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"This is your mother. You may not recognize me as it is not two in the morning and you do not have a suffocating child on your lap, but I assure you that I am one and the same. Listen, bud, today, tomorrow, next week, we will have this conversation. In the meantime I leave you with two little words of wisdom regarding this job of yours. 'Not okay.' I love you. Over and out." Right, this job of mine. What to do about this reservation thing? "Grandma?" "Darling!" "I need to get a table for two for Valentine's dinner anywhere that they don't have paper place mats. What can you do for me?" "Going right for the jackpot today, are we? Can't we start with something smaller, like an afternoon wearing the crown jewels?" "I know, it's for Grayer's mom. It's a long story, but she's going to hunt me until I get her a seat somewhere." "That earmuffs woman? She doesn't deserve the crumbs off your plate." "I know, but can you please just wave your magic wand for me?" "Hmm, call Maurice at Lutece and tell him I'll send him the recipe for the cheesecake next week." "You rock, Grandma." "No, darling, I swing. Love you." "Love you, too." One more call and it's back to les petites ego-centrics. The city is on Valentine's overdrive as I walk over to Elizabeth Arden to meet my grandmother. Since the last Christmas decoration came down in January every store has had a Valentine's theme in the window; even the hardware store has a red toilet-seat cover on display. In Februaries past I would wait with exasperation on line behind men and women buying oysters/champagne/condoms, when I only wanted to pay for my grapefruit/beer/Kleenex and get on with my life. This year, I've got nothing but patience. This is the very first Valentine's Day on which I have not been single. However, in observance of the traditional survival agenda for the one-day-when-being-single-is-just-not-okay, Sarah and I mailed each other Tiger Beat pinups and I am accompanying Grandma to our annual pampering. "Darling, Saint Valentine's Rule Number One," she imparts as we sip our lemon water and admire our lacquered toes. "It's more important to show yourself a little love than to have a man who gives you something in the wrong size and color." "Thanks for the pedicure, Gram." "Anytime, darling. I'm going to go back upstairs for my seaweed wrap. Let's just hope they don't forget me like last time. Really, they should put a little buzzer in your hand. Imagine being found, covered in seaweed and wrapped in a tarp by some poor janitor. Rule Number Two: Never take the last appointment of the day." I thank her profusely, bundle up, bid her farewell, and go to pick up my hot date from nursery school. He comes running out at noon, holding a large, crooked paper heart that leaves a trail of glitter behind him. "Whatcha got there, buddy?" "It's a Valentine. I made it. You can hold it." I take the heart and pass him the juice box I've been keeping warm in my pocket as he settles in the stroller. I look down at the heart, assuming it's for Mrs. X. "Mrs. Butters spelled for me. I told her what to say and she spelled for me. Read it, Nanny, read it." I almost can't speak. "I LOVE NANNY FROM GRAYER ADDISON X." "Yup. That's what I said." "It's beautiful, Grover. Thank you," I say, starting to get teary behind the stroller. "You can hold it," he offers as he grips the juice box. "You know what? I'm going to put it safely in the stroller pocket so it doesn't get hurt. We've got a special afternoon ahead of us." Despite the fact that it's one of the coldest days of the year, I'm under strict instruction not to bring him home until after French class. So I've made an executive decision to ignore all the usual guidelines and take him to California Pizza Kitchen for lunch and then down Third Avenue to the new Muppet movie. I was worried he might be scared of the dark, but he sings and claps all the way through. "That was so funny, Nanny. So funny," he says, as I buckle him back into his stroller and we sing the theme song all the way to French class. After I drop him off with Mme. Maxime to faire les Valentines I run across Madison to Barneys to pick up a little something for H. H. "Can I help you?" the notoriously bitchy blonde behind the Kiehl's counter half asks, half spits. She has never been forgiven for once accusing Sarah of shoplifting the toner she was trying to return. "No, thanks, just browsing." I set my sights on another salesperson, a tall Eurasian man in an expensive-looking black shirt. "Hi, I'm looking for a Valentine's present for my boyfriend." I love saying it. Boyfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend. Yeah, I have the cutest boyfriend. My boyfriend doesn't like wool socks. Oh, my boyfriend works at The Hague, too! "Okay, well, what kind of products does he prefer?" Right, I'm back. "Oh, I don't know. Um, he smells nice. He shaves. Maybe some shave stuff?" He shows me every conceivable product an aspiring model pulling in extra cash at Barneys might ever want to use. "Um, really? Lip liner?" I ask. "Because he plays lacrosse .. ." He shakes his head at my shortsightedness and pulls out more esoteric pastes and lotions. "I don't want to imply that there's anything wrong with him, you know, give him something that fixes anything. He doesn't need fixing." I finally settle on a stainless steel razor and watch him wrap it in red tissue paper and tie a red bow around the black box. Parfait. I greet Grayer outside his classroom with his coat held out. "Bonsoir, Monsieur X. Comment ca va?" "Ca va tres bien, Nanny. Merci beaucoup. Et vous?" he asks, waving his magic fingers at me. "Oui, oui, tres bien." Maxime leans her head out of the classroom to the row of cubbies where I'm bundling Grayer. "Grayer is really coming along with his verbs." She smiles down at him from atop her Charles Jourdan pumps. "But if you could take some time with him to practice the noun list each week, that would be fantastique. If either you or your husband-" "Oh, I'm not his mother." "Ah, mon Dieu! Je m'excuse." "Non, non, pas de problem," I say. "Alors, see you next week, Grayer." I try to push him home quickly because a frigid wind is whipping down Park. "As soon as we get upstairs," I say, crouching in the elevator to loosen his scarf, "I'm going to put some Vaseline on your cheeks, okay? You're getting a little chapped." "Okay. What are we going to do tonight, Nanny? Let's fly! Yeah, I think we should fly as soon as we get upstairs." Lately I've been balancing him on my feet and "flying" him in his room. "After bath, G, that's flying time." I push the stroller over the threshold. "What do you want for dinner?" I'm hanging up our coats when Mrs. X walks into the front hall in a floor-length red evening gown and Velcro curlers, already in the heat of preparation for her Valentine dinner date with Mr. X. "Hi, guys. Did you have a good day?" "Happy Valentine's Day, Mommy!" Grayer shouts in greeting. "Happy Valentine's Day. Oops, be careful of Mommy's dress." Spatula. "Wow, you look beautiful," I say, pulling off my boots. "You think so?" She looks down in consternation at her midriff. "I still have a little time-Mr. X's flight from Chicago doesn't land for another half hour. Could you come help me for a minute?" "Sure. I was just going to get dinner started. I think Grayer's pretty hungry." "Oh. Well, why don't you just order something in? There's money in the drawer." Well, I never. "Great! Grayer, why don't you come help me order?" I keep a hidden stash of menus in the laundry room for emergencies. "Pizza! I want pizza, Nanny! Pleeeaaase?" I raise an eyebrow at him because he knows I can't say "But you had pizza for lunch" in front of his mother. "Great. Nanny, why don't you call for a pizza, pop in a v-i-d-e-o and then come help me," she says as she leaves the room. "Hahaha, pizza, Nanny, we're having pizza," he laughs and claps wildly at his unbelievable good fortune. "Mrs. X?" I push the door open. "In here!" she calls out from the dressing room. She's standing in another floor-length red gown and there's a third hanging up behind her. "Oh, my God! Wow, it's beautiful." This one has thicker straps and red velvet leaf appliques trailing around the skirt. The color is a stunning combination with her thick black hair. She looks in the mirror and shakes her head. "No, it's just not right." I look carefully at her in the dress. I realize I've never seen her arms or sternum before. She looks like a ballet dancer, tiny and all sinew. But she isn't filling out the dress in the bust and it's hanging all wrong. "I think maybe it's the bustline," I say tentatively. She nods her head. "Breast-feeding," she says derisively. "Let me try on the third. Would you like some wine?" I notice the open bottle of Sancerre on the dresser. "No, thank you. I shouldn't." "Oh, come on. Go take a glass off the bar." I walk through to the piano room where I can hear the strains of "I'm Madeline! I'm Madeline!" coming from the library. When I get back she's come out in a beautiful Napoleonic raw-silk gown, looking like Josephine. "Oh, much better," I say. "The empire waist really suits you." "Yeah, but it isn't very sexy, is it?" "Well... no, it's beautiful, but it depends on the look you're going for." "Breathtaking, Nanny. I want to be breathtaking." We both smile as she slips behind the Chinese screen. "I've got one more." "Are you going to keep all of these?" I eye the zeros on the dangling price tags. "No, of course not. I'll return the ones I don't wear. Oh, that reminds me." She sticks her head around the screen. "Can you take the rest back to Bergdorf's for me tomorrow?" "No problem. I can do it while Grayer's at his play date." "Great. Can you zip me?" she calls out. I put down my wine and go around to zip her into a stunningly sexy 1930s red sheath, "Yes," we both say as soon as she looks in the mirror. "It's beautiful," I say. And mean it. It's the first one that uses her proportions to its advantage, making her look sylphlike, rather than emaciated. Looking at her reflection, I realize that I am rooting for her, rooting for them. "So what do you think? Earrings or no earrings? I need to wear this necklace because my husband gave it to me." She holds up a strand of diamonds. "Isn't it beautiful? But I don't want to overaccessorize." "Do you have any little studs?" She starts going through her jewelry box and I take my wine over to the velvet bench. "These?" She holds up a pair of diamond studs-"Or these?"- and rubies. "No, definitely the diamonds. You don't want to overdo the red." "I went to Chanel today and got the perfect lipstick and look!" She sticks out her foot. Her toes are painted in Chanel Redcoat. "Perfect," I say, taking a sip. She puts in the studs and gives herself a quick swipe with the lipstick. "What do you think?" She turns for me. "Oh, wait!" She goes over to the Manolo Blahnik bag on the floor and pulls out a box containing a pair of exquisite black silk sandals. "Too much?" "No, no. They're gorgeous," I say, as she slips them on and turns for me again. "So, what do you think? Anything missing?" "Well, I'd take the curlers out." She laughs. "No, really, it's perfect." I give her another once-over. "Um, it's just that..." "What?" "Do you have a thong?" She quickly looks backward in the mirror. "Oh, my God. You're right." She starts rifling through the plastic bags in her lingerie drawer. "I think Mr. X gave me a pair on our honeymoon." Oh, brilliant, Nan! Brill-i-ant! 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To my surprise, it was harder facing Maude than Richard. Richard's response was predictable -- a rage he contained in front of the police but unleashed in the cab home. He shouted about the family name, about the disgrace to his mother, about the uselessness of the cause. All of this I had known to expect, from hearing of the reactions of other women's husbands. Indeed, I have been lucky to go this long without Richard complaining. He has thought my activities with the WSPU a harmless hobby, to be dabbled in between tea parties. It is only now he truly understands that I too am a suffragette. One thing he said in the cab did surprise me. 'What about your daughter?' he shouted. 'Now that she's firmly on the road to womanhood, she needs a better example than you are setting.' I frowned -- the phrase he used was so awkward it must be masking something. 'What do you mean?' Richard stared at me, both incredulous and embarrassed. She hasn't told you?' 'Told me what?' That she's begun her . . . her . . .' He waved his hand vaguely at my skirt. 'She has?' I cried. 'When?' 'Months ago.' 'How can you know when I don't?' 'I was with her at the time, that's why! And a humiliating moment it was, for both of us. She had to go to Jenny in the end - you weren't home. I should have guessed then how deeply you were into this ridiculous nonsense.' Richard could have said more, but must have sensed he didn't need to. I was remembering when my own courses began - how I had run to my mother, crying, and how she had comforted me. We were silent the rest of the way back. When we got home I took a candle from the hall table and went directly up to Maude's room. I sat on her bed and looked at her in the dim light, wondering what other secrets she was keeping from me, and how to tell her what I must tell her. She opened her eyes and sat up before I had said anything. 'What is it, Mummy?' she asked so clearly that I am not sure she had been asleep. It was best to be honest and direct. 'Do you know where I was today while you were at school?' 'At the WSPU headquarters?' 'I was at Caxton Hall for the Women's Parliament. But then I went to Parliament Square with some others to try to get in to the House of Commons.' 'And - did you?' 'No. I was arrested. I've just come back from Cannon Row Police Station with your father. Who is furious, of course. 'But why were you arrested? What did you do?' 'I didn't do anything. We were simply pushing through the crowd when policemen grabbed us and threw us to the ground. When we got up, they threw us down again and again. The bruises on my shoulders and ribs are quite spectacular. We've all got them.' I did not add that many of those bruises came from the ride in the Black Maria - how the driver took corners so sharply I was thrown about, or how the cubicles in the van were so small that I felt I had been shut in a coffin standing up, or how it smelled of urine, which I was sure the police had done themselves to punish us further. 'Was Caroline Black arrested too?' Maude asked. 'No. She had fallen back to speak to someone she knew, and by the time she caught up the police had already got us. She was terribly upset not to be taken. She even came down to Cannon Row on her own and sat with us.' Maude was silent. I wanted to ask her about what Richard had told me in the cab ride home, but found I couldn't. It was easier to talk about what had happened to me. 'I'll be in court early tomorrow,' I continued. 'They may send me straight to Holloway. I wanted to say goodbye now.' 'But - how long would you be in - in prison?' 'I don't know. Possibly up to three months.' Three months! What will we do?' 'You? You'll be fine. There is something I want you to do for me, though.' Maude gazed at me eagerly. Even before I pulled out the collecting card and began to tell her about self-denial week - a campaign drive the WSPU was initiating to raise money -- I knew I was doing the wrong thing. As her mother I should be comforting and reassuring her. Yet even as her face fell I continued to explain that she should ask all our neighbours as well as any visitors to place donations in the card, and that she should send it to the WSPU office at the end of the week. I don't know why I was so cruel. DOROTHY BAKER As a rule I don't involve myself in this family's comings and goings. I arrive at half-seven in the morning, I cook for them, I leave at seven at night -- six if the supper's a cold one. I stay out of the way, I don't have opinions. Or if I do I keep them to myself. I have my own little house, my grown children with their dramas -- I don't need more. Not like Jenny, who given half a chance pokes her nose into every story going. It's a miracle she's not had it cut right off. But I do feel sorry for Miss Maude. I was going home the other evening through a thick fog when I saw her walking just ahead of me. I'd never seen her in Tufnell Park before. She's got no reason to come over here -- her life goes in other directions, north and west towards Highgate and Hampstead, not east towards Tufnell Park and Holloway. That's to be expected of a family of that class. The streets here are not so rough, but all the same I didn't like to see her on her own, especially in that peasoup. A person could disappear for good in one. I felt I ought to follow to make sure she came to no harm. It was clear enough where she was headed. Can't say I blame her - I'd have done the same in her shoes, though living near it as I do, I don't feel much draw to see it. But then, I don't have family inside. My children act out their dramas within the bounds of the law. Miss Maude found her way there easy enough -- even with the fog and the strange streets she's got a level head on her. When she got there she stopped and stared. The look of the place when it loomed out of the fog must have thrown her. The Castle, they call it round here. True enough it resembles one, with a big arched entrance and stone towers with ramparts. Most peculiar for a prison. My children used to play knights and maidens in front of it, when they dared. There are also rows of little windows set in a brick wall far back from the road, where the prisoners must be. Then we both got a surprise -- blow me if that Black woman wasn't matching up and down in front of the entrance. She's a little thing, but she wore a long grey coat that flapped round her ankles and made her look taller. She was singing this: 'Sing a song of Christabel's clever little plan Four and twenty Suffragettes packed in a van When the van was opened they to the Commons ran Wasn't that a dainty dish for Campbell-Bannerman? Asquith was in the treasury, counting out the money Lloyd George among the Liberal women speaking words of honey And then there came a bright idea to all those little men "Let's give the women votes," they cried, "and all be friends again."' Then she turned to the little windows and shouted, 'Chin up, my dear -- you're halfway through now. Only three weeks to go! And we have so much to do when you come out!' Her voice hardly carried in the fog, though -- don't know how she thought anyone inside would hear her. Miss Maude had seen enough -- she turned and ran. I followed but my running days are long over and I lost sight of her. It was dusk now, and I began to worry. The shops were closed, and soon there wouldn't be any decent people out on the street for her to ask directions of. Then I turned a corner and she was rushing out of the fog towards me, looking very frightened. 'Miss Maude, what on earth are you doing out here?' I said, pretending not to know. 'Mrs Baker!' She was so relieved to see me that she clutched my arm. 'You should be at home,' I scolded, 'not wandering the streets.' 'I've been -- for a walk and got lost.' I looked at her. There was no point in being coy. 'Wanted to see where she is?' 'Yes.' Miss Maude hung her head. I shuddered. 'Grim place. I've never liked having it on my doorstep. Here, you!' I called to a passing figure. 'Hallo, Mrs Baker.' 'Miss Maude, this is Jimmy, my neighbour's son. See her to the Boston Arms, will you, Jimmy? She'll know her way from there.' 'Thank you, Mrs Baker,' Miss Maude whispered. I shrugged. 'It's not my business,' I said. 'Not a word of "is to anyone. Take care how you go in the fog.' I keep my word. In this way Mr. Brown learned a good deal about the religion of the clan and he came to the conclusion that a frontal attack on it would not succeed. And so he built a school and a little hospital in Umuofia. He went from family to family begging people to send their children to his school. But at first they only sent their slaves or sometimes their lazy children. Mr. Brown begged and argued and prophesied. He said that the leaders of the land in the future would be men and women who had learned to read and write. If Umuofia failed to send her children to the school, strangers would come from other places to rule them. They could already see that happening in the Native Court, where the D.C. was surrounded by strangers who spoke his tongue. Most of these strangers came from the distant town of Umuru on the bank of the Great River where the white man first went. In the end Mr. Brown's arguments began to have an effect. More people came to learn in his school, and he encouraged them with gifts of singlets and towels. They were not all young, these people who came to learn. Some of them were thirty years old or more. They worked on their farms in the morning and went to school in the afternoon. And it was not long before the people began to say that the white man's medicine was quick in working. Mr. Brown's school produced quick results. A few months in it were enough to make one a court messenger or even a court clerk. Those who stayed longer became teachers,- and from Umuofia laborers went forth into the Lord's vineyard. New churches were established in the surrounding villages and a few schools with them. From the very beginning religion and education went hand in hand. Mr. Brown's mission grew from strength to strength, and because of its link with the new administration it earned a new social prestige. But Mr. Brown himself was breaking down in health. At first he ignored the warning signs. But in the end he had to leave his flock, sad and broken. It was in the first rainy season after Okonkwo's return to Umuofia that Mr. Brown left for home. As soon as he had learned of Okonkwo's return five months earlier, the missionary had immediately paid him a visit. He had just sent Okonkwo's son, Nwoye, who was now called Isaac, to the new training college for teachers in Umuru. And he had hoped that Okonkwo would be happy to hear of it. But Okonkwo had driven him away with the threat that if he came into his compound again, he would be carried out of it. Okonkwo's return to his native land was not as memorable as he had wished. It was true his two beautiful daughters aroused great interest among suitors and marriage negotiations were soon in progress, but, beyond that, Umuofia did not appear to have taken any special notice of the warrior's return. The clan had undergone such profound change during his exile that it was barely recognizable. 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But they weren't British, he wanted to tell them: not _really_, not in any way he could recognize. And yet his old certainties were slipping away by the moment, along with his old life. . . "Where's the telephone?" he demanded. "I've got to make some calls." It was in the hall; Anahita, raiding her savings, lent him the coins. His head wrapped in a borrowed turban, his body concealed in borrowed trousers (Jumpy"s) and Mishal's shoes, Chamcha dialled the past. "Chamcha," said the voice of Mimi Mamoulian. "You're dead." This happened while he was away: Mimi blacked out and lost her teeth. "A whiteout is what it was," she told him, speaking more harshly than usual because of difficulty with her jaw. "A reason why? Don't ask. Who can ask for reason in these times? What's your number?" she added as the pips went. "I'll call you right back." But it was a full five minutes before she did. "I took a leak. You have a reason why you're alive? Why the waters parted for you and the other guy but closed over the rest? Don't tell me you were worthier. People don't buy that nowadays, not even you, Chamcha. I was walking down Oxford Street looking for crocodile shoes when it happened: out cold in mid-stride and I fell forward like a tree, landed on the point of my chin and all the teeth fell out on the sidewalk in front of the man doing findthe-lady. People can be thoughtful, Chamcha. When I came to I found my teeth in a little pile next to my face. I opened my eyes and saw the little bastards staring at me, wasn't that nice? First thing I thought, thank God, I've got the money. I had them stitched back in, privately of course, great job, better than before. So I've been taking a break for a while. The voiceover business is in bad shape, let me tell you, what with you dying and my teeth, we just have no sense of responsibility. Standards have been lowered, Chamcha. Turn on the TV, listen to radio, you should hear how corny the pizza commercials, the beer ads with the Cherman accents from Central Casting, the Martians eating potato powder and sounding like they came from the Moon. They fired us from _The Aliens Show_. Get well soon. Incidentally, you might say the same for me." So he had lost work as well as wife, home, a grip on life. "It's not just the dentals that go wrong," Mimi powered on. "The fucking plosives scare me stupid. I keep thinking I'll spray the old bones on the street again. Age, Chamcha: it's all humiliations. You get born, you get beaten up and bruised all over and finally you break and they shovel you into an urn. Anyway, if I never work again I'll die comfortable. Did you know I'm with Billy Battuta now? That's right, how could you, you've been swimming. Yeah, I gave up waiting for you so I cradlesnatched one of your ethnic co-persons. You can take it as a compliment. Now I gots to run. Nice talking to the dead, Chamcha. Next time dive from the low board. Toodle oo." I am by nature an inward man, he said silently into the disconnected phone. I have struggled, in my fashion, to find my way towards an appreciation of the high things, towards a small measure of fineness. On good days I felt it was within my grasp, somewhere within me, somewhere within. But it eluded me. I have become embroiled, in things, in the world and its messes, and I cannot resist. The grotesque has me, as before the quotidian had me, in its thrall. The sea gave me up; the land drags me down. He was sliding down a grey slope, the black water lapping at his heart. Why did rebirth, the second chance granted to Gibreel Farishta and himself, feel so much, in his case, like a perpetual ending? He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of noway-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide. Billy Battuta: that worthless piece of shit. Playboy Pakistani, turned an unremarkable holiday business -- _Battuta's Travels_ -- into a fleet of supertankers. A con--man, basically, famous for his romances with leading ladies of the Hindi screen and, according to gossip, for his predilection for white women with enormous breasts and plenty of rump, whom he "treated badly", as the euphemism had it, and "rewarded handsomely". What did Mimi want with bad Billy, his sexual instruments and his Maserati Biturbo? For boys like Battuta, white women -- never mind fat, Jewish, non-deferential white women -- were for fucking and throwing over. What one hates in whites -- love of brown sugar -- one must also hate when it turns up, inverted, in black. Bigotry is not only a function of power. Mimi telephoned the next evening from New York. Anahita called him to the phone in her best damnyankee tones, and he struggled into his disguise. When he got there she had rung off, but she rang back. "Nobody pays transatlantic prices for hanging on." "Mimi," he said, with desperation patent in his voice, "you didn't say you were leaving." "You didn't even tell me your damn address," she responded. "So we both have secrets." He wanted to say, Mimi, come home, you're going to get kicked. "I introduced him to the family," she said, too jokily. "You can imagine. Yassir Arafat meets the Begins. Never mind. We'll all live." He wanted to say, Mimi, you're all I've got. He managed, however, only to piss her off. "I wanted to warn you about Billy," was what he said. She went icy. "Chamcha, listen up. I'll discuss this with you one time because behind all your bulishit you do maybe care for me a little. So comprehend, please, that I am an intelligent female. I have read _Finnegans Wake_ and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g. that we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a 'flattened' world. When I become the voice of a bottle of bubble bath, I am entering Flatland knowingly, understanding what I'm doing and why. Viz., I am earning cash. And as an intelligent woman, able to do fifteen minutes on Stoicism and more on Japanese cinema, I say to you, Chamcha, that I am fully aware of Billy boy's rep. Don't teach me about exploitation. We had exploitation when youplural were running round in skins. Try being Jewish, female and ugly sometime. You'll beg to be black. Excuse my French: brown." "You concede, then, that he's exploiting you," Chamcha interposed, but the torrent swept him away. "What's the fuckin" diff?" she trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. "Billy's a funny boy, a natural scam artist, one of the greats. Who knows for how long this is? I'll tell you some notions I do not require: patriotism, God and love. Definitely not wanted on the voyage. I like Billy because he knows the score." "Mimi," he said, "something's happened to me," but she was still protesting too much and missed it. He put the receiver down without giving her his address. She rang him once more, a few weeks later, and by now the unspoken precedents had been set; she didn't ask for, he didn't give his whereabouts, and it was plain to them both that an age had ended, they had drifted apart, it was time to wave goodbye. It was still all Billy with Mimi: his plans to make Hindi movies in England and America, importing the top stars, Vinod Khanna, Sridevi, to cavort in front of Bradford Town Hall and the Golden Gate Bridge -- "it's some sort of tax dodge, obviously," Mimi carolled gaily. In fact, things were heating up for Billy; Chamcha had seen his name in the papers, coupled with the terms _fraud squad_ and _tax evasion_, but once a scam man, always a ditto, Mimi said. "So he says to me, do you want a mink? I say, Billy, don't buy me things, but he says, who's talking about buying? Have a mink. It's business." They had been in New York again, and Billy had hired a stretched Mercedes limousine "and a stretched chauffeur also". Arriving at the furriers, they looked like an oil sheikh and his moll. Mimi tried on the five figure numbers, waiting for Billy's lead. At length he said, You like that one? It's nice. Billy, she whispered, it's _forty thousand_, but he was already smooth-talking the assistant: it was Friday afternoon, the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. 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His heart began to misbehave, to kick and stumble as if it, too, wanted to metamorphose into some new, diabolic form, to substitute the complex unpredictability of tabla improvisations for its old metronomic beat. Lying sleepless in a narrow bed, snagging his horns in bedsheets and pillowcases as he tossed and turned, he suffered the renewal of coronary eccentricity with a kind of fatalistic acceptance: if everything else, then why not this, too? Badoomboom, went the heart, and his torso jerked. _Watch it or I'll really let you have it. Doomboombadoom_. Yes: this was Hell, all right. The city of London, transformed into Jahannum, Gehenna, Muspellheim. Do devils suffer in Hell? Aren't they the ones with the pitchforks? Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping, grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush. First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road--drills, chirrup of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the deep whirr of a large olive--green garbage eater, screaming radio--voices from a wooden painter's cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming birds. The sun rose, unwrapping the misty city like a gift. Saladin Chamcha slept. Which afforded him no respite: but returned him, rather, to that other night-street down which, in the company of the physiotherapist Hyacinth Phillips, he had fled towards his destiny, clip-clop, on unsteady hoofs; and reminded him that, as captivity receded and the city drew nearer, Hyacinth's face and body had seemed to change. He saw the gap opening and widening between her central upper incisors, and the way her hair knotted and plaited itself into medusas, and the strange triangularity of her profile, which sloped outwards from her hairline to the tip of her nose, swung about and headed in an unbroken line inwards to her neck. He saw in the yellow light that her skin was growing darker by the minute, and her teeth more prominent, and her body as long as a child's stick-figure drawing. At the same time she was casting him glances of an ever more explicit lechery, and grasping his hand in fingers so bony and inescapable that it was as though a skeleton had seized him and was trying to drag him down into a grave; he could smell the freshly dug earth, the cloying scent of it, on her breath, on her lips . . . revulsion seized him. How could he ever have thought her attractive, even desired her, even gone so far as to fantasize, while she straddled him and pummelled fluid from his lungs, that they were lovers in the violent throes of sexual congress? . . . The city thickened around them like a forest; the buildings twined together and grew as matted as her hair. "No light can get in here," she whispered to him. "It's black; all black." She made as if to lie down and pull him towards her, towards the earth, but he shouted, "Quick, the church," and plunged into an unprepossessing box-like building, seeking more than one kind of sanctuary. Inside, however, the pews were full of Hyacinths, young and old, Hyacinths wearing shapeless blue two--piece suits, false pearls, and little pill--box hats decked out with bits of gauze, Hyacinths wearing virginal white nightgowns, every imaginable form of Hyacinth, all singing loudly, _Fix me, Jesus_; until they saw Chamcha, quit their spir-- itualling, and commenced to bawl in a most unspiritual manner, _Satan, the Goat, the Goat_, and suchlike stuff. Now it became clear that the Hyacinth with whom he'd entered was looking at him with new eyes, just the way he'd looked at her in the street; that she, too, had started seeing something that made her feel pretty sick; and when he saw the disgust on that hideously pointy and clouded face he just let rip. "_Hubshees_," he cursed them in, for some reason, his discarded mother-tongue. Troublemakers and savages, he called them. "I feel sorry for you," he pronounced. "Every morning you have to look at yourself in the mirror and see, staring back, the darkness: the stain, the proof that you're the lowest of the low." They rounded upon him then, that congregation of Hyacinths, his own Hyacinth now lost among them, indistinguishable, no longer an individual but a woman-likethem, and he was being beaten frightfully, emitting a piteous bleating noise, running in circles, looking for a way out; until he realized that his assailants' fear was greater than their wrath, and he rose up to his full height, spread his arms, and screamed devilsounds at them, sending them scurrying for cover, cowering behind pews, as he strode bloody but unbowed from the battlefield. Dreams put things in their own way; but Chamcha, coming briefly awake as his heartbeat skipped into a new burst of syncopations, was bitterly aware that the nightmare had not been so very far from the truth; the spirit, at least, was right. -- That was the last of Hyacinth, he thought, and faded away again. -- To find himself shivering in the hail of his own home while, on a higher plane, Jumpy Joshi argued fiercely with Pamela. _With my wife_. And when dream-Pamela, echoing the real one word for word, had rejected her husband a hundred and one times, _he doesn't exist, it, such things are not so_, it was Jamshed the virtuous who, setting aside love and desire, helped. Leaving behind a weeping Pamela -- _Don't you dare bring that back here_, she shouted from the top floor -- from Saladin's den -- Jumpy, wrapping Chamcha in sheepskin and blanket, led enfeebled through the shadows to the Shaandaar Café, promising with empty kindness: "It'll be all right. You'll see. It'll all be fine." When Saladin Chamcha awoke, the memory of these words filled him with a bitter anger. Where's Farishta, he found himself thinking. That bastard: I bet he's doing okay. -- It was a thought to which he would return, with extraordinary results; for the moment, however, he had other fish to fry. I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it had happened, it could not be denied. I am _no longer myself_, or not only. I am the embodiment of wrong, of whatwe--hate, of sin. Why? Why me? What evil had he done -- what vile thing could he, would he do? For what was he -- he couldn't avoid the notion -- being punished? And, come to that, by whom? (I held my tongue.) Had he not pursued his own idea of _the good_, sought to become that which he most admired, dedicated himself with a will bordering on obsession to the conquest of Englishness? Had he not worked hard, avoided trouble, striven to become new? Assiduity, fastidiousness, moderation, restraint, self--reliance, probity, family life: what did these add up to if not a moral code? Was it his fault that Pamela and he were childless? Were genetics his responsibility? Could it be, in this inverted age, that he was being victimized by -- the fates, he agreed with himself to call the persecuting agency -- precisely _because of_ his pursuit of "the good"? -- That nowadays such a pursuit was considered wrong-headed, even evil? -- Then how cruel these fates were, to instigate his rejection by the very world he had so determinedly courted; how desolating, to be cast from the gates of the city one believed oneself to have taken long ago! -- What mean small-mindedness was this, to cast him back into the bosom of _his people_, from whom he'd felt so distant for so long! -- Here thoughts of Zeeny Vakil welled up, and guiltily, nervously, he forced them down again. 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As for Ayesha: when she encountered the Mirza on the balcony, or in the garden as he wandered reading Urdu love-poetry, she was invariably deferential and shy; but her good behaviour, coupled with the total absence of any spark of erotic interest, drove Saeed further and further into the helplessness of his despair. So it was that when, one day, he spied Ayesha entering his wife's quarters and heard, a few minutes later, his mother--in-- law's voice rise in a melodramatic shriek, he was seized by a mood of mulish vengefulness and deliberately waited a full three minutes before going to investigate. He found Mrs. Qureishi tearing her hair and sobbing like a movie queen, while Mishal and Ayesha sat cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, grey eyes staring into grey, and Mishal's face was cradled between Ayesha's outstretched palms. It turned out that the archangel had informed Ayesha that the zamindar's wife was dying of cancer, that her breasts were full of the malign nodules of death, and that she had no more than a few months to live. The location of the cancer had proved to Mishal the cruelty of God, because only a vicious deity would place death in the breast of a woman whose only dream was to suckle new life. When Saeed entered, Ayesha had been whispering urgently to Mishal: "You mustn't think that way. God will save you. This is a test of faith." Mrs. Qureishi told Mirza Saeed the bad news with many shrieks and howls, and for the confused zamindar it was the last straw. He flew into a temper and started yelling loudly and trembling as if he might at any moment start smashing up the furniture in the room and its occupants as well. "To hell with your spook cancer," he screamed at Ayesha in his exasperation. "You have come into my house with your craziness and angels and dripped poison into my family's ears. Get out of here with your visions and your invisible spouse. This is the modern world, and it is medical doctors and not ghosts in potato fields who tell us when we are ill. You have created this bloody hullabaloo for nothing. Get out and never come on to my land again." Ayesha heard him out without removing her eyes or hands from Mishal. When Saeed stopped for breath, clenching and unclenching his fists, she said softly to his wife: "Everything will be required of us, and everything will be given." When he heard this formula, which people all over the village were beginning to parrot as if they knew what it meant, Mirza Saced Akhtar went briefly out of his mind, raised his hand and knocked Ayesha senseless. She fell to the floor, bleeding from the mouth, a tooth loosened by his fist, and as she lay there Mrs. Qureishi hurled abuse at her son-in-law. "O God, I have put my daughter in the care of a killer. O God, a woman hitter. Go on, hit me also, get some practice. Defiler of saints, blasphemer, devil, unclean." Saeed left the room without saying a word. The next day Mishal Akhtar insisted on returning to the city for a complete medical check-up. Saeed took a stand. "If you want to indulge in superstition, go, but don't expect me to come along. It's eight hours' drive each way; so, to hell with it." Mishal left that afternoon with her mother and the driver, and as a result Mirza Saeed was not where he should have been, that is, at his wife's side, when the results of the tests were communicated to her: positive, inoperable, too far advanced, the claws of the cancer dug in deeply throughout her chest. A few months, six if she was lucky, and before that, coming soon, the pain. Mishal returned to Peristan and went straight to her rooms in the zenana, where she wrote her husband a formal note on lavender stationery, telling him of the doctor's diagnosis. 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That was the end of the optimism epidemic. In the morning a sweeper-woman entered the offices of the Free Islam Convocation and found the Hummingbird, silenced, on the floor, surrounded by paw-prints and the shreds of his murderers. She screamed; but later, when the authorities had been and gone, she was told to clean up the room. After clearing away innumerable dog-hairs, swatting countless fleas and extracting from the carpet the remnants of a shattered glass eye, she protested to the University's comptroller of works that, if this sort of thing was going to keep happening, she deserved a small pay rise. She was possibly the last victim of the optimism bug, and in her case the illness didn't last long, because the comptroller was a hard man, and gave her the boot. The assassins were never identified, nor were their paymasters named. My grandfather was called to the campus by Major Zulfikar, Brigadier Dodson's A.D.C., to write his friend's death certificate. Major Zulfikar promised to call on Doctor Aziz to tie up a few loose ends; my grandfather blew his nose and left. At the maidan, tents were coming down like punctured hopes; the Convocation would never be held again. The Rani of Cooch Naheen took to her bed. After a lifetime of making light of her illnesses she allowed them to claim her, and lay still for years, watching herself turn the colour of her bedsheets. Meanwhile, in the old house on Cornwallis Road, the days were full of potential mothers and possible fathers. You see, Padma: you're going to find out now. Using my nose (because, although it has lost the powers which enabled it, so recently, to make history, it has acquired other, compensatory gifts) - turning it inwards, I've been sniffing out the atmosphere in my grandfather's house in those days after the death of India's humming hope; and wafting down to me through the years comes a curious melange of odours, filled with unease, the whiff of things concealed mingling with the odours of burgeoning romance and the sharp stink of my grandmother's curiosity and strength ... while the Muslim League rejoiced, secretly of course, at the fall of its opponent, my grandfather could be found (my nose finds him) seated every morning on what he called his 'thunderbox', tears standing in his eyes. But these are not tears of grief; Aadam Aziz has simply paid the price of being Indianized, and suffers terribly from constipation. Balefully, he eyes the enema contraption hanging on the toilet wall. Why have I invaded my grandfather's privacy? Why, when I might have described how, after Mian Abdullah's death, Aadam buried himself in his work, taking upon himself the care of the sick in the shanty-towns by the railway tracks - rescuing them from quacks who injected them with pepperwater and thought that fried spiders could cure blindness - while continuing to fulfil his dudes as university physician; when I might have elaborated on the great love that had begun to grow between my grandfather and his second daughter, Mumtaz, whose dark skin stood between her and the affections of her mother, but whose gifts of gentleness, care and fragility endeared her to her father with his inner torments which cried out for her form of unquestioning tenderness; why, when I might have chosen to describe the by-now-constant itch in his nose, do I choose to wallow in excrement? Because this is where Aadam Aziz was, on the afternoon after his signing of a death certificate, when all of a sudden a voice -soft, cowardly, embarrassed, the voice of a rhymeless poet - spoke to him from the depths of the large old laundry-chest standing in the corner of the room, giving him a shock so profound that it proved laxative, and the enema contraption did not have to be unhooked from its perch. Rashid the rickshaw boy had let Nadir Khan into the thunderbox-room by way of the sweeper's entrance, and he had taken refuge in the washing-chest. While my grandfather's astonished sphincter relaxed, his ears heard a request for sanctuary, a request muffled by linen, dirty underwear, old shirts and the embarrassment of the speaker. And so it was that Aadam Aziz resolved to hide Nadir Khan. Now comes the scent of a quarrel, because Reverend Mother Naseem is thinking about her daughters, twenty-one-year-old Alia, black Mumtaz, who is nineteen, and pretty, nighty Emerald, who isn't fifteen yet but has a look in her eyes that's older than anything her sisters possess. In the town, among spittoon-hitters and rickshaw-wallahs, among film-poster-trolley pushers and college students alike, the three sisters are known as the Teen Batti', the three bright lights ...and how can Reverend Mother permit a strange man to dwell in the same house as Alia's gravity, Mumtaz's black, luminous skin and Emerald's eyes?... 'You are out of your mind, husband; that death has hurt your brain.' But Aziz, determinedly: 'He is staying.' In the cellars ... because concealment has always been a crucial architectural consideration in India, so that Aziz's house has extensive underground chambers, which can be reached only through trap-doors in the floors, which are covered by carpets and mats... Nadir Khan hears the dull rumble of the quarrel and fears for his fate. My God (I sniff the thoughts of the clammy-palmed poet), the world is gone insane... are we men in this country? Are we beasts? And if I must go, when will the knives come for me?... And through his mind pass images of peacock-feather fans and the new moon seen through glass and transformed into a stabbing, red-stained blade... Upstairs, Reverend Mother says, 'The house is full of young unmarried girls, whatsitsname; is this how you show your daughters respect?' And now the aroma of a temper lost; the great destroying rage of Aadam Aziz is unleashed, and instead of pointing out that Nadir Khan will be under ground, swept under the carpet where he will scarcely be able to defile daughters; instead of paying due testimony to the verbless bard's sense of propriety, which is so advanced that he could not even dream of making improper advances without blushing in his sleep; instead of these avenues of reason, my grandfather bellows, 'Be silent, woman! The man needs our shelter; he will stay.' Whereupon an implacable perfume, a hard cloud of determination settles upon my grandmother, who says, 'Very well. You ask me, whatsitsname, for silence. So not one word, whatsitsname, will pass my lips from now on.' And Aziz, groaning, 'Oh, damnation, woman, spare us your crazy oaths!' But Reverend Mother's lips were sealed, and silence descended. The smell of silence, like a rotting goose-egg, fills my nostrils; overpowering everything else, it possesses the earth ... While Nadir Khan hid in his half-lit underworld, his hostess hid, too, behind a deafening wall of soundlessness. At first my grandfather probed the wall, looking for chinks; he found none. At last he gave up, and waited for her sentences to offer up their glimpses of her self, just as once he had lusted after the brief fragments of her body he had seen through a perforated sheet; and the silence filled the house, from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, so that the flies seemed to give up buzzing, and mosquitoes refrained from humming before they bit; silence stilling the hissing of geese in the courtyard. The children spoke in whispers at first, and then fell quiet: while in the cornfield, Rashid the rickshaw boy yelled his silent 'yell of hate', and kept his own vow of silence, which he had sworn upon his mother's hairs. Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice, as a result, was thin and sharp - it had to be, to squeeze through the narrow gap between his breathing apparatus and his jaw ... a man whose short sight obliged him to take life one step at a time, which gained him a reputation for thoroughness and dullness, and endeared him to his superiors by enabling them to feel well-served without feeling threatened; a man whose starched, pressed uniform reeked of Blanco and rectitude, and about whom, despite his appearance of a character out of a puppet-show, there hung the unmistakable scent of success: Major Zulfikar, a man with a future, came to call, as he had promised, to tie up a few loose ends. Abdullah's murder, and Nadir Khan's suspicious disappearance, were much on his mind, and since he knew about Aadam Aziz's infection by the optimism bug, he mistook the silence in the house for a hush of mourning, and did not stay for long. (In the cellar, Nadir huddled with cockroaches.) Sitting quietly in the drawing-room with the five children, his hat and stick beside him on the Telefunken radiogram, the life-size images of the young Azizes staring at him from the walls, Major Zulfikar fell in love. He was short-sighted, but he wasn't blind, and in the impossibly adult gaze of young Emerald, the brightest of the 'three bright lights', he saw that she had understood his future, and forgiven him, because of it, for his appearance; and before he left, he had decided to marry her after a decent interval. ('Her?' Padma guesses. 'That hussy is your mother?' But there are other mothers-to-be, other future fathers, wafting in and out through the silence.) In that marshy time without words the emotional life of grave Alia, the eldest, was also developing; and Reverend Mother, locked up in the pantry and kitchen, sealed behind her lips, was incapable -because of her vow - of expressing her distrust of the young merchant in reccine and leathercloth who came to visit her daughter. (Aadam Aziz had always insisted that his daughters be permitted to have male friends.) Ahmed Sinai - 'Ahaa!' yells Padma in triumphant recognition - had met Alia at the University, and seemed intelligent enough for the bookish, brainy girl on whose face my grandfather's nose had acquired an air of overweight wisdom; but Naseem Aziz felt uneasy about him, because he had been divorced at twenty. ('Anyone can make one mistake,' Aadam had told her, and that nearly began a fight, because she thought for a moment that there had been something overly personal in his tone of voice. But then Aadam had added, 'Just let this divorce of his fade away for a year or two; then we'll give this house its first wedding, with a big marquee in the garden, and singers and sweetmeats and all.' Which, despite everything, was an idea that appealed to Naseem.) Now, wandering through the walled-jn gardens of silence, Ahmed Sinai and Alia communed without speech; but although everyone expected him to propose, the silence seemed to have got through to him, too, and the question remained unasked. Alia's face acquired a weigh tiness at this time, a jowly pessimistic quality which she was never entirely to lose. ('Now then,' Padma reproves me, 'that's no way to describe your respected motherji.')