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vermilion between shots, which could stand diagonally three feet up from their heads or vanish altogether; or their features and limbs, because they were capable of changing all of them, switching legs, arms, noses, ears, eyes, and every switch conjured up a different accent from their legendary, protean gullets. What made the show a hit was its use of the latest computer-generated imagery. The backgrounds were all simulated: spaceship, other—world landscapes, intergalactic game-show studios; and the actors, too, were processed through machines, obliged to spend four hours every day being buried under the latest in prosthetic make-up which—once the videocomputers had gone to work—made them look just like simulations, too. Maxim Alien, space playboy, and Mamma, undefeated galactic wrestling champion and universal all—corners pasta queen, were overnight sensations. Prime-time beckoned; America, Eurovision, the world.

As The Aliens Show got bigger it began to attract political criticism. Conservatives attacked it for being too frightening, too sexually explicit (Ridley could become positively erect when he thought too hard about Miss Weaver), too weird . Radical commentators began to attack its stereotyping, its reinforcement of the idea of aliens-as-freaks, its lack of positive images. Charncha came under pressure to quit the show; refused; became a target. “Trouble waiting when I go home,” he told Zeeny. “The damn show isn’t an allegory. It’s an entertainment. It aims to please.”

“To please whom?” she wanted to know. “Besides, even now they only let you on the air after they cover your face with rubber and give you a red wig. Big deal deluxe, say I.”

“The point is,” she said when they awoke the next morning, “Salad darling, you really are good looking, no quesch. Skin like milk, England returned. Now that Gibreel has done a bunk, you could be next in line. I’m serious, yaar. They need a new face. Come home and you could be the next, bigger than Bachchan was, bigger than Farishta. Your face isn’t as funny as theirs.”

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another. Now, however, change had begun to feel painful; the arteries of the possible had begun to harden. “It isn’t easy to tell you this, but I’m married now, and not just to wife but life.” The accent slippage again . “I really came to Bombay for one reason, and it wasn’t the play. He’s in his late seventies

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