Midnight's children

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

ich kid,' Shiva yelled, 'you don't know one damn thing! What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you-you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind!'

What I saw at the very end: my mother's hands raising a half-empty glass of Lovely Lassi; my mother's lips pressing gently, nostalgically against the mottled glass; my mother's hands handing the glass to her Nadir-Qasim; who also applied, to the opposite side of the glass, his own, poetic mouth. So it was that life imitated bad art, and my uncle Hanif's sister brought the eroticism of the indirect kiss into the green neon dinginess of the Pioneer Cafe.

But now hands enter the frame-first the hands of Nadir-Qasim, their poetic softness somewhat callused these days; hands flickering like candle-flames, creeping forward across reccine, then jerking back; next a woman's hands, black as jet, inching forwards like elegant spiders; hands lifting up, off reccine tabletop, hands hovering above three fives, beginning the strangest of dances, rising, falling, circling one another, weaving in and out between each other, hands longing for touch, hands outstretching tensing quivering demanding to be-but always at last jerking back, fingertips avoiding fingertips, because what I'm watching here on my dirty glass cinema-screen is, after ail, an Indian movie, in which physical contact is forbidden lest it corrupt the watching flower of Indian youth; and there are feet beneath the table and faces above it, feet advancing towards feet, faces tumbling softly towards faces, but jerking away all of a sudden in a cruel censor's cut… two strangers, each bearing a screen-name

death makes the living see themselves too clearly; after they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated.

'Land, yes! Love, no!' Dr Narlikar said, a little unsteadily; my father refilled his glass.

The Brass Monkey was never so furious as when anyone spoke to her in words of love

After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids. 'He'll learn, Madam,' Mary comforted Amina, 'He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure.' I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

… 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…