Midnights Children

her Daisy air-gun casually in one hand, and offered, in return for bounty money, to end the plague of pussies double-quick.
    All that day, Methwold’s Estate echoed with the sounds of Evie’s air-gun and the agonized wauls of the cats, as Evie stalked the entire army one by one and made herself rich. But (as history so often demonstrates) the moment of one’s greatest triumph also contains the seeds of one’s final downfall; and so it proved, because Evie’s persecution of the cats, was as far as the Brass Monkey was concerned, absolutely the last straw.
    “Brother,” the Monkey told me grimly, “I told you I’d get that girl; now, right now, the time has come.”
    Unanswerable questions: was it true that my sister had acquired the languages of cats as well as birds? Was it her fondness for feline life which pushed her over the brink? … by the time of the great cat invasion, the Monkey’s hair had faded into brown; she had broken her habit of burning shoes; but still, and for whatever reason, there was a fierceness in her which none of the rest of us ever possessed; and she went down into the circus-ring and yelled at the top of her voice: “Evie! Evie Burns! You come out here, this minute, wherever you are!”
    Surrounded by fleeing cats, the Monkey awaited Evelyn Burns. I went out on to the first-floor verandah to watch; from their verandahs, Sonny and Eyeslice and Hairoil and Cyrus were watching too. We saw Evie Burns appear from the direction of the Versailles Villa kitchens; she was blowing the smoke away from the barrel of her gun.
    “You Indians c’n thank your stars you got me around,” Evie declared, “or you’d just’ve got eaten by these cats!”
    We saw Evie fall silent as she saw the thing sitting tensely in the Monkey’s eyes; and then like a blur the Monkey descended on Evie and a battle began which lasted for what seemed like several hours (but it can only have been a few minutes). Shrouded in the dust of the circus-ring they rolled kicked scratched bit, small tufts of hair flew out of the dust-cloud and there were elbows and feet in dirtied white socks and knees and fragments of frock flying out of the cloud; grown-ups came running, servants couldn’t pull them apart, and in the end Homi Catrack’s gardener turned his hose on them to separate them … the Brass Monkey stood up a little crookedly and shook the sodden hem of her dress, ignoring the cries of retribution proceeding from the lips of Amina Sinai and Mary Pereira; because there in the hose-wet dirt of the circus-ring lay Evie Burns, her tooth-braces broken, her hair matted with dust and spittle, her spirit and her dominion over us broken for once and for all.
    A few weeks later her father sent her home for good, “To get a decent education away from these savages,” he was heard to remark; I only heard from her once, six months later, when right out of the blue she wrote me the letter which informed me that she had knifed an old lady who had objected to her assault on a cat. “I gave it to her all right,” Evie wrote, “Tell your sister she just got lucky.” I salute that unknown old woman: she paid the Monkey’s bill.
    More interesting than Evie’s last message is a thought which occurs to me now, as I look back down the tunnel of time. Holding before my eyes the image of Monkey and Evie rolling in the dirt, I seem to discern the driving force behind their battle to the death, a motive far deeper than the mere persecution of cats: they were fighting over me. Evie and my sister (who were, in many ways, not at all dissimilar) kicked and scratched, ostensibly over the fate of a few thirsty strays; but perhaps Evie’s kicks were aimed at me, perhaps they were the violence of her anger at my invasion of her head; and then maybe the strength of the Monkey was the strength of sibling-loyalty, and her act of war was actually an act of love.
    Blood, then, was spilled in the circus-ring. Another rejected title for these pages—you may as well know—was “Thicker Than Water.” In those days of water shortages, something thicker than water ran down the face of Evie Burns; the loyalties of blood motivated the Brass Monkey; and in the streets of the city, rioters spilled each other’s blood. There were bloody murders, and perhaps it is not appropriate to end this sanguinary catalogue by mentioning, once again, the rushes of blood to my mother’s cheeks. Twelve million votes were colored red that year, and red is the