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Babasaheb Mhatre sat in a blue office behind a green door above a labyrinthine bazaar, an awesome figure, buddha-fat, one of the great moving forces of the metropolis, possessing the occult gift of remaining absolutely still, never shifting from his room, and yet being everywhere important and meeting everyone who mattered in Bombay. The day after young Ismail’s father ran across the border to see Naima, the Babasaheb summoned the young man into his presence. “So? Upset or what?” The reply, with downcast eyes: ji, thank you, Babaji, I am okay. “Shut your face,” said Babasaheb Mhatre. “From today you live with me.” Butbut, Babaji ... “But me no buts. Already I have informed my goodwife. I have spoken.” Please excuse Babaji but how what why? “I have spoken .”

Gibreel Farishta was never told why the Babasaheb had decided to take pity on him and pluck him from the futurelessness of the streets, but after a while he began to have an idea. Mrs. Mhatre was a thin woman, like a pencil beside the rubbery Babasaheb, but she was filled so full of mother-love that she should have been fat like a potato. When the Baba came home she put sweets into his mouth with her own hands, and at nights the newcomer to the household could hear the great General Secretary of the B T C A protesting, Let me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon-fed Mhatre with large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she brushed his hair. They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin understood that the Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, however, the Begum did not treat the young man as a child. “You see, he is a grown fellow,” she told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, “Give the boy the blasted spoon of malt.” Yes, a grown fellow, “we must make a man of him, husband, no babying for him.” “Then damn it to hell,” the Babasaheb exploded, “why do you do it to me?” Mrs. Mhatre burst into tears. “But you are everything to me,” she wept, “you are my father, my lover, my baby too. You are my lord and my suckling child. If I displease you then I have no life.”

Babasaheb Mhatre, accepting defeat, swallowed the tablespoon of malt.

He was a kindly man, which he disguised with insults and noise. To console the orphaned youth he would speak to him, in the blue office, about the philosophy of rebirth, convincing him that his parents were already being scheduled for re-entry somewhere, unless of course their lives had been so holy that they had attained the final grace. So it was Mhatre who started Farishta off on the whole reincarnation business, and not just reincarnation. The Babasaheb was an amateur psychic, a tapper of table-legs and a bringer of spirits into glasses. “But I gave that up,” he told his protégé, with many

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