'There,' Narlikar points, 'What do you see?' And Ahmed, mystified, 'Nothing. The tomb. People. What's this about, old chap?' And Narlikar, 'None of that. There!'



And now Ahmed sees that Narlikar's pointing finger is aimed at the cement path ... 'The promenade?' he asks, 'What's that to you? In some minutes the tide will come and cover it up; everybody knows ...' Narlikar, his skin glowing like a beacon, becomes philosophical. 'Just so, brother Ahmed; just so. Land and sea; sea and land; the eternal struggle, not so?' Ahmed, puzzled, remains silent.



'Once there were seven islands,' Narlikar reminds Mm, 'Worli, Mahim, Salsette, Matunga, Colaba, Mazagaon, Bombay. The British joined them up. Sea, brother Ahmed, became land. Land arose, and did not sink beneath the tides!' Ahmed is anxious for his whisky; his lip begins to jut while pilgrims scurry off the narrowing path. 'The point,' he demands. And Narlikar, dazzling with effulgence: 'The point, Ahmed bhai, is this!'



It comes out of his pocket: a little plaster-of-paris model two inches high: the tetrapod! Like a three-dimensional Mercedes-Benz sign, three legs standing on his palm, a fourth rearing lingam-fashion into the evening air, it transfixes my father. 'What is it?' he asks; and now Narlikar tells him: 'This is the baby that will make us richer than Hyderabad, bhai! The little gimmick that will make you, you and me, the masters of that! He points outwards to where sea is rushing over deserted cement pathway... 'The land beneath the sea, my friend! We must manufacture these by the thousand - by tens of thousands! We must tender for reclamation contracts; a fortune is waiting; don't miss it, brother, this is the chance of a lifetime!'



Why did my father agree to dream a gynaecologist's entrepreneurial dream? Why, little by little, did the vision of full-sized concrete tetrapods marching over sea walk, four-legged conquerors triumphing over the sea, capture him as surely as it had the gleaming doctor? Why, in the following years, did Ahmed dedicate himself to the fantasy of every island-dweller - the myth of conquering the waves? Perhaps because he was afraid of missing yet another turning; perhaps for the fellowship of games of shatranj; or maybe it was Narlikar's plausibility - 'Your capital and my contacts, Ahmed bhai, what problem can there be? Every great man in this city has a son brought into the world by me; no doors will close. You manufacture; I will get the contract! Fifty-fifty; fair is fair!'



But, in my view, there is a simpler explanation. My father, deprived of wifely attention, supplanted by bis son, blurred by whisky and djinn, was trying to restore his position in the world; and the dream of tetrapods offered him the chance. Whole-heartedly, he threw himself into the great folly; letters were written, doors knocked upon, black money changed hands; all of which served to make Ahmed Sinai a name known in the corridors of the Sachivalaya - in the passageways of the State Secretariat they got the whiff of a Muslim who was throwing his rupees around like water. And Ahmed Sinai, drinking himself to sleep, was unaware of the danger he was in.



Our lives, at this period, were shaped by correspondence. The Prime Minister wrote to me when I was just seven days old - before I could even wipe my own nose I was receiving fan letters from Times of India readers; and one morning in January Ahmed Sinai, too, received a letter he would never forget.



Red eyes at breakfast were followed by the shaven chin of the working day; footsteps down the stairs; alarmed giggles of Coca-Cola girl. The squeak of a chair drawn up to a desk topped with green leathercloth. Metallic noise of a metal paper-cutter being lifted, colliding momentarily with telephone. The brief rasp of metal slicing envelope; and one minute later, Ahmed was running back up the stairs, yelling for my mother, shouting: 'Amina! Come here, wife! The bastards have shoved my balls in an ice-bucket!'



In the days after Ahmed received the formal letter informing him of the freezing of all his assets, the whole world was talking at once ... 'For pity's sake, janum, such language!' Amina is saying - and is it my imagination, or does a baby blush in a sky-blue crib?



And Narlikar, arriving in a lather of perspiration, 'I blame myself entirely; we made ourselves too public. These are bad times, Sinai bhai - freeze a Muslim's assets, they say, and you make him run to Pakistan, leaving all his wealth behind him. Catch the lizard's tail and he'll snap it off! This so-called secular state gets some damn clever ideas.'



'Everything,' Ahmed Sinai is saying, 'bank account; savings bonds; the rents from the Kurla properties - all blocked, frozen. By order, the letter says. By order they will not let me have four annas, wife - not a chavanni to see the peepshow!'



'It's those photos in the paper,' Amina decides. 'Otherwise how could those jumped-up clever dicks know whom to prosecute? My God, janum, it's my fault ...'



'Not ten pice for a twist of channa,' Ahmed Sinai adds, 'not one anna to give alms to a beggar. Frozen - like in the fridge!'



'It's my fault,' Ismail Ibrahim is saying, 'I should have warned you, Sinai bhai. I have heard about these freezings - only well-off Muslims are selected, naturally. You must fight ...'



'... Tooth and nail!' Homi Catrack insists, 'Like a lion! Like Aurangzeb - your ancestor, isn't it? - like the Rani of Jhansi! Then let's see what kind of country we've ended up in!'



'There are law courts in this State,' Ismail Ibrahim adds; Nussie-the-duck smiles a bovine smile as she suckles Sonny; her fingers move, absently stroking Ms hollows, up and around, down and about, in a steady, unchanging rhythm ...



'You must accept my legal services,' Ismail tells Ahmed, 'Absolutely free, my good friend. No, no I won't hear of it. How can it be? We are neighbours.'



'Broke,' Ahmed is saying, 'Frozen, like water.'



'Come on now,' Amina interrupts him; her dedication rising to new heights, she leads him towards her bedroom... 'Janum, you need to lie for some time.' And Ahmed: 'What's this, wife? A time like this -cleaned out; finished; crushed like ice - and you think about...' But she has closed the door; slippers have been kicked off; arms are reaching towards him; and some moments later her hands are stretching down down down; and then, 'Oh my goodness, janum, I thought you were just talking dirty but it's true! So cold, Allah, so coooold, like little round cubes of ice!'



Such things happen; after the State froze my father's assets, my mother began to feel them growing colder and colder. On the first day, the Brass Monkey was conceived - just in time, because after that, although Amina lay every night with her husband to warm him, although she snuggled up tightly when she felt him shiver as the icy fingers of rage and powerlessness spread upwards from his loins, she could no longer bear to stretch out her hand and touch because his little cubes of ice had become too frigid to hold.



They - we - should have known something bad would happen. That January, Chowpatty Beach, and Juhu and Trombay, too, were littered with the ominous corpses of dead pomfret, which floated, without the ghost of an explanation, belly-side-up, like scaly fingers in to shore.

And other omens: comets were seen exploding above the Back Bay; it was reported that flowers had been seen bleeding real blood; and in February the snakes escaped from the Schaapsteker Institute. The rumour spread that a mad Bengali snake-charmer, a Tubriwallah, was travelling the country, charming reptiles from captivity, leading them out of snake farms (such as the Schaapsteker, where snake venom's medicinal functions were studied, and antivenenes devised) by the Pied Piper fascination of his flute, in retribution for the partition of his beloved Golden Bengal. After a while the rumours added that the Tubriwallah was seven feet tall, with bright blue skin. He was Krishna come to chastise his people; he was the sky-hued Jesus of the missionaries.

It seems that, in the aftermath of my changeling birth, while I enlarged myself at breakneck speed, everything that could possibly go wrong began to do so. In the snake winter of early 1948, and in the succeeding hot and rainy seasons, events piled upon events, so that by the time the Brass Monkey was born in September we were all exhausted, and ready for a few years' rest.

Escaped cobras vanished into the sewers of the city; banded kraits were seen on buses. Religious leaders described the' snake escape as a warning - the god Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation's official renunciation of its deities. ('We are a secular State,' Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary had been asking, 'How are we going to live now, Madam?' Homi Catrack introduced us to Dr Schaapsteker himself. He was eighty-one years old; his tongue flicked constantly in and out between his papery lips; and he was prepared to pay cash rent for a top-floor apartment overlooking the Arabian Sea. Ahmed Sinai, in those days, had taken to his bed; the icy cold of the freeze impregnated his bedsheets; he downed vast quantities of whisky for medicinal purposes, but it failed to warm him up ... so it was Amina who agreed to let the upper storey of Buckingham Villa to the old snake-doctor. At the end of February, snake poison entered our lives.

Dr Schaapsteker was a man who engendered wild stories. The more superstitious orderlies at his Institute swore that he had the capacity of dreaming every night about being bitten by snakes, and thus remained immune to their bites.



Others whispered that he was half-snake himself, the child of an unnatural union between a woman and a cobra. His obsession with the venom of the banded krait - bungarus fasciatus - was becoming legendary. There is no known antivenene to the bite of bungarus: but Schaapsteker had devoted his life to finding one. Buying broken-down horses from the Catrack stables (among others) he injected them with small doses of poison; but the horses, unhelpfully, failed to develop antibodies, frothed at the mouth, died standing up and had to be transformed into glue. It was said that Dr Schaapsteker - 'Sharpsticker sahib' - had now acquired the power of killing horses simply by approaching them with a hypodermic syringe ... but Amina paid no attention to these tall stories. 'He is an old gentleman,' she told Mary Pereira; 'What should we care about people who black-tongue him? He pays his rent, and permits us to live.' Amina was grateful to the European snake-doctor, particularly in those days of the freeze when Ahmed did not seem to have the nerve to fight.



'My beloved father and mother,' Amina wrote, 'By my eyes and head I swear I do not know why such things are happening to us ... Ahmed is a good man, but this Business has hit him hard. If you have advice for your daughter, she is greatly in need of it.' Three days after they received this letter, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother arrived at Bombay Central Station by Frontier Mail; and Amina, driving them Home in our 1946 Rover, looked out of a side window and saw the Mahalaxmi Racecourse; and had the first germ of her reckless idea.



'This modern decoration is all right for you young people, whatsits-name,'



Reverend Mother said. 'But give me one old-fashioned takht to sit on. These chairs are so soft, whatsitsname, they make me feel like I'm falling.'



'Is he ill?' Aadam Aziz asked. 'Should I examine him and prescribe Medicines?'



'This is no time to hide in bed,' Reverend Mother pronounced. 'Now he must be a man, whatsitsname, and do a man's Business.'



'How well you both look, my parents,' Amina cried, thinking that her father was turning into an old man who seemed to be getting shorter with the passing years; while Reverend Mother had grown so wide that armchairs, though soft, groaned beneath her weight... and sometimes, through a trick-of the light, Amina thought she saw, in the centre of her father's body, a dark shadow like a hole.



'What is left in this India?' Reverend Mother asked, hand slicing air. 'Go, leave it all, go to Pakistan. See how well that Zulfikar is doing - he will give you a start. Be a man, my son - get up and start again!'



'He doesn't want to speak now,' Amina said, 'he must rest.'



'Rest?' Aadam Aziz roared. 'The man is a jelly!'



'Even Alia, whatsitsname,' Reverend Mother said, 'all on her own, gone to Pakistan - even she is making a decent life, teaching in a fine school. They say she will be headmistress soon.'



'Shhh, mother, he wants to sleep ... let's go next door ...'



'There is a time to sleep, whatsitsname, and a time to wake! Listen: Mustapha is making many hundreds of rupees a month, whatsitsname, in the Civil Service. What is your husband? Too good to work?'



'Mother, he is upset. His temperature is so low ...'



'What food are you giving? From today, whatsitsname, I will run your kitchen.



Young people today - like babies, whatsitsname!'



'Just as you like, mother.'



'I tell you whatsitsname, it's those photos in the paper. I wrote -didn't I write? - no good would come of that. Photos take away pieces of you. My God, whatsitsname, when I saw your picture, you had become so transparent I could see the writing from the other side coming right through your face!'



'But that's only ...'



'Don't tell me your stories, whatsitsname! I give thanks to God you have recovered from that photography!'



After that day, Amina was freed from the exigencies of running her Home.



Reverend Mother sat at the head of the dining-table, doling out food (Amina took plates to Ahmed, who stayed in bed, moaning from time to time, 'Smashed, wife! Snapped - like an icicle!'); while, in the kitchens, Mary Pereira took the time to prepare, for the benefit of their visitors, some of the finest and most delicate mango pickles, lime chutneys and cucumber kasaundies in the world. And now, restored to the status of daughter in her own Home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people's food seeping into her - because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes imbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination. And, althiough Mary's pickles had a partially counteractive effect - since she had stirred into them the guilt of her heart, and the fear of discovery, so that, good as they tasted, they had the power of making those who ate them subject to nameless uncertainties and dreams of accusing fingers - the diet provided by Reverend Mother filled Amina with a kind of rage, and even produced slight signs of improvement in her defeated husband.



So that finally the day came when Amina, who had been watching me play incompetently with toy horses of sandal wood in the bath, inhaling the sweet odours of sandalwood which the bathwater released, suddenly rediscovered within herself the adventurous streak which was her inheritance from her fading father, the streak which had brought Aadam Aziz down from bis mountain valley; Amina turned to Mary Pereira and said, 'I'm fed up. If nobody in this house is going to put things right, then it's just going to be up to me!'



Toy horses galloped behind Amina's eyes as she left Mary to dry me and marched into her bedroom. Remembered glimpses of Mahalaxmi Racecourse cantered in her head as she pushed aside saris and petticoats. The fever of a reckless scheme flushed her cheeks as she opened the lid of an old tin trunk... filling her purse with the coins and rupee notes of grateful patients and wedding-guests, my mother went to the races.



With the Brass Monkey growing inside her, my mother stalked the paddocks of the racecourse named after the goddess of wealth; braving early-morning sickness and varicose veins, she stood in line at the Tote window, putting money on three-horse accumulators and long-odds outsiders. Ignorant of the first thing about horses, she backed mares known not to be stayers to win long races; she put her money on jockeys because she liked their smiles. Clutching a purse full of the dowry which had lain untouched in its trunk since her own mother had packed it away, she took wild flutters on stallions who looked fit for the Schaapsteker Institute ... and won, and won, and won.



'Good news,' Ismail Ibrahim is saying, 'I always thought you should fight the bastards. I'll begin proceedings at once ... but it will take cash, Amina. Have you got cash?'



'The money will be there.'



'Not for myself,' Ismail explains, 'My services are, as I said, free, gratis absolutely. But, forgive me, you must know how things are, one must give little presents to people to smooth one's way ...'



'Here,' Amina hands him an envelope, 'Will this do for now?'



'My God,' Ismail Ibrahim drops the packet in surprise and rupee notes in large denominations scatter all over his sitting-room floor, 'Where did you lay your hands on ...' And Amina, 'Better you don't ask - and I won't ask how you spend it.'



Schaapsteker money paid for our food bills; but horses fought our war. The streak of luck of my mother at the race-track was so long, a seam so rich, that if it hadn't happened it wouldn't have been credible ... for month after month, she put her money on a jockey's nice tidy hair-style or a horse's pretty piebald colouring; and she never left the track without a large envelope stuffed with notes.



'Things are going well,' Ismail Ibrahim told her, 'But Amina sister, God knows what you are up to. Is it decent? Is it legal?' And Amina: 'Don't worry your head. What can't be cured must be endured. I am doing what must be done.'



Never once in all that time did my mother take pleasure in her mighty victories; because she was weighed down by more than a baby - eating Reverend Mother's curries filled with ancient prejudices, she had become convinced that gambling was the next worst thing on earth, next to alcohol; so, although she was not a criminal, she felt consumed by sin.



Verrucas plagued her feet, although Purushottam the sadhu, who sat under our garden tap until dripping water created a bald patch amid the luxuriantly matted hair on his head, was a marvel at charming them away; but throughout the snake winter and the hot season, my mother fought her husband's fight.



You ask: how is it possible? How could a housewife, however assiduous, however determined, win fortunes on the horses, day after racing day, month after month?



You think to yourself: aha, that Homi Catrack, he's a horse-owner; and everyone knows that most of the races are fixed; Amina was asking her neighbour for hot tips! A plausible notion; but Mr Catrack himself lost as often as he won; he saw my mother at the race-track and was astounded by her success. ('Please,' Amina asked him, 'Catrack Sahib, let this be our secret. Gambling is a terrible thing; it would be so shaming if my mother found out.' And Catrack, nodding dazedly, said, 'Just as you wish.') So it was not the Parsee who was behind it - but perhaps I can offer another explanation. Here it is, in a sky-blue crib in a sky-blue room with a fisherman's pointing finger on the wall: here, whenever his mother goes away clutching a purse full of secrets, is Baby Saleem, who has acquired an expression of the most intense concentration, whose eyes have been seized by a singleness of purpose of such enormous power that it has darkened them to deep navy blue, and whose nose is twitching strangely while he appears to be watching some distant event, to be guiding it from a distance, just as the moon controls the tides.



'Coming to court very soon,' Ismail Ibrahim said, 'I think you can be fairly confident ... my God, Amina, have you found King Solomon's Mines?'



The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. ?perfect balance of rewards and penalties! ?seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes.

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose ... but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity -beca use, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake ... Keeping things simple for the moment, however, I record that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes.



Amina's brother Hanif had not gone to Pakistan. Following the childhood dream which he had whispered to Rashid the rickshaw-boy in an Agra cornfield, he had arrived in Bombay and sought employ, ment in the great film studios.



Precociously confident, he had not only succeeded in becoming the youngest man ever to be given a film to direct in the history of the Indian cinema; he had also wooed and married one of the brightest stars of that celluloid heaven, the divine Pia, whose face was her fortune, and whose saris were made of fabrics whose designers had clearly set out to prove that it was possible to incorporate every colour known to man in a single pattern. Reverend Mother did not approve of the divine Pia, but Hanif of all my family was the one who was free of her confining influence; a jolly, burly man with the booming laugh of the boatman Tai and the explosive, innocent anger of his father Aadam Aziz, he took her to live simply in a small, un-filmi apartment on Marine Drive, telling her, 'Plenty of time to live like Emperors after I've made my name.' She acquiesced; she starred in his first feature, which was partly financed by Homi Catrack and partly by D. W. Rama Studios (Pvt.) Ltd - it was called The Lovers of Kashmir, and one evening in the midst of her racing days Amina Sinai went to the premiere. Her parents did not come, thanks to Reverend Mother's loathing of the cinema, against which Aadam Aziz no longer had the strength to struggle - just as he, who had fought with Mian Abdullah against Pakistan, no longer argued with her when she praised the country, retaining just enough strength to dig in his heels and refuse to emigrate; but Ahmed Sinai, revived by his mother-in-law's cookery, but resentful of her continued presence, got to his feet and accompanied his wife. They took their seats, next to Hanif and. Pia and the male star of the film, one of India's most successful 'lover-boys', I. S. Nayyar.



And, although they didn't know it, a serpent waited in the wings... but in the meanwhile, let us permit Hanif Aziz to have his moment; because The Lovers of Kashmir contained a notion which was to provide my uncle with a spectacular, though brief, period of triumph. In those days it was not permitted for lover-boys and their leading ladies to touch one another on screen, for fear that their osculations might corrupt the nation's youth ... but thirty-three minutes after the beginning of The Lovers the premiere audience began to give off a low buzz of shock, because Pia and Nayyar had begun to kiss - not one another - but things.



Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with all the rich fullness of her painted lips; then passed it to Nayyar; who planted, upon its opposite face, a virilely passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as the indirect kiss - and how much more sophisticated a notion it was than anything in our current cinema; how pregnant with longing and eroticism! The cinema audience (which would, nowadays, cheer raucously at the sight of a young couple diving behind ?bush, which would then begin to shake ridiculously - so low have we sunk in our ability to suggest) watched, riveted to the screen, as the love of Pia and Nayyar, against a background of Dal Lake and ice-blue Kashmiri sky, expressed itself in kisses applied to cups of pink Kashmiri tea; by the fountains of Shalimar they pressed their lips to a sword ... but now, at the height of Hanif Aziz's triumph, the serpent refused to wait; under its influence, the house-lights came up. Against the larger-than-life figures of Pia and Nayyar, kissing mangoes as they mouthed to playback music, the figure of a timorous, inadequately bearded man was seen, marching on to the stage beneath the screen, microphone in hand. The Serpent can take most unexpected forms; now, in the guise of this ineffectual house-manager, it unleashed its venom. Pia and Nayyar faded and died; and the amplified voice of the bearded man said: 'Ladies and gents, your pardon; but there is terrible news.' His voice broke - a sob from the Serpent, to lend power to its teeth! - and then continued, 'This afternoon, at Birla House in Delhi, our beloved Mahatma was killed. Some madman shot him in the stomach, ladies and gentlemen - our Bapu is gone!'



The audience had begun to scream before he finished; the poison of his words entered their veins - there were grown men rolling in the aisles clutching their bellies, not laughing but crying, Hai Ram! Hai Ram! - and women tearing their hair: the city's finest coiffures tumbling around the ears of the poisoned ladies - there were film-stars yelling like fishwives and something terrible to smell in the air - and Hanif whispered, 'Get out of here, big sister - if a Muslim did this thing there will be hell to pay.'



For every ladder, there is a snake ... and for forty-eight hours after the abortive end of The Lovers of Kashmir, our family remained within the walls of Buckingham Villa ('Put furniture against the doors, whatsitsname!' Reverend Mother ordered. 'If there are Hindu servants, let them go Home!'); and Amina did not dare to visit the racetrack.



But for every snake, there is a ladder: and finally the radio gave us a name.



Nathuram Godse. 'Thank God,' Amina burst out, 'It's not a Muslim name!'



And Aadam, upon whom the news of Gandhi's death had placed a new burden of age: 'This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!'



Amina, however, was full of the light-headedness of relief, she was rushing dizzily up the long ladder of relief... 'Why not, after all? By being Godse he has saved our lives!'



Ahmed Sinai, after rising from his supposed sickbed, continued to behave like an invalid. In a voice like cloudy glass he told Amina, 'So, you have told Ismail to go to court; very well, good; but we will lose. In these courts you have to buy judges...' And Amina, rushing to Ismail, 'Never - never under any circumstances - must you tell Ahmed about the money. A man must keep his pride.'



And, later on, 'No, janum, I'm not going anywhere; no, the baby is not being tiring at all; you rest, I must just go to shop - maybe I will visit Hanif- we women, you know, must fill up our days!'



And coming Home with envelopes brimming with rupee-notes ... 'Take, Ismail, now that he's up we have to be quick and careful!' And sitting dutifully beside her mother in the evenings, 'Yes, of course you're right, and Ahmed will be getting so rich soon, you'll just see!'



And endless delays in court; and envelopes, emptying; and the growing baby, nearing the point at which Amina will not be able to insert herself behind the driving-wheel of the 1946 Rover; and can her luck hold?; and Musa and Mary, quarrelling like aged tigers.



What starts fights?



What remnants of guilt fear shame, pickled by time in Mary's intestines, led her willingly? unwillingly? to provoke the aged bearer in a dozen different ways - by a tilt of the nose to indicate her superior status; by aggressive counting of rosary beads under the nose of the devout Muslim; by acceptance of the title mausi, little mother, bestowed upon her by the other Estate servants, which Musa saw as a threat to his status; by excessive familiarity with the Begum Sahiba -little giggled whispers in corners, just loud enough for formal, stiff, correct Musa to hear and feel somehow cheated?



What tiny grain of grit, in the sea of old age now washing over the old bearer, lodged between bis lips to fatten into the dark pearl of hatred - into what unaccustomed torpors did Musa fall, becoming leaden of hand and foot, so that vases were broken, ashtrays spilled, and a veiled hint of forthcoming dismissal - from Mary's conscious or unconscious lips? - grew into an obsessive fear, which rebounded upon the person who started it off?



And (not to omit social factors) what was the brutalizing effect of servant status, of a servants' room behind a blackstoved kitchen, in which Musa was obliged to sleep along with gardener, odd-job boy, and hamal - while Mary slept in style on a rush mat beside a new-born child?



And was Mary blameless or not? Did her inability to go to church -because in churches you found confessionals, and in confessionals secrets could not be kept - turn sour inside her and make her a little sharp, a little hurtful?



Or must we look beyond psychology - seeking our answer in statements such as, there was a snake lying in wait for Mary, and Musa was doomed to learn about the ambiguity of ladders? Or further still, beyond snake-and-ladder, should we see the Hand of Fate in the quarrel - and say, in order for Musa to return as explosive ghost, in order for him to adopt the role of Bomb-in-Bombay, it was necessary to engineer a departure ... or, descending from such sublimities to the ridiculous, could it be that Ahmed Sinai - whom whisky provoked, whom djinns goaded into excesses of rudeness - had so incensed the aged bearer that his crime, with which he equalled Mary's record, was committed out of the injured pride of an abused old servitor - and was nothing to do with Mary at all?



Ending questions, I confine myself to facts: Musa and Mary were perpetually at daggers drawn. And yes: Ahmed insulted him, and Amina's pacifying efforts may not have been successful; and yes: the fuddling shadows of age had convinced him he would be dismissed, without warning, at any moment; and so it was that Amina came to discover, one August morning, that the house had been burgled.



The police came. Amina reported what was missing: a silver spittoon encrusted with lapis lazuli; gold coins; bejewelled samovars and silver tea-services; the contents of a green tin trunk. Servants were lined up in the hall and subjected to the threats of Inspector Johnny Vakeel. 'Come on, own up now' - lathi-stick tapping against his leg -'or you'll see what we can't do to you. You want to stand on one leg all day and night? You want water thrown over you, sometimes boiling hot, sometimes freezing cold? We have many methods in the Police Force ..." And now a cacophony of noise from servants, Not me, Inspector Sahib, I am honest boy; for pity's sake, search my things, sahib! And Amina: 'This is too much, sir, you go too far. My Mary I know, anyway, is innocent. I will not have her questioned.' Suppressed irritation of police officer. A search of belongings is instituted - 'Just in case, Madam. These fellows have limited intelligence - and maybe you discovered the theft too soon for the felon to abscond with the booty!'

The search succeeds. In the bedroll of Musa the old bearer: a silver spittoon.



Wrapped in his puny bundle of clothes: gold coins, a silver samovar. Secreted under his charpoy bed: a missing tea-service. And now Musa has thrown himself at Ahmed Sinai's feet; Musa is begging, 'Forgive, sahib! I was mad; I thought you were going to throw me into the street!' but Ahmed Sinai will not listen; the freeze is upon him; 'I feel so weak,' he says, and leaves the room; and Amina, aghast, asks: 'But, Musa, why did you make that terrible oath?'



... Because, in the interim between line-up in passageway and discoveries in servants' quarters, Musa had said to his master: 'It was not me, sahib. If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper! May my old skin run with sores!'



Amina, with horror on her face, awaits Musa's reply. The bearer's old face twists into a mask of anger; words are spat out. 'Begum Sahiba, I only took your precious possessions, but you, and your sahib, and his father, have taken my whole life; and in my old age you have humiliated me with Christian ayahs.'



There is silence in Buckingham Villa - Amina has refused to press charges, but Musa is leaving. Bedroll on his back, he descends a spiral iron staircase, discovering that ladders can go down as well as up; he walks away down hillock, leaving a curse upon the house.



And (was it the curse that did it?) Mary Pereira is about to discover that even when you win a battle; even when staircases operate in your favour, you can't avoid a snake.



Amina says, 'I can't get you any more money, Ismail; have you had enough?' And Ismail, 'I hope so - but you never know - is there any chance of... ?' But Amina: 'The trouble is, I've got so big and all, I can't get in the car any more. It will just have to do.'



... Time is slowing down for Amina once more; once again, her eyes look through leaded glass, in which red tulips, green-stemmed, dance in unison; for a second time, her gaze lingers on a clocktower which has not worked since the rains of 1947; once again, it is raining. The racing season is over.



A pale blue clocktower: squat, peeling, inoperational. It stood on black-tarred concrete at the end of the circus-ring - the flat roof of the upper storey of the buildings along Warden Road, which abutted our two-storey hillock, so that if you climbed over Buckingham Villa's boundary wall, flat black tar would be under your feet. And beneath black tar, Breach Candy Kindergarten School, from which, every afternoon during term, there rose the tinkling music of Miss Harrison's piano playing the unchanging tunes of childhood; and below that, the shops, Reader's Paradise, Fatbhoy Jewellery, Chimalker's Toys and Bombelli's, with its windows filled with One Yards of Chocolates. The door to the clocktower was supposed to be locked, but it was a cheap lock of a kind Nadir Khan would have recognized: made in India. And on three successive evenings immediately before my first birthday, Mary Pereira, standing by my window at night, noticed a shadowy figure floating across the roof, his hands full of shapeless objects, a shadow which filled her with an unidentifiable dread. After the third night, she told my mother; the police were summoned; and Inspector Vakeel returned to Methwold's Estate, accompanied by a special squad of crack officers - 'all deadeye shots. Begum Sahiba; just you leave it all to us!' - who, disguised as sweepers, with guns concealed under their rags, kept the clocktower under surveillance while sweeping up the dust in the circus-ring.



Night fell. Behind curtains and chick-blinds, the inhabitants of Methwold's Estate peered fearfully in the direction of the clocktower. Sweepers, absurdly, went about their duties in the dark. Johnny Vakeel took up a position on our verandah, rifle just out of sight... and, at midnight, a shadow came over the side wall of the Breach Candy school and made its way towards the tower, with a sack slung over one shoulder ... 'He must enter,' Vakeel had told Amina; 'Must be sure we get the proper johnny.' The johnny, padding across flat tarred roof, arrived at the tower; entered.



'Inspector Sahib, what are you waiting for?'



'Shhh, Begum, this is police Business; please go inside some way. We shall take him when he comes out; you mark my words. Caught,' Vakeel said with satisfaction, 'like a rat in a trap.'



'But who is he?'



'Who knows?' Vakeel shrugged. 'Some badmaash for sure. There are bad eggs everywhere these days.'



... And then the silence of the night is split like milk by a single, sawn-off shriek; somebody lurches against the inside of the clocktower door; it is wrenched open; there is a crash; and something streaks out on to black tarmac.



Inspector Vakeel leaps into action, swinging up his rifle, shooting from the hip like John Wayne; sweepers extract marksmen's weapons from their brushes and blaze away ... shrieks of excited women, yells of servants ... silence.



What lies, brown and black, banded and serpentine on the black tarmac? What, leaking black blood, provokes Dr Schaapsteker to screech from his top-floor vantage-point: 'You complete fools! Brothers of cockroaches! Sons of transvestites!' ... what, flick-tongued, dies while Vakeel races on to tarred roof?



And inside the clocktower door? What weight, falling, created such an almighty crash? Whose hand wrenched a door open; in whose heel are visible the two red, flowing holes, filled with a venom for which there is no known antivenene, a poison which has killed stablefuls of worn-out horses? Whose body is carried out of the tower by plain-clothes men, in a dead march, coffinless, with imitation sweepers for pallbearers? Why, when the moonlight falls upon the dead face, does Mary Pereira fall like a sack of potatoes to the floor, eyes rolling upwards in their sockets, in a sudden and dramatic faint?



And lining the interior walls of the clocktower: what are these strange mechanisms, attached to cheap time-pieces - why are there so many bottles with rags stuffed into their necks?



'Damn lucky you called my boys out, Begum Sahiba,' Inspector Vakeel is saying.



'That was Joseph D'Costa - on our Most Wanted list. Been after him for a year or thereabouts. Absolute black-hearted badmaash. You should see the walls inside that clocktower! Shelves, filled from floor to ceiling with Home-made bombs.



Enough explosive power to blow this hill into the sea!'



Melodrama piling upon melodrama; life acquiring the colouring of a Bombay talkie; snakes following ladders, ladders succeeding snakes; in the midst of too much incident, Baby Saleem fell ill. As if incapable of assimilating so many goings-on, he closed his eyes and became red and flushed. While Amina awaited the results of Ismail's case against the State authorities; while the Brass Monkey grew in her womb; while Mary entered a state of shock from which she would fully emerge only when Joseph's ghost returned to haunt her; while umbilical cord hung in pickle-jar and Mary's chutneys filled our dreams with pointing fingers; while Reverend Mother ran the kitchens, my grandfather examined me and said, 'I'm afraid there is no doubt; the poor lad has typhoid.'



'O God in heaven,' Reverend Mother cried out, 'What dark devil has come, whatsitsname, to sit upon this house?'



This is how I have heard the story of the illness which nearly stopped me before I'd started: day and night, at the end of August 1948, mother and grandfather looked after me; Mary dragged herself out of her guilt and pressed cold flannels to my forehead; Reverend Mother sang lullabies and spooned food into my mouth; even my father, forgetting momentarily his own disorders, stood flapping helplessly in the doorway. But the night came when Doctor Aziz, looking as broken as an old horse, said, 'There is nothing more I can do. He will be dead by morning.' And in the midst of wailing women and the incipient labour of my mother who had been pushed into it by grief and the tearing of Mary Pereira's hair there was a knock; a servant announced Dr Schaapsteker; who handed my grandfather a little bottle and said, 'I make no bones about it: this is kill or cure. Two drops exactly; then wait and see.'



My grandfather, sitting head in hands in the rubble of his medical learning, asked, 'What is it?' And Dr Schaapsteker, nearly eighty-two, tongue flicking at the corners of his mouth: 'Diluted venene of the king cobra. It has been known to work.'



Snakes can lead to triumph, just as ladders can be descended: my grandfather, knowing I would die anyway, administered the cobra poison. The family stood and watched while poison spread through the child's body ... and six hours later, my temperature had returned to normal. After that, my growth-rate lost its phenomenal aspects; but something was given in exchange for what was lost: life, and an early awareness of the ambiguity of snakes.

In the afternoons of that summer, afternoons as hot as towels, the telephone would ring. When Ahmed Sinai was asleep in his room, with his keys under his pillow and umbilical cords in his almirah, telephonic shrilling penetrated the buzzing of the heat insects; and my mother, verruca-hobbled, came into the hall to answer. And now, what expression is this, staining her face the colour of drying blood? ... Not knowing that she's being observed, what fish-like flutterings of lips are these, what strangulated mouthings? ... And why, after listening for a full five minutes, does my mother say, in a voice like broken glass, 'Sorry: wrong number'? Why are diamonds glistening on her eyelids? ...



The Brass Monkey whispered to me, 'Next time it rings, let's find out.'



Five days later. Once more it is afternoon; but today Amina is away, visiting Nussie-the-duck, when the telephone demands attention. 'Quick! Quick or it'll wake him!' The Monkey, agile as her name, picks up the receiver before Ahmed Sinai has even changed the pattern of his snoring ... 'Hullo? Yaas? This is seven zero five six one; hullo?' We listen, every nerve on edge; but for a moment there is nothing at all. Then, when we're about to give up, the voice comes. '... Oh ... yes ... hullo ..." And the Monkey, shouting almost, 'Hullo?



Who is it, please?' Silence again; the voice, which has not been able to prevent itself from speaking, considers its answer; and then, '... Hullo... This is Shanti Prasad Truck Hire Company, please?...' And the Monkey, quick as a flash: 'Yes, what d'you want?' Another pause; the voice, sounding embarrassed, apologetic almost, says, 'I want to rent a truck.'



?feeble excuse of telephonic voice! ?transparent flummery of ghosts! The voice on the phone was no truck-renter's voice; it was soft, a little fleshy, the voice of a poet... but after that, the telephone rang regularly; sometimes my mother answered it, listened in silence while her mouth made fish-motions, and finally, much too late, said, 'Sorry, wrong number'; at other times the Monkey and I clustered around it, two ears to earpiece, while the Monkey took orders for trucks. I wondered: 'Hey, Monkey, what d'you think? Doesn't the guy ever wonder why the trucks don't arrive?' And she, wide-eyed, flutter-voiced: 'Man, do you suppose ... maybe they do!'



But I couldn't see how; and a tiny seed of suspicion was planted in me, a tiny glimmering of a notion that our mother might have a secret - our Amma! Who always said, 'Keep secrets and they'll go bad inside you; don't tell things and they'll give you stomach-ache!' - a minute spark which my experience in the washing-chest would fan into a forest fire. (Because this time, you see, she gave me proof.)



And now, at last, it is time for dirty laundry. Mary Pereira was fond of telling me, 'If you want to be a big man, baba, you must be very clean. Change clothes,'



she advised, 'take regular baths. Go, baba, or I'll send you to the washerman, and he'll wallop you on his stone.' She also threatened me with bugs: 'All right, stay filthy, you will be nobody's darling except the flies'. They will sit on you while you sleep; eggs they'll lay under your skin!' In part, my choice of hiding-place was an act of defiance. Braving dhobis and houseflies, I concealed myself in the unclean place; I drew strength and comfort from sheets and towels; my nose ran freely into the stone-doomed linens; and always, when I emerged into the world from my wooden whale, the sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.



One afternoon in June, I tiptoed down the corridors of the sleeping house towards my chosen refuge; sneaked past my sleeping mother into the white-tiled silence of her bathroom; lifted the lid off my goal; and plunged into its soft continuum of (predominantly white) textiles, whose only memories were of my earlier visits. Sighing softly, I pulled down the lid, and allowed pants and vests to massage away the pains of being alive, purposeless and nearly nine years old.



Electricity in the air. Heat, buzzing like bees. A mantle, hanging somewhere in the sky, waiting to fall gently around my shoulders ... somewhere, a finger reaches towards a dial; a dial whirs around and around, electrical pulses dart along cable, seven, zero, five, six, one, The telephone rings. Muffled shrilling of a bell penetrates the washing-chest, in which a nearlynineyearold boy lies uncomfortably concealed ... I, Saleem, became stiff with the fear of discovery, because now more noises entered the chest: squeak of bedsprings; soft clatter of slippers along corridor; the telephone, silenced in mid-shrill; and - or is this imagination? Was her voice too soft to hear? - the words, spoken too late as usual: 'Sorry. Wrong number.'



And now, hobbling footsteps returning to the bedroom; and the worst fears of the hiding boy are fulfilled. Doorknobs, turning, scream warnings at him; razor-sharp steps cut him deeply as they move across cool white dies. He stays frozen as ice, still as a stick; his nose drips silently into dirty clothes. A pajama-cord - snake-like harbinger of doom! - inserts itself into his left nostril. To sniff would be to die: he refuses to think about it.



... Clamped tight in the grip of terror, he finds his eye looking through a chink in dirty washing ... and sees a woman crying in a bathroom. Rain dropping from a thick black cloud. And now more sound, more motion: his mother's voice has begun to speak, two syllables, over and over again; and her hands have begun to move. Ears muffled by underwear strain to catch the sounds - that one: dir?



Bir? Dil? - and the other: Ha? Ra? No - Na. Ha and Ra are banished; Dil and Bir vanish forever; and the boy hears, in his ears, a name which has not been spoken since Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai: Nadir. Nadir. Na. Dir. Na.



And her hands are moving. Lost in their memory of other days, of what happened after games of hit-the-spittoon in an Agra cellar, they flutter gladly at her cheeks; they hold her bosom tighter than any brassieres; and now they caress her bare midriff, they stray below decks ... yes, this is what we used to do, my love, it was enough, enough for me, even though my father made us, and you ran, and now the telephone, Nadirnadirnadirnadirnadirnadir... hands which held telephone now hold flesh, while in another place what does another hand do? To what, after replacing receiver, is another hand getting up? ... No matter; because here, in her spied-out privacy, Amina Sinai repeats an ancient name, again and again, until finally she bursts out with, 'Arre Nadir Khan, where have you come from now?'



Secrets. A man's name. Never-before-glimpsed motions of the hands. A boy's mind filled with thoughts which have no shape, tormented by ideas which refuse to settle into words; and in a left nostril, a pajama-cord is snaking up up up, refusing to be ignored ... And now - ?shameless mother! Revealer of duplicity, of emotions which have no place in family life; and more: ?brazen unveiler of Black Mango! - Amina Sinai, drying her eyes, is summoned by a more trivial necessity; and as her son's right eye peers out through the wooden slats at the top of the washing-chest, my mother unwinds her sari! While I, silently in the washing-chest: 'Don't do it don't do it don't do!' ... but I cannot close my eye. Unblinking pupil takes in upside-down image of sari falling to the floor, an image which is, as usual, inverted by the mind; through ice-blue eyes I see a slip follow the sari; and then - ?horrible! - my mother, framed in laundry and slatted wood, bends over to pick up her clothes! And there it is, searing my retina - the vision of my mother's rump, black as night, rounded and curved, resembling nothing on earth so much as a gigantic, black Alfonso mango! In the washing-chest, unnerved by the vision, I wrestle with myself... self-control becomes simultaneously imperative and impossible ... under the thunderclap influence of the Black Mango, my nerve cracks; pajama-cord wins its victory; and while Amina Sinai seats herself on a commode, I ... what? Not sneeze; it was less than a sneeze. Not a twitch, either; it was more than that. It's time to talk plainly: shattered by two-syllabic voice and fluttering hands, devastated by Black Mango, the nose of Saleem Sinai, responding to the evidence of maternal



duplicity, quivering at the presence of maternal rump, gave way to a pajama-cord, and was possessed by a cataclysmic - a world-altering - an irreversible sniff. Pajama-cord rises painfully half an inch further up the nostril. But other things are rising, too: hauled by that feverish inhalation, nasal liquids are being sucked relentlessly up up up, nose-goo flowing upwards, against gravity, against nature. Sinuses are subjected to unbearable pressure ... until, inside the nearlynineyearold head, something bursts. Snot rockets through a breached dam into dark new channels. Mucus, rising higher than mucus was ever intended to rise. Waste fluid, reaching as far, perhaps, as the frontiers of the brain ... there is a shock. Something electrical has been moistened.

Pain.



And then noise, deafening manytongued terrifying, inside his head!. ... Inside a white wooden washing-chest, within the darkened auditorium of my skull, my nose began to sing.



But just now there isn't time to listen; because one voice is very close indeed.



Amina Sinai has opened the lower door of the washing-chest; I am tumbling downdown with laundry wrapped around my head like a caul. Pajama-cord jerks out of my nose; and now there is lightning flashing through the dark clouds around my mother - and a refuge has been lost forever.



'I didn't look!' I squealed up through socks and sheets. I didn't see one thing, Ammi, I swear!!'



And years later, in a cane chair among reject towels and a radio announcing exaggerated war victories, .Amina would remember how with thumb and forefinger around the ear of her lying son she led him to Mary Pereira, who was sleeping as usual on a cane mat in a sky-blue room; how she said, 'This young donkey; this good-for-nothing from nowhere is not to speak for one whole day.'... And, just before the roof fell in on her, she said aloud: 'It was my fault. I brought him up too badly.' As the explosion of the bomb ripped through the air, she added, mildly but firmly, addressing her last words on earth to the ghost of a washing-chest: 'Go away now, I've seen enough On Mount Sinai, the prophet Musa or Moses heard disembodied commandments; on Mount Hira, the prophet Muhammad (also known as Mohammed, MaHomet, the Last-But-One, and Mahound) spoke to the Archangel. (Gabriel or Jibreel, as you please.) And on the stage of the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School, run 'under the auspices' of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society, my friend Cyrus-the-great, playing a female part as usual, heard the voices of St Joan speaking the sentences of Bernard Shaw. But Cyrus is the odd one out: unlike Joan, whose voices were heard in a field, but like Musa or Moses, like Muhammad the Penultimate, I heard voices on a hill.



Muhammad (on whose name be peace, let me add; I don't want to offend anyone)



heard a voice saying, 'Recite!' and thought he was going mad; I heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio; and with lips sealed by maternal command, I was unable to ask for comfort. Muhammad, at forty, sought and received reassurance from wife and friends: 'Verily,' they told him, 'you are the Messenger of God'; I, suffering my punishment at nearlynine, could neither seek Brass Monkey's assistance nor solicit softening words from Mary Pereira. Muted for an evening and a night and a morning, I struggled, alone, to understand what had happened to me; until at last I saw the shawl of genius fluttering down, like an embroidered butterfly, the mantle of greatness settling upon my shoulders.



In the heat of that silent night (I was silent; outside me, the sea rustled like distant paper; crows squawked in the throes of their feathery nightmares; the puttering noises of tardy taxi-cabs wafted up from Warden Road; the Brass Monkey, before she fell asleep with her face frozen into a mask of curiosity, begged, 'Come on, Saleem; nobody's listening; what did you do? Tell tell tell!'



... while, inside me, the voices rebounded against the walls of my skull) I was gripped by hot fingers of excitement - the agitated insects of excitement danced in my stomach - because finally, in some way I did not then fully understand, the door which Toxy Catrack had once nudged in my head had been forced open; and through it I could glimpse -shadowy still, undefined, enigmatic - my reason for having been born.



Gabriel or Jibreel told Muhammad: 'Recite!' And then began The Recitation, known in Arabic as Al-Quran: 'Recite: In the Name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood ..." That was on Mount Hira outside Mecca Sharif; on a two-storey hillock opposite Breach Candy Pools, voices also instructed me to recite: Tomorrow!' I thought excitedly. 'Tomorrow!'



By sunrise, I had discovered that the voices could be controlled - I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will; switch off my newly-discovered inner ear. It was astonishing how soon fear left me; by morning, I was thinking, 'Man, this is better than All-India Radio, man; better than Radio Ceylon!'



To demonstrate the loyalty of sisters: when the twenty-four hours were up, on the dot, the Brass Monkey ran into my mother's bedroom. (It was, I think, a Sunday: no school. Or perhaps not - that was the summer of the language marches, and the schools were often shut, because of the danger of violence on the bus-routes.)



'The time's up!' she exclaimed, shaking my mother out of sleep. 'Amma, wake up: it's time: can he talk now?'



'All right,' my mother said, coming into a sky-blue room to embrace me, 'you're forgiven now. But never hide in there again ...'



'Amma,' I said eagerly, 'my Ammi, please listen. I must tell you something.



Something big. But please, please first of all, wake Abba.'



And after a period of 'What?' 'Why?' and 'Certainly not,' my mother saw something extraordinary sitting in my eyes and went to wake Ahmed Sinai anxiously, with 'Janum, please come. I don't know what's got into Saleem.'



Family and ayah assembled in the sitting-room. Amid cut-glass vases and plump cushions, standing on a Persian rug beneath the swirling shadows of ceiling-fans, I smiled into their anxious eyes and prepared my revelation. This was it; the beginning of the repayment of their investment; my first dividend - first, I was sure, of many ... my black mother, lip-jutting father, Monkey of a sister and crime-concealing ayah waited in hot confusion.



Get it out. Straight, without frills. 'You should be the first to know,' I said, trying to give my speech the cadences of adulthood. And then I told them. 'I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think - Ammi, Abboo, I really think - that Archangels have started to talk to me.'



There! I thought. There! It's said! Now there will be pats on the back, sweetmeats, public announcements, maybe more photographs; now their chests will puff up with pride. ?blind innocence of childhood! For my honesty - for my open-hearted desperation to please - I was set upon from all sides. Even the Monkey: 'O God, Saleem, all this tamasha, all this performance, for one of your stupid cracks?' And worse than the Monkey was Mary Pereira: 'Christ Jesus! Save, us, Lord! Holy Father in Rome, such blasphemy I've heard today!' And worse than Mary Pereira was my mother Amina Sinai: Black Mango concealed now, her own unnameable names still warm upon her lips, she cried, 'Heaven forfend! The child will bring down the roof upon our heads!' (Was that my fault, too?) And Amina continued: 'You black man! Goonda! ?Saleem, has your brain gone raw? What has happened to my darling baby boy - are you growing into a madman - a torturer!?'



And worse than Amina's shrieking was my father's silence; worse than her fear was the wild anger sitting on his forehead; and worst of all was my father's hand, which stretched out suddenly, thick-fingered, heavy-jointed,



strong-as-an-ox,to fetch me a mighty blow on the side of my head, so that I could never hear properly in my left ear after that day; so that I fell sideways across the startled room through the scandalized air and shattered a green tabletop of opaque glass; so that, having been certain of myself for the first time in my life, I was plunged into a green, glass-cloudy world filled with cutting edges, a world in which I could no longer tell the people who mattered most about the goings-on inside my head; green shards lacerated my hands as I entered that swirling universe in which I was doomed, until it was far too late, to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for.



In a white-tiled bathroom beside a washing-chest, my mother daubed me with Mercurochrome; gauze veiled my cuts, while through the door my father's voice commanded, 'Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me? Let him enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!'



That night, Amina Sinai would dream of Ramram Seth, who was floating six inches above the ground, his eye-sockets filled with egg-whites, intoning: 'Washing will hide him ... voices will guide him' ... but when, after several days in which the dream sat upon her shoulders wherever she went, she plucked up the courage to ask her disgraced son a little more about his outrageous claim, he replied in a voice as restrained as the unwept tears of his childhood: 'It was just fooling, Amma. A stupid joke, like you said.'



She died, nine years later, without discovering the truth.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars' faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves - or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality ... we have come from 1915 to 1956, so we're a good deal closer to the screen... abandoning my metaphor, then, I reiterate, entirely without a sense of shame, my unbelievable claim: after a curious accident in a washing-chest, I became a sort of radio.

... But today, I feel confused. Padma has not returned - should I alert the police? Is she a Missing Person? - and in her absence, my certainties are falling apart. Even my nose has been playing tricks on me - by day, as I stroll between the pickle-vats tended by our army of strong, hairy-armed, formidably competent women, I have found myself failing to distinguish lemon-odours from lime. The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor sahib has been crossed in - what? - surely not love? ... Padma, and the cracks spreading all over me, radiating like a spider's web from my navel; and the heat... a little confusion is surely permissible in these circumstances. Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.

Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything - to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?



Today, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began ...



Ye Akashvani hai. This is All-India Radio.



Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani cafe, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light with only a cheap transistor for company. A hot night; bubbling air filled with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle-vats; voices in the dark. Pickle-fumes, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then ... it was hot then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat... it was not the voices (then or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea - the idea that his parents' outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their love; that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deformity ... while I, now, Padma-less, send these words into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he ... I no longer have his gift; he never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost ... he had no cracks. No spiders' webs spread through him in the heat.



Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook.



And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive through the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize impotence - ever since the notorious free-transistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented what men could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied) ... then, the nearlynineyearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines.



Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat-haze, then and now, blurs his then-time into mine ... my confusion, travelling across the heat-waves, is also his.



What grows best in the heat: cane-sugar; the coconut palm; certain millets such as bajra, ragi and jowar; linseed, and (given water) tea and rice. Our hot land is also the world's second largest producer of cotton - at least, it was when I learned geography under the mad eye of Mr Emil Zagallo, and the steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador. But the tropical summer grows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom, to fill the close perspiring nights with odours as heavy as musk, which give men dark dreams of discontent... then as now, unease was in the air. Language marchers demanded the partition of the state of Bombay along linguistic boundaries - the dream of Maharashtra was at the head of some processions, the mirage of Gujarat led the others forward. Heat, gnawing at the mind's divisions between fantasy and reality, made anything seem possible; the half-waking chaos of afternoon siestas fogged men's brains, and the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires.




What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.



In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through the daytime streets; by night, they rioted in my head. We shall be watching your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.



It's time to talk about the voices.



But if only our Padma were here ...



I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father's hand - walloping my ear in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another, bodiless hand, which once hit him full in the face - at least had one salutary effect: it obliged me to reconsider and finally to abandon my original, Prophet-apeing position. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I withdrew deep inside myself, despite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue room with her pesterings: 'But what did you do it for, Saleem? You who're always too good and all?' ... until she fell into dissatisfied sleep with her mouth still working silently, and I was alone with the echoes of my father's violence, which buzzed in my left ear, which whispered, 'Neither Michael nor Anael; not Gabriel; forget Cassiel, Sachiel and Samael! Archangels no longer speak to mortals; the Recitation was completed in Arabia long ago; the last prophet will come only to announce the End.' That night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not after all been chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far from being scared, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust.



Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you're always reading about in the sensational magazines. But I ask for patience - wait. Only wait. It was telepathy; but also more than telepathy. Don't write me off too easily.



Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience - before I began to act - there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Luck-now Urdu to the Southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surface transmissions - the front-of-mind stuff which is what I'd originally been picking up - language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words ... but that was after I heard, beneath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other precious signals, utterly different from everything else, most of them faint and distant, like far-off drums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke through the fish-market cacophony of my voices... those secret, nocturnal calk, like calling out to like ... the unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signalling nothing more than their existence, transmitting simply: 'I.' From far to the North, 'I.' And the South East West: 'I.' 'I.' 'And I.'



But I mustn't get ahead of myself. In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening; and soon I was able to 'tune' my inner ear to those voices which I could understand; nor was it long before I picked out, from the throng, the voices of my own family; and of Mary Pereira; and of friends, classmates, teachers. In the street, I learned how to identify the mind-stream of passing strangers - the laws of Doppler shift continued to operate in these paranormal realms, and the voices grew and diminished as the strangers passed.



All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father's wrath, and anxious to keep my right ear in good working order, I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy, the difficulties of concealing knowledge are almost insurmountable; but fortunately, my nearest and dearest were as anxious to forget my outburst as I was to conceal the truth.



'O, you Saleem! Such things you talked yesterday! Shame on you, boy: you better go wash out your mouth with soap!'... The morning after my disgrace, Mary Pereira, shaking with indignation like one of her jellies, suggested the perfect means of my rehabilitation. Bowing my head contritely, I went, without a word, into the bathroom, and there, beneath the amazed gaze of ayah and Monkey, scrubbed teeth tongue roofofmouth gums with a toothbrush covered in the sharp foul lather of Coal Tar Soap. The news of my dramatic atonement rushed rapidly around the house, borne by Mary and Monkey; and my mother embraced me, 'There, good boy; we'll say no more about it,' and Ahmed Sinai nodded gruffly at the breakfast table, 'At least the boy has the grace to admit when he's gone too far.'



As my glass-inflicted cuts faded, it was as though my announcement was also erased; and by the time of my ninth birthday, nobody besides myself remembered anything about the day when I had taken the name of Archangels in vain. The taste of detergent lingered on my tongue for many weeks, reminding me of the need for secrecy.

Even the Brass Monkey was satisfied by my show of contrition - in her eyes, I had returned to form, and was once more the goody-two-shoes of the family. To demonstrate her willingness to re-establish the old order, she set fire to my mother's favourite slippers, and regained her rightful place in the family doghouse. Amongst outsiders, what's more - displaying a conservatism you'd never have suspected in such a tomboy - she closed ranks with my parents, and kept my one aberration a secret from her friends and mine.



In a country where any physical or mental peculiarity in a child is a source of deep family shame, my parents, who had become accustomed to facial birthmarks, cucumber-nose and bandy legs, simply refused to see any more embarrassing things in me; for my part, I did not once mention the buzzings in my ear, the occasional ringing bells of deafness, the intermittent pain. I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing.



But imagine the confusion inside my head! Where, behind the hideous face, above the tongue tasting of soap, hard by the perforated eardrum, lurked a not-very-tidy mind, as full of bric-a-brac as nine-year-old pockets ... imagine yourself inside me somehow, looking out through my eyes, hearing the noise, the voices, and now the obligation of not letting people know, the hardest part was acting surprised, such as when my mother said Hey Saleem guess what we're going for a picnic to the Aarey Milk Colony and I had to go Ooo, exciting!, when I had known all along because I had heard her unspoken inner voice And on my birthday seeing all the presents in the donors' minds before they were even unwrapped And the treasure hunt ruined because there in my father's head was the location of each clue every prize And much harder things such as going to see my father in his ground-floor office, here we are, and the moment I'm in there my head is full of godknowswhat rot because he's thinking about his secretary, Alice or Fernanda, his latest Coca-Cola girl, he's undressing her slowly in his head and it's in my head too, she's sitting stark naked on a cane-bottomed chair and now getting up, crisscross marks all across her rump, that's my father thinking, MY FATHER, now he's looking at me all funny What's the matter son don't you feel well Yes fine Abba fine, must go now GOT TO GET AWAY Homework to do, Abba, and out, run away before he sees the clue on your face (my father always said that when I was lying there was a red light flashing on my forehead)... You see how hard it is, my uncle Hanif comes to take me to the wrestling, and even before we've arrived at Vallabhbai Patel Stadium on Hornby Vellard I'm feeling sad



We're walking with the crowds past giant cardboard cut-outs of Dara Singh and Tagra Baba and the rest and his sadness, my favourite uncle's sadness is pouring into me, it lives like a lizard just beneath the hedge of his jollity, concealed by his booming laugh which was once the laugh of the boatman Tai, we're sitting in excellent seats as floodlights dance on the backs of the interlocked wrestlers and I am caught in the unbreakable grip of my uncle's grief, the grief of his failing film career, flop after flop, he'll probably never get a film again But I mustn't let the sadness leak out of my eyes He's butting into my thoughts, hey phaelwan, hey little wrestler, what's dragging your face down, it looks longer than a bad movie, you want channa? pakoras? what? And me shaking my head, No, nothing, Hanif mamu, so that he relaxes, turns away, starts yelling Ohe come on Dara, that's the ticket, give him hell, Dara yara! And back Home my mother squatting in the corridor with the ice-cream tub, saying with her real outside-voice, You want to help me make it, son, your favourite pistachio flavour, and I'm turning the handle, but her inside-voice is bouncing against the inside of my head, I can see how she's trying to fill up every nook and cranny of her thoughts with everyday things, the price of pom-fret, the roster of household chores, must call in the electrician to mend the ceiling-fan in the dining-room, how she's desperately concentrating on parts of her husband to love, but the unmentionable word keeps finding room, the two syllables which leaked out of her in the bathroom that day, Na Dir Na Dir Na, she's finding it harder and harder to put down the telephone when the wrong numbers come MY MOTHER I tell you when a boy gets inside grown-up thoughts they can really mess him up completely And even at night, no respite, I wake up at the stroke of midnight with Mary Pereira's dreams inside my head Night after night



Always at my personal witching-hour, which also has meaning for her Her dreams are plagued by the image of a man who has been dead for years, Joseph D'Costa, the dream tells me the name, it is coated with a guilt I cannot understand, the same guilt which seeps into us all every time we eat her chutneys, there is a mystery here but because the secret is not in the front of her mind I can't find it out, and meanwhile Joseph is there, each night, sometimes in human form, but not always, sometimes he's a wolf, or a snail, once a broomstick, but we (she-dreaming, I-looking in) know it's him, baleful implacable accusative, cursing her in the language of his incarnations, howling at her when he's wolf-Joseph, covering her in the slime-trails of Joseph-the-snail, beating her with the Business end of his broomstick incarnation ... and in the morning when she's telling me to bathe clean up get ready for school I have to bite back the questions, I am nine years old and lost in the confusion of other people's lives which are blurring together in the heat.



To end this account of the early days of my transformed life, I must add one painful confession: it occurred to me that I could improve my parents' opinion of me by using my new faculty to help out with my schoolwork - in short, I began to cheat in class. That is to say, I tuned in to the inner voices of my schoolteachers and also of my cleverer classmates, and picked information out of their minds. I found that very few of my masters could set a test without rehearsing the ideal answers in their minds - and I knew, too, that on those rare occasions when the teacher was preoccupied by other things, his private love-life or financial difficulties, the solutions could always be found in the precocious, prodigious mind of our class genius, Cyrus-the-great. My marks began to improve dramatically - but not overly so, because I took care to make my versions different from their stolen originals; even when I telepathi-cally cribbed an entire English essay from Cyrus, I added a number of mediocre touches of my own. My purpose was to avoid suspicion; I did not, but I escaped discovery. Under Emil Zagallo's furious, interrogating eyes I remained innocently seraphic; beneath the bemused, head-shaking perplexity of Mr Tandon the English master I worked my treachery in silence - knowing that they would not believe the truth even if, by chance or folly, I spilled the beans.



Let me sum up: at a crucial point in the history of our child-nation, at a time when Five Year Plans were being drawn up and elections were approaching and language marchers were fighting over Bombay, a nine-year-old boy named Saleem Sinai acquired a miraculous gift. Despite the many vital uses to which his abilities could have been put by his impoverished, underdeveloped country, he chose to conceal his talents, frittering them away on inconsequential voyeurism and petty cheating. This behaviour - not, I confess, the behaviour of a hero - was the direct result of a confusion in his mind, which invariably muddled up morality - the desire to do what is right - and popularity - the rather more dubious desire to do what is approved of. Fearing parental ostracism, he suppressed the news of his transformation; seeking parental congratulations, he abused his talents at school. This flaw in his character can partially be excused on the grounds of his tender years; but only partially. Confused thinking was to bedevil much of his career.



I can be quite tough in my self-judgements when I choose.



What stood on the flat roof of the Breach Candy Kindergarten - a roof, you will recall, which could be reached from the garden of Buckingham Villa, simply by climbing over a boundary wall? What, no longer capable of performing the function for which it was designed, watched over us that year when even the winter forgot to cool down - what observed Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice, Hairoil, and myself, as we played kabaddi, and French Cricket, and seven-tiles, with the occasional participation of Cyrus-the-great and of other, visiting friends: Fat Perce Fishwala and Glandy Keith Colaco? What was present on the frequent occasions when Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi-Appah yelled down from the top floor of Homi's Home: 'Brats! Rackety good-for-nothings! Shut your noise!' ... so that we all ran away, returning (when she vanished from our sight) to make mute faces at the window at which she'd stood? In short, what was it, tall and blue and flaking, which oversaw our lives, which seemed, for a while, to be marking time, waiting not only for the nearby time when we would put on long trousers, but also, perhaps, for the coming of Evie Burns? Perhaps you'd like clues: what had once hidden bombs? In what had Joseph D'Costa died of snake-bite? ...



When, after some months of inner torment, I at last sought refuge from grown-up voices, I found it in an old clocktower, which nobody bothered to lock; and here, in the solitude of rusting time, I paradoxically took my first tentative steps towards that involvement with mighty events and public lives from which I would never again be free ... never, until the Widow ...



Banned from washing-chests, I began, whenever possible, to creep unobserved into the tower of crippled hours. When the circus-ring was emptied by heat or chance or prying eyes; when Ahmed and Amina went off to the Willingdon Club for canasta evenings; when the Brass Monkey was away, hanging around her newly-acquired heroines, the Walsingham School for Girls' swimming and diving team ... that is to say, when circumstances permitted, I entered my secret hideout, stretched out on the straw mat I'd stolen from the servants' quarters, closed my eyes, and let my newly-awakened inner ear (connected, like all ears, to my nose) rove freely around the city - and further, north and south, east and west - listening in to all manner of things. To escape the intolerable pressures of eavesdropping on people I knew, I practised my art upon strangers. Thus my entry into public affairs of India occurred for entirely ignoble reasons - upset by too much intimacy, I used the world outside our hillock for light relief.



The world as discovered from a broken-down clocktower: at first, I was no more than a tourist, a child peeping through the miraculous peepholes of a private 'Dilli-dekho' machine. Dugdugee-drums rattled in my left (damaged) ear as I gained my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the eyes of a fat Englishwoman suffering from the tummy-runs; after which, to balance south against north, I hopped down to Madurai's Meenakshi temple and nestled amongst the woolly, mystical perceptions of a chanting priest. I toured Connaught Place in New Delhi in the guise of an auto-rickshaw driver, complaining bitterly to my fares about the rising price of gasoline; in Calcutta I slept rough in a section of drainpipe. By now thoroughly bitten by the travel bug, I zipped down to Cape Comorin and became a fisher-woman whose sari was as tight as her morals were loose ... standing on red sands washed by three seas, I flirted with Dravidian beachcombers in a language I couldn't understand; then up into the Himalayas, into the neanderthal moss-covered hut of a Goojar tribal, beneath the glory of a completely circular rainbow and the tumbling moraine of the Kolahoi glacier. At the golden fortress of Jaisalmer I sampled the inner life of a woman making mirrorwork dresses and at Khajuraho I was an adolescent village boy, deeply embarrassed by the erotic, Tahtric carvings on the Chandela temples standing in the fields, but unable to tear away my eyes ... in the exotic simplicities of travel I was able to find a modicum of peace. But, in the end, tourism ceased to satisfy; curiosity began to niggle; 'Let's find out,' I told myself, 'what really goes on around here.'

With the eclectic spirit of my nine years spurring me on, I leaped into the heads of film stars and cricketers - I learned the truth behind the Filmfare gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala, and I was at the crease with Polly Umrigar at the Brabourne Stadium; I was Lata Mangeshkar the playback singer and Bubu the clown at the circus behind Civil Lines ... and inevitably, through the ramdom processes of my mind-hopping, I discovered politics.



At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my pajama-cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire ... at another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage as usual: I was two months old and my mother had run out of breast-milk. I occupied, briefly, the mind of a Congress Party worker, bribing a village schoolteacher to throw his weight behind the party of Gandhi and Nehru in the coming election campaign; also the thoughts of a Keralan peasant who had decided to vote Communist. My daring grew: one afternoon I deliberately invaded the head of our own State Chief Minister, which was how I discovered, over twenty years before it became a national joke, that Morarji Desai 'took his own water' daily ... I was inside him, tasting the warmth as he gurgled down a frothing glass of urine. And finally I hit my highest point: I became Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister and author of framed letters: I sat with the great man amongst a bunch of gaptoothed, stragglebeard astrologers and adjusted the Five Year Plan to bring it into harmonic alignment with the music of the spheres ... the high life is a heady thing. 'Look at me!' I exulted silently. 'I can go any place I want!'



In that tower which had once been filled choc-a-bloc with the explosive devices of Joseph D'Costa's hatred, this phrase (accompanied by appropriate ticktock sound effects) plopped fully-formed into my thoughts: 'I am the tomb in Bombay .. .watch me explode!'



Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen ...



which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift.



'I can find out any damn thing!' I triumphed, 'There isn't a thing I cannot know!'



Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the spirit of self-aggrandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an instinct for self-preservation. If I had not believed myself in control of the flooding multitudes, their massed identities would have annihilated mine ... but there in my clocktower, filled with the cockiness of my,glee, I became Sin, the ancient moon-god (no, not Indian: I've imported him from Hadhramaut of old), capable of acting-at-a-distance and shifting the tides of the world.



But death, when it visited Methwold's Estate, still managed to take me by surprise.



Even though the freezing of his assets had ended many years ago, the zone below Ahmed Sinai's waist had remained as cold as ice. Ever since the day he had cried out, 'The bastards are shoving my balls in an ice-bucket!', and Amina had taken them in her hands to warm them so that her fingers got glued to them by the cold, his sex had lain dormant, a woolly elephant in an iceberg, like the one they found in Russia in '56. My mother Amina, who had married for children, felt the uncreated lives rotting in her womb and blamed herself for becoming unattractive to him, what with her corns and all. She discussed her unhappiness with Mary Pereira, but the ayah only told her that there was no Happiness to be gained from 'the mens'; they made pickles together as they talked, and Amina stirred her disappointments into a hot lime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes.



Although Ahmed Sinai's office hours were filled with fantasies of secretaries taking dictation in the nude, visions of his Fernandas or Poppys strolling around the room in their birthday suits with crisscross cane-marks on their rumps, his apparatus refused to respond; and one day, when the real Fernanda or Poppy had gone Home, he was playing chess with Dr Narlikar, his tongue (as well as his game) made somewhat loose by djinns, and he confided awkwardly, 'Narlikar, I seem to have lost interest in you-know-what.'



A gleam of pleasure radiated from the luminous gynaecologist; the birth-control fanatic in the dark, glowing doctor leaped out through his eyes and made the following speech: 'Bravo!' Dr Narlikar cried, 'Brother Sinai, damn good show! You - and, may I add, myself - yes, you and I, Sinai bhai, are persons of rare spiritual worth! Not for us the panting humiliations of the flesh - is it not a finer thing, I ask you, to eschew procreation - to avoid adding one more miserable human life to the vast multitudes which are presently beggaring our country - and, instead, to bend our energies to the task of giving them more land to stand on? I tell you, my friend: you and I and our tetrapods: from the very oceans we shall bring forth soil!' To consecrate this oration, Ahmed Sinai poured drinks; my father and Dr Narlikar drank a toast to their four-legged concrete dream.



'Land, yes! Love, no!' Dr Narlikar said, a little unsteadily; my father refilled his glass.



By the last days of 1956, the dream of reclaiming land from the sea with the aid of thousands upon thousands of large concrete tetrapods - that same dream which had been the cause of the freeze -and which was now, for my father, a sort of surrogate for the sexual activity which the aftermath of the freeze denied him - actually seemed to be coming close to fruition. This time, however, Ahmed Sinai was spending his money cautiously; this time he remained hidden in the background, and his name appeared on no documents; this time, he had learned the lessons of the freeze and was determined to draw as little attention to himself as possible; so that when Dr Narlikar betrayed him by dying, leaving behind him no record of my father's involvement in the tetrapod scheme, Ahmed Sinai (who was prone, as we have seen, to react badly in the face of disaster) was swallowed up by the mouth of a long, snaking decline from which he would not emerge until, at the very end of his days, he at last fell in love with his wife.



This is the story that got back to Methwold's Estate: Dr Narlikar had been visiting friends near Marine Drive; at the end of the visit, he had resolved to stroll down to Chowpatty Beach and buy himself some bhel-puri and a little coconut milk. As he strolled briskly along the pavement by the sea-wall, he overtook the tail-end of a language march, which moved slowly along, chanting peacefully. Dr Narlikar neared the place where, with the Municipal Corporation's permission, he had arranged for a single, symbolic tetrapod to be placed upon the sea-wall, as a kind of icon pointing the way to the future; and here he noticed a thing which made him lose his reason. A group of beggar-women had clustered around the tetrapod and were performing the rite of puja. They had lighted oil-lamps at the base of the object; one of them had painted the 铎-symbol on its upraised tip; they were chanting prayers as they gave the tetrapod a thorough and worshipful wash. Technological miracle had been transformed into Shiva-lingam; Doctor Narlikar, the opponent of fertility, was driven wild at this vision, in which it seemed to him that all the old dark priapic forces of ancient, procreative India had been unleashed upon the beauty of sterile twentieth-century concrete ... sprinting along, he shouted his abuse at the worshipping women, gleaming fiercely in his rage; reaching them, he kicked away their little dia-lamps; it is said he even tried to push the women.



And he was seen by the eyes of the language marchers.



The ears of the language marchers heard the roughness of his tongue; the marchers' feet paused, their voices rose in rebuke. Fists were shaken; oaths were oathed. Whereupon the good doctor, made incautious by anger, turned upon the crowd and denigrated its cause, its breeding and its sisters. A silence fell and exerted its powers. Silence guided marcher-feet towards the gleaming gynaecologist, who stood between the tetrapod and the wailing women. In silence the marchers' hands reached out towards Narlikar and in a deep hush he clung to four-legged concrete as they attempted to pull him towards them. In absolute soundlessness, fear gave Dr Narlikar the strength of limpets; his arms stuck to the tetrapod and would not be detached. The marchers applied themselves to the tetrapod ... silently they began to rock it; mutely the force of their numbers overcame its weight. In an evening seized by a demonic quietness the tetrapod tilted, preparing to become the first of its kind to enter the waters and begin the great work of land reclamation. Dr Suresh Narlikar, his mouth opening in a voiceless A, clung to it like a phosphorescent mollusc ... man and four-legged concrete fell without a sound. The splash of the waters broke the spell.

It was said that when Dr Narlikar fell and was crushed into death by the weight of his beloved obsession, nobody had any trouble locating the body because it sent light glowing upwards through the waters like a fire.



'Do you know what's happening?' 'Hey, man, what gives?' - children, myself included, clustered around the garden hedge of Escorial Villa, in which was Dr Narlikar's bachelor apartment; and a hamal of Lila Sabarmati's, taking on an air of grave dignity, informed us, 'They have brought his death Home, wrapped in silk.'



I was not allowed to see the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay wreathed in saffron flowers on his hard, single bed; but I got to know all about it anyway, because the news of it spread far beyond the confines of his room. Mostly, I heard about it from the Estate servants, who found it quite natural to speak openly of a death, but rarely said much about life, because in life everything was obvious.



From Dr Narlikar's own bearer I learned that the death had, by swallowing large quantities of the sea, taken on the qualities of water: it had become a fluid thing, and looked happy, sad or indifferent according to how the light hit it.



Homi Catrack's gardener interjected: 'It is dangerous to look too long at death; otherwise you come away with a little of it inside you, and there are effects.'



We asked: effects? what effects? which effects? how? And Purushottam the sadhu, who had left his place under the Buckingham Villa garden tap for the first time in years, said: 'A death makes the living see themselves too clearly; after they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated.' This extraordinary claim was, in fact, borne out by events, because afterwards Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi-Appah, who had helped to clean up the body, became shriller, more shrewish, more terrifying than ever; and it seemed that everyone who saw the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay in state was affected, Nussie Ibrahim became even sillier and more of a duck, and Lila Sabarmati, who lived upstairs from the death and had helped to arrange its room, afterwards gave in to a promiscuity which had always been lurking within her, and set herself on a road at whose end there would be bullets, and her husband Commander Sabarmati conducting the Colaba traffic with a most unusual baton ...



Our family, however, stayed away from the death. My father refused to go and pay his respects, and would never refer to his late friend by name, calling him simply: 'that traitor'.



Two days later, when the news had been in the papers, Dr Narlikar suddenly acquired an enormous family of female relations. Having been a bachelor and misogynist all his life, he was engulfed, in death, by a sea of giant, noisy, omnicompetent women, who came crawling out from strange corners of the city, from milking jobs at Amul Dairies and from the box-offices of cinemas, from street-side soda-fountains and unhappy marriages; in a year of processions the Narlikar women formed their own parade, an enormous stream of outsize womanhood flowing up our two-storey hillock to fill Dr Narlikar's apartment so full that from the road below you could see their elbows sticking out of the windows and their behinds overflowing on to the verandah. For a week nobody got any sleep because the wailing of the Narlikar women filled the air; but beneath their howls the women were proving as competent as they looked. They took over the running of the Nursing Home; they investigated all of Narlikar's Business deals; and they cut my father out of the tetrapod deal just as coolly as you please.



After all those years my father was left with nothing but a hole in his pocket, while the women took Narlikar's body to Benares to have it cremated, and the Estate servants whispered to me that they had heard how the Doctor's ashes were sprinkled on the waters of Holy Ganga at Manikarnika-ghat at dusk, and they did not sink, but floated on the surface of the water like tiny glowing firebugs, and were washed out to sea where their strange luminosity must have frightened the captains of ships.



As for Ahmed Sinai: I swear that it was after Narlikar's death and the arrival of the women that he began, literally, to fade... gradually his skin paled, his hair lost its colour, until within a few months he had become entirely white except for the darkness of his eyes. (Mary Pereira told Amina: 'That man is cold in the blood; so now his skin has made ice, white ice like a fridge.') I should say, in all honesty, that although he pretended to be worried by his transformation into a white man, and went to see doctors and so forth, he was secretly rather pleased when they failed to explain the problem or prescribe a cure, because he had long envied Europeans their pigmentation. One day, when it was permissible to make jokes again (a decent interval had been allowed to elapse after Dr Narlikar's death), he told Lila Sabarmati at the cocktail hour: 'All the best people are white under the skin; I have merely given up pretending.' His neighbours, all of whom were darker than he, laughed politely and felt curiously ashamed.



Circumstantial evidence indicates that the shock of Narlikar's death was responsible for giving me a snow-white father to set beside my ebony mother; but (although I don't know how much you're prepared to swallow) I shall risk giving an alternative explanation, a theory developed in the abstract privacy of my clocktower... because during my frequent psychic travels, I discovered something rather odd: during the first nine years after Independence, a similar pigmentation disorder (whose first recorded victim may well have been the Rani of Cooch Naheen) afflicted large numbers of the nation's business community. All over India, I stumbled across good Indian businessmen, their fortunes thriving thanks to the first Five Year Plan, which had concentrated on building up commerce... businessmen who had become or were becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destinies had drained the colour from their cheeks ... in which case, perhaps my father was a late victim of a widespread, though generally unremarked phenomenon. The Businessmen of India were turning white.



That's enough to chew on for one day. But Evelyn Lilith Burns is coming; the Pioneer Cafe is getting painfully close; and - more vitally - midnight's other children, including my alter ego Shiva, he of the deadly knees, are pressing extremely hard. Soon the cracks will be wide enough for them to escape ...



By the way: some time around the end of 1956, in all probability, the singer and cuckold Wee Willie Winkie also met his death.