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

wold's Estate of curious flowers, made out of wood and tin, and hand pain
ted with bright red lettering… the fatal signboards erected in all the ga
rdens except our own, evidence that my powers exceeded even my own unders
tanding, and that, having once been exiled from my two storey hillock, I
had now managed to send everyone else away instead.
Signboards in the gardens of Versailles Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci
; signboards nodding to each other in the sea breeze of the cocktail hour. O
n each signboard could be discerned the same seven letters, all bright red,
all twelve inches high: for sale. That was the signboards' message. for sale
Versailles Villa, its owner dead on a toilet seat; the sale was handled by
the ferocious nurse Bi Appah on behalf of poor idiot Toxy; once the sale was
complete, nurse and nursed vanished forever, and Bi Appah held, on her lap,
a bulging suitcase filled with banknotes… I don't know what happened to Tox
y, but considering the avarice of her nurse, I'm sure it was nothing good… f
or sale, the Sabarmati apartment in Escorial Villa; Lila Sabarmati was denie
d custody of her children and faded out of our lives, while Eyeslice and Hai
roil packed their bags and departed into the care of the Indian Navy, which
had placed itself in loco parentis until their father completed his thirty y
ears in jail… for sale, too, the Ibrahims' Sans Souci, because Ishaq Ibrahim
's Embassy Hotel had been burned down by gangsters on the day of Commander S
abarmati's final defeat, as though the criminal classes of the city were pun
ishing the lawyer's family for his failure; and then Ismail Ibrahim was susp
ended from practice, owing to certain proofs of professional misconduct (to
quote the Bombay Bar Commission's report); financially 'embarrassed', the Ib
rahims also passed out of our lives; and, finally forsale, the apartment of
Cyrus Dubash and his mother, because during the hue and cry of the Sabarmati
affair, and almost entirely unnoticed, the nuclear physicist had died his o
range pip choking death, thus unleashing upon Cyrus the religious fanaticism
of his mother and setting in motion the wheels of the period of revelations
which will be the subject of my next little piece.
The signboards nodded in the gardens, which were losing their memories o
f goldfish and cocktail hours and invading cats; and who took them down?
Who were the heirs of the heirs of William Methwold?… They came swarmin
g out of what had once been the residence of Dr Narlikar: fat bellied an
d grossly competent women, grown fatter and more competent than ever on
their tetrapod given wealth (because those were the years of the great l
and reclamations) . The Narlikar women from the Navy they bought Command
er Sabarmati's flat, and from the departing Mrs Dubash her Cyrus's home;
they paid Bi Appah in used banknotes, and the Ibrahims' creditors were
appeased by Narlikar cash.
My father, alone of all the residents, refused to sell; they offered him vas
t sums, but he shook his head. They explained their dream a dream of razing