Midnights Children Read Online Free PDF

longtime-no-see greeting, sends time into a speeding, whirligig, blurry fluster of excitement …
    … “Just think, son,” Aadam’s mother is saying as she sips fresh lime water, reclining on a takht in an attitude of resigned exhaustion, “how life does turn out. For so many years even my ankles were a secret, and now I must be stared at by strange persons who are not even family members.”
    … While Ghani the landowner stands beneath a large oil painting of Diana the Huntress, framed in squiggly gold. He wears thick dark glasses and his famous poisonous smile, and discusses art. “I purchased it from an Englishman down on his luck, Doctor Sahib. Five hundred rupees only—and I did not trouble to beat him down. What are five hundred chips? You see, I am a lover of culture.”
    … “See, my son,” Aadam’s mother is saying as he begins to examine her, “what a mother will not do for her child. Look how I suffer. You are a doctor … feel these rashes, these blotchy bits, understand that my head aches morning noon and night. Refill my glass, child.”
    … But the young Doctor has entered the throes of a most unhippocratic excitement at the boatman’s cry, and shouts, “I’m coming just now! Just let me bring my things!” The shikara’s prow touches the garden’s hem. Aadam is rushing indoors, prayer-mat rolled like cheroot under one arm, blue eyes blinking in the sudden interior gloom; he has placed the cheroot on a high shelf on top of stacked copies of
Vorwärts
and Lenin’s
What Is To Be Done?
and other pamphlets, dusty echoes of his half-faded German life; he is pulling out, from under his bed, a second-hand leather case which his mother called his “doctori-attaché,” and as he swings it and himself upwards and runs from the room, the word HEIDELBERG is briefly visible, burned into the leather on the bottom of the bag. A landowner’s daughter is good news indeed to a doctor with a career to make, even if she is ill. No:
because
she is ill.
    … While I sit like an empty pickle-jar in a pool of Anglepoised light, visited by this vision of my grandfather sixty-three years ago, which demands to be recorded, filling my nostrils with the acrid stench of his mother’s embarrassment which has brought her out in boils, with the vinegary force of Aadam Aziz’s determination to establish a practice so successful that she’ll never have to return to the gem-stone-shop, with the blind mustiness of a big shadowy house in which the young Doctor stands, ill-at-ease, before a painting of a plain girl with lively eyes and a stag transfixed behind her on the horizon, speared by a dart from her bow. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air … everything, and not just the few clues one stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed.
    … Aadam refills his mother’s glass and continues, worriedly, to examine her. “Put some cream on these rashes and blotches, Amma. For the headache, there are pills. The boils must be lanced. But maybe if you wore purdah when you sat in the store … so that no disrespectful eyes could … such complaints often begin in the mind …”
    … Slap of oar in water. Plot of spittle in lake. Tai clears his throat and mutters angrily, “A fine business. A wet-head nakkoo child goes away before he’s learned one damned thing and he comes back a big doctor sahib with a big bag full of foreign machines, and he’s still as silly as an owl. I swear: a too bad business.”
    … Doctor Aziz is shifting uneasily, from foot to foot, under the influence of the landowner’s smile, in whose presence it is not possible to feel relaxed; and is waiting for some tic of reaction to his own extraordinary