Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [135]
Meanwhile, I am ten years old, and working out how to hide in the boot of my mother’s car.
That was the month when Purushottam the sadhu (whom I had never told about my inner life) finally despaired of his stationary existence and contracted the suicidal hiccups which assailed him for an entire year, frequently lifting him bodily several inches off the ground so that his water-balded head cracked alarmingly against the garden tap, and finally killed him, so that one evening at the cocktail hour he toppled sideways with his legs still locked in the lotus position, leaving my mother’s verrucas without any hope of salvation; when I would often stand in the garden of Buckingham Villa in the evenings, watching the Sputniks cross the sky, and feeling as simultaneously exalted and isolated as little Laika, the first and still the only dog to be shot into space (the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, shortly to contract syphilis, sat beside me following the bright pinprick of Sputnik II with her Alsatian eyes—it was a time of great canine interest in the space race); when Evie Burns and her gang occupied my clocktower, and washing-chests had been both forbidden and outgrown, so that for the sake of secrecy and sanity I was obliged to limit my visits to the midnight children to our private, silent hour—I communed with them every midnight, and only at midnight, during that hour which is reserved for miracles, which is somehow outside time; and when—to get to the point—I resolved to prove, with the evidence of my own eyes, the terrible thing I had glimpsed sitting in the front of my mother’s thoughts. Ever since I lay hidden in a washing-chest and heard two scandalous syllables, I had been suspecting my mother of secrets; my incursions into her thought processes had confirmed my suspicions; so it was with a hard glint in my eye, and a steely determination, that I visited Sonny Ibrahim one afternoon after school, with the intention of enlisting his help.
I found Sonny in his room, surrounded by posters of Spanish bullfights, morosely playing Indoor Cricket by himself. When he saw me he cried unhappily, “Hey man I’m damn sorry about Evie man she won’t listen to anyone man what the hell’d you do to her anyway?” … But I held up a dignified hand, commanding and being accorded silence.
“No time for that now, man,” I said. “The thing is, I need to know how to open locks without keys.”
A true fact about Sonny Ibrahim: despite all his bullfighting dreams, his genius lay in the realm of mechanical things. For some time now, he had taken on the job of maintaining all the bikes on Methwold’s Estate in return for gifts of comic-books and a free supply of fizzy drinks. Even Evelyn Lilith Burns gave her beloved Indiabike into his care. All machines, it seemed, were won over by the innocent delight with which he caressed their moving parts; no contraption could resist his ministrations. To put it another way: Sonny Ibrahim had become (out of a spirit of pure inquiry) an expert at picking locks.
Now offered a chance of demonstrating his loyalty to me, his eyes brightened. “Jus’ show me the lock, man! Lead me to the thing!”
When we were sure we were unobserved, we crept along the driveway between Buckingham Villa and Sonny’s Sans Souci; we stood behind my family’s old Rover; and I pointed at the boot. “That’s the one,” I stated. “I need to be able to open it from the outside, and the inside also.”
Sonny’s eyes widened. “Hey, what’re you up to, man? You running away from home secretly and all?”
Finger to lips, I adopted a mysterious expression. “Can’t explain, Sonny,” I said solemnly, “Top-drawer classified information.”
“Wow, man,” Sonny said, and showed me in thirty seconds how to open the boot with the aid of a strip of thin pink plastic. “Take it, man,” said Sonny Ibrahim, “You need it more than me.”
Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could never manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband