Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [114]
As for Ahmed Sinai: I swear that it was after Narlikar’s death and arrival of the women that he began, literally, to fade … gradually his skin paled, his hair lost its color, until within a few months he had become entirely white except for the darkness of his eyes. (Mary Pereira told Amina: “That man is cold in the blood; so now his skin has made ice, white ice like a fridge.”) I should say, in all honesty, that although he pretended to be worried by his transformation into a white man, and went to see doctors and so forth, he was secretly rather pleased when they failed to explain the problem or prescribe a cure, because he had long envied Europeans their pigmentation. One day, when it was permissible to make jokes again (a decent interval had been allowed to elapse after Doctor Narlikar’s death), he told Lila Sabarmati at the cocktail hour: “All the best people are white under the skin; I have merely given up pretending.” His neighbors, all of whom were darker than he, laughed politely and felt curiously ashamed.
Circumstantial evidence indicates that the shock of Narlikar’s death was responsible for giving me a snow-white father to set beside my ebony mother; but (although I don’t know how much you’re prepared to swallow) I shall risk giving an alternative explanation, a theory developed in the abstract privacy of my clocktower … because during my frequent psychic travels, I discovered something rather odd: during the first nine years after Independence, a similar pigmentation disorder (whose first recorded victim may well have been the Rani of Cooch Naheen) afflicted large numbers of the nation’s business community. All over India, I stumbled across good Indian businessmen, their fortunes thriving thanks to the first Five Year Plan, which had concentrated on building up commerce … businessmen who had become or were becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destinies had drained the color from their cheeks … in which case, perhaps my father was a late victim of a widespread, though generally unremarked phenomenon. The businessmen of India were turning white.
That’s enough to chew on for one day. But Evelyn Lilith Burns is coming; the Pioneer Café is getting painfully close; and—more vitally—midnight’s other children, including my alter ego Shiva, he of the deadly knees, are pressing extremely hard. Soon the cracks will be wide enough for them to escape …
By the way: some time around the end of 1956, in all probability, the singer and cuckold Wee Willie Winkie also met his death.
Love in Bombay
DURING RAMZÀN, the month of fasting, we went to the movies as often as we could. After being shaken awake at five a.m. by my mother’s assiduous hand; after pre-dawn breakfasts of melon and sugared lime-water, and especially on Sunday mornings, the Brass Monkey and I took it in turns (or sometimes called out in unison) to remind Amina: “The ten-thirty-in-the-morning show! It’s Metro Cub Club day, Amma, pleeeese!” Then the drive in the Rover to the cinema where we would taste neither Coca-Cola nor potato crisps, neither Kwality ice-cream nor samosas in greasy paper; but at least there was air-conditioning, and Cub Club badges pinned to our clothes, and competitions, and birthday-announcements made by a comp