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By Root 12014 0

which had placed itself in loco parentis until their father completed his thirty years in jail … FOR SALE, too, the Ibrahims’ Sans Souci, because Ishaq Ibrahim’s Embassy Hotel had been burned down by gangsters on the day of Commander Sabarmati’s final defeat, as though the criminal classes of the city were punishing the lawyer’s family for his failure; and then Ismail Ibrahim was suspended from practice, owing to certain proofs of professional misconduct (to quote the Bombay Bar Commission’s report); financially “embarrassed,” the Ibrahims also passed out of our lives; and, finally FOR SALE, the apartment of Cyrus Dubash and his mother, because during the hue and cry of the Sabarmati affair, and almost entirely unnoticed, the nuclear physicist had died his orange-pip-choking death, thus unleashing upon Cyrus the religious fanaticism of his mother and setting in motion the wheels of the period of revelations which will be the subject of my next little piece.

The signboards nodded in the gardens, which were losing their memories of goldfish and cocktail-hours and invading cats; and who took them down? Who were the heirs of the heirs of William Methwold? … They came swarming out of what had once been the residence of Doctor Narlikar: fat-bellied and grossly competent women, grown fatter and more competent than ever on their tetrapod-given wealth (because those were the years of the great land reclamations). The Narlikar women—from the Navy they bought Commander Sabarmati’s flat, and from the departing Mrs. Dubash her Cyrus’s home; they paid Bi-Appah in used banknotes, and the Ibrahims’ creditors were appeased by Narlikar cash.

My father, alone of all the residents, refused to sell; they offered him vast sums, but he shook his head. They explained their dream—a dream of razing the buildings to the ground and erecting on the two-storey hillock a mansion which would soar thirty stories into the skies, a triumphant pink obelisk, a signpost of their future; Ahmed Sinai, lost in abstractions, would have none of it. They told him, “When you’re surrounded by rubble you’ll have to sell for a song”; he (remembering their tetrapodal perfidy) was unmoved.

Nussie-the-duck said, as she left, “I told you so, Amina sister—the end! The end of the world!” This time she was right and wrong; after August 1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had, indeed, come to an end.

Padma—did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin orb, on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two cheap metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No, of course not; but I did. It was a world full of labels: Atlantic Ocean and Amazon and Tropic of Capicorn. And, at the North Pole, it bore the legend: MADE AS ENGLAND. By the August of the nodding signboards and the rapaciousness of the Narlikar women, this tin world had lost its stand; I found Scotch Tape and stuck the earth together at the Equator, and then, my urge for play overcoming my respect, began to use it as a football. In the aftermath of the Sabarmati affair, when the air was filled with the repentance of my mother and the private tragedies of Methwold’s heirs, I clanked my tin sphere around the Estate, secure in the knowledge that the world was still in one piece (although held together by adhesive tape) and also at my feet … until, on the day of Nussie-the-duck’s last eschatological lament—on the day Sonny Ibrahim ceased to be Sonny-next-door—my sister the Brass Monkey descended on me in an inexplicable rage, yelling, “O God, stop your kicking, brother; you don’t feel even a little bad today?” And jumping high in the air, she landed with both feet on the North Pole, and crushed the world into the dust of our driveway under her furious heels.

It seems the departure of Sonny Ibrahim, her reviled adorer, whom she had stripped naked in the middle of the road, had affected the Brass Monkey, after all, despite her lifelong denial of the possibility of love.

Revelations

Om Hare Khusro Hare Kbusrovand Om

KNOW, O UNBLEIVERS, THAT