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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what can we Muslims do?'

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

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

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

But Ahmed Sinai had other things to look at.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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