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come back again. When you have stepped through the looking-glass you step back at your peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds.

“I was so proud of Bhupen tonight,” Zeeny said, getting into bed. “In how many countries could you go into some bar and start up a debate like that? The passion, the seriousness, the respect. You keep your civilization, Toadji; I like this one plenty fine.”

“Give up on me,” he begged her. “I don’t like people dropping in to see me without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seven—tiles and kabaddi, I can’t recite my prayers, I don’t know what should happen at a nikah ceremony, and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I’m on my own. This isn’t home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It makes my heart tremble and my head spin.”

“You’re a stupid,” she shouted at him. “A stupid. Change back! Damn fool! Of course you can.” She was a vortex, a siren, tempting him back to his old self. But it was a dead self, a shadow, a ghost, and he would not become a phantom. There was a return ticket to London in his wallet, and he was going to use it.

 “You never married,” he said when they both lay sleepless in the small hours. Zeeny snorted. “You’ve really been gone too long. Can’t you see me? I’m a blackie.” Arching her back and throwing off the sheet to show off her lavishness. When the bandit queen Phoolan Devi came out of the ravines to surrender and be photographed, the newspapers at once uncreated their own myth of her legendary beauty . She became plain, a common creature, unappetizing where she had been toothsome . Dark skin in north India. “I don’t buy it,” Saladin said. “You don’t expect me to believe that.”

She laughed. “Good, you’re not a complete idiot yet. Who needs to marry? I had work to do.”

And after a pause, she threw his question back at him. So, then. And you?

Not only married, but rich. “So tell, na. How you live, you and the mame.” In a five-storey mansion in Notting Hill. He had started feeling insecure there of late, because the most recent batch of burglars had taken not only the usual video and stereo but also the wolfhound guard dog. It was not possible, he had begun to feel, to live in a place where the criminal elements kidnapped the animals. Pamela told him it was an old local custom. In the

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