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By Root 20116 0

… and why he looked at me strangely in the morning? Yes, you see, the scraps begin to fit together! Padma, does it not become clear? Indira is India and India is Indira … but might she not have read her own father’s letter to a midnight child, in which her own, sloganized centrality was denied; in which the role of mirror-of-the-nation was bestowed upon me? You see? You see? … And there is more, there is even clearer proof, because here is another scrap of the Times of India, in which the Widow’s own news agency Samachar quotes her when she speaks of her “determination to combat the deep and widespread conspiracy which has been growing.” I tell you: she did not mean the Janata Morcha! No, the Emergency had a black part as well as a white, and here is the secret which has lain concealed for too long beneath the mask of those stifled days: the truest, deepest motive behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight. (Whose Conference had, of course, been disbanded years before; but the mere possibility of our reunification was enough to trigger off the red alert.)

Astrologers—I have no doubt—sounded the alarums; in a black folder labelled M.C.C., names were gathered from extant records; but there was more to it than that. There were also betrayals and confessions; there were knees and a nose—a nose, and also knees.

Scraps, shreds, fragments: it seems to me that, immediately before I awoke with the scent of danger in my nostrils, I had dreamed that I was sleeping. I awoke, in this most unnerving of dreams, to find a stranger in my shack: a poetic-looking fellow with lank hair that wormed over his ears (but who was very thin on top). Yes: during my last sleep before what-has-to-be-described, I was visited by the shade of Nadir Khan, who was staring perplexedly at a silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, asking absurdly, “Did you steal this?—Because otherwise, you must be—is it possible?—my Mumtaz’s little boy?” And when I confirmed, “Yes, none other, I am he—,” the dream-specter of Nadir-Qasim issued a warning: “Hide. There is little time. Hide while you can.”

Nadir, who had hidden under my grandfather’s carpet, came to advise me to do likewise; but too late, too late, because now I came properly awake, and smelled the scent of danger blaring like trumpets in my nose … afraid without knowing why, I got to my feet; and is it my imagination or did Aadam Sinai open blue eyes to stare gravely into mine? Were my son’s eyes also filled with alarm? Had flap-ears heard what a nose had sniffed out? Did father and son commune wordlessly in that instant before it all began? I must leave the question-marks hanging, unanswered; but what is certain is that Parvati, my Laylah Sinai, awoke also and asked, “What’s up, mister? What’s got your goat?”—And I, without fully knowing the reason: “Hide, stay in here and don’t come out.”

Then I went outside.

It must have been morning, although the gloom of the endless midnight hung over the ghetto like a fog … through the murky light of the Emergency, I saw children playing seven-tiles, and Picture Singh, with his umbrella folded under his left armpit, urinating against the walls of the Friday Mosque; a tiny bald illusionist was practicing driving knives through the neck of his ten-year-old apprentice, and already a conjurer had found an audience, and was persuading large woollen balls to drop from the armpits of strangers; while in another corner of the ghetto, Chand Sahib the musician was practicing his trumpet-playing, placing the ancient mouthpiece of a battered horn against his neck and playing it simply by exercising his throat-muscles … there, over there, were the three contortionist triplets, balancing surahis of water on their heads as they returned to their huts from the colony’s single stand-pipe … in short, everything seemed to be in order. I began to chide myself for my dreams and nasal alarums; but then it started.

The vans and bulldozers came first, rumbling along the main road; they stopped opposite the ghetto of the magicians. A loudspeaker began to blare: