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 (After he had settled up the last bill, and the wallet he had once found at a rainbow’s end was empty, his father said to him: “See now. You pay your way. I’ve made a man of you.” But what man? That’s what fathers never know. Not in advance; not until it’s too late.)

One day soon after he started at the school he came down to breakfast to find a kipper on his plate. He sat there staring at it, not knowing where to begin. Then he cut into it, and got a mouthful of tiny bones. And after extracting them all, another mouthful, more bones. His fellow-pupils watched him suffer in silence; not one of them said, here, let me show you, you eat it in this way. It took him ninety minutes to eat the fish and he was not permitted to rise from the table until it was done. By that time he was shaking, and if he had been able to cry he would have done so. Then the thought occurred to him that he had been taught an important lesson. England was a peculiar-tasting smoked fish full of spikes and bones, and nobody would ever tell him how to eat it. He discovered that he was a bloody-minded person. “I’ll show them all,” he swore. “You see if I don’t.” The eaten kipper was his first victory, the first step in his conquest of England.

William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.

Five years later he was back home after leaving school, waiting until the English university term began, and his transmutation into a Vilayeti was well advanced. “See how well he complains,” Nasreen teased him in front of his father. “About everything he has such big-big criticisms, the fans are fixed too. loosely to the roof and will fall to slice our heads off in our sleep, he says, and the food is too fattening, why we don’t cook some things without frying, he wants to know, the top-floor balconies are unsafe and the paint is peeled, why can’t we take pride in our surroundings, isn’t it, and the garden is overgrown, we are just junglee people, he thinks so, and look how coarse our movies are, now he doesn’t enjoy, and so much disease you can’t even drink water from the tap, my god, he really got an education, husband, our little Sallu, England—returned, and talking so fine and all.”

They were walking on the lawn in the evening, watching the sun dive into the sea, wandering in the shade of those great spreading trees, some snaky some bearded, which Salahuddin (who now called himself Saladin after the fashion of the English school, but would remain Chamchawala for a while yet, until a theatrical agent shortened his name for commercial reasons) had begun to be able to name, jackfruit, banyan, jacaranda, flame of the forest,

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