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

es the room; and Amina, aghast, asks: 'But, Musa, why did you make that ter
rible oath?'
… Because, in the interim between line up in passageway and discoveries in s
ervants' quarters, Musa had said to his master: 'It was not me, sahib. If I
have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper! May my old skin run with sore
s!'
Amina, with horror on her face, awaits Musa's reply. The bearer's old face
twists into a mask of anger; words are spat out. 'Begum Sahiba, I only took
your precious possessions, but you, and your sahib, and his father, have t
aken my whole life; and in my old age you have humiliated me with Christian
ayahs.'
There is silence in Buckingham Villa Amina has refused to press charges, bu
t Musa is leaving. Bedroll on his back, he descends a spiral iron staircase
, discovering that ladders can go down as well as up; he walks away down hi
llock, leaving a curse upon the house.
And (was it the curse that did it?) Mary Pereira is about to discover that ev
en when you win a battle; even when staircases operate in your favour, you ca
n't avoid a snake.
Amina says, 'I can't get you any more money, Ismail; have you had enough?' A
nd Ismail, 'I hope so but you never know is there any chance of… ?' But Amin
a: 'The trouble is, I've got so big and all, I can't get in the car any more
. It will just have to do.'
… Time is slowing down for Amina once more; once again, her eyes look throu
gh leaded glass, in which red tulips, green stemmed, dance in unison; for a
second time, her gaze lingers on a clocktower which has not worked since t
he rains of 1947; once again, it is raining. The racing season is over.
A pale blue clocktower: squat, peeling, inoperational. It stood on black ta
rred concrete at the end of the circus ring the flat roof of the upper stor
ey of the buildings along Warden Road, which abutted our two storey hillock
, so that if you climbed over Buckingham Villa's boundary wall, flat black
tar would be under your feet. And beneath black tar, Breach Candy Kindergar
ten School, from which, every afternoon during term, there rose the tinklin
g music of Miss Harrison's piano playing the unchanging tunes of childhood;
and below that, the shops, Reader's Paradise, Fatbhoy Jewellery, Chimalker
's Toys and Bombelli's, with its windows filled with One Yards of Chocolate
s. The door to the clocktower was supposed to be locked, but it was a cheap
lock of a kind Nadir Khan would have recognized: made in India. And on thr
ee successive evenings immediately before my first birthday, Mary Pereira,
standing by my window at night, noticed a shadowy figure floating across th
e roof, his hands full of shapeless objects, a shadow which filled her with
an unidentifiable dread. After the third night, she told my mother; the po