Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

n bottles. But I was mistaken about one thing: he didn't win.
Cocktail cabinets had whetted his appetite; but it was my arrival that drov
e him to it… In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry stare. The only
way to get a drink was to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a
new breed of doctors sprang up, djinn doctors, one of whom, Dr Sharabi, was
introduced to my father by Homi Catrack next door. After that, on the firs
t of every month, my father and Mr Catrack and many of the city's most resp
ectable men queued up outside Dr Sharabi's mottled glass surgery door, went
in, and emerged with the little pink chitties of alcoholism. But the permi
tted ration was too small for my father's needs; and so he began to send hi
s servants along, too, and gardeners, bearers, drivers (we had a motor car
now, a 1946 Rover with running boards, just like William Methwold's), even
old Musa and Mary Pereira, brought my father back more and more pink chitti
es, which he took to Vijay Stores opposite the circumcising barbershop .in
Gowalia Tank Road and exchanged for the brown paper bags of alcoholism, ins
ide which were the chinking green bottles, full of djinn. And whisky, too:
Ahmed Sinai blurred the edges of himself by drinking the green bottles and
red labels of his servants. The poor, having little else to peddle, sold th
eir identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father turned them in
to liquid and drank them down.
At six o'clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; a
nd every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his n
ight long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the pass
age of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by
the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.
After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the grou
nd floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever,
and he didn't relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to wo
rk; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edge
s, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother's p
reoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door Ahmed
Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries. After nights in which his quarr
el with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language 'What a wife I foun
d! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse what difference?' An
d then tears, and Amina, 'Oh, janum don't torture me!' which, in turn, prov
oked, 'Torture my foot! You think it's torture for a man to ask his wife fo
r attention? God save me from stupid women!' my father limped downstairs to
make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while Amina began to notice
how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left suddenly, flouncing do
wn our drive without any notice; and you must judge whether she chose to be
blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but she did nothing about i
t, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act of recognition was to