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By Root 12103 0

I settled into the magicians’ colony, scraping a living by amusing foreign and native tourists with the marvellous perspicacities of my nose, which enabled me to smell out their simple, touristy secrets. Picture Singh asked me to share his shack. I slept on tattered sackcloth amongst baskets sibilant with snakes; but I did not mind, just as I found myself capable of tolerating hunger thirst mosquitoes and (in the beginning) the bitter cold of a Delhi winter. This Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, was also the ghetto’s unquestioned chieftain; squabbles and problems were resolved beneath the shade of his ubiquitous and enormous black umbrella; and I, who could read and write as well as smell, became a sort of aide-de-camp to this monumental man who invariably added a lecture on socialism to his serpentine performances, and who was famous in the main streets and alleys of the city for more than his snake-charmer’s skills. I can say, with utter certainty, that Picture Singh was the greatest man I ever met.

One afternoon during the chaya, the ghetto was visited by another copy of that labia-lipped youth whom I’d seen at my Uncle Mustapha’s. Standing on the steps of the mosque, he unfurled a banner which was then held up by two assistants. It read: ABOLISH POVERTY, and bore the cow-suckling-calf symbol of the Indira Congress. His face looked remarkably like a plump calf’s face, and he unleashed a typhoon of halitosis when he spoke. “Brothers-O! Sisters-O! What does Congress say to you? This: that all men are created equal!” He got no further; the crowd recoiled from his breath of bullock dung under a hot sun, and Picture Singh began to guffaw. “O ha ha, captain, too good, sir!” And labia-lips, foolishly: “Okay, you, brother, won’t you share the joke?” Picture Singh shook his head, clutched his sides: “O speech, captain! Absolute master speech!” His laughter rolled out from beneath his umbrella to infect the crowd until all of us were rolling on the ground, laughing, crushing ants, getting covered in dust, and the Congress mooncalf’s voice rose in panic: “What is this? This fellow doesn’t think we are equals? What a low impression he must have—” but now Picture Singh, umbrella-over-head, was striding away towards his hut. Labia-lips, in relief, continued his speech … but not for long, because Picture returned, carrying under his left arm a small circular lidded basket and under his right armpit a wooden flute. He placed the basket on the step beside the Congress-wallah’s feet; removed the lid; raised flute to lips. Amid renewed laughter, the young politico leaped nineteen inches into the air as a king cobra swayed sleepily up from its home … Labia-lips is crying: “What are you doing? Trying to kill me to death?” And Picture Singh, ignoring him, his umbrella furled now, plays on, more and more furiously, and the snake uncoils, faster faster Picture Singh plays until the flute’s music fills every cranny of the slum and threatens to scale the walls of the mosque, and at last the great snake, hanging in the air, supported only by the enchantment of the tune, stands nine feet long out of the basket and dances on its tail … Picture Singh relents. Nagaraj subsides into coils. The Most Charming Man In The World offers the flute to the Congress youth: “Okay, captain,” Picture Singh says agreeably, “you give it a try.” But labia-lips: “Man, you know I couldn’t do it!” Whereupon Picture Singh seizes the cobra just below the head, opens his own mouth wide wide wide, displaying an heroic wreckage of teeth and gums; winking left-eyed at the Congress youth, he inserts the snake’s tongue-flicking head into his hideously yawning orifice! A full minute passes before Picture Singh returns the cobra to its basket. Very kindly, he tells the youth: “You see, captain, here is the truth of the business: some persons are better, others are less. But it may be nice for you to think otherwise.”

Watching this scene, Saleem Sinai learned that Picture Singh and the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it