A few months later, when Mary Pereira finally confessed her crime, and revealed the secrets of her eleven-year-long haunting by the ghost of Joseph D'Costa, we learned that, after her return from exile, she was badly shocked by the condition into which the ghost had fallen in her absence. It had begun to decay, so that now bits of it were missing: an ear, several toes on each foot, most of its teeth; and there was a hole in its stomach-larger than an egg. Distressed by this crumbling spectre, she asked it (when she was sure nobody else was within earshot): 'O God, Joe, what you been doing to yourself?' He replied that the responsibility of her crime had been placed squarely on his shoulders until she confessed, and it was playing hell with his system. From that moment it became inevitable that she would confess; but each time she looked at me she found herself prevented from doing so. Still, it was only a matter of time.

In the meanwhile, and utterly ignorant of how close I was to being exposed as a fraud, I was attempting to come to terms with a Methwold's Estate in which, too, a number of transformations had occurred. In the first place, my father seemed to want nothing more to do with me, an attitude of mind which I found hurtful but (considering my mutilated body) entirely understandable. In the second place, there was the remarkable change in the fortunes of the Brass Monkey. 'My position in this household,' I was obliged to admit to myself, 'has been usurped.' Because now it was the Monkey whom my father admitted into the abstract sanctum of his office, the Monkey whom he smothered in his squashy belly, and who was obliged to bear the burdens of his dreams about the future. I even heard Mary Pereira singing to the Monkey the little ditty which had been my theme-song all my days: 'Anything you want to be,' Mary sang, 'you can be; You can be just what-all you want!' Even my mother seemed to have caught the mood; and now it was my sister who always got the biggest helping of chips at the dinner-table, and the extra nargisi kofta, and the choicest pasanda. While I - whenever anyone in the house chanced to look at me - was conscious of a deepening furrow between their eyebrows, and an atmosphere of confusion and distrust. But how could I complain? The Monkey had tolerated my special position for years. With the possible exception of the time I fell out of a tree in our garden after she nudged me (which could have been an accident, after all), she had accepted my primacy with excellent grace and even loyalty. Now it was my turn; long-trousered, I was required to be adult about my demotion. 'This growing up,' I told myself, 'is harder than I expected.'

The Monkey, it must be said, was no less astonished than I at her elevation to the role of favoured child. She did her best to fall from grace, but it seemed she could do no wrong. These were the days of her flirtation with Christianity, which was partly due to the influence of her European school-friends and partly to the rosary-fingering presence of Mary Pereira (who, unable to go to church because of her fear of the confessional, would regale us instead with Bible stories); mostly, however, I believe it was an attempt by the Monkey to regain her old, comfortable position in the family doghouse (and, speaking of dogs, the Baroness Simki had been put to sleep during my absence, lulled by promiscuity).

My sister spoke highly of gentle Jesus meek and mild; my mother smiled vaguely and patted her on the head. She went around the house humming hymns; my mother took up the tunes and sang along. She requested a nun's outfit to replace her favourite nurse's dress; it was given to her. She threaded chick-peas on a string and used them as a rosary, muttering Hail-Mary-full-of-grace, and my parents praised her skill with her hands. Tormented by her failure to be punished, she mounted to extremes of religious fervour, reciting the Our Father morning and night, fasting in the weeks of Lent instead of during Ramzan, revealing an unsuspected streak of fanaticism which would, later, begin to dominate her personality; and still, it appeared, she was tolerated. Finally she discussed the matter with me. 'Well, brother,' she said, 'looks like from now on I'll just have to be the good guy, and you can have all the fun.'

She was probably right; my parents' apparent loss of interest in me should have given me a greater measure of freedom; but I was mesmerized by the transformations which were taking place in every aspect of my life, and fun, in such circumstances, seemed hard to have.

I was altering physically; too early, soft fuzz was appearing on my chin, and my voice swooped, out of control, up and down the vocal register. I had a strong sense of absurdity: my lengthening limbs were making me clumsy, and I must have cut a clownish figure, as I outgrew shirts and trousers and stuck gawkily and too far out of the ends of my clothes. I felt somehow conspired against, by these garments which flapped comically around my ankles and wrists; and even when I turned inwards to my secret Children, I found change, and didn't like it.

The gradual disintegration of the Midnight Children's Conference -which finally fell apart on the day the Chinese armies came down over the Himalayas to humiliate the Indian fauj - was already well under way. When novelty wears off, boredom, and then dissension, must inevitably ensue. Or (to put it another way)

when a finger is mutilated, and fountains of blood flow out, all manner of vilenesses become possible ... whether or not the cracks in the Conference were the (active-metaphorical) result of my finger-loss, they were certainly widening. Up in Kashmir, Narada-Markandaya was falling into the solipsistic dreams of the true narcissist, concerned only with the erotic pleasures of constant sexual alterations; while Soumitra the time-traveller, wounded by our refusal to listen to his descriptions of a future in which (he said) the country would be governed by a urine-drinking dotard who refused to die, and people would forget everything they had ever learned, and Pakistan would split like an amoeba, and the prime ministers of each half would be assassinated by their successors, both of whom - he swore despite our disbelief -would be called by the same name ... wounded Soumitra became a regular absentee from our nightly meetings, disappearing for long periods into the spidery labyrinths of Time. And the sisters from Baud were content with their ability to bewitch fools young and old. 'What can this Conference help?' they inquired. 'We already have too many lovers.' And our alchemist member was busying himself in a laboratory built for him by his father (to whom he had revealed his secret); pre-occupied with the Philosopher's Stone, he had very little time for us. We had lost him to the lure of gold.

And there were other factors at work as well. Children, however magical, are not immune to their parents; and as the prejudices and world-views of adults began to take over their minds, I found children from Maharashtra loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners reviling Dravidian 'blackies'; there were religious rivalries; and class entered our councils. The rich children turned up their noses at being in such lowly company; Brahmins began to feel uneasy at permitting even their thoughts to touch the thoughts of untouchables; while, among the low-born, the pressures of poverty and Communism were becoming evident ... and, on top of all this, there were clashes of personality, and the hundred squalling rows which are unavoidable in a parliament composed entirely of half-grown brats.

In this way the Midnight Children's Conference fulfilled the prophecy of the Prime Minister and became, in truth, a mirror of the nation; the passive-literal mode was at work, although I railed against it, with increasing desperation, and finally with growing resignation ... 'Brothers, sisters!' I broadcast, with a mental voice as uncontrollable as its physical counterpart, 'Do not let this happen! Do not permit the endless duality of masses-and-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us to come between us! We,' I cried passionately, 'must be a third principle, we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being new, can we fulfil the promise of our birth!' I had supporters, and none greater than Parvati-the-witch; but I felt them slipping away from me, each distracted by his or her own life ... just as, in truth, I was being distracted by mine. It was as though our glorious congress was turning out to be more than another of the toys of childhood, as though long trousers were destroying what midnight had created ... 'We must decide on a programme,' I pleaded, 'our own Five Year Plan, why not?' But I could hear, behind my anxious broadcast, the amused laughter of my greatest rival; and there was SMva in all our heads, saying scornfully, 'No, little rich boy; there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty, and have-and-lack, and right-and-left; there is only me-against-the-world! The world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams; the world, little Snotnose, is things. Things and their makers rule the world; look at Birla, and Tata, and all the powerful: they make things. For things, the country is run. Not for people. For things, America and Russia send aid; but five hundred million stay hungry. When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don't, you fight.' The Children, listening fascinatedly as we fought... or perhaps not, perhaps even our dialogue failed to hold their interest. And now I: 'But people are not tilings; if we come together, if we love each other, if we show that this, just this, this people-together, this Conference, this children-sticking-together-through-thick-and-thin, can be that third way...' But Shiva, snorting: 'Little rich boy, that's all just wind. All that importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-human-ity. Today, what people are is just another kind of thing.' And I, Saleem, crumbling: 'But ... free will ... hope ... the great soul, otherwise known as mahatma, of mankind ... and what of poetry, and art, and ...' Whereupon SMva seized his victory: 'You see? I knew you'd turn out to be like that. Mushy, like overcooked rice. Sentimental as a grandmother. Go, who wants your rubbish? We all have lives to live. Hell's bells, cucumber-nose, I'm fed up with your Conference.

It's got nothing to do with one single thing.'

You ask: there are ten-year-olds? I reply: Yes, but. You say: did ten-year-olds, or even almost-elevens, discuss the role of the individual in society? And the rivalry of capital and labour? Were the internal stresses of agrarian and industrialized zones made explicit? And conflicts in socio-cultural heritages?

Did children of less than four thousand days discuss identity, and the inherent conflicts of capitalism? Having got through fewer than one hundred thousand hours, did they contrast Gandhi and Marxlenin, power and impotence? Was collectivity opposed to singularity? Was God killed by children? Even allowing for the truth of the supposed miracles, can we now believe that urchins spoke like old men with beards?

I say: maybe not in these words; maybe not in words at all, but in the purer language of thought; but yes, certainly, this is what was at the bottom of it all; because children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us. Poison, and after a gap of many years, a Widow with a knife.

In short: after my return to Buckingham Villa, even the salt of the midnight children lost its savour; there were nights, now, when I did not even bother to set up my nationwide network; and the demon lurking inside me (it had two heads)

was free to get on with its devilment. (I never knew about Shiva's guilt or innocence of whore-murders; but such was the influence of Kali-Yuga that I, the good guy and natural victim, was certainly responsible for two deaths. First came Jimmy Kapadia; and second was Homi Catrack.)

If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it is murdered.

We all had our troubles in those, days. Homi Catrack had his idiot Toxy, and the Ibrahims had other worries: Sonny's father Ismail, after years of bribing judges and juries, was in danger of being investigated by the Bar Commission; and Sonny's uncle Ishaq, who ran the second-rate Embassy Hotel near Flora Fountain, was reputedly deep in debt to local gangsters, and worried constantly about being 'bumped off' (in those days, assassinations were becoming as quotidian as the heat) ... so perhaps it isn't surprising that we had all forgotten about the existence of Professor Schaapsteker. (Indians grow larger and more powerful as they age; but Schaapsteker was a European, and his kind unfortunately fade away with the years, and,often completely disappear.)

But now, driven, perhaps, by my demon, my feet led me upstairs to the top floor of Buckingham Villa, where I found a mad old man, incredibly tiny and shrunken, whose narrow tongue darted constantly in and out between his lips - flicking, licking: the former searcher after antivenenes, assassin of horses, Sharpsticker sahib, now ninety-two and no longer of his eponymous Institute, but retired into a dark top-floor apartment filled with tropical vegetation and serpents pickled in brine. Age, failing to draw his teeth and poison-sacs, had turned him instead into the incarnation of snakehood; like other Europeans who stay too long, the ancient insanities of India had pickled his brains, so that he had come to believe the superstitions of the Institute orderlies, according to whom he was the last of a line which began when a king cobra mated with a woman who gave birth to a human (but serpentine) child ... it seems that all my life I've only had to turn a corner to tumble into yet another new and fabulously transmogrified world. Climb a ladder (or even a staircase) and you find a snake awaiting you.

The curtains were always drawn; in Schaapsteker's rooms, the sun neither rose nor set, and no clocks ticked. Was it the demon, or our mutual sense of isolation which drew us together?... Because, in those days of the Monkey's ascendancy and the Conference's decline, I began to ascend the stairs whenever possible, and listen to the ravings of the crazy, sibilant old man.

His first greeting to me, when I stumbled into his unlocked lair, was: 'So, child - you have recovered from the typhoid.' The sentence stirred time like a sluggish dust-cloud and rejoined me to my one-year-old self; I remembered the story of how Schaapsteker had saved my life with snake-poison. And afterwards, for several weeks, I sat at his feet, and he revealed to me the cobra which lay coiled within myself.

Who listed, for my benefit, the occult powers of snakes? (Their shadows kill cows; if they enter a man's dreams, his wife conceives; if they are killed, the murderer's family is denied male issue for twenty generations.) And who described to me - with the aid of books and stuffed corpses - the cobra's constant foes? 'Study your enemies, child,' he hissed, 'or they will surely kill you.' ... At Schaapsteker's feet, I studied the mongoose and the boar, the dagger-billed adjutant bird and the barasinha deer, which crushes snakes' heads under its feet; and the Egyptian ichneumon, and ibis; the four-feet-high secretary bird, fearless and hook-beaked, whose appearance and name made me think suspicious thoughts about my father's Alice Pereira; and the jackal buzzard, the stink cat, the honey ratel from the hills; the road runner, the peccary, and the formidable cangamba bird. Schaapsteker, from the depths of his senility, instructed me in life. 'Be wise, child. Imitate the action of the snake. Be secret; strike from the cover of a bush.'

Once he said: 'You must think of me as another father. Did I not give you your life when it was lost?' With this statement he proved that he was as much under my spell as I under his; he had accepted that he, too, was one of that endless series of parents to whom I alone had the power of giving birth. And although, after a time, I found the air in his chambers too oppressive, and left him once more to the isolation from which he would never again be disturbed, he had shown me how to proceed. Consumed by the two-headed demon of revenge, I used my telepathic powers (for the first time) as a weapon; and in this way I discovered the details of the relationship between Homi Catrack and Lila Sabarmati. Lila and Pia were always rivals in beauty; it was the wife of the heir-apparent to the title of Admiral of the Fleet who had become the film magnate's new fancy-woman. While Commander Sabarmati was at sea on manoeuvres, Lila and Homi were performing certain manoeuvres of their own; while the lion of the seas awaited' the death of the then-Admiral, Homi and Lila, too, were making an appointment with the Reaper. (With my help.)

'Be secret,' said Sharpsticker sahib; secretly, I spied on my enemy Homi, and on the promiscuous mother of Eyeslice and Hairoil (who were very full of themselves of late, ever since, in fact, the papers announced that Commander Sabarmati's promotion was a mere formality. Only a matter of time ...). 'Loose woman,' the demon within me whispered silently, 'Perpetrator of the worst of maternal perfidies! We shall turn you into an awful example; through you we shall demonstrate the fate which awaits the lascivious. ?unobservant adulteress! Did you not see what sleeping around did to the illustrious Baroness Simki von der Heiden? - who was, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bitch, just like yourself.'

My view of Lila Sabarmati has mellowed with age; after all, she and I had one thing in common - her nose, like mine, possessed tremendous powers. Hers, however, was a purely worldly magic: a wrinkle of nasal skin could charm the steeliest of Admirals; a tiny flare of the nostrils ignited strange fires in the hearts of film magnates. I am a little regretful about betraying that nose; it was a little like stabbing a cousin in the back.

What I discovered: every Sunday morning at ten a.m., Lila Sabarmati drove Eyeslice and Hairoil to the Metro cinema for the weekly meetings of the Metro Cub Club. (She volunteered to take the rest of us, too; Sonny and Cyrus, the Monkey and I piled into her Indian-made Hindustan car.) And while we drove towards Lana Turner or Robert Taylor or Sandra Dee, Mr Homi Catrack was also preparing himself for a weekly rendezvous. While Lila's Hindustan puttered along beside railway-lines, Homi was knotting a cream silk scarf around his throat; while she halted at red lights, he donned a Technicolored bush-coat; when she was ushering us into the darkness of the auditorium, he was putting on gold-rimmed sunglasses; and when she left us to watch our film, he, too, was abandoning a child. Toxy Catrack never failed to react to his departures by wailing kicking thrashing-of-legs; she knew what was going on, and not even Bi-Appah could restrain her.

Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors. When Lila drove her Hindustan to an address off Colaba Causeway, she was Juliet coming out on to her balcony; when cream-scarfed, gold-shaded Homi sped off to meet her (in the same Studebaker in which my mother had once been rushed to Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home), he was Leander swimming the Hellespont towards Hero's burning candle. As for my part in the business - I will not give it a name.

I confess: what I did was no act of heroism. I did not battle Homi on horseback, with fiery eyes and flaming sword; instead, imitating the action of the snake, I bega............