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

d all of Narlikar's business deals; and they cut my father out of the tetra
pod deal just as coolly as you please. After all those years my father was
left with nothing but a hole in his pocket, while the women took Narlikar's
body to Benares to have it cremated, and the Estate servants whispered to
me that they had heard how the Doctor's ashes were sprinkled on the waters
of Holy Ganga at Manikarnika ghat at dusk, and they did not sink, but float
ed on the surface of the water like tiny glowing firebugs, and were washed
out to sea where their strange luminosity must have frightened the captains
of ships.
As for Ahmed Sinai: I swear that it was after Narlikar's death and the arriv
al of the women that he began, literally, to fade… gradually his skin paled,
his hair lost its colour, until within a few months he had become entirely
white except for the darkness of his eyes. (Mary Pereira told Amina: 'That m
an is cold in the blood; so now his skin has made ice, white ice like a frid
ge.') I should say, in all honesty, that although he pretended to be worried
by his transformation into a white man, and went to see doctors and so fort
h, he was secretly rather pleased when they failed to explain the problem or
prescribe a cure, because he had long envied Europeans their pigmentation.
One day, when it was permissible to make jokes again (a decent interval had
been allowed to elapse after Dr Narlikar's death), he told Lila Sabarmati at
the cocktail hour: 'All the best people are white under the skin; I have me
rely given up pretending.' His neighbours, all of whom were darker than he,
laughed politely and felt curiously ashamed.
Circumstantial evidence indicates that the shock of Narlikar's death was r
esponsible for giving me a snow white father to set beside my ebony mother
; but (although I don't know how much you're prepared to swallow) I shall
risk giving an alternative explanation, a theory developed in the abstract
privacy of my clocktower… because during my frequent psychic travels, I d
iscovered something rather odd: during the first nine years after Independ
ence, a similar pigmentation disorder (whose first recorded victim may wel
l have been the Rani of Cooch Naheen) afflicted large numbers of the natio
n's business community. All over India, I stumbled across good Indian busi
nessmen, their fortunes thriving thanks to the first Five Year Plan, which
had concentrated on building up commerce… businessmen who had become or w
ere becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan (even he
roic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming master
s of their own destinies had drained the colour from their cheeks… in whic
h case, perhaps my father was a late victim of a widespread, though genera
lly unremarked phenomenon. The businessmen of India were turning white.
That's enough to chew on for one day. But Evelyn Lilith Burns is coming; th
e Pioneer Cafe is getting painfully close; and more vitally midnight's othe
r children, including my alter ego Shiva, he of the deadly knees, are press