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cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space.

What Changez Chamchawala did when the aeroplane took off: trying not to let his son see him doing it, he crossed two pairs of fingers on each hand, and rotated both his thumbs.

And when they were installed in a hotel within a few feet of the ancient location of the Tyburn tree, Changez said to his son: “Take. This belongs to you.” And held out, at arm’s length, a black billfold about whose identity there could be no mistake. “You are a man now. Take.”

The return of the confiscated wallet, complete with all its currency, proved to be one of Changez Chamchawala’s little traps. Salahuddin had been deceived by these all his life. Whenever his father wanted to punish him, he would offer him a present, a bar of imported chocolate or a tin of Kraft cheese, and would then grab him when he came to get it. “Donkey,” Changez scorned his infant son. “Always, always, the carrot leads you to my stick.”

Salahuddin in London took the proffered wallet, accepting the gift of manhood; whereupon his father said: “Now that you are a man, it is for you to look after your old father while we are in London town. You pay all the bills.”

January, 1961. A year you could turn upside down and it would still, unlike your watch, tell the same time. It was winter; but when Salahuddin Chamchawala began to shiver in his hotel room, it was because he was scared halfway out of his wits; his crock of gold had turned, suddenly, into a sorcerer’s curse.

Those two weeks in London before he went to his boarding school turned into a nightmare of cash—tills and calculations, because Changez had meant exactly what he said and never put his hand into his own pocket once. Salahuddin had to buy his own clothes, such as a double-breasted blue serge mackintosh and seven blue-and-white striped Van Heusen shirts with detachable semi—stiff collars which Changez made him wear every day, to get used to the studs, and Salahuddin felt as if a blunt knife were being pushed in just beneath his newly broken Adam”s-apple; and he had to make sure there would be enough for the hotel room, and everything, so that he was too nervous to ask his father if they could go to a movie, not even one, not even The Pure Hell of St Trinians , or to eat out, not a single Chinese meal, and in later years he would remember nothing of his first fortnight in his

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