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

ing with old man Ibrahim Ibrahim; she claimed Lila Sabarmati was teaching h
er to put on make up; she visited Homi Catrack to gossip about guns. (It wa
s the tragic irony of Homi Catrack's life that he, at whom a gun would one
day be pointed, was a true aficionado of firearms… in Evie he found a fello
w creature, a motherless child who was, unlike his own Toxy, as sharp as a
knife and as bright as a bottle. Incidentally, Evie Burns wasted no sympath
y on poor Toxy Catrack. 'Wrong inna head,' she opined carelessly to us all,
'Oughta be put down like rats.' But Evie: rats are not weak! There was mor
e that was rodent like in your face than in the whole body of your despised
Tox.)
That was Evelyn Lilith; and within weeks of her arrival, I had set off the ch
ain reaction from whose effects I would never fully recover.
It began with Sonny Ibrahim, Sonny next door, Sonny of the forcep hollows,
who has been sitting patiently in the wings of my story, awaiting his cue
. In those days, Sonny was a badly bruised fellow: more than forceps had d
ented him. To love the Brass Monkey (even in the nine year old sense of th
e word) was no easy thing to do.
As I've said, my sister, born second and unheralded, had begun to react vio
lently to any declarations of affection. Although she was believed to speak
the languages of birds and cats, the soft words of lovers roused in her an
almost animal rage; but Sonny was too simple to be warned off. For months
now, he had been pestering her with statements such as, 'Saleem's sister, y
ou're a pretty solid type!' or, 'Listen, you want to be my girl? We could g
o to the pictures with your ayah, maybe…' And for an equal number of months
, she had been making him suffer for his love telling tales to his mother;
pushing him into mud puddles accidentally on purpose; once even assaulting
him physically, leaving him with long raking claw marks down his face and a
n expression of sad dog injury in his eyes; but he would not learn. And so,
at last, she had planned her most terrible revenge.
The Monkey attended Walsingham School for Girls on Nepean Sea Road; a sch
ool full of tall, superbly muscled Europeans, who swam like fish and dive
d like submarines. In their spare time, they could be seen from our bedro
om window, cavorting in the map shaped pool of the Breach Candy Club, fro
m which we were, of course, barred… and when I discovered that the Monkey
had somehow attached herself to these segregated swimmers, as a sort of
mascot, I felt genuinely aggrieved with her for perhaps the first time… b
ut there was no arguing with her; she went her own way. Beefy fifteen yea
r old white girls let her sit with them on the Walsingham school bus. Thr
ee such females would wait with her every morning at the same place where
Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus the great and I awaited the bus from the
Cathedral School.
One morning, for some forgotten reason, Sonny and I were the only boys at t