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feeling and because Zeenat had turned up she became the target. “You think I love you?” he said, speaking with deliberate viciousness. “You think I’ll stay with you? I’m a married man.”

“I didn’t want you to stay for me,” she said. “For some reason, I wanted it for you.”

A few days earlier, he had been to see an Indian dramatization of a story by Sartre on the subject of shame. In the original, a husband suspects his wife of infidelity and sets a trap to catch her out. He pretends to leave on a business trip, but returns a few hours later to spy on her. He is kneeling to look through the keyhole of their front door. Then he feels a presence behind him, turns without rising, and there she is, looking down at him with revulsion and disgust. This tableau, he kneeling, she looking down, is the Sartrean archetype. But in the Indian version the kneeling husband felt no presence behind him; was surprised by the wife; stood to face her on equal terms; blustered and shouted; until she wept, he embraced her, and they were reconciled.

“You say I should be ashamed,” Chamcha said bitterly to Zeenat. “You, who are without shame. As a matter of fact, this may be a national characteristic. I begin to suspect that Indians lack the necessary moral refinement for a true sense of tragedy, and therefore cannot really understand the idea of shame.”

Zeenat Vakil finished her whisky. “Okay, you don’t have to say any more.” She held up her hands. “I surrender. I’m going. Mr. Saladin Chamcha. I thought you were still alive, only just, but still breathing, but I was wrong. Turns out you were dead all the time.”

And one more thing before going milk-eyed through the door. “Don’t let people get too close to you, Mr. Saladin. Let people through your defences and the bastards go and knife you in the heart.”

After that there had been nothing to stay for. The aeroplane lifted and banked over the city. Somewhere below him, his father was dressing up a servant as his dead wife. The new traffic scheme had jammed the city centre solid. Politicians were trying to build careers by going on padyatras, pilgrimages on foot across the country. There were graffiti that read: Advice to politicos. Only step to take: padyatra to hell . Or, sometimes: to Assam .

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