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

e discussed her unhappiness with Mary Pereira, but the ayah only told her t
hat there was no happiness to be gained from 'the mens'; they made pickles
together as they talked, and Amina stirred her disappointments into a hot l
ime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes.
Although Ahmed Sinai's office hours were filled with fantasies of secretari
es taking dictation in the nude, visions of his Fernandas or Poppys strolli
ng around the room in their birthday suits with crisscross cane marks on th
eir rumps, his apparatus refused to respond; and one day, when the real Fer
nanda or Poppy had gone home, he was playing chess with Dr Narlikar, his to
ngue (as well as his game) made somewhat loose by djinns, and he confided a
wkwardly, 'Narlikar, I seem to have lost interest in you know what.'
A gleam of pleasure radiated from the luminous gynaecologist; the birth cont
rol fanatic in the dark, glowing doctor leaped out through his eyes and made
the following speech: 'Bravo!' Dr Narlikar cried, 'Brother Sinai, damn good
show! You and, may I add, myself yes, you and I, Sinai bhai, are persons of
rare spiritual worth! Not for us the panting humiliations of the flesh is i
t not a finer thing, I ask you, to eschew procreation to avoid adding one mo
re miserable human life to the vast multitudes which are presently beggaring
our country and, instead, to bend our energies to the task of giving them m
ore land to stand on? I tell you, my friend: you and I and our tetrapods: fr
om the very oceans we shall bring forth soil!' To consecrate this oration, A
hmed Sinai poured drinks; my father and Dr Narlikar drank a toast to their f
our legged concrete dream.
'Land, yes! Love, no!' Dr Narlikar said, a little unsteadily; my father refilled
his glass.
By the last days of 1956, the dream of reclaiming land from the sea with th
e aid of thousands upon thousands of large concrete tetrapods that same dre
am which had been the cause of the freeze and which was now, for my father,
a sort of surrogate for the sexual activity which the aftermath of the fre
eze denied him actually seemed to be coming close to fruition. This time, h
owever, Ahmed Sinai was spending his money cautiously; this time he remaine
d hidden in the background, and his name appeared on no documents; this tim
e, he had learned the lessons of the freeze and was determined to draw as l
ittle attention to himself as possible; so that when Dr Narlikar betrayed h
im by dying, leaving behind him no record of my father's involvement in the
tetrapod scheme, Ahmed Sinai (who was prone, as we have seen, to react bad
ly in the face of disaster) was swallowed up by the mouth of a long, snakin
g decline from which he would not emerge until, at the very end of his days
, he at last fell in love with his wife.
This is the story that got back to Methwold's Estate: Dr Narlikar had been
visiting friends near Marine Drive; at the end of the visit, he had resolve