Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

These were the people amongst whom I spent my childhood: Mr Homi Catrack, film magnate and racehorse-owner, with his idiot daughter Toxy who had to be locked up with her nurse, Bi-Appah, the most fearsome woman I ever knew; also the Ibrahims in Sans Souci, old man Ibrahim Ibrahim with his goatee and sisal, his sons Ismail and Ishaq, and IsmaiPs tiny flustery hapless wife Nussie, whom we always called Nussie-the-duck on account of her waddling gait, and in whose womb my friend Sonny was growing, even now, getting closer and closer to his misadventure with a pair of gynaecological forceps… Escorial Villa was divided into flats. On the ground floor lived the Dubashes, he a physicist who would become a leading light at the Trombay nuclear research base, she a cipher beneath whose blankness a true religious fanaticism lay concealed-but I'll let it lie, mentioning only that they were the parents of Cyrus (who would not be conceived for a few months yet), my first mentor, who played girls' parts in school plays and was known as Cyrus-the-great. Above them was my father's friend Dr Narlikar, who had bought a flat here too… he was as black as my mother; had the ability of glowing brightly whenever he became excited or aroused; hated children, even though he brought us into the world; and would unleash upon the city, when he died, that tribe of women who could do anything and in whose path no obstacle could stand. And, finally, on the top floor, were Commander Sabarmati and Lila-Sabarmati who was one of the highest flyers in the Navy, and his wife with her expensive tastes; he hadn't been able to believe his luck in getting her a home so cheaply. They had two sons, aged eighteen months and four months, who would grow up to be slow and boisterous and to be nicknamed Eyeslice and Hairoil; and they didn't know (how could they?) that I would destroy their lives… Selected by William Methwold, these people who would form the centre of my world moved into the Estate and tolerated the curious whims of the Englishman-because the price, after all, was right.
… There are thirty days to go to the transfer of power and Lila Sabarmati is on the telephone, 'How can you stand it, Nussie? In every room here there are talking budgies, and in the almirahs I find moth-eaten dresses and used brassieres!'… And Nussie is telling Amina, 'Goldfish, Allah, I can't stand the creatures, but Methwold sahib comes himself to feed… and there are half-empty pots of Bovril he says I can't throw… it's mad, Amina sister, what are we doing like this?'… And old man Ibrahim is refusing to switch on the ceiling fan in his bedroom, muttering, 'That machine will fall-it will slice my head off in the night-how long can something so heavy stick on a ceiling?'… and Homi Catrack who is something of an ascetic is obliged to lie on a large soft mattress, he is suffering from backache and sleeplessness and the dark rings of inbreeding around his eyes are being circled by the whorls of insomnia, and his bearer tells him, 'No wonder the foreign sahibs have all gone away, sahib, they must by dying to get some sleep.' But they are all sticking it out; and there are advantages as well as problems. Listen to Lila Sabarmati ('That one-too beautiful to be good,' my mother said)… 'A pianola, Amina sister! And it works! All day I'm sitting sitting, playing God knows what-all! 'Pale Hands I Loved Beside The Shalimar'… such fun, too much, you just push the pedals!'… And Ahmed Sinai finds a cocktail cabinet in Buckingham Villa (which was Methwold's own house before it was ours); he is discovering the delights of fine Scotch whisky and cries, 'So what? Mr Methwold is a little eccentric, that's all-can we not humour him? With our ancient civilization, can we not be as civilized as he?'… and he drains his glass at one go. Advantages and disadvantages: 'All these dogs to look after, Nussie sister,' Lila Sabarmati complains. 'I hate dogs, completely. And my little choochie cat, cho chweet she is I swear, terrified absolutely!'… And Dr Narlikar, glowing with pique, 'Above my bed! Pictures of children, Sinai brother! I am telling you: fat! Pink! Three! Is that fair?'… But now there are twenty days to go, things are settling down, the sharp edges of things are getting blurred, so they have all failed to notice what is happening: the Estate, Methwold's Estate, is changing them. Every evening at six they are out in their gardens, celebrating the cocktail hour, and when William Methwold comes to call they slip effortlessly into their imitation Oxford drawls; and they are learning, about ceiling fans and gas cookers and the correct diet for budgerigars, and Methwold, supervising their transformation, is mumbling under his breath. Listen carefully: what's he saying? Yes, that's it. 'Sabkuch ticktock hai,' mumbles William Methwold. All is well.

When the Bombay edition of the Times of India, searching for a catchy human-interest angle to the forthcoming Independence celebrations, announced that it would award a prize to any Bombay mother who could arrange to give birth to a child at the precise instant of the birth of the new nation, Amina Sinai, who had just awoken from a mysterious dream of flypaper, became glued to newsprint. Newsprint was thrust beneath Ahmed Sinai's nose; and Amina's finger, jabbing triumphantly at the page, punctuated the utter certainty of her voice.
'See, janum?' Amina announced. 'That's going to be me.'
There rose, before their eyes, a vision of bold headlines declaring 'A Charming Pose of Baby Sinai-the Child of this Glorious Hour!'-a vision of A-1 top-quality front-page jumbo-sized baby-snaps; but Ahmed began to argue, 'Think of the odds against it, Begum,' until she set her mouth into a clamp of obstinacy and reiterated, 'But me no buts; it's me all right; I just know it for sure. Don't ask me how.'
And although Ahmed repeated his wife's prophecy to William Methwold, as a cocktail-hour joke, Amina remained unshaken, even when Methwold laughed, 'Woman's intuition-splendid thing, Mrs S.! But really, you can scarcely expect us to…' Even under the pressure of the peeved gaze of her neighbour Nussie-the-duck, who was also pregnant, and had also read the Times of India, Amina stuck to her guns, because Ramram's prediction had sunk deep into her heart.
To tell the truth, as Amina's pregnancy progressed, she had found the words of the fortune-teller pressing more and more heavily down upon her. shoulders, her head, her swelling balloon, so that as she became trapped in a web of worries about giving birth to a child with two heads she somehow escaped the subtle magic of Methwold's Estate, remaining uninfected by cocktail-hours, budgerigars, pianolas and English accents… At first, then, there was something equivocal about her certainty that she would win the Time's prize, because she had convinced herself that if this part of the fortune-teller's prognostications were fulfilled, it proved that the rest would be just as accurate, whatever their meaning might be. So it was not in tones of unadulterated pride and anticipation that my mother said, 'Never mind intuition, Mr Methwold. This is guaranteed fact.'
To herself she added: 'And this, too: I'm going to have a son. But he'll need plenty of looking after, or else.'
It seems to me that, running deep in the veins of my mother, perhaps deeper than she knew, the supernatural conceits of Naseem Aziz had begun to influence her thoughts and behaviour-those conceits which persuaded Reverend Mother that aeroplanes were inventions of the devil, and that cameras could steal your soul, and that ghosts were as obvious a part of reality as Paradise, and that it was nothing less than a sin to place certain sanctified ears between one's thumb and forefinger, were now whispering in her daughter's darkling head. 'Even if we're sitting in the middle of all this English garbage,' my mother was beginning to think, 'this is still India, and people like Ramram Seth know what they know.' In this way the scepticism of her beloved father was replaced by the credulity of my grandmother; and, at the same time, the adventurous spark which Amina had inherited from Doctor Aziz was being snuffed out by another, and equally heavy, weight.
By the time the rains came at the end of June, the foetus was fully formed inside her womb. Knees and nose were present; and as many heads as would grow were already in position. What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book-perhaps an encyclopaedia-even a whole language… which is to say that the lump in the middle of my mother grew so large, and became so heavy, that while Warden Road at the foot of our two-storey hillock became flooded with dirty yellow rainwater and stranded buses began to rust and children swam in the liquid road and newspapers sank soggily beneath the surface, Amina found herself in a circular first-floor tower room, scarcely able to move beneath the weight of her leaden balloon.
Endless rain. Water seeping in under windows in which stained-glass tulips danced along leaded panes. Towels, jammed against window-frames, soaked up water until they became heavy, saturated, useless. The sea: grey and ponderous and stretching out to meet the rainclouds at a narrowed horizon. Rain drumming against my mother's ears, adding to the confusion of fortune-teller and maternal credulity and the dislocating presence of strangers' possessions, making her imagine all manner of strange things. Trapped beneath her growing child, Amina pictured herself as a convicted murderer in Mughal times, when death by crushing beneath a boulder had been a common punishment… and in the years to come, whenever she looked back at that time which was the end of the time before she became a mother, that time in which the ticktock of countdown calendars was rushing everyone towards August 15th, she would say: 'I don't know about any of that. To me, it was like time had come to a complete stop. The baby in my stomach stopped the clocks. I'm sure of that. Don't laugh: you remember the clocktower at the end of the hill? I'm telling you, after that monsoon it never worked again.'
… And Musa, my father's old servant, who had accompanied the couple to Bombay, went off to tell the other servants, in the kitchens of the red-tiled palaces, in the servants' quarters at the backs of Versailles and Escorial and Sans Souci: 'It's going to be a real ten-rupee baby; yes, sir! A whopper of a ten-chip pomfret, wait and see!' The servants were pleased; because a birth is a fine thing and a good big baby is best of all…
… And Amina whose belly had stopped the clocks sat immobilized in a room in a tower and told her husband, 'Put your hand there and feel him… there, did you feel?… such a big strong boy; our little piece-of-the-moon.'
Not until the rains ended, and Amina became so heavy that two manservants had to make a chair with their hands to lift her, did Wee Willie Winkie return to sing in the circus-ring between the four houses; and only then did Amina realize that she had not one, but two serious rivals (two that she knew of) for the Times of India's prize, and that, prophecy or no prophecy, it was going to be a vey close-run finish.