The boatman Tai said:' The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba,just under the water's skin.' I saw the cracks in his eyes-a delicate tracery of colourless lines against the blue; I saw a network of fissures spreading beneath his leathery skin; and I answered the Monkey's question: 'I think he is.' Before the end of the forty-day mourning period, my grandfather's skin had begun to split and flake and peel; he could hardly open his mouth to eat because of the cuts in the corners of his lips; and his teeth began to drop like Flitted flies. But a crack-death can be slow; and it was a long time before we knew about the other cracks, about the disease which was nibbling at his bones, so that finally his skeleton disintegrated into powder inside the weatherbeaten sack of his skin.
   Padma is looking suddenly panicky. 'What are you saying? You, mister: are you telling that you also… what nameless thing can eat up any man's bones? Is it…'
   No time to pause now; no time for sympathy or panic; I have already gone further than I should. Retreating a little in time, I must mention that something also leaked into Aadam Aziz from me; because on the twenty-third day of the mourning period, he asked the entire family to assemble in the same room of glass vases (no need to hide them from my uncle now) and cushions and immobilized fans, the same room in which I had announced visions of my own… Reverend Mother had said, 'He has become like a child again'; like a child, my grandfather announced that, three weeks after he had heard of the death of a son whom he had believed to be alive and well, he had seen with his own eyes the God in whose death he had tried all his life to believe. And, like a child, he was not believed. Except by one person… 'Yes, listen,' my grandfather said, his voice a weak imitation of his old booming tones, 'Yes, Rani? You are here? And Abdullah? Come, sit, Nadir, this is news-where is Ahmed? Alia will want him here… God, my children; God, whom I fought all my life. Oskar? Ilse?-No, of course. I know they are dead. You think I'm old, maybe foolish; but I have seen God.' And the story, slowly, despite rambles and diversions, comes inching out: at midnight, my grandfather awoke in his darkened room. Someone eke present-someone who was not his wife. Reverend Mother, snoring in her bed. But someone. Someone with shining dust on him, lit by the setting moon. And Aadam Aziz, 'Ho, Tai? Is it y6u?' And Reverend Mother, mumbling in her sleep, 'O, sleep, hiusband, forget this…' But the someone, the something, cries in a loud startling (and startled?) voice, 'Jesus Christ Almighty!' (Amid the cut-glass vases, my grandfather laughs apologetically heh-heh, for mentioning the infidel name.) 'Jesus Christ Almighty!' and my grandfather looking, and seeing, yes, there are holes in hands, perforations in the feet as there once were in a… But he is rubbing his eyes, shaking his head, saying: 'Who? What name? What did you say?' And the apparition, startling-startled, 'God! God!' And, after a pause, 'I didn't think you could see me.'
   'But I saw Him,' my grandfather says beneath motionless fans. 'Yes, Г can't deny it, I surely did.'… And the apparition: 'You're the one whose son died'; and my grandfather, with a pain in his chest: 'Why? Why did that happen?' To which the creature, made visible only by dust: 'God has his reasons, old man; life's like that, right?'
   Reverend Mother dismissed us all. 'Old man doesn't know what he means, whatsitsname. Such a thing, that grey hairs should make a man blaspheme!' But Mary Pereira left with her face pale as bedsheets; Mary knew whom Aadam Aziz had seen-who, decayed by his responsibility for her crime, had holes in hands and feet; whose heel had been penetrated by a snake; who died in a nearby clocktower, and had been mistaken for God.
   I may as well finish my grandfather's story here and now; I've gone this far, and the opportunity may not present itself later on… somewhere in the depths of my grandfather's senility, which inevitably reminded me of the craziness of Professor Schaapsteker upstairs, the bitter idea took root that God, by his off-hand attitude to Hanif's suicide, had proved his own culpability in the affair; Aadam grabbed General Zulfikar by his military lapels and whispered to him: 'Because I never believed, he stole my son!' And Zulfikar: 'No, no, Doctor Sahib, you must not trouble yourself so…' But Aadam Aziz never forgot his vision; although the details of the particular deity he had seen grew blurred in his mind, leaving behind only a passionate, drooling desire for revenge (which lust is also common to us both)… at the end of the forty-day mourning period, he would refuse to go to Pakistan (as Reverend Mother had planned) because that was a country built especially for God; and in the remaining years of his life he often disgraced himself by stumbling into mosques and temples with his old man's stick, mouthing imprecations and lashing out at any worshipper or holy man within range. In Agra, he was tolerated for the sake of the man he had once been; the old ones at the Cornwallis Road paan-shop played hit-the-spittoon and reminisced with compassion about the Doctor Sahib's past. Reverend Mother was obliged to yield to him for this reason if for no other-the iconoclasm of his dotage would have created a scandal in a country where he was not known.
   Behind his foolishness and his rages, the cracks continued to spread; the disease munched steadily on his bones, while hatred ate the rest of him away. He did not die, however, until 1964. It happened like this: on Wednesday, December 25th, 1963-on Christmas Day!-Reverend Mother awoke to find her husband gone. Coming out into the courtyard of her home, amid hissing geese and the pale shadows of the dawn, she called for a servant; and was told that the Doctor Sahib had gone by rickshaw to the railway station. By the time she reached the station, the train had gone; and in this way my grandfather, following some unknown impulse, began his last journey, so that he could end his story where it (and mine) began, in a city surrounded by mountains and set upon a lake.
   The valley lay hidden in an eggshell of ice; the mountains had closed in, to snarl like angry jaws around the city on the lake… winter in Srinagar; winter in Kashmir. On Friday, December 27th, a man answering to my grandfather's description was seen, chugha-coated, drooling, in the vicinity of the Hazratbal Mosque. At four forty-five on Saturday morning, Haji Muhammad Khalil Ghanai noticed the theft, from the Mosque's inner sanctum, of the valley's most treasured relic: the holy hair of the Prophet Muhammad.
   Did he? Didn't he? If it was him, why did he not enter the Mosque, stick in hand, to belabour the faithful as he had become accustomed to doing? If not him, then why? There were rumours of a Central Government plot to 'demoralize the Kashmir! Muslims', by stealing their sacred hair; and counter-rumours about Pakistani agents provocateurs, who supposedly stole the relic to foment unrest… did they? Or not? Was this bizarre incident truly political, or was it the penultimate attempt at revenge upon God by a father who had lost his son? For ten days, no food was cooked in any Muslim home; there were riots and burnings of cars; but my grandfather was above politics now, and is not known to have joined in any processions. He was a man with a single mission; and what is known is that on January 1st, 1964 (a Wednesday, just one week after his departure from Agra), he set his face towards the hill which Muslims erroneously called the Takht-e-Sulaiman, Solomon's seat, atop which stood a radio mast, but also the black blister of the temple of the acharya Sankara. Ignoring the distress of the city, my grandfather climbed; while the cracking sickness within him gnawed patiently through his bones. He was not recognized.
   Doctor Aadam Aziz (Heidelberg-returned) died five days before the government announced that its massive search for the single hair of the Prophet's head had been successful. When the State's holiest saints assembled to authenticate the hair, my grandfather was unable to tell them the truth. (If they were wrong… but I can't answer the questions I've asked.) Arrested for the crime-and later released on grounds of ill-health-was one Abdul Rahim Bande; but perhaps my grandfather, had he lived, could have shed a stranger light on the affair… at midday on January ist, Aadam Aziz arrived outside the temple of Sankara Acharya. He was seen to raise his walking-stick; inside the temple, women performing the rite of puja at the Shiva-lingam shrank back-as women had once shrunk from the wrath of another, tetrapod-obsessed doctor; and then the cracks claimed him, and his legs gave way beneath him as the bones disintegrated, and the effect of his fall was to shatter the rest of his skeleton beyond all hope of repair. He was identified by the papers in the pocket of his chugha-coat: a photograph of his son, and a half-completed (and fortunately, correctly addressed) letter to his wife. The body, too fragile to be transported, was buried in the valley of his birth.
   I am watching Padma; her muscles have begun to twitch distractedly.'Consider this,' I say. 'Is what happend to my grandfather so very strange? Compare it with the mere fact of the holy fuss over the theft of a hair; because every last detail of that is true, and by comparison, an old man's death is surely perfectly normal.' Padma relaxes; her muscles give me the go-ahead. Because I've spent too long on Aadam Aziz; perhaps I'm afraid of what must be told next; but the revelation will not be denied.
   One last fact: after the death of my grandfather, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru fell ill and never recovered his health. This fatal sickness finally killed him on May 27th, 1964.
   If I hadn't wanted to be a hero, Mr Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn't have taunted me; Masha Miovic wouldn't have goaded me into losing my finger. And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn't died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the father of the nation was Nehru. Nehru's death; can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault?
   But now we're back in 1958; because on the thirty-seventh day of the mourning period, the truth, which had been creeping up on Mary Pereira-and therefore on me-for over eleven years, finally came out into the open; truth, in the shape of an old, old man, whose stench of Hell penetrated even my clogged-up nostrils, and whose body lacked fingers and toes and was littered with boils and holes, walked up our two-storey hillock and appeared through the dust-cloud to be seen by Mary Pereira, who was cleaning the chick-blinds on the verandah.
   Here, then, was Mary's nightmare come true; here, visible through the pall of dust, was the ghost of Joe D'Costa, walking towards the ground-floor office of Ahmed Sinai! As if it hadn't been enough to show himself to Aadam Aziz… 'Arre, Joseph,' Mary screamed, dropping her duster, 'you go away now! Don't come here now! Don't be bothering the sahibs with your troubles! О God, Joseph, go, go na, you will kill me today!' But the ghost walked on down the driveway.
   Mary Pereira, abandoning chick-blinds, leaving them hanging askew, rushes into the heart of the house to throw herself at the feet of my mother-small fat hands joined in supplication-'Begum Sahiba! Begum Sahiba, forgive me!' And my mother astounded: 'What is this, Mary? What has got your goat?' But Mary is beyond dialogue, she is weeping uncontrollably, crying 'O God my hour has come, my darling Madam, only let me go peacefully, do not put me in the jailkhana!' And also, 'Eleven years, my Madam, see if I haven't loved you all, О Madam, and that boy with his face like the moon; but now I am killed, I am no-good woman, I shall burn in hell! Funtoosh!' cried Mary, and again, 'It's finished; funloosh

  Still I did not guess what was coming; not even when Mary threw herself upon me (I was taller than her now; her tears wet my neck): 'O baba, baba; today you, must learn a thing, such a thing I have done; but come now…' and the little woman drew herself up with immense dignity, '… I will tell you all before that Joseph does. Begum, children, all you other great sirs and madams, come now to sahib's office, and I will tell.'
   Public announcements have punctuated my life; Amina in a Delhi gully, and Mary in a sunless office… with my whole family trooping amazedly behind us, I went downstairs with Mary Pereira, who would not let go of my hand.
   What was in the room with Ahmed Sinai? What had given my father a face from which djinns and money had been chased away and replaced by a look of utter desolation? What sat huddled up in the corner of the room, filling the air with a sulphurous stench? What, shaped like a man, lacked fingers and toes, whose face seemed to bubble like the hot springs of New Zealand (which I'd seen in the Wonder Book of Wonders)?… No time to explain, because Mary Pereira has begun to talk, gabbling out a secret which has been hidden for over eleven years, pulling us all out of the dream-world she invented when she changed name-tags, forcing us into the horror of the truth. And all the time she held on to me; like a mother protecting her child, she shielded me from my family. (Who were learning… as I was… that they were not…)
   … It was just after midnight and in the streets there were fireworks and crowds, the many-headed monster roaring, I did it for my Joseph, sahib, but please don't send me to jail, look the boy is a good boy, sahib, I am a poor woman, sahib, one mistake, one minute in so many years, not jailkhana sahib, I will go, eleven years I gave but I will go now, sahib, only this is a good boy, sahib, you must not send him, sahib, after eleven years he is your son… O, you boy with your face like the sun coming out, О Saleem my piece-of-the-moon, you must know that your father was Winkie and your mother is also dead…
   Mary Pereira ran out of the room.
   Ahmed Sinai said, in a voice as faraway as a bird: 'That, in the corner, is my old servant Musa, who tried to rob me once.'
   (Can any narrative stand so much so soon? I glance towards Padma; she appears to be stunned, like a fish.)
   Once upon a time there was a servant who robbed my father; who swore he was innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should prove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I told you then he was a time-bomb, and he had returned to explode. Musa had, indeed, contracted leprosy; and had returned across the silence of the years to beg for my father's forgiveness, so that he could be released from his self-inflicted curse.
   … Someone was called God who was not God; someone else was taken for a ghost, and was not a ghost; and a third person discovered that although his name was Saleem Sinai, he was not his parents' son…
   'I forgive you,' Ahmed Sinai said to the leper. After that day, he was cured of one of his obsessions; he never tried again to discover his own (and wholly imaginary) family curse.

   'I couldn't tell it any other way,' I say to Padma. Too painful; I had to just blurt it out, all crazy-sounding, just like that.'
   'O, mister,' Padma blubbers helplessly, 'O, mister, mister!'
   'Come on now,' I say, 'It's an old story.'
   But her tears aren't for me; for the moment, she's forgotten about what-chews-at-bones-beneath-the-skin; she's crying over Mary Pereira, of whom, as I've said, she had become excessively fond.
   'What happened to her?' she says with red eyes. 'That Mary?'
   I am seized by an irrational anger. I shout: 'You ask her!'
   Ask her how she went home to the city of Panjim in Goa, how she told her ancient mother the story of her shame! Ask how her mother went wild with the scandal (appropriately enough: it was a time for old folk to lose their wits)! Ask: did daughter and old mother go into the streets to seek forgiveness? Was that not the one time in each ten years when the mummified corpse of St Francis Xavier (as holy a relic as the Prophet's hair) is taken from its vault in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus and carried around the town? Did Mary and old distraught Mrs Pereira find themselves pressing up against the catafalque; was the old lady beside herself with grief for her daughter's crime? Did old Mrs Pereira, shouting, 'Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai!', clamber up on to the bier to kiss the foot of the Holy One? Amidst uncountable crowds, did Mrs Pereira enter a holy frenzy? Ask! Did she or didn't she, in the clutches of her wild spirit, place her lips around the big toe on St Francis's left foot? Ask for yourself: did Mary's mother bite the toe right off?
   'How?' Padma wails, unnerved by my wrath. 'How, ask?'
   … And is this also true: were the papers making it up when they wrote that the old lady had been miraculously punished; when they quoted Church sources and eye-witnesses, who described how the old woman was turned into solid stone? No? Ask her if it's true that the Church sent a stone-statue figure of an old woman around the towns and the villages of Goa, to show what happened to those who misbehave with 'the saints? 'Ask: was this statue not seen in several villages simultaneously-and does that prove fraud, or a further miracle? 'You know I can't ask anyone,' Padma howls… but I, feeling my fury subside, am making no more revelations tonight.
   Baldly, then: Mary Pereira left us, and went to her mother in Goa. But Alice Pereira stayed; Alice remained in Ahmed Sinai's office, and typed, and fetched snacks and fizzy drinks.
   As for me-at the end of the mourning period for my uncle Hanif, I entered my second exile.

Movements performed by pepperpots

   I was obliged to come to the conclusion that Shiva, my rival, my changeling brother, could no longer be admitted into the forum of my mind; for reasons which were, I admit, ignoble. I was afraid he would discover what I was sure I could not conceal from him-the secrets of our birth. Shiva, for whom the world was things, for whom history could only be explained as the continuing struggle of oneself-against-the-crowd, would certainly insist on claiming his birthright; and, aghast at the very notion of my knock-kneed antagonist replacing me in the blue room of my childhood while I, perforce, walked morosely off the two-storey hillock to enter the northern slums; refusing to accept that the prophecy of Ramram Seth had been intended for Winkie's boy, that it was to Shiva that Prime Ministers had written, and for Shiva that fishermen pointed out to sea… placing, in short, a far higher value on my eleven-year-old sonship than on mere blood, I resolved that my destructive, violent alter ego should never again enter the increasingly fractious councils of the Midnight Children's Conference; that I would guard my secret-which had once been Mary's-with my very life.
   There were nights, at this time, when I avoided convening the Conference at all-not because of the unsatisfactory turn it had taken, but simply because I knew it would take time, and cool blood, to erect a barrier around my new knowledge which could deny it to the Children; eventually, I was confident, I would manage this… but I was afraid of Shiva. Most ferocious and powerful of the Children, he would penetrate where others could not go… At any rate, I avoided my fellow-Children; and then suddenly it was too late, because, having exiled Shiva, I found myself hurled into an exile from which I was incapable of contacting my more-than-five-hundred colleagues: I was flung across the Partition-created frontier into Pakistan.
   Late in September 1958, the mourning period for my uncle Hanif Aziz came to an end; and, miraculously, the dust-cloud which had enveloped us was settled by a merciful shower of rain. When we had bathed and put on newly-washed clothes and switched on the ceiling-fans, we emerged from bathrooms filled, briefly, with the illusory optimism of freshly-soaped cleanliness; to discover a dusty, unwashed Ahmed Sinai, whisky-bottle in his hand, his eyes rimmed with blood, swaying upstairs from his office in the manic grip of djinns. He had been wrestling, in his private world of abstraction, with the unthinkable realities which Mary's revelations had unleashed; and owing to some cockeyed functioning of the alcohol, had been seized by an indescribable rage which he directed, neither at Mary's departed back, not at the changeling in his midst, but at my mother-at, I should say, Amina Sinai. Perhaps because he knew he should beg her forgiveness, and would not, Ahmed ranted at her for hours within the shocked hearing of her family; I will not repeat the names he called her, nor the vile courses of action he recommended she should take with her life. But in the end it was Reverend Mother who intervened.
   'Once before, my daughter,' she said, ignoring Ahmed's continuing ravings, 'your father and I, whatsitsname, said there was no shame in leaving an inadequate husband. Now I say again: you have, whatsitsname, a man of unspeakable vileness. Go from him; go today, and take your children, whatsitsname, away from these oaths which he spews from his lips like an animal, whatsitsname, of the gutter. Take your children, I say, whatsitsname-both your children,' she said, clutching me to her bosom. Once Reverend Mother had legitimized me, there was no one to oppose her; it seems to me now, across the years, that even my cursing father was affected by her support of the eleven-year-old snotnosed child.
   Reverend Mother fixed everything; my mother was like putty-like potter's clay!-in her omnipotent hands. At that time, my grandmother (I must continue to call her that) still believed that she and Aadam Aziz would shortly be emigrating to Pakistan; so she instructed my aunt Emerald to take us all with her-Amina, the Monkey, myself, even my aunty Pia-and await her coming. 'Sisters must care for sisters, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother said, 'in times of trouble.' My aunt Emerald looked highly displeased; but both she and General Zulfikar acquiesced. And, since my father was in a lunatic temper which made us fear for our safety, and the Zulfikars had already booked themselves on a ship which was to sail that night, I left my lifelong home that very day, leaving Ahmed Sinai alone with Alice Pereira; because when my mother left her second husband, all the other servants walked out, too.
   In Pakistan, my second period of hurtling growth came to an end. And, in Pakistan, I discovered that somehow the existence of a frontier 'jammed' my thought-transmissions to the more-than-five-hundred; so that, exiled once more from my home, I was also exiled from the gift which was my truest birthright: the gift of the midnight children.

   We lay anchored off the Rann of Kutch on a heat-soaked afternoon. Heat buzzed in my bad left ear; but I chose to remain on deck, watching as small, vaguely ominous rowing boats and fishermen's dhows ran a ferry service between our ship and the Rann, transporting objects veiled in canvas back and forth, back and forth. Below decks, the adults were playing housie-housie; I had no idea where the Monkey was. It was the first time I had ever been on a real ship (occasional visits to American warships in Bombay harbour didn't count, being merely tourism; and there was always the embarrassment of being in the company of dozens of highly-pregnant ladies, who always came on these tour parties in the hope that they would enter labour and give birth to children who qualified, by virtue of their seaborne birth, for American citizenship). I stared through the heat-haze at the Rann. The Rann of Kutch… I'd always thought it a magical name, and half-feared-half-longed to visit the place, that chameleon area which was land for half the year and sea for the other half, and on which, it was said, the receding ocean would abandon all manner of fabulous debris, such as treasure-chests, white ghostly jellyfish, and even the occasional gasping, freak-legendary figure of a merman. Gazing for the first time upon this amphibian terrain, this bog of nightmare, I should have felt excited; but the heat and recent events were weighing me down; my upper lip was still childishly wet with nose-goo, but I felt oppressed by a feeling of having moved directly from an overlong and dribbling childhood into a premature (though still leaky) old age. My voice had deepened; I had been forced to start shaving, and my face was spotted with blood where the razor had sliced off the heads of pimples… The ship's purser passed me and said, 'Better get below, son. It's the hottest time just now.' I asked about the ferrying boats. 'Just supplies,' he said and moved away, leaving me to contemplate a future in which there was little to look forward to except the grudging hospitality of General Zulfikar, the self-satisfied preening of my aunt Emerald, who would no doubt enjoy showing off her worldly success and status to her unhappy sister and bereaved sister-in-law, and the muscle-headed cockiness of their son Zafar… 'Pakistan,' I said aloud, 'What a complete dump!' And we hadn't even arrived… I looked at the boats; they seemed to be swimming through a dizzying haze. The deck seemed to be swaying violently as well, although there was virtually no wind; and although I tried to grab the rails, the boards were too quick for me: they rushed up and hit me on the nose.
   That was how I came to Pakistan, with a mild attack of sunstroke to add to the emptiness of my hands and the knowledge of my birth; and what was the name of the boat? What two sister-ships still plied between Bombay and Karachi in those days before politics ended their journeys? Our boat was the S.S. Sabarmati; its sister, which passed us just before we reached the Karachi harbour, was the Sarasvati. We steamed into exile aboard the Commander's namesake-ship, proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence.

   We reached Rawalpindi by hot, dusty train. (The General and Emerald travelled in Air-Conditioned; they bought the rest of us ordinary first-class tickets.) But it was cool when we reached 'Pindi and I set foot, for the first time, in a northern city… I remember it as a low, anonymous town; army barracks, fruit-shops, a sports goods industry; tall military men in the streets; Jeeps; furniture carvers; polo. A town in which it was possible to be very, very cold. And in a new and expensive housing development, a vast house surrounded by a high wall which was topped by barbed wire and patrolled by sentries: General Zulfikar's home. There was a bath next to the double bed in which the General slept; there was a house catch-phrase: 'Let's get organized!'; the servants wore green military jerseys and berets; in the evenings the odours of bhang and charas floated up from their quarters. The furniture was expensive and surprisingly beautiful; Emerald could not be faulted on her taste. It was a dull, lifeless house, for all its military airs; even the goldfish in the tank set in the dining-room wall seemed to bubble listlessly; perhaps its most interesting inhabitant was not even human. You will permit me, for a moment, to describe the General's dog Bonzo. Excuse me: the General's old beagle bitch.

  This goitred creature of papery antiquity had been supremely indolent and useless all her life; but while I was still recovering from sunstroke she created the first furore of our stay-a sort of trailer for the 'revolution of the pepperpots'. General Zulfikar had taken her one day to a military training-camp, where he was to watch a team of mine-detectors at work in a specially-prepared minefield. (The General was anxious to mine the entire Indo-Pak border. 'Let's get organized!' he would exclaim. 'Let's give those Hindus something to worry! We'll blow their invaders into so many pieces, there'll be no damn thing left to reincarnate.' He was not, however, overly concerned about the frontiers of East Pakistan, being of the view that 'those damn blackies can look after themselves'.)… And now Bonzo slipped her leash, and somehow evading the frantically clutching hands of young jawans, waddled out into the minefield.
   Blind panic. Mine-detecting soldiers picking their way in frenzied slow-motion through the blasting zone. General Zulfikar and other Army brass diving for shelter behind their grandstand, awaiting the explosion… But there was none; and when the flower of the Pakistan Army peeped out from inside dustbins or behind benches, it saw Bonzo picking her way daintily through the field of the lethal seeds, nose to ground, Bonzo-the-insouciant, quite at her ease. General Zulfikar flung his peaked cap in the air. 'Damn marvellous!' he cried in the thin voice which squeezed between his nose and chin, 'The old lady can smell the mines!' Bonzo was drafted forthwith into the armed forces as a four-legged mine-detector with the courtesy rank of sergeant-major.
   I mention Bonzo's achievement because it gave the General a stick with which to beat us. We Sinais-and Pia Aziz-were helpless, non-productive members of the Zulfikar household, and the General did not wish us to forget it: 'Even a damn hundred-year-old beagle bitch can earn her damn living,' he was heard to mutter, 'but my house is full of people who can't get organized into one damn thing.' But before the end of October he would be grateful for (at least) my presence… and the transformation of the Monkey was not far away.
   We went to school with cousin Zafar, who seemed less anxious to marry my sister now that we were children of a broken home; but his worst deed came one weekend when we were taken to the General's mountain cottage in Nathia Gali, beyond Murree. I was in a state of high excitement (my illness had just been declared cured): mountains! The possibility of panthers! Cold, biting air!-so that I thought nothing of it when the General asked me if I'd mind sharing a bed with Zafar, and didn't even guess when they spread the rubber sheet over the mattress… I awoke in the small hours in a large rancid pool of lukewarm liquid and began to yell blue murder. The General appeared at our bedside and began to thrash the living daylights out of his son. 'You're a big man now! Damn it to hell! Still, and still you do it! Get yourself organized! Good for nothing! Who behaves in this damn way? Cowards, that's who! Damn me if I'll have a coward for a son…' The enuresis of my cousin Zafar continued, however, to be the shame of his family; despite thrashings, the liquid ran down his leg; and one day it happened when he was awake. But that was after certain movements had, with my assistance, been performed by pepperpots, proving to me that although the telepathic air-waves were jammed in this country, the modes of connection still seemed to function; active-literally as well as metaphorically, I helped change the fate of the Land of the Pure.

   The Brass Monkey and I were helpless observers, in those days, of my wilting mother. She, who had always been assiduous in the heat, had begun to wither in the northern cold. Deprived of two husbands, she was also deprived (in her own eyes) of meaning; and there was also a relationship to rebuild, between mother and son. She held me tightly one night and said, 'Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.' But there was a distance behind her gentleness, as though she were trying to persuade herself… a distance, too, in the Monkey's midnight whispers of, 'Hey, brother, why don't we go and pour water over Zafar-they'll only think he's wet his bed?'-and it was my sense of this gap which showed me that, despite their use of son and brother, their imaginations were working hard to assimilate Mary's confession; not knowing then that they would be unable to succeed in their re-imaginings of brother and son, I remained terrified of Shiva; and was accordingly driven even deeper into the illusory heart of my desire to prove myself worthy of their kinship. Despite Reverend Mother's recognition of me, I was never at my ease until, on a more-than-three-years-distant verandah, my father said, 'Come, son; come here and let me love you.' Perhaps that is why I behaved as I did on the night of October yth, 1958.
   … An eleven-year-old boy, Padma, knew very little about the internal affairs of Pakistan; but he could see, on that October day, that an unusual dinner-party was being planned. Saleem at eleven knew nothing about the Constitution of 1956 and its gradual erosion; but his eyes were keen enough to spot the Army security officers, the military police, who arrived that afternoon to lurk secretly behind every garden bush. Faction strife and the multiple incompetences of Mr Ghulam Mohammed were a mystery to him; but it was clear that his aunt Emerald was putting on her finest jewels. The farce of four-prime-ministers-in-two-years had never made him giggle; but he could sense, in the air of drama hanging over the General's house, that something like a final curtain was approaching. Ignorant of the emergence of the Republican party, he was nevertheless curious about the guest-list for the Zulfikar party; although he was in a country where names meant nothing-who was Chaudhuri Muhammad Ali? Or Suhrawardy? Or Chundrigar, or Noon?-the anonymity of the dinner-guests, which was carefully preserved by his uncle and aunt, was a puzzling thing. Even though he had once cut Pakistani headlines out of newspapers-furniture hurling slays deputye-pak speaker-he had no idea why, at six p.m., a long line of black limousines came through the sentried walls of-the Zulfikar Estate; why flags waved on their bonnets; why their occupants refused to smile; or why Emerald and Pia and my mother stood behind General Zulfikar with expressions on their faces which would have seemed more appropriate at a funeral than a social gathering. Who what was dying? Who why were the limousine arrivals?-I had no idea; but I was on my toes behind my mother, staring at the smoked-glass windows of the enigmatic cars.
   Car-doors opened; equerries, adjutants, leaped out of vehicles and opened rear doors, saluted stiffly; a small muscle began to tic in my aunt Emerald's cheek. And then, who descended from the flag-waving motors? What names should be put to the fabulous array of moustaches, swagger-sticks, gimlet-eyes, medals and shoulder-pips which emerged? Saleem knew neither names nor serial numbers; ranks, however, could be discerned. Gongs and pips, proudly worn on chests and shoulders, announced the arrival of very top brass indeed. And out of the last car came a tall man with an astonishingly round head, round as a tin globe although unmarked by lines of longitude and latitude; planet-headed, he was not labelled like the orb which the Monkey had once squashed; not made as england (although certainly Sandhurst-trained) he moved through saluting gongs-and-pips; arrived at my aunt Emerald; and added his own salute to the rest.
   'Mr Commander-in-Chief,' my aunt said, 'be welcome in our home.'
   'Emerald, Emerald,' came from the mouth set in the earth-shaped head-the mouth positioned immediately beneath a neat moustache, 'Why such formality, such takalluf?' Whereupon she embraced him with, 'Well then, Ayub, you're looking wonderful.'
   He was a General then, though Field-Marshalship was not far away… we followed him into the house; we watched him drink (water) and laugh (loudly); at dinner we watched him again?saw how he ate like a peasant, so that his moustache became stained with gravy… 'Listen, Em,' he said, 'Always such preparations when I come! But I'm only a simple soldier; dal and rice from your kitchens would be a feast for me.'
   'A soldier, sir,' my aunt replied, 'but simple-never! Not once!'
   Long trousers qualified me to sit at table, next to cousin Zafar, surrounded by gongs-and-pips; tender years, however, placed us both under an obligation to be silent. (General Zulfikar told' me in a military hiss, 'One peep out of you and you're off to the guardhouse. If you want to stay, stay mum. Got it?' Staying mum, Zafar and I were free to look and listen. But Zafar, unlike me, was not trying to prove himself worthy of his name…)
   What did eleven-year-olds hear at dinner? What did they understand by jocund military references to 'that Suhrawardy, who always opposed the Pakistan Idea'-or to Noon, 'who should have been called Sunset, what?' And through discussions of election-rigging and black-money, what undercurrent of danger permeated their skins, making the downy hairs on their arms stand on end? And when the Commander-in-Chief quoted the Quran, how much of its meaning was understood by eleven-year-old ears?
   'It is written,' said the round-headed man, and the gongs-and-pips fell silent, 'Aad and Thamoud we also destroyed. Satan had made their foul deeds seem fair to them, keen-sighted though they were.'

  It was as though a cue had been given; a wave of my aunt's hands dismissed the servants. She rose to go herself; my mother and Pia went with her. Zafar and I, too, rose from our seats; but he, he himself, called down the length of the sumptuous table: 'The little men should stay. It is their future, after all.' The little men, frightened but also proud, sat and stayed mum, following orders.
   Just men now. A change in the roundhead's face; something darker, something mottled and desperate has occupied it… 'Twelve months ago,' he says, 'I spoke to all of you. Give the politicians one year-is that not what I said?' Heads nod; murmurs of assent. 'Gentlemen, we have given them a year; the situation has become intolerable, and I am not prepared to tolerate it any longer!' Gongs-and-pips assume stern, statesmanlike expressions. Jaws are set, eyes gaze keenly into the future. 'Tonight, therefore,'-yes! I was there! A few yards from him!-General Ayub and I, myself and old Ayub Khan!-'I am assuming control of the State.'
   How do eleven-year-olds react to the announcement of a coup? Hearing the words, '… national finances in frightening disarray… corruption and impurity are everywhere…' do their jaws stiffen, too? Do their eyes focus on brighter tomorrows? Eleven-year-olds listen as a General cries, 'The Constitution is hereby abrogated! Central and Provincial legislatures are dissolved! Political parties are forthwith abolished!'-how do you think they feel?
   When General Ayub Khan said, 'Martial Law is now imposed,' both cousin Zafar and I understood that his voice-that voice filled with power and decision and the rich timbre of my aunt's finest cooking-was speaking a thing for which we knew only one word: treason. I'm proud to say I kept my head; but Zafar lost control of a more embarrassing organ. Moisture stained his trouser-fronts; the yellow moisture of fear trickled down his leg to stain Persian carpets; gongs-and-pips smelled something, and turned upon him with looks of infinite distaste; and then (worst of all) came laughter.
   General Zulfikar had just begun saying, 'If you permit, sir, I shall map out tonight's procedures,' when his son wet his pants. In cold fury my uncle hurled his son from the room; 'Pimp! Woman!' followed Zafar out of the dining-chamber, in his father's thin sharp voice; 'Coward! Homosexual! Hindu!' leaped from Punchinello-face to chase his son up the stairs… Zulnkar's eyes settled on me. There was a plea in them. Save the honour of the family. Redeem me from the incontinence of my son. 'You, boy!' my uncle said, 'You want to come up here and help me?'
   Of course, I nodded. Proving my manhood, my fitness for sonship, I assisted my uncle as he made the revolution. And in so doing, in earning his gratitude, in stilling the sniggers of the assembled gongs-and-pips, I created a new father for myself; General Zulfikar became the latest in the line of men who have been willing to call me 'sonny', or 'sonny Jim', or even simply 'my son'.
   How we made the revolution: General Zulfikar described troop movements; I moved pepperpots symbolically while he spoke. In the clutches of the active-metaphorical mode of connection, I shifted salt-cellars and bowls of chutney: This mustard-jar is Company A occupying Head Post Office; there are two pepperpots surrounding a serving-spoon, which means Company В has seized the airport. With the fate of the nation in my hands, I shifted condiments and cutlery, capturing empty biriani-dishes with water-glasses, stationing saltcellars, on guard, around water-jugs. And when General Zulfikar stopped talking, the march of the table-service also came to an end. Ayub Khan seemed to settle down in his chair; was the wink he gave me just my imagination?-at any rate, the Commander-in-Chief said, 'Very good, Zulfikar; good show.'
   In the movements performed by pepperpots etcetera, one table-ornament remained uncaptured: a cream-jug in solid silver, which, in our table-top coup, represented the Head of State, President Iskander Mirza; for three weeks, Mirza remained President.
   An eleven-year-old boy cannot judge whether a President is truly corrupt, even if gongs-and-pips say he is; it is not for eleven-year-olds to say whether Mirza's association with the feeble Republican Party should have disqualified him from high office under the new regime. Saleem Sinai made no political judgments; but when, inevitably at midnight, on November 1st, my uncle shook me awake and whispered, 'Come on, sonny, it's time you got a taste of the real thing!', I leaped out of bed smartly; I dressed and went out into the night, proudly aware that my uncle had preferred my company to that of his own son.
   Midnight. Rawalpindi speeding past us at seventy m.p.h. Motorcycles in front of us beside us behind us. 'Where are we going Zulfy-uncle?' Wait and see. Black smoked-windowed limousine pausing at darkened house. Sentries guard the door with crossed rifles; which part, to let us through. I am marching at my uncle's side, in step, through half-lit corridors; until we burst into a dark room with a shaft of moonlight spotlighting a four-poster bed. A mosquito net hangs over the bed like a shroud.
   There is a man waking up, startled, what the hell is going… But General Zulfikar has a long-barrelled revolver; the tip of the gun is forced mmff between the man's parted teeth. 'Shut up,' my uncle says, superfluously. 'Come with us.' Naked overweight man stumbling from his bed. His eyes, asking: Are you going to shoot me? Sweat rolls down ample belly, catching moonlight, dribbling on to his soo-soo; but it is bitterly cold; he is not perspiring from the heat. He looks like a white Laughing Buddha; but not laughing. Shivering. My uncle's pistol is extracted from his mouth. 'Turn. Quick march!'… And gun-barrel pushed between the cheeks of an overfed rump. The man cries, 'For God's sake be careful; that thing has the safety off!' Jawans giggle as naked flesh emerges into moonlight, is pushed into black limousine… That night, I sat with a naked man as my uncle drove him to a military airfield; I stood and watched as the waiting aircraft taxied, accelerated, flew. What began, active-metaphorically, with pepperpots, ended then; not only did I overthrow a government-I also consigned a president to exile.
   Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots… I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I-even I-had dreamed.

   'Really truly?' Padma asks. 'You were truly there?' Really truly. 'They say that Ayub was a good man before he became bad,' Padma says; it is a question. But Saleem, at eleven, made no such judgments. The movement of pepperpots does not necessitate moral choices. What Saleem was concerned with: not public upheaval, but personal rehabilitation. You see the paradox-my most crucial foray into history up to that moment was inspired by the most parochial of motives. Anyway, it was not 'my' country-or not then. Not my country, although I stayed in it-as refugee, not citizen; entered on my mother's Indian passport, I would have come in for a good deal of suspicion, maybe even deported or arrested as a spy, had it not been for my tender years and the power of my guardian with the Punch-like features-for four long years.
   Four years of nothing.
   Except growing into a teenager. Except watching my mother as she fell apart. Except observing the Monkey, who was a crucial year younger than me, fall under the insidious spell of that God-ridden country; the Monkey, once so rebellious and wild, adopting expressions of demureness and submission which must, at first, have seemed false even to her; the Monkey, learning how to cook and keep house, how to buy spices in the market; the Monkey, making the final break with the legacy of her grandfather, by learning prayers in Arabic and saying them at all prescribed times; the Monkey, revealing the streak of puritan fanaticism which she had hinted at when she asked for a nun's outfit; she, who spurned all offers of worldly love, was seduced by the love of that God who had been named after a carved idol in a pagan shrine built around a giant meteorite: Al-Lah, in the Qa'aba, the shrine of the great Black Stone.
   But nothing else.
   Four years away from the midnight children; four years without Warden Road and Breach Candy and Scandal Point and the lures of One Yard of Chocolates; away from the Cathedral School and the equestrian statue of Sivaji and melon-sellers at the Gateway of India: away from Divali and Ganesh Chaturthi and Coconut Day; four years of separation from a father who sat alone in a house he would not sell; alone, except for Professor Schaapsteker, who stayed in his apartment and shunned the company of men.
   Can nothing really happen for four years? Obviously, not quite. My cousin Zafar, who had never been forgiven by his father for wetting his pants in the presence of history, was given to understand that he would be joining the Army as soon as he was of age. 'I want to see you prove you're not a woman,' his father told him.
   And Bonzo died; General Zulfikar shed manly tears.
   And Mary's confession faded until, because nobody spoke of it, it came to feel like a bad dream; to everyone except'me.
   And (without any assistance from me) relations between India and Pakistan grew worse; entirely without my help, India conquered Goa-'the Portuguese pimple on the face of Mother India'; I sat on the sidelines and played no part in the acquisition of large-scale U.S. aid for Pakistan, nor was I to blame for Sino-India border skirmishes in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh; the Indian census of 1961 revealed a literacy level of 23.7 per cent, but I was not entered in its records. The untouchable problem remained acute; I did nothing to alleviate it; and in the elections of 1962, the All-India Congress won 361 out of 494 seats in the Lok Sabha, and over 61 per cent of all State Assembly seats. Not even in this could my unseen hand be said to have moved; except, perhaps, metaphorically: the status quo was preserved in India; in my life, nothing changed either.
   Then, on September 1st, 1962, we celebrated the Monkey's fourteenth birthday. By this time (and despite my uncle's continued fondness for me) we were well-established as social inferiors, the hapless poor relations of the great Zulfikars; so the party was a skimpy affair. The Monkey, however, gave every appearance of enjoying herself. 'It's my duty, brother,' she told me. I could hardly believe my ears… but perhaps my sister had an intuition of her fate; perhaps she knew the transformation which lay in store for her; why should I assume that I alone have had the powers of secret knowledge?
   Perhaps, then, she guessed that when the hired musicians began to play (shehnai and vina were present; sarangi and sarod had their turns; tabla and sitar performed their virtuosic cross-examinations) , Emerald Zulfikar would descend on her with callous elegance, demanding, 'Come on, Jamila, don't sit there like a melon, sing us a song like any good girl would!'
   And that with this sentence my emerald-icy aunt would have begun, quite unwittingly, my sister's transformation from monkey into singer; because although she protested with the sullen clumsiness of fourteen-year-olds, she was hauled unceremoniously on to the musicians' dais by my organizing aunt; and although she looked as if she wished the floor would open up beneath her feet, she clasped her hands together; seeing no escape, the Monkey began to sing.
   I have not, I think, been good at describing emotions-believing my audience to be capable of joining in; of imagining for themselves what I have been unable to re-imagine, so that my story becomes yours as well… but when my sister began to sing, I was certainly assailed by an emotion of such force that I was unable to understand it until, much later, it was explained to me by the oldest whore in the world. Because, with her first note, the Brass Monkey sloughed off her nick-name; she, who had talked to birds (just as, long ago in a mountain valley, her great-grandfather used to do), must have learned from songbirds the arts of song. With one good ear and one bad ear, I listened to her faultless voice, which at fourteen was the voice of a grown woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God; a voice which was afterwards compared to that of Muhammed's muezzin Bilal, issuing from the lips of a somewhat scrawny girl.
   What I did not understand must wait to be told; let me record here that my sister earned her name at her fourteenth birthday party, and was known after that as Jamila Singer; and that I knew, as I listened to 'My Red Dupatta Of Muslin' and 'Shahbaz Qalandar', that the process which had begun during my first exile was nearing completion in my second; that, from now on, Jamila was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to her talent for ever.
   Jamila sang-I, humbly, bowed my head. But before she could enter fully into her kingdom, something else had to happen: I had to be properly finished off.

Drainage and the desert

   What-chews-on-bones refuses to pause… it's only a matter of time. This is what keeps me going: I hold on to Padma. Padma is what matters-Padma-muscles, Padma's hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus… who, embarrassed, commands: 'Enough. Start. Start now.'
   Yes, it must start with the cable. Telepathy set me apart; telecommunications dragged me down…
   Amina Sinai was cutting verrucas out of her feet when the telegram arrived… once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: my mother, right ankle on left knee, was scooping corn-tissue out of the sole of her foot with a sharp-ended nail file on September 9th, 1962. And the time? The time matters, too. Well, then: in the afternoon. No, it's important to be more… At the stroke of three o'clock, which, even in the north, is the hottest time of day, a bearer brought her an envelope on a silver dish. A few seconds later, far away in New Delhi, Defence Minister Krishna Menon (acting on his own initiative, during Nehru's absence at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference) took the momentous decision to use force if necessary against the Chinese army on the Himalayan frontier. The Chinese must be ejected from the Thag La ridge,' Mr Menon said while my mother tore open a telegram. 'No weakness will be shown.' But this decision was a mere trifle when set beside the implications of my mother's cable; because while the eviction operation, code-named leghorn, was doomed to fail, and eventually to turn India into that most macabre of theatres, the Theatre of War, the cable was to plunge me secretly but surely towards the crisis which would end with my final eviction from my own inner world. While the Indian XXXIII Corps were acting on instructions passed from Menon to General Thapar, I, too, had been placed in great danger; as if unseen forces had decided that I had also overstepped the boundaries of what I was permitted to do or know or be; as though history had decided to put me firmly in my place. I was left entirely without a say in the matter; my mother read the telegram, burst into tears and said, 'Children, we're going home!'… after which, as I began by saying in another context, it was only a matter of time.
   What the telegram said: please come quick sinaisahib suffered HEARTBOOT GRAVELY ILL SALAAMS ALICE PEREIRA.
   'Of course, go at once, my darling,' my aunt Emerald told her sister, 'But what, my God, can be this heartboot?'
   It is possible, even probable, that I am only the first historian to write the story of my undeniably exceptional life-and-times. Those who follow in my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work, this source-book, this Hadith or Purana or Grundrisse, for guidance and inspiration. I say to these future exegetes: when you come to examine the events which followed on from the 'heartboot cable', remember that at the very eye of the hurricane which was unleashed upon me-the sword, to switch metaphors, with which the coup de grace was applied-there lay a single unifying force. I refer to telecommunications.
   Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my undoing; generously, however, I shall accuse nobody of conspiracy; although it would be easy to believe that the controllers of communication had resolved to regain their monopoly of the nation's air-waves…. I must return (Padma is frowning) to the banal chain of cause-and-effect: we arrived at Santa Cruz airport, by Dakota, on September 16th; but to explain the telegram, I must go further back in time.
   If Alice Pereira had once sinned, by stealing Joseph D'Costa from her sister Mary, she had in these latter years gone a long way towards attaining redemption; because for four years she had been Ahmed Sinai's only human companion. Isolated on the dusty hillock which had once been Methwold's Estate, she had borne enormous demands on her accommodating good nature. He would make her sit with him until midnight while he drank djinns and ranted about the injustices of his life; he remembered, after years of forgetfulness, his old dream of translating and re-ordering the Quran, and blamed his family for emasculating him so that he didn't have the energy to begin such a task; in addition, because she was there, his anger often directed itself at her, taking the form of long tirades filled with gutter-oaths and the useless curses he had devised in the days of his deepest abstraction. She attempted to be understanding: he was a lonely man; his once-infallible relationship with the telephone had been destroyed by the economic vagaries of the times; his touch in financial matters had begun to desert him… he fell prey, too, to strange fears. When the Chinese road in the Aksai Chin region was discovered, he became convinced that the yellow hordes would be arriving at Methwold's Estate in a matter of days; and it was Alice who comforted him with ice-cold Coca-Cola, saying, 'No good worrying. Those Chinkies are too little to beat our jawans. Better you drink your Coke; nothing is going to change.'
   In the end he wore her out; she stayed with him, finally, only because she demanded and received large pay increases, and sent much of the money to Goa, for the support of her sister Mary; but on September 1st, she, too, succumbed to the blandishments of the telephone.
   By then, she spent as much time on the instrument as her employer, particularly when the Narlikar women called up. The formidable Narlikars were, at that time, besieging my father, telephoning him twice a day, coaxing and persuading him to sell, reminding him that his position was hopeless, flapping around his head like vultures around a burning godown… on September 1st, like a long-ago vulture, they flung down an arm which slapped him in the face, because they bribed Alice Pereira away from him. Unable to stand him any more, she cried, 'Answer your own telephone! I'm off.'
   That night, Ahmed Sinai's heart began to bulge. Overfull of hate resentment self-pity grief, it became swollen like a balloon, it beat too hard, skipped beats, and finally felled him like an ox; at the Breach Candy Hospital the doctors discovered that my father's heart had actually changed shape-a new swelling had pushed lumpily out of the lower left ventricle. It had, to use Alice's word, 'booted'.
   Alice found him the next day, when, by chance, she returned to collect a forgotten umbrella; like a good secretary, she enlisted the power of telecommunications, telephoning an ambulance and tele-gramming us. Owing to censorship of the mails between India and Pakistan, the 'heartboot cable' took a full week to reach Amina Sinai.'Back-to-Bom!' I yelled happily, alarming airport coolies. 'Back-to-Born!' I cheered, despite everything, until the newly-sober Jamila said, 'Oh, Saleem, honestly, shoo!' Alice Pereira met us at the airport (a telegram had alerted her); and then we were in a real Bombay black-and-yellow taxi, and I was wallowing in the sounds of hot-channa-hot hawkers, the throng of camels bicycles and people people people, thinking how Mumbadevi's city made Rawalpindi look like a village, rediscovering especially the colours, the forgotten vividness of gulmohr and bougainvillaea, the livid green of the waters of the Mahalaxmi Temple 'tank', the stark black-and-white of the traffic policemen's sun umbrellas and the blue-and-yellowness of their uniforms; but most of all the blue blue blue of the sea… only the grey of my father's stricken face distracted me from the rainbow riot of the city, and made me sober up.
   Alice Pereira left us at the hospital and went off to work for the Narlikar women; and now a remarkable thing happened. My mother Amina Sinai, jerked out of lethargy and depression and guilt-fogs and verruca-pain by the sight of my father, seemed miraculously to regain her youth; with all her old gifts of assiduity restored, she set about the rehabilitation of Ahmed, driven by an unstoppable will. She brought him home to the first-floor bedroom in which she had nursed him through the freeze; she sat with him day and night, pouring her strength into his body. And her love had its reward, because not only did Ahmed Sinai make a recovery so complete as to astound Breach Candy's European doctors, but also an altogether more wonderful change occurred, which was that, as Ahmed came to himself under Amina's care, he returned not to the self which had practised curses and wrestled djinns, but to the self he might always have been, filled with contrition and forgiveness and laughter and generosity and the finest miracle of all, which was love. Ahmed Sinai had, at long last, fallen in love with my mother.
   And I was the sacrificial lamb with which they anointed their love.

  They had even begun to sleep together again; and although my sister-with a flash of her old Monkey-self-said, 'In the same bed, Allah, Mi-Mi, how dirty!', I was happy for them; and even, briefly, happier for myself, because I was back in the land of the Midnight Children's Conference. While newspaper headlines marched towards war, I renewed my acquaintance with my miraculous fellows, not knowing how many endings were in store for me.
   On October 9th-indian army poised for all-out effort-I felt able to convene the Conference (time and my own efforts had erected the necessary barrier around Mary's secret). Back into my head they came; it was a happy night, a night for burying old disagreements, for making our own all-out effort at reunion. We repeated, over and over again, our joy at being back together; ignoring the deeper truth-that we were like all families, that family reunions are more delightful in prospect than in reality, and that the time comes when all families must go their separate ways. On October 15th-unprovoked attack on iNDIA-the questionsI'd been dreading and trying not to provoke began: Why is Shiva not here? And: Why have you closed off part of your mind?
   On October 20th, the Indian forces were defeated-thrashed-by the Chinese at Thag La ridge. An official Peking statement announced: In self-defence, Chinese frontier guards were compelled to strike back resolutely. But when, that same night, the children of midnight launched a concerted assault on me, I had no defence. They attacked on a broad front and from every direction, accusing me of secrecy, prevarication, high-handedness, egotism; my mind, no longer a parliament chamber, became the battleground on which they annihilated me. No longer 'big brother Saleem', I listened helplessly while they tore me apart; because, despite all their sound-and-fury, I could not unblock what I had sealed away; I could not bring myself to tell them Mary's secret. Even Parvati-the-witch, for so long my fondest supporter, lost patience with me at last. 'O, Saleem,' she said, 'God knows what that Pakistan has done to you; but you are badly changed.'
   Once, long ago, the death of Mian Abdullah had destroyed another Conference, which had been held together purely by the strength of his will; now, as the midnight children lost faith in me, they also lost their belief in the thing I had made for them. Between October 20th and November 2Oth, I continued to convene-to attempt to convene-our nightly sessions; but they fled from me, not one by one, but in tens and twenties; each night, less of them were willing to tune in; each week, over a hundred of them retreated into private life. In the high Himalayas, Gurkhas and Rajputs fled in disarray from the Chinese army; and in the upper reaches of my mind, another army was also destroyed by things-bickerings, prejudices, boredom, selfishness-which I had believed too small, too petty to have touched them.
   (But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued to believe-I continue now-that what-we-had-in-common would finally have outweighed what-drove-us-apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate responsibility for the end of the Children's Conference; because what destroyed all possibility of renewal was the love of Ahmed and Amina Sinai.)
   … And Shiva? Shiva, whom I cold-bloodedly denied his birthright? Never once, in that last month, did I send my thoughts in search of him; but his existence, somewhere in the world, nagged away at the corners of my mind. Shiva-the-destroyer, Shiva Knoc-knees… he became, for me, first a stabbing twinge of guilt; then an obsession; and finally, as the memory of his actuality grew dull, he became a sort of principle; he came to represent, in my mind, all the vengefulness and violence and simultaneous-love-and-hate-of-Things in the world; so that even now, when I hear of drowned bodies floating like balloons on the Hooghly and exploding when nudged by passing boats; or trains set on fire, or politicians killed, or riots in Orissa or Punjab, it seems to me that the hand of Shiva lies heavily over all these things, dooming us to flounder endlessly amid murder rape greed war-that Shiva, in short, has made us who we are. (He, too, was born on the stroke of midnight; he, like me, was connected to history. The modes of connection-if I'm right in thinking they applied to me-enabled him, too, to affect the passage of the days.)
   I'm talking as if I never saw him again; which isn't true. But that, of course, must get into the queue like everything else; I'm not strong enough to tell that tale just now.

   The disease of optimism, in those days, once again attained epidemic proportions; I, meanwhile, was afflicted by an inflammation of the sinuses. Curiously triggered off by the defeat of Thag La ridge, public optimism about the war grew as fat (and as dangerous) as an overfilled balloon; my long-suffering nasal passages, however, which had been overfilled all their days, finally gave up the struggle against congestion. While parliamentarians poured out speeches about 'Chinese aggression' and 'the blood of our martyred jawans', my eyes began to stream with tears; while the nation puffed itself up, convincing itself that the annihilation of the little yellow men was at hand, my sinuses, too, puffed up and distorted a face which was already so startling that Ayub Khan himself had stared at it in open amazement. In the clutches of the optimism disease, students burned Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-Lai in effigy; with optimism-fever on their brows, mobs attacked Chinese shoemakers, curio dealers and restaurateurs. Burning with optimism, the Government even interned Indian citizens of Chinese descent-now 'enemy aliens'-in camps in Rajasthan. Birla Industries donated a miniature rifle range to the nation; schoolgirls began to go on military parade. But I, Saleem, felt as if I was about to die of asphyxiation. The air, thickened by optimism, refused to enter my lungs.
   Ahmed and Amina Sinai were amongst the worst victims of the renewed disease of optimism; having already contracted it through the medium of their new-born love, they entered into the public enthusiasm with a will. When Morarji Desai, the urine-drinking Finance Minister, launched his 'Ornaments for Armaments' appeal, my mother handed over gold bangles and emerald ear-rings; when Morarji floated an issue of defence bonds, Ahmed Sinai bought them in bushels. War, it seemed, had brought a new dawn to India; in the Times of India, a cartoon captioned 'War with China' showed Nehru looking at graphs labelled 'Emotional Integration', 'Industrial Peace' and 'People's Faith in Government' and crying, 'We never had it so good!' Adrift in the sea of optimism, we-the nation, my parents, I-floated blindly towards the reefs.
   As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences. Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form-or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes. Hence our vulnerability to omens… when the Indian flag was first raised, for instance, a rainbow appeared above that Delhi field, a rainbow of saffron and green; and we felt blessed. Born amidst correspondence, I have found it continuing to hound me… while Indians headed blindly towards a military debacle, I, too, was nearing (and entirely without knowing it) a catastrophe of my own.
   Times of India cartoons spoke of 'Emotional Integration'; in Buckingham Villa, last remnant of Methwold's Estate, emotions had never been so integrated. Ahmed and Amina spent their days like just-courting youngsters; and while the Peking People's Daily complained, 'The Nehru Government has finally shed its cloak of non-alignment', neither my sister nor I were complaining, because for the first time in years we did not have to pretend we were non-aligned in the war between our parents; what war had done for India, the cessation of hostilities had achieved on our two-storey hillock. Ahmed Sinai had even given up his nightly battle with the djinns.
   By November 1st-indians attack under cover of artillery-my nasal passages were in a state of acute crisis. Although my mother subjected me to daily torture by Vick's Inhaler and steaming bowls of Vick's ointment dissolved in water, which, blanket over head, I was obliged to try and inhale, my sinuses refused to respond to treatment. This was the day on which my father held out his arms to me and said, 'Come, son-come here and let me love you.' In a frenzy of happiness (maybe the optimism disease had got to me, after all) I allowed myself to be smothered in his squashy belly; but when he let me go, nose-goo had stained his bush-shirt. I think that's what finally doomed me; because that afternoon, my mother went on to the attack. Pretending to me that she was telephoning a friend, she made a certain telephone call. While Indians attacked under cover of artillery, Amina Sinai planned my downfall, protected by a lie.

   Before I describe my entry into the desert of my later years, however, I must admit the possibility that I have grievously wronged my parents. Never once, to my knowledge, never once in all the time since Mary Pereira's revelations, did they set out to look for the true son of their blood; and I have, at several points in this narrative, ascribed this failure to a certain lack of imagination-I have said, more or less, that I remained their son because they could not imagine me out of the role. And there are worse interpretations possible, too-such as their reluctance to accept into their bosom an-urchin who had spent eleven years in the gutter; but I wish to suggest a nobler motive: maybe, despite everything, despite cucumber-nose stainface chinlessness horn-temples bandy-legs finger-loss monk's-tonsure and my (admittedly unknown to them) bad left ear, despite even the midnight baby-swap of Mary Pereira… maybe, I say, in spite of all these provocations, my parents loved me. I withdrew from them into my secret world; fearing their hatred, I did not admit the possibility that their love was stronger than ugliness, stronger even then blood. It is certainly likely that what a telephone call arranged, what finally took place on November 21st, 1962, was done for the highest of reasons; that my parents ruined me for love.
   The day of November 20th was a terrible day; the night was a terrible night… six days earlier, on Nehru's seventy-third birthday, the great confrontation with the Chinese forces had begun; the Indian army-jawans swing into action!-had attacked the Chinese at Walong. News of the disaster of Walong, and the rout of General Kaul and four battalions, reached Nehru on Saturday 18th; on Monday 20th, it flooded through radio and press and arrived at Methwold's Estate. ultimate panic in new delhi! indian forces in tatters! That day-the last day of my old life-I sat huddled with my sister and parents around our Telefunken radiogram, while telecommunications struck the fear of God and China into our hearts. And my father now said a fateful thing: 'Wife,' he intoned gravely, while Jamila and I shook with fear, 'Begum Sahiba, this country is finished. Bankrupt. Funtoosh.' The evening paper proclaimed the end of the optimism disease: public morale drains away. And after that end, there were others to come; other things would also drain away.
   I went to bed with my head full of Chinese faces guns tanks… but at midnight, my head was empty and quiet, because the midnight Conference had drained away as well; the only one of the magic children who was willing to talk to me was Parvati-the-witch, and we, dejected utterly by what Nussie-the-duck would have called 'the end of the world', were unable to do more than simply commune in silence.
   And other, more mundane drainages: a crack appeared in the mighty Bhakra Nangal Hydro-Electric Dam, and the great reservoir behind it flooded through the fissure… and the Narlikar women's reclamation consortium, impervious to optimism or defeat or anything except the lure of wealth, continued to draw land out of the depths of the seas… but the final evacuation, the one which truly gives this episode its title, took place the next morning, just when I had relaxed and thought that something, after all, might turn out all right… because in the morning we heard the improbably joyous news that the Chinese had suddenly, without needing to, stopped advancing; having gained control of the Himalayan heights, they were apparently content; ceasefire! the newspapers screamed, and my mother almost fainted in relief. (There was talk that General Kaul had been taken prisoner; the President of India, Dr Radhakrishan, commented, 'Unfortunately, this report is completely untrue.')
   Despite streaming eyes and puffed-up sinuses, I was happy; despite even the end of the Children's Conference, I was basking in the new glow of happiness which permeated Buckingham Villa; so when my mother suggested, 'Let's go and celebrate! A picnic, children, you'd like that?' I naturally agreed with alacrity. It was the morning of November 21st; we helped make sandwiches and parathas; we stopped at a fizzy-drinks shop and loaded ice in a tin tub and Cokes in a crate into the boot of our Rover; parents in the front, children in the back, we set off. Jamila Singer sang for us as we drove.
   Through inflamed sinuses, I asked: 'Where are we going? Juhu? Elephanta? Marve? Where?' And my mother, smiling awkwardly: 'Surprise; wait and see.' Through streets filled with relieved, rejoicing crowds we drove… 'This is the wrong way,' I exclaimed; 'This isn't the way to a beach?' My parents both spoke at once, reassuringly, brightly: 'Just one stop first, and then we're off; promise.'
   Telegrams recalled me; radiograms frightened me; but it was a telephone which booked the date time place of my undoing… and my parents lied to me.
   … We halted in front of an unfamiliar building in Carnac Road. Exterior: crumbling. All its windows: blind. 'You coming with me, son?' Ahmed Sinai got out of the car; I, happy to be accompanying my father on his business, walked jauntily beside him. A brass plate on the doorway: Ear Nose Throat Clinic. And I, suddenly alarmed: 'What's this, Abba? Why have we come…' And my father's hand, tightening on my shoulder-and then a man in a white coat-and nurses-and 'Ah yes Mr. Sinai so this is young Saleem-right on time-fine, fine'; while I, 'Abba, no-what about the picnic-'; but doctors are steering me along now, my father is dropping back, the man in the coat calls to him, 'Shan't be long-damn good news about the war, no?' And the nurse, 'Please accompany me for dressing and anaesthesia.'
   Tricked! Tricked, Padma! I told you: once, picnics tricked me; and then there was a hospital and a room with a hard bed and bright hanging lamps and me crying, 'No no no,' and the nurse, 'Don't be stupid now, you're almost a grown man, lie down,' and I, remembering how nasal passages had started everything in my head, how nasal fluid had been sniffed upupup into somewhere-that-nosefluid-shouldn't-go, how .the connection had been made which released my voices, was kicking yelling so that they had to hold me down, 'Honestly,' the nurse said, 'such a baby, I never saw.'
   And so what began in a washing-chest ended on an operating table, because I was held down hand-and-foot and a man saying 'You won't feel a thing, easier than having your tonsils out, get those sinuses fixed in no time, complete clear-out,' and me 'No please no,' but the voice continued, 'I'll put this mask on you now, just count to ten.'
   Count. The numbers marching one two three.
   Hiss of released gas. The numbers crushing me four five six.
   Faces swimming in fog. And still the tumultuous numbers, I was crying, I think, the numbers pounding seven eight nine.
   Ten.
   'Good God, the boy's still conscious. Extraordinary. We'd better try another-can you hear me? Saleem, isn't it? Good chap, just give me another ten!' Can't catch me. Multitudes have teemed inside my head. The master of the numbers, me. Here they go again 'leven twelve.
   But they'll never let up until… thirteen fourteen fifteen… O God O God the fog dizzy and falling back back back, sixteen, beyond war and pepperpots, back back, seventeen eighteen nineteen.
   Twen

   There was a washing-chest and a boy who sniffed too hard. His mother undressed and revealed a Black Mango. Voices came, which were not the voices of Archangels. A hand, deafening the left ear. And what grew best in the heat: fantasy, irrationality, lust. There was a clocktower refuge, and cheatery-in-class. And love in Bombay caused a bicycle-accident; horn-temples entered forcep-hollows, and five hundred and eighty-one children visited my head. Midnight's children: who may have been the embodiment of the hope of freedom, who may also have been freaks-who-ought-to-be-finished-off. Parvati-the-witch, most loyal of all, and Shiva, who became a principle of life. There was a question of purpose, and the debate between ideas and things. There were knees and nose and nose and knees.
   Quarrels, began, and the adult world infiltrated the children's; there was selfishness and snobbishness and hate. And the impossibility of a third principle; the fear of coming-to-nothing-after-all began to grow. And what nobody said: that the purpose of the five hundred and eighty-one lay in their destruction; that they had come, in order to come to nothing. Prophecies were ignored when they spoke to this effect.
   And revelations, and the closing of a mind; and exile, and four-years-after return; suspicions growing, dissension breeding, departures in twenties and tens. And, at the end, just one voice left; but optimism lingered-what-we-had-in-common retained the possibility of overpowering what-forced-us-apart.
   Until:

   Silence outside me. A dark room (blinds down). Can't see anything (nothing there to see).
   Silence inside me. A connection broken (for ever). Can't hear anything (nothing there to hear).
   Silence, like a desert. And a clear, free nose (nasal passages full of air). Air, like a vandal, invading my private places.
   Drained. I have been drained. The parahamsa, grounded.
   (For good.)

  O, spell it out, spell it out: the operation whose ostensible purpose was the draining of my inflamed sinuses and the once-and-for-all clearing of my nasal passages had the effect of breaking whatever connection had been made in a washing-chest; of depriving me of nose-given telepathy; of banishing me from the possibility of midnight children.
   Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles. Sinai contains Ibn Sina, master magician, Sufi adept; and also Sin the moon, the ancient god of Hadhramaut, with his own mode of connection, his powers of action-at-a-distance upon the tides of the world. But Sin is also the letter S, as sinuous as a snake; serpents lie coiled within the name. And there is also the accident of transliteration-Sinai, when in Roman script, though not in Nastaliq, is also the name of the place-of-revelation, of put-off-thy-shoes, of commandments and golden calves; but when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert-of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end.
   In Arabia-Arabia Deserta-at the time of the prophet Muhammad, other prophets also preached: Maslama of the tribe of the Banu Hanifa in the Yamama, the very heart of Arabia; and Hanzala ibn Safwan; and Khalid ibn Sinan. Maslama's God was ar-Rahman, 'the Merciful'; today Muslims pray to Allah, ar-Rahman. Khalid ibn Sinan was sent to the tribe of 'Abs; for a time, he was followed, but then he was lost. Prophets are not always false simply because they are overtaken, and swallowed up, by history. Men of worth have always roamed the desert.

   'Wife,' Ahmed Sinai said, 'this country is finished.' After ceasefire and drainage, these words returned to haunt him; and Amina began to persuade him to emigrate to Pakistan, where her surviving sisters already were, and to which her mother would go after her father's death. 'A fresh start,' she suggested, 'Janum, it would be lovely. What is left for us on this God-forsaken hill?'
   So in the end Buckingham Villa was delivered into the clutches of the Narlikar women, after all; and over fifteen years late, my family moved to Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. Ahmed Sinai left very little behind; there are ways of transmitting money with the help of multi-national companies, and my father knew those ways. And I, although sad to leave the city of my birth, was not unhappy about moving away from the city in which Shiva lurked somewhere like a carefully-concealed land-mine.
   We left Bombay, finally, in February 1963; and on the day of our departure I took an old tin globe down to the garden and buried it amongst the cacti. Inside it: a Prime Minister's-letter, and a jumbo-sized front-page baby-snap, captioned 'Midnight's Child'… They may not be holy relics-I do not presume to compare the trivial memorabilia of my life with the Hazratbal hair of the Prophet, or the body of St Francis Xavier in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus-but they are all that has survived of my past: a squashed tin globe, a mildewed letter, a photograph. Nothing else, not even a silver spittoon. Apart from a Monkey-crushed planet, the only records are sealed in the closed books of heaven, Sidjeen and Illiyun, the Books of Evil and Good; at any rate, that's the story.
   … Only when we were aboard S.S. Sabarmati, and anchored off the Rann of Kutch, did I remember old Schaapsteker; and wondered, suddenly, if anyone had told him we were going. I didn't dare to ask, for fear that the answer might be no; so as I thought of the demolition crew getting to work, and pictured the machines of destruction smashing into my father's office and my own blue room, pulling down the servants' spiral iron staircase and the kitchen in which Mary Pereira had stirred her fears into chutneys and pickles, massacring the verandah where my mother had sat with the child in her belly like a stone, I ako had an image of a mighty, swinging ball crashing into the domain of Sharpsticker sahib, and of the old crazy man himself, pale wasted flick-tongued, being exposed there on top of a crumbling house, amid falling towers and red-tiled roof, old Schaapsteker shrivelling ageing dying in the sunlight which he hadn't seen for so many years. But perhaps I'm dramatizing; I may have got all this from an old film called Lost Horizon, in which beautiful women shrivelled and died when they departed from Shangri-La.
   For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake. We arrived in Karachi on February 9th-and within months, my sister Jamila had been launched on the career which would earn her the names of 'Pakistan's Angel' and 'Bulbul-of-the-Faith'; we had left Bombay, but we gained reflected glory. And one more thing: although I had been drained-although no voices spoke in my head, and never would again-there was one compensation: namely that, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the astonishing delights of possessing a sense of smell.

Jamila Singer

   It turned out to be a sense so acute as to be capable of distinguishing the glutinous reek of hypocrisy behind the welcoming smile with which my spinster aunt Alia greeted us at the Karachi docks. Irremediably embittered by my father's years-ago defection into the arms of her sister, my headmistress aunt had acquired the heavy-footed corpulence of undimmed jealousy; the thick dark hairs of her resentment sprouted through most of the pores of her skin. And perhaps she succeeded in deceiving my parents and Jamila with her spreading arms, her waddling run towards us, her cry of 'Ahmed bhai, at last! But better late than never!', her spider-like-and inevitably accepted-offers of hospitality; but I, who had spent much of my babyhood in the bitter mittens and soured pom-pom hats of her envy, who had been unknowingly infected with failure by the innocent-looking baby-things into which she had knitted her hatred, and who, moreover, could clearly remember what it was like to be possessed by revenge-lust, I, Saleem-the-drained, could smell the vengeful odours leaking out of her glands. I was, however, powerless to protest; we were swept into the Datsun of her vengeance and driven away down Bunder Road to her house at Guru Mandir-like flies, only more foolish, because we celebrated our captivity.
   … But what a sense of smell it was! Most of us are conditioned, from the cradle onwards, into recognizing the narrowest possible spectrum of fragrances; I, however, had been incapable of smelling a thing all my life, and was accordingly ignorant of all olfactory taboos. As a result, I had a tendency not to feign innocence when someone broke wind-which landed me in a certain amount of parental trouble; more important, however, was my nasal freedom to inhale a very great deal more than the scents of purely physical origin with which the rest of the human race has chosen to be content. So, from the earliest days of my Pakistani adolescence, I began to learn the secret aromas of the world, the heady but quick-fading perfume of new love, and also the deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate. (It was not long after my arrival in the 'Land of the Pure' that I discovered within myself the ultimate impurity of sister-love; and the slow burning fires of my aunt filled my nostrils from the start.) A nose will give you knowledge, but not power-over-events; my invasion of Pakistan, armed (if that's the right word) only with a new manifestation of my nasal inheritance, gave me the powers of sniffing-out-the-truth, of smelling-what-was-in-the-air, of following trails; but not the only power an invader needs-the strength to conquer my foes.
   I won't deny it: I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay. Set between the desert and bleakly saline creeks whose shores were littered with stunted mangroves, my new city seemed to possess an ugliness which eclipsed even my own; having grown too fast-its population had quadrupled since 1947-it had acquired the misshapen lumpiness of a gigantic dwarf. On my sixteenth birthday, I was given a Lambretta motor-scooter; riding the city streets on my windowless vehicle, I breathed in the fatalistic hopelessness of the slum dwellers and the smug defensiveness of the rich; I was sucked along the smell-trails of dispossession and also fanaticism, lured down a long underworld corridor at whose end was the door to Tai Bibi, the oldest whore in the world… but I'm running away with myself. At the heart of my Karachi was Alia Aziz's house, a large old building on Clayton Road (she must have wandered in it for years like a ghost with nobody to haunt), a place of shadows and yellowed paint, across which there fell, every afternoon, the long accusing shadow of the minaret of the local mosque. Even when, years later in the magicians' ghetto, I lived in another mosque's shade, a shade which was, at least for a time, a protective, unmenacing penumbra, I never lost my Karachi-born view of mosque-shadows, in which, it seemed to me, I could sniff the narrow, clutching, accusative odour of my aunt. Who bided her time; but whose vengeance, when it came, was crushing.
   It was, in those days, a city of mirages; hewn from the desert, it had not wholly succeeded in destroying the desert's power. Oases shone in the tarmac of Elphinstone Street, caravanserais were glimpsed shimmering amongst the hovels around the black bridge, the Kala Pul. In the rainless city (whose only common factor with the city of my birth was that it, too, had started life as a fishing village), the hidden desert retained its ancient powers of apparition-mongering, with the result that Karachiites had only the slipperiest of grasps on reality, and were therefore willing to turn to their leaders for advice on what was real and what was not. Beset by illusionary sand-dunes and the ghosts of ancient kings, and also by the knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant 'submission', my new fellow-citizens exuded the flat boiled odours of acquiescence, which were depressing to a nose which had smelt-at the very last, and however briefly-the highly-spiced nonconformity of Bombay.
   Soon after our arrival-and, perhaps, oppressed by the mosque-shadowed air of the Clayton Road house-my father resolved to build us a new home. He bought a. plot of land in the smartest of the 'societies', the new housing development zones; and on my sixteenth birthday, Saleem acquired more than a Lambretta-I learned the occult powers of umbilical cords.
   What, pickled in brine, sat for sixteen years in my father's almirah, awaiting just such a day? What, floating like a water-snake in an old pickle-jar, accompanied us on our sea-journey and ended up buried in hard, barren Karachi-earth? What had once nourished life in a womb-what now infused earth with miraculous life, and gave birth to a split-level, American-style modern bungalow?… Eschewing these cryptic questions, I explain that, on my sixteenth birthday, my family (including Alia aunty) assembled on our plot of Korangi Road earth; watched by the eyes of a team of labourers and the beard of a mullah, Ahmed handed Saleem a pickaxe; I drove it inaugurally into the ground. 'A new beginning,' Amina said, 'Inshallah, we shall all be new people now.' Spurred on by her noble and unattainable desire, a workman rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a pickle-jar was produced. Brine was discarded on the thirsty ground; and what-was-left-inside received the mullah's blessings. After which, an umbilical cord-was it mine? Or Shiva's?-was implanted in the earth; and at once, a house began to grow. There were sweetmeats and soft drinks; the mullah, displaying remarkable hunger, consumed thirty-nine laddoos; and Ahmed Sinai did not once complain of the expense. The spirit of the buried cord inspired the workmen; but although the foundations were dug very deep, they would not prevent the house from falling down before we ever lived in it.
   What I surmised about umbilical cords: although they possessed the power of growing houses, some were evidently better at the job than others. The city of Karachi proved my point; clearly constructed on top of entirely unsuitable cords, it was full of deformed houses, the stunted hunchback children of deficient lifelines, houses growing mysteriously blind, with no visible windows, houses which looked like radios or air-conditioners or jail-cells, crazy top-heavy edifices which fell over with monotonous regularity, like drunks; a wild proliferation of mad houses, whose inadequacies as living quarters were exceeded only by their quite exceptional ugliness. The city obscured the desert; but either the cords, or the infertility of the soil, made it grow into something grotesque.

   Capable of smelling sadness and joy, of sniffing out intelligence and stupidity with my eyes closed, I arrived at Karachi, and adolescence-understanding, of course, that the subcontinent's new nations and I had all left childhood behind; that growing pains and strange awkward alterations of voice were in store for us all. Drainage censored my inner life; my sense of connection remained undrained.
   Saleem invaded Pakistan armed only with a hypersensitive nose; but, worst of all, he invaded from the wrong direction! All successful conquests of that part of the world have begun in the north; all conquerors have come by land. Sailing ignorantly against the winds of history, I reached Karachi from the south-east, and by sea. What followed should not, I suppose, have surprised me.
   With hindsight, the advantages of sweeping down from the north are self-evident. From the north came the Umayyad generals, Hajjaj bin Yusuf and Muhammad bin Qasim; also the Ismailis. (Honeymoon Lodge, where it is said Aly Khan sojourned with Rita Hayworth, overlooked our plot of umbilicized earth; rumour has it that the film-star created much scandal by wandering in the grounds dressed in a series of fabulous, gauzy, Hollywood negligees.) O ineluctable superiority of northernness! From which direction did Mahmud of Ghazni descend upon these Indus plains, bringing with him a language boasting no fewer than three forms of the letter S? The inescapable answer: se, sin and swad were northern intruders. And Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, who overthrew the Ghaznavids and established the Delhi Caliphate? Sam Ghuri's son, too, moved southwards on his progress.
   And Tughlaq, and the Mughal Emperors… but I've made my point. It remains only to add that ideas, as well as armies, swept south south south from the northern heights: the legend of Sikandar But-Shikan, the Iconoclast of Kashmir, who at the end of the fourteenth century destroyed every Hindu temple in the Valley (establishing a precedent for my grandfather), travelled down from the hills to the river-plains; and five hundred years later the mujahideen movement of Syed Ahmad Barilwi followed the well-trodden trail. Barilwi's ideas: self-denial, hatred-of-Hindus, holy war… philosophies as well as kings (to cut this short) came from the opposite direction to me.
   Saleem's parents said, 'We must all become new people'; in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah's (like India's first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country whose population of deities rivalled the numbers of its people, so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body was to show a marked preference for the impure. Mopla-like, I was doomed to be a misfit; but, in the end, purity found me out, and even I, Saleem, was cleansed of my misdeeds.
   After my sixteenth birthday, I studied history at my aunt Alia's college; but not even learning could make me feel a part of this country devoid of midnight children, in which my fellow-students took out processions to demand a stricter, more Islamic society-proving that they had contrived to become the antitheses of students everywhere else on earth, by demanding more-rules-not-less. My parents, however, were determined to put down roots; although Ayub Khan and Bhutto were forging an alliance with China (which had so recently been our enemy), Ahmed and Amina would listen to no criticisms of their new home; and my father bought a towel factory.
   There was a new brilliance about my parents in those days; Amina had lost her guilt-fog, her verrucas seemed not to be playing up any more; while Ahmed, although still whitened, had felt the freeze of his loins thawing under the heat of his newfound love for his wife. On some mornings, Amina had toothmarks on her neck; she giggled uncontrollably at times, like a schoolgirl. 'You two, honestly,' her sister Alia said, 'Like honeymooners or I don't know what.' But I could smell what was hidden behind Alia's teeth; what stayed inside when the friendly words came out… Ahmed Sinai named his towels after his wife: Amina Brand.
   'Who are these multi-multis? These Dawoods, Saigols, Haroons?' he cried gaily, dismissing the richest families in the land. 'Who are Valikas or Zulfikars? I could eat them ten at a time. You wait!', he promised, 'In two years the whole world will be wiping itself on an Amina Brand cloth. The finest terry-cloth! The most modern machines! We shall make the whole world clean and dry; Dawoods and Zulfikars will beg to know my secret; and I will say, yes, the towels are high-quality; but the secret is not in the manufacturing; it was love that conquered all.' (I discerned, in my father's speech, the lingering effects of the optimism virus.)
   Did Amina Brand conquer the world in the name of cleanliness (which is next to…)? Did Valikas and Saigols come to ask Ahmed Sinai, 'God, we're stumped, yaar, how'd you do it?' Did high-quality terry-cloth, in patterns devised by Ahmed himself-a little gaudy, but never mind, they were born of love-wipe away the moist-ness of Pakistanis and export-markets alike? Did Russians Englishmen Americans wrap themselves in my mother's immortalized name?… The story of Amina Brand must wait awhile; because the career of Jamila Singer is about to take off; the mosque-shadowed house on Clayton Road has been visited by Uncle Puffs.