Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Our family, however, stayed away from the death. My father refused to go and pay his respects, and would never refer to his late friend by name, calling him simply: 'that traitor'.

Two days later, when the news had been in the papers, Dr Narlikar suddenly acquired an enormous family of female relations. Having been a bachelor and misogynist all his life, he was engulfed, in death, by a sea of giant, noisy, omnicompetent women, who came crawling out from strange corners of the city, from milking jobs at Amul Dairies and from the box-offices of cinemas, from street-side soda-fountains and unhappy marriages; in a year of processions the Narlikar women formed their own parade, an enormous stream of outsize womanhood flowing up our two-storey hillock to fill Dr Narlikar's apartment so full that from the road below you could see their elbows sticking out of the windows and their behinds overflowing on to the verandah. For a week nobody got any sleep because the wailing of the Narlikar women filled the air; but beneath their howls the women were proving as competent as they looked. They took over the running of the Nursing Home; they investigated all of Narlikar's business deals; and they cut my father out of the tetrapod deal just as coolly as you please. After all those years my father was left with nothing but a hole in his pocket, while the women took Narlikar's body to Benares to have it cremated, and the Estate servants whispered to me that they had heard how the Doctor's ashes were sprinkled on the waters of Holy Ganga at Manikarnika-ghat at dusk, and they did not sink, but floated on the surface of the water like tiny glowing firebugs, and were washed out to sea where their strange luminosity must have frightened the captains of ships.

As for Ahmed Sinai: I swear that it was after Narlikar's death and the arrival of the women that he began, literally, to fade… gradually his skin paled, his hair lost its colour, until within a few months he had become entirely white except for the darkness of his eyes. (Mary Pereira told Amina: 'That man is cold in the blood; so now his skin has made ice, white ice like a fridge.') I should say, in all honesty, that although he pretended to be worried by his transformation into a white man, and went to see doctors and so forth, he was secretly rather pleased when they failed to explain the problem or prescribe a cure, because he had long envied Europeans their pigmentation. One day, when it was permissible to make jokes again (a decent interval had been allowed to elapse after Dr Narlikar's death), he told Lila Sabarmati at the cocktail hour: 'All the best people are white under the skin; I have merely given up pretending.' His neighbours, all of whom were darker than he, laughed politely and felt curiously ashamed.

Circumstantial evidence indicates that the shock of Narlikar's death was responsible for giving me a snow-white father to set beside my ebony mother; but (although I don't know how much you're prepared to swallow) I shall risk giving an alternative explanation, a theory developed in the abstract privacy of my clocktower… because during my frequent psychic travels, I discovered something rather odd: during the first nine years after Independence, a similar pigmentation disorder (whose first recorded victim may well have been the Rani of Cooch Naheen) afflicted large numbers of the nation's business community. All over India, I stumbled across good Indian businessmen, their fortunes thriving thanks to the first Five Year Plan, which had concentrated on building up commerce… businessmen who had become or were becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destinies had drained the colour from their cheeks… in which case, perhaps my father was a late victim of a widespread, though generally unremarked phenomenon. The businessmen of India were turning white.

That's enough to chew on for one day. But Evelyn Lilith Burns is coming; the Pioneer Cafe is getting painfully close; and-more vitally-midnight's other children, including my alter ego Shiva, he of the deadly knees, are pressing extremely hard. Soon the cracks will be wide enough for them to escape…

By the way: some time around the end of 1956, in all probability, the singer and cuckold Wee Willie Winkie also met his death.

During Ramzan, the month of fasting, we went to the movies as often as we could. After being shaken awake at five a.m. by my mother's assiduous hand; after pre-dawn breakfasts of melon and sugared lime-water, and especially on Sunday mornings, the Brass Monkey and I took it in turns (or sometimes called out in unison) to remind Amina: 'The ten-thirty-in-the-morning show! It's Metro Cub Club day, Amma, pleeeese!' Then the drive in the Rover to the cinema where we would taste neither Coca-Cola nor potato crisps, neither Kwality ice-cream nor samosas in greasy paper; but at least there was air-conditioning, and Cub Club badges pinned to our clothes, and competitions, and birthday-announcements made by a compere with an inadequate moustache; and finally, the film, after the trailers with their introductory titles, 'Next Attraction' and 'Coming Soon', and the cartoon ('In A Moment, The Big Film; But First… !'): Quentin Durward, perhaps, or Scaramouche. 'Swashbuckling!' we'd say to one another afterwards, playing movie critic; and, 'A rumbustious, bawdy romp!'-although we were ignorant of swashbuckles and bawdiness. There was not much praying in our family (except on Eid-ul-Fitr, when my father took me to the Friday mosque to celebrate the holiday by tying a handkerchief around my head and pressing my forehead to the ground)… but we were always willing to fast, because we liked the cinema.

Evie Burns and I agreed: the world's greatest movie star was Robert Taylor. I also liked Jay Silverheels as Tonto; but his kemo-sabay, Clayton Moore, was too fat for the Lone Ranger, in my view.

Evelyn Lilith Burns arrived on New Year's Day, 1957, to take up residence with her widower father in an apartment in one of the two squat, ugly concrete blocks which had grown up, almost without pur noticing them, on the lower reaches of our hillock, and which were oddly segregated: Americans and other foreigners lived (like Evie) in Noor Ville; arriviste Indian success-stories ended up in Laxmi Vilas. From the heights of Methwold's Estate, we looked down on them all, on white and brown alike; but nobody ever looked down on Evie Burns-except once. Only once did anyone get on top of her.

Before I climbed into my first pair of long pants, I fell in love with Evie; but love was a curious, chain-reactive thing that year. To save time, I shall place all of us in the same row at the Metro cinema; Robert Taylor is mirrored in our eyes as we sit in flickering trances-and also in symbolic sequence: Saleem Sinai is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Evie Burns who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Sonny

Ibrahim who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with the Brass Monkey who is sitting next to the aisle and feeling starving hungry… I loved Evie for perhaps six months of my life; two years later, she was back in America, knifing an old woman and being sent to reform school.

A brief expression of my gratitude is in order at this point: if Evie had not come to live amongst us, my story might never have progressed beyond tourism-in-a-clocktower and cheating in class… and then there would have been no climax in a widows' hostel, no clear proof of my meaning, no coda in a fuming factory over which there presides the winking, saffron-and-green dancing figure of the neon goddess Mumbadevi. But Evie Burns (was she snake or ladder? The answer's obvious: both) did come, complete with the silver bicycle which enabled me not only to discover the midnight children, but also to ensure the partition of the state of Bombay.