Book Two

The fisherman's pointing finger

   Is it possible to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival? I can think of no other reason for Padma's bizarre behaviour; and this explanation at least has the merit of being as outlandish as the rage into which she fell when, tonight, I made the error of writing (and reading aloud) a word which should not have been spoken… ever since the episode of the quack doctor's visit, I have sniffed out a strange discontent in Padma, exuding its enigmatic spoor from her eccrine (or apocrine) glands. Distressed, perhaps, by the futility of her midnight attempts at resuscitating my 'other pencil', the useless cucumber hidden in my pants, she has been waxing grouchy. (And then there was her ill-tempered reaction, last night, to my revelation of the secrets of my birth, and her irritation at my low opinion of the sum of one hundred rupees.) I blame myself: immersed in my autobiographical enterprise, I failed to consider her feelings, and began tonight on the most unfortunate of false notes.
   'Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,' I wrote and read aloud, 'I have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because while Aadam Aziz remained the sheet's victim, I have become its master-and Padma is the one who is now under its spell. Sitting in my enchanted shadows, I vouchsafe daily glimpses of myself-while she, my squatting glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose frozen into immobility by the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralysed-yes!-by love.'
   That was the word: love. Written-and-spoken, it raised her voice to an unusually shrill pitch; it unleashed from her lips a violence which would have wounded me, were I still vulnerable to words. 'Love you?' our Padma piped scornfully, 'What for, my God? What use are you, little princeling,'-and now came her attempted coup de grace-'as a lover?' Arm extended, its hairs glowing in the lamplight, she jabbed a contemptuous index finger in the direction of my admittedly nonfunctional loins; a long, thick digit, rigid with jealousy, which unfortunately served only to remind me of another, long-lost finger… so that she, seeing her arrow miss its mark, shrieked, 'Madman from somewhere! That doctor was right!' and rushed distractedly from the room. I heard footsteps clattering down the metal stairs to the factory floor; feet rushing between the dark-shrouded pickle vats; and a door, first unbolted and then slammed.
   Thus abandoned, I have returned, having no option, to my work.
   The fisherman's pointing finger: unforgettable focal point of the picture which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above the sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight's child, I spent my earliest days. The young Raleigh-and who else?-sat, framed in teak, at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor-did he have a walrus moustache?-whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh-and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic… and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child with a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor sat in a sky-blue room, beneath the pointing finger, and copied the attire of the English milords… 'Look, how chweet! Lila Sabarmati exclaimed to my eternal mortification, 'It's like he's just stepped out of the picture?
   In a picture hanging on a bedroom wall, I sat beside Walter Raleigh and followed a fisherman's pointing finger with my eyes; eyes straining at the horizon, beyond which lay-what?-my future, perhaps; my special doom, of which I was aware from the beginning, as a shimmering grey presence in that sky-blue room, indistinct at first, but impossible to ignore… because the finger pointed even further than that shimmering horizon, it pointed beyond teak frame, across a brief expanse of sky-blue wall, driving my eyes towards another frame, in which my inescapable destiny hung, forever fixed under glass: here was a jumbo-sized baby-snap with its prophetic captions, and here, beside it, a letter on high-quality vellum, embossed with the seal of state-the lions of Sarnath stood above the dharma-chakra on the Prime Minister's missive, which arrived, via Vishwanath the post-boy, one week after my photograph appeared on the front page of the Times of India.
   Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: 'Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.'
   And Mary Pereira, awestruck, 'The Government, Madam? It will be keeping one eye on the boy? But why, Madam? What's wrong with him?'-And Amina, not understanding the note of panic in her ayah's voice: 'It's just a way of putting things, Mary; it doesn't really mean what it says.' But Mary does not relax; and always, whenever she enters the baby's room, her eyes flick wildly towards the letter in its frame; her eyes look around her, trying to see whether the Government is watching; wondering eyes: what do they know? Did somebody see?… As for me, as I grew up, I didn't quite accept my mother's explanation, either; but it lulled me into a sense of false security; so that, even though something of Mary's suspicions had leaked into me, I was still taken by surprise when…
   Perhaps the fisherman's finger was not pointing at the letter in the frame; because if one followed it even further, it led one out through the window, down the two-storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy Pools, and out to another sea which was not the sea in the picture; a sea on which the sails of Koli dhows glowed scarlet in the setting sun… an accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at the city's dispossessed.
   Or maybe-and this idea makes me feel a little shivery despite the heat-it was a finger of warning, its purpose to draw attention to itself; yes, it could have been, why not, a prophecy of another finger, a finger not dissimilar from itself, whose entry into my story would release the dreadful logic of Alpha and Omega… my God, what a notion! How much of my future hung above my crib, just waiting for me to understand it? How many warnings was I given-how many did I ignore?… But no. I will not be a 'madman from somewhere', to use Padma's eloquent phrase. I will not succumb to cracked digressions; not while I have the strength to resist the cracks.

   When Amina Sinai and Baby Saleem arrived home in a borrowed Studebaker, Ahmed Sinai brought a manila envelope along for the ride. Inside the envelope: a pickle-jar, emptied of lime kasaundy, washed, boiled, purified-and now, refilled. A well-sealed jar, with a rubber diaphragm stretched over its tin lid and held in place by a twisted rubber band. What was sealed beneath rubber, preserved in glass, concealed in manila? This: travelling home with father, mother and baby was a quantity of briny water in which, floating gently, hung an umbilical cord. (But was it mine or the Other's? That's something I can't tell you.) While the newly-hired ayah, Mary Pereira, made her way to Methwold's Estate by bus, an umbilical cord travelled in state in the glove compartment of a film magnate's Studey. While Baby Saleem grew towards manhood, umbilical tissue hung unchanging in bottled brine, at the back of a teak almirah. And when, years later, our family entered its exile in the Land of the Pure, when I was struggling towards purity, umbilical cords would briefly have their day.
   Nothing was thrown away; baby and afterbirth were both retained; both arrived at Methwold's Estate; both awaited their time.
   I was not a beautiful baby. Baby-snaps reveal that my large moon-face was too large; too perfectly round. Something lacking in the region of the chin. Fair skin curved across my features-but birthmarks disfigured it; dark stains spread down my western hairline, a dark patch coloured my eastern ear. And my temples: too prominent: bulbous Byzantine domes. (Sonny Ibrahim and I were born to be friends-when we bumped our foreheads, Sonny's forcep-hollows permitted my bulby temples to nestle within them, as snugly as carpenter's joints.) Amina Sinai, immeasurably relieved by my single head, gazed upon it with redoubled maternal fondness, seeing it through a beautifying mist, ignoring the ice-like eccentricity of my sky-blue eyes, the temples like stunted horns, even the rampant cucumber of the nose.
   Baby Saleem's nose: it was monstrous; and it ran.
   Intriguing features of my early life: large and unbeautiful as I was, it appears I was not content. From my very first days I embarked upon an heroic programme of self-enlargement. (As though I knew that, to carry the burdens of my future life, I'd need to be pretty big.) By mid-September I had drained my mother's not inconsiderable breasts of milk. A wet-nurse was briefly employed but she retreated, dried-out as a desert after only a fortnight, accusing Baby Saleem of trying to bite off her nipples with his toothless gums. I moved on to the bottle and downed vast quantities of compound: the bottle's nipples suffered, too, vindicating the complaining wet-nurse. Baby-book records were meticulously kept; they reveal that I expanded almost visibly, enlarging day by day; but unfortunately no nasal measurements were taken so I cannot say whether my breathing apparatus grew in strict proportion, or faster than the rest. I must say that I had a healthy metabolism. Waste matter was evacuated copiously from the appropriate orifices; from my nose there flowed a shining cascade of goo. Armies of handkerchiefs, regiments of nappies found their way into the large washing-chest in my mother's bathroom… shedding rubbish from various apertures, I kept my eyes quite dry. 'Such a good baby, Madam,' Mary Pereira said, 'Never takes out one tear.'
   Good baby Saleem was a quiet child; I laughed often, but soundlessly. (Like my own son, I began by taking stock, listening before I rushed into gurgles and, later, into speech.) For a time Amina and Mary became afraid that the boy was dumb; but, just when they were on the verge of telling his father (from whom they had kept their worries secret-no father wants a damaged child), he burst into sound, and became, in that respect at any rate, utterly normal, 'It's as if,' Amina whispered to Mary, 'he's decided to put our minds at rest.

  There was one more serious problem. Amina and Mary took a few days to notice it. Busy with the mighty, complex processes of turning themselves into a two-headed mother, their vision clouded by a fog of stenchy underwear, they failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids. Amina, remembering how, during her pregnancy, the weight of her unborn child had held time as still as a dead green pond, began to wonder whether the reverse might not be taking place now-whether the baby had some magical power over all the time in his immediate vicinity, and was speeding it up, so that mother-and-ayah never had enough time to do everything that needed doing, so that the baby could grow at an apparently fantastic rate; lost in such chronological daydreams, she didn't notice my problem. Only when she shrugged the idea off, and told herself I was just a good strapping boy with a big appetite, an early developer, did the veils of maternal love part sufficiently for her and Mary to yelp, in unison: 'Look, baap-re-baap! Look, Madam! See, Mary! The little chap never blinks!'
   The eyes were too blue: Kashmiri-blue, changeling-blue, blue with the weight of unspilled tears, too blue to blink. When I was fed, my eyes did not flutter; when virginal Mary set me across her shoulder, crying, 'Oof, so heavy, sweet Jesus!' I burped without nictating. When Ahmed Sinai limped splint-toed to my crib, I yielded to jutting lips with keen and batless gaze… 'Maybe a mistake, Madam,' Mary suggested. 'Maybe the little sahib is copying us-blinking when we blink.' And Amina: 'We'll blink in turn and watch.' Their eyelids opening-and-closing alternately, they observed my icy blueness; but there was not the slightest tremor; until Amina took matters into her own hands and reached into the cradle to stroke my eyelids downwards. They closed: my breathing altered, instantly, to the contented rhythms of sleep. After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids. 'He'll learn, Madam,' Mary comforted Amina, 'He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure.' I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
   Now, looking back through baby eyes, I can see it all perfectly-it's amazing how much you can remember when you try. What I can see: the city, basking like a bloodsucker lizard in the summer heat. Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it's really a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India. A glamorous leech, producing nothing except films bush-shirts fish… in the aftermath of Partition, I see Vishwanath the postboy bicycling towards our two-storey hillock, vellum envelope in his saddlebag, riding his aged Arjuna Indiabike past a rotting bus-abandoned although it isn't the monsoon season, because its driver suddenly decided to leave for Pakistan, switched off the engine and departed, leaving a full busload of stranded passengers, hanging off the windows, clinging to the roof-rack, bulging through the doorway… I can hear their oaths, son-of-a-pig, brother-of-a-jackass; but they will cling to their hard-won places for two hours before they leave the bus to its fate. And, and: here is India's first swimmer of the English Channel, Mr Pushpa Roy, arriving at the gates of the Breach Candy Pools. Saffron bathing-cap on his head, green trunks wrapped in flag-hued towel, this Pushpa has declared war on the whites-only policy of the baths. He holds a cake of Mysore sandalwood soap; draws himself up; marches through the gate… whereupon hired Pathans seize him, Indians save Europeans from an Indian mutiny as usual, and out he goes, struggling valiantly, frogmarched into Warden Road and flung into the dust. Channel swimmer dives into the street, narrowly missing camels taxis bicycles (Vishwanath swerves to avoid his cake of soap)… but he is not deterred; picks himself up; dusts himself down; and promises to be back tomorrow. Throughout my childhood years, the days were punctuated by the sight of Pushpa the swimmer, in saffron cap and flag-tinted towel, diving unwillingly into Warden Road. And in the end his indomitable campaign won a victory, because today the Pools permit certain Indians-'the better sort'-to step into their map-shaped waters. But Pushpa does not belong to the better sort; old now and forgotten, he watches the Pools from afar… and now more and more of the multitudes are flooding into me-such as Bano Devi, the famous lady wrestler of those days, who would only wrestle men and threatened to marry anyone who beat her, as a result of which vow she never lost a bout; and (closer to home now) the sadhu under our garden tap, whose name was Purushottam and whom we (Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus and I) would always call Puru-the-guru-believing me to be the Mubarak, the Blessed One, he devoted his life to keeping an eye on me, and filled his days teaching my father palmistry and witching away my mother's verrucas; and then there is the rivalry of the old bearer Musa and the new ayah Mary, which will grow until it explodes; in short, at the end of 1947, life in Bombay was as teeming, as manifold, as multitudinously shapeless as ever… except that I had arrived; I was already beginning to take my place at the centre of the universe; and by the time I had finished, I would give meaning to it all. You don't believe me? Listen: at my cradle-side, Mary Pereira is singing a little song:
   @@@Anything you want to be, you can be: You can be just what-all you want.
 
   By the time of my circumcision by a barber with a cleft palate from the Royal Barber House on Gowalia Tank Road (I was just over two months old), I was already much in demand at Methwold's Estate. (Incidentally, on the subject of the circumcision: I still swear that I can remember the grinning barber, who held me by the foreskin while my member waggled frantically like a slithering snake; and the razor descending, and the pain; but I'm told that, at the time, I didn't even blink.)
   Yes, I was a popular little fellow: my two mothers, Amina and Mary, couldn't get enough of me. In all practical matters, they were the most intimate of allies. After my circumcision, they bathed me together; and giggled together as my mutilated organ waggled angrily in the bathwater. 'We better watch this boy, Madam,' Mary said naughtily, 'His thing has a life of its own!' And Amina, 'Tch, tch, Mary, you're terrible, really…' But then amid sobs of helpless laughter, 'Just see, Madam, his poor little soo-soo!' Because it was wiggling again, thrashing about, like a chicken with a slitted gullet… Together, they cared for me beautifully; but in the matter of emotion, they were deadly rivals. Once, when they took me for a pram-ride through the Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill, Amina overheard Mary telling the other ayahs, 'Look: here's my own big son'-and felt oddly threatened. Baby Saleem became, after that, the battleground of their loves; they strove to outdo one another in demonstrations of affection; while he, blinking by now, gurgling aloud, fed on their emotions, using it to accelerate his growth, expanding and swallowing infinite hugs kisses chucks-under-the-chin, charging towards the moment when he would acquire the essential characteristic of human beings: every day, and only in those rare moments when I was left alone with the fisherman's pointing finger, I tried to heave myself erect in my cot.
   (And while I made unavailing efforts to get to my feet, Amina, too, was in the grip of a useless resolve-she was trying to expel from her mind the dream of her unnameable husband, which had replaced the dream of flypaper on the night after I was born; a dream of such overwhelming reality that it stayed with her throughout her waking hours. In it, Nadir Khan came to her bed and impregnated her; such was the mischievous perversity of the dream that it confused Amina about the parentage of her child, and provided me, the child of midnight, with a fourth father to set beside Winkie and Methwold and Ahmed Sinai. Agitated but helpless in the clutches of the dream, my mother Amina began at that time to form the fog of guilt which would, in later years, surround her head like a dark black wreath.)
 
   I never heard Wee Willie Winkie in his prime. After his blind-eyed bereavement, his sight gradually returned; but something harsh and bitter crept into his voice. He told us it was asthma, and continued to arrive at Methwold's Estate once a week to sing songs which were, like himself, relics of the Methwold era. 'Good Night, Ladies,' he sang; and, keeping up to date, added 'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By' to his repertoire, and, a little later, 'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?' Placing a sizeable infant with menacingly knocking knees on a small mat beside him in the circus-ring, he sang songs filled with nostalgia, and nobody had the heart to turn him away. Winkie and the fisherman's finger were two of the few survivals of the days of William Methwold, because after the Englishman's disappearance his successors emptied his palaces of their abandoned contents. Lila Sabarmati preserved her pianola; Ahmed Sinai kept his whisky-cabinet; old man Ibrahim came to terms with ceiling-fans; but the goldfish died, some from starvation, others as a result of being so colossally overfed that they exploded in little clouds of scales and undigested fish-food; the dogs ran wild, and eventually ceased to roam the Estate; and the fading clothes in the old almirahs were distributed amongst the sweeper-women and other servants on the Estate, so that for years afterwards the heirs of William Methwold were cared for by men and women wearing the increasingly ragged shirts and cotton print dresses of their erstwhile masters. But Winkie and the picture on my wall survived; singer and fisherman became institutions of our lives, like the cocktail hour, which was already a habit too powerful to be broken. 'Each little tear and sorrow,' Winkie sang, 'only brings you closer to me…' And his voice grew worse and worse, until it sounded like a sitar whose resonating drum, made out of lacquered pumpkin, had been eaten away by mice; 'It's asthma,' he insisted stubbornly. Before he died he lost his voice completely; doctors revised his diagnosis to throat cancer; but they were wrong, too, because Winkie died of no disease but of the bitterness of losing a wife whose infidelity he never suspected. His son, named Shiva after the god of procreation and destruction, sat at his feet in those early days, silently bearing the burden of being the cause (or so he thought) of his father's slow decline; and gradually, down the years, we watched his eyes filling with an anger which could not be spoken; we watched his fists close around pebbles and hurl them, ineffectually at first, more dangerously as he grew, into the surrounding emptiness. When Lila Sabarmati's elder son was eight, he took it upon himself to tease young Shiva about his surliness, his unstarched shorts, his knobbly knees; whereupon the boy whom Mary's crime had doomed to poverty and accordions hurled a sharp flat stone, with a cutting edge like a razor, and blinded his tormentor in the right eye. After Eyeslice's accident, Wee Willie Winkie came to Methwold's Estate alone, leaving his son to enter the dark labyrinths from which only a war would save him.
 

  Why Methwold's Estate continued to tolerate Wee Willie Winkie despite the decay of his voice and the violence of his son: he had, once, given them an important clue about their lives. 'The first birth,' he had said, 'will make you real.'
   As a direct result of Winkie's clue, I was, in my early days, highly in demand. Amina and Mary vied for my attention; but in every house on the Estate, there were people who wanted to know me; and eventually Amina, allowing her pride in my popularity to overcome her reluctance to let me out of her sight, agreed to lend me, on a kind of rota basis, to the various families on the hill. Pushed by Mary Pereira in a sky-blue pram, I began a triumphal progress around the red-tiled palaces, gracing each in turn with my presence, and making them seem real to their owners. And so, looking back now through the eyes of Baby Saleem, I can reveal most of the secrets of my neighbourhood, because the grown-ups lived their lives in my presence without fear of being observed, not knowing that, years later, someone would look back through baby-eyes and decide to let the cats out of their bags.
   So here is old man Ibrahim, dying with worry because, back in Africa, governments are nationalizing his sisal plantations; here is his elder son Ishaq fretting over Ms hotel business, which is running into debt, so that he is obliged to borrow money from local gangsters; here are Ishaq's eyes, coveting his brother's wife, though why Nussie-the-duck should have aroused sexual interest in anyone is a mystery to me; and here is Nussie's husband, Ismail the lawyer, who has learned an important lesson from Ms son's forcep-birth: 'Nothing comes out right in life,' he tells his duck of a wife, 'unless it's forced out.' Applying this philosophy to his legal career, he embarks on a career of bribing judges and fixing juries; all children have the power to change their parents, and Sonny turned Ms father into a highly successful crook. And, moving across to Versailles Villa, here is Mrs Dubash with her shrine to the god Ganesh, stuck in the corner of an apartment of such supernatural untidiness that, in our house, the word 'dubash' became a verb meaning 'to make a mess'… 'Oh, Saleem, you've dubashed your room again, you black man!' Mary would cry. And now the cause of the mess, leaning over the hood of my pram to chuck me under the chin: Adi Dubash, the physicist, genius of atoms and litter. His wife, who is already carrying Cyrus-the-great within her, hangs back, growing her child, with something fanatical gleaming in the inner corners of her eyes, biding its time; it will not emerge until Mr Dubash, whose daily life was spent working with the most dangerous substances in the world, dies by choking on an orange from which his wife forgot to remove the pips. I was never invited into the flat of Dr Narlikar, the child-hating gynaecologist; but in the homes of Lila Sabarmati and Homi Catrack I became a voyeur, a tiny party to Lila's thousand and one infidelities, and eventually a witness to the beginnings of the liaison between the naval officer's wife and the film-magnate-and-racehorse-owner; which, all in good time, would serve me well when I planned a certain act of revenge.
   Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I'm bound to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views on the subject, being a Blessed One to a guru under a tap, a voyeur to Lola Sabarmati; in the eyes of Nussie-the-duck I was a rival, and a more successful rival, to her own Sonny (although, to her credit, she never showed her resentment, and asked to borrow me just like everyone else); to my two-headed mother I was all kinds of babyish things-they called me joonoo-moonoo, and putch-putch, and little-piece-of-the-moon.
   But what, after all, can a baby do except swallow all of it and hope to make sense of it later? Patiently, dry-eyed, I imbibed Nehru-letter and Winkle's prophecy; but the deepest impression of all was made on the day when Homi Catrack's idiot daughter sent her thoughts across the circus-ring and into my infant head.
   Toxy Catrack, of the outsize head and dribbling mouth; Toxy, who stood at a barred top-floor window, stark naked, masturbating with motions of consummate self-disgust; who spat hard and often through her bars, and sometimes hit us on the head… she was twenty-one years old, a gibbering half-wit, the product of years of inbreeding; but inside my head she was beautiful, because she had not lost the gifts with which every baby is born and which life proceeds to erode. I can't remember anything Toxy said when she sent her thoughts to whisper to me; probably nothing except gurgles and spittings; but she gave a door in my mind a little nudge, so that when an accident took place in a washing-chest it was probably Toxy who made it possible.
   That's enough for the moment, about the first days of Baby Saleem-already my very presence is having an effect on history; already Baby Saleem is working changes on the people around him; and, in the case of my father, I am convinced that it was I who pushed him into the excesses which led, perhaps inevitably, to the terrifying time of the freeze.

   Ahmed Sinai never forgave his son for breaking his toe. Even after the splint was removed, a tiny limp remained. My father leaned over my crib and said, 'So, my son: you're starting as you mean to go on. Already you've started bashing your poor old father!' In my opinion, this was only half a joke. Because, with my birth, everything changed for Ahmed Sinai. His position in the household was undermined by my coming. Suddenly Amina's assiduity had acquired different goals; she never wheedled money out of him any more, and the napkin in his lap at the breakfast-table felt sad pangs of nostalgia for the old days. Now it was, 'Your son needs so-and-so,' or 'Janum, you must give money for such-and-such.' Bad show, Ahmed Sinai thought. My father was a self-important man.
   And so it was my doing that Ahmed Sinai fell, in those days after my birth, into the twin fantasies which were to be his undoing, into the unreal worlds of the djinns and of the land beneath the sea.
   A memory of my father in a cool-season evening, sitting on my bed (I was seven years old) and telling me, in a slightly thickened voice, the story of the fisherman who found the djinn in a bottle washed up on the beach… 'Never believe in a djinn's promises, my son! Let them out of the bottle and they'll eat you up!' And I, timidly-because I could smell danger on my father's breath: 'But, Abba, can a djinn really live inside a bottle?' Whereupon my father, in a mercurial change of mood, roared with laughter and left the room, returning with a dark green bottle with a white label. 'Look,' he said sonorously, 'Do you want to see the djinn in here?' 'No!' I squealed in fright; but 'Yes!' yelled my sister the Brass Monkey from the neighbouring bed… and cowering together in excited terror we watched him unscrew the cap and dramatically cover the bottleneck with the palm of his hand; and now, in the other hand, a cigarette-lighter materialized. 'So perish all evil djinns!' my father cried; and, removing his palm, applied the flame to the neck of the bottle. Awestruck, the Monkey and I watched an eerie flame, blue-green-yellow, move in a slow circle down the interior walls of the bottle; until, reaching the bottom, it flared briefly and died. The next day I provoked gales of laughter when I told Sonny, Eyeslice and Hairoil, 'My father fights with djinns; he beats them; it's true!… And it was true. Ahmed Sinai, deprived of wheedles and attention, began, soon after my birth, a life-long struggle with djinn-bottles. But I was mistaken about one thing: he didn't win.
   Cocktail-cabinets had whetted his appetite; but it was my arrival that drove him to it… In those days, Bombay had been declared a dry stare. The only way to get a drink was to get yourself certified as an alcoholic; and so a new breed of doctors sprang up, djinn-doctors, one of whom, Dr Sharabi, was introduced to my father by Homi Catrack next door. After that, on the first of every month, my father and Mr Catrack and many of the city's most respectable men queued up outside Dr Sharabi's mottled-glass surgery door, went in, and emerged with the little pink chitties of alcoholism. But the permitted ration was too small for my father's needs; and so he began to send his servants along, too, and gardeners, bearers, drivers (we had a motor-car now, a 1946 Rover with running-boards, just like William Methwold's), even old Musa and Mary Pereira, brought my father back more and more pink chitties, which he took to Vijay Stores opposite the circumcising barbershop .in Gowalia Tank Road and exchanged for the brown paper bags of alcoholism, inside which were the chinking green bottles, full of djinn. And whisky, too: Ahmed Sinai blurred the edges of himself by drinking the green bottles and red labels of his servants. The poor, having little else to peddle, sold their identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father turned them into liquid and drank them down.
   At six o'clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.
   After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever, and he didn't relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother's preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door-Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries. After nights in which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language-'What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse-what difference?' And then tears, and Amina, 'Oh, janum-don't torture me!' which, in turn, provoked, 'Torture my foot! You think it's torture for a man to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!'-my father limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. And after a while Amina began to notice how his secretaries never lasted long, how they left suddenly, flouncing down our drive without any notice; and you must judge whether she chose to be blind, or whether she took it as a punishment, but she did nothing about it, continuing to devote her time to me; her only act of recognition was to give the girls a collective name. 'Those Anglos,' she said to Mary, revealing a touch of snobbery, 'with their funny names, Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I don't know what. What should I care about them? Cheap type females. I call them all his Coca-Cola girls-that's what they all sound like.

  While Ahmed pinched bottoms, Amina became long-suffering; but he might have been glad if she had appeared to care.
   Mary Pereira said, 'They aren't so funny names, Madam; beg your pardon, but they are good Christian words.' And Amina remembered Ahmed's cousin Zohra making fun of dark skin-and, falling over herself to apologize, tumbled into Zohra's mistake: 'Oh, notion, Mary, how could you think I was making fun of you?'
   Horn-templed, cucumber-nosed, I lay in my crib and listened; and everything that happened, happened because of me… One day in January 1948, at five in the afternoon, my father was visited by Dr Narlikar. There were embraces as usual, and slaps on the back. 'A little chess?' my father asked, ritually, because these visits were getting to be a habit. They would play chess in the old Indian way, the game of shatranj, and, freed by the simplicities of the chess-board from the convolutions of his life, Ahmed would daydream for an hour about the re-shaping of the Quran; and then it would be six o'clock, cocktail hour, time for the djinns… but this evening Narlikar said, 'No.' And Ahmed, 'No? What's this no? Come, sit, play, gossip…' Narlikar, interrupting: 'Tonight, brother Sinai, there is something I must show you.' They are in a 1946 Rover now, Narlikar working the crankshaft and jumping in; they are driving north along Warden Road, past Mahalaxmi Temple on the left and Willingdon Club golf-course on the right, leaving the race-track behind them, cruising along Hornby Vellard beside the sea wall; Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium is in sight, with its giant cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, Bano Devi the Invincible Woman and Dara Singh, mightiest of all… there are channa-vendors and dog-walkers promenading by the sea. 'Stop,' Narlikar commands, and they get out. They stand facing the sea; sea-breeze cools their faces; and out there, at the end of a narrow cement path in the midst of the waves, is the island on which stands the tomb of Haji Ali the mystic. Pilgrims are strolling between Vellard and tomb.
   '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.

Snakes and ladders

   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. О perfect balance of rewards and penalties! О 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 л 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.
   While my temperature came down, my sister was being born at Narlikar's Nursing Home. It was September ist; and the birth was so uneventful, so effortless that it passed virtually unnoticed on Methwold's Estate; because on the same day Ismail Ibrahim visited my parents at the clinic and announced that the case had been won… While Ismail celebrated, I was grabbing the bars of my cot; while he cried, 'So much for freezes! Your assets are your own again! By order of the High Court!', I was heaving red-faced against gravity; and while Ismail announced, with a straight face, 'Sinai bhai, the rule of law has won a famous victory,' and avoided my mother's delighted, triumphant eyes, I, Baby Saleem, aged exactly one year, two weeks and one day, hauled myself upright in my cot.
   The effects of the events of that day were twofold: I grew up with legs that were irretrievably bowed, because I had got to my feet too early; and the Brass Monkey (so called because of her thick thatch of red-gold hair, which would not darken until she was nine) learned that, if she was going to get any attention in her life, she would have to make plenty of noise.

Accident in a washing-chest

   It has been two whole days since Padma stormed out of my life. For two days, her place at the vat of mango kasaundy has been taken by another woman-also thick of waist, also hairy of forearm; but, in my eyes, no replacement at all!-while my own dung-lotus has vanished into I don't know where. A balance Mas been upset; I feel.cracks widening down the length of my body; because suddenly I am alone, without my necessary ear, and it isn't enough. I am seized by a sudden fist of anger: why should I be so unreasonably treated by my one disciple? Other men have recited stories before me; other men were not so impetuously abandoned. When Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, dictated his masterpiece to elephant-headed Ganesh, did the god walk out on him halfway? He certainly did not. (Note that, despite my Muslim background, I'm enough of a Bombayite to be well up in Hindu stories, and actually I'm very fond of the image of trunk-nosed, flap-eared Ganesh solemnly taking dictation!)
   How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience? How to do without her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps-kept?-my feet on the ground? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present… but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?
   I am, perhaps, hiding behind all these questions. Yes, perhaps that's right. I should speak plainly, without the cloak of a question-mark: our Padma has gone, and I miss her. Yes, that's it.
   But there is still work to be done: for instance:
   In the summer of 1956, when most things in the world were still larger than myself, my sister the Brass Monkey developed the curious habit of setting fire to shoes. While Nasser sank ships at Suez, thus slowing down the movements of the world by obliging it to travel around the Cape of Good Hope, my sister was also trying to impede our progress. Obliged to fight for attention, possessed by her need to place herself at the centre of events, even of unpleasant ones (she was my sister, after all; but no prime minister wrote letters to her, no sadhus watched her from their places under garden taps; unprophesied, un-photographed, her life was a struggle from the start), she carried her war into the world of footwear, hoping, perhaps, that by burning our shoes she would make us stand still long enough to notice that she was there… she made no attempt at concealing her crimes. When my father entered his room to find a pair of black Oxfords on fire, the Brass Monkey was standing over them, match in hand. His nostrils were assailed by the unprecedented odour of ignited boot-leather, mingled with Cherry Blossom boot-polish and a little Three-In-One oil… 'Look, Abba!' the Monkey said charmingly, 'Look how pretty-just the exact colour of my hair!'
   Despite all precautions, the merry red flowers of my sister's obsession blossomed all over the Estate that summer, blooming in the sandals of Nussie-the-duck and the film-magnate footwear of Homi Catrack; hair-coloured flames licked at Mr Dubash's down-at-heel suedes and at Lila Sabarmati's stiletto heels. Despite the concealment of matches and the vigilance of servants, the Brass Monkey found her ways, undeterred by punishment and threats. For one year, on and off, Methwold's Estate was assailed by the fumes of incendiarized shoes; until her hair darkened into anonymous brown, and she seemed to lose interest in matches.
   Amina Sinai, abhorring the idea of beating her children, temperamentally incapable of raising her voice, came close to her wits'end; and the Monkey was sentenced, for day after day, to silence. This was my mother's chosen disciplinary method: unable to strike us, she ordered us to seal our lips. Some echo, no doubt, of the great silence with which her own mother had tormented Aadam Aziz lingered in her ears-because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound-and with an emphatic 'Chup!' she would place a finger across her lips and command our tongues to be still. It was a punishment which never failed to cow me into submission; the Brass Monkey, however, was made of less pliant stuff. Soundlessly, behind lips clamped tight as her grandmother's, she plotted the incineration of leather-just as once, long ago, another monkey in another city had performed the act which made inevitable the burning of a leathercloth godown…
   She was as beautiful (if somewhat scrawny) as I was ugly; but she was from the first, mischievous as a whirlwind and noisy as a crowd. Count the windows and vases, broken accidentally-on-purpose; number, if you can, the meals that somehow flew off her treacherous dinner-plates, to stain valuable Persian rugs! Silence was, indeed, the worst punishment she could have been given; but she bore it cheerfully, standing innocently amid the ruins of broken chairs and shattered ornaments.
   Mary Pereira said, 'That one! That Monkey! Should have been born with four legs!' But Amina, in whose mind the memory of her narrow escape from giving birth to a two-headed son had obstinately refused to fade, cried, 'Mary! What are you saying? Don't even think such things!'… Despite my mother's protestations, it was true that the Brass Monkey was as much animal as human; and, as all the servants and children on Methwold's Estate knew, she had the gift of talking to birds, and to cats. Dogs, too: but after she was bitten, at the age of six, by a supposedly rabid stray, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to Breach Candy Hospital, every afternoon for three weeks, to be given an injection in the stomach, it seems she either forgot their language or else refused to have any further dealings with them. From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence. The Brass Monkey was never so furious as when anyone spoke to her in words of love; desperate for affection, deprived of it by my overpowering shadow, she had a tendency to turn upon anyone who gave her what she wanted, as if she were defending herself against the possibility of being tricked.
   … Such as the time when Sonny Ibrahim plucked up his courage to tell her, 'Hey, listen, Saleem's sister-you're a solid type. I'm, um, you know, damn keen on you…' And at once she marched across to where his father and mother were sipping lassi in the gardens of Sans Souci to say, 'Nussie auntie, I don't know what your Sonny's been getting up to. Only just now I saw him and Cyrus behind a bush, doing such funny rubbing things with their soo-soos!'…
   The Brass Monkey had bad table manners; she trampled flowerbeds; she acquired the tag of problem-child; but she and I were close-as-close, in spite of framed letters from Delhi and sadhu-under-the-tap. From the beginning, I decided to treat her as an ally, not a competitor; and, as a result, she never once blamed me for my preeminence in our household, saying, 'What's to blame? Is it your fault if they think you're so great?' (But when, years later, I made the same mistake as Sonny, she treated me just the same.)
   And it was Monkey who, by answering a certain wrong-number telephone call, began the process of events which led to my accident in a white washing-chest made of slatted wood.

   Already, at the age of nearlynine, I knew this much: everybody was waiting for me. Midnight and baby-snaps, prophets and prime ministers had created around me a glowing and inescapable mist of expectancy… in which my father pulled me into his squashy belly in the cool of the cocktail hour to say, 'Great things! My son: what is not in store for you? Great deeds, a great life!' While I, wriggling between jutting lip and big toe, wetting his shirt with my eternally leaking nose-goo, turned scarlet and squealed, 'Let me go, Abba! Everyone will see!' And he, embarrassing me beyond belief, bellowed, 'Let them look! Let the whole world see how I love my son!'… and my grandmother, visiting us one winter, gave me advice, too: 'Just pull up your socks, whatsitsname, and you'll be better than anyone in the whole wide world!'… Adrift in this haze of anticipation, I had already felt within myself the first movings of that shapeless animal which still, on these Padmaless nights, champs and scratches in my stomach: cursed by a multitude of hopes and nicknames (I had already acquired Sniffer and Snotnose), I became afraid that everyone was wrong-that my much-trumpeted existence might turn out to be utterly useless, void, and without the shred of a purpose. And it was to escape from this beast that I took to hiding myself, from an early age, in my mother's large white washing-chest; because although the creature was inside me, the comforting presence of enveloping soiled linen seemed to lull it into sleep.
   Outside the washing-chest, surrounded by people who seemed to possess a devastatingly clear sense of purpose, I buried myself in fairy-tales. Hatim Tai and Batman, Superman and Sinbad helped to get me through the nearlynine years. When I went shopping with Mary Pereira-overawed by her ability to tell a chicken's age by looking at its neck, by the sheer determination with which she stared dead pomfrets in the eyes-I became Aladdin, voyaging in a fabulous cave; watching servants dusting vases with a dedication as majestic as it was obscure, I imagined Ali Baba's forty thieves hiding in the dusted urns; in the garden, staring at Purushottam the sadhu being eroded by water, I turned into the genie of the lamp, and thus avoided, for the most part, the terrible notion that I, alone in the universe, had no idea what I should be, or how I should behave. Purpose: it crept up behind me when I stood staring down from my window at European girls cavorting in the map-shaped pool beside the sea. 'Where do you get it?' I yelped aloud; the Brass Monkey, who shared my sky-blue room, jumped half-way out of her skin. I was then nearlyeight; she was almostseven. It was a very early age at which to be perplexed by meaning.

  But servants are excluded from washing-chests; school buses, too, are absent. In my nearlyninth year I had begun to attend the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School on Outram Road in the old Fort district; washed and brushed every morning, I stood at the foot of our two-storey hillock, white-shorted, wearing a blue-striped elastic belt with a snake-buckle, satchel over my shoulder, my mighty cucumber of a nose dripping as usual; Eyeslice and Hairoil, Sonny Ibrahim and precocious Cyrus-the-great waited too. And on the bus, amid rattling seats and the nostalgic cracks of the window-panes, what certainties! What nearlynine-year-old certitudes about the future! A boast from Sonny: 'I'm going to be a bullfighter; Spain! Chiquitas! Hey, toro, toro!' His satchel held before him like the muleta of Manolete, he enacted his future while the bus rattled around Kemp's Corner, past Thomas Kemp and Co. (Chemists), beneath the Air-India rajah's poster ('See you later, alligator! I'm off to London on Air-India!') and the other hoarding, on which, throughout my childhood, the Kolynos Kid, a gleamtoothed pixie in a green, elfin, chlorophyll hat proclaimed the virtues of Kolynos Toothpaste: 'Keep Teeth Kleen and Keep Teeth Brite! Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White!' The kid on his hoarding, the children in the bus: one-dimensional, flattened by certitude, they knew what they were for. Here is Glandy Keith Colaco, a thyroid balloon of a child with hair already sprouting tuftily on his lip: 'I'm going to run my father's cinemas; you bastards want to watch movies, you'll have to come an' beg me for seats!'… And Fat Perce Fishwala, whose obesity is due to nothing but overeating, and who, along with Glandy Keith, occupies the privileged position of class bully: 'Bah! That's nothing! I'll have diamonds and emeralds and moonstones! Pearls as big as my balls!' Fat Perce's father runs the city's other jewellery business; his great enemy is the son of Mr Fatbhoy, who, being small and intellectual, comes off badly in the war of the pearl-tcsticled children… And Eyeslice, announcing his future as a Test cricketer, with a fine disregard for his one empty socket; and Hairoil, who is as slicked-down and neat as his brother is curly-topped and dishevelled, says, 'What selfish bums you are! I shall follow my father into the Navy; I shall defend my country!' Whereupon he is pelted with rulers, compasses, inky pellets… in the school bus, as it clattered past Chowpatty Beach, as it turned left off Marine Drive beside the apartment of my favourite uncle Hanif and headed past Victoria Terminus towards Flora Fountain, past Churchgate Station and Crawford Market, I held my peace; I was mild-mannered Clark Kent protecting my secret identity; but what on earth was that? 'Hey, Snotnose!' Glandy Keith yelled, 'Hey, whaddya suppose our Sniffer'11 grow up to be?' And the answering yell from Fat Perce Fishwala, 'Pinocchio!' And the rest, joining in, sing a raucous chorus of 'There are no strings on me!'… while Cyrus-the-great sits quiet as genius and plans the future of the nation's leading nuclear research establishment.
   And, at home, there was the Brass Monkey with her shoe-burning; and my father, who had emerged from the depths of his collapse to fall, once more, into the folly of tetrapods… 'Where do you find it?' I pleaded at my window; the fisherman's finger pointed, misleadingly, out to sea.
   Banned from washing-chests: cries of 'Pinocchio! Cucumber-nose! Goo-face!' Concealed in my hiding-place, I was safe from the memory of Miss Kapadia, the teacher at Breach Candy Kindergarten, who had, on my first day at school, turned from her blackboard to greet me, seen my nose, and dropped her duster in alarm, smashing the nail on her big toe, in a screechy but minor echo of my father's famous mishap; buried amongst soiled hankies and crumpled pajamas, I could forget, for a time, my ugliness.
   Typhoid 'attacked me; krait-poison cured me; and my early, overheated growth-rate cooled off. By the time I was nearlynine, Sonny Ibrahim was an inch and a half taller than I. But one piece of Baby Saleem seemed immune to disease and extract-of-snakes. Between my eyes, it mushroomed outwards and downwards, as if all my expansionist forces, driven out of the rest of my body, had decided to concentrate on this single incomparable thrust… between my eyes and above my lips, my nose bloomed like a prize marrow. (But then, I was spared wisdom teeth; one should try to count one's blessings.)
   What's in a nose? The usual answer: 'That's simple. A breathing apparatus; olfactory organs; hairs.' But in my case, the answer was simpler still, although, I'm bound to admit, somewhat repellent: what was in my nose was snot. With apologies, I must unfortunately insist on details: nasal congestion obliged me to breathe through my mouth, giving me the air of a gasping goldfish; perennial blockages doomed me to a childhood without perfumes, to days which ignored the odours of musk and chambeli and mango kasaundy and home-made ice-cream: and dirty washing, too. A disability in the world outside washing-chests can be a positive advantage once you're in. But only for the duration of your stay.
   Purpose-obsessed, I worried about my nose. Dressed in the bitter garments which arrived regularly from my headmistress aunt Alia, I went to school, played French cricket, fought, entered fairy-tales… and worried. (In those days, my aunt Alia had begun to send us an unending stream of children's clothes, into whose seams she had sewn her old maid's bile; the Brass Monkey and I were clothed in her gifts, wearing at first the baby-things of bitterness, then the rompers of resentment; I grew up in white shorts starched with the starch of jealousy, while the Monkey wore the pretty flowered frocks of Alia's undimmed envy… unaware that our wardrobe was binding us in the webs of her revenge, we led our well-dressed lives.) My nose: elephantine as the trunk of Ganesh, it should, I thought, have been a superlative breather; a smeller without an answer, as we say; instead, it was permanently bunged-up, and as useless as a wooden sikh-kabab.
   Enough. I sat in the washing-chest and forgot my nose; forgot about the climbing of Mount Everest in 1953-when grubby Eyeslice giggled, 'Hey, men! You think that Tenzing could climb up Sniffer's face?'-and about the quarrels between my parents over my nose, for which Ahmed Sinai never tired of blaming Amina's father: 'Never before in my family has there been a nose like it! We have excellent noses; proud noses; royal noses, wife!' Ahmed Sinai had already begun, at that time, to believe in the fictional ancestry he had created for the benefit of William Methwold; djinn-sodden, he saw Mughal blood running in his veins… Forgotten, too, the night when I was eight and a half, and my father, djinns on his breath, came into my bedroom to rip the sheets off me and demand: 'What are you up to? Pig! Pig from somewhere?' I looked sleepy; innocent; puzzled. He roared on. 'Chhi-chhi! Filthy! God punishes boys who do that! Already he's made your nose as big as poplars. He'll stunt your growth; he'll make your soo-soo shrivel up!' And my mother, arriving nightdressed in the startled room, 'Janum, for pity's sake; the boy was only sleeping.' The djinn roared through my father's lips, possessing him completely: 'Look on his face! Whoever got a nose like that from sleeping?'
   There are no mirrors in a washing-chest; rude jokes do not enter it, nor pointing fingers. The rage of fathers is muffled by used sheets and discarded brassieres. A washing-chest is a hole in the world, a place which civilization has put outside itself, beyond the pale; this makes it the finest of hiding-places. In the washing-chest, I was like Nadir Khan in his underworld, safe from all pressures, concealed from the demands of parents and history…
   … My father, pulling me into his squashy belly, speaking in a voice choked with instant emotion: 'All right, all right, there, there, you're a good boy; you can be anything you want; you just have to want it enough! Sleep now…' And Mary Pereira, echoing him in her little rhyme: 'Anything you want to be, you can be; You can be just what-all you want!' It had already occurred to me that our family believed implicitly in good business principles; they expected a handsome return for their investment in me. Children get food shelter pocket-money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' they sing; but I, Pin( cchio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive-nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness. Don't misunderstand m;:. I didn't mind. I was, at that time, a dutiful child. I longed to give them what they wanted, what soothsayers and framed letters had promised them; I simply did not know how. Where did greatness come from? How did you get some? When?… When I was seven years old, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother came to visit us. On my seventh birthday, dutifully, I permitted myself to be dressed up like the boys in the fisherman picture; hot and constricted in the outlandish garb, I smiled and smiled. 'See, my little piece-of-the-moon!' Amina cried cutting a cake covered with candied farmyard animals, 'So chweet! Never takes out one tear!' Sandbagging down the floods of tears lurking just beneath my eyes, the tears of heat discomfort and the absence of One Yard Of Chocolates in my pile of presents, I took a slice of cake to Reverend Mother, who was ill in bed. I had been given a doctor's stethoscope; it was around my neck. She gave me permission to examine her; I prescribed more exercise. 'You must walk across the room, to the almirah and back, once a day. You may lean on me; I am the doctor.' Stethoscoped English milord guided witchmoled grandmother across the room; hobblingly, creakingly, she obeyed.
   After three months of this treatment, she made a full recovery. The neighbours came to celebrate, bearing rasgullas and gulab-jamans and other sweets. Reverend Mother, seated regally on a takht in the living-room, announced: 'See my grandson? He cured me, whatsits-name. Genius! Genius, whatsitsname: it is a gift from God.' Was that it, then? Should I stop worrying? Was genius something utterly unconnected with wanting, or learning how, or knowing about, or being able to? Something which, at the appointed hour, would float down around my shoulders like an immaculate, delicately worked pashmina shawl? Greatness as a falling mantle: which never needed to be sent to the dhobi. One does not beat genius upon a stone… That one clue, my grandmother's one chance sentence, was my only hope; and, as it turned out, she wasn't very far wrong. (The accident is almost upon me; and the children of midnight are waiting.)