Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

I have titled this episode somewhat oddly. 'Alpha and Omega' stares back at me from the page, demanding to be explained-a curious heading for what will be my story's half-way point, one that reeks of beginnings and ends, when you could say it should be more concerned with middles; but, unrepentantly, I have no intention of changing it, although there are many alternative titles, for instance 'From Monkey to Rhesus', or 'Finger Redux', or-in a more allusive style-'The Gander', a reference, obviously, to the mythical bird, the hamsa or parahamsa, symbol of the ability to live in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the world of land-and-water and the world of air, of flight. But 'Alpha and Omega' it is; 'Alpha and Omega' it remains. Because there are beginnings here, and all manner of ends; but you'll soon see what I mean.

Padma clicks her tongue in exasperation. 'You're talking funny again,' she criticizes, 'Are you going to tell about Evie or not?'

… After the general election, the Central Government continued to shilly-shally about the future of Bombay. The State was to be partitioned; then not to be partitioned; then partition reared its head again. And as for the city itself-it was to be the capital of Maharashtra; or of both Maharashtra and Gujarat; or an independent state of its own… while the government tried to work out what on earth to do, the city's inhabitants decided to encourage it to be quick. Riots proliferated (and you could still hear the old battle-song of the Mahrattas-How are you? I am well! I'll take a stick and thrash you to hell!-rising above the fray); and to make things worse, the weather joined in the melee. There was a severe drought; roads cracked; in the villages, peasants were being forced to kill their cows; and on Christmas Day (of whose significance no boy who attended a mission school and was attended upon by a Catholic ayah could fail to be aware) there was a series of loud explosions at the Wal-keshwar Reservoir and the main fresh-water pipes which were the city's lifelines began to blow fountains into the air like giant steel whales. The newspapers were full of talk of saboteurs; speculation over the criminals' identities and political affiliation jostled for space against reports of the continuing wave of whore-murders. (I was particularly interested to learn that the murderer had his own curious 'signature'. The corpses of the ladies of the night were all strangled to death; there were bruises on their necks, bruises too large to be thumbprints, but wholly consistent with the marks which would be left by a pair of giant, preternaturally powerful knees.)

But I digress. What, Padma's frown demands, does all this have to do with Evelyn Lilith Burns? Instantly, leaping to attention, as it were, I provide the answer: in the days after the destruction of the city's fresh-water supply, the stray cats of Bombay began to congregate in those areas of the city where water was still relatively plentiful; that is to say, the better-off areas, in which each house owned its own overhead or underground water-tank. And, as a result, the two-storey hillock of Methwold's Estate was invaded by an army of thirsting felines; cats swarming all over the circus-ring, cats climbing bougainvillaea creepers and leaping into sitting-rooms, cats knocking over flower-vases to drink the plant-stale water, cats bivouacked in bathrooms, slurping liquid out of water-closets, cats rampant in the kitchens of the palaces of William Methwold. The Estate's servants were vanquished in their attempts to repel the great cat invasion; the ladies of the Estate were reduced to helpless exclamations of horror. Hard dry worms of cat-excrement were everywhere; gardens were ruined by sheer feline force of numbers: and at night sleep became an impossibility as the army found voice, and sang its thirst at the moon. (The Baroness Simki von der Heiden refused to fight the cats; she was already showing signs of the disease which would shortly lead to her extermination.)

Nussie Ibrahim rang my mother to announce, 'Amina sister, it is the end of the world.'

She was wrong; because on the third day after the great cat invasion, Evelyn Lilith Burns visited each Estate household in turn, carrying 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.