Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms

plane. Small chhooi-mooi touch-me-not plants grew at the foot of the tree of his own life, the walnut-tree that Changez had planted with his own hands on the day of the coming of the son. Father and son at the birth-tree were both awkward, unable to respond properly to Nasreen’s gentle fun. Saladin had been seized by the melancholy notion that the garden had been a better place before he knew its names, that something had been lost which he would never be able to regain. And Changez Chamchawala found that he could no longer look his son in the eye, because the bitterness he saw came close to freezing his heart. When he spoke, turning roughly away from the eighteen-year-old walnut in which, at times during their long separations, he had imagined his only son’s soul to reside, the words came out incorrectly and made him sound like the rigid, cold figure he had hoped he would never become, and feared he could not avoid.

“Tell your son,” Changez boomed at Nasreen, “that if he went abroad to learn contempt for his own kind, then his own kind can feel nothing but scorn for him. What is he? A fauntleroy, a grand panjandrum? Is this my fate: to lose a son and find a freak?”

“Whatever I am, father dear,” Saladin told the older man, “I owe it all to you.”

It was their last family chat. All that summer feelings continued to run high, for all Nasreen’s attempts at mediation, you must apologize to your father, darling, poor man is suffering like the devil but his pride won’t let him hug you . Even the ayah Kasturba and the old bearer Vallabh, her husband, attempted to mediate but neither father nor son would bend. “Same material is the problem,” Kasturba told Nasreen. “Daddy and sonny, same material, same to same.”

When the war with Pakistan began that September Nasreen decided, with a kind of defiance, that she would not cancel her Friday parties, “to show that Hindus—Muslims can love as well as hate,” she pointed out. Changez saw a look in her eyes and did not attempt to argue, but set the servants to putting blackout curtains over all the windows instead. That night, for the last time, Saladin Chamchawala played his old role of doorman, dressed up in an English dinner-jacket, and when the guests came—the same old guests, dusted with the grey powders of age but otherwise the same—they bestowed upon him the same old pats and kisses, the nostalgic benedictions of his youth. “Look how grown,” they were saying. “Just a darling, what to say.” They were all trying to hide their fear of the war, danger of air-raids , the

[ Back ] [ Next ]