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By Root 12099 0

attention he required may be one of the reasons why I managed, in spite of all indications to the contrary, to stay alive … incapable of anything else in those days after my release from captivity, I concentrated on watching my son. “I tell you, captain, it’s lucky you came back,” Picture Singh joked, “otherwise this one would have turned us all into ayahs.” I understood once again that Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the eyes of the child who was simultaneously not-my-son and also more my heir than any child of my flesh could have been, I found in his empty, limpid pupils a second mirror of humility, which showed me that, from now on, mine would be as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster: the traditional function, perhaps, of reminiscer, of teller-of-tales … I wondered if all over the country the bastard sons of Shiva were exerting similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisaged for the second time that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything. (How these children may, in the future, be identified: their bim-bis stick out instead of in.)

But it’s time to get things moving: a taunt, a last railway-train heading south south south, a final battle … on the day following the weaning of Aadam, Saleem accompanied Picture Singh to Connaught Place, to assist him in his snake-charming. Durga the dhoban agreed to take my son with her to the dhobighat: Aadam spent the day observing how power was thrashed out of the clothes of the well-to-do and absorbed by the succubus-woman. On that fateful day, when the warm weather was returning to the city like a swarm of bees, I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed silver spittoon. Picture Singh had provided me with a spittoon-surrogate, an empty Dalda Vanaspati can, but although I used this to entertain my son with my expertise in the gentle art of spittoon-hittery, sending long jets of betel-juice across the grimy air of the magicians’ colony, I was not consoled. A question: why such grief over a mere receptacle of juices? My reply is that you should never underestimate a spittoon. Elegant in the salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, it permitted intellectuals to practice the artforms of the masses; gleaming in a cellar, it transformed Nadir Khan’s underworld into a second Taj Majal; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it was nevertheless present throughout my history, covertly assimilating incidents in washing-chests, ghost-visions, freeze-unfreeze, drainage, exiles; falling from the sky like a piece of the moon, it perpetrated a transformation. O talismanic spittoon! O beauteous lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice! What sensitive person could fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its loss?

… Beside me at the back of a bus bulging with humanity, Picture Singh sat with snake-baskets coiled innocently on his lap. As we rattled and banged through that city which was also filled with the resurgent ghosts of earlier, mythological Delhis, the Most Charming Man In The World wore an air of faded despondency, as if a battle in a distant darkroom were already over … until my return, nobody had understood that Pictureji’s real and unvoiced fear was that he was growing old, that his powers were dimming, that he would soon be adrift and incompetent in a world he did not understand: like me, Picture Singh clung to the presence of Baby Aadam as if the child were a torch in a long dark tunnel. “A fine child, captain,” he told me, “a child of dignity: you hardly notice his ears.”

That day, however, my son was not with us.

New Delhi smells assailed me in Connaught Place—the biscuity perfume of the J. B. Mangharam advertisement, the mournful chalkiness of crumbling plaster; and there was also the tragic spoor of the auto-rickshaw drivers, starved into fatalism by rising