Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [129]
Eventually the last of his calico-skirted secretaries quit, being unable to tolerate life in an atmosphere so thin and abstract as to make breathing difficult; and now my father sent for Mary Pereira and coaxed her with, “We’re friends, Mary, aren’t we, you and I?”, to which the poor woman replied, “Yes, Sahib, I know; you will look after me when I’m old,” and promised to find him a replacement. The next day she brought him her sister, Alice Pereira, who had worked for all kinds of bosses and had an almost infinite tolerance of men. Alice and Mary had long made up their quarrel over Joe D’Costa; the younger woman was often upstairs with us at the end of the day, bringing her qualities of sparkle and sauciness into the somewhat oppressive air of our home. I was fond of her, and it was through her that we learned of my father’s greatest excesses, whose victims were a budgerigar and a mongrel dog.
By July Ahmed Sinai had entered an almost permanent state of intoxication; one day, Alice reported, he had suddenly gone off for a drive, making her fear for his life, and returned somehow or other with a shrouded bird-cage in which, he said, was his new acquisition, a bulbul or Indian nightingale. “For God knows how long,” Alice confided, “he tells me all about bulbuls; all fairy stories of its singing and what-all; how this Calipha was captivated by its song, how the singing could make longer the beauty of the night; God knows what the poor man was babbling, quoting Persian and Arabic, I couldn’t make top or bottom of it. But then he took off the cover, and in the cage is nothing but a talking budgie, some crook in Chor Bazaar must have painted the feathers! Now how could I tell the poor man, him so excited with his bird and all, sitting there calling out, “Sing, little bulbul! Sing!” … and it’s so funny, just before it died from the paint it just repeated his line back at him, straight out like that—not squawky like a bird, you know, but in his own self-same voice: Sing! Little bulbul, sing!”
But there was worse on the way. A few days later I was sitting with Alice on the servants’ spiral iron staircase when she said, “Baba, I don’t know what got into your daddy now. All day sitting down there cursing curses at the dog!”
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,