Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [121]
The Monkey attended Walsingham School for Girls on Nepean Sea Road; a school full of tall, superbly muscled Europeans, who swam like fish and dived like submarines. In their spare time, they could be seen from our bedroom window, cavorting in the map-shaped pool of the Breach Candy Club, from which we were, of course, barred … and when I discovered that the Monkey had somehow attached herself to these segregated swimmers, as a sort of mascot, I felt genuinely aggrieved with her for perhaps the first time … but there was no arguing with her; she went her own way. Beefy fifteen-year-old white girls let her sit with them on the Walsingham school bus. Three such females would wait with her every morning at the same place where Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus-the-great and I awaited the bus from the Cathedral School.
One morning, for some forgotten reason, Sonny and I were the only boys at the stop. Maybe there was a bug going round or something. The Monkey waited until Mary Pereira had left us alone, in the care of the beefy swimmers; and then suddenly the truth of what she was planning flashed into my head as, for no particular reason, I tuned into her thoughts; and I yelled “Hey!”—but too late. The Monkey screeched, “You keep out of this!” and then she and the three beefy swimmers had jumped upon Sonny Ibrahim, street-sleepers and beggars and bicycling clerks were watching with open amusement, because they were ripping every scrap of clothing off his body … “Damn it man, are you just going to stand and watch?”—Sonny yelling for help, but I was immobilized, how could I take sides between my sister and my best friend, and he, “I’ll tell my daddy on you!”, tearful now, while the Monkey, “That’ll teach you to talk shit—and that’ll teach you,” his shoes, off; no shirt any more; his vest, dragged off by a high-board diver. “And that’ll teach you to write your sissy love letters,” no socks now, and plenty of tears, and “There!” yelled the Monkey; the Walsingham bus arrived and the assailants and my sister jumped in and sped away, “Ta-ta-ba-ta, lover-boy!” they yelled, and Sonny was left in the street, on the pavement opposite Chimalker’s and Reader’s Paradise, naked as the day he was born; his forcep-hollows glistened like rock-pools, because Vaseline had dripped into them from his hair; and his eyes were wet as well, as he, “Why’s she do it, man? Why, when I only told her I liked …”
“Search me,” I said, not knowing where to look, “She does things, that’s all.” Not knowing, either, that the time would come when she did something worse to me.
But that was nine years later … meanwhile, early in 1957, election campaigns had begun: the Jan Sangh was campaigning for rest homes for aged sacred cows; in Kerala, E. M. S. Namboodiripad was promising that Communism would give everyone food and jobs; in Madras, the Anna-D.M.K. party of C. N. Annadurai fanned the flames of regionalism; the Congress fought back with reforms such as the Hindu Succession Act, which gave Hindu women equal rights of inheritance … in short, everybody was busy pleading his own cause; I, however, found myself tongue-tied in the face of Evie Burns, and approached Sonny Ibrahim to ask him to plead on my behalf.
In India, we’ve always been vulnerable to Europeans … Evie had only been with us a matter of weeks, and already I was being sucked into a grotesque