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and his body began to lean dangerously, but although the room fell silent nobody moved towards him, nobody tried to stop him talking, nobody called him a drunk. In the middle of a sentence, everyday blindings, or shootings, or corruptions, who do we think we , he sat down heavily and stared into his glass.

Now a young man stood up in a far corner of the joint and argued back. Assam had to be understood politically, he cried, there were economic reasons, and yet another fellow came to his feet to reply, cash matters do not explain why a grown man clubs a little girl to death, and then another fellow said, if you think that, you have never been hungry, salah, how bloody romantic to suppose economics cannot make men into beasts. Chamcha clutched at his glass as the noise level rose, and the air seemed to thicken, gold teeth flashed in his face, shoulders rubbed against his, elbows nudged, the air was turning into soup, and in his chest the irregular palpitations had begun. George grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him out into the street. “You okay, man? You were turning green.” Saladin nodded his thanks, gasped in lungfuls of the night, calmed down. “Rum and exhaustion,” he said. “I have the peculiar habit of getting my nerves after the show. Quite often I get wobbly. Should have known.” Zeeny was looking at him, and there was more in her eyes than sympathy. A glittering look, triumphant, hard. Something got through to you , her expression gloated. About bloody time .

After you recover from typhoid, Chamcha reflected, you remain immune to the disease for ten years or so. But nothing is forever; eventually the antibodies vanish from your blood. He had to accept the fact that his blood no longer contained the immunizing agents that would have enabled him to suffer India’s reality. Rum, heart palpitations, a sickness of the spirit. Time for bed.

She wouldn’t take him to her place. Always and only the hotel, with the gold-medallioned young Arabs strutting in the midnight corridors holding bottles of contraband whisky. He lay on the bed with his shoes on, his collar and tie loose, his right arm flung across his eyes; she, in the hotel’s white bathrobe, bent over him and kissed his chin. “I’ll tell you what happened to you tonight,” she said. “You could say we cracked your shell.”

He sat up, angry. “Well, this is what’s inside,” he blazed at her. “An Indian translated into English-medium. When I attempt Hindustani these days, people look polite. This is me.” Caught in the aspic of his adopted language, he had begun to hear, in India’s Babel, an ominous warning: don’t

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