Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [165]
What do I know, Amma? I know about the Pioneer Café! Suddenly, as we drove home, I was filled once again with my recent lust for revenge upon my perfidious mother, a lust which had faded in the brilliant glare of my exile, but which now returned and was united with my new-born loathing of Homi Catrack. This two-headed lust was the demon which possessed me, and drove me into doing the worst thing I ever did … “Everything will be all right,” my mother was saying, “You just wait and see.”
Yes, mother.
It occurs to me that I have said nothing, in this entire piece, about the Midnight Children’s Conference; but then, to tell the truth, they didn’t seem very important to me in those days. I had other things on my mind.
Commander Sabarmati’s Baton
AFEW MONTHS LATER, when Mary Pereira finally confessed her crime, and revealed the secrets of her eleven-year-long haunting by the ghost of Joseph D’Costa, we learned that, after her return from exile, she was badly shocked by the condition into which the ghost had fallen in her absence. It had begun to decay, so that now bits of it were missing: an ear, several toes on each foot, most of its teeth; and there was a hole in its stomach larger than an egg. Distressed by this crumbling spectre, she asked it (when she was sure nobody else was within earshot): “O God, Joe, what you been doing to yourself?” He replied that the responsibility for her crime had been placed squarely on his shoulders until she confessed, and it was playing hell with his system. From that moment it became inevitable that she would confess; but each time she looked at me she found herself prevented from doing so. Still, it was only a matter of time.
In the meanwhile, and utterly ignorant of how close I was to being exposed as a fraud, I was attempting to come to terms with a Methwold’s Estate in which, too, a number of transformations had occurred. In the first place, my father seemed to want nothing more to do with me, an attitude of mind which I found hurtful but (considering my mutilated body) entirely understandable. In the second place, there was the remarkable change in the fortunes of the Brass Monkey. “My position in this household,” I was obliged to admit to myself, “has been usurped.” Because now it was the Monkey whom my father admitted into the abstract sanctum of his office, the Monkey whom he smothered in his squashy belly, and who was obliged to bear the burdens of his dreams about the future. I even heard Mary Pereira singing to the Monkey the little ditty which had been my theme-song all my days: “Anything you want to be,” Mary sang, “you can be; You can be just what-all you want!” Even my mother seemed to have caught the mood; and now it was my sister who always got the biggest helping of chips at the dinner-table, and the extra nargisi kofta, and the choicest pasanda. While I—whenever anyone in the house chanced to look at me—was conscious of a deepening furrow between their eyebrows, and an atmosphere of confusion and distrust. But how could I complain? The Monkey had tolerated my special position for years. With the possible exception of the time I fell out of a tree in our garden after she nudged me (which could have been an accident, after all), she had accepted my primacy with excellent grace and even loyalty. Now it was my turn; long-trousered, I was required to be adult about my demotion. “This growing up,” I told myself, “is harder than I expected.”
The Monkey, it must be said, was no less astonished than I at her elevation to the role of favored child. She did her best to fall from grace, but it seemed she could do no wrong. These were the days of her flirtation with Christianity, which was partly due to the influence of her European school-friends and partly to the rosary-fingering presence of