Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

At six o'clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.

After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever, and he didn't relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother's preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door-Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries. After nights in which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language-'What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse-what difference?' And then tears, and Amina, 'Oh, janum-don't torture me!' which, in turn, provoked, 'Torture my foot! You think it's torture for a man to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!'-my father limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while Amina began to notice how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left suddenly, flouncing down our drive without any notice; and you must judge whether she chose to be blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but she did nothing about it, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act of recognition was to give the girls a collective name. 'Those Anglos,' she said to Mary, revealing a touch of snobbery, 'with their funny names, Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I don't know what. What should I care about them? Cheap type females. I call them all his Coca-Cola girls-that's what they all sound like.'

While Ahmed pinched bottoms, Amina became long-suffering; but he might have been glad if she had appeared to care.

Mary Pereira said, 'They aren't so funny names, Madam; beg your pardon, but they are good Christian words.' And Amina remembered Ahmed's cousin Zohra making fun of dark skin-and, falling over herself to apologize, tumbled into Zohra's mistake: 'Oh, notion, Mary, how could you think I was making fun of you?'

Horn-templed, cucumber-nosed, I lay in my crib and listened; and everything that happened, happened because of me… One day in January 1948, at five in the afternoon, my father was visited by Dr Narlikar. There were embraces as usual, and slaps on the back. 'A little chess?' my father asked, ritually, because these visits were getting to be a habit. They would play chess in the old Indian way, the game of shatranj, and, freed by the simplicities of the chess-board from the convolutions of his life, Ahmed would daydream for an hour about the re-shaping of the Quran; and then it would be six o'clock, cocktail hour, time for the djinns… but this evening Narlikar said, 'No.' And Ahmed, 'No? What's this no? Come, sit, play, gossip…' Narlikar, interrupting: 'Tonight, brother Sinai, there is something I must show you.' They are in a 1946 Rover now, Narlikar working the crankshaft and jumping in; they are driving north along Warden Road, past Mahalaxmi Temple on the left and Willingdon Club golf-course on the right, leaving the race-track behind them, cruising along Hornby Vellard beside the sea wall; Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium is in sight, with its giant cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, Bano Devi the Invincible Woman and Dara Singh, mightiest of all… there are channa-vendors and dog-walkers promenading by the sea. 'Stop,' Narlikar commands, and they get out. They stand facing the sea; sea-breeze cools their faces; and out there, at the end of a narrow cement path in the midst of the waves, is the island on which stands the tomb of Haji Ali the mystic. Pilgrims are strolling between Vellard and tomb.

'There,' Narlikar points, 'What do you see?' And Ahmed, mystified, 'Nothing. The tomb. People. What's this about, old chap?' And Narlikar, 'None of that. There!' And now Ahmed sees that Narlikar's pointing finger is aimed at the cement path… 'The promenade?' he asks, 'What's that to you? In some minutes the tide will come and cover it up; everybody knows…' Narlikar, his skin glowing like a beacon, becomes philosophical. 'Just so, brother Ahmed; just so. Land and sea; sea and land; the eternal struggle, not so?' Ahmed, puzzled, remains silent. 'Once there were seven islands,' Narlikar reminds Mm, 'Worli, Mahim, Salsette, Matunga, Colaba, Mazagaon, Bombay. The British joined them up. Sea, brother Ahmed, became land. Land arose, and did not sink beneath the tides!' Ahmed is anxious for his whisky; his lip begins to jut while pilgrims scurry off the narrowing path. 'The point,' he demands. And Narlikar, dazzling with effulgence: 'The point, Ahmed bhai, is this!'

It comes out of his pocket: a little plaster-of-paris model two inches high: the tetrapod! Like a three-dimensional Mercedes-Benz sign, three legs standing on his palm, a fourth rearing lingam-fashion into the evening air, it transfixes my father. 'What is it?' he asks; and now Narlikar tells him: 'This is the baby that will make us richer than Hyderabad, bhai! The little gimmick that will make you, you and me, the masters of that! He points outwards to where sea is rushing over deserted cement pathway… 'The land beneath the sea, my friend! We must manufacture these by the thousand-by tens of thousands! We must tender for reclamation contracts; a fortune is waiting; don't miss it, brother, this is the chance of a lifetime!'

Why did my father agree to dream a gynaecologist's entrepreneurial dream? Why, little by little, did the vision of full-sized concrete tetrapods marching over sea walk, four-legged conquerors triumphing over the sea, capture him as surely as it had the gleaming doctor? Why, in the following years, did Ahmed dedicate himself to the fantasy of every island-dweller-the myth of conquering the waves? Perhaps because he was afraid of missing yet another turning; perhaps for the fellowship of games of shatranj; or maybe it was Narlikar's plausibility-'Your capital and my contacts, Ahmed bhai, what problem can there be? Every great man in this city has a son brought into the world by me; no doors will close. You manufacture; I will get the contract! Fifty-fifty; fair is fair!' But, in my view, there is a simpler explanation. My father, deprived of wifely attention, supplanted by bis son, blurred by whisky and djinn, was trying to restore his position in the world; and the dream of tetrapods offered him the chance. Whole-heartedly, he threw himself into the great folly; letters were written, doors knocked upon, black money changed hands; all of which served to make Ahmed Sinai a name known in the corridors of the Sachivalaya-in the passageways of the State Secretariat they got the whiff of a Muslim who was throwing his rupees around like water. And Ahmed Sinai, drinking himself to sleep, was unaware of the danger he was in.

Our lives, at this period, were shaped by correspondence. The Prime Minister wrote to me when I was just seven days old-before I could even wipe my own nose I was receiving fan letters from Times of India readers; and one morning in January Ahmed Sinai, too, received a letter he would never forget.

Red eyes at breakfast were followed by the shaven chin of the working day; footsteps down the stairs; alarmed giggles of Coca-Cola girl. The squeak of a chair drawn up to a desk topped with green leathercloth. Metallic noise of a metal paper-cutter being lifted, colliding momentarily with telephone. The brief rasp of metal slicing envelope; and one minute later, Ahmed was running back up the stairs, yelling for my mother, shouting:

'Amina! Come here, wife! The bastards have shoved my balls in an ice-bucket!'