sat at his feet, and he revealed to me the cobra which lay coiled within myself.
   Who listed, for my benefit, the occult powers of snakes? (Their shadows kill cows; if they enter a man's dreams, his wife conceives; if they are killed, the murderer's family is denied male issue for twenty generations.) And who described to me-with the aid of books and stuffed corpses-the cobra's constant foes? 'Study your enemies, child,' he hissed, 'or they will surely kill you.'… At Schaapsteker's feet, I studied the mongoose and the boar, the dagger-billed adjutant bird and the barasinha deer, which crushes snakes' heads under its feet; and the Egyptian ichneumon, and ibis; the four-feet-high secretary bird, fearless and hook-beaked, whose appearance and name made me think suspicious thoughts about my father's Alice Pereira; and the jackal buzzard, the stink cat, the honey ratel from the hills; the road runner, the peccary, and the formidable cangamba bird. Schaapsteker, from the depths of his senility, instructed me in life. 'Be wise, child. Imitate the action of the snake. Be secret; strike from the cover of a bush.'
   Once he said: 'You must think of me as another father. Did I not give you your life when it was lost?' With this statement he proved that he was as much under my spell as I under his; he had accepted that he, too, was one of that endless series of parents to whom I alone had the power of giving birth. And although, after a time, I found the air in his chambers too oppressive, and left him once more to the isolation from which he would never again be disturbed, he had shown me how to proceed. Consumed by the two-headed demon of revenge, I used my telepathic powers (for the first time) as a weapon; and in this way I discovered the details of the relationship between Homi Catrack and Lila Sabarmati. Lila and Pia were always rivals in beauty; it was the wife of the heir-apparent to the title of Admiral of the Fleet who had become the film magnate's new fancy-woman. While Commander Sabarmati was at sea on manoeuvres, Lila and Homi were performing certain manoeuvres of their own; while the lion of the seas awaited' the death of the then-Admiral, Homi and Lila, too, were making an appointment with the Reaper. (With my help.)
   'Be secret,' said Sharpsticker sahib; secretly, I spied on my enemy Homi, and on the promiscuous mother of Eyeslice and Hairoil (who were very full of themselves of late, ever since, in fact, the papers announced that Commander Sabarmati's promotion was a mere formality. Only a matter of time…). 'Loose woman,' the demon within me whispered silently, 'Perpetrator of the worst of maternal perfidies! We shall turn you into an awful example; through you we shall demonstrate the fate which awaits the lascivious. О unobservant adulteress! Did you not see what sleeping around did to the illustrious Baroness Simki von der Heiden?-who was, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bitch, just like yourself.'
   My view of Lila Sabarmati has mellowed with age; after all, she and I had one thing in common-her nose, like mine, possessed tremendous powers. Hers, however, was a purely worldly magic: a wrinkle of nasal skin could charm the steeliest of Admirals; a tiny flare of the nostrils ignited strange fires in the hearts of film magnates. I am a little regretful about betraying that nose; it was a little like stabbing a cousin in the back.
   What I discovered: every Sunday morning at ten a.m., Lila Sabarmati drove Eyeslice and Hairoil to the Metro cinema for the weekly meetings of the Metro Cub Club. (She volunteered to take the rest of us, too; Sonny and Cyrus, the Monkey and I piled into her Indian-made Hindustan car.) And while we drove towards Lana Turner or Robert Taylor or Sandra Dee, Mr Homi Catrack was also preparing himself for a weekly rendezvous. While Lila's Hindustan puttered along beside railway-lines, Homi was knotting a cream silk scarf around his throat; while she halted at red lights, he donned a Technicolored bush-coat; when she was ushering us into the darkness of the auditorium, he was putting on gold-rimmed sunglasses; and when she left us to watch our film, he, too, was abandoning a child. Toxy Catrack never failed to react to his departures by wailing kicking thrashing-of-legs; she knew what was going on, and not even Bi-Appah could restrain her.
   Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors. When Lila drove her Hindustan to an address off Colaba Causeway, she was Juliet coming out on to her balcony; when cream-scarfed, gold-shaded Homi sped off to meet her (in the same Studebaker in which my mother had once been rushed to Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home), he was Leander swimming the Hellespont towards Hero's burning candle. As for my part in the business-I will not give it a name.
   I confess: what I did was no act of heroism. I did not battle Homi on horseback, with fiery eyes and flaming sword; instead, imitating the action of the snake, I began to cut pieces out of newspapers. From GOAN LIBERATION COMMITTEE LAUNCHES satyagraha campaign I extracted the letters 'com'; speaker OF E-PAK ASSEMBLY DECLARED MANIAC gave me my second syllable, 'man'. I found 'der' concealed in nehru considers RESIGNATION AT CONGRESS ASSEMBLY; into my second word now, I excised 'sab' from riots, mass arrests in red-run kerala: SABOTEURS RUN AMOK: GHOSH ACCUSES CONGRESS GOONDAS, and got 'arm' from chinese armed forces' border activities spurn bandung principles. To complete the name, I snipped the letters 'ati' from dulles foreign policy is inconsistent, erratic, p.m. avers. Cutting up history to suit my nefarious purposes, I seized on why indira gandhi is congress president now and kept the 'why'; but I refused to be tied exclusively to politics, and turned to advertising for the 'does YOUR' in DOES YOUR CHEWING GUM LOSE ITS FLAVOUR? BUT p.k. keeps its savour! A sporting human-interest story, mohun bagan centre-forward takes wife, gave me its last word, and 'go то' I took from the tragic masses go то abul kalam azad's funeral. Now I was obliged to find my words in little pieces once again: death on south col: sherpa plunges provided me with a much-needed 'col', but 'aba' was hard to find, turning up at last in a cinema advertisement: Ali-baba, seventeenth SUPERCOLOSSAL WEEK-PLANS FILLING UP FAST!… Those were the days when Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, was campaigning for a plebiscite in his state to determine its future; his courage gave me the syllable 'cause', because it led to this headline: abdullah 'incitement' cause of his re-arrest-govt spokesman. Then, too, Acharya Vinobha Bhave, who had spent ten years persuading landowners to donate plots to the poor in his bhoodan campaign, announced that donations had passed the million-acre mark, and launched two new campaigns, asking for the donations of whole villages ('gramdan') and of individual lives ('jivandan'). When J. P. Narayan announced the dedication of his life to Bhave's work, the headline narayan walks in bhave's way gave me my much-sought 'way'. I had nearly finished now; plucking an 'on' from pakistan on course for political chaos: faction strife bedevils public affairs, and a 'sunday' from the masthead of the Sunday Blitz, I found myself just one word short. Events in East Pakistan provided me with my finale. FURNITURE HURLING SLAYS DEPUTY E-PAK SPEAKER: MOURNING PERIOD DECLARED gave me 'MOURNING', from which, deftly and deliberately, I excised the letter 'u'. I needed a terminal question-mark, and found it at the end of the perennial query of those strange days: after nehru, who

  In the secrecy of a bathroom, I glued my completed note-my first attempt at rearranging history-on to a sheet of paper; snake-like, I inserted the document in my pocket, like poison in a sac. Subtly, I arranged to spend an evening with Eyeslice and Hairoil. We played a game: 'Murder in the Dark'… During a game of murder, I slipped inside Commander Sabarmati's almirah and inserted my lethal missive into the inside pocket of his spare uniform. At that moment (no point hiding it) I felt the delight of the snake who hits its target, and feels its fangs pierce its victim's heel…
   commander SABARMATI (my note read)
   WHY DOES YOUR WIFE GO TO COLABA
   CAUSEWAY ON SUNDAY MORNING?
   No, I am no longer proud of what I did; but remember that my demon of revenge had two heads. By unmasking the perfidy of Lila Sabarmati, I hoped also to administer a salutary shock to my own mother. Two birds with one stone; there were to be two punished women, one impaled on each fang of my forked snake's tongue. It is not untrue to say that what came to be known as the Sabarmati affair had its real beginnings at a dingy cafe in the north of the city, when a stowaway watched a ballet of circling hands.
   I was secret; I struck from the cover of a bush. What drove me? Hands at the Pioneer Cafe; wrong-number telephone calls; notes slipped to me on balconies, and passed under cover of bedsheets; my mother's hypocrisy and Pia's inconsolable grief: 'Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai!'… Mine was a slow poison; but three weeks later, it had its effect.
   It emerged, afterwards, that after receiving my anonymous note Commander Sabarmati had engaged the services of the illustrious Dom Minto, Bombay's best-known private detective. (Minto, old and almost lame, had lowered his rates by then.) He waited until he received Minto's report. And then:
   That Sunday morning, six children sat in a row at the Metro Cub Club, watching Francis The Talking Mule And The Haunted House. You see, I had my alibi; I was nowhere near the scene of the crime. Like Sin, the crescent moon, I acted from a distance upon the tides of the world … while a mule talked on a screen, Commander Sabarmati visited the naval arsenal. He signed out a good, long-nosed revolver; also ammunition. He held, in his left hand, a piece of paper on which an address had been written in a private detective's tidy hand; in his right hand, he grasped the un-holstered gun. By taxi, the Commander arrived at Colaba Causeway. He paid off the cab, walked gun-in-hand down a narrow gully past shirt-stalls and toyshops, and ascended the staircase of an apartment block set back from the gully at the rear of a concrete courtyard. He rang the doorbell of apartment 18c; it was heard in 18b by an Anglo-Indian teacher giving private Latin tuition. When Commander Sabarmati's wife Lila answered the door, he shot her twice in the stomach at point-blank range. She fell backwards; he marched past her, and found Mr Homi Catrack rising from the toilet, his bottom unwiped, pulling frantically at his trousers. Commander Vinoo Sabarmati shot him once in the genitals, once in the heart and once through the right eye. The gun was not silenced; but when it had finished speaking, there was an enormous silence in the apartment. Mr Catrack sat down on the toilet after he was shot and seemed to be smiling.
   Commander Sabarmati walked out of the apartment block with the smoking gun in his hand (he was seen, through the crack of a door, by a terrified Latin tutor); he strolled along Colaba Causeway until he saw a traffic policeman on his little podium. Commander Sabarmati told the policeman, 'I have only now killed my wife and her lover with this gun; I surrender myself into your…' But he had been waving the gun under the policeman's nose; the officer was so scared that he dropped his traffic-conducting baton and fled. Commander Sabar-mati, left alone on the policeman's pedestal amid the sudden confusion of the traffic, began to direct the cars, using the smoking gun as a baton. This is how he was found by the posse of twelve policemen who arrived ten minutes later, who sprang courageously upon him and seized him hand and foot, and who removed from him the unusual baton with which, for ten minutes, he had expertly conducted the traffic.
   A newspaper said of the Sabarmati affair: 'It is a theatre in which India will discover who she was, what she is, and what she might become.'… But Commander Sabarmati was only a puppet; I was the puppet-master, and the nation performed my play-only I hadn't meant it! I didn't think he'd… I only wanted to… a scandal, yes, a scare, a lesson to all unfaithful wives and mothers, but not that, never, no.

   Aghast at the result of my actions, I rode the turbulent thought-waves of the city… at the Parsee General Hospital, a doctor said, 'Begum Sabarmati will live; but she will have to watch what she eats.'… But Homi Catrack was dead… And who was engaged as the lawyer for the defence?-Who said, 'I will defend him free gratis and for nothing'?-Who, once the victor of the Freeze Case, was now the Commander's champion? Sonny Ibrahim said, 'My father will get him off if anyone can.'
   Commander Sabarmati was the most popular murderer in the history of Indian jurisprudence. Husbands acclaimed his punishment of an errant wife; faithful women felt justified in their fidelity. Inside Lila's own sons, I found these thoughts: 'We knew she was like that. We knew a Navy man wouldn't stand for it.' A columnist in the Illustrated Weekly of India, writing a pen-portrait to go alongside the 'Personality of the Week' full-colour caricature of the Commander, said: 'In the Sabarmati Case, the noble sentiments of the Ramayana combine with the cheap melodrama of the Bombay talkie; but as for the chief protagonist, all agree on his upstandingness; and he is undeniably an attractive chap.'
   My revenge on my mother and Homi Catrack had precipitated a national crisis… because Naval regulations decreed that no man who had been in a civil jail could aspire to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. So Admirals, and city politicians, and of course Ismail Ibrahim, demanded: 'Commander Sabarmati must stay in a Navy jail. He is innocent until proven guilty. His career must not be ruined if it can possibly be avoided.' And the authorities: 'Yes.' And Commander Sabarmati, safe in the Navy's own lock-up, discovered the penalties of fame-deluged with telegrams of support, he awaited trial; flowers filled his cell, and although he asked to be placed on an ascetic's diet of rice and water, well-wishers inundated him with tiffin-carriers filled with birianis and pista-ki-lauz and other rich foods. And, jumping the queue in the Criminal Court, the case began in double-quick time… The prosecution said, 'The charge is murder in the first degree.'
   Stern-jawed, strong-eyed, Commander Sabarmati replied: 'Not guilty.'
   My mother said, 'O my God, the poor man, so sad, isn't it?' I said, 'But an unfaithful wife is a terrible thing, Amma…' and she turned away her head.
   The prosecution said, 'Here is an open and shut case. Here is motive, opportunity, confession, corpse and premeditation: the gun signed out, the children sent to the cinema, the detective's report. What else to say? The state rests.'
   And public opinion: 'Such a good man, Allah!'
   Ismail Ibrahim said: 'This is a case of attempted suicide.'
   To which, public opinion: '?????????'
   Ismail Ibrahim expounded: 'When the Commander received Dom Minto's report, he wanted to see for himself if it was true; and if so, to kill himself. He signed out the gun; it was for himself. He went to the Colaba address in a spirit of despair only; not as killer, but as dead man! But there-seeing his wife there, jury members!-seeing her half-clothed with her shameless lover!-jury members, this good man, this great man saw red. Red, absolutely, and while seeing red he did his deeds. Thus there is no premeditation, and so no murder in the first degree. Killing yes, but not cold-blooded. Jury members, you must find him not guilty as charged.'
   And buzzing around the city was, 'No, too much… Ismail Ibrahim has gone too far this time… but, but… he has got a jury composed mostly of women… and not rich ones… therefore doubly susceptible, to the Commander's charm and the lawyer's wallet… who knows? Who can tell?' The jury said, 'Not guilty.'
   My mother cried, 'Oh wonderful!… But, but: is it justice?' And thejudge, answering her: 'Using the powers vested in me, I reverse this absurd verdict. Guilty as charged.'
   O, the wild furor of those days! When Naval dignitaries and bishops and other politicians demanded, 'Sabarmati must stay in the Navy jail pending High Court appeal. The bigotry of one judge must not ruin this great man!' And police authorities, capitulating, 'Very well.' The Sabarmati Case goes rushing upwards, hurtling towards High Court hearing at unprecedented speed… and the Commander tells his lawyer, 'I feel as though destiny is no longer in my control; as though something has taken over… let us call it Fate.'
   I say: 'Call it Saleem, or Snotnose, or Sniffer, or Stainface; call it little-piece-of-the-moon.'
   The High Court verdict: 'Guilty as charged.' The press headlines: sabarmati for civil jail at last? Ismail Ibrahim's statement: 'We are going all the way! To the Supreme Court!' And now, the bombshell. A pronouncement from the State Chief Minister himself: 'It is a heavy thing to make an exception to the law; but in view of Commander Sabarmati's service to his country, I am permitting him to remain in Naval confinement pending the Supreme Court decision.'
   And more press headlines, stinging as mosquitoes: state government FLOUTS LAW! SABARMATI SCANDAL NOW A PUBLIC DISGRACE !… When I realized that the press had turned against the Commander, I knew he was done for.
   The Supreme Court verdict: 'Guilty.'

   Ismail Ibrahim said: 'Pardon! We appeal for pardon to the President of India!'
   And now great matters are to be weighed in Rashtrapati Bhavan-behind the gates of President House, a man must decide if any man can be set above the law; whether the assassination of a wife's fancy-man should be set aside for the sake of a Naval career; and still higher things-is India to give her approval to the rule of law, or to the ancient principle of the overriding primacy of heroes? If Rama himself were alive, would we send him to prison for slaying the abductor of Sita? Great matters; my vengeful irruption into the history of my age was certainly no trivial affair.
   The President of India said, 'I shall not pardon this man.'
   Nussie Ibrahim (whose husband had lost his biggest case) wailed, 'Hai! Ai-hai!' And repeated an earlier observation: 'Amina sister, that good man going to prison-I tell you, it is the end of the world!'

   A confession, trembling just beyond my lips: 'It was all my doing, Amma; I wanted to teach you a lesson. Amma, do not go to see other men, with Lucknow-work on their shirt; enough, my mother, of teacup-kissery! I am in long trousers now, and may speak to you as a man.' But it never spilled out of me; there was no need, because I heard my mother answering a wrong-number telephone call-and with a strange, subdued voice, speak into the mouthpiece as follows: 'No; nobody by that name here; please believe what I am telling you, and never call me again.'
   Yes, I had taught my mother a lesson; and after the Sabarmati affair she never saw her Nadir-Qasim in the flesh, never again, not as long as she lived; but, deprived of him, she fell victim to the fate of all women in our family, namely the curse of growing old before her time; she began to shrink, and her hobble became more pronounced, and there was the emptiness of age in her eyes.
   My revenge brought in its wake a number of unlooked-for developments; perhaps the most dramatic of these was the appearance in the gardens of Methwold's Estate of curious flowers, made out of wood and tin, and hand-painted with bright red lettering… the fatal signboards erected in all the gardens except our own, evidence that my powers exceeded even my own understanding, and that, having once been exiled from my two-storey hillock, I had now managed to send everyone else away instead.
   Signboards in the gardens of Versailles Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci; signboards nodding to each other in the sea-breeze of the cocktail hour. On each signboard could be discerned the same seven letters, all bright red, all twelve inches high: for sale. That was the signboards' message. for sale-Versailles Villa, its owner dead on a toilet seat; the sale was handled by the ferocious nurse Bi-Appah on behalf of poor idiot Toxy; once the sale was complete, nurse and nursed vanished forever, and Bi-Appah held, on her lap, a bulging suitcase filled with banknotes… I don't know what happened to Toxy, but considering the avarice of her nurse, I'm sure it was nothing good… for sale, the Sabarmati apartment in Escorial Villa; Lila Sabarmati was denied custody of her children and faded out of our lives, while Eyeslice and Hairoil packed their bags and departed into the care of the Indian Navy, which had placed itself in loco parentis until their father completed his thirty years in jail… for sale, too, the Ibrahims' Sans Souci, because Ishaq Ibrahim's Embassy Hotel had been burned down by gangsters on the day of Commander Sabarmati's final defeat, as though the criminal classes of the city were punishing the lawyer's family for his failure; and then Ismail Ibrahim was suspended from practice, owing to certain proofs of professional misconduct (to quote the Bombay Bar Commission's report); financially 'embarrassed', the Ibrahims also passed out of our lives; and, finally forsale, the apartment of Cyrus Dubash and his mother, because during the hue and cry of the Sabarmati affair, and almost entirely unnoticed, the nuclear physicist had died his orange-pip-choking death, thus unleashing upon Cyrus the religious fanaticism of his mother and setting in motion the wheels of the period of revelations which will be the subject of my next little piece.
   The signboards nodded in the gardens, which were losing their memories of goldfish and cocktail-hours and invading cats; and who took them down? Who were the heirs of the heirs of William Methwold?… They came swarming out of what had once been the residence of Dr Narlikar: fat-bellied and grossly competent women, grown fatter and more competent than ever on their tetrapod-given wealth (because those were the years of the great land reclamations) . The Narlikar women-from the Navy they bought Commander Sabarmati's flat, and from the departing Mrs Dubash her Cyrus's home; they paid Bi-Appah in used banknotes, and the Ibrahims' creditors were appeased by Narlikar cash.
   My father, alone of all the residents, refused to sell; they offered him vast sums, but he shook his head. They explained their dream-a dream of razing the buildings to the ground and erecting on the two-storey hillock a mansion which would soar thirty stories into the skies, a triumphant pink obelisk, a signpost of their future; Ahmed Sinai, lost in abstractions, would have none of it. They told him, 'When you're surrounded by rubble you'll have to sell for a song'; he (remembering their tetrapodal perfidy) was unmoved.
   Nussie-the-duck said, as she left, 'I told you so, Amina sister-the end! The end of the world!' This time she was right and wrong; after August 1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had, indeed, come to an end.
   Padma-did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin orb, on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two cheap metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No, of course not; but I did. It was a world full of labels: Atlantic Ocean and Amazon and Tropic of Capricorn. And, at the North Pole, it bore the legend: made as england. By the August of the nodding signboards and the rapaciousness of the Narlikar women, this tin world had lost its stand; I found Scotch Tape and stuck the earth together at the Equator, and then, my urge for play overcoming my respect, began to use it as a football. In the aftermath of the Sabarmati affair, when the air was filled with the repentance of my mother and the private tragedies of Methwold's heirs, I clanked my tin sphere around the Estate, secure in the knowledge that the world was still in one piece (although held together by adhesive tape) and also at my feet… until, on the day of Nussie-the-duck's last eschatological lament-on the day Sonny Ibrahim ceased to be Sonny-next-door-my sister the Brass Monkey descended on me in an inexplicable rage, yelling, 'O God, stop your kicking, brother; you don't feel even a little bad today?' And jumping high in the air, she landed with both feet on the North Pole, and crushed the world into the dust of our driveway under her furious heels.
   It seems the departure of Sonny Ibrahim, her reviled adorer, whom she had stripped naked in the middle of the road, had affected the Brass Monkey, after all, despite her lifelong denial of the possibility of love.

Revelations

   От Hare Khusro Hare Khusrovand От
   Know, О unbleivers, that in the dark Midnights of celestial space in a time before Time lay the sphere of Blessed khusrovand!!! Even modern scientists now affirm that for generations they have lied to conceal from the People whose right it is to know of the Unquestionabel true existance of this holy home of truth!!! Leading Intellectuals the World Over, also in America, speak of the anti-religious conspiracy of reds, jews, etc., to hide these vital news! The Veil lifts now. Blessed lord khusro comes with Irrefutable Proofs. Read and believe!
   Know that in true-existing Khusrovand lived Saints whose Spiritual Purity-Advancement was such that they had, through meditation &c., gained powers for the good of all, powers Beyond Imagining! They saw through steel, and could BEND GIRDERS with TEETH!!!
   @@@now!
   For 1st Time, such powers may be used
   In Your Service! LORD KHUSRO is here!
 
   Hear of the Fall of Khusrovand: how the red devil Bhimutha (black be his name) unleashed a fearsome Hail of Meteorites (which has been well chronicled by world observatories, but not Explained)… so horrible a rain of stone, that Fair Khusrovand was ruined & its Saints destroyd.
   But noble Juraell and beauteous Khalila were wise. sacrificing themselves in an ecstasy of Kundalini Art, they saved the soul of their unborn son lord khusro. Entering True Oneness in a Supreme Yogic Trance (whose powers are now accepted in whole world!) they transformed their Noble Spirits into a Flashing Beam of kundalini life force energy light, of which today's wellknown laser is a common imitation & Copy. Along this beam, Soul of unborn Khusro flew, traversing the bottomless deeps of Celestial Space-Eternity, until by our luck! it came to our own Duniya (World) & lodged in Womb of a humble Parsee matron of Good Family.
   So the Child was born & was of true Goodness & Unparalleled brain (giving the lie to that lie, that we are all Born Equal! Is a Crook the equal of Saint? of course not!!) But for some Time his true nature lay Hidden, until while portraying and Earth-Saint in a drama production (of which leading critics have said, The Purity of His Performance Defied The Blief), he came awake & knew who he was. Now has he taken up his True Name,
   lord khusro khusrovani
   * BHAGWAN *
   & is Set Forth humbly with Ash on his Ascetic's Brow to heal Disease and End Droughts & fight the Legions of Bhimutha wherever they may Come. For be afraid! Bhimutha's rain of stone will come to us also! Do not heed lies of politicos poets Reds &cetera. put your trust in Only True Lord
   @@@KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO KHUSRO
   & send Donations to POBox 555, Head Post Office, Bombay-1. blessings! beauty!! truth!!! 0m Hare Khusro Hare Khusrovand От
 
   Cyrus-the-great had a nuclear physicist for a father and, for a mother, a religious fanatic whose faith had gone sour inside her as a result of so many years of being suppressed by the domineering rationality of her Dubash; and when Cyrus's father choked on an orange from which his mother had forgotten to remove the pips, Mrs Dubash applied herself to the task of erasing her late husband from the personality of her son-of remaking Cyrus in her own strange image, Cyrus-the-great, Ватт a plate, In nineteen hundred and forty-eight-Cyrus the school prodigy-Cyrus as Saint Joan in Shaw's play-all these Cyruses, to whom we had grown accustomed, with whom we had grown up, now disappeared; in their place there emerged the overblown, almost bovinely placid figure of Lord Khusro Khusrovand. At the age often, Cyrus vanished from the Cathedral School and the meteoric rise of India's richest guru began. (There are as many versions of India as Indians; and, when set beside Cyrus's India, my own version seems almost mundane.)
   Why did he let it happen? Why did posters cover the city, and advertisements fill the newspapers, without a peep out of the child genius?… Because Cyrus (although he used to lecture us, not un-mischievously, on the Parts of a Wooman's Body) was simply the most malleable of boys, and would not have dreamed of crossing his mother. For his mother, he put on a sort of brocade skirt and a turban; for the sake of filial duty, he permitted millions of devotees to kiss his little finger. In the name of maternal love, he truly became Lord Khusro, the most successful holy child in history; in no time at all he was being hailed by crowds half a million strong, and credited with miracles; American guitarists came to sit at his feet, and they all brought their cheque-books along. Lord Khusrovand acquired accountants, and tax havens, and a luxury liner called the Khusrovand Starship, and an aircraft-Lord Khusro's Astral Plane. And somewhere inside the faintly-smiling, benediction-scattering boy… in a place which was forever hidden by his mother's frighteningly efficient shadow (she had, after all, lived in the same house as the Narlikar women; how well did she know them? How much of their awesome competence leaked into her?), there lurked the ghost of a boy who had been my friend.
   'That Lord Khusro?' Padma asks, amazed. 'You mean that same mahaguru who drowned at sea last year?' Yes, Padma; he could not walk on water; and very few people who have come into contact with me have been vouchsafed a natural death… let me confess that I was somewhat resentful of Cyrus's apotheosis. 'It should have been me,' I even thought, 'I am the magic child; not only my primacy at home, but even my true innermost nature, has now been purloined.'
   Padma: I never became a 'mahaguru'; millions have never seated themselves at my feet; and it was my own fault, because one day, many years ago, I had gone to hear Cyrus's lecture on the Parts of a Wooman's Body.
   'What?' Padma shakes her head, puzzled. 'What's this now?'
   The nuclear physicist Dubash possessed a beautiful marble statuette-a female nude-and with the help of this figurine, his son would give expert lectures on female anatomy to an audience of sniggering boys. Not free; Cyrus-the-great charged a fee. In exchange for anatomy, he demanded comic-books-and I, in all innocence, gave him a copy of that most precious of Superman comics, the one containing the frame-story, about the explosion of the planet Krypton and the rocket-ship in which Jor-El his father despatched him through space, to land on earth and be adopted by the good, mild Kents… did nobody else see it? In all those years, did no person understand that what Mrs Dubash had done was to rework and reinvent the most potent of all modern myths-the legend of the coming of the superman? I saw the hoardings trumpeting the coming of Lord Khusro Khusrovand Bhagwan; and found myself obliged, yet again, to accept responsibility for the events of my turbulent, fabulous world.
 
   How I admire the leg-muscles of my solicitous Padma! There she squats, a few feet from my table, her sari hitched up in fisherwoman-fashion. Calf-muscles show no sign of strain; thigh-muscles, rippling through sari-folds, display their commendable stamina. Strong enough to squat forever, simultaneously defying gravity and cramp, my Padma listens unhurriedly to my lengthy tale; О mighty pickle-woman! What reassuring solidity, how comforting an air of permanence, in her biceps and triceps… for my admiration extends also to her arms, which could wrestle mine down in a trice, and from which, when they enfold me nightly in futile embraces, there is no escape. Past our crisis now, we exist in perfect harmony: I recount, she is recounted to; she ministers, and I accept her ministrations with grace. I am, in fact, entirely content with the uncomplaining thews of Padma Mangroli, who is, unaccountably, more interested in me than my tales.
   Why I have chosen to expound on Padma's musculature: these days, it's to those muscles, much as to anything or-one (for instance, my son, who hasn't even learned to read as yet), that I'm telling my story. Because I am rushing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible, and overstatements, and jarring alterations in tone; I'm racing the cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have already been made, and that, as my decay accelerates (my writing speed is having trouble keeping up), the risk of unreliability grows… in this condition, I am learning to use Padma's muscles as my guides. When she's bored, I can detect in her fibres the ripples of uninterest; when she's unconvinced, there is a tic which gets going in her cheek. The dance of her musculature helps to keep me on the rails; because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe… Padma, having accepted the story of Cyrus-the-great, gives me the courage to speed on, into the worst time of my eleven-year-old life (there is, was, worse to come)-into the August-and-September when revelations flowed faster than blood.
   Nodding signboards had scarcely been taken down when the demolition crews of the Narlikar women moved in; Buckingham Villa was enveloped in the tumultuous dust of the dying palaces of William Methwold. Concealed by dust from Warden Road below, we were nevertheless still vulnerable to telephones; and it was the telephone which informed us, in the tremulous voice of my aunt Pia, of the suicide of my beloved uncle Hanif. Deprived of the income he had received from Homi Catrack, my uncle had taken his booming voice and his obsessions with hearts and reality up to the roof of his Marine Drive apartment block; he had stepped out into the evening sea-breeze, frightening the beggars so much (when he fell) that they gave up pretending to be blind and ran away yelling… in death as in life, Hanif Aziz espoused the cause of truth and put illusion to flight. He was nearly thirty-four years old. Murder breeds death; by killing Homi Catrack, I had killed my uncle, too. It was my fault; and the dying wasn't over yet.

  The family gathered at Buckingham Villa: from Agra, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother; from Delhi, my uncle Mustapha, the Civil Servant who had polished the art of agreeing with his superiors to the point at which they had stopped hearing him, which is why he never got promoted; and his half-Irani wife Sonia and their children who had been so thoroughly beaten into insignificance that I can't even remember how many of them there were; and from Pakistan, bitter Alia, and even General Zulfikar and my aunt Emerald, who brought twenty-seven pieces of luggage and two servants, and never stopped looking at their watches and inquiring about the date. Their son Zafar also came. And, to complete the circle, my mother brought Pia to stay in our house, 'at least for the forty-day mourning period, my sister.'
   For forty days, we were besieged by the dust; dust creeping under the wet towels we placed around all the windows, dust slyly following in each mourning arrival, dust filtering through the very walls to hang like a shapeless wraith in the air,' dust deadening the sounds of formal ululation and also the deadly sniping of grieving kinsfolk; the remnants of Methwold's Estate settled on my grandmother and goaded her towards a great fury; they irritated the pinched nostrils of Punchinello-faced General Zulfikar and forced him to sneeze on to his chin. In the ghost-haze of the dust it sometimes seemed we could discern the shapes of the past, the mirage of Lila Sabarmati's pulverized pianola or the prison bars at the window of Toxy Catrack's cell; Dubash's nude statuette danced in dust-form through our chambers, and Sonny Ibrahim's bullfight-posters visited us as clouds. The Narlikar women had moved away while bulldozers did their work; we were alone inside the dust-storm, which gave us all the appearance of neglected furniture, as if we were chairs and tables which had been abandoned for decades without covering-sheets; we looked like the ghosts of ourselves. We were a dynasty born out of a nose, the aquiline monster on the face of Aadam Aziz, and the dust, entering our nostrils in our time of grief, broke down our reserve, eroded the barriers which permit families to survive; in the dust storm of the dying palaces things were said and seen and done from which none of us ever recovered.
   It was started by Reverend Mother, perhaps because the years had filled her out until she resembled the Sankara Acharya mountain in her native Srinagar, so that she presented the dust with the largest surface area to attack. Rumbling up from her mountainous body came a noise like an avalanche, which, when it turned into words, became a fierce attack on aunt Pia, the bereaved widow. We had all noticed that my mumani was behaving unusually. There was an unspoken feeling that an actress of her standing should have risen to the challenge of widowhood in high style; we had unconsciously been eager to see her grieving, looking forward to watching an accomplished tragedienne orchestrate her own calamity, anticipating a forty-day raga in which bravura and gentleness, howling pain and soft despond would all be blended in the exact proportions of art; but Pia remained still, dry-eyed, and anticlimactically composed. Amina Sinai and Emerald Zulfikar wept and rent their hair, trying to spark off Pia's talents; but finally, when it seemed nothing would move Pia, Reverend Mother lost patience. The dust entered her disappointed fury and increased its bitterness. 'That woman, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother rumbled, didn't I tell you about her? My son, Allah, he could have been anything, but no, whatsitsname, she must make him ruin his life; he must jump off a roof, whatsitsname, to be free of her.'
   It was said; could not be unsaid. Pia sat like stone; my insides shook like cornflour pudding. Reverend Mother went grimly on; she swore an oath upon the hairs of her dead son's head. 'Until that woman shows my son's memory some respect, whatsitsname, until she takes out a wife's true tears, no food will pass my lips. It is shame and scandal, whatsitsname, how she sits with antimony instead of tears in her eyes!' The house resounded with this echo of her old wars with Aadam Aziz. And until the twentieth day of the forty, we were all afraid that my grandmother would die of starvation and the forty days would have to start all over again. She lay dustily on her bed; we waited and feared.
   I broke the stalemate between grandmother and aunt; so at least I can legitimately claim to have saved one life. On the twentieth day, I sought out Pia Aziz who sat in her ground-floor room like a blind woman; as an excuse for my visit, I apologized clumsily for my indiscretions in the Marine Drive apartment. Pia spoke, after a distant silence: 'Always melodrama,' she said, flatly, 'In his family members, in his work. He died for his hate of melodrama; it is why I would not cry.' At the time I did not understand; now I'm sure that Pia Aziz was exactly right. Deprived of a livelihood by spurning the cheap-thrill style of the Bombay cinema, my uncle strolled off the edge of a roof; melodrama inspired (and perhaps tainted) his final dive to earth. Pia's refusal to weep was in honour of his memory… but the effort of admitting it breached the walls of her self-control. Dust made her sneeze; the sneeze brought tears to her eyes; and now the tears would not stop, and we all witnessed our hoped-for performance after all, because once they fell they fell like Flora Fountain, and she was unable to resist her own talent; she shaped the flood like the performer she was, introducing dominant themes and subsidiary motifs, beating her astonishing breasts in a manner genuinely painful to observe, now squeezing, now pummelling… she tore her garments and her hair. It was an exaltation of tears, and it persuaded Reverend Mother to eat. Dal and pistachio-nuts poured into my grandmother while salt water flooded from my aunt. Now Naseem Aziz descended upon Pia, embracing her, turning the solo into a duet, mingling the music of reconciliation with the unbearably beautiful tunes of grief. Our palms itched with inexpressible applause. And the best was still to come, because Pia, the artiste, brought her epic efforts to a superlative close. Laying her head in her mother-in-law's lap, she said in a voice filled with submission and emptiness, 'Ma, let your unworthy daughter listen to you at last; tell me what to do, I will do.' And Reverend Mother, tearfully: 'Daughter, your father Aziz and I will go to Rawalpindi soon; in our old age we will live near our youngest daughter, our Emerald. You will also come, and a petrol pump will be purchased.' And so it was that Reverend Mother's dream began to come true, and Pia Aziz agreed to relinquish the world of films for that of fuel. My uncle Hanif, I thought, would probably have approved.
   The dust affected us all during those forty days; it made Ahmed Sinai churlish and raucous, so that he refused to sit in the company of his in-laws and made Alice Pereira relay messages to the mourners, messages which he also yelled out from his office: 'Keep the racket down! I am working in the middle of this hullabaloo!' It made General Zulfikar and Emerald look constantly at calendars and airline timetables, while their son Zafar began to boast to the Brass Monkey that he was getting his father to arrange a marriage between them. 'You should think you're lucky,' this cocky cousin told my sister, 'My father is a big man in Pakistan.' But although Zafar had inherited his father's looks, the dust had clogged up the Monkey's spirits, and she didn't have the heart to fight him. Meanwhile my aunt Alia spread her ancient, dusty disappointment through the air and my most absurd relatives, the family of my uncle Mustapha, sat sullenly in corners and were forgotten, as usual; Mustapha Aziz's moustache, proudly waxed and upturned at the tips when he arrived, had long since sagged under the depressive influence of the dust.
   And then, on the twenty-second day of the mourning period, my grandfather, Aadam Aziz, saw God.

   He was sixty-eight that year-still a decade older than the century. But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll; his eyes were still blue, but his back was bent. Shuffling around Buckingham Villa in embroidered skull-cap and full-length chugha-coat-coated, too, in a thin film of dust-he munched aimlessly on raw carrots and sent thin streaks of spittle down the grizzled white contours of his chin. And as he declined, Reverend Mother grew larger and stronger; she, who had once wailed pitifully at the sight of Mercurochrome, now appeared to thrive on his weakness, as though their marriage had been one of those mythical unions in which succubi appear to men as innocent damsels, and, after luring them into the matrimonial bed, regain their true, awful aspect and begin to swallow their souls… my grandmother, in those days, had acquired a moustache almost as luxuriant as the dustily-sagging hair on the upper lip of her one surviving son. She sat cross-legged on her bed, smearing her lip with a mysterious fluid which set hard around the hairs and was then ripped off by a sharp, violent hand; but the remedy only served to exacerbate the ailment.
   'He has become like a child again, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother told my grandfather's children, 'and Hanif has finished him off,' She warned us that he had begun to see things. 'He talks to people who are not there,' she whispered loudly while he wandered through the room sucking his teeth, 'How he calls out, whatsitsname! In the middle of the night!' And she mimicked him: 'Ho, Tai? Is it you?' She told us children about the boatman, and the Hummingbird, and the Rani of Cooch Naheen. 'Poor man has lived too long, whatsitsname; no father should see his son die first.'… And Amina, listening, shook her head in sympathy, not knowing that Aadam Aziz would leave her this legacy-that she, too, in her last days, would be visited by things which had no business to return.
   We could not use the ceiling-fans for the dust; perspiration ran down the face of my stricken grandfather and left streaks of mud on his cheeks. Sometimes he would grab anyone who was near him and speak with utter lucidity: 'These Nehrus will not be happy until they have made themselves hereditary kings!' Or, dribbling into the face of a squirming General Zulfikar: 'Ah, unhappy Pakistan! How ill-served by her rulers!' But at other times he seemed to imagine himself in a gemstone store, and muttered,'… Yes: there were emeralds and rubies…' The Monkey whispered to me, 'Is grandpa going to die?'
   What leaked into me from Aadam Aziz: a certain vulnerability to women, but also its cause, the hole at the centre of himself caused by his (which is also my) failure to believe or disbelieve in God. And something else as well-something which, at the age of eleven, I saw before anyone else noticed. My grandfather had begun to crack.
   'In the head?' Padma asks, 'You mean in the upper storey?'