Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [163]
If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it is murdered.
We all had our troubles in those days. Homi Catrack had his idiot Toxy, and the Ibrahims had other worries: Sonny’s father Ismail, after years of bribing judges and juries, was in danger of being investigated by the Bar Commission; and Sonny’s uncle Ishaq, who ran the second-rate Embassy Hotel near Flora Fountain, was reputedly deep in debt to local gangsters, and worried constantly about being “bumped off” (in those days, assassinations were becoming as quotidian as the heat) … so perhaps it isn’t surprising that we had all forgotten about the existence of Professor Schaapsteker. (Indians grow larger and more powerful as they age; but Schaapsteker was a European, and his kind unfortunately fade away with the years, and often completely disappear.)
But now, driven, perhaps, by my demon, my feet led me upstairs to the top floor of Buckingham Villa, where I found a mad old man, incredibly tiny and shrunken, whose narrow tongue darted constantly in and out between his lips—flicking, licking: the former searcher after antivenes, assassin of horses, Sharpsticker Sahib, now ninety-two and no longer of his eponymous Institute, but retired into a dark top-floor apartment filled with tropical vegetation and serpents pickled in brine. Age, failing to draw his teeth and poison-sacs, had turned him instead into the incarnation of snakehood; like other Europeans who stay too long, the ancient insanities of India had pickled his brains, so that he had come to believe the superstitions of the Institute orderlies, according to whom he was the last of a line which began when a king cobra mated with a woman who gave birth to a human (but serpentine) child … it seems that all my life I’ve only had to turn a corner to tumble into yet another new and fabulously transmogrified world. Climb a ladder (or even a staircase) and you find a snake awaiting you.
The curtains were always drawn; in Schaapsteker’s rooms, the sun neither rose nor set, and no clocks ticked. Was it the demon, or our mutual sense of isolation which drew us together? … Because, in those days of the Monkey’s ascendancy and the Conference’s decline, I began to ascend the stairs whenever possible, and listen to the ravings of the crazy, sibilant old man.
His first greeting to me, when I stumbled into his unlocked lair, was: “So, child—you have recovered from the typhoid.” The sentence stirred time like a sluggish dust-cloud and rejoined me to my one-year-old self; I remembered the story of how Schaapsteker had saved my life with snake-poison. And afterwards, for several weeks, I sat at his feet, and he revealed to me the cobra which lay coiled within myself.
Who listed, for my benefit, the occult powers of snakes? (Their shadows kill cows; if they enter a man’s dreams, his wife conceives; if they are killed, the murderer’s family is denied male issue for twenty generations.) And who described to me—with the aid of books and stuffed corpses—the cobra’s constant foes? “Study your enemies, child,” he hissed, “or they will surely kill you.” … At Schaapsteker’s feet, I studied the mongoose and the boar, the dagger-billed adjutant bird and the barasinha deer, which crushes snakes’ heads under its feet; and the Egyptian ichneumon, and ibis; the four-feet-high secretary bird, fearless and hook-beaked, whose appearance and name made me think suspicious thoughts about my father’s Alice Pereira; and the jackal buzzard, the stink cat, the honey ratel from the hills; the road runner, the peccary, and the formidable cangamba bird. Schaapsteker, from the depths of his senility, instructed me in life. “Be wise, child. Imitate the action of the snake. Be secret; strike from the cover of a bush.”
Once he said: “You must think of me as another father. Did I not give you your life when it was lost?