Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [117]
I was not allowed to see the death of Doctor Narlikar as it lay wreathed in saffron flowers on his hard, single bed; but I got to know all about it anyway, because the news of it spread far beyond the confines of his room. Mostly, I heard about it from the Estate servants, who found it quite natural to speak openly of a death, but rarely said much about life, because in life everything was obvious. From Doctor Narlikar’s own bearer I learned that the death had, by swallowing large quantities of the sea, taken on the qualities of water: it had become a fluid thing, and looked happy, sad or indifferent according to how the light hit it. Homi Catrack’s gardener interjected: “It is dangerous to look too long at death; otherwise you come away with a little of it inside you, and there are effects.” We asked: effects? what effects? which effects? how? And Purushottam the sadhu, who had left his place under the Buckingham Villa garden tap for the first time in years, said: “A death makes the living see themselves too clearly; after they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated.” This extraordinary claim was, in fact, borne out by events, because afterwards Toxy Catrack’s nurse Bi-Appah, who had helped to clean up the body, became shriller, more shrewish, more terrifying than ever; and it seemed that everyone who saw the death of Doctor Narlikar as it lay in state was affected, Nussie Ibrahim became even sillier and more of a duck, and Lila Sabarmati, who lived upstairs from the death and had helped to arrange its room, afterwards gave in to a promiscuity which had always been lurking within her, and set herself on a road at whose end there would be bullets, and her husband Commander Sabarmati conducting the Colaba traffic with a most unusual baton …
Our family, however, stayed away from the death. My father refused to go and pay his respects, and would never refer to his late friend by name, calling him simply: “that traitor.”
Two days later, when the news had been in the papers, Doctor Narlikar suddenly acquired an enormous family of female relations. Having been a bachelor and misogynist all his life, he was engulfed, in death, by a sea of giant, noisy, omnicompetent women, who came crawling out from strange corners of the city, from milking jobs at Amul Dairies and from the box-offices of cinemas, from street-side soda-fountains and unhappy marriages; in a year of processions the Narlikar women formed their own parade, an enormous stream of outsize womanhood flowing up our two-storey hillock to fill Doctor Narlikar’s apartment so full that from the road, below you could see their elbows sticking out of the windows and their behinds overflowing on to the verandah. For a week nobody got any sleep because the wailing of the Narlikar women filled the air; but beneath their howls the women were proving as competent as they looked. They took over the running of the Nursing Home; they investigated all of Narlikar’s business deals; and they cut my father out of the tetrapod deal just as coolly as you please. After all those years my father was left with nothing but a hole in his pocket, while the women took Narlikar’s body to Benares to have it cremated, and the Estate servants whispered to me that they had heard how the Doctor’s ashes were sprinkled on the waters of Holy Ganga at Manikarnika-ghat at dusk, and they did not sink, but floated on the surface of the water like tiny glowing firebugs, and were washed out to sea where their strange luminosity must have frightened the captains of ships.
As for Ahmed Sinai: I swear that it was after Narlikar’s death and arrival of the women that he began, literally, to fade … gradually his skin paled, his hair lost its color, until within a few months he had become entirely white except for the