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

of the Narlikar women moved in; Buckingham Villa was enveloped in the tumu
ltuous dust of the dying palaces of William Methwold. Concealed by dust fr
om Warden Road below, we were nevertheless still vulnerable to telephones;
and it was the telephone which informed us, in the tremulous voice of my
aunt Pia, of the suicide of my beloved uncle Hanif. Deprived of the income
he had received from Homi Catrack, my uncle had taken his booming voice a
nd his obsessions with hearts and reality up to the roof of his Marine Dri
ve apartment block; he had stepped out into the evening sea breeze, fright
ening the beggars so much (when he fell) that they gave up pretending to b
e blind and ran away yelling… in death as in life, Hanif Aziz espoused the
cause of truth and put illusion to flight. He was nearly thirty four year
s old. Murder breeds death; by killing Homi Catrack, I had killed my uncle
, too. It was my fault; and the dying wasn't over yet.
The family gathered at Buckingham Villa: from Agra, Aadam Aziz and Reveren
d Mother; from Delhi, my uncle Mustapha, the Civil Servant who had polishe
d the art of agreeing with his superiors to the point at which they had st
opped hearing him, which is why he never got promoted; and his half Irani
wife Sonia and their children who had been so thoroughly beaten into insig
nificance that I can't even remember how many of them there were; and from
Pakistan, bitter Alia, and even General Zulfikar and my aunt Emerald, who
brought twenty seven pieces of luggage and two servants, and never stoppe
d looking at their watches and inquiring about the date. Their son Zafar a
lso came. And, to complete the circle, my mother brought Pia to stay in ou
r house, 'at least for the forty day mourning period, my sister.'
For forty days, we were besieged by the dust; dust creeping under the wet t
owels we placed around all the windows, dust slyly following in each mourni
ng arrival, dust filtering through the very walls to hang like a shapeless
wraith in the air,' dust deadening the sounds of formal ululation and also
the deadly sniping of grieving kinsfolk; the remnants of Methwold's Estate
settled on my grandmother and goaded her towards a great fury; they irritat
ed the pinched nostrils of Punchinello faced General Zulfikar and forced hi
m to sneeze on to his chin. In the ghost haze of the dust it sometimes seem
ed we could discern the shapes of the past, the mirage of Lila Sabarmati's
pulverized pianola or the prison bars at the window of Toxy Catrack's cell;
Dubash's nude statuette danced in dust form through our chambers, and Sonn
y Ibrahim's bullfight posters visited us as clouds. The Narlikar women had
moved away while bulldozers did their work; we were alone inside the dust s
torm, which gave us all the appearance of neglected furniture, as if we wer
e chairs and tables which had been abandoned for decades without covering s
heets; we looked like the ghosts of ourselves. We were a dynasty born out o
f a nose, the aquiline monster on the face of Aadam Aziz, and the dust, ent
ering our nostrils in our time of grief, broke down our reserve, eroded the