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

e creaks and groans of a rustling, decayed imagination.
My father had succumbed to abstraction. It seems that Narlikar's death and
the end of his tetrapod dream had shown Ahmed Sinai the unreliable nature o
f human relationships; he had decided to divest himself of all such ties. H
e took to rising before dawn and locking himself with his current Fernanda
or Flory in his downstairs office, outside whose windows the two evergreen
trees he planted to commemorate my birth and the Monkey's had already grown
tall enough to keep out most of the daylight when it arrived. Since we har
dly ever dared disturb him, my father entered a deep solitude, a condition
so unusual in our overcrowded country as to border on abnormality; he began
to refuse food from our kitchen and to live on cheap rubbish brought daily
by his girl in a tiffin carrier, lukewarm parathas and soggy vegetable sam
osas and bottles of fizzy drinks. A strange perfume wafted out from under h
is office door; Amina took it for the odour of stale air and second rate fo
od; but it's my belief that an old scent had returned in a stronger form, t
he old aroma of failure which had hung about him from the earliest days.
He sold off the many tenements or chawls which he'd bought cheaply on his a
rrival in Bombay, and on which our family's fortunes had been based. Freein
g himself from all business connections with human beings even his anonymou
s tenants in Kurla and Worli, in Matunga and Mazagaon and Mahim he liquefie
d his assets, and entered the rarefied and abstract air of financial specul
ation. Locked in his office, in those days, his one contact with the outsid
e world (apart from his poor Fernandas) was his telephone. He spent his day
deep in conference with this instrument, as it put his money into such and
such shares or soandso stocks, as it invested in government bonds or bear m
arket equities, selling long or short as he commanded… and invariably getti
ng the best price of the day. In a streak of good fortune comparable only t
o my mother's success on the horses all those years previously, my father a
nd his telephone took the stock exchange by storm, a feat made more remarka
ble by Ahmed Sinai's constantly worsening drinking habits. Djinn sodden, he
nevertheless managed to ride high on the abstract undulations of the money
market, reacting to its emotional, unpredictable shifts and changes the wa
y a lover does to his beloved's slightest whim… he could sense when a share
would rise, when the peak would come; and he always got out before the fal
l. This was how his plunge into the abstract solitude of his telephonic day
s was disguised, how his financial coups obscured his steady divorce from r
eality; but under cover of his growing riches, his condition was getting st
eadily worse.
Eventually the last of his calico skirted secretaries quit, being unable to
tolerate life in an atmosphere so thin and abstract as to make breathing d
ifficult; and now my father sent for Mary Pereira and coaxed her with, 'We'
re friends, Mary, aren't we, you and I?', to which the poor woman replied,