alliance fortune international limited属于哪个国家
alliance fortune international limited属于哪个国家
09-01-16 &匿名提问 发布
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And other omens: comets were seen exploding above the Back B it was reported that flowers had been seen and in February the snakes escaped from the Schaapsteker Institute. The rumour spread that a mad Bengali snake-charmer, a Tubriwallah, was travelling the country, charming reptiles from captivity, leading them out of snake farms (such as the Schaapsteker, where snake venom's medicinal functions were studied, and antivenenes devised) by the Pied Piper fascination of his flute, in retribution for the partition of his beloved Golden Bengal. After a while the rumours added that the Tubriwallah was seven feet tall, with bright blue skin. He was Krishna come to he was the sky-hued Jesus of the missionaries. It seems that, in the aftermath of my changeling birth, while I enlarged myself at breakneck speed, everything that could possibly go wrong began to do so. In the snake winter of early 1948, and in the succeeding hot and rainy seasons, events piled upon events, so that by the time the Brass Monkey was born in September we were all exhausted, and ready for a few years' rest. Escaped cobras vanished into th banded kraits were seen on buses. Religious leaders described the' snake escape as a warning - the god Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation's official renunciation of its deities. ('We are a secular State,' Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and M but still Ahmed Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary had been asking, 'How are we going to live now, Madam?' Homi Catrack introduced us to Dr Schaapsteker himself. He was eighty- his tongue flicked constantly in and out bet and he was prepared to pay cash rent for a top-floor apartment overlooking the Arabian Sea. Ahmed Sinai, in those days,
the icy cold of the freeze impre he downed vast quantities of whisky for medicinal purposes, but it failed to warm him up ... so it was Amina who agreed to let the upper storey of Buckingham Villa to the old snake-doctor. At the end of February, snake poison entered our lives. Dr Schaapsteker was a man who engendered wild stories. The more superstitious orderlies at his Institute swore that he had the capacity of dreaming every night about being bitten by snakes, and thus remained immune to their bites. Others whispered that he was half-snake himself, the child of an unnatural union between a woman and a cobra. His obsession with the venom of the banded krait - bungarus fasciatus - was becoming legendary. There is no known antivenene to the bite of bungarus: but Schaapsteker had devoted his life to finding one. Buying broken-down horses from the Catrack stables (among others) he injected them with s but the horses, unhelpfully, failed to develop antibodies, frothed at the mouth, died standing up and had to be transformed into glue. It was said that Dr Schaapsteker - 'Sharpsticker sahib' - had now acquired the power of killing horses simply by approaching them with a hypodermic syringe ... but Amina paid no attention to these tall stories. 'He is an old gentleman,' she told Mary P 'What should we care about people who black-tongue him? He pays his rent, and permits us to live.' Amina was grateful to the European snake-doctor, particularly in those days of the freeze when Ahmed did not seem to have the nerve to fight. 'My beloved father and mother,' Amina wrote, 'By my eyes and head I swear I do not know why such things are happening to us ... Ahmed is a good man, but this business has hit him hard. If you have advice for your daughter, she is greatly in need of it.' Three days after they received this letter, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother arrived at Bombay Central Station by Frontier M and Amina, driving them home in our 1946 Rover, looked out of a side window and saw the Mahalaxmi R and had the first germ of her reckless idea. 'This modern decoration is all right for you young people, whatsits-name,' Reverend Mother said. 'But give me one old-fashioned takht to sit on. These chairs are so soft, whatsitsname, they make me feel like I'm falling.' 'Is he ill?' Aadam Aziz asked. 'Should I examine him and prescribe medicines?' 'This is no time to hide in bed,' Reverend Mother pronounced. 'Now he must be a man, whatsitsname, and do a man's business.' 'How well you both look, my parents,' Amina cried, thinking that her father was turning into an old man who seemed to be getting shorter wi while Reverend Mother had grown so wide that armchairs, though soft, groaned beneath her weight... and sometimes, through a trick-of the light, Amina thought she saw, in the centre of her father's body, a dark shadow like a hole. 'What is left in this India?' Reverend Mother asked, hand slicing air. 'Go, leave it all, go to Pakistan. See how well that Zulfikar is doing - he will give you a start. Be a man, my son - get up and start again!' 'He doesn't want to speak now,' Amina said, 'he must rest.' 'Rest?' Aadam Aziz roared. 'The man is a jelly!' 'Even Alia, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother said, 'all on her own, gone to Pakistan - even she is making a decent life, teaching in a fine school. They say she will be headmistress soon.' 'Shhh, mother, he wants to sleep ... let's go next door ...' 'There is a time to sleep, whatsitsname, and a time to wake! Listen: Mustapha is making many hundreds of rupees a month, whatsitsname, in the Civil Service. What is your husband? Too good to work?' 'Mother, he is upset. His temperature is so low ...' 'What food are you giving? From today, whatsitsname, I will run your kitchen. Young people today - like babies, whatsitsname!' 'Just as you like, mother.' 'I tell you whatsitsname, it's those photos in the paper. I wrote -didn't I write? - no good would come of that. Photos take away pieces of you. My God, whatsitsname, when I saw your picture, you had become so transparent I could see the writing from the other side coming right through your face!' 'But that's only ...' 'Don't tell me your stories, whatsitsname! I give thanks to God you have recovered from that photography!' After that day, Amina was freed from the exigencies of running her home. Reverend Mother sat at the head of the dining-table, doling out food (Amina took plates to Ahmed, who stayed in bed, moaning from time to time, 'Smashed, wife! Snapped - like an icicle!'); while, in the kitchens, Mary Pereira took the time to prepare, for the benefit of their visitors, some of the finest and most delicate mango pickles, lime chutneys and cucumber kasaundies in the world. And now, restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people's food seeping into her - because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes imbued with the personal Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination. And, althiough Mary's pickles had a partially counteractive effect - since she had stirred into them the guilt of her heart, and the fear of discovery, so that, good as they tasted, they had the power of making those who ate them subject to nameless uncertainties and dreams of accusing fingers - the diet provided by Reverend Mother filled Amina with a kind of rage, and even produced slight signs of improvement in her defeated husband. So that finally the day came when Amina, who had been watching me play incompetently with toy horses of sandal wood in the bath, inhaling the sweet odours of sandalwood which the bathwater released, suddenly rediscovered within herself the adventurous streak which was her inheritance from her fading father, the streak which had brought Aadam Aziz down from Amina turned to Mary Pereira and said, 'I'm fed up. If nobody in this house is going to put things right, then it's just going to be up to me!' Toy horses galloped behind Amina's eyes as she left Mary to dry me and marched into her bedroom. Remembered glimpses of Mahalaxmi Racecourse cantered in her head as she pushed aside saris and petticoats. The fever of a reckless scheme flushed her cheeks as she opened the lid of an old tin trunk... filling her purse with the coins and rupee notes of grateful patients and wedding-guests, my mother went to the races. With the Brass Monkey growing inside her, my mother stalked the paddocks of the racecourse named after t braving early-morning sickness and varicose veins, she stood in line at the Tote window, putting money on three-horse accumulators and long-odds outsiders. Ignorant of the first thing about horses, she backed mares known not to be staye she put her money on jockeys because she liked their smiles. Clutching a purse full of the dowry which had lain untouched in its trunk since her own mother had packed it away, she took wild flutters on stallions who looked fit for the Schaapsteker Institute ... and won, and won, and won. 'Good news,' Ismail Ibrahim is saying, 'I always thought you should fight the bastards. I'll begin proceedings at once ... but it will take cash, Amina. Have you got cash?' 'The money will be there.' 'Not for myself,' Ismail explains, 'My services are, as I said, free, gratis absolutely. But, forgive me, you must know how things are, one must give little presents to people to smooth one's way ...' 'Here,' Amina hands him an envelope, 'Will this do for now?' 'My God,' Ismail Ibrahim drops the packet in surprise and rupee notes in large denominations scatter all over his sitting-room floor, 'Where did you lay your hands on ...' And Amina, 'Better you don't ask - and I won't ask how you spend it.' Schaapsteker money pai but horses fought our war. The streak of luck of my mother at the race-track was so long, a seam so rich, that if it hadn't happened it wouldn't have been credible ... for month after month, she put her money on a jockey's nice tidy hair-style or a horse's pret and she never left the track without a large envelope stuffed with notes. 'Things are going well,' Ismail Ibrahim told her, 'But Amina sister, God knows what you are up to. Is it decent? Is it legal?' And Amina: 'Don't worry your head. What can't be cured must be endured. I am doing what must be done.' Never once in all that time did my mother take pleasure in
because she was weighed down by more than a baby - eating Reverend Mother's curries filled with ancient prejudices, she had become convinced that gambling was the next worst thing on earth, so, although she was not a criminal, she felt consumed by sin. Verrucas plagued her feet, although Purushottam the sadhu, who sat under our garden tap until dripping water created a bald patch amid the luxuriantly matted hair on his head, was a marvel a but throughout the snake winter and the hot season, my mother fought her husband's fight. You ask: how is it possible? How could a housewife, however assiduous, however determined, win fortunes on the horses, day after racing day, month after month? You think to yourself: aha, that Homi Catrack, he's a horse- and everyone knows that most of Amina was asking her neighbour for hot tips! A but Mr Catrack himself los he saw my mother at the race-track and was astounded by her success. ('Please,' Amina asked him, 'Catrack Sahib, let this be our secret. Gambling it would be so shaming if my mother found out.' And Catrack, nodding dazedly, said, 'Just as you wish.') So it was not the Parsee who was behind it - but perhaps I can offer another explanation. Here it is, in a sky-blue crib in a sky-blue room with a fisherman's pointing finger on the wall: here, whenever his mother goes away clutching a purse full of secrets, is Baby Saleem, who has acquired an expression of the most intense concentration, whose eyes have been seized by a singleness of purpose of such enormous power that it has darkened them to deep navy blue, and whose nose is twitching strangely while he appears to be watching some distant event, to be guiding it from a distance, just as the moon controls the tides. 'Coming to court very soon,' Ismail Ibrahim said, 'I think you can be fairly confident ... my God, Amina, have you found King Solomon's Mines?' The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. ?perfect balance of rewards and penalties! ?seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes. A and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting ju and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it' no mere carrot-and- because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuos in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, f here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose ... but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity -beca use, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake ... Keeping things simple for the moment, however, I record that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes. Amina's brother Hanif had not gone to Pakistan. Following the childhood dream which he had whispered to Rashid the rickshaw-boy in an Agra cornfield, he had arrived in Bombay and sought employ, ment in the great film studios. Precociously confident, he had not only succeeded in becoming the youngest man ever to be given a film to direct in the history of the I he had also wooed and married one of the brightest stars of that celluloid heaven, the divine Pia, whose face was her fortune, and whose saris were made of fabrics whose designers had clearly set out to prove that it was possible to incorporate every colour known to man in a single pattern. Reverend Mother did not approve of the divine Pia, but Hanif of all my family was the one who was free of her a jolly, burly man with the booming laugh of the boatman Tai and the explosive, innocent anger of his father Aadam Aziz, he took her to live simply in a small, un-filmi apartment on Marine Drive, telling her, 'Plenty of time to live like Emperors after I've made my name.' S she starred in his first feature, which was partly financed by Homi Catrack and partly by D. W. Rama Studios (Pvt.) Ltd - it was called The Lovers of Kashmir, and one evening in the midst of her racing days Amina Sinai went to the premiere. Her parents did not come, thanks to Reverend Mother's loathing of the cinema, against which Aadam Aziz no longer had the strength to struggle - just as he, who had fought with Mian Abdullah against Pakistan, no longer argued with her when she praised the country, retaining just enough strength to dig in his heels an but Ahmed Sinai, revived by his mother-in-law's cookery, but resentful of her continued presence, got to his feet and accompanied his wife. They took their seats, next to Hanif and. Pia and the male star of the film, one of India's most successful 'lover-boys', I. S. Nayyar. And, although they didn't know it, a serpent waited in the wings... but in the meanwhile, let us permit Hanif Azi because The Lovers of Kashmir contained a notion which was to provide my uncle with a spectacular, though brief, period of triumph. In those days it was not permitted for lover-boys and their leading ladies to touch one another on screen, for fear that their osculations might corrupt the nation's youth ... but thirty-three minutes after the beginning of The Lovers the premiere audience began to give off a low buzz of shock, because Pia and Nayyar had begun to kiss - not one another - but things. Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with all the rich fullness then passed it to N who planted, upon its opposite face, a virilely passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as the indirect kiss - and how much more sophisticated a notion it was than anything i how pregnant with longing and eroticism! The cinema audience (which would, nowadays, cheer raucously at the sight of a young couple diving behind ?bush, which would then begin to shake ridiculously - so low have we sunk in our ability to suggest) watched, riveted to the screen, as the love of Pia and Nayyar, against a background of Dal Lake and ice-blue Kashmiri sky, expressed itself in kisses applied to cups of pink K by the fountains of Shalimar they pressed their lips to a sword ... but now, at the height of Hanif Aziz's triumph, the ser under its influence, the house-lights came up. Against the larger-than-life figures of Pia and Nayyar, kissing mangoes as they mouthed to playback music, the figure of a timorous, inadequately bearded man was seen, marching on to the stage beneath the screen, microphone in hand. The Serpent can take m now, in the guise of this ineffectual house-manager, it unleashed its venom. Pia and N and the amplified voice of the bearded man said: 'Ladies and gents, but there is terrible news.' His voice broke - a sob from the Serpent, to lend power to its teeth! - and then continued, 'This afternoon, at Birla House in Delhi, our beloved Mahatma was killed. Some madman shot him in the stomach, ladies and gentlemen - our Bapu is gone!' The audience had begun to screa the poison of his words entered their veins - there were grown men rolling in the aisles clutching their bellies, not laughing but crying, Hai Ram! Hai Ram! - and women tearing their hair: the city's finest coiffures tumbling around the ears of the poisoned ladies - there were film-stars yelling like fishwives and something terrible to smell in the air - and Hanif whispered, 'Get out of here, big sister - if a Muslim did this thing there will be hell to pay.' For every ladder, there is a snake ... and for forty-eight hours after the abortive end of The Lovers of Kashmir, our family remained within the walls of Buckingham Villa ('Put furniture against the doors, whatsitsname!' Reverend Mother ordered. 'If there are Hindu servants, let them go home!'); and Amina did not dare to visit the racetrack. But for every snake, there is a ladder: and finally the radio gave us a name. Nathuram Godse. 'Thank God,' Amina burst out, 'It's not a Muslim name!' And Aadam, upon whom the news of Gandhi's death had placed a new burden of age: 'This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!' Amina, however, was full of the light-headedness of relief, she was rushing dizzily up the long ladder of relief... 'Why not, after all? By being Godse he has saved our lives!' Ahmed Sinai, after rising from his supposed sickbed, continued to behave like an invalid. In a voice like cloudy glass he told Amina, 'So, you have told I very well, but we will lose. In these courts you have to buy judges...' And Amina, rushing to Ismail, 'Never - never under any circumstances - must you tell Ahmed about the money. A man must keep his pride.' And, later on, 'No, janum, I' no, the baby is not you rest, I must just go to shop - maybe I will visit Hanif- we women, you know, must fill up our days!' And coming home with envelopes brimming with rupee-notes ... 'Take, Ismail, now that he's up we have to be quick and careful!' And sitting dutifully beside her mother in the evenings, 'Yes, of course you're right, and Ahmed will be getting so rich soon, you'll just see!' And end and envelopes, and the growing baby, nearing the point at which Amina will not be able to insert herself behind the driving-wheel of the 1946 R and can her luck hold?; and Musa and Mary, quarrelling like aged tigers. What starts fights? What remnants of guilt fear shame, pickled by time in Mary's intestines, led her willingly? unwillingly? to provoke the aged bearer in a dozen different ways - by a tilt of the nose to indicate by aggressive counting of rosary beads under the nose of the devout M by acceptance of the title mausi, little mother, bestowed upon her by the other Estate servants, which Musa saw as a
by excessive familiarity with the Begum Sahiba -little giggled whispers in corners, just loud enough for formal, stiff, correct Musa to hear and feel somehow cheated? What tiny grain of grit, in the sea of old age now washing over the old bearer, lodged between bis lips to fatten into the dark pearl of hatred - into what unaccustomed torpors did Musa fall, becoming leaden of hand and foot, so that vases were broken, ashtrays spilled, and a veiled hint of forthcoming dismissal - from Mary's conscious or unconscious lips? - grew into an obsessive fear, which rebounded upon the person who started it off? And (not to omit social factors) what was the brutalizing effect of servant status, of a servants' room behind a blackstoved kitchen, in which Musa was obliged to sleep along with gardener, odd-job boy, and hamal - while Mary slept in style on a rush mat beside a new-born child? And was Mary blameless or not? Did her inability to go to church -because in churches you found confessionals, and in confessionals secrets could not be kept - turn sour inside her and make her a little sharp, a little hurtful? Or must we look beyond psychology - seeking our answer in statements such as, there was a snake lying in wait for Mary, and Musa was doomed to learn about the ambiguity of ladders? Or further still, beyond snake-and-ladder, should we see the Hand of Fate in the quarrel - and say, in order for Musa to return as explosive ghost, in order for him to adopt the role of Bomb-in-Bombay, it was necessary to engineer a departure ... or, descending from such sublimities to the ridiculous, could it be that Ahmed Sinai - whom whisky provoked, whom djinns goaded into excesses of rudeness - had so incensed the aged bearer that his crime, with which he equalled Mary's record, was committed out of the injured pride of an abused old servitor - and was nothing to do with Mary at all? Ending questions, I confine myself to facts: Musa and Mary were perpetually at daggers drawn. And yes: Ahmed insulted him, and Amina's pacifying efforts may not
and yes: the fuddling shadows of age had convinced him he would be dismissed, without warning, and so it was that Amina came to discover, one August morning, that the house had been burgled. The police came. Amina reported what was missing: a silver spittoon encrust bejewelled samovars and silver tea- the contents of a green tin trunk. Servants were lined up in the hall and subjected to the threats of Inspector Johnny Vakeel. 'Come on, own up now' - lathi-stick tapping against his leg -'or you'll see what we can't do to you. You want to stand on one leg all day and night? You want water thrown over you, sometimes boiling hot, sometimes freezing cold? We have many methods in the Police Force ...& And now a cacophony of noise from servants, Not me, Inspector Sahib, I for pity's sake, search my things, sahib! And Amina: 'This is too much, sir, you go too far. My Mary I know, anyway, is innocent. I will not have her questioned.' Suppressed irritation of police officer. A search of belongings is instituted - 'Just in case, Madam. These fellows have limited intelligence - and maybe you discovered the theft too soon for the felon to abscond with the booty!' The search succeeds. In the bedroll of Musa the old bearer: a silver spittoon. Wrapped in his puny bundle of clothes: gold coins, a silver samovar. Secreted under his charpoy bed: a missing tea-service. And now Musa has thrown himself at Ahmed Sinai' Musa is begging, 'Forgive, sahib! I I thought you were going to throw me into the street!' but Ahmed S th 'I feel so weak,' he says, and Amina, aghast, asks: 'But, Musa, why did you make that terrible oath?' ... Because, in the interim between line-up in passageway and discoveries in servants' quarters, Musa had said to his master: 'It was not me, sahib. If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper! May my old skin run with sores!' Amina, with horror on her face, awaits Musa's reply. The bearer's old face twists
words are spat out. 'Begum Sahiba, I only took your precious possessions, but you, and your sahib, and his father, have and in my old age you have humiliated me with Christian ayahs.' There is silence in Buckingham Villa - Amina has refused to press charges, but Musa is leaving. Bedroll on his back, he descends a spiral iron staircase, discovering that ladders can g he walks away down hillock, leaving a curse upon the house. And (was it the curse that did it?) Mary Pereira is about to discover that even w even when staircases operate in your favour, you can't avoid a snake. Amina says, 'I can't get you any more money, I have you had enough?' And Ismail, 'I hope so - but you never know - is there any chance of... ?' But Amina: 'The trouble is, I've got so big and all, I can't get in the car any more. It will just have to do.' ... Time is slowing down for A once again, her eyes look through leaded glass, in which red tulips, green-stemmed, for a second time, her gaze lingers on a clocktower which has not worked since the rains of 1947; once again, it is raining. The racing season is over. A pale blue clocktower: squat, peeling, inoperational. It stood on black-tarred concrete at the end of the circus-ring - the flat roof of the upper storey of the buildings along Warden Road, which abutted our two-storey hillock, so that if you climbed over Buckingham Villa's boundary wall, flat black tar would be under your feet. And beneath black tar, Breach Candy Kindergarten School, from which, every afternoon during term, there rose the tinkling music of Miss Harrison's piano playing the unchangin and below that, the shops, Reader's Paradise, Fatbhoy Jewellery, Chimalker's Toys and Bombelli's, with its windows filled with One Yards of Chocolates. The door to the clocktower was supposed to be locked, but it was a cheap lock of a kind Nadir Khan would have recognized: made in India. And on three successive evenings immediately before my first birthday, Mary Pereira, standing by my window at night, noticed a shadowy figure floating across the roof, his hands full of shapeless objects, a shadow which filled her with an unidentifiable dread. After the third night, the
and Inspector Vakeel returned to Methwold's Estate, accompanied by a special squad of crack officers - 'all deadeye shots. Begum S just you leave it all to us!' - who, disguised as sweepers, with guns concealed under their rags, kept the clocktower under surveillance while sweeping up the dust in the circus-ring. Night fell. Behind curtains and chick-blinds, the inhabitants of Methwold's Estate peered fearfully in the direction of the clocktower. Sweepers, absurdly, went about their duties in the dark. Johnny Vakeel took up a position on our verandah, rifle just out of sight... and, at midnight, a shadow came over the side wall of the Breach Candy school and made its way towards the tower, with a sack slung over one shoulder ... 'He must enter,' Vakeel had told A 'Must be sure we get the proper johnny.' The johnny, padding across flat tarred roof,
entered. 'Inspector Sahib, what are you waiting for?' 'Shhh, Begum, thi please go inside some way. We shall take h you mark my words. Caught,' Vakeel said with satisfaction, 'like a rat in a trap.' 'But who is he?' 'Who knows?' Vakeel shrugged. 'Some badmaash for sure. There are bad eggs everywhere these days.' ... And then the silence of the night is split like milk by a single, sawn- somebody lurches against the inside of and something streaks out on to black tarmac. Inspector Vakeel leaps into action, swinging up his rifle, shooting from the hip like John W sweepers extract marksmen's weapons from their brushes and blaze away ... shrieks of excited women, yells of servants ... silence. What lies, brown and black, banded and serpentine on the black tarmac? What, leaking black blood, provokes Dr Schaapsteker to screech from his top-floor vantage-point: 'You complete fools! Brothers of cockroaches! Sons of transvestites!' ... what, flick-tongued, dies while Vakeel races on to tarred roof? And inside the clocktower door? What weight, falling, created such an almighty crash? Whose hand
in whose heel are visible the two red, flowing holes, filled with a venom for which there is no known antivenene, a poison which has killed stablefuls of worn-out horses? Whose body is carried out of the tower by plain-clothes men, in a dead march, coffinless, with imitation sweepers for pallbearers? Why, when the moonlight falls upon the dead face, does Mary Pereira fall like a sack of potatoes to the floor, eyes rolling upwards in their sockets, in a sudden and dramatic faint? And lining the interior walls of the clocktower: what are these strange mechanisms, attached to cheap time-pieces - why are there so many bottles with rags stuffed into their necks? 'Damn lucky you called my boys out, Begum Sahiba,' Inspector Vakeel is saying. 'That was Joseph D'Costa - on our Most Wanted list. Been after him for a year or thereabouts. Absolute black-hearted badmaash. You should see the walls inside that clocktower! Shelves, filled from floor to ceiling with home-made bombs. Enough explosive power to blow this hill into the sea!' Melodrama p life acquiring the colouring of a B snakes following ladders, ladde in the midst of too much incident, Baby Saleem fell ill. As if incapable of assimilating so many goings-on, he closed his eyes and became red and flushed. While Amina awaited the results of Ismail's case against the S while the Brass Mon while Mary entered a state of shock from which she would fully emerge only when Joseph's ghost r while umbilical cord hung in pickle-jar and Mary's chutneys filled our dreams w while Reverend Mother ran the kitchens, my grandfather examined me and said, 'I'm afra the poor lad has typhoid.' 'O God in heaven,' Reverend Mother cried out, 'What dark devil has come, whatsitsname, to sit upon this house?' This is how I have heard the story of the illness which nearly stopped me before I'd started: day and night, at the end of August 1948, mother and grandfa Mary dragged herself out of her guilt and pressed cold fla Reverend Mother sang lullabies and spoone even my father, forgetting momentarily his own disorders, stood flapping helplessly in the doorway. But the night came when Doctor Aziz, looking as broken as an old horse, said, 'There is nothing more I can do. He will be dead by morning.' And in the midst of wailing women and the incipient labour of my mother who had been pushed into it by grief and the tearing of Mary Pereira's ha a servant announced Dr S who handed my grandfather a little bottle and said, 'I make no bones about it: this is kill or cure. T then wait and see.' My grandfather, sitting head in hands in the rubble of his medical learning, asked, 'What is it?' And Dr Schaapsteker, nearly eighty-two, tongue flicking at the corners of his mouth: 'Diluted venene of the king cobra. It has been known to work.' Snakes can lead to triumph, just as ladders can be descended: my grandfather, knowing I would die anyway, administered the cobra poison. The family stood and watched while poison spread through the child's body ... and six hours later, my temperature had returned to normal. After that, my growth-rate lost it but something was given in exchange for what was lost: life, and an early awareness of the ambiguity of snakes. While my temperature came down, my sister was being born at Narlikar's Nursing Home. It was S and the birth was so uneventful, so effortless that it passed virtually unnoticed on Methwold's E because on the same day Ismail Ibrahim visited my parents at the clinic and announced that the case had been won ... While Ismail celebrated, I was grabbin while he cried, 'So much for freezes! Your assets are your own again! By order of the High Court!', I was heaving red-f and while Ismail announced, with a straight face, 'Sinai bhai, the rule of law has won a famous victory,' and avoided my mother's delighted, triumphant eyes, I, Baby Saleem, aged exactly one year, two weeks and one day, hauled myself upright in my cot. The effects of the events of that day were twofold: I grew up with legs that were irretrievably bowed, because I had got
and the Brass Monkey (so called because of her thick thatch of red-gold hair, which would not darken until she was nine) learned that, if she was going to get any attention in her life, she would have to make plenty of noise.
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