Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms

now, and I won’t have many more chances. He hasn’t been to the show; Muhammad must go to the mountain.”

My father, Changez Chamchawala, owner of a magic lamp . “Changez Chamchawala, are you kidding, don’t think you can leave me behind,” she clapped her hands. “I want to check out the hair and toenails.” His father, the famous recluse. Bombay was a culture of re—makes. Its architecture mimicked the skyscraper, its cinema endlessly re-invented The Magnificent Seven and Love Story , obliging all its heroes to save at least one village from murderous dacoits and all its heroines to die of leukaemia at least once in their careers, preferably at the start. Its millionaires, too, had taken to importing their lives. Changez’s invisibility was an Indian dream of the crorepati penthoused wretch of Las Vegas; but a dream was not a photograph, after all, and Zeeny wanted to see with her own eyes. “He makes faces at people if he’s in a bad mood,” Saladin warned her. “Nobody believes it till it happens, but it’s true. Such faces! Gargoyles. Also, he’s a prude and he’ll call you a tart and anyway I’ll probably have a fight with him, it’s on the cards.”

What Saladin Chamcha had come to India for: forgiveness. That was his business in his old home town. But whether to give or to receive, he was not able to say.

Bizarre aspects of the present circumstances of Mr. Changez Chamchawala: with his new wife, Nasreen the Second, he lived for five days every week in a high-walled compound nicknamed the Red Fort in the Pali Hill district beloved of movie stars; but every weekend he returned without his wife to the old house at Scandal Point, to spend his days of rest in the lost world of the past, in the company of the first, and dead, Nasreen. Furthermore: it was said that his second wife refused to set foot in the old place. “Or isn’t allowed to,” Zeeny hypothesized in the back of the black-glass-windowed Mercedes limousine which Changez had sent to collect his son. As Saladin finished filling in the background, Zeenat Vakil whistled appreciatively. “Crazee.”

The Chamchawala fertilizer business, Changez’s empire ofdung, was to be investigated for tax fraud and import duty evasion by a Government commission, but Zeeny wasn’t interested in that. “Now,” she said, “I’ll get to find out what you’re really like.”

Scandal Point unfurled before them. Saladin felt the past rush in like a tide, drowning him, filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness. I’m not myself

[ Back ] [ Next ]