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

'Yes, sahib, I know; you will look after me when I'm old,' and promised to
find him a replacement. The next day she brought him her sister, Alice Pere
ira, who had worked for all kinds of bosses and had an almost infinite tole
rance of men. Alice and Mary had long since made up their quarrel over Joe
D'Costa; the younger woman was often upstairs with us at the end of the day
, bringing her qualities of sparkle and sauciness into the somewhat oppress
ive air of our home. I was fond of her, and it was through her that we lear
ned of my father's greatest excesses, whose victims were a budgerigar and a
mongrel dog.
By July Ahmed Sinai had entered an almost permanent state of intoxication; o
ne day, Alice reported, he had suddenly gone off for a drive, making her fea
r for his life, and returned somehow or other with a shrouded bird cage in w
hich, he said, was his new acquisition, a bulbul or Indian nightingale. 'For
God knows how long,' Alice confided, 'he tells me all about bulbuls; all fa
iry stories of its singing and what all; how this Calipha was captivated by
its song, how the singing could make longer the beauty of the night; God kno
ws what the poor man was babbling, quoting Persian and Arabic, I couldn't ma
ke top or bottom of it. But then he took off the cover, and in the cage is n
othing but a talking budgie, some crook in Chor Bazaar must have painted the
feathers! Now how could I tell the poor man, him so excited with his bird a
nd all, sitting there calling out, 'Sing, little bulbul! Sing!'… and it's so
funny, just before it died from the paint it just repeated his line back at
him, straight out like that not squawky like a bird, you know, but in his o
wn self same voice: Sing! Little bulbul, sing!'
But there was worse on the way. A few days later I was sitting with Alice on
the servants' spiral iron staircase when she said, 'Baba, I don't know what
got into your daddy now. All day sitting down there cursing curses at the d
og!'
The mongrel bitch we named Sherri had strolled up to the two storey hillock
earlier that year and simply adopted us, not knowing that life was a dange
rous business for animals on Methwold's Estate; and in his cups Ahmed Sinai
made her the guinea pig for his experiments with the family curse.
This was that same fictional curse which he'd dreamed up to impress William
Methwold, but now in the liquescent chambers of his mind the djinns persua
ded him that it was no fiction, that he'd just forgotten the words; so he s
pent long hours in his insanely solitary office experimenting with formulae
… 'Such things he is cursing the poor creature with!' Alice said, 'I wonder
she don't drop down dead straight off!'
But Sherri just sat there in a corner and grinned stupidly back at him, ref
using to turn purple or break out in boils, until one evening he erupted fr
om his office and ordered Amina to drive us all to Hornby Vellard. Sherri c
ame too. We promenaded, wearing puzzled expressions, up and down the Vellar