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

d the old Willingd on Club… Throughout my childhood, whenever bad times c
ame to Bombay, some insomniac nightwalker would report that he had seen t
he statue moving; disasters, in the city of my youth, danced to the occul
t music of a horse's grey, stone hooves.
And where are they now, the first inhabitants? Coconuts have done best of a
ll. Coconuts are still' beheaded daily on Chowpatty beach; while on Juhu be
ach, under the languid gaze of film stars at the Sun'n'Sand hotel, small bo
ys still shin up coconut palms and bring down the bearded fruit. Coconuts e
ven have their own festival, Coconut Day, which was celebrated a few days b
efore my synchronistic birth. You may feel reassured about coconuts. Rice h
as not been so lucky; rice paddies lie under concrete now; tenements tower
where once rice wallowed within sight of the sea. But still, in the city, w
e are great rice eaters. Patna rice, Basmati, Kashmiri rice travels to the
metropolis daily; so the original, ur rice has left its mark upon us all, a
nd cannot be said to have died in vain. as for Mumbadevi she's not so popul
ar these days, having been replaced by elephant headed Ganesh in the people
's affections. The calendar of festivals reveals her decline: Ganesh 'Ganpa
ti Baba' has his day of Ganesh Chaturthi, when huge processions are 'taken
out' and march to Chowpatty bearing plaster effigies of the god, which they
hurl into the sea. Ganesh's day is a rain making ceremony, it makes the mo
nsoon possible, and it, too, was celebrated in the days before my arrival a
t the end of the ticktock countdown but where is Mumbadevi's day? It is not
on the calendar. Where the prayers of pomfret folk, the devotions of crab
catchers?… Of all the first inhabitants, the Koli fishermen have come off w
orst of all. Squashed now into a tiny village in the thumb of the handlike
peninsula, they have admittedly given their name to a district Colaba. But
follow Colaba Causeway to its tip past cheap clothes shops and Irani restau
rants and the second rate flats of teachers journalists and clerks and you'
ll find them, trapped between the naval base and the sea. And sometimes Kol
i women, their hands stinking of pomfret guts and crabmeat, jostle arrogant
ly to the head of a Colaba bus queue, with their crimson (or purple) saris hitched braze
their bulging and somewhat fishy eyes. A fort, and afterwards a city, took t
heir land; pile drivers stole (tetrapods would steal) pieces of their sea. B
ut there are still Arab dhows, every evening, spreading their sails against
the sunset… in August 1947, the British, having ended the dominion of fishin
g nets, coconuts, rice and Mumbadevi, were about to depart themselves; no do
minion is everlasting.
And on June 19th, two weeks after their arrival by Frontier Mail, my pare
nts entered into a curious bargain with one such departing Englishman. Hi
s name was William Methwold.