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By Root 12009 0

her and becoming affection and, finally, love. In this way she came to adore his over-loud voice and the way it assaulted her eardrums and made her tremble; and his peculiarity of always being in a good mood until after he had shaved—after which, each morning, his manner became stern, gruff, business-like and distant; and his vulture-hooded eyes which concealed what she was sure was his inner goodness behind a bleakly ambiguous gaze; and the way his lower lip jutted out beyond his upper one; and his shortness which led him to forbid her ever to wear high heels … “My God,” she told herself, “it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man!” But she was undismayed. “Who, after all,” she reasoned privately, “ever truly knows another human being completely?” and continued to learn to love and admire his appetite for fried foods, his ability to quote Persian poetry, the furrow of anger between his eyebrows … “At this rate,” she thought, “there will always be something fresh about him to love; so our marriage just can’t go stale.” In this way, assiduously, my mother settled down to life in the old city. The tin trunk sat unopened in an old almirah.

And Ahmed, without knowing or suspecting, found himself and his life worked upon by his wife until, little by little, he came to resemble—and to live in a place that resembled—a man he had never known and an underground chamber he had never seen. Under the influence of a painstaking magic so obscure that Amina was probably unaware of working it, Ahmed Sinai found his hair thinning, and what was left becoming lank and greasy; he discovered that he was willing to let it grow until it began to worm over the tops of his ears. Also, his stomach began to spread, until it became the yielding, squashy belly in which I would so often be smothered and which none of us, consciously at any rate, compared to the pudginess of Nadir Khan. His distant cousin Zohra told him, coquettishly, “You must diet, cousinji, or we won’t be able to reach you to kiss!” But it did no good … and little by little Amina constructed in Old Delhi a world of soft cushions and draperies over the windows which let in as little light as possible … she lined the chick-blinds with black cloths; and all these minute transformations helped her in her Herculean task, the task of accepting, bit by bit, that she must love a new man. (But she remained susceptible to the forbidden dream-images of … and was always drawn to men with soft stomachs and longish, lankish hair.)

You could not see the new city from the old one. In the new city, a race of pink conquerors had built palaces in pink stone; but the houses in the narrow lanes of the old city leaned over, jostled, shuffled, blocked each other’s view of the roseate edifices of power. Not that anyone ever looked in that direction, anyway. In the Muslim muhallas or neighborhoods which clustered around Chandni Chowk, people were content to look inwards into the screened-off courtyards of their lives; to roll chick-blinds down over their windows and verandahs. In the narrow lanes, young loafers held hands and linked arms and kissed when they met and stood in hip-jutting circles, facing inwards. There was no greenery and the cows kept away, knowing they weren’t sacred here. Bicycle bells rang constantly. And above their cacophony sounded the cries of itinerant fruit-sellers: Come all you greats-O, eat a few dates-O!

To all of which was added, on that January morning when my mother and father were each concealing secrets from the other, the nervous clatter of the footsteps of Mr. Mustapha Kemal and Mr. S. P. Butt; and also the insistent rattle of Lifafa Das’s dugdugee drum.

When the clattering footsteps were first heard in the gullies of the muhalla, Lifafa Das and his peepshow and drum were still some distance away. Clatter-feet descended from a taxi and rushed into the narrow lanes; meanwhile, in their corner house, my mother stood in her kitchen stirring khichri for breakfast overhearing my father conversing with his distant cousin Zohra. Feet clacked