Midnights Children

sharpshooting, except once, and that was at the end of her reign, during the great cat invasion; and there were extenuating circumstances.
    Flushed, sweating, Evie Burns dismounted and announced: “From now on, there’s a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians? Any arguments?”
    No arguments; I knew then that I had fallen in love.
    At Juhu Beach with Evie: she won the camel-races, could drink more coconut milk than any of us, could open her eyes under the sharp salt water of the Arabian Sea.
    Did six months make such a difference? (Evie was half a year older than me.) Did it entitle you to talk to grown-ups as an equal? Evie was seen gossiping with old man Ibrahim Ibrahim; she claimed Lila Sabarmati was teaching her to put on make-up; she visited Homi Catrack to gossip about guns. (It was the tragic irony of Homi Catrack’s life that he, at whom a gun would one day be pointed, was a true
aficionado
of firearms … in Evie he found a fellow-creature, a motherless child who was, unlike his own Toxy, as sharp as a knife and as bright as a bottle. Incidentally, Evie Burns wasted no sympathy on poor Toxy Catrack. “Wrong inna head,” she opined carelessly to us all, “Oughta be put down like rats.” But Evie: rats are not weak! There was more that was rodent-like in your face than in the whole body of your despised Tox.)
    That was Evelyn Lilith; and within weeks of her arrival, I had set off the chain reaction from whose effects I would never fully recover.
    It began with Sonny Ibrahim, Sonny-next-door, Sonny of the forcep-hollows, who has been sitting patiently in the wings of my story, awaiting his cue. In those days, Sonny was a badly bruised fellow: more than forceps had dented him. To love the Brass Monkey (even in the nine-year-old sense of the word) was no easy thing to do.
    As I’ve said, my sister, born second and unheralded, had begun to react violently to any declarations of affection. Although she was believed to speak the languages of birds and cats, the soft words of lovers roused in her an almost animal rage; but Sonny was too simple to be warned off. For months now, he had been pestering her with statements such as, “Saleem’s sister, you’re a pretty solid type!” or, “Listen, you want to be my girl? We could go to the pictures with your ayah, maybe …” And for an equal number of months, she had been making him suffer for his love—telling tales to his mother; pushing him into mud-puddles accidentally-on-purpose; once even assaulting him physically, leaving him with long raking claw-marks down his face and an expression of sad-dog injury in his eyes; but he would not learn. And so, at last, she had planned her most terrible revenge.
    The Monkey attended Walsingham School for Girls on Nepean Sea Road; a school full of tall, superbly muscled Europeans, who swam like fish and dived like submarines. In their spare time, they could be seen from our bedroom window, cavorting in the map-shaped pool of the Breach Candy Club, from which we were, of course, barred … and when I discovered that the Monkey had somehow attached herself to these segregated swimmers, as a sort of mascot, I felt genuinely aggrieved with her for perhaps the first time … but there was no arguing with her; she went her own way. Beefy fifteen-year-old white girls let her sit with them on the Walsingham school bus. Three such females would wait with her every morning at the same place where Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus-the-great and I awaited the bus from the Cathedral School.
    One morning, for some forgotten reason, Sonny and I were the only boys at the stop. Maybe there was a bug going round or something. The Monkey waited until Mary Pereira had left us alone, in the care of the beefy swimmers; and then suddenly the truth of what she was planning flashed into my head as, for no particular reason, I tuned into her thoughts; and I yelled “Hey!”—but too late. The Monkey screeched, “You keep out of this!” and then she and the three beefy swimmers had jumped upon Sonny Ibrahim, street-sleepers and beggars and bicycling clerks were watching with open amusement, because they were ripping every scrap of clothing off his body … “Damn it man, are you just going to stand and watch?”—Sonny yelling for help, but I was immobilized, how could I take sides between my sister and my best friend, and he, I’ll tell my daddy on you!”, tearful now, while the Monkey, “That’ll teach you to talk shit—and