Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [90]
It seems that, in the aftermath of my changeling birth, while I enlarged myself at breakneck speed, everything that could possibly go wrong began to do so. In the snake winter of early 1948, and in the succeeding hot and rainy seasons, events piled upon events, so that by the time the Brass Monkey was born in September we were all exhausted, and ready for a few years’ rest.
Escaped cobras vanished into the sewers of the city; banded kraits were seen on buses. Religious leaders described the snake escape as a warning—the good Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation’s official renunciation of its deities. (“We are a secular State,” Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary had been asking, “How are we going to live now, Madam?” Homi Catrack introduced us to Doctor Schaap-steker himself. He was eighty-one years old; his tongue flicked constantly in and out between his papery lips; and he was prepared to pay cash rent for a top-floor apartment overlooking the Arabian Sea. Ahmed Sinai, in those days, had taken to his bed; the icy cold of the freeze impregnated his bedsheets; he downed vast quantities of whisky for medicinal purposes, but it failed to warm him up … so it was Amina who agreed to let the upper storey of Buckingham Villa to the old snake-doctor. At the end of February, snake poison entered our lives.
Doctor Schaapsteker was a man who engendered wild stories. The more superstitious orderlies at his Institute swore that he had the capacity of dreaming every night about being bitten by snakes, and thus remained immune to their bites. Others whispered that he was half-snake himself, the child of an unnatural union between a woman and a cobra. His obsession with the venom of the banded krait—bungarus fasciatus—was becoming legendary. There is no known antivenene to the bite of bungarus; but Schaapsteker had devoted his life to finding one. Buying broken-down horses from the Catrack stables (among others) he injected them with small doses of the poison; but the horses, unhelpfully, failed to develop antibodies, frothed at the mouth, died standing up and had to be transformed into glue. It was said that Doctor Schaapsteker—“Sharpsticker Sahib”—had now acquired the power of killing horses simply by approaching them with a hypodermic syringe … but Amina paid no attention to these tall stories. “He is an old gentleman,” she told Mary Pereira; “What should we care about people who black-tongue him? He pays his rent, and permits us to live.” Amina was grateful to the European snake-doctor, particularly in those days of the freeze when Ahmed did not seem to have the nerve to fight.
“My beloved father and mother,” Amina wrote, “By my eyes and head I swear I do not know why such things are happening to us … Ahmed is a good man, but this business has hit him hard. If you have advice for your daughter, she is greatly in need of it.” Three days after they received this letter, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother arrived at Bombay Central Station by Frontier Mail; and Amina, driving them home in our 1946 Rover, looked out of a side window and saw the Mahalaxmi Racecourse; and had the first germ of her reckless idea.
“This modern decoration is all right for you young people, whatsitsname,” Reverend Mother said. “But give me one old-fashioned takht to sit on. These chairs are so soft, whatsitsname, they make me feel like I’m falling.”
“Is he ill?” Aadam Aziz asked. “Should I examine him and prescribe medicines?”
“This is no time to hide in bed,” Reverend Mother