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

ose woman,' the demon within me whispered silently, 'Perpetrator of the wor
st of maternal perfidies! We shall turn you into an awful example; through
you we shall demonstrate the fate which awaits the lascivious. ? unobservan
t adulteress! Did you not see what sleeping around did to the illustrious B
aroness Simki von der Heiden? who was, not to put too fine a point upon it,
a bitch, just like yourself.'
My view of Lila Sabarmati has mellowed with age; after all, she and I had one
thing in common her nose, like mine, possessed tremendous powers. Hers, howe
ver, was a purely worldly magic: a wrinkle of nasal skin could charm the stee
liest of Admirals; a tiny flare of the nostrils ignited strange fires in the
hearts of film magnates. I am a little regretful about betraying that nose; i
t was a little like stabbing a cousin in the back.
What I discovered: every Sunday morning at ten a.m., Lila Sabarmati drove
Eyeslice and Hairoil to the Metro cinema for the weekly meetings of the Me
tro Cub Club. (She volunteered to take the rest of us, too; Sonny and Cyru
s, the Monkey and I piled into her Indian made Hindustan car.) And while w
e drove towards Lana Turner or Robert Taylor or Sandra Dee, Mr Homi Catrac
k was also preparing himself for a weekly rendezvous. While Lila's Hindust
an puttered along beside railway lines, Homi was knotting a cream silk sca
rf around his throat; while she halted at red lights, he donned a Technico
lored bush coat; when she was ushering us into the darkness of the auditor
ium, he was putting on gold rimmed sunglasses; and when she left us to wat
ch our film, he, too, was abandoning a child. Toxy Catrack never failed to
react to his departures by wailing kicking thrashing of legs; she knew wh
at was going on, and not even Bi Appah could restrain her.
Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Lai
la and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and
Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The world is full of lov
e stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessor
s. When Lila drove her Hindustan to an address off Colaba Causeway, she w
as Juliet coming out on to her balcony; when cream scarfed, gold shaded H
omi sped off to meet her (in the same Studebaker in which my mother had o
nce been rushed to Dr Narlikar's Nursing Home), he was Leander swimming t
he Hellespont towards Hero's burning candle. As for my part in the busine
ss I will not give it a name.
I confess: what I did was no act of heroism. I did not battle Homi on h
orseback, with fiery eyes and flaming sword; instead, imitating the act
ion of the snake, I began to cut pieces out of newspapers. From GOAN LI
BERATION COMMITTEE LAUNCHES satyagraha campaign I extracted the letters
'com'; speaker OF E PAK ASSEMBLY DECLARED MANIAC gave me my second
lable, 'man'. I found 'der' concealed in nehru considers RESIGNATION AT
CONGRESS ASSEMBLY; into my second word now, I excised 'sab' from riots