Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [133]
He sold off the many tenements or chawls which he’d bought cheaply on his arrival in Bombay, and on which our family’s fortunes had been based. Freeing himself from all business connections with human beings—even his anonymous tenants in Kurla and Worli, in Matunga and Mazagaon and Mahim—he liquefied his assets, and entered the rarefied and abstract air of financial speculation. Locked in his office, in those days, his one contact with the outside world (apart from his poor Fernandas) was his telephone. He spent his day deep in conference with this instrument, as it put his money into suchand-such shares or soandso stocks, as it invested in government bonds or bear market equities, selling long or short as he commanded … and invariably getting the best price of the day. In a streak of good fortune comparable only to my mother’s success on the horses all those years previously, my father and his telephone took the stock exchange by storm, a feat made more remarkable by Ahmed Sinai’s constantly-worsening drinking habits. Djinn-sodden, he nevertheless managed to ride high on the abstract undulations of the money market, reacting to its emotional, unpredictable shifts and changes the way a lover does to his beloved’s slightest whim … he could sense when a share would rise, when the peak would come; and he always got out before the fall. This was how his plunge into the abstract solitude of his telephonic days was disguised, how his financial coups obscured his steady divorce from reality; but under cover of his growing riches, his condition was getting steadily worse.
Eventually the last of his calico-skirted secretaries quit, being unable to tolerate life in an atmosphere so thin and abstract as to make breathing difficult; and now my father sent for Mary Pereira and coaxed her with, “We’re friends, Mary, aren’t we, you and I?”, to which the poor woman replied, “Yes, Sahib, I know; you will look after me when I’m old,” and promised to find him a replacement. The next day she brought him her sister, Alice Pereira, who had worked for all kinds of bosses and had an almost infinite tolerance of men. Alice and Mary had long made up their quarrel over Joe D’Costa; the younger woman was often upstairs with us at the end of the day, bringing her qualities of sparkle and sauciness into the somewhat oppressive air of our home. I was fond of her, and it was through her that we learned of my father’s greatest excesses, whose victims were a budgerigar and a mongrel dog.
By July Ahmed Sinai had entered an almost permanent state of intoxication; one day, Alice reported, he had suddenly gone off for a drive, making her fear for his life, and returned somehow or other with a shrouded bird-cage in which, he said, was his new acquisition, a bulbul or Indian nightingale. “For God knows how long,” Alice confided, “he tells me all about bulbuls; all fairy stories of its singing and what-all; how this Calipha was captivated by its song, how the singing could make longer the beauty of the night; God knows what the poor man was babbling, quoting Persian and Arabic, I couldn’t make top or bottom of it. But then he took off the cover, and in the cage is nothing but a talking budgie, some crook in Chor Bazaar must have painted the feathers! Now how could I tell the poor man, him so excited with his bird and all, sitting there calling out, “Sing, little bulbul! Sing!” … and it’s so funny, just before it died from the paint it just repeated his line back at him, straight out like that—not squawky like a bird, you know, but in his own self-same voice: Sing! Little bulbul, sing!”
But there was worse on the way. A few days later I was sitting with Alice on the servants’ spiral iron staircase when she said, “Baba, I don’t know what