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

he stop. Maybe there was a bug going round or something. The Monkey waited
until Mary Pereira had left us alone, in the care of the beefy swimmers; an
d then suddenly the truth of what she was planning flashed into my head as,
for no particular reason, I tuned into her thoughts; and I yelled 'Hey!' b
ut too late. The Monkey screeched, 'You keep out of this!' and then she and
the three beefy swimmers had jumped upon Sonny Ibrahim, street sleepers an
d beggars and bicycling clerks were watching with open amusement, because t
hey were ripping every scrap of clothing off his body… 'Damn it man, are yo
u going just to stand and watch?' Sonny yelling for help, but I was immobil
ized, how could I take sides between my sister and my best friend, and he,
'I'll tell my daddy on you!', tearful now, while the Monkey, 'That'll teach
you to talk shit and that'll teach you', his shoes, off; no shirt any more
; his vest, dragged off by a high board diver, 'And that'll teach you to wr
ite your sissy love letters', no socks now, and plenty of tears, and 'There
!' yelled the Monkey; the Walsingham bus arrived and the assailants and my
sister jumped in and sped away, 'Ta ta ba ta, lover boy!' they yelled, and
Sonny was left in the street, on the pavement opposite Chimalker's and Read
er's Paradise, naked as the day he was born; his forcep hollows glistened l
ike rock pools, because Vaseline had dripped into them from his hair; and h
is eyes were wet as well, as he, 'Why's she do it, man? Why, when I only to
ld her I liked…'
'Search me,' I said, not knowing where to look, 'She does things, that's all
.' Not knowing, either, that the time would come when she did something wors
e to me.
But that was nine years later… meanwhile, early in 1957, election campai
gns had begun: the Jan Sangh was campaigning for rest homes for aged sac
red cows; in Kerala, E. M. S. Namboodiripad was promising that Communism
would give everyone food and jobs; in Madras, the Anna D.M.K. party of
C. N. Annadurai fanned the flames of regionalism; the Congress fought ba
ck with reforms such as the Hindu Succession Act, which gave Hindu women
equal rights of inheritance… in short, everybody was busy pleading his
own cause; I, however, found myself tongue tied in the face of Evie Burn
s, and approached Sonny Ibrahim to ask him to plead on my behalf.
In India, we've always been vulnerable to Europeans… Evie had only been wit
h us a matter of weeks, and already I was being sucked into a grotesque mim
icry of European literature. (We had done Cyrano, in a simplified version,
at school; I had also read the Classics Illustrated comic book.) Perhaps it
would be fair to say that Europe repeats itself, in India, as farce… Evie
was American. Same thing.
'But hey, man, that's no fair man, why don't you do it yourself?'
'Listen, Sonny,' I pleaded, 'you're my friend, right?'