Midnights Children

world of footwear, hoping, perhaps, that by burning our shoes she would make us stand still long enough to notice that she was there … she made no attempt at concealing her crimes. When my father entered his room to find a pair of black Oxfords on fire, the Brass Monkey was standing over them, match in hand. His nostrils were assailed by the unprecedented odor of ignited boot-leather, mingled with Cherry Blossom boot-polish and a little Three-In-One oil … “Look, Abba!” the Monkey said charmingly, “Look how pretty—just the exact color of my hair!”
    Despite all precautions, the merry red flowers of my sister’s obsession blossomed all over the Estate that summer, blooming in the sandals of Nussie-the-duck and the film-magnate footwear of Homi Catrack; hair-colored flames licked at Mr. Dubash’s down-at-heel suedes and at Lila Sabarmati’s stiletto heels. Despite the concealment of matches and the vigilance of servants, the Brass Monkey found her ways, undeterred by punishment and threats. For one year, on and off, Methwold’s Estate was assailed by the fumes of incendiarized shoes; until her hair darkened into anonymous brown, and she seemed to lose interest in matches.
    Amina Sinai, abhorring the idea of beating her children, temperamentally incapable of raising her voice, came close to her wits’ end; and the Monkey was sentenced, for day after day, to silence. This was my mother’s chosen disciplinary method: unable to strike us, she ordered us to seal our lips. Some echo, no doubt, of the great silence with which her own mother had tormented Aadam Aziz lingered in her ears—because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound—and with an emphatic
“Chup!”
she would place a finger across her lips and command our tongues to be still. It was a punishment which never failed to cow me into submission; the Brass Monkey, however, was made of less pliant stuff. Soundlessly, behind lips clamped tight as her grandmother’s, she plotted the incineration of leather—just as once, long ago, another monkey in another city had performed the act which made inevitable the burning of a leathercloth godown …
    She was as beautiful (if somewhat scrawny) as I was ugly; but she was from the first, mischievous as a whirlwind and noisy as a crowd. Count the windows and vases, broken accidentally-on-purpose; number, if you can, the meals that somehow flew off her treacherous dinner-plates, to stain valuable Persian rugs! Silence was, indeed the worst punishment she could have been given; but she bore it cheerfully, standing innocently amid the ruins of broken chairs and shattered ornaments.
    Mary Pereira said, “That one! That Monkey! Should have been born with four legs!” But Amina, in whose mind the memory of her narrow escape from giving birth to a two-headed son had obstinately refused to fade, cried, “Mary! What are you saying? Don’t even think such things!” … Despite my mother’s protestations, it was true that the Brass Monkey was as much animal as human; and, as all the servants and children on Methwold’s Estate knew, she had the gift of talking to birds, and to cats. Dogs, too: but after she was bitten, at the age of six, by a supposedly rabid stray, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to Breach Candy Hospital, every afternoon for three weeks, to be given an injection in the stomach, it seems she either forgot their language or else refused to have any further dealings with them. From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence. The Brass Monkey was never so furious as when anyone spoke to her in words of love; desperate for affection, deprived of it by my overpowering shadow, she had a tendency to turn upon anyone who gave her what she wanted, as if she were defending herself against the possibility of being tricked.
    … Such as the time when Sonny Ibrahim plucked up his courage to tell her, “Hey, listen, Saleem’s sister—you’re a solid type. I’m, um, you know, damn keen on you …” And at once she marched across to where his father and mother were sipping lassi in the gardens of Sans Souci to say, “Nussie Aunty, I don’t know what your Sonny’s been getting up to. Only just now I saw him and Cyrus behind a bush, doing such funny rubbing things with their soo-soos!” …
    The Brass Monkey had bad table manners; she trampled flowerbeds; she acquired the tag of problem-child;