Contents


Book One

The perforated sheet 9
Mercurochrome 24
Hit-the-spittoon 37
Under the carpet 51
A public announcement 64
Many-headed monsters 78
Methwold 92
Tick, tock 106


Book Two

The fisherman's pointing finger 121
Snakes and ladders 136
Accident in a washing-chest 149
All-India radio 165
Love in Bombay 180
My tenth birthday 192
At the Pioneer Cafe 207
Alpha and Omega 223
The Kolynos Kid 237
Commander Sabarmati's baton 252
Revelations 267
Movements performed by pepperpots 282
Drainage and the desert 294
Jamila Singer 306
How Saleem achieved purity 326

Book Three

The buddha 345
In the Sundarbans 360
Sam and the Tiger 374
The shadow of the Mosque 384
A wedding 404
Midnight 421
Abracadabra 443


Book One

The perforated sheet
I was born in the city of Bombay... once upon a time. No, that won't
do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor
Narlikar's Nursing Home on August isth, 1947. And the time? The
time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more
... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined
palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out:
at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled
forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks
and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe;
but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen
me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies
of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed
to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my
country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers
had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos
ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter.
I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy,
Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily
embroiled in Fate - at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement.
And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.

Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I
will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, overused
body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on
having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster
than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning - yes, meaning something.
I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of
intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling
of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower
of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the
lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me;
and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a

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