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

an air of grave dignity, informed us, 'They have brought his death home, w
rapped in silk.'
I was not allowed to see the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay wreathed in saff
ron flowers on his hard, single bed; but I got to know all about it anyway,
because the news of it spread far beyond the confines of his room. Mostly, I
heard about it from the Estate servants, who found it quite natural to spea
k openly of a death, but rarely said much about life, because in life everyt
hing was obvious. From Dr Narlikar's own bearer I learned that the death had
, by swallowing large quantities of the sea, taken on the qualities of water
: it had become a fluid thing, and looked happy, sad or indifferent accordin
g to how the light hit it. Homi Catrack's gardener interjected: 'It is dange
rous to look too long at death; otherwise you come away with a little of it
inside you, and there are effects.' We asked: effects? what effects? which e
ffects? how? And Purushottam the sadhu, who had left his place under the Buc
kingham Villa garden tap for the first time in years, said: 'A death makes t
he living see themselves too clearly; after they have been in its presence,
they become exaggerated.' This extraordinary claim was, in fact, borne out b
y events, because afterwards Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi Appah, who had helped t
o clean up the body, became shriller, more shrewish, more terrifying than ev
er; and it seemed that everyone who saw the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay i
n state was affected, Nussie Ibrahim became even sillier and more of a duck,
and Lila Sabarmati, who lived upstairs from the death and had helped to arr
ange its room, afterwards gave in to a promiscuity which had always been lur
king within her, and set herself on a road at whose end there would be bulle
ts, and her husband Commander Sabarmati conducting the Colaba traffic with a
most unusual baton…
Our family, however, stayed away from the death. My father refused to go and
pay his respects, and would never refer to his late friend by name, calling
him simply: 'that traitor'.
Two days later, when the news had been in the papers, Dr Narlikar suddenly
acquired an enormous family of female relations. Having been a bachelor and
misogynist all his life, he was engulfed, in death, by a sea of giant, noi
sy, omnicompetent women, who came crawling out from strange corners of the
city, from milking jobs at Amul Dairies and from the box offices of cinemas
, from street side soda fountains and unhappy marriages; in a year of proce
ssions the Narlikar women formed their own parade, an enormous stream of ou
tsize womanhood flowing up our two storey hillock to fill Dr Narlikar's apa
rtment so full that from the road below you could see their elbows sticking
out of the windows and their behinds overflowing on to the verandah. For a
week nobody got any sleep because the wailing of the Narlikar women filled
the air; but beneath their howls the women were proving as competent as th
ey looked. They took over the running of the Nursing Home; they investigate