Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [45]
“The rapscallions have perpetrated an outrage!” Mr. Kemal, who is the thinnest man Amina Sinai has ever seen, sets off with his curiously archaic phraseology (derived from his fondness for litigation, as a result of which he has become infected with the cadences of the law-courts) a kind of chain reaction of farcical panic, to which little, squeaky, spineless S. P. Butt, who has something wild dancing like a monkey in the eyes, adds considerably, by getting out these three words: “Yes, the firebugs!” And now Zohra in an odd reflex action clutches the radio to her bosom, muffling Lata between her breasts, screaming, “O God, O God, what firebugs, where? This house? O God I can feel the heat!” Amina stands frozen khichri-in-hand staring at the two men in their business suits as her husband, secrecy thrown to the winds now, rises shaven but as-yet-unsuited to his feet and asks, “The godown?”
Godown, gudam, warehouse, call it what you like; but no sooner had Ahmed Sinai asked his question than a hush fell upon the room, except of course that Lata Mangeshkar’s voice still issued from Zohra’s cleavage; because these three men shared one such large edifice, located on the industrial estate at the outskirts of the city. “Not the godown, God forfend,” Amina prayed silently, because the reccine and leathercloth business was doing well—through Major Zulfikar, who was now an aide at Military G.H.Q. in Delhi, Ahmed Sinai had landed a contract to supply leathercloth jackets and waterproof table coverings to the Army itself—and large stocks of the material on which their lives depended were stored in that warehouse. “But who would do such a thing?” Zohra wailed in harmony with her singing breasts, “What mad people are loose in the world these days?” … and that was how Amina heard, for the first time, the name which her husband had hidden from her, and which was, in those times, striking terror into many hearts. “It is Ravana,” said S. R Butt … but Ravana is the name of a many-headed demon; are demons, then, abroad in the land? “What rubbish is this?” Amina, speaking with her father’s hatred of superstition, demanded an answer; and Mr. Kemal provided it. “It is the name of a dastardly crew, Madam; a band of incendiary rogues. These are troubled days; troubled days.”
In the godown: roll upon roll of leathercloth; and the commodities dealt in by Mr. Kemal, rice tea lentils—he hoards them all over the country in vast quantities, as a form of protection against the many-headed many-mouthed rapacious monster that is the public, which, if given its heads, would force prices so low in a time of abundance that godfearing entrepreneurs would starve while the monster grew fat … “Economics is scarcity,” Mr. Kemal argues, “therefore my hoards not only keep prices at a decent level but underpin the very structure of the economy.”—And then there is, in the godown, Mr. Butt’s stockpile, boxed in cartons bearing the words AAG BRAND. I do not need to tell you that aag means fire. S. P. Butt was a manufacturer of matches.
“Our informations,” Mr. Kemal says, “reveal only the fact of a fire at the estate. The precise godown is not specified.”
“But why should it be ours?” Ahmed Sinai asks. “Why, since we still have time to pay?”
“Pay?” Amina interrupts. “Pay whom? Pay what? Husband, janum, life of mine, what is happening here?” … But “We must go,” S. P. Butt says, and Ahmed Sinai is leaving, crumpled night-pajamas and all, rushing clatter-footed out of the house with the thin one and the spineless one, leaving behind him uneaten khichri, wide-eyed women, muffled Lata, and hanging in the air the name of Ravana … “a gang of ne’er-do-wells, Madam; unscrupulous cut-throats and bounders to a man!”
And S. P. Butt