Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [120]
Impossible to picture Evie Burns without also conjuring up a bicycle; and not just any two-wheeler, but one of the last of the great old-timers, an Arjuna Indiabike in mint condition, with drop-handlebars wrapped in masking tape and five gears and a seat made of reccine cheetah-skin. And a silver frame (the color, I don’t need to tell you, of the Lone Ranger’s horse) … slobby Eyeslice and neat Hairoil, Cyrus the genius and the Monkey, and Sonny Ibrahim and myself—the best of friends, the true sons of the Estate, its heirs by right of birth—Sonny with the slow innocence he had had ever since the forceps dented his brain and me with my dangerous secret knowledge—yes, all of us, future bullfighters and Navy chiefs and all, stood frozen in open-mouthed attitudes as Evie Burns began to ride her bike, fasterfasterfaster, around and around the edges of the circus-ring. “Lookit me now: watch me go, ya dummies!”
On and off the cheetah-seat, Evie performed. One foot on the seat, one leg stretched out behind her, she whirled around us; she built up speed and then did a headstand on the seat! She could straddle the front wheel, facing the rear, and work the pedals the wrong way round … gravity was her slave, speed her element, and we knew that a power had come among us, a witch on wheels, and the flowers of the hedgerows threw her petals, the dust of the circus-ring stood up in clouds of ovation, because the circus-ring had found its mistress, too: it was the canvas beneath the brush of her whirling wheels.
Now we noticed that our heroine packed a Daisy air-pistol on her right hip … “More to come, ya zeroes!” she yelled, and drew the weapon. Her pellets gave stones the gift of flight; we threw annas into the air and she gunned them down, stone-dead. “Targets! More targets!”—and Eyeslice surrendered his beloved pack of rummy cards without a murmur, so that she could shoot the heads off the kings. Annie Oakley in toothbraces—nobody dared question her sharpshooting, except once, and that was at the end of her reign, during the great cat invasion; and there were extenuating circumstances.
Flushed, sweating, Evie Burns dismounted and announced: “From now on, there’s a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians? Any arguments?”
No arguments; I knew then that I had fallen in love.
At Juhu Beach with Evie: she won the camel-races, could drink more coconut milk than any of us, could open her eyes under the sharp salt water of the Arabian Sea.
Did six months make such a difference? (Evie was half a year older than me.) Did it entitle you to talk to grown-ups as an equal? Evie was seen gossiping with old man Ibrahim Ibrahim; she claimed Lila Sabarmati was teaching her to put on make-up; she visited Homi Catrack to gossip about guns. (It was the tragic irony of Homi Catrack’s life that he, at whom a gun would one day be pointed, was a true aficionado of firearms … in Evie he found a fellow-creature, a motherless child who was, unlike his own Toxy, as sharp as a knife and as bright as a bottle. Incidentally, Evie Burns wasted no sympathy on poor Toxy Catrack. “Wrong inna head,” she opined carelessly to us all, “Oughta be put down like rats.” But Evie: rats are not weak! There was more that was rodent-like in your face than in the whole body of your despised Tox.)
That was Evelyn Lilith; and within weeks of her arrival, I had set off the chain reaction from whose effects I would never fully recover.
It began with Sonny Ibrahim, Sonny-next-door, Sonny of the forcep-hollows, who has been sitting patiently in the wings of my story, awaiting his cue. In those days, Sonny was a badly bruised fellow: more than forceps had dented him. To love the Brass Monkey (even in the nine-year-old sense of the word) was no easy thing to do.
As I’ve said, my sister, born second and unheralded, had begun to react violently to any declarations of affection. Although she was believed to speak