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today , he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us are ourselves. None of us are like this .

These days there were steel gates, operated by remote control from within, sealing the crumbling triumphal arch. They opened with a slow whirring sound to admit Saladin into that place of lost time. When he saw the walnut-tree in which his father had claimed that his soul was kept, his hands began to shake. He hid behind the neutrality of facts. “In Kashmir,” he told Zeeny, “your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a child comes of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it’s a valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don’t you think?”

The car had stopped under the entrance porch. Zeeny fell silent as the two of them climbed the six stairs to the front door, where they were greeted by a composed and ancient bearer in white, brass-buttoned livery, whose shock of white hair Chamcha suddenly recognized, by translating it back into black, as the mane of that same Vallabh who had presided over the house as its major-domo in the Olden Days. “My God, Vallabhbhai,” he managed, and embraced the old man. The servant smiled a difficult smile. “I grow so old, baba, I was thinking you would not recognize.” He led them down the crystal-heavy corridors of the mansion and Saladin realized that the lack of change was excessive, and plainly deliberate. It was true, Vallabh explained to him, that when the Begum died Changez Sahib had sworn that the house would be her memorial. As a result nothing had changed since the day she died, paintings, furniture, soap—dishes, the red-glass figures of fighting bulls and china ballerinas from Dresden, all left in their exact positions, the same magazines on the same tables, the same crumpled balls of paper in the wastebaskets, as though the house had died, too, and been embalmed. “Mummified,” Zeeny said, voicing the unspeakable as usual. “God, but it’s spooky, no?” It was at this point, while Vallabh the bearer was opening the double doors leading into the blue drawingroom, that Saladin Chamcha saw his mother’s ghost.

He let out a loud cry and Zeeny whirled on her heel. “There,” he pointed towards the far, darkened end of the hallway, “no question, that blasted newsprint sari, the big headlines, the one she wore the day she, she,” but now Vallabh had begun to flap his arms like a weak, flightless bird, you see, baba, it was only Kasturba, you have not forgotten, my wife, only my wife. My ayah Kasturba with whom I played in rock-pools. Until I grew up and went

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