Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [169]
The signboards nodded in the gardens, which were losing their memories of goldfish and cocktail-hours and invading cats; and who took them down? Who were the heirs of the heirs of William Methwold? … They came swarming out of what had once been the residence of Doctor Narlikar: fat-bellied and grossly competent women, grown fatter and more competent than ever on their tetrapod-given wealth (because those were the years of the great land reclamations). The Narlikar women—from the Navy they bought Commander Sabarmati’s flat, and from the departing Mrs. Dubash her Cyrus’s home; they paid Bi-Appah in used banknotes, and the Ibrahims’ creditors were appeased by Narlikar cash.
My father, alone of all the residents, refused to sell; they offered him vast sums, but he shook his head. They explained their dream—a dream of razing the buildings to the ground and erecting on the two-storey hillock a mansion which would soar thirty stories into the skies, a triumphant pink obelisk, a signpost of their future; Ahmed Sinai, lost in abstractions, would have none of it. They told him, “When you’re surrounded by rubble you’ll have to sell for a song”; he (remembering their tetrapodal perfidy) was unmoved.
Nussie-the-duck said, as she left, “I told you so, Amina sister—the end! The end of the world!” This time she was right and wrong; after August 1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had, indeed, come to an end.
Padma—did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin orb, on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two cheap metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No, of course not; but I did. It was a world full of labels: Atlantic Ocean and Amazon and Tropic of Capicorn. And, at the North Pole, it bore the legend: MADE AS ENGLAND. By the August of the nodding signboards and the rapaciousness of the Narlikar women, this tin world had lost its stand; I found Scotch Tape and stuck the earth together at the Equator, and then, my urge for play overcoming my respect, began to use it as a football. In the aftermath of the Sabarmati affair, when the air was filled with the repentance of my mother and the private tragedies of Methwold’s heirs, I clanked my tin sphere around the Estate, secure in the knowledge that the world was still in one piece (although held together by adhesive tape) and also at my feet … until, on the day of Nussie-the-duck’s last eschatological lament—on the day Sonny Ibrahim ceased to be Sonny-next-door—my sister the Brass Monkey descended on me in an inexplicable rage, yelling, “O God, stop your kicking, brother; you don’t feel even a little bad today?” And jumping high in the air, she landed with both feet on the North Pole, and crushed the world into the dust of our driveway under her furious heels.
It seems the departure of Sonny Ibrahim, her reviled adorer, whom she had stripped naked in the middle of the road, had affected the Brass Monkey, after all, despite her lifelong denial of the possibility of love.
Revelations
Om Hare Khusro Hare Kbusrovand Om
KNOW, O UNBLEIVERS, THAT in the dark Midnights of CELESTIAL SPACE in a time before Time lay the sphere of Blessed KHUSROVAND!!! Even MODERN SCIENTISTS now affirm that for generations they have LIED to conceal from the People whose right it is to know of the Unquestionabel TRUE existance of this HOLY HOME OF TRUTH!!! Leading Intellectuals the World Over, also in America, speak of the ANTI-RELIGIOUS CONSPIRACY of reds, JEWS, etc., to hide these VITAL NEWS! The Veil lifts now. Blessed LORD KHUSRO comes with Irrefutable Proofs. Read and believe!
Know that in TRUE-EXISTING Khusrovand lived Saints whose Spiritual Purity-Advancement was such that they had, through MEDITATION & C., gained powers FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, powers Beyond Imagining! They SAW THROUGH steel, and could BEND GIRDERS with TEETH!!!
* * * NOW! * * *
For 1st Time, such powers may be used
in Your Service! LORD KHUSRO is
* * * HERE! * * *
Hear of the Fall of Khusrovand: how the RED DEVIL Bhimutha (BLACK be his name) unleashed a fearsome Hail of Meteorites (which has been well chronicled by WORLD OBSERVATORIES, but not Explained)