Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [166]
That Sunday morning, six children sat in a row at the Metro Cub Club, watching Francis The Talking Mule And The Haunted House. You see, I had my alibi; I was nowhere near the scene of the crime. Like Sin, the crescent moon, I acted from a distance upon the tides of the world … while a mule talked on a screen, Commander Sabarmati visited the naval arsenal. He signed out a good, long-nosed revolver; also ammunition. He held, in his left hand, a piece of paper on which an address had been written in a private detective’s tidy hand; in his right hand, he grasped the unholstered gun. By taxi, the Commander arrived at Colaba Causeway. He paid off the cab, walked gun-in-hand down a narrow gully past shirt-stalls and toyshops, and ascended the staircase of an apartment block set back from the gully at the rear of a concrete courtyard. He rang the doorbell of apartment 18c; it was heard in 18b by an Anglo-Indian teacher giving private Latin tuition. When Commander Sabarmati’s wife Lila answered the door, he shot her twice in the stomach at point-blank range. She fell backwards; he marched past her, and found Mr. Homi Catrack rising from the toilet, his bottom unwiped, pulling frantically at his trousers. Commander Vinoo Sabarmati shot him once in the genitals, once in the heart and once through the right eye. The gun was not silenced; but when it had finished speaking, there was an enormous silence in the apartment. Mr. Catrack sat down on the toilet after he was shot and seemed to be smiling.
Commander Sabarmati walked out of the apartment block with the smoking gun in his hand (he was seen, through the crack of a door, by a terrified Latin tutor); he strolled along Colaba Causeway until he saw a traffic policeman on his little podium. Commander Sabarmati told the policeman, “I have only now killed my wife and her lover with this gun; I surrender myself into your …” But he had been waving the gun under the policeman’s nose; the officer was so scared that he dropped his traffic-conducting baton and fled. Commander Sabarmati, left alone on the policeman’s pedestal amid the sudden confusion of the traffic, began to direct the cars, using the smoking gun as a baton. This is how he was found by the posse of twelve policemen who arrived ten minutes later, who sprang courageously upon him and seized him hand and foot, and who removed from him the unusual baton with which, for ten minutes, he had expertly conducted the traffic.
A newspaper said of the Sabarmati affair: “It is a theater in which India will discover who she was, what she is, and what she might become.” … But Commander Sabarmati was only a puppet; I was the puppet-master, and the nation performed my play—only I hadn’t meant it! I didn’t think he’d … I only wanted to … a scandal, yes, a scare, a lesson to all unfaithful wives and mothers, but not that, never, no.
Aghast at the result of my actions, I rode the turbulent thought-waves of the city … at the Parsee General Hospital, a doctor said, “Begum Sabarmati will live; but she will have to watch what she eats.” … But Homi Catrack was dead … And who was engaged as the lawyer for the defence?—Who said, “I will defend him free gratis and for nothing?”—Who, once the victor of the Freeze Case, was now the Commander’s champion? Sonny Ibrahim said, “My father will get him off if anyone can.”
Commander Sabarmati was the most popular murderer in the history of Indian jurisprudence. Husbands acclaimed his punishment of an errant wife; faithful women felt justified in their fidelity. Inside Lila’s own sons, I found these thoughts: “We knew she was like that. We knew a Navy man wouldn’t stand for it.” A columnist in the Illustrated Weekly of India, writing a pen-portrait to go alongside the “Personality of the Week” full-color caricature of the Commander, said: “In the Sabarmati Case, the noble sentiments of the Ramayana combine with the cheap melodrama of the Bombay talkie; but as for the chief protagonist, all agree on his upstandingness; and he is undeniably an attractive chap.