Still I did not guess what was coming; not even when Mary threw herself upon me (I was taller than her now; her tears wet my neck): 'O baba, baba; today you, must learn a thing, such a thing I have done; but come now…' and the little woman drew herself up with immense dignity, '… I will tell you all before that Joseph does. Begum, children, all you other great sirs and madams, come now to sahib's office, and I will tell.'

Public announcements have punctuated my life; Amina in a Delhi gully, and Mary in a sunless office… with my whole family trooping amazedly behind us, I went downstairs with Mary Pereira, who would not let go of my hand.

What was in the room with Ahmed Sinai? What had given my father a face from which djinns and money had been chased away and replaced by a look of utter desolation? What sat huddled up in the corner of the room, filling the air with a sulphurous stench? What, shaped like a man, lacked fingers and toes, whose face seemed to bubble like the hot springs of New Zealand (which I'd seen in the Wonder Book of Wonders)?… No time to explain, because Mary Pereira has begun to talk, gabbling out a secret which has been hidden for over eleven years, pulling us all out of the dream-world she invented when she changed name-tags, forcing us into the horror of the truth. And all the time she held on to me; like a mother protecting her child, she shielded me from my family. (Who were learning… as I was… that they were not…)

… It was just after midnight and in the streets there were fireworks and crowds, the many-headed monster roaring, I did it for my Joseph, sahib, but please don't send me to jail, look the boy is a good boy, sahib, I am a poor woman, sahib, one mistake, one minute in so many years, not jailkhana sahib, I will go, eleven years I gave but I will go now, sahib, only this is a good boy, sahib, you must not send him, sahib, after eleven years he is your son… O, you boy with your face like the sun coming out, О Saleem my piece-of-the-moon, you must know that your father was Winkie and your mother is also dead…

Mary Pereira ran out of the room.

Ahmed Sinai said, in a voice as faraway as a bird: 'That, in the corner, is my old servant Musa, who tried to rob me once.'

(Can any narrative stand so much so soon? I glance towards Padma; she appears to be stunned, like a fish.)

Once upon a time there was a servant who robbed my father; who swore he was innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should prove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I told you then he was a time-bomb, and he had returned to explode. Musa had, indeed, contracted leprosy; and had returned across the silence of the years to beg for my father's forgiveness, so that he could be released from his self-inflicted curse.

… Someone was called God who was not God; someone else was taken for a ghost, and was not a ghost; and a third person discovered that although his name was Saleem Sinai, he was not his parents' son…

'I forgive you,' Ahmed Sinai said to the leper. After that day, he was cured of one of his obsessions; he never tried again to discover his own (and wholly imaginary) family curse.

'I couldn't tell it any other way,' I say to Padma. Too painful; I had to just blurt it out, all crazy-sounding, just like that.'

'O, mister,' Padma blubbers helplessly, 'O, mister, mister!'

'Come on now,' I say, 'It's an old story.'

But her tears aren't for me; for the moment, she's forgotten about what-chews-at-bones-beneath-the-skin; she's crying over Mary Pereira, of whom, as I've said, she had become excessively fond.

'What happened to her?' she says with red eyes. 'That Mary?'

I am seized by an irrational anger. I shout: 'You ask her!'

Ask her how she went home to the city of Panjim in Goa, how she told her ancient mother the story of her shame! Ask how her mother went wild with the scandal (appropriately enough: it was a time for old folk to lose their wits)! Ask: did daughter and old mother go into the streets to seek forgiveness? Was that not the one time in each ten years when the mummified corpse of St Francis Xavier (as holy a relic as the Prophet's hair) is taken from its vault in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus and carried around the town? Did Mary and old distraught Mrs Pereira find themselves pressing up against the catafalque; was the old lady beside herself with grief for her daughter's crime? Did old Mrs Pereira, shouting, 'Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai!', clamber up on to the bier to kiss the foot of the Holy One? Amidst uncountable crowds, did Mrs Pereira enter a holy frenzy? Ask! Did she or didn't she, in the clutches of her wild spirit, place her lips around the big toe on St Francis's left foot? Ask for yourself: did Mary's mother bite the toe right off?

'How?' Padma wails, unnerved by my wrath. 'How, ask?'

… And is this also true: were the papers making it up when they wrote that the old lady had been miraculously punished; when they quoted Church sources and eye-witnesses, who described how the old woman was turned into solid stone? No? Ask her if it's true that the Church sent a stone-statue figure of an old woman around the towns and the villages of Goa, to show what happened to those who misbehave with 'the saints? 'Ask: was this statue not seen in several villages simultaneously-and does that prove fraud, or a further miracle? 'You know I can't ask anyone,' Padma howls… but I, feeling my fury subside, am making no more revelations tonight.

Baldly, then: Mary Pereira left us, and went to her mother in Goa. But Alice Pereira stayed; Alice remained in Ahmed Sinai's office, and typed, and fetched snacks and fizzy drinks.

As for me-at the end of the mourning period for my uncle Hanif, I entered my second exile.

I was obliged to come to the conclusion that Shiva, my rival, my changeling brother, could no longer be admitted into the forum of my mind; for reasons which were, I admit, ignoble. I was afraid he would discover what I was sure I could not conceal from him-the secrets of our birth. Shiva, for whom the world was things, for whom history could only be explained as the continuing struggle of oneself-against-the-crowd, would certainly insist on claiming his birthright; and, aghast at the very notion of my knock-kneed antagonist replacing me in the blue room of my childhood while I, perforce, walked morosely off the two-storey hillock to enter the northern slums; refusing to accept that the prophecy of Ramram Seth had been intended for Winkie's boy, that it was to Shiva that Prime Ministers had written, and for Shiva that fishermen pointed out to sea… placing, in short, a far higher value on my eleven-year-old sonship than on mere blood, I resolved that my destructive, violent alter ego should never again enter the increasingly fractious councils of the Midnight Children's Conference; that I would guard my secret-which had once been Mary's-with my very life.

There were nights, at this time, when I avoided convening the Conference at all-not because of the unsatisfactory turn it had taken, but simply because I knew it would take time, and cool blood, to erect a barrier around my new knowledge which could deny it to the Children; eventually, I was confident, I would manage this… but I was afraid of Shiva. Most ferocious and powerful of the Children, he would penetrate where others could not go… At any rate, I avoided my fellow-Children; and then suddenly it was too late, because, having exiled Shiva, I found myself hurled into an exile from which I was incapable of contacting my more-than-five-hundred colleagues: I was flung across the Partition-created frontier into Pakistan.

Late in September 1958, the mourning period for my uncle Hanif Aziz came to an end; and, miraculously, the dust-cloud which had enveloped us was settled by a merciful shower of rain. When we had bathed and put on newly-washed clothes and switched on the ceiling-fans, we emerged from bathrooms filled, briefly, with the illusory optimism of freshly-soaped cleanliness; to discover a dusty, unwashed Ahmed Sinai, whisky-bottle in his hand, his eyes rimmed with blood, swaying upstairs from his office in the manic grip of djinns. He had been wrestling, in his private world of abstraction, with the unthinkable realities which Mary's revelations had unleashed; and owing to some cockeyed functioning of the alcohol, had been seized by an indescribable rage which he directed, neither at Mary's departed back, not at the changeling in his midst, but at my mother-at, I should say, Amina Sinai. Perhaps because he knew he should beg her forgiveness, and would not, Ahmed ranted at her for hours within the shocked hearing of her family; I will not repeat the names he called her, nor the vile courses of action he recommended she should take with her life. But in the end it was Reverend Mother who intervened.