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

n army of thirsting felines; cats swarming all over the circus ring, cats cl
imbing bougainvillaea creepers and leaping into sitting rooms, cats knocking
over flower vases to drink the plant stale water, cats bivouacked in bathro
oms, slurping liquid out of water closets, cats rampant in the kitchens of t
he palaces of William Methwold. The Estate's servants were vanquished in the
ir attempts to repel the great cat invasion; the ladies of the Estate were r
educed to helpless exclamations of horror. Hard dry worms of cat excrement w
ere everywhere; gardens were ruined by sheer feline force of numbers: and at
night sleep became an impossibility as the army found voice, and sang its t
hirst at the moon. (The Baroness Simki von der Heiden refused to fight the c
ats; she was already showing signs of the disease which would shortly lead t
o her extermination.)
Nussie Ibrahim rang my mother to announce, 'Amina sister, it is the end of t
he world.'
She was wrong; because on the third day after the great cat invasion, Evelyn
Lilith Burns visited each Estate household in turn, carrying her Daisy air
gun casually in one hand, and offered, in return for bounty money, to end th
e plague of pussies double quick.
All that day, Methwold's Estate echoed with the sounds of Evie's air gun and
the agonized wauls of the cats, as Evie stalked the entire army one by one
and made herself rich. But (as history so often demonstrates) the moment of
one's greatest triumph also contains the seeds of one's final downfall; and
so it proved, because Evie's persecution of the cats was,' as far as the Bra
ss Monkey was concerned, absolutely the last straw.
'Brother,' the Monkey told me grimly, 'I told you I'd get that girl; now, righ
t now, the time has come.'
Unanswerable questions: was it true that my sister had acquired the language
s of cats as well as birds? Was it her fondness for feline life which pushed
her over the brink?… by the time of the great cat invasion, the Monkey's ha
ir had faded into brown; she had broken her habit of burning shoes; but stil
l, and for whatever reason, there was a fierceness in her which none of the
rest of us ever possessed; and she went down into the circus ring and yelled
at the top of her voice: 'Evie! Evie Burns! You come out here, this minute,
wherever you are!'
Surrounded by fleeing cats, the Monkey awaited Evelyn Burns. I went out on
to the first floor verandah to watch; from their verandahs, Sonny and Eye
slice and Hairoil and Cyrus were watching too. We saw Evie Burns appear fr
om the direction of the Versailles Villa kitchens; she was blowing the smo
ke away from the barrel of her gun.
'You Indians c'n thank your stars you got me around,' Evie declared, 'or you'd
just've got eaten by these cats!'
We saw Evie fall silent as she saw the thing sitting tensely in the Monkey's