• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 11833 0

For his mother, he put on a sort of brocade skirt and a turban; for the sake of filial duty, he permitted millions of devotees to kiss his little finger. In the name of maternal love, he truly became Lord Khusro, the most successful holy child in history; in no time at all he was being hailed by crowds half a million strong, and credited with miracles; American guitarists came to sit at his feet, and they all brought their check-books along. Lord Khusrovand acquired accountants, and tax havens, and a luxury liner called the Khusrovand Starship, and an aircraft—Lord Khusro’s Astral Plane. And somewhere inside the faintly-smiling, benediction-scattering boy … in a place which was forever hidden by his mother’s frighteningly efficient shadow (she had, after all, lived in the same house as the Narlikar women; how well did she know them? How much of their awesome competence leaked into her?), there lurked the ghost of a boy who had been my friend.

“That Lord Khusro?” Padma asks, amazed. “You mean that same mahaguru who drowned at sea last year?” Yes, Padma; he could not walk on water; and very few people who have come into contact with me have been vouchsafed a natural death … let me confess that I was somewhat resentful of Cyrus’s apotheosis. “It should have been me,” I even thought, “I am the magic child; not only my primacy at home, but even my true innermost nature, has now been purloined.”

Padma: I never became a “mahaguru”; millions have never seated themselves at my feet; and it was my own fault, because one day, many years ago, I had gone to hear Cyrus’s lecture on the Parts of a Wooman’s Body.

“What?” Padma shakes her head, puzzled. “What’s this now?”

The nuclear physicist Dubash possessed a beautiful marble statuette—a female nude—and with the help of this figurine, his son would give expert lectures on female anatomy to an audience of sniggering boys. Not free; Cyrus-the-great charged a fee. In exchange for anatomy, he demanded comic-books—and I, in all innocence, gave him a copy of that most precious of Superman comics, the one containing the frame-story, about the explosion of the planet Krypton and the rocket-ship in which Jor-El his father despatched him through space, to land on earth and be adopted by the good, mild Kents … did nobody else see it? In all those years, did no person understand that what Mrs. Dubash had done was to rework and reinvent the most potent of all modern myths—the legend of the coming of the superman? I saw the hoardings trumpeting the coming of Lord Khusro Khusrovand Bhagwan; and found myself obliged, yet again, to accept responsibility for the events of my turbulent, fabulous world.

How I admire the leg-muscles of my solicitous Padma! There she squats, a few feet from my table, her sari hitched up in fisherwoman-fashion. Calf-muscles show no sign of strain; thigh-muscles, rippling through sari-folds, display their commendable stamina. Strong enough to squat forever, simultaneously defying gravity and cramp, my Padma listens unhurriedly to my lengthy tale; O mighty picklewoman! What reassuring solidity, how comforting an air of permanence, in her biceps and triceps … for my admiration extends also to her arms, which could wrestle mine down in a trice, and from which, when they enfold me nightly in futile embraces, there is no escape. Past our crisis now, we exist in perfect harmony: I recount, she is recounted to; she ministers, and I accept her ministrations with grace. I am, in fact, entirely content with the uncomplaining thews of Padma Mangroli, who is, unaccountably, more interested in me than my tales.

Why I have chosen to expound on Padma’s musculature: these days, it’s to those muscles, as much as to anything or -one (for instance, my son, who hasn’t even learned to read as yet), that I’m telling my story. Because I am rushing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible, and overstatements, and jarring alterations in tone; I’m racing the cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have already been made, and that, as my decay accelerates (my writing speed is having trouble