Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [75]
“What do you want here, sadhuji?”—Musa, unable to avoid deference; to which the sadhu, calm as a lake: “I have come to await the coming of the One. The Mubarak—He who is Blessed. It will happen very soon.”
Believe it or not: I was prophesied twice! And on that day on which everything was so remarkably well-timed, my mother’s sense of timing did not fail her; no sooner had the sadhu’s last word left his lips than there issued, from a first-floor tower-room with glass tulips dancing in the windows, a piercing yell, a cocktail containing equal proportions of panic, excitement and triumph … “Arré Ahmed!” Amina Sinai yelled, “Janum, the baby! It’s coming—bang on time!”
Ripples of electricity through Methwold’s Estate … and here comes Homi Catrack, at a brisk emaciated sunken-eyed trot, offering: “My Studebaker is at your disposal, Sinai Sahib; take it now—go at once!” … and when there are still five hours and thirty minutes left, the Sinais, husband and wife, drive away down the two-storey hillock in the borrowed car; there is my father’s big toe pressing down on the accelerator; there are my mother’s hands pressing down on her moon-belly; and they are out of sight now, around the bend, past Band Box Laundry and Reader’s Paradise, past Fatbhoy jewels and Chimalker toys, past One yard of Chocolates and Breach Candy gates, driving towards Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home where, in a charity ward, Wee Willie’s Vanita still heaves and strains, spine curving, eyes popping, and a midwife called Mary Pereira is waiting for her time, too … so that neither Ahmed of the jutting lip and squashy belly and fictional ancestors, nor dark-skinned prophecy-ridden Amina were present when the sun finally set over Methwold’s Estate, and at the precise instant of its last disappearance—five hours and two minutes to go—William Methwold raised a long white arm above his head. White hand dangled above brilliantined black hair; long tapering white fingers twitched towards center-parting, and the second and final secret was revealed, because fingers curled, and seized hair; drawing away from his head, they failed to release their prey; and in the moment after the disappearance of the sun Mr. Methwold stood in the afterglow of his Estate with his hairpiece in his hand.
“A baldie!” Padma exclaims. “That slicked-up hair of his … I knew it; too good to be true!”
Bald, bald; shiny-pated! Revealed: the deception which had tricked an accordionist’s wife. Samson-like, William Methwold’s power had resided in his hair; but now, bald patch glowing in the dusk, he flings his thatch through the window of his motor-car; distributes, with what looks like carelessness, the signed title-deeds to his palaces; and drives away. Nobody at Methwold’s Estate ever saw him again; but I, who never saw him once, find him impossible to forget.
Suddenly everything is saffron and green. Amina Sinai in a room with saffron walls and green woodwork. In a neighboring room, Wee Willie Winkie’s Vanita, green-skinned, the whites of her eyes shot with saffron, the baby finally beginning its descent through inner passages that are also, no doubt, similarly colorful. Saffron minutes and green seconds tick away on the clocks on the walls. Outside Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home, there are fireworks and crowds, also conforming to the colors of the night—saffron rockets, green sparkling rain; the men in shirts of zafaran hue, the women in saris of lime. On a saffron-and-green carpet, Doctor Narlikar talks to Ahmed Sinai. “I shall see to your Begum personally,