Read Midnights Children for Free Online Page B

for a living; something hot and vinegary has steamed her up tonight. Thick of waist, somewhat hairy of forearm, she flounces, gesticulates, exits. Poor Padma. Things are always getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told her, when she was only small, that she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is “The One Who Possesses Dung.”
    In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a little of turmeric, ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air—just as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten up by curiosity, used to do night after night! I’ll begin at once: by revealing that my grandfather’s premonitions in the corridor were not without foundation. In the succeeding months and years, he fell under what I can only describe as the sorcerer’s spell of that enormous—and as yet unstained—perforated cloth.
    “Again?” Aadam’s mother said, rolling her eyes. “I tell you, my child, that girl is so sickly from too much soft living only. Too much sweetmeats and spoiling, because of the absence of a mother’s firm hand. But go, take care of your invisible patient, your mother is all right with her little nothing of a headache.”
    In those years, you see, the landowner’s daughter Naseem Ghani contracted a quite extraordinary number of minor illnesses, and each time a shikara-wallah was despatched to summon the tall young Doctor Sahib with the big nose who was making such a reputation for himself in the valley. Aadam Aziz’s visits to the bedroom with the shaft of sunlight and the three lady wrestlers became weekly events; and on each occasion he was vouchsafed a glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of the young woman’s body. Her initial stomach-ache was succeeded by a very slightly twisted right ankle, an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of the left foot, a tiny cut on the lower left calf. (“Tetanus is a killer, Doctor Sahib,” the landowner said, “My Naseem must not die for a scratch.”) There was the matter of her stiff right knee, which the Doctor was obliged to manipulate through the hole in the sheet … and after a time the illnesses leapt upwards, avoiding certain unmentionable zones, and began to proliferate around her upper half. She suffered from something mysterious which her father called Finger Rot, which made the skin flake off her hands; from weakness of the wrist-bones, for which Aadam prescribed calcium tablets; and from attacks of constipation, for which he gave her a course of laxatives, since there was no question of being permitted to administer an enema. She had fevers and she also had subnormal temperatures. At these times his thermometer would be placed under her armpit and he would hum and haw about the relative inefficiency of the method. In the opposite armpit she once developed a slight case of tineachloris and he dusted her with yellow powder; after this treatment—which required him to rub the powder in, gently but firmly, although the soft secret body began to shake and quiver and he heard helpless laughter coming through the sheet, because Naseem Ghani was very ticklish—the itching went away, but Naseem soon found a new set of complaints. She waxed anemic in the summer and bronchial in the winter. (“Her tubes are most delicate,” Ghani explained, “like little flutes.”) Far away the Great War moved from crisis to crisis, while in the cobwebbed house Doctor Aziz was also engaged in a total war against his sectioned patient’s inexhaustible complaints. And, in all those war years, Naseem never repeated an illness. “Which only shows,” Ghani told him, “that you are a good doctor. When you cure, she is cured for good. But alas!”—he struck his forehead—“She pines for her late mother, poor baby, and her body suffers. She