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

all; because children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, a
nd it was the poison of grown ups which did for us. Poison, and after a gap o
f many years, a Widow with a knife.
In short: after my return to Buckingham Villa, even the salt of the midnigh
t children lost its savour; there were nights, now, when I did not even bot
her to set up my nationwide network; and the demon lurking inside me (it ha
d two heads) was free to get on with its devilment. (I never knew about Shi
va's guilt or innocence of whore murders; but such was the influence of Kal
i Yuga that I, the good guy and natural victim, was certainly responsible f
or two deaths. First came Jimmy Kapadia; and second was Homi Catrack.)
If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it i
s murdered.
We all had our troubles in those, days. Homi Catrack had his idiot Toxy, an
d the Ibrahims had other worries: Sonny's father Ismail, after years of bri
bing judges and juries, was in danger of being investigated by the Bar Comm
ission; and Sonny's uncle Ishaq, who ran the second rate Embassy Hotel near
Flora Fountain, was reputedly deep in debt to local gangsters, and worried
constantly about being 'bumped off' (in those days, assassinations were be
coming as quotidian as the heat)… so perhaps it isn't surprising that we ha
d all forgotten about the existence of Professor Schaapsteker. (Indians gro
w larger and more powerful as they age; but Schaapsteker was a European, an
d his kind unfortunately fade away with the years, and,often completely dis
appear.)
But now, driven, perhaps, by my demon, my feet led me upstairs to the top fl
oor of Buckingham Villa, where I found a mad old man, incredibly tiny and sh
runken, whose narrow tongue darted constantly in and out between his lips fl
icking, licking: the former searcher after antivenenes, assassin of horses,
Sharpsticker sahib, now ninety two and no longer of his eponymous Institute,
but retired into a dark top floor apartment filled with tropical vegetation
and serpents pickled in brine. Age, failing to draw his teeth and poison sa
cs, had turned him instead into the incarnation of snakehood; like other Eur
opeans who stay too long, the ancient insanities of India had pickled his br
ains, so that he had come to believe the superstitions of the Institute orde
rlies, according to whom he was the last of a line which began when a king c
obra mated with a woman who gave birth to a human (but serpentine) child… it
seems that all my life I've only had to turn a corner to tumble into yet an
other new and fabulously transmogrified world. Climb a ladder (or even a sta
ircase) and you find a snake awaiting you.
The curtains were always drawn; in Schaapsteker's rooms, the sun neither ro
se nor set, and no clocks ticked. Was it the demon, or our mutual sense of
isolation which drew us together?… Because, in those days of the Monkey's a