But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next: 'At this rate,' Padma complains, 'you'll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.'



She is affecting nonchalance, jutting a careless hip in my general direction, but doesn't fool me. I know now that she is, despite all her protestations, hooked. No doubt about it: my story has her by the throat, so that all at once she's stopped nagging me to go Home, to take more baths, to change my vinegar-stained clothes, to abandon even for a moment this darkling pickle-factory where the smells of spices are forever frothing in the air... now my dung goddess simply makes up a cot in the corner of this office and prepares my food on two blackened gas-rings, only interrupting my Anglepoise-lit writing to expostulate, 'You better get a move on or you'll die before you get yourself born.' Fighting down the proper pride of the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her. 'Things - even people - have a way of leaking into each other,'



I explain, 'like flavours when you cook. Ilse Lubin's suicide, for example, leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise,' I intone earnestly, 'the past has dripped into me .'.. so we can't ignore it...'



Her shrug, which does pleasantly wavy things to her chest, cuts me off. 'To me it's a crazy way of telling your life story,' she cries, 'if you can't even get to where your father met your mother.'



... And certainly Padma is leaking into me. As history pours out of my fissured body, my lotus is quietly dripping in, with her down-to-earthery, and her paradoxical superstition, her contradictory love of the fabulous - so it's appropriate that I'm about to tell the story of the death of Mian Abdullah. The doomed Hummingbird: a legend of our times.



... And Padma is a generous woman, because she stays by me in these last days, although I can't do much for her. That's right - and once again, it's a fitting thing to mention before I launch into the tale of Nadir Khan - I am unmanned.



Despite Padma's many and varied gifts and ministrations, I can't leak into her, not even when she puts her left foot on my right, winds her right leg around my waist, inclines her head up toward mine and makes cooing noises; not even when she whispers in my ear, 'So now that the writery is done, let's see if we can make your other pencil work!'; despite everything she tries, I cannot hit her spittoon.



Enough confessions. Bowing to the ineluctable Padma-pressures of what-happened-nextism, and remembering the finite quantity of time at my disposal, I leap forwards from Mercurochrome and land in 1942. (I'm keen to get my parents together, too.)



It seems that in the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism. Bicycling around Agra, he whistled piercingly, badly, but very happily. He was by no means alone, because, despite strenuous efforts by the authorities to stamp it out, this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year, and drastic steps were to be taken before it was brought under control. The old men at the paan-shop at the top of Cornwallis Road chewed betel and suspected a trick. 'I have lived twice as long as I should have,' the oldest one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing up against each other around his vocal chords, 'and I've never seen so many people so cheerful in such a bad time. It is the devil's work.' It was, indeed, a resilient virus - the weather alone should have discouraged such germs from breeding, since it had become clear that the rains had failed. The earth was cracking. Dust ate the edges of roads, and on some days huge gaping fissures appeared in the midst of macadamed intersections. The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might now issue from the Assuring earth.



Apparently a Sikh from the bicycle-repair shop had had his turban pushed off his head in the heat of one afternoon, when his hair, without any reason, had suddenly stood on end. And, more prosaically, the water shortage had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with which to adulterate the milk :.. Far away, there was a World War in progress once again. In Agra, the heat mounted. But still my grandfather whistled. The old men at the paan-shop found Ms whistling in rather poor taste, given the circumstances.



(And I, like them, expectorate and rise above fissures.)



Astride his bicycle, leather attache attached to carrier, my grandfather wMstled. Despite irritations of the nose, his lips pursed. Despite a bruise on his chest which had refused to fade for twenty-three years, his good humour was unimpaired. Air passed his lips and was transmuted into sound. He whistled an old German tune: Tannenbaum.



The optimism epidemic had been caused by one single human being, whose name, Mian Abdullah, was only used by newspapermen. To everyone else, he was the Hummingbird, a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist. 'Magician turned conjurer,' the newspapermen wrote, 'Mian Abdullah rose from the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi to become the hope of India's hundred million Muslims.' The Hummingbird was the founder, chairman, unifier and moving spirit of the Free Islam Convocation; and in 1942, marquees and rostrums were being erected on the Agra maidan, where the Convocation's second annual assembly was about to take place. My grandfather, fifty-two years old, his hair turned white by the years and other afflictions, had begun whistling as he passed the maidan.



Now he leaned round corners on his bicycle, taking them at a jaunty angle, threading his way between cowpats and children ... and, in another time and place, told Ms friend the Rani of Cooch Naheen: 'I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian. I'm still not much of a Muslim, but I'm all for Abdullah. He's fighting my fight.' His eyes were still the blue of Kashmiri sky... he arrived Home, and although Ms eyes retained a glimmer of contentment, the whistling stopped; because waiting for him in the courtyard filled with malevolent geese were the disapproving features of my grandmama, Naseem Aziz, whom he had made the mistake of loving in fragments, and who was now unified and transmuted into the formidable figure she would always remain, and who was always known by the curious title of Reverend Mother.



She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch's nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties. Earlier that year Aadam Aziz had commissioned life-size blow-up photographs of his family to hang on the living-room wall; the three girls and two boys had posed dutifully enough, but Reverend Mother had rebelled when her turn came. Eventually, the photographer had tried to catch her unawares, but she seized Ms camera and broke it over his skull. Fortunately, he lived; but there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone's little black box. It was enough for her that she must live in unveiled, barefaced shamelessness - there was no question of allowing the fact to be recorded.



It was perhaps the obligation of facial nudity, coupled with Aziz's constant requests for her to move beneath Mm, that had driven her to the barricades; and the domestic rules she established were a system of self-defence so impregnable that Aziz, after many fruitless attempts, had more or less given up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain. (Perhaps, too, it wasn't a system of self-defence at all, but a means of defence against her self.)



Among the things to which she denied entry were all political matters. When Doctor Aziz wished to talk about such things, he visited his friend the Rani, and Reverend Mother sulked; but not very hard, because she knew Ms visits represented a victory for her.



The twin hearts of her kingdom were her kitchen and her pantry. I never entered the former, but remembered staring through the pantry's locked screen-doors at the enigmatic world within, a world of hanging wire baskets covered with linen cloths to keep out the flies, of tins wMch I knew to be full of gur and other sweets, of locked chests with neat square labels, of nuts and turnips and sacks of grain, of goose-eggs and wooden brooms. Pantry and kitchen were her inalienable territory; and she defended them ferociously. When she was carrying her last child, my aunt Emerald, her husband offered to relieve her of the chore of supervising the cook. She did not reply; but the next day, when Aziz approached the kitchen, she emerged from it with a metal pot in her hands and barred the doorway. She was fat and also pregnant, so there was not much room left in the doorway. Aadam Aziz frowned. 'What is this, wife?' To which my grandmother answered, 'This, whatsitsname, is a very heavy pot; and if just once I catch you in here, whatsitsname, I'll push your head into it, add some dahi, and make, whatsitsname, a korma.' I don't know how my grandmother came to adopt the term whatsitsname as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry for help ... as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe. She didn't know, you see, what it was called.



... And at the dinner-table, imperiously, she continued to rule. No food was set upon the table, no plates were laid. Curry and crockery were marshalled upon a low side-table by her right hand, and Aziz and the cMldren ate what she dished out. It is a sign of the power of this custom that, even when her husband was afflicted by constipation, she never once permitted Mm to choose Ms food, and listened to no requests or words of advice. A fortress may not move. Not even when its dependants' movements become irregular.



During the long concealment of Nadir Khan, during the visits to the house on Cornwallis Road of young Zulfikar who fell in love with Emerald and of the prosperous reccine-and-leathercloth merchant named Ahmed Sinai who hurt my aunt Alia so badly that she bore a grudge for twenty-five years before discharging it cruelly upon my mother, Reverend Mother's iron grip upon her household never faltered; and even before Nadir's arrival precipitated the great silence, Aadam Aziz had tried to break this grip, and been obliged to go to war with his wife.

(All this helps to show how remarkable his affliction by optimism actually was.)



... In 1932, ten years earlier, he had taken control of his children's education. Reverend Mother was dismayed; but it was a father's traditional role, so she could not object. Alia was eleven; the second daughter, Mumtaz, was almost nine. The two boys, Hanif and Mustapha, were eight and six, and young Emerald was not yet five. Reverend Mother took to confiding her fears to the family cook, Daoud. 'He fills their heads with I don't know what foreign languages, whatsitsname, and other rubbish also, no doubt.' Daoud stirred pots and Reverend Mother cried, 'Do you wonder, whatsitsname, that the little one calls herself Emerald? In English, whatsitsname? That man will ruin my children for me. Put less cumin in that, whatsitsname, you should pay more attention to your cooking and less to minding other people's Business.'



She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction. Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. 'You have your Hummingbird,' she told him, 'but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man's hum.' It was one of her rare political comments ... and then the day arrived when Aziz Arew out the religious tutor.



Thumb and forefinger closed around the maulvi's ear. Naseem Aziz saw her husband leading the stragglebearded wretch to the door in the garden wall; gasped; then cried out as her husband's foot was applied to the divine's fleshy parts.



Unleashing thunderbolts, Reverend Mother sailed into battle.



'Man without dignity!' she cursed her husband, and, 'Man without, whatsitsname, shame!' Children watched from the safety of the back verandah. And Aziz, 'Do you know what that man was teaching your children?' And Reverend Mother hurling question against question, 'What will you not do to bring disaster, whatsitsname, on our heads?' -But now Aziz, 'You think it was Nastaliq script?



Eh?' - to which his wife, warming up: 'Would you eat pig? Whatsitsname? Would you spit on the Quran?' And, voice rising, the doctor ripostes, 'Or was it some verses of "The Cow"? You think that?' ... Paying no attention, Reverend Mother arrives at her climax: 'Would you marry your daughters to Germans!?' And pauses, fighting for breath, letting my grandfather reveal, 'He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs and who knows what other vegetarians. Will you have hateful children, woman?'



'Will you have godless ones?' Reverend Mother envisages the legions of the Archangel Gabriel descending at night to carry her heathen brood to hell. She has vivid pictures of hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages... 'I take this oath, whatsitsname,' my grandmother said, 'I swear no food will come from my kitchen to your lips! No, not one chapati, until you bring the maulvi sahib back and kiss his, whatsitsname, feet!'



The war of starvation which began that day very nearly became a duel to the death. True to her word, Reverend Mother did not hand her husband, at mealtimes, so much as an empty plate. Doctor Aziz took immediate reprisals, by refusing to feed himself when he was out. Day by day the five children watched their father disappearing, while their mother grimly guarded the dishes of food. 'Will you be able to vanish completely?' Emerald asked with interest, adding solicitously, 'Don't do it unless you know how to come back again.' Aziz's face acquired craters; even his nose appeared to be getting thinner. His body had become a battlefield and each day a piece of it was blasted away. He told Alia, his eldest, the wise child: 'In any war, the field of battle suffers worse devastation than either army. This is natural.' He began to take rickshaws when he did his rounds. Hamdard the rickshaw-wallah began to worry about him.



The Rani of Cooch Naheen sent emissaries to plead with Reverend Mother. 'India isn't full enough of starving people?' the emissaries asked Naseem, and she unleashed a basilisk glare which was already becoming a legend. Hands clasped in her lap, a muslin dupatta wound miser-tight around her head, she pierced her visitors with lidless eyes and stared them down. Their voices turned to stone; their hearts froze; and alone in a room with strange men, my grandmother sat in triumph, surrounded by downcast eyes. 'Full enough, whatsitsname?' she crowed.



'Well, perhaps. But also, perhaps not.'



But the truth was that Naseem Aziz was very anxious; because while Aziz's death by starvation would be a clear demonstration of the superiority of her idea of the world over his, she was unwilling to be widowed for a mere principle; yet she could see no way out of the situation which did not involve her in backing down and losing face, and having learned to bare her face, my grandmother was most reluctant to lose any of it.



'Fall ill, why don't you?' - Alia, the wise child, found the solution. Reverend Mother beat a tactical retreat, announced a pain, a killing pain absolutely, whatsitsname, and took to her bed. In her absence Alia extended the olive branch to her father, in the shape of a bowl of chicken soup. Two days later, Reverend Mother rose (having refused to be examined by her husband for the first time in her life), reassumed her powers, and with a shrug of acquiescence in her daughter's decision, passed Aziz his food as though it were a mere trifle of a Business.



That was ten years earlier; but still, in 1942, the old men at the paan-shop are stirred by the sight of the whistling doctor into giggling memories of the time when his wife had nearly made him do a disappearing trick, even though he didn't know how to come back. Late into the evening they nudge each other with, 'Do you remember when -' and 'Dried up like a skeleton on a washing line! He couldn't even ride his -' and '- I tell you, baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream her daughters' dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!' But as evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest. Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a pursing of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but instead a long red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in unerring accuracy towards an old brass spittoon. There is much slapping of thighs and self-admiring utterance of 'Wah, wah, sir!' and, 'Absolute master shot!' ... Around the oldsters, the town fades into desultory evening pastimes.



Children play hoop and kabaddi and draw beards on posters of Mian Abdullah. And now the old men place the spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting-place, and aim longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. 'Oh too good, yara!' The street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams, superimposing this game of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon ... But here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes ... here, Brigadier Dodson, the town's military commander, stifling with heat... and here, his A.D.C., Major Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of the Raj.



Memory of a mildewing photograph (perhaps the work of the same poor brained photographer whose life-size blow-ups so nearly cost him his life): Aadam Aziz, aglow with optimism-fever, shakes hands with a man of sixty or so, an impatient, sprightly type with a lock of white hair falling across his brow like a kindly scar. It is Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird. ('You see, Doctor Sahib, I keep myself fit. You wish to hit me in the stomach? Try, try. I'm in tiptop shape.'... In the photograph, folds of a loose white shirt conceal the stomach, and my grandfather's fist is not clenched, but swallowed up by the hand of the ex-conjurer.) And behind them, looking benignly on, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, who was going white in blotches, a disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous scale shortly after Independence ... 'I am the victim,' the Rani whispers, through photographed lips that never move, 'the hapless victim of my cross-cultural concerns. My skin is the outward expression of the internationalism of my spirit.' Yes, there is a conversation going on in this photograph, as like expert ventriloquists the optimists meet their leader.



Beside the Rani - listen carefully now; history and ancestry are about to meet! - stands a peculiar fellow, soft and paunchy, his eyes like stagnant ponds, his hair long like a poet's. Nadir Khan, the Hummingbird's personal secretary. His feet, if they were not frozen by the snapshot, would be shuffling in embarrassment. He mouths through his foolish, rigid smile, 'It's true; I have written verses ...' Whereupon Mian Abdullah interrupts, booming through his open mouth with glints of pointy teeth: 'But what verses! Not one rhyme in page after page!...' And the Rani, gently: 'A modernist, then?' And Nadir, shyly: 'Yes.'

What tensions there are now in the still, immobile scene! What edgy banter, as the Hummingbird speaks: 'Never mind about that; art should uplift; it should remind us of our glorious literary heritage!' ... And is that a shadow, or a frown on his secretary's brow? ... Nadir's voice, issuing lowaslow from the fading picture: 'I do not believe in high art, Mian Sahib. Now art must be beyond categories; my poetry and - oh - the game of hit-the-spittoon are equals.'... So now the Rani, kind woman that she is, jokes, 'Well, I shall set aside a room, perhaps; for paan-eating and spittoon-hittery. I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, and you must all come and practise.



Let the walls be splashed with our inaccurate expectorating! They will be honest stains, at least.' And now the photograph has run out of words; now I notice, with my mind's eye, that all the while the Hummingbird has been staring towards the door, which is past my grandfather's shoulder at the very edge of the picture. Beyond the door, history calls. The Hummingbird is impatient to get away... but he has been with us, and his presence has brought us two threads which will pursue me through all my days: the thread that leads to the ghetto of the magicians; and the thread that tells the story of Nadir the rhymeless, verbless poet and a priceless silver spittoon.



'What nonsense,' our Padma says. 'How can a picture talk? Stop now; you must be too tired to think.' But when I say to her that Mian Abdullah had the strange trait of humming without pause, humming in a strange way, neither musical nor unmusical, but somehow mechanical, the hum of an engine or dynamo, she swallows it easily enough, saying judiciously, 'Well, if he was such an energetic man, it's no surprise to me.' She's all ears again; so I warm to my theme and report that Mian Abdullah's hum rose and fell in direct relationship to his work rate.



It was a hum that could fall low enough to give you toothache, and when it rose to its highest, most feverish pitch, it had the ability of inducing erections in anyone within its vicinity. ('Arre baap,' Padma laughs, 'no wonder he was so popular with the men!') Nadir Khan, as his secretary, was attacked constantly by his master's vibratory quirk, and his ears jaw penis were forever behaving according to the dictates of the Hummingbird. Why, then, did Nadir stay, despite erections which embarrassed him in the company of strangers, despite aching molars and a work schedule which often occupied twenty-two hours in every twenty-four? Not - I believe - because he saw it as his poetic duty to get close to the centre of events and transmute them into literature. Nor because he wanted fame for himself. No: but Nadir had one thing in common with my grandfather, and it was enough. He, too, suffered from the optimism disease.



Like Aadam Aziz, like the Rani of Cooch Naheen, Nadir Khan loathed the Muslim League ('That bunch of toadies!' the Rani cried in her silvery voice, swooping around the octaves like a skier. 'Landowners with vested interests to protect! What do they have to do with Muslims? They go like toads to the British and form governments for them, now mat the Congress refuses to do it!' It was the year of the 'Quit India' resolution. 'And what's more,' the Rani said with finality, 'they are mad. Otherwise why would they want to partition India?')



Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird, had created the Free Islam Convocation almost single-handedly. He invited the leaders of the dozens of Muslim splinter groups to form a loosely federated alternative to the dogmatism and vested interests of the Leaguers. It had been a great conjuring trick, because they had all come.



That was the first Convocation, in Lahore; Agra would see the second. The marquees would be filled with members of agrarian movements, urban labourers'



syndicates, religious divines and regional groupings. It would see confirmed what the first assembly had intimated: that the League, with its demand for a partitioned India, spoke on nobody's behalf but its own. They have turned their backs on us,' said the Convocation's posters, 'and now they claim we're standing behind them!' Mian Abdullah opposed the partition.



In the throes of the optimism epidemic, the Hummingbird's patron, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, never mentioned the clouds on the horizon. She never pointed out that Agra was a Muslim League stronghold, saying only, 'Aadam my boy, if the Hummingbird wants to hold Convocation here, I'm not about to suggest he goes to Allahabad.' She was bearing the entire expense of the event without complaint or interference; not, let it be said, without making enemies in the town. The Rani did not live like other Indian princes. Instead of teetar-hunts, she endowed scholarships. Instead of hotel scandals, she had politics. And so the rumours began. 'These scholars of hers, man, everyone knows they have to perform extra-curricular duties. They go to her bedroom in the dark, and she never lets them see her blotchy face, but bewitches them into bed with her voice of a singing witch!' Aadam Aziz had never believed in witches. He enjoyed her brilliant circle of friends who were as much at Home in Persian as they were in German. But Naseem Aziz, who half-believed the stories about the Rani, never accompanied him to the princess's house. 'If God meant people to speak many tongues,' she argued, 'why did he put only one in our heads?'



And so it was that none of the Hummingbird's optimists were prepared for what happened. They played hit-the-spittoon, and ignored the cracks in the earth.



Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. According to legend, then - according to the polished gossip of the ancients at the paan-shop - Mian Abdullah owed his downfall to his purchase, at Agra railway station, of a peacock-feather fan, despite Nadir Khan's warning about bad luck.



What is more, on that night of crescent moons, Abdullah had been working with Nadir, so that when the new moon rose they both saw it through glass. 'These things matter,' the betel-chewers say. 'We have been alive too long, and we know.' (Padma is nodding her head in agreement.)



The Convocation offices were on the ground floor of the historical faculty building at the University campus. Abdullah and Nadir were coming to the end of their night's work; the Hummingbird's hum was low-pitched and Nadir's teeth were on edge. There was a poster on the office wall, expressing Abdullah's favourite anti-Partition sentiment, a quote from the poet Iqbal: 'Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?' And now the assassins reached the campus.



Facts: Abdullah had plenty of enemies. The British attitude to him was always ambiguous. Brigadier Dodson hadn't wanted him in town. There was a knock on the door and Nadir answered it. Six new moons came into the room, six crescent knives held by men dressed all in black, with covered faces. Two men held Nadir while the others moved towards the Hummingbird.



'At this point,' the betel-chewers say, 'the Hummingbird's hum became higher.



Higher and higher, yara, and the assassins' eyes became wide as their members made tents under their robes. Then -Allah, then! - the knives began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he'd never hummed before. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with red. But now - listen! - Abdullah's humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were eating, others dying; there were some who fornicated and others who did not hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that left six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these turned and ran for the University, many of them rushing across the railway tracks from the wrong side of town. It is well known that this is true. Everyone in town saw it, except those who were asleep. They went noisily, like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair ... and all the time Abdullahji was humming, humming-humming, and the knives were singing. And know this: suddenly one of the killers' eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!'



They say, 'When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives were blunt... they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which had no glass because Abdullah's hum had shattered it ... they thudded against the door until the wood broke ... and then they were everywhere, baba!... some without legs, others lacking hair, but most of them had some teeth at least, and some of these were sharp ... And now see this: the assassins cannot have feared interruption, because they had posted no guards; so the dogs got them by surprise... the two men holding Nadir Khan, that spineless one, fell beneath the weight of the beasts, with maybe sixty-eight dogs on their necks ... afterwards the killers were so badly damaged that nobody could say who they were.'



'At some point,' they say, 'Nadir dived out of the window and ran. The dogs and assassins were too busy to follow him.'



Dogs? Assassins? ... If you don't believe me, check. Find out about Mian Abdullah and his Convocations. Discover how we've swept his story under the carpet ... then let me tell how Nadir Khan, his lieutenant, spent three years under my family's rugs.



As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art. 'Look at me,' he said before he killed himself, 'I wanted to be a miniaturist and I've got elephantiasis instead!' The swollen events of the night of the crescent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room-mate, because life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.



How did Nadir Khan run across the night town without being noticed? I put it down to his being a bad poet, and as such, a born survivor. As he ran, there was a self-consciousness about him, his body appearing to apologize for behaving as if it were in a cheap thriller, of the sort hawkers sell on railway stations, or give away free with bottles of green Medicine that can cure colds, typhoid, impotence, Homesickness and poverty... On Cornwallis Road, it was a warm night.



A coal-brazier stood empty by the deserted rickshaw rank. The paan-shop was closed and the old men were asleep on the roof, dreaming of tomorrow's game. An insomniac cow, idly chewing a Red and White cigarette packet, strolled by a bundled street-sleeper, which meant he would wake in the morning, because a cow will ignore a sleeping man unless he's about to die. Then it nuzzles at him thoughtfully. Sacred cows eat anything.



My grandfather's large old stone house, bought from the proceeds of the gemstone shops and blind Ghani's dowry settlement, stood in the darkness, set back a dignified distance from the road. There was a walled-in garden at the rear and by the garden door was the low outhouse rented cheaply to the family of old Hamdard and his son Rashid the rickshaw boy. In front of the outhouse was the well with its cow-driven waterwheel, from which irrigation channels ran down to the small cornfield which lined the house all way to the gate in the perimeter wall along Cornwallis Road. Between house and field ran a small gully for pedestrians and rickshaws. In Agra the cycle-rickshaw had recently replaced the kind where a man stood between wooden shafts. There was still trade for the horse-drawn tongas, but it was dwindling ... Nadir Khan ducked in through the gate, squatted for a moment with his back to the perimeter wall, reddening as he passed his water. Then, seemingly upset by the vulgarity of his decision, he fled to the cornfield and plunged in. Partially concealed by the sun-withered stalks, he lay down in the foetal position.

That was the end of the optimism epidemic. In the morning a sweeper-woman entered the offices of the Free Islam Convocation and found the Hummingbird, silenced, on the floor, surrounded by paw-prints and the shreds of his murderers. She screamed; but later, when the authorities had been and gone, she was told to clean up the room. After clearing away innumerable dog-hairs, swatting countless fleas and extracting from the carpet the remnants of a shattered glass eye, she protested to the University's comptroller of works that, if this sort of thing was going to keep happening, she deserved a small pay rise. She was possibly the last victim of the optimism bug, and in her case the illness didn't last long, because the comptroller was a hard man, and gave her the boot.

The assassins were never identified, nor were their paymasters named. My grandfather was called to the campus by Major Zulfikar, Brigadier Dodson's A.D.C., to write his friend's death certificate. Major Zulfikar promised to call on Doctor Aziz to tie up a few loose ends; my grandfather blew his nose and left. At the maidan, tents were coming down like punctured hopes; the Convocation would never be held again. The Rani of Cooch Naheen took to her bed.



After a lifetime of making light of her illnesses she allowed them to claim her, and lay still for years, watching herself turn the colour of her bedsheets.



Meanwhile, in the old house on Cornwallis Road, the days were full of potential mothers and possible fathers. You see, Padma: you're going to find out now.



Using my nose (because, although it has lost the powers which enabled it, so recently, to make history, it has acquired other, compensatory gifts) - turning it inwards, I've been sniffing out the atmosphere in my grandfather's house in those days after the death of India's humming hope; and wafting down to me through the years comes a curious melange of odours, filled with unease, the whiff of things concealed mingling with the odours of burgeoning romance and the sharp stink of my grandmother's curiosity and strength ... while the Muslim League rejoiced, secretly of course, at the fall of its opponent, my grandfather could be found (my nose finds him) seated every morning on what he called his 'thunderbox', tears standing in his eyes. But these are not tears of grief; Aadam Aziz has simply paid the price of being Indianized, and suffers terribly from constipation. Balefully, he eyes the enema contraption hanging on the toilet wall.



Why have I invaded my grandfather's privacy? Why, when I might have described how, after Mian Abdullah's death, Aadam buried himself in his work, taking upon himself the care of the sick in the shanty-towns by the railway tracks - rescuing them from quacks who injected them with pepperwater and thought that fried spiders could cure blindness - while continuing to fulfil his dudes as university physician; when I might have elaborated on the great love that had begun to grow between my grandfather and his second daughter, Mumtaz, whose dark skin stood between her and the affections of her mother, but whose gifts of gentleness, care and fragility endeared her to her father with his inner torments which cried out for her form of unquestioning tenderness; why, when I might have chosen to describe the by-now-constant itch in his nose, do I choose to wallow in excrement? Because this is where Aadam Aziz was, on the afternoon after his signing of a death certificate, when all of a sudden a voice -soft, cowardly, embarrassed, the voice of a rhymeless poet - spoke to him from the depths of the large old laundry-chest standing in the corner of the room, giving him a shock so profound that it proved laxative, and the enema contraption did not have to be unhooked from its perch. Rashid the rickshaw boy had let Nadir Khan into the thunderbox-room by way of the sweeper's entrance, and he had taken refuge in the washing-chest. While my grandfather's astonished sphincter relaxed, his ears heard a request for sanctuary, a request muffled by linen, dirty underwear, old shirts and the embarrassment of the speaker. And so it was that Aadam Aziz resolved to hide Nadir Khan.



Now comes the scent of a quarrel, because Reverend Mother Naseem is thinking about her daughters, twenty-one-year-old Alia, black Mumtaz, who is nineteen, and pretty, nighty Emerald, who isn't fifteen yet but has a look in her eyes that's older than anything her sisters possess. In the town, among spittoon-hitters and rickshaw-wallahs, among film-poster-trolley pushers and college students alike, the three sisters are known as the Teen Batti', the three bright lights ...and how can Reverend Mother permit a strange man to dwell in the same house as Alia's gravity, Mumtaz's black, luminous skin and Emerald's eyes?... 'You are out of your mind, husband; that death has hurt your brain.'



But Aziz, determinedly: 'He is staying.' In the cellars ... because concealment has always been a crucial architectural consideration in India, so that Aziz's house has extensive underground chambers, which can be reached only through trap-doors in the floors, which are covered by carpets and mats... Nadir Khan hears the dull rumble of the quarrel and fears for his fate. My God (I sniff the thoughts of the clammy-palmed poet), the world is gone insane... are we men in this country? Are we beasts? And if I must go, when will the knives come for me?... And through his mind pass images of peacock-feather fans and the new moon seen through glass and transformed into a stabbing, red-stained blade...



Upstairs, Reverend Mother says, 'The house is full of young unmarried girls, whatsitsname; is this how you show your daughters respect?' And now the aroma of a temper lost; the great destroying rage of Aadam Aziz is unleashed, and instead of pointing out that Nadir Khan will be under ground, swept under the carpet where he will scarcely be able to defile daughters; instead of paying due testimony to the verbless bard's sense of propriety, which is so advanced that he could not even dream of making improper advances without blushing in his sleep; instead of these avenues of reason, my grandfather bellows, 'Be silent, woman! The man needs our shelter; he will stay.' Whereupon an implacable perfume, a hard cloud of determination settles upon my grandmother, who says, 'Very well. You ask me, whatsitsname, for silence. So not one word, whatsitsname, will pass my lips from now on.' And Aziz, groaning, 'Oh, damnation, woman, spare us your crazy oaths!'



But Reverend Mother's lips were sealed, and silence descended. The smell of silence, like a rotting goose-egg, fills my nostrils; overpowering everything else, it possesses the earth ... While Nadir Khan hid in his half-lit underworld, his hostess hid, too, behind a deafening wall of soundlessness. At first my grandfather probed the wall, looking for chinks; he found none. At last he gave up, and waited for her sentences to offer up their glimpses of her self, just as once he had lusted after the brief fragments of her body he had seen through a perforated sheet; and the silence filled the house, from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, so that the flies seemed to give up buzzing, and mosquitoes refrained from humming before they bit; silence stilling the hissing of geese in the courtyard. The children spoke in whispers at first, and then fell quiet: while in the cornfield, Rashid the rickshaw boy yelled his silent 'yell of hate', and kept his own vow of silence, which he had sworn upon his mother's hairs.



Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice, as a result, was thin and sharp - it had to be, to squeeze through the narrow gap between his breathing apparatus and his jaw ... a man whose short sight obliged him to take life one step at a time, which gained him a reputation for thoroughness and dullness, and endeared him to his superiors by enabling them to feel well-served without feeling threatened; a man whose starched, pressed uniform reeked of Blanco and rectitude, and about whom, despite his appearance of a character out of a puppet-show, there hung the unmistakable scent of success: Major Zulfikar, a man with a future, came to call, as he had promised, to tie up a few loose ends. Abdullah's murder, and Nadir Khan's suspicious disappearance, were much on his mind, and since he knew about Aadam Aziz's infection by the optimism bug, he mistook the silence in the house for a hush of mourning, and did not stay for long. (In the cellar, Nadir huddled with cockroaches.) Sitting quietly in the drawing-room with the five children, his hat and stick beside him on the Telefunken radiogram, the life-size images of the young Azizes staring at him from the walls, Major Zulfikar fell in love. He was short-sighted, but he wasn't blind, and in the impossibly adult gaze of young Emerald, the brightest of the 'three bright lights', he saw that she had understood his future, and forgiven him, because of it, for his appearance; and before he left, he had decided to marry her after a decent interval. ('Her?' Padma guesses. 'That hussy is your mother?' But there are other mothers-to-be, other future fathers, wafting in and out through the silence.)



In that marshy time without words the emotional life of grave Alia, the eldest, was also developing; and Reverend Mother, locked up in the pantry and kitchen, sealed behind her lips, was incapable -because of her vow - of expressing her distrust of the young merchant in reccine and leathercloth who came to visit her daughter. (Aadam Aziz had always insisted that his daughters be permitted to have male friends.) Ahmed Sinai - 'Ahaa!' yells Padma in triumphant recognition - had met Alia at the University, and seemed intelligent enough for the bookish, brainy girl on whose face my grandfather's nose had acquired an air of overweight wisdom; but Naseem Aziz felt uneasy about him, because he had been divorced at twenty. ('Anyone can make one mistake,' Aadam had told her, and that nearly began a fight, because she thought for a moment that there had been something overly personal in his tone of voice. But then Aadam had added, 'Just let this divorce of his fade away for a year or two; then we'll give this house its first wedding, with a big marquee in the garden, and singers and sweetmeats and all.' Which, despite everything, was an idea that appealed to Naseem.) Now, wandering through the walled-jn gardens of silence, Ahmed Sinai and Alia communed without speech; but although everyone expected him to propose, the silence seemed to have got through to him, too, and the question remained unasked. Alia's face acquired a weigh tiness at this time, a jowly pessimistic quality which she was never entirely to lose. ('Now then,' Padma reproves me, 'that's no way to describe your respected motherji.')



One more thing: Alia had inherited her mother's tendency to put on fat. She would balloon outwards with the passing years.



And Mumtaz, who had come out of her mother's womb black as midnight? Mumtaz was never brilliant; not as beautiful as Emerald; but she was good, and dutiful, and alone. She spent more time with her father than any of her sisters, fortifying him against the bad temper which was being exaggerated nowadays by the constant itch in his nose; and she took upon herself the duties of caring for the needs of Nadir Khan, descending daily into his underworld bearing trays of food, and brooms, and even emptying his personal thunderbox, so that not even a latrine cleaner could guess at his presence. When she descended, he lowered his eyes; and no words, in that dumb house, were exchanged between them.



What was it the spittoon hitters said about Naseem Aziz? 'She eavesdropped on her daughters' dreams, just to know what they were up to.' Yes, there's no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen in this country of ours, just pick up any newspaper and see the daily titbits recounting miracles in this village or that -Reverend Mother began to dream her daughters' dreams. (Padma accepts this without blinking; but what others will swallow as effortlessly as a laddoo, Padma may just as easily reject. No audience is without its idiosyncrasies of belief.) So, then: asleep in her bed at night, Reverend Mother visited Emerald's dreams, and found another dream within them - Major Zulfikar's private fantasy, of owning a large modern house with a bath beside his bed. This was the zenith of the Major's ambitions; and in this way Reverend Mother discovered, not only that her daughter had been meeting her Zulfy in secret, in places where speech was possible, but also that Emerald's ambitions were greater than her man's. And (why not?) in Aadam Aziz's dreams she saw her husband walking mournfully up a mountain in Kashmir with a hole in his stomach the size of a fist, and guessed that he was falling out of love with her, and also foresaw his death; so that years later, when she heard, she said only. 'Oh, I knew it, after all.'



... It could not be long now, Reverend Mother thought, before our Emerald tells her Major about the guest in the cellar; and then I shall be able to speak again. But then, one night, she entered the dreams of her daughter Mumtaz, the blackie whom she had never been able to love because of her skin of a South Indian fisherwoman, and realized the trouble would not stop there; because Mumtaz Aziz - like her admirer under the carpets - was also falling in love.



There was no proof. The invasion of dreams - or a mother's knowledge, or a woman's intuition, call it what you like - is not something that will stand up in court, and Reverend Mother knew that it was a serious Business to accuse a daughter of getting up to hanky-panky under her father's roof. In addition to which, something steely had entered Reverend Mother; and she resolved to do nothing, to keep her silence intact, and let Aadam Aziz discover just how badly his modern ideas were ruining his children - let Mm find out for himself, after Ms lifetime of telling her to be quiet with her decent old-fashioned notions. 'A bitter woman,' Padma says; and I agree.



'Well?' Padma demands. 'Was it true?'



Yes: after a fashion: true.



'There was hankying and pankying? In the cellars? Without even chaperones?'



Consider the circumstances - extenuating, if ever circumstances were. Things seem permissible underground that would seem absurd or even wrong in the clear light of day. 'That fat poet did it to the poor blackie? He did?' He was down there a long time, too - long enough to start talking to flying cockroaches and fearing that one day someone would ask Mm to leave and dreaming of crescent knives and howling dogs and wishing and wishing that the Hummingbird were alive to tell Mm what to do and to discover that you could not write poetry underground; and then this girl comes with food and she doesn't mind cleaning away your pots and you lower your eyes but you see an ankle that seems to glow with graciousness, a black ankle like the black of the underground nights ...

'I'd never have thought he was up to it.' Padma sounds admiring. 'The fat old good-for-notMng!'



And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive Mding in the cellar from Ms faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (HaniFs dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel Business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then 'And then? Come on, baba, what then?'



shyly, she smiles at him.



'What?'



And after that, there are smiles in the underworld, and something has begun.



'Oh, so what? You're telling me that's all?'



That's all: until the day Nadir Khan asked to see my grandfather -his sentences barely audible in the fog of silence - and asked for Ms daughter's hand in marriage.



'Poor girl,' Padma concludes, 'Kashmiri girls are normally fair like mountain snow, but she turned out black. Well, well, her skin would have stopped her making a good match, probably; and that Nadir's no fool. Now they'll have to let Mm stay, and get fed, and get a roof over Ms head, and all he has to do is hide like a fat earthworm under the ground. Yes, maybe he's not such a fool.'



My grandfather tried hard to persuade Nadir Khan that he was no longer in danger; the assassins were dead, and Mian Abdullah had been their real target; but Nadir Khan still dreamed about the singing knives, and begged, 'Not yet, Doctor Sahib; please, some more time.' So that one night in -the late summer of 1943 - the rains had failed again - my grandfather, Ms voice sounding distant and eerie in that house in which so few words were spoken, assembled Ms children in the drawing-room where their portraits hung. When they entered they discovered that their mother was absent, having chosen to remain immured in her room with her web of silence; but present were a lawyer and (despite Aziz's reluctance, he had complied with Mumtaz's wishes) a mullah, both provided by the ailing Rani of Cooch Naheen, both 'utterly discreet'. And their sister Mumtaz was there in bridal finery, and beside her in a chair set in front of the radiogram was the lank-haired, overweight, embarrassed figure of Nadir Khan. So it was that the first wedding in the house was one at which there were no tents, no singers, no sweetmeats and only a minimum of guests; and after the rites were over and Nadir Khan lifted his bride's veil - giving Aziz a sudden shock, making Mm young for a moment, and in Kashmir again, sitting on a dais while people put rupees in his lap - my grandfather made them all swear an oath not to reveal the presence in their cellar of their new brother-in-law. Emerald, reluctantly, gave her promise last of all.



After that Aadam Aziz made his sons help him carry all manner of furnishings down through the trap-door in the drawing-room floor: draperies and cushions and lamps and a big comfortable bed. And at last Nadir and Mumtaz stepped down into the vaults; the trap-door was shut and the carpet rolled into place and Nadir Khan, who loved his wife as delicately as a man ever had, had taken her into his underworld.



Mumtaz Aziz began to lead a double life. By day she was a single girl, living chastely with her parents, studying mediocrely at the university, cultivating those gifts of assiduity, nobility and forbearance which were to be her hallmarks throughout her life, up to and including the time when she was assailed by the talking washing-chests of her past and then squashed flat as a rice pancake; but at night, descending through a trap-door, she entered a lamplit, secluded marriage chamber which her secret husband had taken to calling the Taj Mahal, because Taj Bibi was the name by which people had called an earlier Mumtaz - Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Emperor Shah Jehan, whose name meant 'king of the world'. When she died he built her that mausoleum which has been immortalized on postcards and chocolate boxes and whose outdoor corridors stink of urine and whose walls are covered in graffiti and whose echoes are tested for visitors by guides although there are signs in three languages pleading for silence. Like Shah Jehan and his Mumtaz, Nadir and his dark lady lay side by side, and lapis lazuli inlay work was their companion because the bedridden, dying Rani of Cooch Naheen had sent them, as a wedding gift, a wondrously-carved, lapis-inlaid, gemstone-crusted silver spittoon. In their comfortable lamplit seclusion, husband and wife played the old men's game.



Mumtaz made the paans for Nadir but did not like the taste herself. She spat streams of nibu-pani. His jets were red and hers were lime. It was the happiest time of her life. And she said afterwards, at the ending of the long silence, 'We would have had children in the end; only then it wasn't right, that's all.'



Mumtaz Aziz loved children all her life.



Meanwhile, Reverend Mother moved sluggishly through the months in the grip of a silence which had become so absolute that even the servants received their instructions in sign language, and once the cook Daoud had been staring at her, trying to understand her somnolently frantic signalling, and as a result had not been looking in the direction of the boiling pot of gravy which fell upon his foot and fried it like a five-toed egg; he opened-his mouth to scream but no sound emerged, and after that he became convinced that the old hag had the power of witchery, and became too scared to leave her service. He stayed until his death, hobbling around the courtyard and being attacked by the geese.



They were not easy years. The drought led to rationing, and what with the proliferation of meatless days and riceless days it was hard to feed an extra, hidden mouth. Reverend Mother was forced to dig deep into her pantry, which thickened her rage like heat under a sauce. Hairs began to grow out of the moles on her face. Mumtaz noticed with concern that her mother was swelling, month by month. The unspoken words inside her were blowing her up ... Mumtaz had the impression that her mother's skin was becoming dangerously stretched.



And Doctor Aziz spent his days out of the house, away from the deadening silence, so Mumtaz, who spent her nights underground, saw very little in those days of the father whom she loved; and Emerald kept her promise, telling the Major nothing about the family secret; but conversely, she told her family nothing about her relationship with him, which was fair, she thought; and in the cornfield Mustapha and Hanif and Rashid the rickshaw boy became infected with the listlessness of the times; and finally the house on Cornwallis Road drifted as far as August 9th, 1945, and things changed.



Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.



What happened in August 1945? The Rani of Cooch Naheen died, but that's not what I'm after, although when she went she had become so sheetly-white that it was difficult to see her against the bed-clothes; having fulfilled her function by bequeathing my story a silver spittoon, she had the grace to exit quickly...



also in 1945, the monsoons did not fail. In the Burmese jungle, Orde Wingate and his Chindits, as well as the army of Subhas Chandra Bose, which was fighting on the Japanese side, were drenched by the returning rains. Satyagraha demonstrators in Jullundur, lying non-violently across railway lines, were soaked to the skin. The cracks in the long-parched earth began to close; there were towels wedged against the doors and windows of the house on Cornwallis Road, and they had to be wrung out and replaced constandy. Mosquitoes sprouted in the pools of water standing by every roadside. And the cellar - Mumtaz's Taj Mahal grew damp, until at last she fell ill. For some days she told nobody, but when her eyes became red-rimmed and she began to shake with fever, Nadir, fearing pneumonia, begged her to go to her father for treatment. She spent the next many weeks back in her maiden's bed, and Aadam Aziz sat by his daughter's bedside, putting cooling flannels on her forehead while she shook. On August 6th the illness broke. On the morning of the 9th Mumtaz was well enough to take a little solid food.



And now my grandfather fetched an old leather bag with the word HEIDELBERG burned into the leather at the base, because he had decided that, as she was very run-down, he had better give her a thorough physical check-up. As he unclasped the bag, his daughter began to cry.



(And now we're here. Padma: this is it.)



Ten minutes later the long time of silence was ended for ever as my grandfather emerged roaring from the sick-room. He bellowed for his wife, his daughters, his sons. His lungs were strong and the noise reached Nadir Khan in the cellar. It would not have been difficult for him to guess what the fuss was about.



The family assembled in the drawing-room around the radiogram, beneath the ageless photographs. Aziz carried Mumtaz into the room and set her down on a couch. His face looked terrible. Can you imagine how the insides of his nose must have felt? Because he had this bombshell to drop: that, after two years of marriage, his daughter was still a virgin.



It had been three years since Reverend Mother had spoken. 'Daughter, is this thing true?' The silence, which had been hanging in the corners of the house like a torn cobweb, was finally blown away; but Mumtaz just nodded: Yes. True.



Then she spoke. She said she loved her husband and the other thing would come right in the end. He was a good man and when it was possible to have children he would surely find it possible to do the thing. She said a marriage should not depend on the thing, she had thought, so she had not liked to mention it, and her father was not right to tell everyone out loud like he had. She would have said more; but now Reverend Mother burst.

Three years of words poured out of her (but her body, stretched by the exigencies of storing them, did not diminish). My grandfather stood very still by the Telefunken as the storm broke over him. Whose idea had it been? Whose crazy fool scheme, whatsitsname, to let this coward who wasn't even a man into the house? To stay here, whatsitsname, free as a bird, food and shelter for three years, what did you care about meatless days, whatsitsname, what did you know about the cost of rice? Who was the weakling, whatsitsname, yes, the white-haired weakling who had permitted this iniquitous marriage? Who had put his daughter into that scoundrel's, whatsitsname, bed? Whose head was full of every damn fool incomprehensible thing, whatsitsname, whose brain was so softened by fancy foreign ideas that he could send his child into such an unnatural marriage? Who had spent his life offending God, whatsitsname, and on whose head was this a judgment? Who had brought disaster down upon his house ...

she spoke against my grandfather for an hour and nineteen minutes and by the time she had finished the clouds had run out of water and the house was full of puddles. And, before she ended, her youngest daughter Emerald did a very curious thing.



Emerald's hands rose up beside her face, bunched into fists, but with index fingers extended. Index fingers entered ear-holes and seemed to life Emerald out of her chair until she was running, fingers plugging ears, running - FULL-TILT! - without her dupatta on, out into the street, through the puddles of water, past the rickshaw-stand, past the paan-shop where the old men were just emerging cautiously into the clean fresh air of after-the-rain, and her speed amazed the urchins who were on their marks, waiting to begin their game of dodging in and out between the betel-jets, because nobody was used to seeing a young lady, much less one of the Teen Batti, running alone and distraught through the rain-soaked streets with her fingers in her ears and no dupatta around her shoulders.



Nowadays, the cities are full of modern, fashionable, dupatta-less misses; but back then the old men clicked their tongues in sorrow, because a woman without a dupatta was a woman without honour, and why had Emerald Bibi chosen to leave her honour at Home? The old ones were baffled, but Emerald knew. She saw, clearly, freshly in the after-rain air, that the fountain-head of her family's troubles was that cowardly plumpie (yes, Padma) who lived underground. If she could get rid of him everyone would be happy again ... Emerald ran without pausing to the Cantonment district. The Cantt, where the army was based; where Major Zulfikar would be! Breaking her oath, my aunt arrived at his office.



Zulfikar is a famous name amongst Muslims. It was the name of the two-pronged sword carried by Ali, the nephew of the prophet Muhammad. It was a weapon such as the world had never seen.



Oh, yes: something else was happening in the world that day. A weapon such as the world had never seen was being dropped on yellow people in Japan. But in Agra, Emerald was using a secret weapon of her own. It was bandylegged, short, flat-headed; its nose almost touched its chin; it dreamed of a big modern house with a plumbed-in bath right beside the bed.



Major Zulfikar had never been absolutely sure whether or not he believed Nadir Khan to have been behind the Hummingbird's murder; but he itched for the chance to find out. When Emerald told him about Agra's subterranean Taj, he became so excited that he forgot to be angry, and rushed to Cornwallis Road with a force of fifteen men. They arrived in the drawing-room with Emerald at their head. My aunt: treason with a beautiful face, no dupatta and pink loose-pajamas. Aziz watched dumbly as the soldiers rolled back the drawing-room carpet and opened the big trap-door as my grandmother attempted to console Mumtaz. 'Women must marry men,' she said. 'Not mice, whatsitsname! There is no shame in leaving that, whatsitsname, worm.' But her daughter continued to cry.



Absence of Nadir in his underworld! Warned by Aziz's first roar, overcome by the embarrassment which flooded over him more easily than monsoon rain, he vanished.



A trap-door flung open in one of the toilets - yes, the very one, why not, in which he had spoken to Doctor Aziz from the sanctuary of a washing-chest. A wooden 'thunderbox' -a 'throne' - lay on one side, empty enamel pot rolling on coir matting. The toilet had an outside door giving out on to the gully by the cornfield; the door was open. It had been locked from the outside, but only with an Indian-made lock, so it had been easy to force ... and in the soft lamplit seclusion of the Taj Mahal, a shining spittoon, and a note, addressed to Mumtaz, signed by her husband, three words long, six syllables, three exclamation marks: Talaaq! Talaaq! Talaaq! The English lacks the thunderclap sound of the Urdu, and anyway you know what it means. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. Nadir Khan had done the decent thing.



?awesome rage of Major Zulfy when he found the bird had flown! This was the colour he saw: red. ?anger fully comparable to my grandfather's fury, though expressed in petty gestures! Major Zulfy, at first, hopped up and down in helpless fits of temper; controlled himself at last; and- rushed out through bathroom, past throne, alongside cornfield, through perimeter gate. No sign of a running, plump, longhair, rhymeless poet. Looking left: nothing. And right: zero. Enraged Zulfy made his choice, pelted past the cycle-rickshaw rank. Old men were playing hit-the-spittoon and the spittoon was out in the street.



Urchins, dodging in and out of the streams of betel-juice. Major Zulfy ran, ononon. Between the old men and their target, but he lacked the urchins' skill.



What an unfortunate moment: a low hard jet of red fluid caught him squarely in the crotch. A stain like a hand clutched at the groin of his battledress; squeezed; arrested his progress. Major Zulfy stopped in almighty wrath. ?even more unfortunate; because a second player, assuming the mad soldier would keep on running' had unleashed a second jet. A second red hand clasped the first and completed Major Zulfy's day... slowly, with deliberation, he went to the spittoon and kicked it over, into the dust. He jumped on it -once! twice! again! - flattening it, and refusing to show that it had hurt his foot. Then, with some dignity, he limped away, back to the car parked outside my grandfather's house.



The old ones retrieved their brutalized receptacle and began to knock it back into shape.



'Now that I'm getting married,' Emerald told Mumtaz, 'it'll be very rude of you if you don't even try to have a good time. And you should be giving me advice and everything.' At the time, although Mumtaz smiled at her younger sister, she had thought it a great cheek on Emerald's part to say this; and, unintentionally perhaps, had increased the pressure of the pencil with which she was applying henna tracery to the soles of her sister's feet. 'Hey!' Emerald squealed, 'No need to get mad! I just thought we should try to be friends.'



Relations between the sisters had been somewhat strained since Nadir Khan's disappearance; and Mumtaz hadn't liked it when Major Zulfikar (who had chosen not to charge my grandfather with harbouring a wanted man, and squared it with Brigadier Dodson) asked for, and received, permission to marry Emerald. 'It's like blackmail,' she thought. 'And anyway, what about Alia? The eldest shouldn't be married last, and look how patient she's been with her merchant fellow.' But she said nothing, and smiled her forebearing smile, and devoted her gift of assiduity to the wedding preparations, and agreed to try and have a good time; while Alia went on waiting for Ahmed Sinai. ('She'll wait forever,' Padma guesses: correctly.)



January 1946. Marquees, sweetmeats, guests, songs, fainting bride, stiff-at-attention groom: a beautiful wedding... at which the leather-cloth merchant, Ahmed Sinai, found himself deep in conversation with the newly-divorced Mumtaz. 'You love-children? - what a coincidence, so do I..." 'And you didn't have any, poor girl? Well, matter of fact, my wife couldn't ...'



'Oh, no; how sad for you; and she must have been bad-tempered like anything!''... Oh, like hell... excuse me. Strength of emotions carried me away.''- Quite all right; don't think about it. Did she throw dishes and all?'



'Did she throw? In one month we had to eat out of newspaper!' 'No, my goodness, what whoppers you tell!' 'Oh, it's no good, you're too clever for me. But she did throw dishes all the same.' 'You poor, poor man.' 'No - you. Poor, poor you.' And thinking: 'Such a charming chap, with Alia he always looked so bored ...' And,'... This girl, I never looked at her, but my goodness me...' And,'...



You can tell he loves children; and for that I could...' And,'... Well, never mind about the skin...' It was noticeable that, when it was time to sing, Mumtaz found the spirit to join in all the songs; but Alia remained silent. She had been bruised even more badly than her father in Jallianwala Bagh; and you couldn't see a mark on her.



'So, gloomy sis, you managed to enjoy yourself after all.'



In June that year, Mumtaz re-married. Her sister - taking her cue from their mother- would not speak to her until, just before they both died, she saw her chance of revenge. Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Alia that these things happen, it was better to find out now than later, and Mumtaz had been badly hurt and needed a man to help her recover...



besides, Alia had brains, she would be all right. 'But, but,' Alia said, 'nobody ever married a book.' 'Change your name,' Ahmed Sinai said. 'Time for a fresh start. Throw Mumtaz and her Nadir Khan out of the window, I'll choose you a new name. Amina. Amina Sinai: you'd like that?' 'Whatever you say, husband,' my mother said. 'Anyway,' Alia, the wise child, wrote in her diary, 'who wants to get landed with this marrying Business? Not me; never; no.'



Mian Abdullah was a false start for a lot of optimistic people; his assistant (whose name could not be spoken in my father's house) was my mother's wrong turning. But those were the years of the drought; many crops planted at that time ended up by coming to nothing.



'What happened to the plumpie?' Padma asks, crossly, 'You don't mean you aren't going to tell?'

There followed an illusionist January, a time so still on its surface that 1947 seemed not to have begun at all. (While, of course, in fact...) In which the Cabinet Mission - old Pethick-Lawrence, clever Cripps, military A. V. Alexander - saw their scheme for the transfer of power fail. (But of course, in fact it would only be six months until...) In which the viceroy, Wavell, understood that he was finished, washed-up, or in our own expressive word, funtoosh, (Which, of course, in fact only speeded things up, because it let in the last of the viceroys, who ...) In which Mr Attlee seemed too busy deciding the future of Burma with Mr Aung Sam. (While, of course, in fact he was briefing the last viceroy, before announcing his appointment; the last-viceroy-to-be was visiting the King and being granted plenipotentiary powers; so that soon, soon ...) In which the Constituent Assembly stood self-adjourned, without having settled on a Constitution. (But, of course, in fact Earl Mountbatten, the last viceroy, would be with us any day, with his inexorable ticktock, his soldier's knife that could cut subcontinents in three, and his wife who ate chicken breasts secretly behind a locked lavatory door.) And in the midst of the mirror-like stillness through which it was impossible to see the great machineries grinding, my mother, the brand-new Amina Sinai, who also looked still and unchanging although great things were happening beneath her skin, woke up one morning with a head buzzing with insomnia and a tongue thickly coated with unslept sleep and found herself saying aloud, without meaning to at all, 'What's the sun doing here, Allah? It's come up in the wrong place.'

... I must interrupt myself. I wasn't going to today, because Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings; but I simply must register a protest. So, breaking into a chapter which, by a happy chance, I have named 'A Public Announcement', I issue (in the strongest possible terms)

the following general medical alert: 'A certain Doctor N. Q. Baligga,' I wish to proclaim - from the rooftops! Through the loudhailers of minarets! - 'is a quack. Ought to be locked up, struck off, defenestrated. Or worse: subjected to his own quackery, brought out in leprous boils by a mis-prescribed pill. Damn fool,' I underline my point, 'can't see what's under his nose!'



Having let off steam, I must leave my mother to worry for a further moment about the curious behaviour of the sun, to explain that our Padma, alarmed by my references to cracking up, has confided covertly in this Baligga - this ju-ju man! this green-Medicine wallah! -and as a result, the charlatan, whom I will not deign to glorify with a description, came to call. I, in all innocence and for Padma's sake, permitted him to examine me. I should have feared the worst; the worst is what he did. Believe this if you can: the fraud has pronounced me whole! 'I see no cracks,' he intoned mournfully, differing from Nelson at Copenhagen in that he possessed no good eye, his blindness not the choice of stubborn genius but the inevitable curse of his folly! Blindly, he impugned my state of mind, cast doubts on my reliability as a witness, and Godknowswhatelse: 'I see no cracks.'



In the end it was Padma who shooed him away. 'Never mind, Doctor Sahib,' Padma said, 'we will look after him ourselves.' On her face I saw a kind of recognition of her own dull guilt... exit Baligga, never to return to these pages. But good God! Has the medical profession - the calling of Aadam Aziz - sunk so low? To this cess-pool of Baliggas? In the end, if this be true, everyone will do without doctors ... which brings me back to the reason why Amina Sinai awoke one morning with the sun on her lips.



'It's come up in the wrong place!' she yelped, by accident; and then, through the fading buzzing of her bad night's sleep, understood how in this month of illusion she had fallen victim to a trick, because all that had happened was that she had woken up in Delhi, in the Home of her new husband, which faced east towards the sun; so the truth of the matter was that the sun was in the right place, and it was her position which had changed ... but even after she grasped this elementary thought, and stored it away with the many similar mistakes she had made since coming here (because her confusion about the sun had been a regular occurrence, as if her mind were refusing to accept the alteration in her circumstances, the new, above-ground position of her bed), something of its jumbling influence remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease.



'In the end, everyone can do without fathers,' Doctor Aziz told his daughter when he said goodbye; and Reverend Mother added, 'Another orphan in the family, whatsitsname, but never mind, Muhammad was an orphan too; and you can say this for your Ahmed Sinai, whatsitsname, at least he is half Kashmiri.' Then, with his own hands, Doctor Aziz had passed a green tin trunk into the railway compartment where Ahmed Sinai awaited his bride. 'The dowry is neither small nor vast as these things go,' my grandfather said. 'We are not crorepatis, you understand. But we have given you enough; Amina will give you more.' Inside the green tin trunk: silver samovars, brocade saris, gold coins given to Doctor Aziz by grateful patients, a museum in which the exhibits represented illnesses cured and lives saved. And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up after the dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so re-invented her, thus becoming in a sense her father as well as her new husband ... he walked (with his own feet) along the platform as the train began to move.



A relay runner at the end of his lap, he stood wreathed in smoke and comic-book vendors and the confusion of peacock-feather fans and hot snacks and the whole lethargic hullabaloo of squatting porters and plaster animals on trolleys as the train picked up speed and headed for the capital city, accelerating into the next lap of the race. In the compartment the new Amina Sinai sat (in mint condition) with her feet on the green tin trunk which had been an inch too high to fit under the seat. With her sandals bearing down on the locked museum of her father's achievements she sped away into her new life, leaving Aadam Aziz behind to dedicate himself to an attempt to fuse the skills of Western and hakimi Medicine, attempt which would gradually wear him down, convincing him that the hegemony of superstition, mumbo-jumbo and all things magical would never be broken in India, because the hakims refused to co-operate; and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to do so.



As the train pulled out of the station Ahmed Sinai jumped up and bolted the compartment door and pulled down the shutters, much to Amina's amazement; but then suddenly there were thumps outside and hands moving the doorknobs and voices saying 'Let us in, maharaj! Maharajin, are you there, ask your husband to open.' And always, in all the trains in this story, there were these voices and these fists banging and pleading; in the Frontier Mail to Bombay and in all the expresses of the years; and it was always frightening, until at last I was the one on the outside, hanging on for dear life, and begging, 'Hey, maharaj! Let me in, great sir.'



'Fare dodgers,' Ahmed Sinai said, but they were more than that. They were a prophecy. There were to be others soon.



... And now the sun was in the wrong place. She, my mother, lay in bed and felt ill-at-ease; but also excited by the thing that had happened inside her and which, for the moment, was her secret. At her side, Ahmed Sinai snored richly.



No insomnia for him; none, despite the troubles which had made him bring a grey bag full of money and hide it under his bed when he thought Amina wasn't looking. My father slept soundly, wrapped in the soothing envelope of my mother's greatest gift, which turned out to be worth a good deal more than the contents of the green tin trunk: Amir, a Sinai gave Ahmed the gift of her inexhaustible assiduity.



Nobody ever took pains the way Amina did. Dark of skin, glowing of eye, my mother was by nature the most meticulous person on earth. Assiduously, she arranged flowers in the corridors and rooms of the Old Delhi house; carpets were selected with infinite care. She could spend twenty-five minutes worrying at the positioning of a chair. By the time she'd finished with her Home-making, adding tiny touches bere, making fractional alterations there, Ahmed Sinai found his orphan's dwelling transformed into something gentle and loving. Amina would rise before he did, her assiduity driving her to dust everything, even the cane chick-blinds (until he agreed to employ a hamal for the purpose); but what Ahmed never knew was that his wife's talents were most dedicatedly, most determinedly applied not to the externals of their lives, but to the matter of Ahmed Sinai himself.



Why had she married him? - For solace, for children. But at first the insomnia coating her brain got in the way of her first aim; and children don't always come at once. So Amina had found herself dreaming about an undreamable poet's face and waking with an unspeakable name on her lips. You ask: what did she do about it? I answer: she gritted her teeth and set about putting herself straight. This is what she told herself: 'You big ungrateful goof, can't you see who is your husband now? Don't you know what a husband deserves?' To avoid fruitless controversy about the correct answers to these questions, let me say that, in my mother's opinion, a husband deserved unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. But there was a difficulty: Amina, her mind clogged up with Nadir Khan and insomnia, found she couldn't naturally provide Ahmed Sinai with these things. And so, bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioural, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes ... in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit.



Each day she selected one fragment of Ahmed Sinai, and concentrated her entire being upon it until it became wholly familiar; until she felt fondness rising up within her and becoming affection and, finally, love. In this way she came to adore his over-loud voice and the way it assaulted her eardrums and made her tremble; and his peculiarity of always being in a good mood until after he had shaved -after which, each morning, his manner became stern, gruff, Businesslike and distant; and his vulture-hooded eyes which concealed what she was sure was his inner goodness behind a bleakly ambiguous gaze; and the way his lower lip jutted out beyond his upper one; and his shortness which led him to forbid her ever to wear high heels ... 'My God,' she told herself, 'it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man!' But she was undismayed.

'Who, after all,' she reasoned privately, 'ever truly knows another human being completely?' and continued to learn to love and admire his appetite for fried foods, his ability to quote Persian poetry, the furrow of anger between his eyebrows... 'At this rate,' she thought, 'there will always be something fresh about him to love; so our marriage just can't go stale.' In this way, assiduously, my mother settled down to life in the old city. The tin trunk sat unopened in an old almirah.



And Ahmed, without knowing or suspecting, found himself and his life worked upon by his wife until, little by little, he came to resemble -and to live in a place that resembled - a man he had never known and an underground chamber he had never seen. Under the influence of a painstaking magic so obscure that Amina was probably unaware of working it, Ahmed Sinai found Ms hair thinning, and what was left becoming lank and greasy; he discovered that he was willing to let it grow until it began to worm over the tops of his ears. Also, his stomach began to spread, until it became the yielding, squashy belly in which I would so often be smothered and which none of us, consciously at any rate, compared to the pudginess of Nadir Khan. His distant cousin Zobra told him, coquettishly, 'You must diet, cousinji, or we won't be able to reach you to kiss!' But it did no good ... and little by little Amina constructed in Old Delhi a world of soft cushions and draperies over the windows which let in as little light as possible... she lined the chick-blinds with black cloths; and all these minute transformations helped her in her Herculean task, the task of accepting, bit by bit, that she must love a new man. (But she remained susceptible to the forbidden dream-images of... and was always drawn to men with soft stomachs and longish, lankish hair.)



You could not see the new city from the old one. In the new city, a race of pink conquerors had built palaces in pink stone; but the houses in the narrow lanes of the old city leaned over, jostled, shuffled, blocked each other's view of the roseate edifices of power. Not that anyone ever looked in that direction, anyway. In the Muslim muhallas or neighbourhoods which clustered around Chandni Chowk, people were content to look inwards into the screened-off courtyards of their lives; to roll chick-blinds down over their windows and verandahs. In the narrow lanes, young loafers held hands and linked arms and kissed when they met and stood in hip-jutting circles, facing inwards. There was no greenery and the cows kept away, knowing they weren't sacred here. Bicycle bells rang constantly.



And above their cacophony sounded the cries of itinerant fruit-sellers: Come all you greats-O, eat a few dates-O! To all of which was added, on that January morning when my mother and father were each concealing secrets from the other, the nervous clatter of the footsteps of Mr Mustapha Kemal and Mr S. P. Butt; and also the insistent rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum.



When the clattering footsteps were first heard in the gullies of the muhalla, Lifafa Das and his peepshow and drum were still some distance away. Clatter-feet descended from a taxi and rushed into the narrow lanes; meanwhile, in their corner house, my mother stood in her kitchen stirring khichri for breakfast overhearing my father conversing with his distant cousin Zohra. Feet clacked past fruit salesmen and hand-holding loafers; my mother overheard:'... You newlyweds, I can't stop coming to see, cho chweet I can't tell you!' While feet approached, my father actually coloured. In those days he was in the high summer of his charm; his lower lip really didn't jut so much, the line between his eyebrows was still only faint... and Amina, stirring khichri, heard Zohra squeal, 'Oh look, pink! But then you are so fair, cousinji! ...' And he was letting her listen to All-India Radio at the table, which Amina was not allowed to do; Lata Mangeshkar was singing a waily love-song as 'Just like me, don'tyouthink,' Zohra went on. 'Lovely pink babies we'll have, a perfect match, no, cousinji, pretty white couples?' And the feet clattering and the pan being stirred while 'How awful to be black, cousinji, to wake every morning and see it staring at you, in the mirror to be shown proof of your inferiority! Of course they know; even blackies know white is nicer, don'tyouthinkso?' The feet very close now and Amina stamping into the dining-room pot in hand, concentrating hard at restraining herself, thinking Why must she come today when I have news to tell and also I'll have to ask for money in front of her. Ahmed Sinai liked to be asked nicely for money, to have it wheedled out of him with caresses and sweet words until his table napkin began to rise in his lap as something moved in his pajamas; and she didn't mind, with her assiduity she learned to love this also, and when she needed money there were strokes and 'Janum, my life, please...' and'.. .Just a little so that I can make nice food and pay the bills ...' and 'Such a generous man, give me what you like, I know it will be enough'... the techniques of street beggars and she'd have to do it in front of that one with her saucer eyes and giggly voice and loud chat about blackies.



Feet at the door almost and Amina in the dining-room with hot khichri at the ready, so very near to Zohra's silly head, whereupon Zohra cries, 'Oh, present company excluded, of course!' just in case, not being sure whether she's been overheard or not, and 'Oh, Ahmed, cousinji, you are really too dreadful to think I meant our lovely Amina who really isn't so black but only like a white lady standing in the shade!' While Amina with her pot in hand looks at the pretty head and thinks Should I? And, Do I dare? And calms herself down with: 'It's a big day for me; and at least she raised the subject of children; so now it'll be easy for me to...' But it's too late, the wailing of Lata on the radio has drowned the sound of the doorbell so they haven't heard old Musa the bearer going to answer the door; Lata has obscured the sound of anxious feet clattering upstairs; but all of a sudden here they are, the feet of Mr Mustapha Kemal and Mr S. P. Butt, coming to a shuffling halt.



'The rapscallions have perpetrated an outrage!' Mr Kemal, who is the thinnest man Amina Sinai has ever seen, sets off with his curiously archaic phraseology (derived from his fondness for litigation, as a result of which he has become infected with the cadences of the lawcourts) a kind of chain reaction of farcical panic, to which little, eaky, spineless S. P. Butt, who has something wild dancing like a monkey in the eyes, adds considerably, by getting out these three words: 'Yes, the firebugs!' And now Zohra in an odd reflex action clutches the radio to her: bosom, muffing Lata between her breasts, screaming, 'O God, ? God, what firebugs, where? This house? ?God I can feel the heat!' Amina stands frozen khichri-in-hand staring at the two men in their Business suits as her husband, secrecy thrown to the winds now, rises shaven but as-yet-unsuited to his feet and asks, 'The godown?'



Godown, gudam, warehouse, call it what you like; but no sooner had Ahmed Sinai asked his question than a hush fell upon the room, except of course that Lata Mangeshkar's voice still issued from Zohra's cleavage; because these three men shared one such large edifice, located on the industrial estate at the outskirts of the city. 'Not the godown, God forfend," Amina prayed silently, because the reccine and leathercloth Business was doing well - through Major Zulfikar, who was now an aide at Military G.H.Q, in Delhi, Ahmed Sinai had landed a contract to supply leathercloth jackets and waterproof table coverings to the Army itself- and large stocks of the material on which their lives depended were stored in that warehouse. 'But who would do such a thing?' Zohra wailed in harmony with her singing breasts, 'What mad people are loose in the world these days?'... and that was how Amina heard, for the first time, the name which her husband had hidden from her, and which was, in those times, striking terror into many hearts. 'It is Havana,' said S. P. Butt... but Ravana is the name of a many-headed demon; are demons, then, abroad in the land? 'What rubbish is this?'



Amina, speaking with her father's hatred of superstition, demanded an answer; and Mr Kemal provided it. 'It is the name of a dastardly crew, Madam; a band of incendiary rogues. These are troubled days; troubled days.'



In the godown;roll upon roll of leathercloth; and the commodities dealt in by Mr Kemal, rice tea lentfls - he hoards them all over the1 country in vast quantities, as a form of protection against the many-headed many-mouthed rapacious monster that is the public, which, if given its heads, would force prices so low in a time of abundance that godfearing entrepreneurs would starve while the monster grew fat... 'Economics is scarcity,' Mr Kemal argues, 'therefore my hoards not only keep prices at a decent level but underpin the very structure of the economy.' - And then there is, in the godown, Mr Butt's stockpile, boxed in cartons bearing the words AAG BRAND. I do not need to tell you that aag means fire. S. P. Butt was a manufacturer of matches.



'Our informations,' Mr Kemal says, 'reveal only the fact of a fire at the estate. The precise godown is not specified.'



'But why should it be ours?' Ahmed Sinai asks. 'Why, since we still have time to pay?'



'Pay?' Amina interrupts. 'Pay whom? Pay what? Husband, janum, life of mine, what is happening here?'... But 'We must go,' S. P. Butt says, and Ahmed Sinai is leaving, crumpled night-pajamas and all, rushing clatterfooted out of the house with the thin one and the spineless one, leaving behind him uneaten khichri, wide-eyed women, muffled Lata, and hanging in the air the name of Ravana... 'a gang of ne'er-do-wells, Madam; unscrupulous cut-throats and bounders to a man!'



And S. P. Butt's last quavering words: 'Damnfool Hindu firebugs, Begum Sahiba.



But what can we Muslims do?'

What is known about the Ravana gang? That it posed as a fanatical anti-Muslim movement, which, in those days before the Partition riots, in those days when pigs' heads could be left with impunity in the courtyards of Friday mosques, was nothing unusual. That it sent men out, at dead of night, to paint slogans on the walls of both old and new cities: NO PARTITION OR ELSE PERDITION! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA! and so forth. And that it burned down Muslim-owned factories, shops, godowns. But there's more, and this is not commonly known: behind this facade of racial hatred, the Ravana gang was a brilliantly-conceived commercial enterprise. Anonymous phone calls, letters written with words cut out of newspapers were issued to Muslim Businessmen, who were offered the choice between paying a single, once-only cash sum and having their world burned down.



Interestingly, the gang proved itself to be ethical. There were no second demands. And they meant business: in the absence of grey bags full of pay-off money, fire would lick at shopfronts factories warehouses. Most people paid, preferring that to the risky alternative of trusting to the police. The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. And it is said (though I can't be sure of this) that , when the blackmail letters arrived, they contained a list of 'satisfied customers' who had paid up and stayed in Business. The Ravana gang - like all professionals - gave references.



Two men in Business suits, one in pajamas, ran through the narrow gullies of the Muslim muhalla to the taxi waiting on Chandni Chowk. They attracted curious glances: not only because of their varied attire, but because they were trying not to run. 'Don't show panic,' Mr Kemal said, 'Look calm.' But their feet kept getting out of control and rushing on. Jerkily, in little rushes of speed followed by a few badly-disciplined steps at walking pace, they left the muhalla; and passed, on their way, a young man with a black metal peepshow box on wheels, a man holding a dugdugee drum: Lifafa Das, on his way to the scene of the important annunciation which gives this episode its name. Lifafa Pas was rattling his drum and calling: 'Come see everything, come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi, come see India, come see! Come see, come see!'



But Ahmed Sinai had other things to look at.



The children of the muhalla had their own names for most of the local inhabitants. One group of three neighbours was known as the 'fighting-cock people', because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose Homes were separated by one of the muhalla's few Hindu residences. The Sindhi and the Bengali had very little in common - they didn't speak the same language or cook the same food; but they were both Muslims, and they both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from their rooftops. They hurled multilingual abuse at him from their windows. They flung scraps of meat at his door... while he, in turn, paid urchins to throw stones at their windows, stones with messages wrapped round them: 'Wait,' the messages said, 'Your turn will come'... the children of the muhalla did not call my father by his right name. They knew him as 'the man who can't follow his nose'.



Ahmed Sinai was the possessor of a sense of direction so inept that, left to his own devices, he could even get lost in the winding gullies of his own neighbourhood. Many times the street-arabs in the lanes had come across him, wandering forlornly, and been offered a four-anna chavanni piece to escort him Home. I mention this because I believe that my father's gift for taking wrong turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it was also a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir Khan, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what's more, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road... But that's enough for now, because I've given the three Businessmen enough time to get to the industrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct consequence of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future failure, the odour of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths. Mr Kemal, who smelled it, would say privately to S. P. Butt, "These Kashmiri types, old boy: well-known fact they never wash.' This slander connects my father to the boatman Tai... to Tai in the grip of the self-destructive rage which made him give up being clean.



At the industrial estate, night-watchmen were sleeping peacefully through the noise of the fire-engines. Why? How? Because they had made a deal with the Ravana mob, and, when tipped off about the gang's impending arrival, would take sleeping draughts and pull their charpoy beds away from the buildings of the estate. In this way the gang avoided violence, and the nightwatchmen augmented their meagre wages. It was an amicable and not unintelligent arrangement.



Amid sleeping night-watchmen, Mr Kemal, my father and S. P. Butt watched cremated bicycles rise up into the sky in thick black clouds. Butt father Kemal stood alongside fire engines, as relief flooded through them, because it was the Arjuna Indiabike godown that was burning - the Arjuna brand-name, taken from a hero of Hindu mythology, had failed to disguise the fact that the company was Muslim-owned. Washed by relief, father Kemal Butt breathed air filled with incendiarized bicycles, coughing and spluttering as the fumes of incinerated wheels, the vaporized ghosts of chains bells saddlebags handlebars, the transubstantiated frames of Arjuna Indiabikes moved in and out of their lungs. A crude cardboard mask had been nailed to a telegraph pole in front of the flaming godown - a mask of many faces - a devil's mask of snarling faces with broad curling lips and bright red nostrils. The faces of the many-headed monster, Ravana the demon king, looking angrily down at the bodies of the night-watchmen who were sleeping so soundly that no one, neither the firemen, nor Kemal, nor Butt, nor my father, had the heart to disturb them; while the ashes of pedals and inner tubes fell upon them from the skies.



'Damn bad Business,' Mr Kemal said. He was not being sympathetic. He was criticizing the owners of the Arjuna Indiabike Company.



Look: the cloud of the disaster (which is also a relief) rises and gathers like a ball in the discoloured morning sky. See how it thrusts itself westward into the heart of the old city; how it is pointing, good lord, like a finger, pointing down at the Muslim muhalla near Chandni Chowk! ... Where, right now, Lifafa Das is crying his wares in the Sinais' very own gully.



'Come see everything, see the whole world, come see!'



It's almost time for the public announcement. I won't deny I'm excited: I've been hanging around in the background of my own story for too long, and although it's still a little while before I can take over, it's nice to get a look in.



So, with a sense of high expectation, I follow the pointing finger in the sky and look down on my parents' neighbourhood, upon bicycles, upon street-vendors touting roasted gram in twists of paper, upon the hip-jutting, hand-holding street loafers, upon flying scraps of paper and little clustered whirlwinds of flies around the sweetmeat stalls... all of it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view. And there are children, swarms of them, too, attracted into the street by the magical rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum and his voice, 'Dunya dekho', see the whole world! Boys without shorts on, girls without vests, and other, smarter infants in school whites, their shorts held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped snake-buckles, fat little boys with podgy fingers; all flocking to the black box on wheels, including this one particular girl, a girl with one long hairy continuous eyebrow shading both eyes, the eight-year-old daughter of that same discourteous Sindhi who is even now raising the flag of the still-fictional country, of Pakistan on his roof, who is even now hurling abuse at his neighbour, while his daughter rushes into the street with her chavanni in her hand, her expression of a midget queen, and murder lurking just behind her lips. What's her name? I don't know; but I know those eyebrows.



Lifafa Das: who has by an unfortunate chance set up Ms black peepshow against a wall on which someone has daubed a swastika (in those days you saw them everywhere; the extremist R.S.S.S. party got them on every wall; not the Nazi swastika which was the wrong way round, but the ancient Hindu symbol of power.



Svasti is Sanskrit for good) ... this Lifafa Das whose arrival Pve been trumpeting was a young fellow who was invisible until he smiled, when he became beautiful, or rattled his drum, whereupon he became irresistible to children.



Dugdugee-men: all over India, they shout, 'Dilli dekho', 'come see Delhi!' But this was Delhi, and Lifafa Das had altered his cry accordingly. 'See the whole world, come see everything!' The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to, prey upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put everything into his box.



(I am suddenly reminded of Nadir Khan's friend the painter: is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?)



Inside the peepshow of Lifafa Das were pictures of the Taj Mahal, and MeenaksM Temple, and the holy Ganges; but as well as these famous sights the peepshow-man had felt the urge to include more contemporary images - Stafford Cripps leaving Nehru's residence; untouchables being touched; educated persons sleeping in large numbers on railway lines; a publicity still of a European actress with a mountain of fruit on her head - Lifafa called her Carmen Verandah; even a newspaper photograph, mounted on card, of a fire at the industrial estate.



Lifafa Das did not believe in shielding his audiences from the not-always-pleasant features of the age... and often, when he came into these gullies, grown-ups as well as children came to see what was new inside his box on wheels, and among his most frequent customers was Begum Amina Sinai.



But today there is something hysterical in the air; something brittle and menacing has settled on the muhalla as the cloud of cremated Indiabikes hangs overhead... and now it slips its leash, as this girl with her one continuous eyebrow squeals, her voice lisping with an innocence it does not possess, 'Me firth t! Out of my way... let me thee! I can't thee!' Because there are already eyes at the holes in the box, there are already children absorbed in the progression of postcards, and Ldfafa Das says (without pausing in his work - he goes right on turning the knob which keeps the postcards moving inside the box), 'A few minutes, bibi; everyone will have his turn; wait only.' To which the one-eyebrowed midget queen replies, 'No! No! I want to be firtht!' Lifafa stops smiling - becomes invisible - shrugs. Unbridled fury appears on the face of the midget queen. And now an insult rises; a deadly barb trembles on her lips.



'You've got a nerve, coming into thith muhalla! I know you: my father knows you: everyone knows you're a Hindu!!'



Lifafa Das stands silently, turning the handles of his box; but now the ponytailed one-eyebrowed valkyrie is chanting, pointing with pudgy fingers, and the boys in their school whites and snake-buckles are joining in, 'Hindu! Hindu! Hindu!' And chick-blinds are flying up; and from his window the girl's father leans out and joins in, hurling abuse at a new target, and the Bengali joins in in Bengali... 'Mother raper! Violator of our daughters!' ... and remember the papers have been talking of assaults on Muslim children, so suddenly a voice screams out - a woman's voice, maybe even silly Zohra's, 'Rapist! Arre my God they found the badmaash! There he u!' And now the insanity of the cloud like a pointing finger and the whole disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant, 'Ra-pist! Ra-pist! Ray-ray-ray-pist!' without really knowing what they're saying; the children have edged away from Lifafa Das and he's moved, too, dragging his box on wheels, trying to get away, but now he is surrounded by voices filled with blood, and the street loafers are moving towards him, men are getting off bicycles, a pot flies through the air and shatters on a wall beside him; he has his back against a doorway as a fellow with a quiff of oily hair grins sweetly at him and says, 'So, mister: it is you?



Mister Hindu, who denies our daughters? Mister idolater, who sleeps with his sister?' And Lifafa Das, 'No, for the love of...', smiling like a fool ... and then the door behind him opens and he falls backwards, landing in a dark cool corridor beside my mother Amina Sinai.



She had spent the morning alone with giggling Zohra and the echoes of the name Ravana, not knowing what was happening out there at the industrial estate, letting her mind linger upon the way the whole world seemed to be going mad; and when the screaming started and Zohra - before she could be stopped - joined in, something hardened inside her some realization that she was her father's daughter, some ghost-memory of Nadir Khan hiding from crescent knives in a cornfield, some irritation of her nasal passages, and she went downstairs to the rescue, although Zohra screeched, 'What you doing, sisterji, that mad beast, for God, don't let him in here, have your brains gone raw?'... My mother opened the door and Lifafa Das fell in.



Picture her that morning, a dark shadow between the mob and its prey, her womb bursting with its invisible untold secret: 'Wah, wah,' she applauded the crowd.



'What heroes! Heroes, I swear, absolutely! Only fifty of you against this terrible monster of a fellow! Allah, you make my eyes shine with pride.'



... And Zohra, 'Come back, sisterji!' And the oily quiff, 'Why speak for this goonda, Begum Sahiba? This is not right acting.' And Amina, 'I know this man. He is a decent type. Go, get out, none of you have anything to do? In a Muslim muhalla you would tear a man to pieces? Go, remove yourselves.' But the mob has stopped being surprised, and is moving forward again ... and now. Now it comes.



'Listen,' my mother shouted, 'Listen well. I am with child. I am a mother who will have a child, and I am giving this man my shelter. Come on now, if you want to kill, kill a mother also and show the world what men you are!'



That was how it came about that my arrival - the coming of Saleem Sinai - was announced to the assembled masses of the people before my father had heard about it. From the moment of my conception, it seems, I have been public property.



But although my mother was right when she made her public announcement, she was also wrong. This is why: the baby she was carrying did not turn out to be her son.



My mother came to Delhi; worked assiduously at loving her husband; was prevented by Zohra and khichri and clattering feet from telling her husband her news; heard screams; made a public announcement. And it worked. My annunciation saved a life.



After the crowd dispersed, old Musa the bearer went into the street and rescued Lifafa Das's pecpshow, while Amina gave the young man with the beautiful smile glass after glass of fresh lime water. It seemed that his experience had drained him not only of liquid but also sweetness, because he put four spoonfuls of raw sugar into every glass, while Zohra cowered in pretty terror on a sofa. And, at length, Lifafa Das (rehydrated by lime water, sweetened by sugar) said: 'Begum Sahiba, you are a great lady. If you allow, I bless your house; also your unborn child. But also - please permit - I will do one thing more for you.'



'Thank you,' my mother said, 'but you must do nothing at all.'



But he continued (the sweetness of sugar coating las tongue). 'My cousin, Shri Ramram Seth, is a great seer, Begum Sahiba. Palmist, astrologer, fortune-teller.



You will please come to him, and he will reveal to you the future of your son.'



Soothsayers prophesied me ... in January 1947, my mother Amina Sinai was offered the gift of a prophecy in return for her gift of a life. And despite Zohra's 'It is madness to go with this one, Amina sister, do not even think of it for one sec, these are times to be careful'; despite her memories of her father's scepticism and of his thumbandforefinger closing around a maulvi's ear, the offer touched my mother in a place which answered Yes. Caught up in the illogical wonderment of her brand-new motherhood of which she had only just become certain, 'Yes,' she said, 'Lifafa Das, you will please meet me after some days at the gate to the Red Fort. Then you will take me to your cousin.'



'I shall be waiting every day,' he joined his palms; and left.



Zohra was so stunned that, when Ahmed Sinai came Home, she could only shake her head and say, 'You newlyweds; crazy as owls; I must leave you to each other!'



Musa, the old bearer, kept his mouth shut, too. He kept himself in the background of our lives, always, except twice ... once when he left us; once when he returned to destroy the world by accident.

What is known about the Ravana gang? That it posed as a fanatical anti-Muslim movement, which, in those days before the Partition riots, in those days when pigs' heads could be left with impunity in the courtyards of Friday mosques, was nothing unusual. That it sent men out, at dead of night, to paint slogans on the walls of both old and new cities: NO PARTITION OR ELSE PERDITION! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA! and so forth. And that it burned down Muslim-owned factories, shops, godowns. But there's more, and this is not commonly known: behind this facade of racial hatred, the Ravana gang was a brilliantly-conceived commercial enterprise. Anonymous phone calls, letters written with words cut out of newspapers were issued to Muslim Businessmen, who were offered the choice between paying a single, once-only cash sum and having their world burned down.



Interestingly, the gang proved itself to be ethical. There were no second demands. And they meant business: in the absence of grey bags full of pay-off money, fire would lick at shopfronts factories warehouses. Most people paid, preferring that to the risky alternative of trusting to the police. The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. And it is said (though I can't be sure of this) that , when the blackmail letters arrived, they contained a list of 'satisfied customers' who had paid up and stayed in Business. The Ravana gang - like all professionals - gave references.



Two men in Business suits, one in pajamas, ran through the narrow gullies of the Muslim muhalla to the taxi waiting on Chandni Chowk. They attracted curious glances: not only because of their varied attire, but because they were trying not to run. 'Don't show panic,' Mr Kemal said, 'Look calm.' But their feet kept getting out of control and rushing on. Jerkily, in little rushes of speed followed by a few badly-disciplined steps at walking pace, they left the muhalla; and passed, on their way, a young man with a black metal peepshow box on wheels, a man holding a dugdugee drum: Lifafa Das, on his way to the scene of the important annunciation which gives this episode its name. Lifafa Pas was rattling his drum and calling: 'Come see everything, come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi, come see India, come see! Come see, come see!'



But Ahmed Sinai had other things to look at.



The children of the muhalla had their own names for most of the local inhabitants. One group of three neighbours was known as the 'fighting-cock people', because they comprised one Sindhi and one Bengali householder whose Homes were separated by one of the muhalla's few Hindu residences. The Sindhi and the Bengali had very little in common - they didn't speak the same language or cook the same food; but they were both Muslims, and they both detested the interposed Hindu. They dropped garbage on his house from their rooftops. They hurled multilingual abuse at him from their windows. They flung scraps of meat at his door... while he, in turn, paid urchins to throw stones at their windows, stones with messages wrapped round them: 'Wait,' the messages said, 'Your turn will come'... the children of the muhalla did not call my father by his right name. They knew him as 'the man who can't follow his nose'.



Ahmed Sinai was the possessor of a sense of direction so inept that, left to his own devices, he could even get lost in the winding gullies of his own neighbourhood. Many times the street-arabs in the lanes had come across him, wandering forlornly, and been offered a four-anna chavanni piece to escort him Home. I mention this because I believe that my father's gift for taking wrong turnings did not simply afflict him throughout his life; it was also a reason for his attraction to Amina Sinai (because thanks to Nadir Khan, she had shown that she could take wrong turnings, too); and, what's more, his inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road... But that's enough for now, because I've given the three Businessmen enough time to get to the industrial estate. I shall add only that (in my opinion as a direct consequence of his lack of a sense of direction) my father was a man over whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future failure, the odour of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths. Mr Kemal, who smelled it, would say privately to S. P. Butt, "These Kashmiri types, old boy: well-known fact they never wash.' This slander connects my father to the boatman Tai... to Tai in the grip of the self-destructive rage which made him give up being clean.



At the industrial estate, night-watchmen were sleeping peacefully through the noise of the fire-engines. Why? How? Because they had made a deal with the Ravana mob, and, when tipped off about the gang's impending arrival, would take sleeping draughts and pull their charpoy beds away from the buildings of the estate. In this way the gang avoided violence, and the nightwatchmen augmented their meagre wages. It was an amicable and not unintelligent arrangement.



Amid sleeping night-watchmen, Mr Kemal, my father and S. P. Butt watched cremated bicycles rise up into the sky in thick black clouds. Butt father Kemal stood alongside fire engines, as relief flooded through them, because it was the Arjuna Indiabike godown that was burning - the Arjuna brand-name, taken from a hero of Hindu mythology, had failed to disguise the fact that the company was Muslim-owned. Washed by relief, father Kemal Butt breathed air filled with incendiarized bicycles, coughing and spluttering as the fumes of incinerated wheels, the vaporized ghosts of chains bells saddlebags handlebars, the transubstantiated frames of Arjuna Indiabikes moved in and out of their lungs. A crude cardboard mask had been nailed to a telegraph pole in front of the flaming godown - a mask of many faces - a devil's mask of snarling faces with broad curling lips and bright red nostrils. The faces of the many-headed monster, Ravana the demon king, looking angrily down at the bodies of the night-watchmen who were sleeping so soundly that no one, neither the firemen, nor Kemal, nor Butt, nor my father, had the heart to disturb them; while the ashes of pedals and inner tubes fell upon them from the skies.



'Damn bad Business,' Mr Kemal said. He was not being sympathetic. He was criticizing the owners of the Arjuna Indiabike Company.



Look: the cloud of the disaster (which is also a relief) rises and gathers like a ball in the discoloured morning sky. See how it thrusts itself westward into the heart of the old city; how it is pointing, good lord, like a finger, pointing down at the Muslim muhalla near Chandni Chowk! ... Where, right now, Lifafa Das is crying his wares in the Sinais' very own gully.



'Come see everything, see the whole world, come see!'



It's almost time for the public announcement. I won't deny I'm excited: I've been hanging around in the background of my own story for too long, and although it's still a little while before I can take over, it's nice to get a look in.



So, with a sense of high expectation, I follow the pointing finger in the sky and look down on my parents' neighbourhood, upon bicycles, upon street-vendors touting roasted gram in twists of paper, upon the hip-jutting, hand-holding street loafers, upon flying scraps of paper and little clustered whirlwinds of flies around the sweetmeat stalls... all of it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view. And there are children, swarms of them, too, attracted into the street by the magical rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum and his voice, 'Dunya dekho', see the whole world! Boys without shorts on, girls without vests, and other, smarter infants in school whites, their shorts held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped snake-buckles, fat little boys with podgy fingers; all flocking to the black box on wheels, including this one particular girl, a girl with one long hairy continuous eyebrow shading both eyes, the eight-year-old daughter of that same discourteous Sindhi who is even now raising the flag of the still-fictional country, of Pakistan on his roof, who is even now hurling abuse at his neighbour, while his daughter rushes into the street with her chavanni in her hand, her expression of a midget queen, and murder lurking just behind her lips. What's her name? I don't know; but I know those eyebrows.



Lifafa Das: who has by an unfortunate chance set up Ms black peepshow against a wall on which someone has daubed a swastika (in those days you saw them everywhere; the extremist R.S.S.S. party got them on every wall; not the Nazi swastika which was the wrong way round, but the ancient Hindu symbol of power.



Svasti is Sanskrit for good) ... this Lifafa Das whose arrival Pve been trumpeting was a young fellow who was invisible until he smiled, when he became beautiful, or rattled his drum, whereupon he became irresistible to children.



Dugdugee-men: all over India, they shout, 'Dilli dekho', 'come see Delhi!' But this was Delhi, and Lifafa Das had altered his cry accordingly. 'See the whole world, come see everything!' The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to, prey upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put everything into his box.



(I am suddenly reminded of Nadir Khan's friend the painter: is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?)



Inside the peepshow of Lifafa Das were pictures of the Taj Mahal, and MeenaksM Temple, and the holy Ganges; but as well as these famous sights the peepshow-man had felt the urge to include more contemporary images - Stafford Cripps leaving Nehru's residence; untouchables being touched; educated persons sleeping in large numbers on railway lines; a publicity still of a European actress with a mountain of fruit on her head - Lifafa called her Carmen Verandah; even a newspaper photograph, mounted on card, of a fire at the industrial estate.



Lifafa Das did not believe in shielding his audiences from the not-always-pleasant features of the age... and often, when he came into these gullies, grown-ups as well as children came to see what was new inside his box on wheels, and among his most frequent customers was Begum Amina Sinai.



But today there is something hysterical in the air; something brittle and menacing has settled on the muhalla as the cloud of cremated Indiabikes hangs overhead... and now it slips its leash, as this girl with her one continuous eyebrow squeals, her voice lisping with an innocence it does not possess, 'Me firth t! Out of my way... let me thee! I can't thee!' Because there are already eyes at the holes in the box, there are already children absorbed in the progression of postcards, and Ldfafa Das says (without pausing in his work - he goes right on turning the knob which keeps the postcards moving inside the box), 'A few minutes, bibi; everyone will have his turn; wait only.' To which the one-eyebrowed midget queen replies, 'No! No! I want to be firtht!' Lifafa stops smiling - becomes invisible - shrugs. Unbridled fury appears on the face of the midget queen. And now an insult rises; a deadly barb trembles on her lips.



'You've got a nerve, coming into thith muhalla! I know you: my father knows you: everyone knows you're a Hindu!!'



Lifafa Das stands silently, turning the handles of his box; but now the ponytailed one-eyebrowed valkyrie is chanting, pointing with pudgy fingers, and the boys in their school whites and snake-buckles are joining in, 'Hindu! Hindu! Hindu!' And chick-blinds are flying up; and from his window the girl's father leans out and joins in, hurling abuse at a new target, and the Bengali joins in in Bengali... 'Mother raper! Violator of our daughters!' ... and remember the papers have been talking of assaults on Muslim children, so suddenly a voice screams out - a woman's voice, maybe even silly Zohra's, 'Rapist! Arre my God they found the badmaash! There he u!' And now the insanity of the cloud like a pointing finger and the whole disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant, 'Ra-pist! Ra-pist! Ray-ray-ray-pist!' without really knowing what they're saying; the children have edged away from Lifafa Das and he's moved, too, dragging his box on wheels, trying to get away, but now he is surrounded by voices filled with blood, and the street loafers are moving towards him, men are getting off bicycles, a pot flies through the air and shatters on a wall beside him; he has his back against a doorway as a fellow with a quiff of oily hair grins sweetly at him and says, 'So, mister: it is you?



Mister Hindu, who denies our daughters? Mister idolater, who sleeps with his sister?' And Lifafa Das, 'No, for the love of...', smiling like a fool ... and then the door behind him opens and he falls backwards, landing in a dark cool corridor beside my mother Amina Sinai.



She had spent the morning alone with giggling Zohra and the echoes of the name Ravana, not knowing what was happening out there at the industrial estate, letting her mind linger upon the way the whole world seemed to be going mad; and when the screaming started and Zohra - before she could be stopped - joined in, something hardened inside her some realization that she was her father's daughter, some ghost-memory of Nadir Khan hiding from crescent knives in a cornfield, some irritation of her nasal passages, and she went downstairs to the rescue, although Zohra screeched, 'What you doing, sisterji, that mad beast, for God, don't let him in here, have your brains gone raw?'... My mother opened the door and Lifafa Das fell in.



Picture her that morning, a dark shadow between the mob and its prey, her womb bursting with its invisible untold secret: 'Wah, wah,' she applauded the crowd.



'What heroes! Heroes, I swear, absolutely! Only fifty of you against this terrible monster of a fellow! Allah, you make my eyes shine with pride.'



... And Zohra, 'Come back, sisterji!' And the oily quiff, 'Why speak for this goonda, Begum Sahiba? This is not right acting.' And Amina, 'I know this man. He is a decent type. Go, get out, none of you have anything to do? In a Muslim muhalla you would tear a man to pieces? Go, remove yourselves.' But the mob has stopped being surprised, and is moving forward again ... and now. Now it comes.



'Listen,' my mother shouted, 'Listen well. I am with child. I am a mother who will have a child, and I am giving this man my shelter. Come on now, if you want to kill, kill a mother also and show the world what men you are!'



That was how it came about that my arrival - the coming of Saleem Sinai - was announced to the assembled masses of the people before my father had heard about it. From the moment of my conception, it seems, I have been public property.



But although my mother was right when she made her public announcement, she was also wrong. This is why: the baby she was carrying did not turn out to be her son.



My mother came to Delhi; worked assiduously at loving her husband; was prevented by Zohra and khichri and clattering feet from telling her husband her news; heard screams; made a public announcement. And it worked. My annunciation saved a life.



After the crowd dispersed, old Musa the bearer went into the street and rescued Lifafa Das's pecpshow, while Amina gave the young man with the beautiful smile glass after glass of fresh lime water. It seemed that his experience had drained him not only of liquid but also sweetness, because he put four spoonfuls of raw sugar into every glass, while Zohra cowered in pretty terror on a sofa. And, at length, Lifafa Das (rehydrated by lime water, sweetened by sugar) said: 'Begum Sahiba, you are a great lady. If you allow, I bless your house; also your unborn child. But also - please permit - I will do one thing more for you.'



'Thank you,' my mother said, 'but you must do nothing at all.'



But he continued (the sweetness of sugar coating las tongue). 'My cousin, Shri Ramram Seth, is a great seer, Begum Sahiba. Palmist, astrologer, fortune-teller.



You will please come to him, and he will reveal to you the future of your son.'



Soothsayers prophesied me ... in January 1947, my mother Amina Sinai was offered the gift of a prophecy in return for her gift of a life. And despite Zohra's 'It is madness to go with this one, Amina sister, do not even think of it for one sec, these are times to be careful'; despite her memories of her father's scepticism and of his thumbandforefinger closing around a maulvi's ear, the offer touched my mother in a place which answered Yes. Caught up in the illogical wonderment of her brand-new motherhood of which she had only just become certain, 'Yes,' she said, 'Lifafa Das, you will please meet me after some days at the gate to the Red Fort. Then you will take me to your cousin.'



'I shall be waiting every day,' he joined his palms; and left.



Zohra was so stunned that, when Ahmed Sinai came Home, she could only shake her head and say, 'You newlyweds; crazy as owls; I must leave you to each other!'



Musa, the old bearer, kept his mouth shut, too. He kept himself in the background of our lives, always, except twice ... once when he left us; once when he returned to destroy the world by accident.

Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance; in which case Musa -for all his age and servility - was nothing less than a time-bomb, ticking softly away until his appointed time; in which case, we should either -optimistically - get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or ebe, of course, we might - as pessimists - give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway; things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos? Was my father being opti- or pessimistic when my mother told him her news (after everyone in the neighbourhood had heard it), and he replied with, 'I told you so; it was only a matter of time? My mother's Pregnancy, it seems, was fated; my birth, however, owed a good deal to accident.