Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [84]
Cocktail-cabinets had whetted his appetite; but it was my arrival that drove him to it … In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry state. The only way to get a drink was to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up, djinn-doctors, one of whom, Doctor Sharabi, was introduced to my father by Homi Catrack next door. After that, on the first of every month, my father and Mr. Catrack and many of the city’s most respectable men queued up outside Doctor Sharabi’s mottled-glass surgery door, went in, and emerged with the little pink chitties of alcoholism. But the permitted ration was too small for my father’s needs; and so he began to send his servants along, too, and gardeners, bearers, drivers (we had a motorcar now, a 1946 Rover with running-boards, just like William Methwold’s), even old Musa and Mary Pereira, brought my father back more and more pink chitties, which he took to Vijay Stores opposite the circumzising barbershop in Gowalia Tank Road and exchanged for the brown paper bags of alcoholism, inside which were the chinking green bottles, full of djinn. And whisky, too: Ahmed Sinai blurred the edges of himself by drinking the green bottles and red labels of his servants. The poor, having little else to peddle, sold their identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father turned them into liquid and drank them down.
At six o’clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.
After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever, and he didn’t relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother’s preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door—Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries; After nights in which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language—“What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse—what difference?” And then tears, and Amina, “Oh, janum—don’t torture me!” which, in turn, provoked, “Torture my foot! You think it’s torture for a man to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!”—my father limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while Amina began to notice how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left suddenly, flouncing down our drive without any notice; and you must judge whether she chose to be blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but she did nothing about it, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act of recognition was to give the girls a collective name. “Those Anglos,” she said to Mary, revealing a touch of snobbery, “with their funny names, Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I don’t know what. What should I care about them? Cheap type females. I call them all his Coca-Cola girls—that’s what they all sound like.”
While Ahmed pinched bottoms, Amina became long-suffering; but he might have been glad if she had appeared to care.