Before I climbed into my first pair of long pants, I fell in love with Evie; but love was a curious, chain-reactive thing that year. To save time, I shall place all of us in the same row at the Metro cinema; Robert Taylor is mirrored in our eyes as we sit in flickering trances-and also in symbolic sequence: Saleem Sinai is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Evie Burns who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with Sonny

Ibrahim who is sitting-next-to-and-in-love-with the Brass Monkey who is sitting next to the aisle and feeling starving hungry… I loved Evie for perhaps six months of my life; two years later, she was back in America, knifing an old woman and being sent to reform school.

A brief expression of my gratitude is in order at this point: if Evie had not come to live amongst us, my story might never have progressed beyond tourism-in-a-clocktower and cheating in class… and then there would have been no climax in a widows' hostel, no clear proof of my meaning, no coda in a fuming factory over which there presides the winking, saffron-and-green dancing figure of the neon goddess Mumbadevi. But Evie Burns (was she snake or ladder? The answer's obvious: both) did come, complete with the silver bicycle which enabled me not only to discover the midnight children, but also to ensure the partition of the state of Bombay.

To begin at the beginning: her hair was made of scarecrow straw, her skin was peppered with freckles and her teeth lived in a metal cage. These teeth were, it seemed, the only things on earth over which she was powerless-they grew wild, in malicious crazy-paving overlaps, and stung her dreadfully when she ate ice-cream. (I permit myself this one generalization: Americans have mastered the universe, but have no dominion over their mouths; whereas India is impotent, but her children tend to have excellent teeth.)

Racked by toothaches, my Evie rose magnificently above the pain. Refusing to be ruled by bone and gums, she ate cake and drank Coke whenever they were going; and never complained. A tough kid, Evie Burns: her conquest of suffering confirmed her sovereignty over us all. It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.

Once, I shyly gave her a necklace of flowers (queen-of-the-night for my lily-of-the-eve), bought with my own pocket-money from a hawker-woman at Scandal Point. 'I don't wear flowers,' Evelyn Lilith said, and tossed the unwanted chain into the air, spearing it before it fell with a pellet from her unerring Daisy air-pistol. Destroying flowers with a Daisy, she served notice that she was not to be manacled, not even by a necklace: she was our capricious, whirligig Lill-of-the-Hill. And also Eve. The Adam's-apple of my eye.

How she arrived: Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice and Hairoil Sabarmati, Cyrus Dubash, the Monkey and I were playing French cricket in the circus-ring between Methwold's four palaces. A New Year's Day game: Toxy clapping at her barred window; even Bi-Appah was in good humour and not, for once, abusing us. Cricket-even French cricket, and even when played by children-is a quiet game: peace anointed in linseed oil. The kissing of leather and willow; sprinkled applause; the occasional cry-'Shot! Shot, sir!'-'Owzatt??' but Evie on her bicycle was having none of that.

'Hey, you! Alia you! Hey, whassamatter? You all deaf or what?'

I was batting (elegantly as Ranji, powerfully as Vinoo Mankad) when she charged up the hill on her two-wheeler, straw hair flying, freckles ablaze, mouth-metal flashing semaphore messages in the sunlight, a scarecrow astride a silver bullet… 'Hey, you widda leaky nose! Stop watching the schoopid ball, ya crumb! I'll showya something worth watching!'

Impossible to picture Evie Burns without also conjuring up a bicycle; and not just any two-wheeler, but one of the last of the great old-timers, an Arjuna Indiabike in mint condition, with drop-handlebars wrapped in masking tape and five gears and a seat made of reccine cheetah-skin. And a silver frame (the colour, I don't need to tell you, of the Lone Ranger's horse)… slobby Eyeslice and neat Hairoil, Cyrus the genius and the Monkey, and Sonny Ibrahim and myself-the best of friends, the true sons of the Estate, its heirs by right of birth-Sonny with the slow innocence he had had ever since the forceps dented his brain and me with my dangerous secret knowledge-yes, all of us, future bullfighters and Navy chiefs and all, stood frozen in open-mouthed attitudes as Evie Burns began to ride her bike, fasterfasterfaster, around and around the edges of the circus-ring. 'Lookit me now: watch me go, ya dummies!'

On and off the cheetah-seat, Evie performed. One foot on the seat, one leg stretched out behind her, she whirled around us; she built up speed and then did a headstand on the seat! She could straddle the front wheel, facing the rear, and work the pedals the wrong way round… gravity was her slave, speed her element, and we knew that a power had come among us, a witch on wheels, and the flowers of the hedgerows threw her petals, the dust of the circus-ring stood up in clouds of ovation, because the circus-ring had found its mistress, too: it was the canvas beneath the brush of her whirling wheels.

Now we noticed that our heroine packed a Daisy air-pistol on her right hip… 'More to come, ya zeroes!' she yelled, and drew the weapon. Her pellets gave stones the gift of flight; we threw annas into the air and she gunned them down, stone-dead. 'Targets! More targets!'-and Eyeslice surrendered his beloved pack of rummy cards without a murmur, so that she could shoot the heads off the kings. Annie Oakley in tooth-braces-nobody dared question her sharp-shooting, except once, and that was the end of her reign, during the great cat invasion; and there were extenuating circumstances.

Flushed, sweating, Evie Burns dismounted and announced: 'From now on, there's a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians? Any arguments?'

No arguments; I knew then that I had fallen in love.

At Juhu Beach with Evie: she won the camel-races, could drink more coconut milk than any of us, could open her eyes under the sharp salt water of the Arabian Sea.

Did six months make such a difference? (Evie was half a year older than me.) Did it entitle you to talk to grown-ups as an equal? Evie was seen gossiping with old man Ibrahim Ibrahim; she claimed Lila Sabarmati was teaching her to put on make-up; she visited Homi Catrack to gossip about guns. (It was the tragic irony of Homi Catrack's life that he, at whom a gun would one day be pointed, was a true aficionado of firearms… in Evie he found a fellow-creature, a motherless child who was, unlike his own Toxy, as sharp as a knife and as bright as a bottle. Incidentally, Evie Burns wasted no sympathy on poor Toxy Catrack. 'Wrong inna head,' she opined carelessly to us all, 'Oughta be put down like rats.' But Evie: rats are not weak! There was more that was rodent-like in your face than in the whole body of your despised Tox.)

That was Evelyn Lilith; and within weeks of her arrival, I had set off the chain reaction from whose effects I would never fully recover.

It began with Sonny Ibrahim, Sonny-next-door, Sonny of the forcep-hollows, who has been sitting patiently in the wings of my story, awaiting his cue. In those days, Sonny was a badly bruised fellow: more than forceps had dented him. To love the Brass Monkey (even in the nine-year-old sense of the word) was no easy thing to do.

As I've said, my sister, born second and unheralded, had begun to react violently to any declarations of affection. Although she was believed to speak the languages of birds and cats, the soft words of lovers roused in her an almost animal rage; but Sonny was too simple to be warned off. For months now, he had been pestering her with statements such as, 'Saleem's sister, you're a pretty solid type!' or, 'Listen, you want to be my girl? We could go to the pictures with your ayah, maybe…' And for an equal number of months, she had been making him suffer for his love-telling tales to his mother; pushing him into mud-puddles accidentally-on-purpose; once even assaulting him physically, leaving him with long raking claw-marks down his face and an expression of sad-dog injury in his eyes; but he would not learn. And so, at last, she had planned her most terrible revenge.