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radio said, and when they ruffled Saladin’s hair their hands were a little too shaky, or alternatively a little too rough.

Late that evening the sirens sang and the guests ran for cover, hiding under beds, in cupboards, anywhere. Nasreen Chamchawala found herself alone by a food-laden table, and attempted to reassure the company by standing there in her newsprint sari, munching a piece of fish as if nothing were the matter. So it was that when she started choking on the fishbone of her death there was nobody to help her, they were all crouching in corners with their eyes shut; even Saladin, conqueror of kippers, Saladin of the England-returned upper lip, had lost his nerve. Nasreen Chamchawala fell, twitched, gasped, died, and when the all—clear sounded the guests emerged sheepishly to find their hostess extinct in the middle of the dining-room, stolen away by the exterminating angel, khali—pili khalaas, as Bombay—talk has it, finished off for no reason, gone for good.

Less than a year after the death of Nasreen Chamchawala from her inability to triumph over fishbones in the manner of her foreign-educated son, Changez married again without a word of warning to anyone. Saladin in his English college received a letter from his father commanding him, in the irritatingly orotund and obsolescent phraseology that Changez always used in correspondence, to be happy. “Rejoice,” the letter said, “for what is lost is reborn.” The explanation for this somewhat cryptic sentence came lower down in the aerogramme, and when Saladin learned that his new stepmother was also called Nasreen, something went wrong in his head, and he wrote his father a letter full of cruelty and anger, whose violence was of the type that exists only between fathers and sons, and which differs from that between daughters and mothers in that there lurks behind it the possibility of actual, jaw—breaking fisticuffs. Changez wrote back by return of post; a brief letter, four lines of archaic abuse, cad rotter bounder scoundrel varlet whoreson rogue. “Kindly consider all family connections irreparably sundered,” it concluded. “Consequences your responsibility.”

After a year of silence, Saladin received a further communication, a letter of forgiveness that was in all particulars harder to take than the earlier, excommunicatory thunderbolt. “When you become a father, O my son,” Changez Chamchawala confided, “then shall you know those moments—ah! Too sweet! -- when, for love, one dandies the bonny babe upon one’s knee; whereupon, without warning or provocation, the blessed creature—may I be frank? -- it wets one. Perhaps for a moment one feels the gorge rising, a tide of anger swells within the blood—but then it dies away, as quickly as it came.

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