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without her and in a hollow a man with ivory glasses . “Please, baba, nothing to be cross, only when the Begum died Changez Sahib donated to my wife some few garments, you do not object? Your mother was a so-generous woman, when alive she always gave with an open hand.” Chamcha, recovering his equilibrium, was feeling foolish. “For God’s sake, Vallabh,” he muttered. “For God’s sake. Obviously I don’t object.” An old stiffness re-entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of the old retainer permitted him to reprove, “Excuse, baba, but you should not blaspheme.”

“See how he’s sweating,” Zeeny stage-whispered. “He looks scared stiff.” Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha was warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once said: “Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she holds herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something, I bet.” Chamcha tried to be reasonable. “They stay here alone most of the time, probably sleep in the master bedroom and eat off the good plates, it must get to feeling like their place.” But he was thinking how strikingly, in that old sari, his ayah Kasturba had come to resemble his mother.

“Stayed away so long,” his father’s voice spoke behind him, “that now you can’t tell a living ayah from your departed ma.”

Saladin turned around to take in the melancholy sight of a father who had shrivelled like an old apple, but who insisted nevertheless on wearing the expensive Italian suits of his opulently fleshy years. Now that he had lost both Popeye-forearms and Bluto-belly, he seemed to be roaming about inside his clothes like a man in search of something he had not quite managed to identify. He stood in the doorway looking at his son, his nose and lips curled, by the withering sorcery of the years, into a feeble simulacrum of his former ogre—face. Chamcha had barely begun to understand that his father was no longer capable of frightening anybody, that his spell had been broken and he was just an old geezer heading for the grave; while Zeeny had noted with some disappointment that Changez Chamchawala’s hair was conservatively short, and since he was wearing highly polished Oxford lace-ups it didn’t seem likely that the eleveninch toenail story was true either; when the ayah Kasturba returned, smoking a cigarette, and strolled past the three of them, father son mistress, towards a blue velour-covered button-backed Chesterfield sofa, upon which she arranged her body as sensually as any movie starlet, even though she was a woman well advanced in years.

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