The breath nearly felled Aziz; it was sharp as an axe. In 1918, Doctor Aziz's father, deprived of his birds, died in his sleep; and at once his mother, who had been able to sell the gemstone business thanks to the success of Aziz's practice, and who now saw her husband's death as a merciful release for her from a life filled with responsibilities, took to her own deathbed and followed her man before the end of his own forty-day mourning period. By the time the Indian regiments ugg boots clearance returned at the end of the war, Doctor Aziz was an orphan, and a free man - except that his heart had fallen through a hole some seven inches across. Desolating effect of Tai's behaviour: it ruined Doctor Aziz's good relations with the lake's floating population. He, who as a child had chatted freely with fishwives and flower-sellers, found himself looked at askance. 'Ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz.' Tai had branded him as an alien, and therefore a person not completely to be trusted. They didn't like the boatman, but they found the transformation which the Doctor had evidently worked upon him even more disturbing. Aziz found himself suspected, even ostracized, by the poor; and it hurt him badly. Now he understood what Tai was up to: the man was trying to chase him out of the valley. The story of the perforated sheet got out, too. The lady wrestlers were evidently less discreet than they looked. Aziz began to notice people pointing at him. Women giggled behind their palms ... 'I've decided to give Tai his victory,' he said. The three lady wrestlers, two holding up the sheet, the third hovering near the door, strained to hear him through the cotton wool in their ears. ('I made my father do it,' Naseem told him, 'These chatterjees won't do any more of their tittling and tattling from now on.') Naseem's eyes, hole-framed, became wider than ever. .. .Just like his own when, a few days earlier, he had been walking the city streets, had seen the last bus of the winter arrive, painted with its colourful inscriptions - on the front, GOD WILLING in green shadowed in red; on the back, blue-shadowed yellow crying THANK GOD!, and in cheeky maroon, SORRY-BYE-BYE! - and had recognized, through a web of new rings and lines on her face, Ike Lubin as she descended ... Nowadays, Ghani the landowner left him alone with earplugged guardians, To talk a little; the doctor-patient relationship can only deepen in strictest confidentiality. I see that now, Aziz Sahib - forgive my earlier intrusions.' Nowadays, Naseem's tongue was getting freer all the time. 'What kind ofUGG Bailey Button Triplet talk is this? What are you - a man or a mouse? To leave home because of a stinky shikara-man!' ... 'Oskar died,' Ilse told him, sipping fresh lime water on his mother's takht. 'Like a comedian. He went to talk to the army and tell them not to be pawns. The fool really thought the troops would fling down their guns and walk away. We watched from a window and I prayed they wouldn't just trample all over him. The regiment had learned to march in step by then, you wouldn't recognize them. As he reached the streetcorner across from the parade ground he tripped over his own shoelace and fell into the street. A staff car hit him and he died. He could never keep his laces tied, that ninny' ... here there were diamonds freezing in her lashes ... 'He was the type that gives anarchists a bad name.' 'All right,' Naseem conceded, 'so you've got a good chance of landing a good job. Agra University, it's a famous place, don't think I don't know. University doctor!... sounds good. Say you're going for that, and it's a different business.' Eyelashes drooped in the hole. 'I will miss you, naturally ...' 'I'm in love,' Aadam Aziz said to Ilse Lubin. And later,'... So I've only seen her through a hole in a sheet, one part at a time; and I swear her bottom blushes.' 'They must be putting something in the air up here,' Use said. 'Naseem, I've got the job,' Aadam said excitedly. 'The letter came today. With effect from April 1919. Your father says he can find a buyer for my house and the gemstone shop also.' 'Wonderful,' Naseem pouted. 'So now I must find a new doctor. Or maybe I'll get that old hag again who didn't know two things about anything.' 'Because I am an orphan,' Doctor Aziz said, 'I must come myself in place Uggs Classic Short of my family members. But I have come nevertheless, Ghani Sahib, for the first time without being sent for. This is not a professional visit.' 'Dear boy!' Ghani, clapping Aadam on the back. 'Of course you must marry her. With an A-1 fine dowry! No expense spared! It will be the wedding of the year, oh most certainly, yes!' 'I cannot leave you behind when I go,' Aziz said to Naseem. Ghani said, 'Enough of this tamasha! No more need for this sheet tomfoolery! Drop it down, you women, these are young lovers now!' 'At last,' said Aadam Aziz, 'I see you whole at last. But I must go now. My rounds ... and an old friend is staying with me, I must tell her, she will be very happy for us both. A dear friend from Germany.' 'No, Aadam baba,' his bearer said, 'since the morning I have not seen Ilse Begum. She hired that old Tai to go for a shikara ride.' 'What can be said, sir?' Tai mumbled meekly. 'I am honoured indeed to be summoned into the home of a so-great personage as yourself. Sir, the lady hired me for a trip to the Mughal Gardens, to do it before the lake freezes. A quiet lady, Doctor Sahib, not one word out of her all the time. So I was thinking my own unworthy private thoughts as old fools will and suddenly when I look she is not in her seat. Sahib, on my wife's head I swear it, it is not possible to see over the back of the seat, how was I to tell? Believe a poor old boatman who was your friend when you were young ...' 'Aadam baba,' the old bearer interrupted, 'excuse me but just now I have Uggs Adirondack found this paper on her table.' 'I know where she is,' Doctor Aziz stared at Tai. 'I don't know how you keep getting mixed up in my life; but you showed me the place once. You said: certain foreign women come here to drown.' 'I, Sahib?' Tai shocked, malodorous, innocent. 'But grief is making your head play trick! How can I know these things?' And after the body, bloated, wrapped in weeds, had been dredged up by a group of blank-faced boatmen, Tai visited the shikara halt and told the men there, as they recoiled from his breath of a bullock with dysentery, 'He blames me, only imagine! Brings his loose Europeans here and tells me it is my fault when they jump into the lake!... I ask, how did he know just where to look? Yes, ask him that, ask that nakkoo Aziz!' She had left a note. It read: 'I didn't mean it.' I make no comment; these events, which have tumbled from my lips any old how, garbled by haste and emotion, are for others to judge. Let me be direct now, and say that during the long, hard winter of 1918-19, Tai fell ill, contracting a violent skin disease, akin to that European curse called the King's Evil; but he refused to see Doctor Aziz, and was treated by a local homeopath. And in March, when the lake thawed, a marriage took place in a large marquee in the grounds of Ghani the landowner's house. The wedding contract assured Aadam Aziz of a respectable sum of money, which would help buy a house in Agra, and the dowry included, at Doctor Aziz's especial request, a certain mutilated bedsheet. The young couple sat on a dais, garlanded and cold, while the guests filed past dropping rupees into their laps. That night my grandfather placed the perforated sheet beneath his bride and himself and in the morning it was adorned bUggs Bailey Button y three drops of blood, which formed a small triangle. In the morning, the sheet was displayed, and after the consummation ceremony a limousine hired by the landowner arrived to drive my grandparents to Amritsar, where they would catch the Frontier Mail. Mountains crowded round and stared as my grandfather left his home for the last time. (He would return, once, but not to leave.) Aziz thought he saw an ancient boatman standing on land to watch them pass - but it was probably a mistake, since Tai was ill. The blister of a temple atop Sankara Acharya, which Muslims had taken to calling the Takht-e-Sulaiman, or Seat of Solomon, paid them no attention. Winter-bare poplars and snow-covered fields of saffron undulated around them as the car drove south, with an old leather bag containing, amongst other things, a stethoscope and a bedsheet, packed in the boot. Doctor Aziz felt, in the pit of his stomach, a sensation akin to weightlessness. Or falling.

(... And now I am cast as a ghost. I am nine years old and the whole family, my father, my mother, the Brass Monkey and myself, are staying at my grandparents' house in Agra, and the grandchildren -myself among them - are staging the customary New Year's play; and I have been cast as a ghost. Accordingly - and surreptitiously so as to preserve the secrets of the forthcoming theatricals - I am ransacking the house for a spectral disguise. My grandfather is out and about his rounds. I am in his room. And here on top of this cupboard is an old trunk, covered in dust and spiders, butugg boots clearance sale unlocked. And here, inside it, is the answer to my prayers. Not just a sheet, but one with a hole already cut in it! Here it is, inside this leather bag inside this trunk, right beneath an old stethoscope and a tube of mildewed Vick's Inhaler ... the sheet's appearance in our show was nothing less than a sensation. My grandfather took one look at it and rose roaring to his feet. He strode up on stage and unghosted me right in front of everyone. My grandmother's lips were so tightly pursed they seemed to disappear. Between them, the one booming at me in the voice of a forgotten boatman, the other conveying her fury through vanished lips, they reduced the awesome ghost to a weeping wreck. I fled, took to my heels and ran into the little cornfield, not knowing what had happened. I sat there - perhaps on the very spot on which Nadir Khan had sat! - for several hours, swearing over and over that I would never again open a forbidden trunk, and feeling vaguely resentful that it had not been locked in the first place. But I knew, from their rage, that the sheet was somehow very important indeed.) I have been interrupted by Padma, who brought me my dinner and then withheld it, blackmailing me: 'So if you're going to spend all your time wrecking your eyes with that scribbling, at least you must read it to me.' I have been singing for my supper - but perhaps our Padma will be useful, because it's impossible to stop her being a critic. She is particularly angry with my remarks about her name. 'What do you know, city boy?' she cried - hand slicing the air. 'In my village there is no shame in being named for the Dung Goddess. Write at once that you are wrong, completely.' In accordance with my lotus's wishes, I insert, forthwith, a brief paean to Dung. Dung, that fertilizes and causes the crops to grow! Dung, which is patted into thin chapati-like cakes when still fresh and moist, and is sold to the village builders, who use it to secure and strengthen the walls of kachcha buildings made of mud! Dung, whose arrival from the nether end of cattle goes a long way towards explaining their divine and sacred status! Oh, yes, I was wrong, I admit I was prejudiced, no doubt Uggs Classic Cardy because its unfortunate odours do have a way of offending my sensitive nose - how wonderful, how ineffably lovely it must be to be named for the Purveyor of Dung! ... On April 6th, 1919, the holy city of Amritsar smelled (gloriously, Padma, celestially!) of excrement. And perhaps the (beauteous!) reek did not offend the Nose on my grandfather's face - after all, Kashmir! peasants used it, as described above, for a kind of plaster. Even in Srinagar, hawkers with barrows of round dung-cakes were not an uncommon sight. But then the stuff was drying, muted, useful. Amritsar dung was fresh and (worse) redundant. Nor was it all bovine. It issued from the rumps of the horses between the shafts of the city's many tongas, ikkas and gharries; and mules and men and dogs attended nature's calls, mingling in a brotherhood of shit. But there were cows, too: sacred kine roaming the dusty streets, each patrolling its own territory, staking its claims in excrement. And flies! Public Enemy Number One, buzzing gaily from turd to steaming turd, celebrated and cross-pollinated these freely-given offerings. The city swarmed about, too, mirroring the motion of the flies. Doctor Aziz looked down from his hotel window on to this scene as a Jain in a face-mask walked past, brushing the pavement before him with a twig-broom, to avoid stepping on an ant, or even a fly. Spicy sweet fumes rose from a street-snack barrow. 'Hot pakoras, pakoras hot!' A white woman was buying silks from a shop across the street and men in turbans were ogling her. Naseem - now Naseem Aziz - had a sharp headache; it was the first time she'd ever repeated an illness, but lifeUggs Classic Mini outside her quiet valley had come as something of a shock to her. There was a jug of fresh lime water by her bed, emptying rapidly. Aziz stood at the window, inhaling the city. The spire of the Golden Temple gleamed in the sun. But his nose itched: something was not right here. Close-up of my grandfather's right hand: nails knuckles fingers all somehow bigger than you'd expect. Clumps of red hair on the outside edges. Thumb and forefinger pressed together, separated only by a thickness of paper. In short: my grandfather was holding a pamphlet. It had been inserted into his hand (we cut to a long-shot - nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary) as he entered the hotel foyer. Scurrying of urchin through revolving door, leaflets falling in his wake, as the chaprassi gives chase. Mad revolutions in the doorway, roundandround; until chaprassi-hand demands a close-up, too, because it is pressing thumb to forefinger, the two separated only by the thickness of urchin-ear. Ejection of juvenile disseminator of gutter-tracts; but still my grandfather retained the message. Now, looking out of his window, he sees it echoed on a wall opposite; and there, on the minaret of a mosque; and in the large black type of newsprint under a hawker's arm. Leaflet newspaper mosque and wall are crying: Hartal! Which is to say, literally speaking, a day of mourning, of stillness, of silence. But this is India in the heyday of the Mahatma, when even language obeys the instructions of Gandhiji, and the word has acquired, under his influence, new resonances. Hartal -April 7, agree mosque newspaper wall and pamphlet, because Gandhi has decreed that the whole of India shall, on Fashion Uggs that day, come to a halt. To mourn, in peace, the continuing presence of the British. 'I do not understand this hartal when nobody is dead,' Naseem is crying softly. 'Why will the train not run? How long are we stuck for?' Doctor Aziz notices a soldierly young man in the street, and thinks- the Indians have fought for the British; so many of them have seen the world by now, and been tainted by Abroad. They will not easily go back to the old world. The British are wrong to try and turn back the clock. 'It was a mistake to pass the Rowlatt Act,' he murmurs. 'What rowlatt?' wails Naseem. 'This is nonsense where I'm concerned!' 'Against political agitation,' Aziz explains, and returns to his thoughts. Tai once said: 'Kashmiris are different. Cowards, for instance. Put a gun in a Kashmiri's hand and it will have to go off by itself - he'll never dare to pull the trigger. We are not like Indians, always making battles.' Aziz, with Tai in his head, does not feel Indian. Kashmir, after all, is not strictly speaking a part of the Empire, but an independent princely state. He is not sure if the hartal of pamphlet mosque wall newspaper is his fight, even though he is in occupied territory now. He turns from the window ... ... To see Naseem weeping into a pillow. She has been weeping ever since he asked her, on their second night, to move a little. 'Move where?' she asked. 'Move how?' He became awkward and said, 'Only move, I mean, like a woman ...' She shrieked in horror. 'My God,what have I married? I know youUggs Classic Tall Europe-returned men. You find terrible women and then you try to make us girls be like them! Listen, Doctor Sahib, husband or no husband, I am not any ... bad word woman,' This was a battle my grandfather never won; and it set the tone for their marriage, which rapidly developed into a place of frequent and devastating warfare, under whose depredations the young girl behind the sheet and the gauche young Doctor turned rapidly into different, stranger beings... 'What now, wife?' Aziz asks. Naseem buries her face in the pillow. 'What else?' she says in muffled tones. 'You, or what? You want me to walk naked in front of strange men.' (He has told her to come out of purdah.)

He says, 'Your shirt covers you from neck to wrist to knee. Your loose pajamas hide you down to and including your ankles. What we have left are your feet and face. Wife, are your face and feet obscene?' But she wails, 'They will see more than that! They will see my deep-deep shame!' And now an accident, which launches us into the world of Mercurochrome ... Aziz, finding his temper slipping from him, drags all his wife's purdah-veils from her suitcase, flings them into a wastepaper basket made of tin with a painting of Guruuggs clearance Nanak on the side, and sets fire to them. Flames leap up, taking him by surprise, licking at curtains. Aadam rushes to the door and yells for help as the cheap curtains begin to blaze ... and bearers guests washerwomen stream into the room and flap at die burning fabric with dusters towels and other people's laundry. Buckets are brought; the fire goes out; and Naseem cowers on the bed as about thirty-five Sikhs, Hindus and untouchables throng in the smoke-filled room. Finally they leave, and Naseem unleashes two sentences before clamping her lips obstinately shut. 'You are a mad man. I want more lime water.' My grandfather opens the windows, turns to his bride. 'The smoke will take time to go; I will take a walk. Are you coming?' Lips clamped; eyes squeezed; a single violent No from the head; and my grandfather goes into the streets alone. His parting shot: 'Forget about being a good Kashmiri girl. Start thinking about being a modern Indian woman.' ... While in the Cantonment area, at British Army H.Q., one Brigadier R. E. Dyer is waxing his moustache. It is April 7th, 1919, and in Amritsar the Mahatma's grand design is being distorted. The shops have shut; the railway station is closed; but now rioting mobs are breaking them up. Doctor Aziz, leather bag in hand, is out in the streets, giving help wherever possible. Trampled bodies have been left where they fell. He is bandaging wounds, daubing them liberally with Mercurochrome, which makes them look bloodier than ever, but at least disinfects them. Finally he returns to his hotel room, his clothes soaked in red stains, and Naseem commences a panic. 'Let me help, let me help, Allah what a man I've married, who goes into gullies to fight with goondas!' She is all over him with water on wads of cotton wool. 'I don't know why can't you be a respectable doctor like Uggs Delaine ordinary people are just cure important illnesses and all? ?God you've got blood everywhere! Sit, sit now, let me wash you at least!' 'It isn't blood, wife.' 'You think I can't see for myself with my own eyes? Why must you make a fool of me even when you're hurt? Must your wife not look after you, even?' 'It's Mercurochrome, Naseem. Red medicine.' Naseem - who had become a whirlwind of activity, seizing clothes, running taps - freezes. 'You do it on purpose,' she says, 'to make me look stupid. I am not stupid. I have read several books.' It is April 13th, and they are still in Amritsar. 'This affair isn't finished,' Aadam Aziz told Naseem. 'We can't go, you see: they may need doctors again.' 'So we must sit here and wait until the end of the world?' He rubbed his nose. 'No, not so long, I am afraid.' That afternoon, the streets are suddenly full of people, all moving in the same direction, defying Dyer's new Martial Law regulations. Aadam tells Naseem, 'There must be a meeting planned - there will be trouble from the military. They have banned meetings.' 'Why do you have to go? Why not wait to be called?' ... A compound can be anything from a wasteland to a park. The largestUggs for Babies compound in Amritsar is called Jallianwala Bagh. It is not grassy. Stones cans glass and other things are everywhere. To get into it, you must walk down a very narrow alleyway between two buildings. On April 13th, many thousands of Indians are crowding through this alleyway. 'It is peaceful protest,' someone tells Doctor Aziz. Swept along by the crowds, he arrives at the mouth of the alley. A bag from Heidelberg is in his right hand. (No close-up is necessary.) He is, I know, feeling very scared, because his nose is itching worse than it ever has; but he is a trained doctor, he puts it out of his mind, he enters the compound. Somebody is making a passionate speech. Hawkers move through the crowd selling channa and sweetmeats. The air is filled with dust. There do not seem to be any goondas, any trouble- makers, as far as my grandfather can see. A group of Sikhs has spread a cloth on the ground and is eating, seated around it. There is still a smell of ordure in the air. Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. ? Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack troops. He is the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar - an important man, after all; the waxed tips of his moustache are rigid with importance. As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather's nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer's right and twenty-five to his left; and Aadam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. 'Yaaaakh-th??!' he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life. His 'doctori-attache' flies open; bottles, liniment and syringes scatter in the dust. He is scrabbling furiously at people's feet, trying to save his equipment before it is crushed. There is a noise like teeth chattering in winter and someone falls on him. Red stuffstains his shirt. There are screams now and sobs and the strange chattering continues. More and more people seem to have stumbled and fallen on top of my grandfather. He becomes afraid for his back. The clasp of his bag is digging into his chest, inflicting upon it a bruise so severe and mysterious that it will not fade until after his death, years later, on the hill of Sankara Acharya or Takht-e-Sulaiman. His nose is jammed against a bottle of red pills. The chattering stops and is replaced by the noisesUggs for Kids of people and birds. There seems to be no traffic noise whatsoever. Brigadier Dyer's fifty men put down their machine-guns and go away. They have fired a total of one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into the unarmed crowd. Of these, one thousand five hundred and sixteen have found their mark, killing or wounding some person. 'Good shooting,' Dyer tells his men, 'We have done a jolly good thing.' When my grandfather got home that night, my grandmother was trying hard to be a modern woman, to please him, and so she did not turn a hair at his appearance. 'I see you've been spilling the Mercurochrome again, clumsy,' she said, appeasingly. 'It's blood,' he replied, and she fainted. When he brought her round with the help of a little sal volatile, she said, 'Are you hurt?' 'No,' he said. 'But where have you been, my God?' 'Nowhere on earth,' he said, and began to shake in her arms. My own hand, I confess, has begun to wobble; not entirely because of its theme, but because I have noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing in my wrist, beneath the skin ... No matter. We all owe death a life. So let me conclude with the uncorroborated rumour that the boatman Tai, who recovered from his scrofulous infection soon after my grandfather left Kashmir, did not die until 1947, when (the story goes) he was infuriated by India and Pakistan's struggle over his valley, and walked to Chhamb with the express purpose of standing between the opposing forces and giving them a piece of his mind. Kashmiri for the Kashmiris: that was his line. Naturally, they shot him. Oskar Lubin would probably have approved of his rhetorical gesture; R. E. Dyer might have commended his murderers' rifle skills. I must go to bed. Padma is waiting; and I need a little warmth. Chapter 3 Hit-the-spittoon Please believe that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening Uggs Jimmy Choo gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug - that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust. This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)

There are moments of terror, but they go away. Panic like a bubbling sea-beast conies up for air, boils on the surface, but eventually returns to the deep. It is important for me to remain calm. I chew betel-nut and expectorate in the direction of a cheap brassy bowl, playing the ancient game of hit-the-spittoon: Nadir Khan's game, which he learned from the old men in Agra... and these days you can buy 'rocket paans' in which, as well as the gum-reddening paste of the betel, the comfort of cocaine lies folded in a leaf. But that would be cheating. ... Rising from my pages comes the unmistakable whiff of chutney. So ugg boots let me obfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately-gifted olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments. But now, 'A cook?' you gasp in horror, 'A khansama merely? How is it possible?' And, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings - by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks. But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next: 'At this rate,' Padma complains, 'you'll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.' She is affecting nonchalance, jutting a careless hip in my general direction, but doesn't fool me. I know now that she is, despite all her protestations, hooked. No doubt about it: my story has her by the throat, so that all at once she's stopped nagging me to go home, to take more baths, to change my vinegar-stained clothes, to abandon even for a moment this darkling pickle-factory where the smells of spices are forever frothing in the air... now my dung goddess simply makes up a cot in the corner of this office and prepares my food on two blackened gas-rings, only interrupting my Anglepoise-lit writing to expostulate, 'You better get a move on or you'll die before you get yourself born.' Fighting down the proper pride of the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her. 'Things - even people - have a way of leaking into each other,' I explain, 'like flavours when you cook. Ilse Lubin's suicide, for example, leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise,' I intone earnestly, 'the past has dripped into me .'.. so we can't ignore it...' Her shrug, which does pleasantly wavy things to her chest, cuts me off. 'To me it's a crazy way of telling your life story,' she cries, 'if you can't even get to where your father met your mother.' ... And certainly Padma is leaking into me. As history pours out of my Uggs Kensington fissured body, my lotus is quietly dripping in, with her down-to-earthery, and her paradoxical superstition, her contradictory love of the fabulous - so it's appropriate that I'm about to tell the story of the death of Mian Abdullah. The doomed Hummingbird: a legend of our times. ... And Padma is a generous woman, because she stays by me in these last days, although I can't do much for her. That's right - and once again, it's a fitting thing to mention before I launch into the tale of Nadir Khan - I am unmanned. Despite Padma's many and varied gifts and ministrations, I can't leak into her, not even when she puts her left foot on my right, winds her right leg around my waist, inclines her head up toward mine and makes cooing noises; not even when she whispers in my ear, 'So now that the writery is done, let's see if we can make your other pencil work!'; despite everything she tries, I cannot hit her spittoon. Enough confessions. Bowing to the ineluctable Padma-pressures of what-happened-nextism, and remembering the finite quantity of time at my disposal, I leap forwards from Mercurochrome and land in 1942. (I'm keen to get my parents together, too.) It seems that in the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism. Bicycling around Agra, he whistled piercingly, badly, but very happily. He was by no means alone, because, despite strenuous efforts by the authorities to stamp it out, this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year, and drastic steps were to be taken before it was brought under control. The old men at the paan-shop at the top of Cornwallis Road chewed betel and suspected a trick. 'I have lived twice as long as I should have,' the oldest one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing up against each other around his vocal chords, 'and I've never seen so many people so cheerful in such Uggs Knightsbridge a bad time. It is the devil's work.' It was, indeed, a resilient virus - the weather alone should have discouraged such germs from breeding, since it had become clear that the rains had failed. The earth was cracking. Dust ate the edges of roads, and on some days huge gaping fissures appeared in the midst of macadamed intersections. The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might now issue from the Assuring earth. Apparently a Sikh from the bicycle-repair shop had had his turban pushed off his head in the heat of one afternoon, when his hair, without any reason, had suddenly stood on end. And, more prosaically, the water shortage had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with which to adulterate the milk :.. Far away, there was a World War in progress once again. In Agra, the heat mounted. But still my grandfather whistled. The old men at the paan-shop found Ms whistling in rather poor taste, given the circumstances. (And I, like them, expectorate and rise above fissures.) Astride his bicycle, leather attache attached to carrier, my grandfather wMstled. Despite irritations of the nose, his lips pursed. Despite a bruise on his chest which had refused to fade for twenty-three years, his good humour was unimpaired. Air passed his lips and was transmuted into sound. He whistled an old German tune: Tannenbaum. The optimism epidemic had been caused by one single human being, whose name, Mian Abdullah, was only used by newspapermen. To everyone else, he was the Hummingbird, a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist. 'Magician turned conjurer,' the newspapermen wrote, 'Mian Abdullah rose from the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi to become the hope of India's hundred million Muslims.' The Hummingbird was the founder, chairman, unifier and moving spirit of the Free Islam Convocation; and in 1942, marquees and rostrums were being erected on the Agra maidan, where the Convocation's second Uggs Knitted Boots annual assembly was about to take place. My grandfather, fifty-two years old, his hair turned white by the years and other afflictions, had begun whistling as he passed the maidan. Now he leaned round corners on his bicycle, taking them at a jaunty angle, threading his way between cowpats and children ... and, in another time and place, told Ms friend the Rani of Cooch Naheen: 'I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian. I'm still not much of a Muslim, but I'm all for Abdullah. He's fighting my fight.' His eyes were still the blue of Kashmiri sky... he arrived home, and although Ms eyes retained a glimmer of contentment, the whistling stopped; because waiting for him in the courtyard filled with malevolent geese were the disapproving features of my grandmama, Naseem Aziz, whom he had made the mistake of loving in fragments, and who was now unified and transmuted into the formidable figure she would always remain, and who was always known by the curious title of Reverend Mother. She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch's nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties. Earlier that year Aadam Aziz had commissioned life-size blow-up photographs of his family to hang on the living-room wall; the three girls and two boys had posed dutifully enough, but Reverend Mother had rebelled when her turn came. Eventually, the photographer had tried to catch her unawares, but she seized Ms camera and broke it over his skull. Fortunately, he lived; but Uggs Metallic there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone's little black box. It was enough for her that she must live in unveiled, barefaced shamelessness - there was no question of allowing the fact to be recorded.