I married Parvati-the-witch on February 23rd, 1975, the second anniversary of my outcast's return to the magicians' ghetto.

Stiffening of Padma: taut as a washing-line, my dung-lotus inquires: 'Married?

But last night only you said you wouldn't - and why you haven't told me all these days, weeks, months... ?' I look at her sadly, and remind her that I have already mentioned the death of my poor Parvati, which was not a natural death ... slowly Padma uncoils, as I continue: 'Women have made me; and also unmade.

From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, there's no escape from her.'

There have been thirty-two years, in this story, during which I remained unborn; soon, I may complete thirty-one years of my own. For sixty-three years, before and after midnight, women have done their best; and also, I'm bound to say, their worst.

In a blind landowner's house on the shores of a Kashmir! lake, Naseem Aziz doomed me to the inevitability of perforated sheets; and in the waters of that same lake, Ilse Lubin leaked into history, and I have not forgotten her deathwish; Before Nadir Khan hid in his underworld, my grandmother had, by becoming Reverend Mother, begun a sequence of women who changed their names, a sequence which continues even today - and which even leaked into Nadir, who became Qasim, and sat with dancing hands in the Pioneer Cafe; and after Nadir's departure, my mother Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai; And Alia, with the bitterness of ages, who clothed me in the baby-things impregnated with her old-maid fury; and Emerald, who laid a table on which I made pepperpots march; There was the Rani of Cooch Naheen, whose money, placed at the disposal of a humming man, gave birth to the optimism disease, which has recurred, at intervals, ever since; and, in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi, a distant relative called Zohra whose flirtations gave birth, in my father, to that later weakness for Fernandas and Florys; So to Bombay. Where Winkie's Vanita could not resist the centre-parting of William Methwold, and Nussie-the-duck lost a baby-race; while Mary Pereira, in the name of love, changed the baby-tags of history and became a second mother to me ...

Women and women and women: Toxy Catrack, nudging open the door which would later let in the children of midnight; the terrors of her nurse Bi-Appah; the competitive love of Amina and Mary, and what my mother showed me while I lay concealed in a washing-chest: yes, the Black Mango, which forced me to sniff, and unleashed what-were-not-Archangels! ... And Evelyn Lilith Burns, cause of a bicycle-accident, who pushed me down a two-storey hillock into the midst of history.

And the Monkey. I musn't forget the Monkey.

But also, also, there was Masha Miovic, goading me into finger-loss, and my aunty Pia, filling my heart with revenge-lust, and Lila Sabarmati, whose indiscretions made possible my terrible, manipulating, newspaper-cut-out revenge; And Mrs Dubash, who found my gift of a Superman comic and built it, with the help of her son, into Lord Khusro Khusrovand; And Mary, seeing a ghost.

In Pakistan, the land of submission, the home of purity, I watched the transformation of Monkey-into-Singer, and fetched bread, and fell in love; it was a woman, Tai Bibi, who told me the truth about myself. And in the heart of my inner darkness, I turned to the Puffias, and was only narrowly saved from the threat of a golden-dentured bride.

Beginning again, as the buddha, I lay with a latrine-cleaner and was subjected to electrified urinals as a result; in the East, a farmer's wife tempted me, and Time was assassinated in consequence; and there were houris in a temple, and we only just escaped in time.

In the shadow of a mosque, Resham Bibi issued a warning.

And I married Parvati-the-witch.

'Oof, mister,' Padma exclaims, 'that's too much women!'

I do not disagree; because I have not even included her, whose dreams of marriage and Kashmir have inevitably been leaking into me, making me wish, if-only, if-only, so that, having once resigned myself to the cracks, I am now assailed by pangs of discontent, anger, fear and regret.

But above all, the Widow.

'I swear!' Padma slaps her knee, 'Too much, mister; too much.'

How are we to understand my too-many women? As the multiple faces of Bharat-Mata? Or as even more ... as the dynamic aspect of maya, as cosmic energy, which is represented as the female organ?

Maya, in its dynamic aspect, is called Shakti; perhaps it is no accident that, in the Hindu pantheon, the active power of a deity is contained within his queen! Maya-Shakti mothers, but also 'muffles consciousness in its dream-web'.

Too-many-women: are they all aspects of Devi, the goddess - who is Shakti, who slew the buffalo-demon, who defeated the ogre Mahisha, who is Kali Durga Chandi Chamunda Uma Sati and Parvati ... and who, when active, is coloured red?

'I don't know about that,' Padma brings me down to earth, 'They are just women, that's all.'

Descending from my flight of fancy, I am reminded of the importance of speed; driven on by the imperatives of rip tear crack, I abandon reflections; and begin.

This is how it came about: how Parvati took her destiny into her own hands; how a lie, issuing from my lips, brought her to the desperate condition in which, one night, she extracted from her shabby garments a lock of hero's hair, and began to speak sonorous words.

Spurned by Saleem, Parvati remembered who had once been his arch-enemy; and, taking a bamboo stick with seven knots in it, and an improvized metal hook attached to one end, she squatted in her shack and recited; with the Hook of Indra in her right hand, and a lock of hair in her left, she summoned him to her. Parvati called to Shiva; believe don't believe, but Shiva came.

From the beginning there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees; but throughout this narrative I've been pushing him, the other, into the background (just as once, I banned him from the councils of the Children). He can be concealed no longer, however; because one morning in May 1974 - is it just my cracking memory, or am I right in thinking it was the 18th, perhaps at the very moment at which the deserts of Rajasthan were being shaken by India's first nuclear explosion? Was Shiva's explosion into my life truly synchronous with India's arrival, without prior warning, at the nuclear age? - he came to the magicians' slum. Uniformed, gonged-and-pipped, and a Major now, Shiva alighted from an Army motorcycle; and even through the modest khaki of his Army pants it was easy to make out the phenomenal twin bulges of his lethal knees... India's most decorated war hero, but once he led a gang of apaches in the back-streets of Bombay; once, before he discovered the legitimized violence of war, prostitutes were found throttled in gutters (I know, I know - no proof); Major Shiva now, but also Wee Willie Winkie's boy, who still remembered the words of long-silenced songs: 'Good Night, Ladies' still echoed on occasion in his ears.

There are ironies here, which must not pass unnoticed; for had not Shiva risen as Saleem fell? Who was the slum-dweller now, and who looked down from commanding heights? There is nothing like a war for the re-invention of lives ... On what may well have been May 18th, at any rate, Major Shiva came to the magicians' ghetto, and strode through the cruel streets of the slum with a strange expression on his face, which combined the infinite disdain for poverty of the recently-exalted with something more mysterious: because Major Shiva, drawn to our humble abode by the incantations of Parvati-the-witch, cannot have known what force impelled him to come.

What follows is a reconstruction of the recent career of Major Shiva; I pieced the story together from Parvati's accounts, which I got out of her after our marriage. It seems my arch-rival was fond of boasting to her about his exploits, so you may wish to make allowances for the distortions of truth which such chest-beating creates; however, there seems no reason to believe that what he told Parvati and she repeated to me was very far removed from what-was-the-case.

At the end of the war in the East, the legends of Shiva's awful exploits buzzed through the streets of the cities, leaped on to newspaper and into magazines, and thus insinuated themselves into the salons of the well-to-do, settling in clouds as thick as flies upon the eardrums of the country's hostesses, so that Shiva found himself elevated in social status as well as military rank, and was invited to a thousand and one different gatherings - banquets, musical soirees, bridge parties, diplomatic receptions, party political conferences, great melas and also smaller, local fetes, school sports days and fashionable balls - to be applauded and monopolized by the noblest and fairest in the land, to all of whom the legends of his exploits clung like flies, walking over their eyeballs so that they saw the young man through the mist of his legend, coating their fingertips so that they touched him through the magical film of his myth, settling on their tongues so that they could not speak to him as they would to an ordinary human being. The Indian Army, which was at that time fighting a political battle against proposed expenditure cuts, understood the value of so charismatic an ambassador, and permitted the hero to circulate amongst his influential admirers; Shiva espoused his new life with a will.

He grew a luxuriant moustache to which his personal batman applied a daily pomade of linseed-oil spiced with coriander; always elegantly turned out in the drawing-rooms of the mighty, he engaged in political chit-chat, and declared himself a firm admirer of Mrs Gandhi, largely because of his hatred for her opponent Morarji Desai, who was intolerably ancient, drank his own urine, had skin which rustled like rice-paper, and, as Chief Minister of Bombay, had once been responsible for the banning of alcohol and the persecution of young goondas, that is to say hooligans or apaches, or, in other words, of the child Shiva himself... but such idle chatter occupied a mere fraction of his thoughts, the rest of which were entirely taken up with the ladies. Shiva, too, was besotted by too-much-women, and in those heady days after the military victory acquired a secret reputation which (he boasted to Parvati) rapidly grew to rival his official, public fame - a 'black' legend to set beside the 'white' one. What was whispered at the hen-parties and canasta-evenings of the land? What was hissed through giggles wherever two or three glittering ladies got together?

This: Major Shiva was becoming a notorious seducer; a ladies'-man; a cuckolder of the rich; in short, a stud.

There were women - he told Parvati - wherever he went: their curving bird-soft bodies quaking beneath the weight of their jewellery and lust, their eyes misted over by his legend; it would have been difficult to refuse them even had he wanted to. But Major Shiva had no intention of refusing. He listened sympathetically to their little tragedies - impotent husbands, beatings, lack-of-attention - to whatever excuses the lovely creatures wished to offer.

Like my grandmother at her petrol pump (but with more sinister motives) he gave patient audience to their woes; sipping whisky in the chandeliered splendour of ballrooms, he watched them batting their eyelids and breathing suggestively while they moaned; and always, at last, they contrived to drop a handbag, or spill a drink, or knock his swagger-stick from his grasp, so that he would have to stoop to the floor to retrieve whatever-had-fallen, and then he would see the notes tucked into their sandals, sticking daintily out from under painted toes.

In those days (if the Major is to be believed) the lovely scandalous begums of India became awfully clumsy, and their chap-pals spoke of rendezvous-at-midnight, of trellises of bougainvillaea outside bedroom windows, of husbands conveniently away launching ships or exporting tea or buying ball-bearings from Swedes. While these unfortunates were away, the Major visited their homes to steal their most prized possessions: their women fell into his arms. It is possible (I have divided by half the Major's own figures) that at the height of his philanderings there were no less than ten thousand women in love with him.

And certainly there were children. The spawn of illicit midnights. Beautiful bouncing infants secure in the cradles of the rich. Strewing bastards across the map of India, the war hero went his way; but (and this, too, is what he told Parvati) he suffered from the curious fault of losing interest in anyone who became pregnant; no matter how beautiful sensuous loving they were, he deserted the bedrooms of all who bore his children; and lovely ladies with red-rimmed eyes were obliged to persuade their cuckolded husbands that yes, of course it's your baby, darling, life-of-mine, doesn't it look just like you, and of course I'm not sad, why should I be, these are tears of joy..

One such deserted mother was Roshanara, the child-wife of the steel magnate S.

P. Shetty; and at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in Bombay, she punctured the mighty balloon of his pride. He had been promenading about the paddock, stooping every few yards to return ladies' shawls and parasols, which seemed to acquire a life of their own and spring out of their owners' hands as he passed; Roshanara Shetty confronted him here, standing squarely in his path and refusing to budge, her seventeen-year-old eyes filled with the ferocious pique of childhood. He greeted her coolly, touching his Army cap, and attempted to pass; but she dug her needle-sharp nails into his arm, smiling dangerously as ice, and strolled along beside him. As they walked she poured her infantile poison into his ear, and her hatred and resentment of her former lover gave her the skill to make him believe her. Callously she whispered that it was so funny, my God, the way he strutted around in high society like some kind of rooster, while all the time the ladies were laughing at him behind his back, O yes, Major Sahib, don't fool yourself, high-class women have always enjoyed sleeping with animals peasants brutes, but that's how we think of you, my God it's disgusting just to watch you eat, gravy down your chin, don't you think we see how you never hold teacups by their handles, do you imagine we can't hear your belches and breakings of wind, you're just our pet ape, Major Sahib, very useful, but basically a clown.

After the onslaught of Roshanara Shetty, the young war hero began to see his world differently. Now he seemed to see women giggling behind fans wherever he went; he noticed strange amused sidelong glances which he'd never noticed before; and although he tried to improve his behaviour, it was no use, he seemed to become clumsier the harder he tried, so that food flew off his plate on to priceless Kelim rugs and belches broke from his throat with the roar of a train emerging from a tunnel and he broke wind with the rage of typhoons. His glittering new life became, for him, a daily humiliation; and now he reinterpreted the advances of the beautiful ladies, understanding that by placing their love-notes beneath their toes they were obliging him to kneel demeaningly at their feet ... as he learned that a man may possess every manly attribute and still be despised for not knowing how to hold a spoon, he felt an old violence being renewed in him, a hatred for these high-ups and their power, which is why I am sure - why I know - that when the Emergency offered Shiva-of-the-knees the chance of grabbing some power for himself, he did not wait to be asked a second time.

On May 15th, 1974, Major Shiva returned to his regiment in Delhi; he claimed that, three days later, he was suddenly seized by a desire to see once more the saucer-eyed beauty whom he had first encountered long ago in the conference of the Midnight Children; the pony-tailed temptress who had asked him, in Dacca, for a single lock of his hair. Major Shiva declared to Parvati that his arrival at the magicians' ghetto had been motivated by a desire to be done with the rich bitches of Indian high society; that he had been besotted by her pouting lips the moment he laid eyes on them; and that these were the only reasons for asking her to go away with him. But I have already been overgenerous to Major Shiva - in this, my own personal version of history, I have allowed his account too much space; so I insist that, whatever the knock-kneed Major might have thought, the thing that drew him into the ghetto was quite simply and straightforwardly the magic of Parvati-the-witch.

Saleem was not in the ghetto when Major Shiva arrived by motorcycle; while nuclear explosions rocked the Rajasthani wastes, out of sight, beneath the desert's surface, the explosion which changed my life also took place out of my sight. When Shiva grasped Parvati by the wrist, I was with Picture Singh at an emergency conference of the city's many red cells, discussing the ins and outs of the national railway strike; when Parvati, without demurring, took her place on the pillion of a hero's Honda, I was busily denouncing the government's arrests of union leaders. In short, while I was preoccupied with politics and my dream of national salvation, the powers of Parvati's witchcraft had set in motion the scheme which would end with hennaed palms, and songs, and the signing of a contract.

... I am obliged, perforce, to reply on the accounts of others; only Shiva could tell what had befallen him; it was Resham Bibi who described Parvati's departure to me on my return, saying, 'Poor girl, let her go, so sad she has been for so long, what is to blame?'; and only Parvati could recount to me what befell her while she was away.

Because of the Major's national status as a war hero, he was permitted to take certain liberties with military regulations; so nobody took him to task for importing a woman into what were not, after all, married men's quarters; and he, not knowing what had brought about this remarkable alteration in his life, sat down as requested in a cane chair, while she took off his boots, pressed his feet, brought him water flavoured with freshly-squeezed limes, dismissed his batman, oiled his moustache, caressed his knees and after all that produced a dinner of biriani so exquisite that he stopped wondering what was happening to him and began to enjoy it instead. Parvati-the-witch turned those simple Army quarters into a palace, a Kailasa fit for Shiva-the-god; and Major Shiva, lost in the haunted pools of her eyes, aroused beyond endurance by the erotic protrusion of her lips, devoted his undivided attentions to her for four whole months: or, to be precise, for one hundred and seventeen nights. On September 12th, however, things changed: because Parvati, kneeling at his feet, fully aware of his views on the subject, told him that she was going to have his child.

The liaison of Shiva and Parvati now became a tempestuous business, filled with blows and broken plates: an earthly echo of that eternal marital battle-of-the-gods which their namesakes are said to perform atop Mount Kailasa in the great Himalayas ... Major Shiva, at this time, began to drink; also to whore. The whoring trails of the war hero around the capital of India bore a strong resemblance to the Lambretta-travels of Saleem Sinai along the spoors of Karachi streets; Major Shiva, unmanned in the company of the rich by the revelations of Roshanara Shetty, had taken to paving for his pleasures. And such was his phenomenal fecundity (he assured Parvati while beating her) that he ruined the'careers of many a loose woman by giving them babies whom they would love too much to expose; he sired around the capital an army of street-urchins to -mirror the regiment of bastards he had fathered on the begums of the chandeliered salons.

Dark clouds were gathering in political skies as well: in Bihar, where corruption inflation hunger illiteracy landlessness ruled the roost, Jaya-Prakash Narayan led a coalition of students and workers against the governing Indira Congress; in Gujarat, there were riots, railway trains were burned, and Morarji Desai went on a fast-unto-death to bring down the corrupt government of the Congress (under Chimanbhai Patel) in that drought-ridden state ... it goes without) saying that he succeeded without being obliged to die; in short, while anger seethed in Shiva's mind, the country was getting angry, too; and what was being born while something grew in Parvati's belly? You know the answer: in late 1974, J. P. Narayan and Morarji Desai formed the opposition party known as the Janata Morcha: the people's front. While Major Shiva reeled from whore to whore, the Indira Congress was reeling too.

And at last, Parvati released him from her spell. (No other explanation will do; if he was not bewitched, why did he not cast her off the instant he heard of her pregnancy? And if the spell had not been lifted, how could he have done it at all?) Shaking his head as though awaking from a dream, Major Shiva found himself in the company of a balloon-fronted slum girl, who now seemed to him to represent everything he most feared - she became the personification of the slums of his childhood, from which he had escaped, and which now, through her, through her damnable child, were trying to drag him down down down again ...

dragging her by the hair, he hurled her on to his motorcycle, and in a very short time she stood, abandoned, on the fringes of the magicians' ghetto, having been returned whence she came, bringing with her only one thing which she had not owned when she left: the thing hidden inside her like an invisible man in a wicker basket, the thing which was growing growing growing, just as she had planned.

Why do I say that? - Because it must be true; because what followed, followed; because it is my belief that Parvati-the-witch became pregnant in order to invalidate my only defence against marrying her. But I shall only describe, and leave analysis to posterity.

On a cold day in January, when the muezzin's cries from the highest minaret of the Friday Mosque froze as they left his lips and fell upon the city as sacred snow, Parvati returned. She had waited until there could be no possible doubt about her condition; her inner basket bulged through the clean new garments of Shiva's now-defunct infatuation. Her lips, sure of their coming triumph, had lost their fashionable pout; in her saucer-eyes, as she stood on the steps of the Friday Mosque to ensure that as many people as possible saw her changed appearance, there lurked a silvered gleam of contentment. That was how I found her when I returned to the chaya of the mosque with Picture Singh. I was feeling disconsolate, and the sight of Parvati-the-witch on the steps, hands folded calmly over her swollen belly, long rope-of-hair blowing gently in the crystal air, did nothing to cheer me up.

Pict............