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

She was as beautiful (if somewhat scrawny) as I was ugly; but she was from
the first, mischievous as a whirlwind and noisy as a crowd. Count the windo
ws and vases, broken accidentally on purpose; number, if you can, the meals
that somehow flew off her treacherous dinner plates, to stain valuable Per
sian rugs! Silence was, indeed, the worst punishment she could have been gi
ven; but she bore it cheerfully, standing innocently amid the ruins of brok
en chairs and shattered ornaments.
Mary Pereira said, 'That one! That Monkey! Should have been born with four
legs!' But Amina, in whose mind the memory of her narrow escape from givi
ng birth to a two headed son had obstinately refused to fade, cried, 'Mary
! What are you saying? Don't even think such things!'… Despite my mother's
protestations, it was true that the Brass Monkey was as much animal as hu
man; and, as all the servants and children on Methwold's Estate knew, she
had the gift of talking to birds, and to cats. Dogs, too: but after she wa
s bitten, at the age of six, by a supposedly rabid stray, and had to be dr
agged kicking and screaming to Breach Candy Hospital, every afternoon for
three weeks, to be given an injection in the stomach, it seems she either
forgot their language or else refused to have any further dealings with th
em. From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of da
ngerous independence. The Brass Monkey was never so furious as when anyone
spoke to her in words of love; desperate for affection, deprived of it by
my overpowering shadow, she had a tendency to turn upon anyone who gave h
er what she wanted, as if she were defending herself against the possibili
ty of being tricked.
… Such as the time when Sonny Ibrahim plucked up his courage to tell her,
'Hey, listen, Saleem's sister you're a solid type. I'm, um, you know, damn
keen on you…' And at once she marched across to where his father and moth
er were sipping lassi in the gardens of Sans Souci to say, 'Nussie auntie,
I don't know what your Sonny's been getting up to. Only just now I saw hi
m and Cyrus behind a bush, doing such funny rubbing things with their soo
soos!'…
The Brass Monkey had bad table manners; she trampled flowerbeds; she acquire
d the tag of problem child; but she and I were close as close, in spite of f
ramed letters from Delhi and sadhu under the tap. From the beginning, I deci
ded to treat her as an ally, not a competitor; and, as a result, she never o
nce blamed me for my preeminence in our household, saying, 'What's to blame?
Is it your fault if they think you're so great?' (But when, years later, I
made the same mistake as Sonny, she treated me just the same.)
And it was Monkey who, by answering a certain wrong number telephone call
, began the process of events which led to my accident in a white washing
chest made of slatted wood.