Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [134]
The mongrel bitch we named Sherri had strolled up to the two-storey hillock earlier that year and simply adopted us, not knowing that life was a dangerous business for animals on Methwold’s Estate; and in his cups Ahmed Sinai made her the guinea-pig for his experiments with the family curse.
This was that same fictional curse which he’d dreamed up to impress William Methwold, but now in the liquescent chambers of his mind the djinns persuaded him that it was no fiction, that he’d just forgotten the words; so he spent long hours in his insanely solitary office experimenting with formulae … “Such things he is cursing the poor creature with!” Alice said, “I wonder she don’t drop down dead straight off!”
But Sherri just sat there in a corner and grinned stupidly back at him, refusing to turn purple or break out in boils, until one evening he erupted from his office and ordered Amina to drive us all to Hornby Vellard. Sherri came too. We promenaded, wearing puzzled expressions, up and down the Vellard, and then he said, “Get in the car, all of you.” Only he wouldn’t let Sherri in … as the Rover accelerated away with my father at the wheel she began to chase after us, while the Monkey yelled Daddydaddy and Amina pleaded Janumplease and I sat in mute horror, we had to drive for miles, almost all the way to Santa Cruz airport, before he had his revenge on the bitch for refusing to succumb to his sorceries … she burst an artery as she ran and died spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of a hungry cow.
The Brass Monkey (who didn’t even like dogs) cried for a week; my mother became worried about dehydration and made her drink gallons of water, pouring it into her as if she were a lawn, Mary said; but I liked the new puppy my father bought me for my tenth birthday, out of some flicker of guilt perhaps: her name was the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, and she had a pedigree chock-full of champion Alsatians, although in time my mother discovered that that was as false as the mock-bulbul, as imaginary as my father’s forgotten curse and Mughal ancestry; and after six months she died of venereal disease. We had no pets after that.
My father was not the only one to approach my tenth birthday with his head lost in the clouds of his private dreams; because here is Mary Pereira, indulging in her fondness for making chutneys, kasaundies and pickles of all descriptions, and despite the cheery presence of her sister Alice there is something haunted in her face.
“Hullo, Mary!” Padma—who seems to have developed a soft spot for my criminal ayah—greets her return to center-stage. “So what’s eating her?”
This, Padma: plagued by her nightmares of assaults by Joseph D’Costa, Mary was finding it harder and harder to get sleep. Knowing what dreams had in store for her, she forced herself to stay awake; dark rings appeared under her eyes, which were covered in a thin, filmy glaze; and gradually the blurriness of her perceptions merged waking and dreaming into something very like each other … a dangerous condition to get into, Padma. Not only does your work suffer but things start escaping from your dreams … Joseph D’Costa had, in fact, managed to cross the blurred frontier, and now appeared in Buckingham Villa not as a nightmare, but as a full-fledged ghost. Visible (at this time) only to Mary Pereira, he began haunting her in all the rooms of our home, which, to her horror and shame, he treated as casually as if it were his own. She saw him in the drawing-room amongst cut-glass vases and Dresden figurines and the rotating shadows of ceiling-fans, lounging in soft armchairs with his long raggedy legs sprawling over the arms; his eyes were filled up with egg-whites and there were holes in his feet where the snake had bitten him. Once she saw him in Amina Begum’s bed in the afternoon, lying down cool as a cucumber right next to my sleeping mother, and she burst out, “Hey, you! Go on out from there! What do you think, you’re some sort of lord?”—but she