Midnights Children

that’ll teach you,” his shoes, off; no shirt any more; his vest, dragged off by a high-board diver. “And that’ll teach you to write your sissy love letters,” no socks now, and plenty of tears, and “There!” yelled the Monkey; the Walsingham bus arrived and the assailants and my sister jumped in and sped away, “Ta-ta-ba-ta, lover-boy!” they yelled, and Sonny was left in the street, on the pavement opposite Chimalker’s and Reader’s Paradise, naked as the day he was born; his forcep-hollows glistened like rock-pools, because Vaseline had dripped into them from his hair; and his eyes were wet as well, as he, “Why’s she do it, man? Why, when I only told her I liked …”
    “Search me,” I said, not knowing where to look, “She does things, that’s all.” Not knowing, either, that the time would come when she did something worse to me.
    But that was nine years later … meanwhile, early in 1957, election campaigns had begun: the Jan Sangh was campaigning for rest homes for aged sacred cows; in Kerala, E. M. S. Namboodiripad was promising that Communism would give everyone food and jobs; in Madras, the Anna-D.M.K. party of C. N. Annadurai fanned the flames of regionalism; the Congress fought back with reforms such as the Hindu Succession Act, which gave Hindu women equal rights of inheritance … in short, everybody was busy pleading his own cause; I, however, found myself tongue-tied in the face of Evie Burns, and approached Sonny Ibrahim to ask him to plead on my behalf.
    In India, we’ve always been vulnerable to Europeans … Evie had only been with us a matter of weeks, and already I was being sucked into a grotesque mimicry of European literature. (We had done
Cyrano
, in a simplified version, at school; I had also read the
Classics Illustrated
comic book.) Perhaps it would be fair to say that Europe repeats itself, in India, as farce … Evie was American. Same thing.
    “But hey, man, that’s no-fair man, why don’t you do it yourself?”
    “Listen, Sonny,” I pleaded, “you’re my friend, right?”
    “Yeah, but you didn’t even help …”
    “That was my sister, Sonny, so how could I?”
    “No, so you have to do your own dirty …”
    “Hey, Sonny, man, think. Think only. These girls need careful handling, man. Look how the Monkey flies off the handle! You’ve got the experience, yaar, you’ve been through it. You’ll know how to go gently this time. What do I know, man? Maybe she doesn’t like me even. You want me to have my clothes torn off, too? That would make you feel better?”
    And innocent, good-natured Sonny, “… Well, no … ?”
    “Okay, then. You go. Sing my praises a little. Say never mind about my nose. Character is what counts. You can do that?”
    “… Weeeelll … I … okay, but you talk to your sis also, yah?”
    “I’ll talk, Sonny. What can I promise? You know what she’s like. But I’ll talk to her for sure.”
    You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke. For every victorious election campaign, there are twice as many that fail … from the verandah of Buckingham Villa, through the slats of the chick-blind, I spied on Sonny Ibrahim as he canvassed my chosen constituency … and heard the voice of the electorate, the rising nasality of Evie Burns, splitting the air with scorn: “Who?
Him?
Whynt’cha tell him to jus’ go blow his nose? That sniffer? He can’t even ride a
bike!
”
    Which was true.
    And there was worse to come; because now (although a chick-blind divided the scene into narrow slits) did I not see the expression on Evie’s face begin to soften and change?—did Evie’s hand (sliced lengthways by the chick) not reach out towards my electoral agent?—and weren’t those Evie’s fingers (the nails bitten down to the quick) touching Sonny’s temple-hollows, the fingertips getting covered in dribbled Vaseline?—and did Evie say or did she not: “Now you, f’r instance: you’re
cute
”? Let me sadly affirm that I did; it did; they were; she did.
    Saleem Sinai loves Evie Burns; Evie loves Sonny Ibrahim; Sonny is potty about the Brass Monkey; but what does the Monkey say?
    “Don’t make me sick, Allah,” my sister said when I tried—rather nobly, considering how he’d failed me—to argue Sonny’s case. The voters had given the thumbs-down to us both.
    I wasn’t giving in just yet. The siren temptations of Evie Burns—who never cared about me, I’m bound to