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

d, and then he said, 'Get in the car, all of you.' Only he wouldn't let She
rri in… as the Rover accelerated away with my father at the wheel she began
to chase after us, while the Monkey yelled Daddydaddy and Amina pleaded Ja
numplease and I sat in mute horror, we had to drive for miles, almost all t
he way to Santa Cruz airport, before he had his revenge on the bitch for re
fusing to succumb to his sorceries… she burst an artery as she ran and died
spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of a hungry cow.
The Brass Monkey (who didn't even like dogs) cried for a week; my mother b
ecame worried about dehydration and made her drink gallons of water, pouri
ng it into her as if she were a lawn, Mary said; but I liked the new puppy
my father bought me for my tenth birthday, out of some flicker of guilt p
erhaps: her name was the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, and she had a pedi
gree chock full of champion Alsatians, although in time my mother discover
ed that that was as false as the mock bulbul, as imaginary as my father's
forgotten curse and Mughal ancestry; and after six months she died of vene
real disease. We had no pets after that.
My father was not the only one to approach my tenth birthday with his head l
ost in the clouds of his private dreams; because here is Mary Pereira, indul
ging in her fondness for making chutneys, kasaundies and pickles of all desc
riptions, and despite the cheery presence of her sister Alice there is somet
hing haunted in her face.
'Hullo, Mary!' Padma who seems to have developed a soft spot for my criminal
ayah greets her return to centre stage. 'So what's eating her?'
This, Padma: plagued by her nightmares of assaults by Joseph D'Costa, Mary
was finding it harder and harder to get sleep. Knowing what dreams had in s
tore for her, she forced herself to stay awake; dark rings appeared under h
er eyes, which were covered in a thin, filmy glaze; and gradually the blurr
iness of her perceptions merged waking and dreaming into something very lik
e each other… a dangerous condition to get into, Padma. Not only does your
work suffer but things start escaping from your dreams.. .Joseph D'Costa ha
d, in fact, managed to cross the blurred frontier, and now appeared in Buck
ingham Villa not as a nightmare, but as a full fledged ghost. Visible (at t
his time) only to Mary Pereira, he began haunting her in all the rooms of o
ur home, which, to her horror and shame, he treated as casually as if it we
re his own. She saw him in the drawing room amongst cut glass vases and Dre
sden figurines and the rotating shadows of ceiling fans, lounging in soft a
rmchairs with his long raggedy legs sprawling over the arms; his eyes were
filled up with egg whites and there were holes in his feet where the snake
had bitten him. Once she saw him in Amina Begum's bed in the afternoon, lyi
ng down cool as cucumber right next to my sleeping mother, and she burst ou
t, 'Hey, you! Go on out from there! What do you think, you're some sort of