我认为，正确的语文教学观是由价值论、思维论、方法论三者构成的有机体系。价值论研究教学的目标的规定性，思维论研究教学教过程的规定性，方法论研究教学方法的规定性。三者互相联系，互相制约。(《我的语文教学观》)
　　为使语文教学的方法更加科学，王先生在多篇文章里探讨了这个问题。比如在《为了使学生更聪明》)一文中，他曾编写了“解词析句”“分析与综合”“个别到一般”“比较归纳”“推论因果”“联想归纳”等六个单元，依序对学生进行了相应的训练。
　　在《努力做到教法与学法的统一》一文中，王先生很郑重地就当前语文界存在的各种不良方法进行了揭示。并且明确提出了“我们追求的是教法与学法的统一”的口号，强调了科学教法的客观性。他说：
　　一切科学的方法，都有客观的依据。凡是没有客观依据的方法一定是靠不住的。读书的方法，来源于“书”的客观存在和“读书人”的客观存在。所以，要指导学生“自能读书”，就不能不研究、尊重这两种客观存在。
　　“法”要尊重客观规律，还有一层意思。目前所倡导、所使用的许多方法，一般是与班级授课、师生互动的条件相适应的。这些法有现实的效应。但不能满足于这个层次，这个阶段。学生毕竟要长大，要独立，要自去读书。所以随着年级的增高，要逐步强化独立读书、独立学习的方法。这才是真正为学生的未来着想，才是真的“人文主义”。
　　为了使自己的教学法更有价值。王先生尝试了教学中的策略思想。他提出：
　　要让学生真能独立读书，还应在阅读教学中增加“策略”思想。比如，“阅读的材料选择”“阅读的问题导向”“阅读的读物配伍”“阅读的循序渐进原则”“阅读的博精相兼原则”“阅读的实践性原则”“阅读的发现性原则”“阅读的创造性原则”“阅读的时间管理”“阅读的快与慢的辩证法”，等等。
　　我们可以这样认为，在目前的语文阅读教学中，王先生对于阅读教学的这一观点是独一无二的。其思考还没有人能出其右者。
　　而在语文教学的方法方面，王先生自己一直比较欣赏的是他尝试的“五子”法，即：“选例子，指路子，做样子，给场子，挂牌子”。
　　选例子，就是要选择最有训练价值的典型例文、例段、例句、例词，等等。这个选择很重要，做得好，可以事半功倍，为提高效率、减轻负担创造了条件。
　　指路子，即通过对典型例子的分析，总结规律，形成方法，训练思路。没有这一步，上升不到规律性的认识，学生的认识不能形成飞跃，所谓思路和方法就无从谈起，就只能停留在“囫囵”和“混沌”。
　　做样子，这是老师的示范动作。你说这样规律、那样方法，这东西灵不灵?怎么用?教师要带头把这规律、方法运用到解决问题的实践中去。这不仅是对规律、方法的验证，也是对实践的一种导引。有了这一步，学生会自觉地去学习。
　　给场子，就是提供实践、练习的机会，就像给练武的人提供场地。有的教科书，例题之后必配有恰切的习题，这一步似乎不难。语文教材常常不是这样，它不怎么揭示规律，也很少有适用的练习题，所以教师要在这方面用些心思。还有一点，这种“给场子”的方针，是和“满堂灌”“满堂问”之类的做法不相容的。
　　挂牌子，就是要对做得好的学生及时奖以“金牌”。这是一种总结，一种激励，对学生心理的成长很有意义。自然，对学习过程中出现的问题也要及时指出，予以订正。
　　为了避免班级授课中个性与共性的冲突。王先生还考虑了教师教学方法的均衡性。他说：
　　教师授课，自然要考虑“一般”水平、“一般”需要，那么如何满足优秀生的较高要求，又如何照顾后进生的较低水平呢?笔者有一个方针：承认差别，提倡个性，鼓励创造。在课堂上，尽量给学生个体活动的时间，在讨论中鼓励发表不同的意见，可以不必“统一”时就不去统一，以便进一步去思考。(《努力做到教法与学法的统一》)
　　正是因为王先生对于语文教学的方法论思考得全面，思考得深入，高瞻远瞩，所以他对于那些不符合语文教学内在规律的现象往往深怀厌恶，常生恨铁不成钢之感。对于那些语文教学活动中的浅豁行为，庸俗态度，恶劣扮相，毫不留情。
　　在他看来，这样的语文教学花哨有余，谨严不足，表演有余，而方法不足。实际上是肤浅有余，深刻不足，无疑是与语文的宗旨相背的。
　　二、他比较重视学生学法的有效性
　　王先生对于学生语文学习的有效性的重视，大致体现在两个方面。一个方面是，在课堂上充分利用教师教学方法的有效性进行学法指导。
　　另一个方面是，用写“课后笔记”的方法对学生进行学法指导。这是一种兼有复习和学习的课后学习方法。其具体的操作模式如下：
　　一、新知识:
　　(一)文学常识
　　(二)字词积累
　　(三)文化常识
　　二、新感悟
　　三、新方法
　　1.“可想而知”法:根据字形(形声、会意、象形等)判断词义。
　　2.“藕断丝连”法:从上、下文中找根据,如:对偶、对仗、排比等。
　　3.“身临其境”法:注意语言环境,见:以情解文、以理解文法。
　　4.“切身体验”法:根据自己的生活经验做出判断,如“槛”字的解释过程:
　　补:新感悟
　　(二)从分析到综合
　　这种笔记要求在课后完成，是上课、复习之后，在融会贯通的基础上所做的思考和总结。这种笔记要求三项内容：新知识(又分为语言知识、文学知识、泛文化知识三类)，新方法(包括读法、写法、说话法、听话法，而贯穿其中的是思维方法，是语文的规律)，新感悟(是思想认识的深化，情感态度的激发)。这种笔记是“人人殊”的。你以为什么知识对你来说是新的、重要的，你就总结起来；你领悟到什么新方法，你就概括起来，并且给它一个名目(名不正则言不顺；而且，这种概括的命名，意义极深远)；在“新感悟”一栏，可以赞扬，可以批判，也可以反省，可以思考社会，可以探讨历史，也可以研究人生，每个人都可以自由联想，自由发挥。
　　从王先生的课后笔记上，我们不难体会到王先生对学生主体地位的尊重与内在动机的激发。正是在这种学生主体的意识中，我们才发现，王先生的语文教育思想的全面性和先进性。
　　三、他抓住了语文教学的核心内容
　　语文教育的核心内容是什么？显然不是表面的演员的舞台表演。而是由基础知识、阅读教学、写作教学和能力拓展所构成的一个整体。而其中阅读能力和写作能力无疑又是重中之重。为此王先生在阅读教学的构想方面所费尤多。
　　他不仅探索了阅读教学的基本规律，解析阅读教学的本质特点，更以他对阅读的独到理解，形成了语文教学的一家之言。在他的语文阅读教学体系中，他抛弃了一般的阅读教学模式，而以思维的训练为核心，以阅读方法的引导为内容，从阅读对象的具体确认到具体分析，从整体把握到微观探索，从文内诸要素到文外诸要素等等方面，用文章诸因互解的方式，解决了阅读教学的无法可依，无章可寻的问题。虽然这种方法也仅仅是一家之言，但是在教学诸般阅读教学模式中，无疑也是一枝独秀的。
　　关于这一点，我们可以从王先生构想的《阅读能力分解图》中可见一斑。至少从这个图中，我们可以看到王先生对于阅读教学的体系构建是相当严密的，他的阅读构建不仅思路严谨，层次分明，而且章法得当，可操作性强，可谓简要而高效。如此则避免了目前阅读教学中无章可寻，诸说杂陈的局面。
　　在写作教学中，王先生也秉持了他一贯的注意思维训练的特点。特别注意将学生的认知特点与写作的规律结合起来。如在记叙文写作中，他就比较强调观察与思考的关联，比较重视联想与想象的合理，比较重视质疑与归纳的顺序。在议论文写作中，他更是以“对事物的认识和分析”“论证的方法”“结构”“构思成篇”为依归，充分突出了人的认知心理在写作活动中的重要作用。
　　就笔者的粗浅感受而言，实际上，王先生的语文教育思想相当深厚。比如关于教材建设问题，教师修养问题，文学批评问题，问学与考据问题，等等，王先生都有过精辟的论述。只是限于我们的读解能力有限，仅得其皮毛而已，至于是否稍副王先生的本意，我们也是要心存疑惧的。
　　不当之处处，即乞方家教正。







.

大致说来，王先生的语文教学方法论有以如下几个方面的特点：
　　一、他比较重视教师教法的科学性
　　王先生曾说：
　　我认为，正确的语文教学观是由价值论、思维论、方法论三者构成的有机体系。价值论研究教学的目标的规定性，思维论研究教学教过程的规定性，方法论研究教学方法的规定性。三者互相联系，互相制约。(《我的语文教学观》)
　　为使语文教学的方法更加科学，王先生在多篇文章里探讨了这个问题。比如在《为了使学生更聪明》)一文中，他曾编写了“解词析句”“分析与综合”“个别到一般”“比较归纳”“推论因果”“联想归纳”等六个单元，依序对学生进行了相应的训练。
　　在《努力做到教法与学法的统一》一文中，王先生很郑重地就当前语文界存在的各种不良方法进行了揭示。并且明确提出了“我们追求的是教法与学法的统一”的口号，强调了科学教法的客观性。他说：
　　一切科学的方法，都有客观的依据。凡是没有客观依据的方法一定是靠不住的。读书的方法，来源于“书”的客观存在和“读书人”的客观存在。所以，要指导学生“自能读书”，就不能不研究、尊重这两种客观存在。
　　“法”要尊重客观规律，还有一层意思。目前所倡导、所使用的许多方法，一般是与班级授课、师生互动的条件相适应的。这些法有现实的效应。但不能满足于这个层次，这个阶段。学生毕竟要长大，要独立，要自去读书。所以随着年级的增高，要逐步强化独立读书、独立学习的方法。这才是真正为学生的未来着想，才是真的“人文主义”。
　　为了使自己的教学法更有价值。王先生尝试了教学中的策略思想。他提出：
　　要让学生真能独立读书，还应在阅读教学中增加“策略”思想。比如，“阅读的材料选择”“阅读的问题导向”“阅读的读物配伍”“阅读的循序渐进原则”“阅读的博精相兼原则”“阅读的实践性原则”“阅读的发现性原则”“阅读的创造性原则”“阅读的时间管理”“阅读的快与慢的辩证法”，等等。
　　我们可以这样认为，在目前的语文阅读教学中，王先生对于阅读教学的这一观点是独一无二的。其思考还没有人能出其右者。
　　而在语文教学的方法方面，王先生自己一直比较欣赏的是他尝试的“五子”法，即：“选例子，指路子，做样子，给场子，挂牌子”。
　　选例子，就是要选择最有训练价值的典型例文、例段、例句、例词，等等。这个选择很重要，做得好，可以事半功倍，为提高效率、减轻负担创造了条件。
　　指路子，即通过对典型例子的分析，总结规律，形成方法，训练思路。没有这一步，上升不到规律性的认识，学生的认识不能形成飞跃，所谓思路和方法就无从谈起，就只能停留在“囫囵”和“混沌”。
　　做样子，这是老师的示范动作。你说这样规律、那样方法，这东西灵不灵?怎么用?教师要带头把这规律、方法运用到解决问题的实践中去。这不仅是对规律、方法的验证，也是对实践的一种导引。有了这一步，学生会自觉地去学习。
　　给场子，就是提供实践、练习的机会，就像给练武的人提供场地。有的教科书，例题之后必配有恰切的习题，这一步似乎不难。语文教材常常不是这样，它不怎么揭示规律，也很少有适用的练习题，所以教师要在这方面用些心思。还有一点，这种“给场子”的方针，是和“满堂灌”“满堂问”之类的做法不相容的。
　　挂牌子，就是要对做得好的学生及时奖以“金牌”。这是一种总结，一种激励，对学生心理的成长很有意义。自然，对学习过程中出现的问题也要及时指出，予以订正。
　　为了避免班级授课中个性与共性的冲突。王先生还考虑了教师教学方法的均衡性。他说：
　　教师授课，自然要考虑“一般”水平、“一般”需要，那么如何满足优秀生的较高要求，又如何照顾后进生的较低水平呢?笔者有一个方针：承认差别，提倡个性，鼓励创造。在课堂上，尽量给学生个体活动的时间，在讨论中鼓励发表不同的意见，可以不必“统一”时就不去统一，以便进一步去思考。(《努力做到教法与学法的统一》)
　　正是因为王先生对于语文教学的方法论思考得全面，思考得深入，高瞻远瞩，所以他对于那些不符合语文教学内在规律的现象往往深怀厌恶，常生恨铁不成钢之感。对于那些语文教学活动中的浅豁行为，庸俗态度，恶劣扮相，毫不留情。
　　在他看来，这样的语文教学花哨有余，谨严不足，表演有余，而方法不足。实际上是肤浅有余，深刻不足，无疑是与语文的宗旨相背的。
　　二、他比较重视学生学法的有效性
　　王先生对于学生语文学习的有效性的重视，大致体现在两个方面。一个方面是，在课堂上充分利用教师教学方法的有效性进行学法指导。
　　另一个方面是，用写“课后笔记”的方法对学生进行学法指导。这是一种兼有复习和学习的课后学习方法。其具体的操作模式如下：
　　一、新知识:
　　(一)文学常识
　　(二)字词积累
　　(三)文化常识
　　二、新感悟
　　三、新方法
　　1.“可想而知”法:根据字形(形声、会意、象形等)判断词义。
　　2.“藕断丝连”法:从上、下文中找根据,如:对偶、对仗、排比等。
　　3.“身临其境”法:注意语言环境,见:以情解文、以理解文法。
　　4.“切身体验”法:根据自己的生活经验做出判断,如“槛”字的解释过程:
　　补:新感悟
　　(二)从分析到综合
　　这种笔记要求在课后完成，是上课、复习之后，在融会贯通的基础上所做的思考和总结。这种笔记要求三项内容：新知识(又分为语言知识、文学知识、泛文化知识三类)，新方法(包括读法、写法、说话法、听话法，而贯穿其中的是思维方法，是语文的规律)，新感悟(是思想认识的深化，情感态度的激发)。这种笔记是“人人殊”的。你以为什么知识对你来说是新的、重要的，你就总结起来；你领悟到什么新方法，你就概括起来，并且给它一个名目(名不正则言不顺；而且，这种概括的命名，意义极深远)；在“新感悟”一栏，可以赞扬，可以批判，也可以反省，可以思考社会，可以探讨历史，也可以研究人生，每个人都可以自由联想，自由发挥。
　　从王先生的课后笔记上，我们不难体会到王先生对学生主体地位的尊重与内在动机的激发。正是在这种学生主体的意识中，我们才发现，王先生的语文教育思想的全面性和先进性。
　　三、他抓住了语文教学的核心内容
　　语文教育的核心内容是什么？显然不是表面的演员的舞台表演。而是由基础知识、阅读教学、写作教学和能力拓展所构成的一个整体。而其中阅读能力和写作能力无疑又是重中之重。为此王先生在阅读教学的构想方面所费尤多。
　　他不仅探索了阅读教学的基本规律，解析阅读教学的本质特点，更以他对阅读的独到理解，形成了语文教学的一家之言。在他的语文阅读教学体系中，他抛弃了一般的阅读教学模式，而以思维的训练为核心，以阅读方法的引导为内容，从阅读对象的具体确认到具体分析，从整体把握到微观探索，从文内诸要素到文外诸要素等等方面，用文章诸因互解的方式，解决了阅读教学的无法可依，无章可寻的问题。虽然这种方法也仅仅是一家之言，但是在教学诸般阅读教学模式中，无疑也是一枝独秀的。
　　关于这一点，我们可以从王先生构想的《阅读能力分解图》中可见一斑。至少从这个图中，我们可以看到王先生对于阅读教学的体系构建是相当严密的，他的阅读构建不仅思路严谨，层次分明，而且章法得当，可操作性强，可谓简要而高效。如此则避免了目前阅读教学中无章可寻，诸说杂陈的局面。
　　在写作教学中，王先生也秉持了他一贯的注意思维训练的特点。特别注意将学生的认知特点与写作的规律结合起来。如在记叙文写作中，他就比较强调观察与思考的关联，比较重视联想与想象的合理，比较重视质疑与归纳的顺序。在议论文写作中，他更是以“对事物的认识和分析”“论证的方法”“结构”“构思成篇”为依归，充分突出了人的认知心理在写作活动中的重要作用。
　　就笔者的粗浅感受而言，实际上，王先生的语文教育思想相当深厚。比如关于教材建设问题，教师修养问题，文学批评问题，问学与考据问题，等等，王先生都有过精辟的论述。只是限于我们的读解能力有限，仅得其皮毛而已，至于是否稍副王先生的本意，我们也是要心存疑惧的。
　　不当之处处，即乞方家教正。
It was past midnight now, and in her room, Adrienne held the conch as she sat on the bed. Dan had called an hour earlier, full of news about Amanda.

“She told me she was going to take the boys out tomor-row, just the three of them. That they needed to spend some time with their mom.” He paused. “I don’t know what you said, but I guess whatever it was worked.”

“I’m glad.”

“So what did you say to her?’ She was, you know, kind of circumspect about it.”

“The same thing I’ve been saying all along. The same thing you and Matt have been saying.”

“Then why did she listen to you this time?”

“I guess,” Adrienne said, drawing out the words, “be-cause she finally wanted to.”

Later, after she’d hung up the phone, Adrienne read the letters from Paul, just as she’d known she would. Though

his words were hard to see through her tears, her own words were even harder to read. She’d read those countless times, too, the ones she had written to Paul in the year they’d been apart. Her own letters had been in the second stack, the stack that Mark Flanner had brought with him when he’d come to her house two months after Paul had been buried in Ecuador,

Amanda had forgotten to ask about Mark’s visit before she’d gone, and Adrienne hadn’t reminded her. In time, Amanda might bring it up again, but even now, Adrienne wasn’t sure how much she would say. This was the one part of the story she’d kept entirely to herself over the years, locked away, like the letters. Even her father didn’t know what Paul had done.

In the pale glow of the streetlight shining through her window, Adrienne rose from the bed and took a jacket and scarf from the closet, then walked downstairs. She un-locked the back door and stepped outside.

Stars were blazing like tiny sparkles on a magician’s cape, and the air was moist and cold. In the yard, she could see blackened pools, reflecting the ebony above. Lights shone from neighbors’ windows, and though she knew it was just her imagination, she could almost smell salt in the air, as if sea mist were rolling over the neighborhood yards. Mark had come to the house on a February morning; his arm was still in a sling, but she’d barely noticed it. Instead, she found herself staring at him, unable to turn away. He looked, she thought, exactly like his father. When he of-fered the saddest of smiles as she opened the door, Adri-enne took a small step backward, trying hard to hold back the tears.

They sat at the table, two coffee cups between them, and Mark removed the letters from the bag he’d brought with him.

“He saved them,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do with them, except to bring them to you.”

Adrienne nodded as she took them.

“Thank you for your letter,” she said. “I know how hard it must have been for you to write it.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and for a long time, he was silent. Then, of course, he told her why he’d come.

Now, on the porch, Adrienne smiled as she thought about what Paul had done for her. She remembered going to visit her father in the nursing home after Mark had left, the place her father would never have to leave. As Mark had explained as he’d sat at the table, Paul had already made arrangements for her father to be taken care of there until the end of his days—a gift he had hoped to surprise her with. When she began to protest, Mark made it clear that it would have broken his heart to know that she wouldn’t accept it.

“Please,” he finally said, “it’s what my dad wanted.”

In the years that followed, she would cherish Paul’s final gesture, just as she cherished every memory of the few days they spent together. Paul still meant everything to her, would always mean everything to her, and in the chilly air of a late winter evening, Adrienne knew she would always feel that way.

She’d already lived through more years than she had remaining, but it hadn’t seemed that long. Entire years had slipped from her memory, washed away like sandy foot-prints near the water’s edge. With the exception of the time she’d spent with Paul Flanner, she sometimes be-lieved that she had passed through life with no more awareness than that of a small child on a tong car ride, staring out the window as the scenery rolled past.

She had fallen in love with a stranger in the course of a weekend, and she would never fall in love again. The de-sire to love again had ended on a mountain pass in Ecuador. Paul had died for his son, and in that moment, part of her had died as well.

She wasn’t bitter, though. In the same situation, she knew she would have tried to save her own child as well. Yes, Paul was gone, but he had left her with so much. She’d found love and joy, she’d found a strength she never knew she had, and nothing could ever take those things away.

But all of it was over now, all except the memories, and she’d constructed those with infinite care. They were as real to her as the scene she was staring at now, and blink-ing back the tears that had started falling in the empty darkness of her bedroom, she raised her chin. Staring into the sky, she breathed deeply, listening to the distant and imagined echo of waves as they broke along the shore on a stormy night in Rodanthe
First, the graduate student opens the topic to report that each content, must be realistic, one by one earnestly fills. The expression needs to be clear, rigorously, the handwriting wants easy to distinguish clearly, the loan word needs simultaneously to use the original text and Chinese expresses. First time presents the abbreviation, must pour leaves the full title. two, participate in the topic report appraisal component member, should have above the vice-quality the title. The master's degree graduate student opens the topic to report that appraises the component member not to be short in three people; The doctorate graduate student opens the topic to report that appraises the component member not to be short in five people. Each appraisal component member should have a group leader, the doctorate graduate student opens the topic to report that appraisal group leader should have professor the title. Each appraisal group may have a record operator in addition, the record operator should have above the lecturer (including lecturer) the title, and should be familiar with the corresponding specialty.
Third, opens the topic to report that deals appraises the question which and graduate student's reply the component member proposed gives, the accurate record concretely. After opening the topic reported had ended, by appraises the component member to synthesize appraises component member's opinion, wrote the concrete appraisal conclusion. And verifies after the specialized person in charge signs, reports the graduate faculty to set up a file. in the four, this report, composes by graduate student to the topic and research work's analysis and the description, to the master's degree paper graduate student should many in 3000 characters, to the doctorate paper graduate student should many in 5000 characters. When the second page of later various fences blank space will be insufficient, but will add the page separate. the five, basis paper work's final findings, submit the dissertation the topic to be possible, in this opens in the foundation which the topic reported to have the suitable modification. six, this open the topic report triplicate copy, student individual and teacher keeps one, the discipline keeps one, hands over the graduate faculty to raise manages one to set up a file (besides signature must printing), the graduate faculty is not responsible to inquire.
They had grown up next door to each other, on the fringe of a city, near fields and woods and orchards,  within  sight  of  a lovely bell tower that belonged to a school for the blind.

Now they were twenty, had not seen each other for nearly a year. There had always been playful, comfortable warmth between them, but never any talk of love.

His name was Newt. Her name was Catharine. In the early afternoon, Newt knocked on Catharine’s front door.

Catharine came to the door. She was carrying a fat, glossy magazine she had been reading.The magazine was devoted entirely to brides. “Newt!” she said. She was surprised to see him.

“Could you come for a walk?” he said. He was a shy person, even with Catharine. He covered his shyness by speaking absently as though what really concerned him were far away—as though he were a secret agent pausing briefly on a mission between beautiful, distant, and sinister points. This manner of speaking had always been Newt’s style, even in matters that concerned him desperately.

“A walk?” said Catharine.

“One foot in front of the other,” said Newt, through leaves, over bridges---“ “I had no idea you were in town,” she said.

“Just this minute got in,” he said.

“Still in the Army, I see,” she said.

“Seven months more to go,” he said. He was a private first class in the Artillery. His uniform was rumpled. His shoes were dusty. He needed a shave. He held out his hand for the magazine.

“Let’s see the pretty book,” he said.

She gave it to him. “I’m getting married, Newt,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“I’m awfully busy, Newt,” she said. “The wedding is only a week away.”

“If we go for a walk,” he said, “it will make you rosy. It will make you a rosy bride.” He turned the pages of the magazine. “A rosy bride like her—like her—like her,” he said, showing her rosy brides.

Catharine turned rosy, thinking about rosy brides.

“That will be my present to Henry Stewart Chasens,” said Newt. “By taking you for a walk, I’ll be giving him a rosy bride.”

“You know his name?” she said.

“Mother wrote,” he said. “From Pittsburgh?”

“Yes,” she said. “You’d like him.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Can—can you come to the wedding, Newt?” she said.

“That I doubt,” he said.

“Your furlough isn’t for long enough?” she said.

“Furlough?” said Newt. He was studying a two page ad for flat silver. “I’m not on furlough,” he said.

“Oh?” she said.

“I’m what they call A.W.O.L.[1],” said Newt.

“Oh, Newt! You’re not!” she said.

“Sure I am,” he said, still looking at the magazine.

“Why, Newt?” she said.

“I had to find out what your silver pattern is,” he said. He read names of silver patterns from the magazine. Albemarle? Heather?” he said. “Legend? Rambler rose?” He looked up, smiled. “I plan to give you and your husband a spoon,” he said.

“Newt, Newt—tell me really,” she said.

“I want to go for a walk,” he said.

She wrung her hands in sisterly anguish. “Oh, Newt—you’re fooling me about being A.W.O.L.,” she said.

Newt imitated a police siren softly, and raised his eyebrows.

“Where—where from?”

“Fort Bragg,” he said.

“North Carolina?” she said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Near Fayetteville—where Scarlet O’Hara went to school.”

“How did you get here, Newt?” she said.

He raised his thumb, jerked it in a hitchhike gesture. “Two days,” he said.

“Does your mother know?” she said.

“I didn’t come to see my mother,” he told her.

“Who did you come to see?” she said.

“You,” he said.

“Why me?” she said.

“Because I love you,” he said. “Now can we take a walk?” he said. “One foot in front of the other—through leaves, over bridges—“

They were taking the walk now, were in a woods with a brown-leaf floor.

Catharine was angry and rattled, close to tears. “Newt,” she said, “this is absolutely crazy.”

“How so?” said Newt.

“What a crazy time to tell me you love me,” she said. “You never talked that way before.”

She stopped walking.

“Let’s keep walking,” he said.

“No,” she said. “So far, no farther. I shouldn’t have come out with you at all,” she said.

“You did,” he said.

“To get you out of the house,” she said. “If somebody walked in and heard you talking to me that way, a week before the wedding—“

“What would they think?” he said.

“They’d think you were crazy,” she said.

“Why?” he said

Catharine took a deep breath, made a speech. “Let me say that I’m deeply honored by this crazy thing you’ve done,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re really A.W.O.L., but maybe you are. I can’t believe you really love me, but maybe you do. But—“

“I do,” said Newt.

“Well, I’m deeply honored,” said Catharine, “and I’m very fond of you as a friend, Newt, extremely fond—but it’s just too late.” She took a step away from him. “You’ve never even kissed me,” she said, and she protected herself with her hands. “I don’t mean you should do it now. I just mean that this is all so unexpected. I haven’t got the remotest idea of how to respond.”

“Just walk some more,” he said. “Have a nice time.”

They started walking again.

“How did you expect me to react?” she said.

“How would I know what to expect?” he said. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

Did you think I would throw myself into your arms?” she said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said.

“I’m not disappointed,” he said. “I wasn’t counting on it. This is very nice, just walking.”

Catharine stopped again. “You know what happens next?” she said.

“Nope,” he said.

“We shake hands,” she said. “We shake hands and part friends,” she said. “That’s what happens next.”

Newt nodded. “All right,” he said. “Remember me from time to time. Remember how much I loved you.”

Involuntarily, Catharine burst into tears. She turned her back to Newt, looked into the infinate colonnade of the woods.

“What does that mean?” said Newt.

“Rage!” said Catharine. She clenched her hands. “You have no right—“

“I had to find out,” he said.

“If I’d loved you,” she said, “I would have let you know before now.”

“You would?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. She faced him, looked up at him, her face quite red. “You would have known,” she said.

“How?” he said.

“You would have seen it,” she said. “Women aren’t very clever at hiding it.”

Newt looked closely at Catharine’s face now. To her consternation, she realized that what she had said was true, that a woman couldn’t hide love.

Newt was seeing love now.

And he did what he had to do. He kissed her.

“You’re hell to get along with!” she said when Newt let her go.

“I am?” said Newt.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

“You didn’t like it?” he said.

“What did you expect,” she said—“wild, adandoned passion?”

“I keep telling you,” he said,” I never know what’s going to happen next.”

“We say good-by,” she said.

He frowned slightly. “All right,” he said.

She made another speech. “I’m not sorry we kissed,” she said. “That was sweet. We should have kissed, we’ve been so close. I’ll always remember you , Newt, and good luck.”

“You too,” he said.

“Thirty days,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“Thirty days in the stockade,” he said—“that’s what one kiss will cost me.”

“I—I’m sorry,” she said, “but I didn’t ask you to go A.W.O.L.”

“I know,” he said.

“You certainly don’t deserve any hero’s reward for doing something as foolish as that,” she said.

“Must be nice to be a hero,” said Newt. “Is Henry Stewart Chasens a hero?”

“He might be, if he got the chance,” said Catharine. She noted uneasily that they had begun to walk again. The farewell had been forgotten.

“You really love him?” he said.

“Certainly I love him!” she said hotly. “I wouldn’t marry him if I didn’t love him!”

“What’s good about him?” said Newt.

“Honestly!” she cried, stopping again. “Do you have any idea how offensive you’re being? Many, many, many things are good about Henry! Yes,” she said, “and many, many, many things are probably bad, too. But that isn’t any of your business. I love Henry, and I don’t have to argue his merits with you!”

“Sorry,” said Newt.

“Honestly!” said Catharine.

Newt kissed her again. He kissed her again because she wanted him to.

They were now in a large orchard.

“How did we get so far from home, Newt?” said Catharine.

“One foot in front of the other—through leaves, over bridges,” said Newt.

“They add up—the steps,” she said.

Bells rang in the tower of the school for the blind nearby.

“School for the blind,” said Newt.

“School for the blind,” said Catharine. She shook her head in drowsy wonder. “I’ve got to go back now,” she said.

“Say good-by,” said Newt.

“Every time I do,” said Catharine, “I seem to get kissed.”

Newt sat down on the close-cropped grass under an apple tree. “Sit down,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“I won’t touch you,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

She sat down under another tree, twenty feet away from him. She closed her eyes.

“Dream of Henry Stewart Chasens,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“Dream of your wonderful husband-to-be,” he said.

“All right, I will,” she said. She closed her eyes tighter, caught glimpses of her

husband-to-be.

Newt yawned.

The bees were humming in the trees, and Catharine almost fell asleep. When she opened her eyes she saw that Newt really was asleep.

He began to snore softly.

Catharine let him sleep for an hour, and while he slept she adored him with all her heart.

The shadows of the apple trees grew to the east. The bells in the tower of the school for the blind rang again.

“*chick-a-dee-dee-dee*,” went a chickadee.

Somewhere far away an automobile started nagged and failed, nagged and failed, fell still.

Catharine came out from under her tree, knelt by Newt.

“Newt?” she said.

“H’m?” he said. He opened his eyes.

“Late,” she said.

“Hello, Catharine,” he said.

“Hello, Newt,” she said.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“Too late,” he said.

“Too late,” she said.

He stood, stretched groaningly. “A very nice walk,” he said.

“I thought so,” she said.

“Part company here?” he said.

“Where will you go?” she said.

“Hitch into town, turn myself in,” he said.

“Good luck,” she said.

“You too,” he said. “Marry me, Catharine?”

“No,” she said.

He smiled, stared at her hard for a moment, then walked away quickly.

Catharine watched him grow smaller in the long perspective of shadows and trees, knew that if he stopped and turned now, if he called to her, she would run to him. She would have no choice.

Newt did stop. He did turn. He did call. “Catharine,” he called. She ran to him, put her arms aroud him, could not speak







37


I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but Ms accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.



Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning - yes, meaning -something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.



And there are so many stories to tell,-too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.



(The sheet, incidentally, is stained too, with three drops of old, faded redness. As the Quran tells us: Recite, in the name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.)



One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray.



Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies.



Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history.



Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes.



The world was new again. After a winter's gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow. The new grass bided its time underground; the mountains were retreating to their hill-stations for the warm season. (In the winter, when the valley shrank under the ice, the mountains closed in and snarled like angry jaws around the city on the lake.)



In those days the radio mast had not been built and the temple of Sankara Acharya, a little black blister on a khaki hill, still dominated the streeets and lake of Srinagar. In those days there was no army camp at the lakeside, no endless snakes of camouflaged trucks and jeeps clogged the narrow mountain roads, no soldiers hid behind the crests of the mountains past Baramulla and Gulmarg. In those days travellers were not shot as spies if they took photographs of bridges, and apart from the Englishmen's houseboats on the lake, the valley had hardly changed since the Mughal Empire, for all its springtime renewals; but my grandfather's eyes - which were, like the rest of him, twenty-five years old - saw things differently ... and his nose had started to itch.




To reveal the secret of my grandfather's altered vision: he had spent five years, five springs, away from home. (The tussock of earth, crucial though its presence was as it crouched under a chance wrinkle of the prayer-mat, was at bottom no more than a catalyst.) Now, returning, he saw through travelled eyes.



Instead of the beauty of the tiny valley circled by giant teeth, he noticed the narrowness, the proximity of the horizon; and felt sad, to be at home and feel so utterly enclosed. He also felt - inexplicably - as though the old place resented his educated, stethoscoped return. Beneath the winter ice, it had been coldly neutral, but now there was no doubt; the years in Germany had returned him to a hostile environment. Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up with hate, and he came to sacrifice himself at the shrine of the black stone god in the temple on the hill, he would try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise, the way it was before travel and tussocks and army tanks messed everything up.



On the morning when the valley, gloved in a prayer-mat, punched him on the nose, he had been trying, absurdly, to pretend that nothing had changed. So he had risen in the bitter cold of four-fifteen, washed himself in the prescribed fashion, dressed and put on his father's astrakhan cap; after which he had carried the rolled cheroot of the prayer-mat into the small lakeside garden in front of their old dark house and unrolled it over the waiting tussock. The ground felt deceptively soft under his feet and made him simultaneously uncertain and unwary. 'In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful ...'



- the exordium, spoken with hands joined before him like a book, comforted a part of him, made another, larger part feel uneasy - "... Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Creation ..." - but now Heidelberg invaded his head; here was Ingrid, briefly his Ingrid, her face scorning him for this Mecca-turned parroting; here, their friends Oskar and Ilse Lubin the anarchists, mocking his prayer with their anti-ideologies -'... The Compassionate, the Merciful, King of the Last Judgment!...' - Heidelberg, in which, along with medicine and politics, he learned that India - like radium - had been 'discovered' by the Europeans; even Oskar was filled with admiration for Vasco da Gama, and this was what finally separated Aadam Aziz from his friends, this belief of theirs that he was somehow the invention of their ancestors - "... You alone we worship, and to You alone we pray for help ..." - so here he was, despite their presence in his head, attempting to re-unite himself with an earlier self which ignored their influence but knew everything it ought to have known, about submission for example, about what he was doing now, as his hands, guided by old memories, fluttered upwards, thumbs pressed to ears, fingers spread, as he sank to his knees - '... Guide us to the straight path, The path of those whom You have favoured ...' But it was no good, he was caught in a strange middle ground, trapped between belief and disbelief, and this was only a charade after all - '... Not of those who have incurred Your wrath, Nor of those who have gone astray.' My grandfather bent his forehead towards the earth. Forward he bent, and the earth, prayer-mat-covered, curved up towards him. And now it was the tussock's time. At one and the same time a rebuke from Ilse-Oskar-Ingrid-Heidelberg as well as valley-and-God, it smote him upon the point of the nose. Three drops fell. There were rubies and diamonds. And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood. Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.



The young, newly-qualified Doctor Aadam Aziz stood facing the springtime lake, sniffing the whiffs of change; while his back (which was extremely straight) was turned upon yet more changes. His father had had a stroke in his absence abroad, and his mother had kept it a secret. His mother's voice, whispering stoically: '... Because your studies were too important, son.' This mother, who had spent her life housebound, in purdah, had suddenly found enormous strength and gone out to run the small gemstone business (turquoises, rubies, diamonds) which had put Aadam through medical college, with the help of a scholarship; so he returned to find the seemingly immutable order of his family turned upside down, his mother going out to work while his father sat hidden behind the veil which the stroke had dropped over his brain ... in a wooden chair, in a darkened room, he sat and made bird-noises. Thirty different species of birds visited him and sat on the sill outside his shuttered window conversing about this and that. He seemed happy enough.



(... And already I can see the repetitions beginning; because didn't my grandmother also find enormous ... and the stroke, too, was not the only ... and the Brass Monkey had her birds ... the curse begins already, and we haven't even got to the noses yet!)



The lake was no longer frozen over. The thaw had come rapidly, as usual; many of the small boats, the shikaras, had been caught napping, which was also normal.



But while these sluggards slept on, on dry land, snoring peacefully beside their owners, the oldest boat was up at the crack as old folk often are, and was therefore the first craft to move across the unfrozen lake. Tai's shikara ...this, too, was customary.



Watch how the old boatman, Tai, makes good time through the misty water, standing stooped over at the back of his craft! How his oar, a wooden heart on a yellow stick, drives jerkily through the weeds! In these parts he's considered very odd because he rows standing up... among other reasons. Tai, bringing an urgent summons to Doctor Aziz, is about to set history in motion... while Aadam, looking down into the water, recalls what Tai taught him years ago: "The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba, just under the water's skin.' Aadam's eyes are a clear blue, the astonishing blue of mountain sky, which has a habit of dripping into the pupils of Kashmir! men; they have not forgotten how to look. They see - there! like the skeleton of a ghost, just beneath the surface of Lake Dali - the delicate tracery, the intricate crisscross of colourless lines, the cold waiting veins of the future. His German years, which have blurred so much else, haven't deprived him of the gift of seeing. Tai's gift. He looks up, sees the approaching V of Tai's boat, waves a greeting. Tai's arm rises - but this is a command. 'Wait!' My grandfather waits; and during this hiatus, as he experiences the last peace of his life, a muddy, ominous sort of peace, I had better get round to describing him.



Keeping out of my voice the natural envy of the ugly man for the strikingly impressive, I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. Pressed flat against a wall of his family home, he measured twenty-five bricks (a brick for each year of his life), or just over six foot two. A strong man also. His beard was thick and red - and annoyed his mother, who said only Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had said, They went mad with the colours when they made your face.' But the central feature of my grandfather's anatomy was neither colour nor height, neither strength of arm nor straightness of back. There it was, reflected in the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face... Aadam Aziz, waiting for Tai, watches his rippling nose. It would have dominated less dramatic faces than his easily; even on him, it is what one sees first and remembers longest. 'A cyranose,' Ilse Lubin said, and Oskar added, 'A proboscissimus.' Ingrid announced, 'You could cross a river on that nose.' (Its bridge was wide.)



My grandfather's nose: nostrils flaring, curvaceous as dancers. Between them swells the nose's triumphal arch, first up and out, then down and under, sweeping in to his upper lip with a superb and at present red-tipped flick. An easy nose to hit a tussock with. I wish to place on record my gratitude to this mighty organ - if not for it, who would ever have believed me to be truly my mother's son, my grandfather's grandson? - this colossal apparatus which was to be my birthright, too. Doctor Aziz's nose - comparable only to the trunk of the elephant-headed god Ganesh - established incontrovertibly his right to be a patriarch. It was Tai who taught him that, too. When young Aadam was barely past puberty the dilapidated boatman said, That's a nose to start a family on, my princeling. There'd be no mistaking whose brood they were. Mughal Emperors would have given their right hands for noses like that one. There are dynasties waiting inside it,' - and here Tai lapsed into coarseness - 'like snot.'



On Aadam Aziz, the nose assumed a patriarchal aspect. On my mother, it looked noble and a little long-suffering; on my aunt Emerald, snobbish; on my aunt Alia, intellectual; on my uncle Hanif it was the organ of an unsuccessful genius; my uncle Mustapha made it a second-rater's sniffer; the Brass Monkey escaped it completely; but on me - on me, it was something else again. But I mustn't reveal all my secrets at once.



(Tai is getting nearer. He, who revealed the power of the nose, and who is now bringing my grandfather the message which will catapult him into his future, is stroking his shikara through the early morning lake ...)



Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been plying this same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen Lakes ...forever. As far as anyone knew. He lived somewhere in the insanitary bowels of the old wooden-house quarter and his wife grew lotus roots and other curious vegetables on one of the many 'floating gardens' lilting on the surface of the spring and summer water. Tai himself cheerily admitted he had no idea of his age. Neither did his wife - he was, she said, already leathery when they married. His face was a sculpture of wind on water: ripples made of hide. He had two golden teeth and no others. In the town, he had few friends. Few boatmen or traders invited him to share a hookah when he floated past the shikara moorings or one of the lakes' many ramshackle, waterside provision-stores and tea-shops.



The general opinion of Tai had been voiced long ago by Aadam Aziz's father the gemstone merchant: 'His brain fell out with his teeth.' (But now old Aziz sahib sat lost in bird tweets while Tai simply, grandly, continued.) It was an impression the boatman fostered by his chatter, which was fantastic, grandiloquent and ceaseless, and as often as not addressed only to himself.



Sound carries over water, and the lake people giggled at his monologues; but with undertones of awe, and even fear. Awe, because the old halfwit knew the lakes and hills better than any of his detractors; fear, because of his claim to an antiquity so immense it defied numbering, and moreover hung so lightly round his chicken's neck that it hadn't prevented him from winning a highly desirable wife and fathering four sons upon her... and a few more, the story went, on other lakeside wives. The young bucks at the shikara moorings were convinced he had a pile of money hidden away somewhere - a hoard, perhaps, of priceless golden teeth, rattling in a sack like walnuts. Years later, when Uncle Puffs tried to sell me his daughter by offering to have her teeth drawn and replaced in gold, I thought of Tai's forgotten treasure... and, as a child, Aadam Aziz had loved him.



He made his living as a simple ferryman, despite all the rumours of wealth, taking hay and goats and vegetables and wood across the lakes for cash; people, too. When he was running his taxi-service he erected a pavilion in the centre of the shikara, a gay affair of flowered-patterned curtains and canopy, with cushions to match; and deodorised his boat with incense. The sight of Tai's shikara approaching, curtains flying, had always been for Doctor Aziz one of the defining images of the coming of spring. Soon the English sahibs would arrive and Tai would ferry them to the Shalimar Gardens and the King's Spring, chattering and pointy and stooped. He was the living antithesis of Oskar-Ilse-Ingrid's belief in the inevitability of change... a quirky, enduring familiar spirit of the valley. A watery Caliban, rather too fond of cheap Kashmiri brandy.



Memory of my blue bedroom wall: on which, next to the P.M.'s letter, the Boy Raleigh hung for many years, gazing rapturously at an old fisherman in what looked like a red dhoti, who sat on - what? -driftwood? - and pointed out to sea as he told his fishy tales... and the Boy Aadam, my grandfather-to-be, fell in love with the boatman Tai precisely because of the endless verbiage which made others think him cracked. It was magical talk, words pouring from him like fools' money, past Ms two gold teeth, laced with hiccups and brandy, soaring up to the most remote Himalayas of the past, then swooping shrewdly on some present detail, Aadam's nose for instance, to vivisect its meaning like a mouse. TMs friendship had plunged Aadam into hot water with great regularity. (Boiling water. Literally. While his mother said, 'We'll kill that boatman's bugs if it kills you.') But still the old soliloquist would dawdle in Ms boat at the garden's lakeside toes and Aziz would sit at Ms feet until voices summoned Mm indoors to be lectured on Tai's filthiness and warned about the pillaging armies of germs Ms mother envisaged leaping from that hospitably ancient body on to her son's starched white loose-pajamas. But always Aadam returned to the water's edge to scan the mists for the ragged reprobate's hunched-up frame steering its magical boat through the enchanted waters of the morning.



'But how old are you really, Taiji?' (Doctor Aziz, adult, redbearded, slanting towards the future, remembers the day he asked the unaskable question.) For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall. The monologue, interrupted. Slap of oar in water. He was riding in the shikara with Tai, squatting amongst goats, on a pile of straw, in full knowledge of the stick and bathtub waiting for him at home. He had come for stories - and with one question had silenced the storyteller.



'No, tell, Taiji, how old, truly? And now a brandy bottle, materialising from nowhere: cheap liquor from the folds of the great warm chugha-coat. Then a shudder, a belch, a glare. Glint of gold. And - at last! - speech. 'How old? You ask how old, you little wet-head, you nosey ...' Tai, forecasting the fisherman on my wall, pointed at the mountains. 'So old, nakkoo!' Aadam, the nakkoo, the nosey one, followed his pointing finger. 'I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die. Listen. Listen, nakkoo ...' - the brandy bottle again, followed by brandy-voice, and words more intoxicating than booze -'... I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. Once I knew where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year. Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can't read.' Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping hand. Which sweeps again to chugha-pocket, to brandy bottle, to lips chapped with cold. Tai always had woman's lips. 'Nakkoo, listen, listen. I have seen plenty. Yara, you should've seen that Isa when he came, beard down to his balls, bald as an egg on his head. He was old and fagged-out but he knew his manners. "You first, Taiji," he'd say, and "Please to sit"; always a respectful tongue, he never called me crackpot, never called me tu either. Always aap. Polite, see? And what an appetite! Such a hunger, I would catch my ears in fright. Saint or devil, I swear he could eat a whole kid in one go. And so what? I told him, eat, fill your hole, a man comes to Kashmir to enjoy life, or to end it, or both. His work was finished. He just came up here to live it up a little.' Mesmerized by this brandied portrait of a bald, gluttonous Christ, Aziz listened, later repeating every word to the consternation of his parents, who dealt in stones and had no time for 'gas'.



'Oh, you don't believe?' - licking his sore lips with a grin, knowing it to be the reverse of the truth; 'Your attention is wandering?' - again, he knew how furiously Aziz was hanging on his words. 'Maybe the straw is pricking your behind, hey? Oh, I'm so sorry, babaji, not to provide for you silk cushions with gold brocade-work - cushions such as the Emperor Jehangir sat upon! You think of the Emperor Jehangir as a gardener only, no doubt,' Tai accused my grandfather, 'because he built Shalimar. Stupid! What do you know? His name meant Encompasser of the Earth. Is that a gardener's name? God knows what they teach you boys these days. Whereas I' ... puffing up a little here ..'I knew his precise weight, to the tola! Ask me how many maunds, how many seers! When he was happy he got heavier and in Kashmir he was heaviest of all. I used to carry his litter... no, no, look, you don't believe again, that big cucumber in your face is waggling like the little one in your pajamas! So, come on, come on, ask me questions! Give examination! Ask how many times the leather thongs wound round the handles of the litter - the answer is thirty-one. Ask me what was the Emperor's dying word - I tell you it was "Kashmir". He had bad breath and a good heart. Who do you think I am? Some common ignorant lying pie-dog? Go, get out of the boat now, your nose makes it too heavy to row; also your father is waiting to beat my gas out of you, and your mother to boil off your skin.'



In the brandy bottle of the boatman Tai I see, foretold, my own father's possession by djinns ... and there will be another bald foreigner ... and Tai's gas prophesies another kind, which was the consolation of my grandmother's old age, and taught her stories, too ... and pie-dogs aren't far away ... Enough.



I'm frightening myself. Despite beating and boiling, Aadam Aziz floated with Tai in his shikara, again and again, amid goats hay flowers furniture lotus-roots, though never with the English sahibs, and heard again and again the miraculous answers to that single terrifying question: 'But Taiji, how old are you, honestly?



From Tai, Aadam learned the secrets of the lake - where you could swim without being pulled down by weeds; the eleven varieties of water-snake; where the frogs spawned; how to cook a lotus-root; and where the three English women had drowned a few years back. There is a tribe of feringhee women who come to this water to drown,' Tai said. 'Sometimes they know it, sometimes they don't, but I know the minute I smell them. They hide under the water from God knows what or who - but they can't hide from me, baba!' Tai's laugh, emerging to infect Aadam - a huge, booming laugh that seemed macabre when it crashed out of that old, withered body, but which was so natural in my giant grandfather that nobody knew, in later times, that it wasn't really his (my uncle Hanif inherited this laugh; so until he died, a piece of Tai lived in Bombay). And, also from Tai, my grandfather heard about noses.



Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you. If they don't get on, you feel it here. Then you rub your nose with embarrassment to make the itch go away. A nose like that, little idiot, is a great gift. I say: trust it. When it warns you, look out or you'll be finished. Follow your nose and you'll go far.' He cleared his throat; his eyes rolled away into the mountains of the past. Aziz settled back on the straw. 'I knew one officer once - in the army of that Iskandar the Great. Never mind his name. He had a vegetable just like yours hanging between his eyes. When the army halted near Gandhara, he fell in love with some local floozy. At once his nose itched like crazy. He scratched it, but that was useless. He inhaled vapours from crushed boiled eucalyptus leaves. Still no good, baba! The itching sent him wild; but the damn fool dug in his heels and stayed with his little witch when the army went home. He became - what? - a stupid thing, neither this nor that, a half-and-halfer with a nagging wife and an itch in the nose, and in the end he pushed his sword into his stomach. What do you think of that?'



...Doctor Aziz in 1915, whom rubies and diamonds have turned into a half-and-halfer, remembers this story as Tai enters hailing distance. His nose is itching still. He scratches, shrugs, tosses his head; and then Tai shouts.



'Ohe! Doctor Sahib! Ghani the landowner's daughter is sick.'



The message, delivered curtly, shouted unceremoniously across the surface of the lake although boatman and pupil have not met for half a decade, mouthed by woman's lips that are not smiling in long-time-no-see greeting, sends time into a speeding, whirligig, blurry fluster of excitement...



...'Just think, son,' Aadam's mother is saying as she sips fresh lime water, reclining on a takht in an attitude of resigned exhaustion, 'how life does turn out. For so many years even my ankles were a secret, and now I must be stared at by strange persons who are not even family members.'



...While Ghani the landowner stands beneath a large oil painting of Diana the Huntress, framed in squiggly gold. He wears thick dark glasses and his famous poisonous smile, and discussed art. 'I purchased it from an Englishman down on his luck, Doctor Sahib. Five hundred rupees only - and I did not trouble to beat him down. What are five hundred chips? You see, I am a lover of culture.'



... 'See, my son,' Aadam's mother is saying as he begins to examine her, 'what a mother will not do for her child. Look how I suffer. You are a doctor... feel these rashes, these blotchy bits, understand that my head aches morning noon and night. Refill my glass, child.'



... But the young Doctor has entered the throes of a most un-hippocratic excitement at the boatman's cry, and shouts, 'I'm coming just now! Just let me bring my things!' The shikara's prow touches the garden's hem. Aadam is rushing indoors, prayer-mat rolled like cheroot under one arm, blue eyes blinking in the sudden interior gloom; he has placed the cheroot on a high shelf on top of stacked copies of Vorwarts and Lenin's What Is To Be Done? and other pamphlets, dusty echoes of his half-faded German life; he is pulling out, from under his bed, a second-hand leather case which his mother called his 'doctori-attache', and as he swings it and himself upwards and runs from the room, the word HEIDELBERG is briefly visible, burned into the leather on the bottom of the bag.



A landowner's daughter is good news indeed to a doctor with a career to make, even if she is ill. No: because she is ill.



... While I sit like an empty pickle jar in a pool of Anglepoised light, visited by this vision of my grandfather sixty-three years ago, which demands to be recorded, filling my nostrils with the acrid stench of his mother's embarrassment which has brought her out in boils, with the . vinegary force of Aadam Aziz's determination to establish a practice so successful that she'll never have to return to the gemstone-shop, with the blind mustiness of a big shadowy house in which the young Doctor stands, ill-at-ease, before a painting of a plain girl with lively eyes and a stag transfixed behind her on the horizon, speared by a dart from her bow. Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air ... everything, and not just the few clues one stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed.



... Aadam refills his mother's glass and continues, worriedly, to examine her.



Tut some cream on these rashes and blotches, Amma. .. For the headache, there are pills. The boils must be lanced. But maybe if you wore purdah when you sat in the store... so that no disrespectful eyes could ... such complaints often begin in the mind ...'



... Slap of oar in water. Plop of spittle in lake. Tai clears his throat and mutters angrily, 'A fine business. A wet-head nakkoo child goes away before he's learned one damn thing and he comes back a big doctor sahib with a big bag full of foreign machines, and he's still as silly as an owl. I swear: a too bad business.'



... Doctor Aziz is shifting uneasily, from foot to foot, under the influence of the landowner's smile, in whose presence it is not possible to feel relaxed; and is waiting for some tic of reaction to his own extraordinary appearance. He has grown accustomed to these involuntary twitches of surprise at his size, his face of many colours, his nose ... but Ghani makes no sign, and the young Doctor resolves, in return, not to let his uneasiness show. He stops shifting his weight. They face each other, each suppressing (or so it seems) his view of the other, establishing the basis of their future relationship. And now Ghani alters, changing from an art-lover to tough-guy. 'This is a big chance for you, young man,' he says. Aziz's eyes have strayed to Diana. Wide expanses of her blemished pink skin are visible.



... His mother is moaning, shaking her head. 'No, what do you know, child, you have become a big-shot doctor but the gemstone business is different. Who would buy a turquoise from a woman hidden inside a black hood? It is a question of establishing trust. So they must look at me; and I must get pains and boils. Go, go, don't worry your head about your poor mother.'



... 'Big shot,' Tai is spitting into the lake, 'big bag, big shot. Pah! We haven't got enough bags at home that you must bring back that thing made of a pig's skin that makes one unclean just by looking at it? And inside, God knows what all.' Doctor Aziz, seated amongst flowery curtains and the smell of incense, has his thoughts wrenched away from the patient waiting across the lake. Tai's bitter monologue breaks into his consciousness, creating a sense of dull shock, a smell like a casualty ward overpowering the incense... the old man is clearly furious about something, possessed by an incomprehensible rage that appears to be directed at his erstwhile acolyte, or, more precisely and oddly,



at his bag. Doctor Aziz attempts to make small talk... 'Your wife is well? Do they still talk about your bag of golden teeth?'... tries to remake an old friendship; but Tai is in full flight now, a stream of invective pouring out of him. The Heidelberg bag quakes under the torrent of abuse. 'Sistersleeping pigskin bag from Abroad full of foreigners' tricks. Big-shot bag. Now if a man breaks an arm that bag will not let the bone-setter bind it in leaves. Now a man must let his wife lie beside that bag and watch knives come and cut her open. A fine business, what these foreigners put in our young men's heads. I swear: it is a too-bad thing. That bag should fry in Hell with the testicles of the ungodly.'



... Ghani the landowner snaps his braces with his thumbs. 'A big chance, yes indeed. They are saying good things about you in town. Good medical training.



Good... good enough... family. And now our own lady doctor is sick so you get your opportunity. That woman, always sick these days, too old, I am thinking, and not up in the latest developments also, what-what? I say: physician heal thyself. And I tell you this: I am wholly objective in my business relations.



Feelings, love, I keep for my family only. If a person is not doing a first-class job for me, out she goes! You understand me? So: my daughter Naseem is not well. You will treat her excellently. Remember I have friends; and ill-health strikes high and low alike.'



... 'Do you still pickle water-snakes in brandy to give you virility, Taiji? Do you still like to eat lotus-root without any spices?' Hesitant questions, brushed aside by the torrent of Tai's fury. Doctor Aziz begins to diagnose. To the ferryman, the bag represents Abroad; it is the alien thing, the invader, progress. And yes, it has indeed taken possession of the young Doctor's mind; and yes, it contains knives, and cures for cholera and malaria and smallpox; and yes, it sits between doctor and boatman, and has made them antagonists. Doctor Aziz begins to fight, against sadness, and against Tai's anger, which is beginning to infect him, to become his own, which erupts only rarely, but comes, when it does come, unheralded in a roar from bis deepest places, laying waste everything in sight; and then vanishes, leaving him wondering why everyone is so upset ... They are approaching Ghani's house. A bearer awaits the shikara, standing with clasped hands on a little wooden jetty. Aziz fixes his mind on the job in hand.



... 'Has your usual doctor agreed to my visit, Ghani Sahib?' ... Again, a hesitant question is brushed lightly aside. The landowner says, 'Oh, she will agree. Now follow me, please.'



... The bearer is waiting on the jetty. Holding the shikara steady as Aadam Aziz climbs out, bag in hand. And now, at last, Tai speaks directly to my grandfather. Scorn in his face, Tai asks, 'Tell me this, Doctor Sahib: have you got in that bag made of dead pigs one of those machines that foreign doctors use to smell with?' Aadam shakes his head, not understanding. Tai's voice gathers new layers of disgust. 'You know, sir, a thing like an elephant's trunk.' Aziz, seeing what he means, replies: 'A stethoscope? Naturaly.' Tai pushes the shikara off from the jetty. Spits. Begins to row away. 'I knew it,' he says. 'You will use such a machine now, instead of your own big nose.'



My grandfather does not trouble to explain that a stethoscope is more like a pair of ears than & nose. He is stifling his own irritation, the resentful anger of a cast-off child; and besides, there is a patient waiting. Time settles down and concentrates on the importance of the moment.



The house was opulent but badly lit. Ghani was a widower and the servants clearly took advantage. There were cobwebs in corners and layers of dust on ledges. They walked down a long corridor; one of the doors was ajar and through it Aziz saw a room in a state of violent disorder. This glimpse, connected with a glint of light in Ghani's dark glasses, suddenly informed Aziz that the landowner was blind. This aggravated his sense of unease: a blind man who claimed to appreciate European paintings? He was, also, impressed, because Ghani hadn't bumped into anything... they halted outside a thick teak door. Ghani said, 'Wait here two moments,' and went into the room behind the door.



In later years, Doctor Aadam Aziz swore that during those two moments of solitude in the gloomy spidery corridors of the landowner's mansion he was gripped by an almost uncontrollable desire to turn and run away as fast as his legs would carry him. Unnerved by the enigma of the blind art-lover, his insides filled with tiny scrabbling insects as a result of the insidious venom of Tai's mutterings, his nostrils itching to the point of convincing him that he had somehow contracted venereal disease, he felt his feet begin slowly, as though encased in boots of lead, to turn; felt blood pounding in his temples; and was seized by so powerful a sensation of standing upon a point of no return that he very nearly wet his German woollen trousers. He began, without knowing it, to blush furiously; and at this point his mother appeared before him, seated on the floor before a low desk, a rash spreading like a blush across her face as she held a turquoise up to the light. His mother's face had acquired all the scorn of the boatman Tai. 'Go, go, run,' she told him in Tai's voice, 'Don't worry about your poor old mother.' Doctor Aziz found himself stammering, 'What a useless son you've got, Amma; can't you see there's a hole in the middle of me the size of a melon?' His mother smiled a pained smile. 'You always were a heartless boy,' she sighed, and then turned into a lizard on the wall of the corridor and stuck her tongue out at him. Doctor Aziz stopped feeling dizzy, became unsure that he'd actually spoken aloud, wondered what he'd meant by that business about the hole, found that his feet were no longer trying to escape, and realized that he was being watched. A woman with the biceps of a wrestler was staring at him, beckoning him to follow her into the room. The state of her sari told him that she was a servant; but she was not servile. 'You look green as a fish,' she said. 'You young doctors. You come into a strange house and your liver turns tojelly. Come, Doctor Sahib, they are waiting for you.' Clutching his bag a fraction too tightly, he followed her through the dark teak door.



... Into a spacious bedchamber that was as ill-lit as the rest of the house; although here there were shafts of dusty sunlight seeping in through a fanlight high on one wall. These fusty rays illuminated a scene as remarkable as anything the Doctor had ever witnessed: a tableau of such surpassing strangeness that his feet began to twitch towards the door once again. Two more women, also built like professional wrestlers, stood stiffly in the light, each holding one corner of an enormous white bedsheet, their arms raised high above their heads so that the sheet hung between them like a curtain. Mr Ghani welled up out of the murk surrounding the sunlit sheet and permitted the nonplussed Aadam to stare stupidly at the peculiar tableau for perhaps half a minute, at the end of which, and before a word had been spoken, the Doctor made a discovery: In the very centre of the sheet, a hole had been cut, a crude circle about seven inches in diameter.



'Close the door, ayah,' Ghani instructed the first of the lady wrestlers, and then, turning to Aziz, became confidential. This town contains many good-for-nothings who have on occasion tried to climb into my daughter's room.



She needs,' he nodded at the three musclebound women, 'protectors.'



Aziz was still looking at the perforated sheet. Ghani said, 'All right, come on, you will examine my Naseem right now. Pronto.'



My grandfather peered around the room. 'But where is she, Ghani Sahib?' he blurted out finally. The lady wrestlers adopted supercilious expressions and, it seemed to him, tightened their musculatures, just in case he intended to try something fancy.



'Ah, I see your confusion,' Ghani said, his poisonous smile broadening, 'You Europe-returned chappies forget certain things. Doctor Sahib, my daughter is a decent girl, it goes without saying. She does not flaunt her body under the noses of strange men. You will understand that you cannot be permitted to see her, no, not in any circumstances; accordingly I have required her to be positioned behind that sheet. She stands there, like a good girl.'



A frantic note had crept into Doctor Aziz's voice. 'Ghani Sahib, tell me how I am to examine her without looking at her?' Ghani smiled on.



'You will kindly specify which portion of my daughter it is necessary to inspect. I will then issue her with my instructions to place the required segment against that hole which you see there. And so, in this fashion the thing may be achieved.'



'But what, in any event, does the lady complain of?' - my grandfather, despairingly. To which Mr Ghani, his eyes rising upwards in their sockets, his smile twisting into a grimace of grief, replied: 'The poor child! She has a terrible, a too dreadful stomachache.'



'In that case,' Doctor Aziz said with some restraint, 'will she show me her stomach, please.





38








Padma - our plump Padma - is sulking magnificently. (She can't read and, like all fish-lovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she doesn't. Padma: strong, jolly, a consolation for my last days. But definitely a bitch-in-the-manger.) She attempts to cajole me from my desk: 'Eat, na, food is spoiling.' I remain stubbornly hunched over paper. 'But what is so precious,'

Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air updownup in exasperation, 'to need all this writing-shiting?' I reply: now that I've let out the details of my birth, now that the perforated sheet stands between doctor and patient, there's no going back. Padma snorts. Wrist smacks against forehead. 'Okay, starve starve, who cares two pice?' Another louder, conclusive snort... but I take no exception to her attitude. She stirs a bubbling vat all day for a living; something hot and vinegary has steamed her up tonight. Thick of waist, somewhat hairy of forearm, she flounces, gesticulates, exits. Poor Padma. Things are always getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told her, when she was only small, that she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is 'The One Who Possesses Dung'.



In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a little of turmeric, ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air - just as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten up by curiosity, used to do night after night! I'll begin at once: by revealing that my grandfather's premonitions in the corridor were not without foundation. In the succeeding months and years, he fell under what I can only describe as the sorcerer's spell of that enormous - and as yet unstained - perforated cloth.



'Again?' Aadam's mother said, rolling her eyes. 'I tell you, my child, that girl is so sickly from too much soft living only. Too much sweetmeats and spoiling, because of the absence of a mother's firm hand. But go, take care of your invisible patient, your mother is all right with her little nothing of a headache.'



In those years, you see, the landowner's daughter Naseem Ghani contracted a quite extraordinary number of minor illnesses, and each time a shikara wallah was despatched to summon the tall young Doctor sahib with the big nose who was making such a reputation for himself in the valley. Aadam Aziz's visits to the bedroom with the shaft of sunlight and the three lady wrestlers became weekly events; and on each occasion he was vouchsafed a glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of the young woman's body. Her initial stomach-ache was succeeded by a very slightly twisted right ankle, an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of the left foot, a tiny cut on the lower left calf.



Tetanus is'a killer, Doctor Sahib,' the landowner said, 'My Naseem must not die for a scratch.') There was the matter of her stiff right knee, which the Doctor was obliged to manipulate through the hole in the sheet ... and after a time the illnesses leapt upwards, avoiding certain unmentionable zones, and began to proliferate around her upper half. She suffered from something mysterious which her father called Finger Rot, which made the skin flake off her hands; from weakness of the wrist-bones, for which Aadam prescribed calcium tablets; and from attacks of constipation, for which he gave her a course of laxatives, since there was no question of being permitted to administer an enema. She had fevers and she also had subnormal temperatures. At these times his thermometer would be placed under her armpit and he would hum and haw about the relative inefficiency of the method. In the opposite armpit she once developed a slight case of tineachloris and he dusted her with yellow powder; after this treatment - which required him to rub the powder in, gently but firmly, although the soft secret body began to shake and quiver and he heard helpless laughter coming through the sheet, because Naseem Ghani was very ticklish - the itching went away, but Naseem soon I found a new set of complaints. She waxed anaemic in the summer and bronchial in the winter. ('Her tubes are most delicate,' Ghani explained, 'like little flutes.') Far away the Great War moved from crisis to crisis, while in the cobwebbed house Doctor Aziz was also engaged in a total war against his sectioned patient's inexhaustible complaints. And, in all those war years, Naseem never repeated an illness. 'Which only shows,' Ghani told Mm, 'that you are a good doctor. When you cure, she is cured for good. But alas!' - he struck his forehead - 'She pines for her late mother, poor baby, and her body suffers.



She is a too loving child.'



So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination, she accompanied him on all his rounds, she moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of the ankles; he could smell her scent of lavender and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little girl; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face.



His mother by on her bed, spreadeagled on her stomach. 'Come, come and press me,' she said, 'my doctor son whose fingers can soothe his old mother's muscles.



Press, press, my child with his expression of a constipated goose.' He kneaded her shoulders. She grunted, twitched, relaxed. 'Lower now,' she said, 'now higher. To the right. Good. My brilliant son who cannot see what that Ghani landowner is doing. So clever, my child, but he doesn't guess why that girl is forever ill with her piffling disorders. Listen, my boy: see the nose on your face for once: that Ghani thinks you are a good catch for her. Foreign-educated and all. I have worked in shops and been undressed by the eyes of strangers so that you should marry that Naseem! Of course I am right; otherwise why would he look twice at our family?' Aziz pressed his mother. 'O God, stop now, no need to kill me because I tell you the truth!'



By 1918, Aadam Aziz had come to live for his regular trips across the lake. And now his eagerness became even more intense, because it became clear that, after three years, the landowner and his daughter had become willing to lower certain barriers. Now, for the first time, Ghani said, 'A lump in the right chest. Is it worrying, Doctor? Look. Look well.' And there, framed in the hole, was a perfectly-formed and lyrically lovely ... 'I must touch it,' Aziz said, fighting with his voice. Ghani slapped him on the back. 'Touch, touch!' he cried, 'The hands of the healer! The curing touch, eh, Doctor?' And Aziz reached out a hand ... 'Forgive me for asking; but is it the lady's time of the month?' ... Little secret smiles appearing on the faces of the lady wrestlers. Ghani, nodding affably: 'Yes. Don't be so embarrassed, old chap. We are family and doctor now.'



And Aziz, 'Then don't worry. The lumps will go when the time ends.'... And the next time, 'A pulled muscle in the back of her thigh, Doctor Sahib. Such pain!'



And there, in the sheet, weakening the eyes of Aadam Aziz, hung a superbly rounded and impossible buttock ... And now Aziz: 'Is it permitted that ...'



'Whereupon a word from Ghani; an obedient reply from behind the sheet; a drawstring pulled; and pajamas fall from the celestial rump, which swells wondrously through the hole. Aadam Aziz forces himself into a medical frame of mind ... reaches out... feels. And swears to himself, in amazement, that he sees the bottom reddening in a shy, but compliant blush.



That evening, Aadam contemplated the blush. Did the magic of the sheet work on both sides of the hole? Excitedly, he envisaged his headless Naseem tingling beneath the scrutiny of his eyes, his thermometer, his stethoscope, his fingers, and trying to build a picture in her mind of him. She was at a disadvantage, of course, having seen nothing but his hands ... Aadam began to hope with an illicit desperation for Naseem Ghani to develop a migraine or graze her unseen chin, so they could look each other in the face. He knew how unprofessional his feelings were; but did nothing to stifle them. There was not much he could do.



They had acquired a life of their own. In short: my grandfather had fallen in love, and had come to think of the perforated sheet as something sacred and magical, because through it he had seen the things which had filled up the hole inside him which had been created when he had been hit on the nose by a tussock and insulted by the boatman Tai.



On the day the World War ended, Naseem developed the longed-for headache. Such historical coincidences have littered, and pejrhaps befouled, my family's existence in the world.



He hardly dared to look at what was framed in the hole in the sheet. Maybe she was hideous; perhaps that explained all this performance ... he looked. And saw a soft face that was not at all ugly, a cushioned setting for her glittering, gemstone eyes, which were brown with flecks of gold: tiger's-eyes. Doctor Aziz's fall was complete. And Naseem burst out, 'But Doctor, my God, what a nose?



Ghani, angrily, 'Daughter, mind your ...' But patient and doctor were laughing together, and Aziz was saying, 'Yes, yes, it is a remarkable specimen. They tell me there are dynasties waiting in it...' And he bit his tongue because he had been about to add, '... like snot.'



And Ghani, who had stood blindly beside the sheet for three long years, smiling and smiling and smiling, began once again to smile his secret smile, which was mirrored in the lips of the wrestlers.



Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai chose to stink. For three years now, he had neither bathed nor washed himself after answering calls of nature. He wore the same clothes, unwashed, year in, year out; his one concession to winter was to put his chugha-coat over his putrescent pajamas. The little basket of hot coals which he carried inside the chugha, in the Kashmiri fashion, to keep him warm in the bitter cold, only animated and accentuated his evil odours. He took to drifting slowly past the Aziz household,



releasing the dreadful fumes of his body across the small garden and into the house. Flowers died; birds fled from the ledge outside old Father Aziz's window.



Naturally, Tai lost work; the English in particular were reluctant to be ferried by a human cesspit. The story went around the lake that Tai's wife, driven to distraction by the old man's sudden filthiness, pleaded for a reason. He had answered: 'Ask our foreign-returned doctor, ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz,'



Was it, then, an attempt to offend the Doctor's hypersensitive nostrils (in which the itch of danger had subsided somewhat under the anaesthetizing ministrations of love)? Or a gesture of unchangingness in defiance of the invasion of the doctori-attache from Heidelberg? Once Aziz asked the ancient, straight out, what it was all for; but Tai only breathed on him and rowed away.



The breath nearly felled Aziz; it was sharp as an axe.



In 1918, Doctor Aziz's father, deprived of his birds, died in his sleep; and at once his mother, who had been able to sell the gemstone business thanks to the success of Aziz's practice, and who now saw her husband's death as a merciful release for her from a life filled with responsibilities, took to her own deathbed and followed her man before the end of his own forty-day mourning period. By the time the Indian regiments returned at the end of the war, Doctor Aziz was an orphan, and a free man - except that his heart had fallen through a hole some seven inches across.



Desolating effect of Tai's behaviour: it ruined Doctor Aziz's good relations with the lake's floating population. He, who as a child had chatted freely with fishwives and flower-sellers, found himself looked at askance. 'Ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz.' Tai had branded him as an alien, and therefore a person not completely to be trusted. They didn't like the boatman, but they found the transformation which the Doctor had evidently worked upon him even more disturbing. Aziz found himself suspected, even ostracized, by the poor; and it hurt him badly. Now he understood what Tai was up to: the man was trying to chase him out of the valley.



The story of the perforated sheet got out, too. The lady wrestlers were evidently less discreet than they looked. Aziz began to notice people pointing at him. Women giggled behind their palms ...



'I've decided to give Tai his victory,' he said. The three lady wrestlers, two holding up the sheet, the third hovering near the door, strained to hear him through the cotton wool in their ears. ('I made my father do it,' Naseem told him, 'These chatterjees won't do any more of their tittling and tattling from now on.') Naseem's eyes, hole-framed, became wider than ever.



.. .Just like his own when, a few days earlier, he had been walking the city streets, had seen the last bus of the winter arrive, painted with its colourful inscriptions - on the front, GOD WILLING in green shadowed in red; on the back, blue-shadowed yellow crying THANK GOD!, and in cheeky maroon, SORRY-BYE-BYE! - and had recognized, through a web of new rings and lines on her face, Ike Lubin as she descended ...



Nowadays, Ghani the landowner left him alone with earplugged guardians, To talk a little; the doctor-patient relationship can only deepen in strictest confidentiality. I see that now, Aziz Sahib - forgive my earlier intrusions.'



Nowadays, Naseem's tongue was getting freer all the time. 'What kind of talk is this? What are you - a man or a mouse? To leave home because of a stinky shikara-man!' ...



'Oskar died,' Ilse told him, sipping fresh lime water on his mother's takht.



'Like a comedian. He went to talk to the army and tell them not to be pawns. The fool really thought the troops would fling down their guns and walk away. We watched from a window and I prayed they wouldn't just trample all over him. The regiment had learned to march in step by then, you wouldn't recognize them. As he reached the streetcorner across from the parade ground he tripped over his own shoelace and fell into the street. A staff car hit him and he died. He could never keep his laces tied, that ninny' ... here there were diamonds freezing in her lashes ... 'He was the type that gives anarchists a bad name.'



'All right,' Naseem conceded, 'so you've got a good chance of landing a good job. Agra University, it's a famous place, don't think I don't know. University doctor!... sounds good. Say you're going for that, and it's a different business.' Eyelashes drooped in the hole. 'I will miss you, naturally ...'



'I'm in love,' Aadam Aziz said to Ilse Lubin. And later,'... So I've only seen her through a hole in a sheet, one part at a time; and I swear her bottom blushes.'



'They must be putting something in the air up here,' Use said.



'Naseem, I've got the job,' Aadam said excitedly. 'The letter came today. With effect from April 1919. Your father says he can find a buyer for my house and the gemstone shop also.'



'Wonderful,' Naseem pouted. 'So now I must find a new doctor. Or maybe I'll get that old hag again who didn't know two things about anything.'



'Because I am an orphan,' Doctor Aziz said, 'I must come myself in place of my family members. But I have come nevertheless, Ghani Sahib, for the first time without being sent for. This is not a professional visit.'



'Dear boy!' Ghani, clapping Aadam on the back. 'Of course you must marry her.



With an A-1 fine dowry! No expense spared! It will be the wedding of the year, oh most certainly, yes!'



'I cannot leave you behind when I go,' Aziz said to Naseem. Ghani said, 'Enough of this tamasha! No more need for this sheet tomfoolery! Drop it down, you women, these are young lovers now!'



'At last,' said Aadam Aziz, 'I see you whole at last. But I must go now. My rounds ... and an old friend is staying with me, I must tell her, she will be very happy for us both. A dear friend from Germany.'



'No, Aadam baba,' his bearer said, 'since the morning I have not seen Ilse Begum. She hired that old Tai to go for a shikara ride.'



'What can be said, sir?' Tai mumbled meekly. 'I am honoured indeed to be summoned into the home of a so-great personage as yourself. Sir, the lady hired me for a trip to the Mughal Gardens, to do it before the lake freezes. A quiet lady, Doctor Sahib, not one word out of her all the time. So I was thinking my own unworthy private thoughts as old fools will and suddenly when I look she is not in her seat. Sahib, on my wife's head I swear it, it is not possible to see over the back of the seat, how was I to tell? Believe a poor old boatman who was your friend when you were young ...'



'Aadam baba,' the old bearer interrupted, 'excuse me but just now I have found this paper on her table.'



'I know where she is,' Doctor Aziz stared at Tai. 'I don't know how you keep getting mixed up in my life; but you showed me the place once. You said: certain foreign women come here to drown.'



'I, Sahib?' Tai shocked, malodorous, innocent. 'But grief is making your head play trick! How can I know these things?'



And after the body, bloated, wrapped in weeds, had been dredged up by a group of blank-faced boatmen, Tai visited the shikara halt and told the men there, as they recoiled from his breath of a bullock with dysentery, 'He blames me, only imagine! Brings his loose Europeans here and tells me it is my fault when they jump into the lake!... I ask, how did he know just where to look? Yes, ask him that, ask that nakkoo Aziz!'



She had left a note. It read: 'I didn't mean it.'



I make no comment; these events, which have tumbled from my lips any old how, garbled by haste and emotion, are for others to judge. Let me be direct now, and say that during the long, hard winter of 1918-19, Tai fell ill, contracting a violent skin disease, akin to that European curse called the King's Evil; but he refused to see Doctor Aziz, and was treated by a local homeopath. And in March, when the lake thawed, a marriage took place in a large marquee in the grounds of Ghani the landowner's house. The wedding contract assured Aadam Aziz of a respectable sum of money, which would help buy a house in Agra, and the dowry included, at Doctor Aziz's especial request, a certain mutilated bedsheet. The young couple sat on a dais, garlanded and cold, while the guests filed past dropping rupees into their laps. That night my grandfather placed the perforated sheet beneath his bride and himself and in the morning it was adorned by three drops of blood, which formed a small triangle. In the morning, the sheet was displayed, and after the consummation ceremony a limousine hired by the landowner arrived to drive my grandparents to Amritsar, where they would catch the Frontier Mail. Mountains crowded round and stared as my grandfather left his home for the last time. (He would return, once, but not to leave.) Aziz thought he saw an ancient boatman standing on land to watch them pass - but it was probably a mistake, since Tai was ill. The blister of a temple atop Sankara Acharya, which Muslims had taken to calling the Takht-e-Sulaiman, or Seat of Solomon, paid them no attention. Winter-bare poplars and snow-covered fields of saffron undulated around them as the car drove south, with an old leather bag containing, amongst other things, a stethoscope and a bedsheet, packed in the boot. Doctor Aziz felt, in the pit of his stomach, a sensation akin to weightlessness.



Or falling.



(... And now I am cast as a ghost. I am nine years old and the whole family, my father, my mother, the Brass Monkey and myself, are staying at my grandparents'



house in Agra, and the grandchildren -myself among them - are staging the customary New Year's play; and I have been cast as a ghost. Accordingly - and surreptitiously so as to preserve the secrets of the forthcoming theatricals - I am ransacking the house for a spectral disguise. My grandfather is out and about his rounds. I am in his room. And here on top of this cupboard is an old trunk, covered in dust and spiders, but unlocked. And here, inside it, is the answer to my prayers. Not just a sheet, but one with a hole already cut in it! Here it is, inside this leather bag inside this trunk, right beneath an old stethoscope and a tube of mildewed Vick's Inhaler ... the sheet's appearance in our show was nothing less than a sensation. My grandfather took one look at it and rose roaring to his feet. He strode up on stage and unghosted me right in front of everyone. My grandmother's lips were so tightly pursed they seemed to disappear.



Between them, the one booming at me in the voice of a forgotten boatman, the other conveying her fury through vanished lips, they reduced the awesome ghost to a weeping wreck. I fled, took to my heels and ran into the little cornfield, not knowing what had happened. I sat there - perhaps on the very spot on which Nadir Khan had sat! - for several hours, swearing over and over that I would never again open a forbidden trunk, and feeling vaguely resentful that it had not been locked in the first place. But I knew, from their rage, that the sheet was somehow very important indeed.)



I have been interrupted by Padma, who brought me my dinner and then withheld it, blackmailing me: 'So if you're going to spend all your time wrecking your eyes with that scribbling, at least you must read it to me.' I have been singing for my supper - but perhaps our Padma will be useful, because it's impossible to stop her being a critic. She is particularly angry with my remarks about her name. 'What do you know, city boy?' she cried - hand slicing the air. 'In my village there is no shame in being named for the Dung Goddess. Write at once that you are wrong, completely.' In accordance with my lotus's wishes, I insert, forthwith, a brief paean to Dung.



Dung, that fertilizes and causes the crops to grow! Dung, which is patted into thin chapati-like cakes when still fresh and moist, and is sold to the village builders, who use it to secure and strengthen the walls of kachcha buildings made of mud! Dung, whose arrival from the nether end of cattle goes a long way towards explaining their divine and sacred status! Oh, yes, I was wrong, I admit I was prejudiced, no doubt because its unfortunate odours do have a way of offending my sensitive nose - how wonderful, how ineffably lovely it must be to be named for the Purveyor of Dung! ... On April 6th, 1919, the holy city of Amritsar smelled (gloriously, Padma, celestially!) of excrement. And perhaps the (beauteous!) reek did not offend the Nose on my grandfather's face - after all, Kashmir! peasants used it, as described above, for a kind of plaster. Even in Srinagar, hawkers with barrows of round dung-cakes were not an uncommon sight. But then the stuff was drying, muted, useful. Amritsar dung was fresh and (worse) redundant. Nor was it all bovine. It issued from the rumps of the horses between the shafts of the city's many tongas, ikkas and gharries; and mules and men and dogs attended nature's calls, mingling in a brotherhood of shit. But there were cows, too: sacred kine roaming the dusty streets, each patrolling its own territory, staking its claims in excrement. And flies! Public Enemy Number One, buzzing gaily from turd to steaming turd, celebrated and cross-pollinated these freely-given offerings. The city swarmed about, too, mirroring the motion of the flies. Doctor Aziz looked down from his hotel window on to this scene as a Jain in a face-mask walked past, brushing the pavement before him with a twig-broom, to avoid stepping on an ant, or even a fly. Spicy sweet fumes rose from a street-snack barrow. 'Hot pakoras, pakoras hot!' A white woman was buying silks from a shop across the street and men in turbans were ogling her. Naseem - now Naseem Aziz - had a sharp headache; it was the first time she'd ever repeated an illness, but life outside her quiet valley had come as something of a shock to her. There was a jug of fresh lime water by her bed, emptying rapidly. Aziz stood at the window, inhaling the city. The spire of the Golden Temple gleamed in the sun. But his nose itched: something was not right here.



Close-up of my grandfather's right hand: nails knuckles fingers all somehow bigger than you'd expect. Clumps of red hair on the outside edges. Thumb and forefinger pressed together, separated only by a thickness of paper. In short: my grandfather was holding a pamphlet. It had been inserted into his hand (we cut to a long-shot - nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary) as he entered the hotel foyer. Scurrying of urchin through revolving door, leaflets falling in his wake, as the chaprassi gives chase. Mad revolutions in the doorway, roundandround; until chaprassi-hand demands a close-up, too, because it is pressing thumb to forefinger, the two separated only by the thickness of urchin-ear. Ejection of juvenile disseminator of gutter-tracts; but still my grandfather retained the message. Now, looking out of his window, he sees it echoed on a wall opposite; and there, on the minaret of a mosque; and in the large black type of newsprint under a hawker's arm.



Leaflet newspaper mosque and wall are crying: Hartal! Which is to say, literally speaking, a day of mourning, of stillness, of silence. But this is India in the heyday of the Mahatma, when even language obeys the instructions of Gandhiji, and the word has acquired, under his influence, new resonances. Hartal -April 7, agree mosque newspaper wall and pamphlet, because Gandhi has decreed that the whole of India shall, on that day, come to a halt. To mourn, in peace, the continuing presence of the British.



'I do not understand this hartal when nobody is dead,' Naseem is crying softly.



'Why will the train not run? How long are we stuck for?'



Doctor Aziz notices a soldierly young man in the street, and thinks- the Indians have fought for the British; so many of them have seen the world by now, and been tainted by Abroad. They will not easily go back to the old world. The British are wrong to try and turn back the clock. 'It was a mistake to pass the Rowlatt Act,' he murmurs.



'What rowlatt?' wails Naseem. 'This is nonsense where I'm concerned!'



'Against political agitation,' Aziz explains, and returns to his thoughts. Tai once said: 'Kashmiris are different. Cowards, for instance. Put a gun in a Kashmiri's hand and it will have to go off by itself - he'll never dare to pull the trigger. We are not like Indians, always making battles.' Aziz, with Tai in his head, does not feel Indian. Kashmir, after all, is not strictly speaking a part of the Empire, but an independent princely state. He is not sure if the hartal of pamphlet mosque wall newspaper is his fight, even though he is in occupied territory now. He turns from the window ...



... To see Naseem weeping into a pillow. She has been weeping ever since he asked her, on their second night, to move a little. 'Move where?' she asked.



'Move how?' He became awkward and said, 'Only move, I mean, like a woman ...'



She shrieked in horror. 'My God,what have I married? I know you Europe-returned men. You find terrible women and then you try to make us girls be like them! Listen, Doctor Sahib, husband or no husband, I am not any ... bad word woman,'



This was a battle my grandfather never won; and it set the tone for their marriage, which rapidly developed into a place of frequent and devastating warfare, under whose depredations the young girl behind the sheet and the gauche young Doctor turned rapidly into different, stranger beings... 'What now, wife?'



Aziz asks. Naseem buries her face in the pillow. 'What else?' she says in muffled tones. 'You, or what? You want me to walk naked in front of strange men.' (He has told her to come out of purdah.)



He says, 'Your shirt covers you from neck to wrist to knee. Your loose pajamas hide you down to and including your ankles. What we have left are your feet and face. Wife, are your face and feet obscene?' But she wails, 'They will see more than that! They will see my deep-deep shame!'



And now an accident, which launches us into the world of Mercurochrome ... Aziz, finding his temper slipping from him, drags all his wife's purdah-veils from her suitcase, flings them into a wastepaper basket made of tin with a painting of Guru Nanak on the side, and sets fire to them. Flames leap up, taking him by surprise, licking at curtains. Aadam rushes to the door and yells for help as the cheap curtains begin to blaze ... and bearers guests washerwomen stream into the room and flap at die burning fabric with dusters towels and other people's laundry. Buckets are brought; the fire goes out; and Naseem cowers on the bed as about thirty-five Sikhs, Hindus and untouchables throng in the smoke-filled room. Finally they leave, and Naseem unleashes two sentences before clamping her lips obstinately shut.



'You are a mad man. I want more lime water.'



My grandfather opens the windows, turns to his bride. 'The smoke will take time to go; I will take a walk. Are you coming?'



Lips clamped; eyes squeezed; a single violent No from the head; and my grandfather goes into the streets alone. His parting shot: 'Forget about being a good Kashmiri girl. Start thinking about being a modern Indian woman.'



... While in the Cantonment area, at British Army H.Q., one Brigadier R. E. Dyer is waxing his moustache.



It is April 7th, 1919, and in Amritsar the Mahatma's grand design is being distorted. The shops have shut; the railway station is closed; but now rioting mobs are breaking them up. Doctor Aziz, leather bag in hand, is out in the streets, giving help wherever possible. Trampled bodies have been left where they fell. He is bandaging wounds, daubing them liberally with Mercurochrome, which makes them look bloodier than ever, but at least disinfects them. Finally he returns to his hotel room, his clothes soaked in red stains, and Naseem commences a panic. 'Let me help, let me help, Allah what a man I've married, who goes into gullies to fight with goondas!' She is all over him with water on wads of cotton wool. 'I don't know why can't you be a respectable doctor like ordinary people are just cure important illnesses and all? ?God you've got blood everywhere! Sit, sit now, let me wash you at least!'



'It isn't blood, wife.'



'You think I can't see for myself with my own eyes? Why must you make a fool of me even when you're hurt? Must your wife not look after you, even?'



'It's Mercurochrome, Naseem. Red medicine.'



Naseem - who had become a whirlwind of activity, seizing clothes, running taps - freezes. 'You do it on purpose,' she says, 'to make me look stupid. I am not stupid. I have read several books.'



It is April 13th, and they are still in Amritsar. 'This affair isn't finished,'



Aadam Aziz told Naseem. 'We can't go, you see: they may need doctors again.'



'So we must sit here and wait until the end of the world?'



He rubbed his nose. 'No, not so long, I am afraid.'



That afternoon, the streets are suddenly full of people, all moving in the same direction, defying Dyer's new Martial Law regulations. Aadam tells Naseem, 'There must be a meeting planned - there will be trouble from the military. They have banned meetings.'



'Why do you have to go? Why not wait to be called?'



... A compound can be anything from a wasteland to a park. The largest compound in Amritsar is called Jallianwala Bagh. It is not grassy. Stones cans glass and other things are everywhere. To get into it, you must walk down a very narrow alleyway between two buildings. On April 13th, many thousands of Indians are crowding through this alleyway. 'It is peaceful protest,' someone tells Doctor Aziz. Swept along by the crowds, he arrives at the mouth of the alley. A bag from Heidelberg is in his right hand. (No close-up is necessary.) He is, I know, feeling very scared, because his nose is itching worse than it ever has; but he is a trained doctor, he puts it out of his mind, he enters the compound.



Somebody is making a passionate speech. Hawkers move through the crowd selling channa and sweetmeats. The air is filled with dust. There do not seem to be any goondas, any trouble- makers, as far as my grandfather can see. A group of Sikhs has spread a cloth on the ground and is eating, seated around it. There is still a smell of ordure in the air. Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. ? Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack troops. He is the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar - an important man, after all; the waxed tips of his moustache are rigid with importance. As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather's nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer's right and twenty-five to his left; and Aadam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. 'Yaaaakh-th铑铑!' he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life. His 'doctori-attache'



flies open; bottles, liniment and syringes scatter in the dust. He is scrabbling furiously at people's feet, trying to save his equipment before it is crushed.



There is a noise like teeth chattering in winter and someone falls on him. Red stuffstains his shirt. There are screams now and sobs and the strange chattering continues. More and more people seem to have stumbled and fallen on top of my grandfather. He becomes afraid for his back. The clasp of his bag is digging into his chest, inflicting upon it a bruise so severe and mysterious that it will not fade until after his death, years later, on the hill of Sankara Acharya or Takht-e-Sulaiman. His nose is jammed against a bottle of red pills. The chattering stops and is replaced by the noises of people and birds. There seems to be no traffic noise whatsoever. Brigadier Dyer's fifty men put down their machine-guns and go away. They have fired a total of one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into the unarmed crowd. Of these, one thousand five hundred and sixteen have found their mark, killing or wounding some person. 'Good shooting,'



Dyer tells his men, 'We have done a jolly good thing.'



When my grandfather got home that night, my grandmother was trying hard to be a modern woman, to please him, and so she did not turn a hair at his appearance.



'I see you've been spilling the Mercurochrome again, clumsy,' she said, appeasingly.



'It's blood,' he replied, and she fainted. When he brought her round with the help of a little sal volatile, she said, 'Are you hurt?'



'No,' he said.



'But where have you been, my God?'



'Nowhere on earth,' he said, and began to shake in her arms.



My own hand, I confess, has begun to wobble; not entirely because of its theme, but because I have noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing in my wrist, beneath the skin ... No matter. We all owe death a life. So let me conclude with the uncorroborated rumour that the boatman Tai, who recovered from his scrofulous infection soon after my grandfather left Kashmir, did not die until 1947, when (the story goes) he was infuriated by India and Pakistan's struggle over his valley, and walked to Chhamb with the express purpose of standing between the opposing forces and giving them a piece of his mind. Kashmiri for the Kashmiris: that was his line. Naturally, they shot him. Oskar Lubin would probably have approved of his rhetorical gesture; R. E. Dyer might have commended his murderers' rifle skills. I must go to bed. Padma is waiting; and I need a little warmth.




39



Please believe that I am falling apart.



I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug - that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams.



In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust. This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)



There are moments of terror, but they go away. Panic like a bubbling sea-beast conies up for air, boils on the surface, but eventually returns to the deep. It is important for me to remain calm. I chew betel-nut and expectorate in the direction of a cheap brassy bowl, playing the ancient game of hit-the-spittoon: Nadir Khan's game, which he learned from the old men in Agra... and these days you can buy 'rocket paans' in which, as well as the gum-reddening paste of the betel, the comfort of cocaine lies folded in a leaf. But that would be cheating.



... Rising from my pages comes the unmistakable whiff of chutney. So let me obfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately-gifted olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments. But now, 'A cook?' you gasp in horror, 'A khansama merely? How is it possible?' And, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings - by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.



But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next: 'At this rate,' Padma complains, 'you'll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.'



She is affecting nonchalance, jutting a careless hip in my general direction, but doesn't fool me. I know now that she is, despite all her protestations, hooked. No doubt about it: my story has her by the throat, so that all at once she's stopped nagging me to go home, to take more baths, to change my vinegar-stained clothes, to abandon even for a moment this darkling pickle-factory where the smells of spices are forever frothing in the air... now my dung goddess simply makes up a cot in the corner of this office and prepares my food on two blackened gas-rings, only interrupting my Anglepoise-lit writing to expostulate, 'You better get a move on or you'll die before you get yourself born.' Fighting down the proper pride of the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her. 'Things - even people - have a way of leaking into each other,'



I explain, 'like flavours when you cook. Ilse Lubin's suicide, for example, leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise,' I intone earnestly, 'the past has dripped into me .'.. so we can't ignore it...'



Her shrug, which does pleasantly wavy things to her chest, cuts me off. 'To me it's a crazy way of telling your life story,' she cries, 'if you can't even get to where your father met your mother.'



... And certainly Padma is leaking into me. As history pours out of my fissured body, my lotus is quietly dripping in, with her down-to-earthery, and her paradoxical superstition, her contradictory love of the fabulous - so it's appropriate that I'm about to tell the story of the death of Mian Abdullah. The doomed Hummingbird: a legend of our times.



... And Padma is a generous woman, because she stays by me in these last days, although I can't do much for her. That's right - and once again, it's a fitting thing to mention before I launch into the tale of Nadir Khan - I am unmanned.



Despite Padma's many and varied gifts and ministrations, I can't leak into her, not even when she puts her left foot on my right, winds her right leg around my waist, inclines her head up toward mine and makes cooing noises; not even when she whispers in my ear, 'So now that the writery is done, let's see if we can make your other pencil work!'; despite everything she tries, I cannot hit her spittoon.



Enough confessions. Bowing to the ineluctable Padma-pressures of what-happened-nextism, and remembering the finite quantity of time at my disposal, I leap forwards from Mercurochrome and land in 1942. (I'm keen to get my parents together, too.)



It seems that in the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism. Bicycling around Agra, he whistled piercingly, badly, but very happily. He was by no means alone, because, despite strenuous efforts by the authorities to stamp it out, this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year, and drastic steps were to be taken before it was brought under control. The old men at the paan-shop at the top of Cornwallis Road chewed betel and suspected a trick. 'I have lived twice as long as I should have,' the oldest one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing up against each other around his vocal chords, 'and I've never seen so many people so cheerful in such a bad time. It is the devil's work.' It was, indeed, a resilient virus - the weather alone should have discouraged such germs from breeding, since it had become clear that the rains had failed. The earth was cracking. Dust ate the edges of roads, and on some days huge gaping fissures appeared in the midst of macadamed intersections. The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might now issue from the Assuring earth.



Apparently a Sikh from the bicycle-repair shop had had his turban pushed off his head in the heat of one afternoon, when his hair, without any reason, had suddenly stood on end. And, more prosaically, the water shortage had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with which to adulterate the milk :.. Far away, there was a World War in progress once again. In Agra, the heat mounted. But still my grandfather whistled. The old men at the paan-shop found Ms whistling in rather poor taste, given the circumstances.



(And I, like them, expectorate and rise above fissures.)



Astride his bicycle, leather attache attached to carrier, my grandfather wMstled. Despite irritations of the nose, his lips pursed. Despite a bruise on his chest which had refused to fade for twenty-three years, his good humour was unimpaired. Air passed his lips and was transmuted into sound. He whistled an old German tune: Tannenbaum.



The optimism epidemic had been caused by one single human being, whose name, Mian Abdullah, was only used by newspapermen. To everyone else, he was the Hummingbird, a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist. 'Magician turned conjurer,' the newspapermen wrote, 'Mian Abdullah rose from the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi to become the hope of India's hundred million Muslims.' The Hummingbird was the founder, chairman, unifier and moving spirit of the Free Islam Convocation; and in 1942, marquees and rostrums were being erected on the Agra maidan, where the Convocation's second annual assembly was about to take place. My grandfather, fifty-two years old, his hair turned white by the years and other afflictions, had begun whistling as he passed the maidan.



Now he leaned round corners on his bicycle, taking them at a jaunty angle, threading his way between cowpats and children ... and, in another time and place, told Ms friend the Rani of Cooch Naheen: 'I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian. I'm still not much of a Muslim, but I'm all for Abdullah. He's fighting my fight.' His eyes were still the blue of Kashmiri sky... he arrived home, and although Ms eyes retained a glimmer of contentment, the whistling stopped; because waiting for him in the courtyard filled with malevolent geese were the disapproving features of my grandmama, Naseem Aziz, whom he had made the mistake of loving in fragments, and who was now unified and transmuted into the formidable figure she would always remain, and who was always known by the curious title of Reverend Mother.



She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch's nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties. Earlier that year Aadam Aziz had commissioned life-size blow-up photographs of his family to hang on the living-room wall; the three girls and two boys had posed dutifully enough, but Reverend Mother had rebelled when her turn came. Eventually, the photographer had tried to catch her unawares, but she seized Ms camera and broke it over his skull. Fortunately, he lived; but there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone's little black box. It was enough for her that she must live in unveiled, barefaced shamelessness - there was no question of allowing the fact to be recorded.



It was perhaps the obligation of facial nudity, coupled with Aziz's constant requests for her to move beneath Mm, that had driven her to the barricades; and the domestic rules she established were a system of self-defence so impregnable that Aziz, after many fruitless attempts, had more or less given up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain. (Perhaps, too, it wasn't a system of self-defence at all, but a means of defence against her self.)



Among the things to which she denied entry were all political matters. When Doctor Aziz wished to talk about such things, he visited his friend the Rani, and Reverend Mother sulked; but not very hard, because she knew Ms visits represented a victory for her.



The twin hearts of her kingdom were her kitchen and her pantry. I never entered the former, but remembered staring through the pantry's locked screen-doors at the enigmatic world within, a world of hanging wire baskets covered with linen cloths to keep out the flies, of tins wMch I knew to be full of gur and other sweets, of locked chests with neat square labels, of nuts and turnips and sacks of grain, of goose-eggs and wooden brooms. Pantry and kitchen were her inalienable territory; and she defended them ferociously. When she was carrying her last child, my aunt Emerald, her husband offered to relieve her of the chore of supervising the cook. She did not reply; but the next day, when Aziz approached the kitchen, she emerged from it with a metal pot in her hands and barred the doorway. She was fat and also pregnant, so there was not much room left in the doorway. Aadam Aziz frowned. 'What is this, wife?' To which my grandmother answered, 'This, whatsitsname, is a very heavy pot; and if just once I catch you in here, whatsitsname, I'll push your head into it, add some dahi, and make, whatsitsname, a korma.' I don't know how my grandmother came to adopt the term whatsitsname as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry for help ... as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe. She didn't know, you see, what it was called.



... And at the dinner-table, imperiously, she continued to rule. No food was set upon the table, no plates were laid. Curry and crockery were marshalled upon a low side-table by her right hand, and Aziz and the cMldren ate what she dished out. It is a sign of the power of this custom that, even when her husband was afflicted by constipation, she never once permitted Mm to choose Ms food, and listened to no requests or words of advice. A fortress may not move. Not even when its dependants' movements become irregular.



During the long concealment of Nadir Khan, during the visits to the house on Cornwallis Road of young Zulfikar who fell in love with Emerald and of the prosperous reccine-and-leathercloth merchant named Ahmed Sinai who hurt my aunt Alia so badly that she bore a grudge for twenty-five years before discharging it cruelly upon my mother, Reverend Mother's iron grip upon her household never faltered; and even before Nadir's arrival precipitated the great silence, Aadam Aziz had tried to break this grip, and been obliged to go to war with his wife.



(All this helps to show how remarkable his affliction by optimism actually was.)



... In 1932, ten years earlier, he had taken control of his children's education. Reverend Mother was dismayed; but it was a father's traditional role, so she could not object. Alia was eleven; the second daughter, Mumtaz, was almost nine. The two boys, Hanif and Mustapha, were eight and six, and young Emerald was not yet five. Reverend Mother took to confiding her fears to the family cook, Daoud. 'He fills their heads with I don't know what foreign languages, whatsitsname, and other rubbish also, no doubt.' Daoud stirred pots and Reverend Mother cried, 'Do you wonder, whatsitsname, that the little one calls herself Emerald? In English, whatsitsname? That man will ruin my children for me. Put less cumin in that, whatsitsname, you should pay more attention to your cooking and less to minding other people's business.'



She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction. Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. 'You have your Hummingbird,' she told him, 'but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man's hum.' It was one of her rare political comments ... and then the day arrived when Aziz Arew out the religious tutor.



Thumb and forefinger closed around the maulvi's ear. Naseem Aziz saw her husband leading the stragglebearded wretch to the door in the garden wall; gasped; then cried out as her husband's foot was applied to the divine's fleshy parts.



Unleashing thunderbolts, Reverend Mother sailed into battle.



'Man without dignity!' she cursed her husband, and, 'Man without, whatsitsname, shame!' Children watched from the safety of the back verandah. And Aziz, 'Do you know what that man was teaching your children?' And Reverend Mother hurling question against question, 'What will you not do to bring disaster, whatsitsname, on our heads?' -But now Aziz, 'You think it was Nastaliq script?



Eh?' - to which his wife, warming up: 'Would you eat pig? Whatsitsname? Would you spit on the Quran?' And, voice rising, the doctor ripostes, 'Or was it some verses of "The Cow"? You think that?' ... Paying no attention, Reverend Mother arrives at her climax: 'Would you marry your daughters to Germans!?' And pauses, fighting for breath, letting my grandfather reveal, 'He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs and who knows what other vegetarians. Will you have hateful children, woman?'



'Will you have godless ones?' Reverend Mother envisages the legions of the Archangel Gabriel descending at night to carry her heathen brood to hell. She has vivid pictures of hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages... 'I take this oath, whatsitsname,' my grandmother said, 'I swear no food will come from my kitchen to your lips! No, not one chapati, until you bring the maulvi sahib back and kiss his, whatsitsname, feet!'



The war of starvation which began that day very nearly became a duel to the death. True to her word, Reverend Mother did not hand her husband, at mealtimes, so much as an empty plate. Doctor Aziz took immediate reprisals, by refusing to feed himself when he was out. Day by day the five children watched their father disappearing, while their mother grimly guarded the dishes of food. 'Will you be able to vanish completely?' Emerald asked with interest, adding solicitously, 'Don't do it unless you know how to come back again.' Aziz's face acquired craters; even his nose appeared to be getting thinner. His body had become a battlefield and each day a piece of it was blasted away. He told Alia, his eldest, the wise child: 'In any war, the field of battle suffers worse devastation than either army. This is natural.' He began to take rickshaws when he did his rounds. Hamdard the rickshaw-wallah began to worry about him.



The Rani of Cooch Naheen sent emissaries to plead with Reverend Mother. 'India isn't full enough of starving people?' the emissaries asked Naseem, and she unleashed a basilisk glare which was already becoming a legend. Hands clasped in her lap, a muslin dupatta wound miser-tight around her head, she pierced her visitors with lidless eyes and stared them down. Their voices turned to stone; their hearts froze; and alone in a room with strange men, my grandmother sat in triumph, surrounded by downcast eyes. 'Full enough, whatsitsname?' she crowed.



'Well, perhaps. But also, perhaps not.'



But the truth was that Naseem Aziz was very anxious; because while Aziz's death by starvation would be a clear demonstration of the superiority of her idea of the world over his, she was unwilling to be widowed for a mere principle; yet she could see no way out of the situation which did not involve her in backing down and losing face, and having learned to bare her face, my grandmother was most reluctant to lose any of it.



'Fall ill, why don't you?' - Alia, the wise child, found the solution. Reverend Mother beat a tactical retreat, announced a pain, a killing pain absolutely, whatsitsname, and took to her bed. In her absence Alia extended the olive branch to her father, in the shape of a bowl of chicken soup. Two days later, Reverend Mother rose (having refused to be examined by her husband for the first time in her life), reassumed her powers, and with a shrug of acquiescence in her daughter's decision, passed Aziz his food as though it were a mere trifle of a business.



That was ten years earlier; but still, in 1942, the old men at the paan-shop are stirred by the sight of the whistling doctor into giggling memories of the time when his wife had nearly made him do a disappearing trick, even though he didn't know how to come back. Late into the evening they nudge each other with, 'Do you remember when -' and 'Dried up like a skeleton on a washing line! He couldn't even ride his -' and '- I tell you, baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream her daughters' dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!' But as evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest. Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a pursing of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but instead a long red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in unerring accuracy towards an old brass spittoon. There is much slapping of thighs and self-admiring utterance of 'Wah, wah, sir!' and, 'Absolute master shot!' ... Around the oldsters, the town fades into desultory evening pastimes.



Children play hoop and kabaddi and draw beards on posters of Mian Abdullah. And now the old men place the spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting-place, and aim longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. 'Oh too good, yara!' The street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams, superimposing this game of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon ... But here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes ... here, Brigadier Dodson, the town's military commander, stifling with heat... and here, his A.D.C., Major Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of the Raj.



Memory of a mildewing photograph (perhaps the work of the same poor brained photographer whose life-size blow-ups so nearly cost him his life): Aadam Aziz, aglow with optimism-fever, shakes hands with a man of sixty or so, an impatient, sprightly type with a lock of white hair falling across his brow like a kindly scar. It is Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird. ('You see, Doctor Sahib, I keep myself fit. You wish to hit me in the stomach? Try, try. I'm in tiptop shape.'... In the photograph, folds of a loose white shirt conceal the stomach, and my grandfather's fist is not clenched, but swallowed up by the hand of the ex-conjurer.) And behind them, looking benignly on, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, who was going white in blotches, a disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous scale shortly after Independence ... 'I am the victim,' the Rani whispers, through photographed lips that never move, 'the hapless victim of my cross-cultural concerns. My skin is the outward expression of the internationalism of my spirit.' Yes, there is a conversation going on in this photograph, as like expert ventriloquists the optimists meet their leader.



Beside the Rani - listen carefully now; history and ancestry are about to meet! - stands a peculiar fellow, soft and paunchy, his eyes like stagnant ponds, his hair long like a poet's. Nadir Khan, the Hummingbird's personal secretary. His feet, if they were not frozen by the snapshot, would be shuffling in embarrassment. He mouths through his foolish, rigid smile, 'It's true; I have written verses ...' Whereupon Mian Abdullah interrupts, booming through his open mouth with glints of pointy teeth: 'But what verses! Not one rhyme in page after page!...' And the Rani, gently: 'A modernist, then?' And Nadir, shyly: 'Yes.'



What tensions there are now in the still, immobile scene! What edgy banter, as the Hummingbird speaks: 'Never mind about that; art should uplift; it should remind us of our glorious literary heritage!' ... And is that a shadow, or a frown on his secretary's brow? ... Nadir's voice, issuing lowaslow from the fading picture: 'I do not believe in high art, Mian Sahib. Now art must be beyond categories; my poetry and - oh - the game of hit-the-spittoon are equals.'... So now the Rani, kind woman that she is, jokes, 'Well, I shall set aside a room, perhaps; for paan-eating and spittoon-hittery. I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, and you must all come and practise.



Let the walls be splashed with our inaccurate expectorating! They will be honest stains, at least.' And now the photograph has run out of words; now I notice, with my mind's eye, that all the while the Hummingbird has been staring towards the door, which is past my grandfather's shoulder at the very edge of the picture. Beyond the door, history calls. The Hummingbird is impatient to get away... but he has been with us, and his presence has brought us two threads which will pursue me through all my days: the thread that leads to the ghetto of the magicians; and the thread that tells the story of Nadir the rhymeless, verbless poet and a priceless silver spittoon.



'What nonsense,' our Padma says. 'How can a picture talk? Stop now; you must be too tired to think.' But when I say to her that Mian Abdullah had the strange trait of humming without pause, humming in a strange way, neither musical nor unmusical, but somehow mechanical, the hum of an engine or dynamo, she swallows it easily enough, saying judiciously, 'Well, if he was such an energetic man, it's no surprise to me.' She's all ears again; so I warm to my theme and report that Mian Abdullah's hum rose and fell in direct relationship to his work rate.



It was a hum that could fall low enough to give you toothache, and when it rose to its highest, most feverish pitch, it had the ability of inducing erections in anyone within its vicinity. ('Arre baap,' Padma laughs, 'no wonder he was so popular with the men!') Nadir Khan, as his secretary, was attacked constantly by his master's vibratory quirk, and his ears jaw penis were forever behaving according to the dictates of the Hummingbird. Why, then, did Nadir stay, despite erections which embarrassed him in the company of strangers, despite aching molars and a work schedule which often occupied twenty-two hours in every twenty-four? Not - I believe - because he saw it as his poetic duty to get close to the centre of events and transmute them into literature. Nor because he wanted fame for himself. No: but Nadir had one thing in common with my grandfather, and it was enough. He, too, suffered from the optimism disease.



Like Aadam Aziz, like the Rani of Cooch Naheen, Nadir Khan loathed the Muslim League ('That bunch of toadies!' the Rani cried in her silvery voice, swooping around the octaves like a skier. 'Landowners with vested interests to protect! What do they have to do with Muslims? They go like toads to the British and form governments for them, now mat the Congress refuses to do it!' It was the year of the 'Quit India' resolution. 'And what's more,' the Rani said with finality, 'they are mad. Otherwise why would they want to partition India?')



Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird, had created the Free Islam Convocation almost single-handedly. He invited the leaders of the dozens of Muslim splinter groups to form a loosely federated alternative to the dogmatism and vested interests of the Leaguers. It had been a great conjuring trick, because they had all come.



That was the first Convocation, in Lahore; Agra would see the second. The marquees would be filled with members of agrarian movements, urban labourers'



syndicates, religious divines and regional groupings. It would see confirmed what the first assembly had intimated: that the League, with its demand for a partitioned India, spoke on nobody's behalf but its own. They have turned their backs on us,' said the Convocation's posters, 'and now they claim we're standing behind them!' Mian Abdullah opposed the partition.



In the throes of the optimism epidemic, the Hummingbird's patron, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, never mentioned the clouds on the horizon. She never pointed out that Agra was a Muslim League stronghold, saying only, 'Aadam my boy, if the Hummingbird wants to hold Convocation here, I'm not about to suggest he goes to Allahabad.' She was bearing the entire expense of the event without complaint or interference; not, let it be said, without making enemies in the town. The Rani did not live like other Indian princes. Instead of teetar-hunts, she endowed scholarships. Instead of hotel scandals, she had politics. And so the rumours began. 'These scholars of hers, man, everyone knows they have to perform extra-curricular duties. They go to her bedroom in the dark, and she never lets them see her blotchy face, but bewitches them into bed with her voice of a singing witch!' Aadam Aziz had never believed in witches. He enjoyed her brilliant circle of friends who were as much at home in Persian as they were in German. But Naseem Aziz, who half-believed the stories about the Rani, never accompanied him to the princess's house. 'If God meant people to speak many tongues,' she argued, 'why did he put only one in our heads?'



And so it was that none of the Hummingbird's optimists were prepared for what happened. They played hit-the-spittoon, and ignored the cracks in the earth.



Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. According to legend, then - according to the polished gossip of the ancients at the paan-shop - Mian Abdullah owed his downfall to his purchase, at Agra railway station, of a peacock-feather fan, despite Nadir Khan's warning about bad luck.



What is more, on that night of crescent moons, Abdullah had been working with Nadir, so that when the new moon rose they both saw it through glass. 'These things matter,' the betel-chewers say. 'We have been alive too long, and we know.' (Padma is nodding her head in agreement.)



The Convocation offices were on the ground floor of the historical faculty building at the University campus. Abdullah and Nadir were coming to the end of their night's work; the Hummingbird's hum was low-pitched and Nadir's teeth were on edge. There was a poster on the office wall, expressing Abdullah's favourite anti-Partition sentiment, a quote from the poet Iqbal: 'Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?' And now the assassins reached the campus.



Facts: Abdullah had plenty of enemies. The British attitude to him was always ambiguous. Brigadier Dodson hadn't wanted him in town. There was a knock on the door and Nadir answered it. Six new moons came into the room, six crescent knives held by men dressed all in black, with covered faces. Two men held Nadir while the others moved towards the Hummingbird.



'At this point,' the betel-chewers say, 'the Hummingbird's hum became higher.



Higher and higher, yara, and the assassins' eyes became wide as their members made tents under their robes. Then -Allah, then! - the knives began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he'd never hummed before. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with red. But now - listen! - Abdullah's humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were eating, others dying; there were some who fornicated and others who did not hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that left six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these turned and ran for the University, many of them rushing across the railway tracks from the wrong side of town. It is well known that this is true. Everyone in town saw it, except those who were asleep. They went noisily, like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair ... and all the time Abdullahji was humming, humming-humming, and the knives were singing. And know this: suddenly one of the killers' eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!'



They say, 'When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives were blunt... they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which had no glass because Abdullah's hum had shattered it ... they thudded against the door until the wood broke ... and then they were everywhere, baba!... some without legs, others lacking hair, but most of them had some teeth at least, and some of these were sharp ... And now see this: the assassins cannot have feared interruption, because they had posted no guards; so the dogs got them by surprise... the two men holding Nadir Khan, that spineless one, fell beneath the weight of the beasts, with maybe sixty-eight dogs on their necks ... afterwards the killers were so badly damaged that nobody could say who they were.'



'At some point,' they say, 'Nadir dived out of the window and ran. The dogs and assassins were too busy to follow him.'



Dogs? Assassins? ... If you don't believe me, check. Find out about Mian Abdullah and his Convocations. Discover how we've swept his story under the carpet ... then let me tell how Nadir Khan, his lieutenant, spent three years under my family's rugs.



As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art. 'Look at me,' he said before he killed himself, 'I wanted to be a miniaturist and I've got elephantiasis instead!' The swollen events of the night of the crescent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room-mate, because life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.



How did Nadir Khan run across the night town without being noticed? I put it down to his being a bad poet, and as such, a born survivor. As he ran, there was a self-consciousness about him, his body appearing to apologize for behaving as if it were in a cheap thriller, of the sort hawkers sell on railway stations, or give away free with bottles of green medicine that can cure colds, typhoid, impotence, homesickness and poverty... On Cornwallis Road, it was a warm night.



A coal-brazier stood empty by the deserted rickshaw rank. The paan-shop was closed and the old men were asleep on the roof, dreaming of tomorrow's game. An insomniac cow, idly chewing a Red and White cigarette packet, strolled by a bundled street-sleeper, which meant he would wake in the morning, because a cow will ignore a sleeping man unless he's about to die. Then it nuzzles at him thoughtfully. Sacred cows eat anything.



My grandfather's large old stone house, bought from the proceeds of the gemstone shops and blind Ghani's dowry settlement, stood in the darkness, set back a dignified distance from the road. There was a walled-in garden at the rear and by the garden door was the low outhouse rented cheaply to the family of old Hamdard and his son Rashid the rickshaw boy. In front of the outhouse was the well with its cow-driven waterwheel, from which irrigation channels ran down to the small cornfield which lined the house all way to the gate in the perimeter wall along Cornwallis Road. Between house and field ran a small gully for pedestrians and rickshaws. In Agra the cycle-rickshaw had recently replaced the kind where a man stood between wooden shafts. There was still trade for the horse-drawn tongas, but it was dwindling ... Nadir Khan ducked in through the gate, squatted for a moment with his back to the perimeter wall, reddening as he passed his water. Then, seemingly upset by the vulgarity of his decision, he fled to the cornfield and plunged in. Partially concealed by the sun-withered stalks, he lay down in the foetal position.



Rashid the rickshaw boy was seventeen and on his way home from the cinema. That morning he'd seen two men pushing a low trolley on which were mounted two enormous hand-painted posters, back-to-back, advertising the new film Gat-Wallah, starring Rashid's favourite actor Dev. FRESH FROM FIFTY FIERCE WEEKS IN DELHI! STRAIGHT FROM SIXTY-THREE SHARPSHOOTER WEEKS IN BOMBAY! the posters cried. SECOND RIP-ROARIOUS YEAR! The film was an eastern Western. Its hero, Dev, who was not slim, rode the range alone. It looked very like the Indo-Gangetic plain. Gai-Wallah means cow-fellow and Dev played a sort of one-man vigilante force for the protection of cows. SINGLE-HANDED! and DOUBLE-BARRELLED!, he stalked the many herds of cattle which were being driven across the range to the slaughterhouse, vanquished the cattlemen and liberated the sacred beasts. (The film was made for Hindu audiences; in Delhi it had caused riots. Muslim Leaguers had driven cows past cinemas to the slaughter, and had been mobbed.) The songs and dances were good and there was a beautiful nautch girl who would have looked more graceful if they hadn't made her dance in a ten-gallon cowboy hat. Rashid sat on a bench in the front stalls and joined in the whistles and cheers. He ate two samosas, spending too much money; his mother would be hurt but he'd had a fine time. As he pedalled his rickshaw home he practised some of the fancy riding he'd seen in the film, hanging down low on one side, freewheeling down a slight slope, using the rickshaw the way Gai-Wallah used his horse to conceal him from his enemies. Eventually he reached up, turned the handlebars and to his delight the rickshaw moved sweetly through the gate and down the gully by the cornfield. Gai-Wallah had used this trick to steal up on a gang of cattlemen as they sat in the brush, drinking and gambling. Rashid applied the brakes and flung himself into the cornfield, running -FULL-TILT!-at the unsuspecting cattlemen, his guns cocked and ready. As he neared their camp-fire he released his 'yell of hate' to frighten them. YAAAAAAAA! Obviously he did not really shout so close to the Doctor Sahib's house, but he distended his mouth as he ran, screaming silently. BLAMM! BLAMM! Nadir Khan had been finding sleep hard to come by and now he opened his eyes. He saw - EEEYAAAH! - a wild stringy figure coming at him like a mail-train, yelling at the top of his voice - but maybe he had gone deaf, because there wasn't any noise! - and he was rising to his feet, the shriek was just passing his over-plump lips, when Rashid saw him and found voice as well. Hooting in terrified unison, they both turned tail and ran. Then they stopped, each having noted the other's flight, and peered at one another through the shrivelling corn. Rashid recognized Nadir Khan, saw his torn clothes and was deeply troubled.



'I am a friend,' Nadir said foolishly. 'I must see Doctor Aziz.'



'But the Doctor is asleep, and is not in the cornfield.' Pull yourself together, Rashid told himself, stop talking nonsense! This is Mian Abdullah's friend!...



But Nadir didn't seem to have noticed; his face was working furiously, trying to get out some words which had stuck like shreds of chicken between his teeth...



'My life,' he managed it at last, 'is in danger.'



And now Rashid, still full of the spirit of Gai-Wallah, came to the rescue. He led Nadir to a door in the side of the house. It was bolted and locked; but Rashid pulled, and the lock came away in his hand. 'Indian-made' he whispered, as if that explained everything. And, as Nadir stepped inside, Rashid hissed, 'Count on me completely, sahib. Mum's the word! I swear on my mother's grey hairs.'



He replaced the lock on the outside. To have actually saved the Hummingbird's right-hand man!... But from what? Whom?... Well, real life was better than the pictures, sometimes.



'Is that him?' Padma asks, in some confusion. 'That fat soft cowardly plumpie?



Is he going to be your father?'







40



That was the end of the optimism epidemic. In the morning a sweeper-woman entered the offices of the Free Islam Convocation and found the Hummingbird, silenced, on the floor, surrounded by paw-prints and the shreds of his murderers. She screamed; but later, when the authorities had been and gone, she was told to clean up the room. After clearing away innumerable dog-hairs, swatting countless fleas and extracting from the carpet the remnants of a shattered glass eye, she protested to the University's comptroller of works that, if this sort of thing was going to keep happening, she deserved a small pay rise. She was possibly the last victim of the optimism bug, and in her case the illness didn't last long, because the comptroller was a hard man, and gave her the boot.



The assassins were never identified, nor were their paymasters named. My grandfather was called to the campus by Major Zulfikar, Brigadier Dodson's A.D.C., to write his friend's death certificate. Major Zulfikar promised to call on Doctor Aziz to tie up a few loose ends; my grandfather blew his nose and left. At the maidan, tents were coming down like punctured hopes; the Convocation would never be held again. The Rani of Cooch Naheen took to her bed.



After a lifetime of making light of her illnesses she allowed them to claim her, and lay still for years, watching herself turn the colour of her bedsheets.



Meanwhile, in the old house on Cornwallis Road, the days were full of potential mothers and possible fathers. You see, Padma: you're going to find out now.



Using my nose (because, although it has lost the powers which enabled it, so recently, to make history, it has acquired other, compensatory gifts) - turning it inwards, I've been sniffing out the atmosphere in my grandfather's house in those days after the death of India's humming hope; and wafting down to me through the years comes a curious melange of odours, filled with unease, the whiff of things concealed mingling with the odours of burgeoning romance and the sharp stink of my grandmother's curiosity and strength ... while the Muslim League rejoiced, secretly of course, at the fall of its opponent, my grandfather could be found (my nose finds him) seated every morning on what he called his 'thunderbox', tears standing in his eyes. But these are not tears of grief; Aadam Aziz has simply paid the price of being Indianized, and suffers terribly from constipation. Balefully, he eyes the enema contraption hanging on the toilet wall.



Why have I invaded my grandfather's privacy? Why, when I might have described how, after Mian Abdullah's death, Aadam buried himself in his work, taking upon himself the care of the sick in the shanty-towns by the railway tracks - rescuing them from quacks who injected them with pepperwater and thought that fried spiders could cure blindness - while continuing to fulfil his dudes as university physician; when I might have elaborated on the great love that had begun to grow between my grandfather and his second daughter, Mumtaz, whose dark skin stood between her and the affections of her mother, but whose gifts of gentleness, care and fragility endeared her to her father with his inner torments which cried out for her form of unquestioning tenderness; why, when I might have chosen to describe the by-now-constant itch in his nose, do I choose to wallow in excrement? Because this is where Aadam Aziz was, on the afternoon after his signing of a death certificate, when all of a sudden a voice -soft, cowardly, embarrassed, the voice of a rhymeless poet - spoke to him from the depths of the large old laundry-chest standing in the corner of the room, giving him a shock so profound that it proved laxative, and the enema contraption did not have to be unhooked from its perch. Rashid the rickshaw boy had let Nadir Khan into the thunderbox-room by way of the sweeper's entrance, and he had taken refuge in the washing-chest. While my grandfather's astonished sphincter relaxed, his ears heard a request for sanctuary, a request muffled by linen, dirty underwear, old shirts and the embarrassment of the speaker. And so it was that Aadam Aziz resolved to hide Nadir Khan.



Now comes the scent of a quarrel, because Reverend Mother Naseem is thinking about her daughters, twenty-one-year-old Alia, black Mumtaz, who is nineteen, and pretty, nighty Emerald, who isn't fifteen yet but has a look in her eyes that's older than anything her sisters possess. In the town, among spittoon-hitters and rickshaw-wallahs, among film-poster-trolley pushers and college students alike, the three sisters are known as the Teen Batti', the three bright lights ...and how can Reverend Mother permit a strange man to dwell in the same house as Alia's gravity, Mumtaz's black, luminous skin and Emerald's eyes?... 'You are out of your mind, husband; that death has hurt your brain.'



But Aziz, determinedly: 'He is staying.' In the cellars ... because concealment has always been a crucial architectural consideration in India, so that Aziz's house has extensive underground chambers, which can be reached only through trap-doors in the floors, which are covered by carpets and mats... Nadir Khan hears the dull rumble of the quarrel and fears for his fate. My God (I sniff the thoughts of the clammy-palmed poet), the world is gone insane... are we men in this country? Are we beasts? And if I must go, when will the knives come for me?... And through his mind pass images of peacock-feather fans and the new moon seen through glass and transformed into a stabbing, red-stained blade...



Upstairs, Reverend Mother says, 'The house is full of young unmarried girls, whatsitsname; is this how you show your daughters respect?' And now the aroma of a temper lost; the great destroying rage of Aadam Aziz is unleashed, and instead of pointing out that Nadir Khan will be under ground, swept under the carpet where he will scarcely be able to defile daughters; instead of paying due testimony to the verbless bard's sense of propriety, which is so advanced that he could not even dream of making improper advances without blushing in his sleep; instead of these avenues of reason, my grandfather bellows, 'Be silent, woman! The man needs our shelter; he will stay.' Whereupon an implacable perfume, a hard cloud of determination settles upon my grandmother, who says, 'Very well. You ask me, whatsitsname, for silence. So not one word, whatsitsname, will pass my lips from now on.' And Aziz, groaning, 'Oh, damnation, woman, spare us your crazy oaths!'



But Reverend Mother's lips were sealed, and silence descended. The smell of silence, like a rotting goose-egg, fills my nostrils; overpowering everything else, it possesses the earth ... While Nadir Khan hid in his half-lit underworld, his hostess hid, too, behind a deafening wall of soundlessness. At first my grandfather probed the wall, looking for chinks; he found none. At last he gave up, and waited for her sentences to offer up their glimpses of her self, just as once he had lusted after the brief fragments of her body he had seen through a perforated sheet; and the silence filled the house, from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, so that the flies seemed to give up buzzing, and mosquitoes refrained from humming before they bit; silence stilling the hissing of geese in the courtyard. The children spoke in whispers at first, and then fell quiet: while in the cornfield, Rashid the rickshaw boy yelled his silent 'yell of hate', and kept his own vow of silence, which he had sworn upon his mother's hairs.



Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice, as a result, was thin and sharp - it had to be, to squeeze through the narrow gap between his breathing apparatus and his jaw ... a man whose short sight obliged him to take life one step at a time, which gained him a reputation for thoroughness and dullness, and endeared him to his superiors by enabling them to feel well-served without feeling threatened; a man whose starched, pressed uniform reeked of Blanco and rectitude, and about whom, despite his appearance of a character out of a puppet-show, there hung the unmistakable scent of success: Major Zulfikar, a man with a future, came to call, as he had promised, to tie up a few loose ends. Abdullah's murder, and Nadir Khan's suspicious disappearance, were much on his mind, and since he knew about Aadam Aziz's infection by the optimism bug, he mistook the silence in the house for a hush of mourning, and did not stay for long. (In the cellar, Nadir huddled with cockroaches.) Sitting quietly in the drawing-room with the five children, his hat and stick beside him on the Telefunken radiogram, the life-size images of the young Azizes staring at him from the walls, Major Zulfikar fell in love. He was short-sighted, but he wasn't blind, and in the impossibly adult gaze of young Emerald, the brightest of the 'three bright lights', he saw that she had understood his future, and forgiven him, because of it, for his appearance; and before he left, he had decided to marry her after a decent interval. ('Her?' Padma guesses. 'That hussy is your mother?' But there are other mothers-to-be, other future fathers, wafting in and out through the silence.)



In that marshy time without words the emotional life of grave Alia, the eldest, was also developing; and Reverend Mother, locked up in the pantry and kitchen, sealed behind her lips, was incapable -because of her vow - of expressing her distrust of the young merchant in reccine and leathercloth who came to visit her daughter. (Aadam Aziz had always insisted that his daughters be permitted to have male friends.) Ahmed Sinai - 'Ahaa!' yells Padma in triumphant recognition - had met Alia at the University, and seemed intelligent enough for the bookish, brainy girl on whose face my grandfather's nose had acquired an air of overweight wisdom; but Naseem Aziz felt uneasy about him, because he had been divorced at twenty. ('Anyone can make one mistake,' Aadam had told her, and that nearly began a fight, because she thought for a moment that there had been something overly personal in his tone of voice. But then Aadam had added, 'Just let this divorce of his fade away for a year or two; then we'll give this house its first wedding, with a big marquee in the garden, and singers and sweetmeats and all.' Which, despite everything, was an idea that appealed to Naseem.) Now, wandering through the walled-jn gardens of silence, Ahmed Sinai and Alia communed without speech; but although everyone expected him to propose, the silence seemed to have got through to him, too, and the question remained unasked. Alia's face acquired a weigh tiness at this time, a jowly pessimistic quality which she was never entirely to lose. ('Now then,' Padma reproves me, 'that's no way to describe your respected motherji.')



One more thing: Alia had inherited her mother's tendency to put on fat. She would balloon outwards with the passing years.



And Mumtaz, who had come out of her mother's womb black as midnight? Mumtaz was never brilliant; not as beautiful as Emerald; but she was good, and dutiful, and alone. She spent more time with her father than any of her sisters, fortifying him against the bad temper which was being exaggerated nowadays by the constant itch in his nose; and she took upon herself the duties of caring for the needs of Nadir Khan, descending daily into his underworld bearing trays of food, and brooms, and even emptying his personal thunderbox, so that not even a latrine cleaner could guess at his presence. When she descended, he lowered his eyes; and no words, in that dumb house, were exchanged between them.



What was it the spittoon hitters said about Naseem Aziz? 'She eavesdropped on her daughters' dreams, just to know what they were up to.' Yes, there's no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen in this country of ours, just pick up any newspaper and see the daily titbits recounting miracles in this village or that -Reverend Mother began to dream her daughters' dreams. (Padma accepts this without blinking; but what others will swallow as effortlessly as a laddoo, Padma may just as easily reject. No audience is without its idiosyncrasies of belief.) So, then: asleep in her bed at night, Reverend Mother visited Emerald's dreams, and found another dream within them - Major Zulfikar's private fantasy, of owning a large modern house with a bath beside his bed. This was the zenith of the Major's ambitions; and in this way Reverend Mother discovered, not only that her daughter had been meeting her Zulfy in secret, in places where speech was possible, but also that Emerald's ambitions were greater than her man's. And (why not?) in Aadam Aziz's dreams she saw her husband walking mournfully up a mountain in Kashmir with a hole in his stomach the size of a fist, and guessed that he was falling out of love with her, and also foresaw his death; so that years later, when she heard, she said only. 'Oh, I knew it, after all.'



... It could not be long now, Reverend Mother thought, before our Emerald tells her Major about the guest in the cellar; and then I shall be able to speak again. But then, one night, she entered the dreams of her daughter Mumtaz, the blackie whom she had never been able to love because of her skin of a South Indian fisherwoman, and realized the trouble would not stop there; because Mumtaz Aziz - like her admirer under the carpets - was also falling in love.



There was no proof. The invasion of dreams - or a mother's knowledge, or a woman's intuition, call it what you like - is not something that will stand up in court, and Reverend Mother knew that it was a serious business to accuse a daughter of getting up to hanky-panky under her father's roof. In addition to which, something steely had entered Reverend Mother; and she resolved to do nothing, to keep her silence intact, and let Aadam Aziz discover just how badly his modern ideas were ruining his children - let Mm find out for himself, after Ms lifetime of telling her to be quiet with her decent old-fashioned notions. 'A bitter woman,' Padma says; and I agree.



'Well?' Padma demands. 'Was it true?'



Yes: after a fashion: true.



'There was hankying and pankying? In the cellars? Without even chaperones?'



Consider the circumstances - extenuating, if ever circumstances were. Things seem permissible underground that would seem absurd or even wrong in the clear light of day. 'That fat poet did it to the poor blackie? He did?' He was down there a long time, too - long enough to start talking to flying cockroaches and fearing that one day someone would ask Mm to leave and dreaming of crescent knives and howling dogs and wishing and wishing that the Hummingbird were alive to tell Mm what to do and to discover that you could not write poetry underground; and then this girl comes with food and she doesn't mind cleaning away your pots and you lower your eyes but you see an ankle that seems to glow with graciousness, a black ankle like the black of the underground nights ...



'I'd never have thought he was up to it.' Padma sounds admiring. 'The fat old good-for-notMng!'



And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive Mding in the cellar from Ms faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (HaniFs dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then 'And then? Come on, baba, what then?'



shyly, she smiles at him.



'What?'



And after that, there are smiles in the underworld, and something has begun.



'Oh, so what? You're telling me that's all?'



That's all: until the day Nadir Khan asked to see my grandfather -his sentences barely audible in the fog of silence - and asked for Ms daughter's hand in marriage.



'Poor girl,' Padma concludes, 'Kashmiri girls are normally fair like mountain snow, but she turned out black. Well, well, her skin would have stopped her making a good match, probably; and that Nadir's no fool. Now they'll have to let Mm stay, and get fed, and get a roof over Ms head, and all he has to do is hide like a fat earthworm under the ground. Yes, maybe he's not such a fool.'



My grandfather tried hard to persuade Nadir Khan that he was no longer in danger; the assassins were dead, and Mian Abdullah had been their real target; but Nadir Khan still dreamed about the singing knives, and begged, 'Not yet, Doctor Sahib; please, some more time.' So that one night in -the late summer of 1943 - the rains had failed again - my grandfather, Ms voice sounding distant and eerie in that house in which so few words were spoken, assembled Ms children in the drawing-room where their portraits hung. When they entered they discovered that their mother was absent, having chosen to remain immured in her room with her web of silence; but present were a lawyer and (despite Aziz's reluctance, he had complied with Mumtaz's wishes) a mullah, both provided by the ailing Rani of Cooch Naheen, both 'utterly discreet'. And their sister Mumtaz was there in bridal finery, and beside her in a chair set in front of the radiogram was the lank-haired, overweight, embarrassed figure of Nadir Khan. So it was that the first wedding in the house was one at which there were no tents, no singers, no sweetmeats and only a minimum of guests; and after the rites were over and Nadir Khan lifted his bride's veil - giving Aziz a sudden shock, making Mm young for a moment, and in Kashmir again, sitting on a dais while people put rupees in his lap - my grandfather made them all swear an oath not to reveal the presence in their cellar of their new brother-in-law. Emerald, reluctantly, gave her promise last of all.



After that Aadam Aziz made his sons help him carry all manner of furnishings down through the trap-door in the drawing-room floor: draperies and cushions and lamps and a big comfortable bed. And at last Nadir and Mumtaz stepped down into the vaults; the trap-door was shut and the carpet rolled into place and Nadir Khan, who loved his wife as delicately as a man ever had, had taken her into his underworld.



Mumtaz Aziz began to lead a double life. By day she was a single girl, living chastely with her parents, studying mediocrely at the university, cultivating those gifts of assiduity, nobility and forbearance which were to be her hallmarks throughout her life, up to and including the time when she was assailed by the talking washing-chests of her past and then squashed flat as a rice pancake; but at night, descending through a trap-door, she entered a lamplit, secluded marriage chamber which her secret husband had taken to calling the Taj Mahal, because Taj Bibi was the name by which people had called an earlier Mumtaz - Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Emperor Shah Jehan, whose name meant 'king of the world'. When she died he built her that mausoleum which has been immortalized on postcards and chocolate boxes and whose outdoor corridors stink of urine and whose walls are covered in graffiti and whose echoes are tested for visitors by guides although there are signs in three languages pleading for silence. Like Shah Jehan and his Mumtaz, Nadir and his dark lady lay side by side, and lapis lazuli inlay work was their companion because the bedridden, dying Rani of Cooch Naheen had sent them, as a wedding gift, a wondrously-carved, lapis-inlaid, gemstone-crusted silver spittoon. In their comfortable lamplit seclusion, husband and wife played the old men's game.



Mumtaz made the paans for Nadir but did not like the taste herself. She spat streams of nibu-pani. His jets were red and hers were lime. It was the happiest time of her life. And she said afterwards, at the ending of the long silence, 'We would have had children in the end; only then it wasn't right, that's all.'



Mumtaz Aziz loved children all her life.



Meanwhile, Reverend Mother moved sluggishly through the months in the grip of a silence which had become so absolute that even the servants received their instructions in sign language, and once the cook Daoud had been staring at her, trying to understand her somnolently frantic signalling, and as a result had not been looking in the direction of the boiling pot of gravy which fell upon his foot and fried it like a five-toed egg; he opened-his mouth to scream but no sound emerged, and after that he became convinced that the old hag had the power of witchery, and became too scared to leave her service. He stayed until his death, hobbling around the courtyard and being attacked by the geese.



They were not easy years. The drought led to rationing, and what with the proliferation of meatless days and riceless days it was hard to feed an extra, hidden mouth. Reverend Mother was forced to dig deep into her pantry, which thickened her rage like heat under a sauce. Hairs began to grow out of the moles on her face. Mumtaz noticed with concern that her mother was swelling, month by month. The unspoken words inside her were blowing her up ... Mumtaz had the impression that her mother's skin was becoming dangerously stretched.



And Doctor Aziz spent his days out of the house, away from the deadening silence, so Mumtaz, who spent her nights underground, saw very little in those days of the father whom she loved; and Emerald kept her promise, telling the Major nothing about the family secret; but conversely, she told her family nothing about her relationship with him, which was fair, she thought; and in the cornfield Mustapha and Hanif and Rashid the rickshaw boy became infected with the listlessness of the times; and finally the house on Cornwallis Road drifted as far as August 9th, 1945, and things changed.



Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.



What happened in August 1945? The Rani of Cooch Naheen died, but that's not what I'm after, although when she went she had become so sheetly-white that it was difficult to see her against the bed-clothes; having fulfilled her function by bequeathing my story a silver spittoon, she had the grace to exit quickly...



also in 1945, the monsoons did not fail. In the Burmese jungle, Orde Wingate and his Chindits, as well as the army of Subhas Chandra Bose, which was fighting on the Japanese side, were drenched by the returning rains. Satyagraha demonstrators in Jullundur, lying non-violently across railway lines, were soaked to the skin. The cracks in the long-parched earth began to close; there were towels wedged against the doors and windows of the house on Cornwallis Road, and they had to be wrung out and replaced constandy. Mosquitoes sprouted in the pools of water standing by every roadside. And the cellar - Mumtaz's Taj Mahal grew damp, until at last she fell ill. For some days she told nobody, but when her eyes became red-rimmed and she began to shake with fever, Nadir, fearing pneumonia, begged her to go to her father for treatment. She spent the next many weeks back in her maiden's bed, and Aadam Aziz sat by his daughter's bedside, putting cooling flannels on her forehead while she shook. On August 6th the illness broke. On the morning of the 9th Mumtaz was well enough to take a little solid food.



And now my grandfather fetched an old leather bag with the word HEIDELBERG burned into the leather at the base, because he had decided that, as she was very run-down, he had better give her a thorough physical check-up. As he unclasped the bag, his daughter began to cry.



(And now we're here. Padma: this is it.)



Ten minutes later the long time of silence was ended for ever as my grandfather emerged roaring from the sick-room. He bellowed for his wife, his daughters, his sons. His lungs were strong and the noise reached Nadir Khan in the cellar. It would not have been difficult for him to guess what the fuss was about.



The family assembled in the drawing-room around the radiogram, beneath the ageless photographs. Aziz carried Mumtaz into the room and set her down on a couch. His face looked terrible. Can you imagine how the insides of his nose must have felt? Because he had this bombshell to drop: that, after two years of marriage, his daughter was still a virgin.



It had been three years since Reverend Mother had spoken. 'Daughter, is this thing true?' The silence, which had been hanging in the corners of the house like a torn cobweb, was finally blown away; but Mumtaz just nodded: Yes. True.



Then she spoke. She said she loved her husband and the other thing would come right in the end. He was a good man and when it was possible to have children he would surely find it possible to do the thing. She said a marriage should not depend on the thing, she had thought, so she had not liked to mention it, and her father was not right to tell everyone out loud like he had. She would have said more; but now Reverend Mother burst.



Three years of words poured out of her (but her body, stretched by the exigencies of storing them, did not diminish). My grandfather stood very still by the Telefunken as the storm broke over him. Whose idea had it been? Whose crazy fool scheme, whatsitsname, to let this coward who wasn't even a man into the house? To stay here, whatsitsname, free as a bird, food and shelter for three years, what did you care about meatless days, whatsitsname, what did you know about the cost of rice? Who was the weakling, whatsitsname, yes, the white-haired weakling who had permitted this iniquitous marriage? Who had put his daughter into that scoundrel's, whatsitsname, bed? Whose head was full of every damn fool incomprehensible thing, whatsitsname, whose brain was so softened by fancy foreign ideas that he could send his child into such an unnatural marriage? Who had spent his life offending God, whatsitsname, and on whose head was this a judgment? Who had brought disaster down upon his house ...



she spoke against my grandfather for an hour and nineteen minutes and by the time she had finished the clouds had run out of water and the house was full of puddles. And, before she ended, her youngest daughter Emerald did a very curious thing.



Emerald's hands rose up beside her face, bunched into fists, but with index fingers extended. Index fingers entered ear-holes and seemed to life Emerald out of her chair until she was running, fingers plugging ears, running - FULL-TILT! - without her dupatta on, out into the street, through the puddles of water, past the rickshaw-stand, past the paan-shop where the old men were just emerging cautiously into the clean fresh air of after-the-rain, and her speed amazed the urchins who were on their marks, waiting to begin their game of dodging in and out between the betel-jets, because nobody was used to seeing a young lady, much less one of the Teen Batti, running alone and distraught through the rain-soaked streets with her fingers in her ears and no dupatta around her shoulders.



Nowadays, the cities are full of modern, fashionable, dupatta-less misses; but back then the old men clicked their tongues in sorrow, because a woman without a dupatta was a woman without honour, and why had Emerald Bibi chosen to leave her honour at home? The old ones were baffled, but Emerald knew. She saw, clearly, freshly in the after-rain air, that the fountain-head of her family's troubles was that cowardly plumpie (yes, Padma) who lived underground. If she could get rid of him everyone would be happy again ... Emerald ran without pausing to the Cantonment district. The Cantt, where the army was based; where Major Zulfikar would be! Breaking her oath, my aunt arrived at his office.



Zulfikar is a famous name amongst Muslims. It was the name of the two-pronged sword carried by Ali, the nephew of the prophet Muhammad. It was a weapon such as the world had never seen.



Oh, yes: something else was happening in the world that day. A weapon such as the world had never seen was being dropped on yellow people in Japan. But in Agra, Emerald was using a secret weapon of her own. It was bandylegged, short, flat-headed; its nose almost touched its chin; it dreamed of a big modern house with a plumbed-in bath right beside the bed.



Major Zulfikar had never been absolutely sure whether or not he believed Nadir Khan to have been behind the Hummingbird's murder; but he itched for the chance to find out. When Emerald told him about Agra's subterranean Taj, he became so excited that he forgot to be angry, and rushed to Cornwallis Road with a force of fifteen men. They arrived in the drawing-room with Emerald at their head. My aunt: treason with a beautiful face, no dupatta and pink loose-pajamas. Aziz watched dumbly as the soldiers rolled back the drawing-room carpet and opened the big trap-door as my grandmother attempted to console Mumtaz. 'Women must marry men,' she said. 'Not mice, whatsitsname! There is no shame in leaving that, whatsitsname, worm.' But her daughter continued to cry.



Absence of Nadir in his underworld! Warned by Aziz's first roar, overcome by the embarrassment which flooded over him more easily than monsoon rain, he vanished.



A trap-door flung open in one of the toilets - yes, the very one, why not, in which he had spoken to Doctor Aziz from the sanctuary of a washing-chest. A wooden 'thunderbox' -a 'throne' - lay on one side, empty enamel pot rolling on coir matting. The toilet had an outside door giving out on to the gully by the cornfield; the door was open. It had been locked from the outside, but only with an Indian-made lock, so it had been easy to force ... and in the soft lamplit seclusion of the Taj Mahal, a shining spittoon, and a note, addressed to Mumtaz, signed by her husband, three words long, six syllables, three exclamation marks: Talaaq! Talaaq! Talaaq! The English lacks the thunderclap sound of the Urdu, and anyway you know what it means. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. Nadir Khan had done the decent thing.



?awesome rage of Major Zulfy when he found the bird had flown! This was the colour he saw: red. ?anger fully comparable to my grandfather's fury, though expressed in petty gestures! Major Zulfy, at first, hopped up and down in helpless fits of temper; controlled himself at last; and- rushed out through bathroom, past throne, alongside cornfield, through perimeter gate. No sign of a running, plump, longhair, rhymeless poet. Looking left: nothing. And right: zero. Enraged Zulfy made his choice, pelted past the cycle-rickshaw rank. Old men were playing hit-the-spittoon and the spittoon was out in the street.



Urchins, dodging in and out of the streams of betel-juice. Major Zulfy ran, ononon. Between the old men and their target, but he lacked the urchins' skill.



What an unfortunate moment: a low hard jet of red fluid caught him squarely in the crotch. A stain like a hand clutched at the groin of his battledress; squeezed; arrested his progress. Major Zulfy stopped in almighty wrath. ?even more unfortunate; because a second player, assuming the mad soldier would keep on running' had unleashed a second jet. A second red hand clasped the first and completed Major Zulfy's day... slowly, with deliberation, he went to the spittoon and kicked it over, into the dust. He jumped on it -once! twice! again! - flattening it, and refusing to show that it had hurt his foot. Then, with some dignity, he limped away, back to the car parked outside my grandfather's house.



The old ones retrieved their brutalized receptacle and began to knock it back into shape.



'Now that I'm getting married,' Emerald told Mumtaz, 'it'll be very rude of you if you don't even try to have a good time. And you should be giving me advice and everything.' At the time, although Mumtaz smiled at her younger sister, she had thought it a great cheek on Emerald's part to say this; and, unintentionally perhaps, had increased the pressure of the pencil with which she was applying henna tracery to the soles of her sister's feet. 'Hey!' Emerald squealed, 'No need to get mad! I just thought we should try to be friends.'



Relations between the sisters had been somewhat strained since Nadir Khan's disappearance; and Mumtaz hadn't liked it when Major Zulfikar (who had chosen not to charge my grandfather with harbouring a wanted man, and squared it with Brigadier Dodson) asked for, and received, permission to marry Emerald. 'It's like blackmail,' she thought. 'And anyway, what about Alia? The eldest shouldn't be married last, and look how patient she's been with her merchant fellow.' But she said nothing, and smiled her forebearing smile, and devoted her gift of assiduity to the wedding preparations, and agreed to try and have a good time; while Alia went on waiting for Ahmed Sinai. ('She'll wait forever,' Padma guesses: correctly.)



January 1946. Marquees, sweetmeats, guests, songs, fainting bride, stiff-at-attention groom: a beautiful wedding... at which the leather-cloth merchant, Ahmed Sinai, found himself deep in conversation with the newly-divorced Mumtaz. 'You love-children? - what a coincidence, so do I..." 'And you didn't have any, poor girl? Well, matter of fact, my wife couldn't ...'



'Oh, no; how sad for you; and she must have been bad-tempered like anything!''... Oh, like hell... excuse me. Strength of emotions carried me away.''- Quite all right; don't think about it. Did she throw dishes and all?'



'Did she throw? In one month we had to eat out of newspaper!' 'No, my goodness, what whoppers you tell!' 'Oh, it's no good, you're too clever for me. But she did throw dishes all the same.' 'You poor, poor man.' 'No - you. Poor, poor you.' And thinking: 'Such a charming chap, with Alia he always looked so bored ...' And,'... This girl, I never looked at her, but my goodness me...' And,'...



You can tell he loves children; and for that I could...' And,'... Well, never mind about the skin...' It was noticeable that, when it was time to sing, Mumtaz found the spirit to join in all the songs; but Alia remained silent. She had been bruised even more badly than her father in Jallianwala Bagh; and you couldn't see a mark on her.



'So, gloomy sis, you managed to enjoy yourself after all.'



In June that year, Mumtaz re-married. Her sister - taking her cue from their mother- would not speak to her until, just before they both died, she saw her chance of revenge. Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Alia that these things happen, it was better to find out now than later, and Mumtaz had been badly hurt and needed a man to help her recover...



besides, Alia had brains, she would be all right. 'But, but,' Alia said, 'nobody ever married a book.' 'Change your name,' Ahmed Sinai said. 'Time for a fresh start. Throw Mumtaz and her Nadir Khan out of the window, I'll choose you a new name. Amina. Amina Sinai: you'd like that?' 'Whatever you say, husband,' my mother said. 'Anyway,' Alia, the wise child, wrote in her diary, 'who wants to get landed with this marrying business? Not me; never; no.'



Mian Abdullah was a false start for a lot of optimistic people; his assistant (whose name could not be spoken in my father's house) was my mother's wrong turning. But those were the years of the drought; many crops planted at that time ended up by coming to nothing.



'What happened to the plumpie?' Padma asks, crossly, 'You don't mean you aren't going to tell?'

儿童青少年心算能力的发展及其机制研究
论文提示：作为日常生活的一种重要思维活动，心算也是认知发展的研究主题之一。本文研究心算能力发展主要想解决两个问题，一是描述儿童青少年

作为日常生活的一种重要思维活动，心算也是认知发展的研究主题之一。本文研究心算能力发展主要想解决两个问题，一是描述儿童青少年的心算能力如何随年龄变化而发展；二是揭示儿童青少年心算能力变化的因素或机制。加工速度和工作记忆是心算加工中两个特别重要的元素成分，个体在这两方面都存在差异，并且承担着年龄和心算关系的中介作用。以248名10-18岁的儿童青少年为被试，对心算、加工速度和工作记忆三种认知能力进行测试，考查加工速度和工作记忆在心算能力发展中的作用。研究表明：(1) 儿童青少年阶段包括加工速度、工作记忆和心算活动在内的各种认知能力都呈现出与年龄密切相关的发展趋势。(2) 随年龄的增长，心算反应时减少，正确率提高，但是通过统计方法控制了加工速度和工作记忆以后，心算能力的年龄差异显著下降。(3) 加工速度和工作记忆在心算的年龄差异中起着同等重要的作用，其中加工速度对心算年龄差异的作用量约为43％-76％，工作记忆对心算年龄差异的作用量约为36％-68％。(4)加工速度和工作记忆综合起来可以解释大约53％-86％心算能力发展中的年龄差异。(5) 加工速度中知觉运动速度对心算能力发展的作用量明显大于感觉运动速度的作用量
前言 6-9
第一部分 文献综述 9-21
1 心算 10-12
2 加工速度 12-15
3 工作记忆 15-18
4 年龄、加工速度、工作记忆与心算 18-19
5 问题的提出 19-21
第二部分 研究方法 21-24
1 研究对象 21
2 任务设计 21-22
3 研究程序 22-24
第三部分 研究结果 24-35
1 基本的数据统计 24-25
2 心算的数据统计 25-27
3 加工速度和工作记忆在心算能力发展中的作用 27-32
4 加工速度在心算能力发展中作用的进一步分析 32-33
5 工作记忆在心算能力发展中作用的进一步分析 33-35
第四部分 讨论 35-42
1 实验分析 35-39
2 心算能力和认知发展 39-40
3 教学启示 40-42
第五部分 结论与展望

一些学者凭借视觉上的直观经验，把心理发展的内外因界定于主客体之间，而且不可逾越。实际上客体只相对于主体而言的，它并不等同于整个纯客观环境，而只是环境的一部分。主体通过活动发挥出现实的本质力量（实践能力和认识能力），才能使客观环境中的“自在之物”转化成“为我之物”，即活动对象或客体。儿童心理发展的内外因应该界定于客体与自在之物之间，而主客体则是不可分割的整体。对于刚刚降生的婴儿来说，环境才是纯粹的心理发展的外因；随着儿童本质力量的成长，环境中的自在之物就逐渐转化为儿童活动的对象，即客体，这部分的环境因素也就转化为儿童心理发展的内因。唯有如此，我们才能在内因的动力学意义上，正确把握教育对儿童心理发展所起的主导作用，也才有可能深刻领会维果茨基的正确命题：教学是人为的发展。还有一些学者习惯于把儿童心理发展的内外因界定于主观的心理过程和客观的物质过程之间，因此就把主客体之间的矛盾归之于心理发展的外因。儿童真实的生活过程是一个有机联系的连续发展的整体，虽然儿童内部的心理活动起源于外部的实践活动，观念上的活动对象派生于现实中的活动对象，但在儿童的真实生活中，内部活动与外部活动，观念上的活动对象与现实中的活动对象，以及主体活动与活动对象，都是难以割裂的。列昂茨夫说得好，由于内部活动与外部活动的根本的共同性，“这两种活动是人同他从中实现其现实生活的世界的相互联系的中介。与此相适应，作为古典的笛卡儿──洛克心理学之基础的主要区别：外部世界、时空世界（外部的躯体的活动和它有关）这一方面，同另一方面──意识的内部现象和过程的世界──的区别，应当让位于另一种区别，即对象性现实及其观念化的转化形式这一方面，同另一方面既包括外部过程，也包括内部过程在内的主体活动的区别。这就意味着排除了把活动分割为仿佛属于两个完全不同领域的两个部分或两个方面。”如果我们硬是把儿童的内部心理活动从他的生活实践中剥离出去，那岂不是悖逆现代心理学发展主流？这也不符合儿童真实的生活过程。如果我们硬要从儿童的主观心理世界中去寻找心理发展的根本动力，那同唯心论者在人的精神内部寻找意识的来源又有什么本质上的区别呢？当我们把主客体之间的矛盾说成是心理发展的外因时，就会出现唯物论和辩证法在最基本原理上的二律背反；同时也推翻了儿童心理是在主客体相互作用的过程中发生发展的这个基本前提。

一些学者凭借视觉上的直观经验，把心理发展的内外因界定于主客体之间，而且不可逾越。实际上客体只相对于主体而言的，它并不等同于整个纯客观环境，而只是环境的一部分。主体通过活动发挥出现实的本质力量（实践能力和认识能力），才能使客观环境中的“自在之物”转化成“为我之物”，即活动对象或客体。儿童心理发展的内外因应该界定于客体与自在之物之间，而主客体则是不可分割的整体。对于刚刚降生的婴儿来说，环境才是纯粹的心理发展的外因；随着儿童本质力量的成长，环境中的自在之物就逐渐转化为儿童活动的对象，即客体，这部分的环境因素也就转化为儿童心理发展的内因。唯有如此，我们才能在内因的动力学意义上，正确把握教育对儿童心理发展所起的主导作用，也才有可能深刻领会维果茨基的正确命题：教学是人为的发展。还有一些学者习惯于把儿童心理发展的内外因界定于主观的心理过程和客观的物质过程之间，因此就把主客体之间的矛盾归之于心理发展的外因。儿童真实的生活过程是一个有机联系的连续发展的整体，虽然儿童内部的心理活动起源于外部的实践活动，观念上的活动对象派生于现实中的活动对象，但在儿童的真实生活中，内部活动与外部活动，观念上的活动对象与现实中的活动对象，以及主体活动与活动对象，都是难以割裂的。列昂茨夫说得好，由于内部活动与外部活动的根本的共同性，“这两种活动是人同他从中实现其现实生活的世界的相互联系的中介。与此相适应，作为古典的笛卡儿──洛克心理学之基础的主要区别：外部世界、时空世界（外部的躯体的活动和它有关）这一方面，同另一方面──意识的内部现象和过程的世界──的区别，应当让位于另一种区别，即对象性现实及其观念化的转化形式这一方面，同另一方面既包括外部过程，也包括内部过程在内的主体活动的区别。这就意味着排除了把活动分割为仿佛属于两个完全不同领域的两个部分或两个方面。”如果我们硬是把儿童的内部心理活动从他的生活实践中剥离出去，那岂不是悖逆现代心理学发展主流？这也不符合儿童真实的生活过程。如果我们硬要从儿童的主观心理世界中去寻找心理发展的根本动力，那同唯心论者在人的精神内部寻找意识的来源又有什么本质上的区别呢？当我们把主客体之间的矛盾说成是心理发展的外因时，就会出现唯物论和辩证法在最基本原理上的二律背反；同时也推翻了儿童心理是在主客体相互作用的过程中发生发展的这个基本前提。

一些学者凭借视觉上的直观经验，把心理发展的内外因界定于主客体之间，而且不可逾越。实际上客体只相对于主体而言的，它并不等同于整个纯客观环境，而只是环境的一部分。主体通过活动发挥出现实的本质力量（实践能力和认识能力），才能使客观环境中的“自在之物”转化成“为我之物”，即活动对象或客体。儿童心理发展的内外因应该界定于客体与自在之物之间，而主客体则是不可分割的整体。对于刚刚降生的婴儿来说，环境才是纯粹的心理发展的外因；随着儿童本质力量的成长，环境中的自在之物就逐渐转化为儿童活动的对象，即客体，这部分的环境因素也就转化为儿童心理发展的内因。唯有如此，我们才能在内因的动力学意义上，正确把握教育对儿童心理发展所起的主导作用，也才有可能深刻领会维果茨基的正确命题：教学是人为的发展。还有一些学者习惯于把儿童心理发展的内外因界定于主观的心理过程和客观的物质过程之间，因此就把主客体之间的矛盾归之于心理发展的外因。儿童真实的生活过程是一个有机联系的连续发展的整体，虽然儿童内部的心理活动起源于外部的实践活动，观念上的活动对象派生于现实中的活动对象，但在儿童的真实生活中，内部活动与外部活动，观念上的活动对象与现实中的活动对象，以及主体活动与活动对象，都是难以割裂的。列昂茨夫说得好，由于内部活动与外部活动的根本的共同性，“这两种活动是人同他从中实现其现实生活的世界的相互联系的中介。与此相适应，作为古典的笛卡儿──洛克心理学之基础的主要区别：外部世界、时空世界（外部的躯体的活动和它有关）这一方面，同另一方面──意识的内部现象和过程的世界──的区别，应当让位于另一种区别，即对象性现实及其观念化的转化形式这一方面，同另一方面既包括外部过程，也包括内部过程在内的主体活动的区别。这就意味着排除了把活动分割为仿佛属于两个完全不同领域的两个部分或两个方面。”如果我们硬是把儿童的内部心理活动从他的生活实践中剥离出去，那岂不是悖逆现代心理学发展主流？这也不符合儿童真实的生活过程。如果我们硬要从儿童的主观心理世界中去寻找心理发展的根本动力，那同唯心论者在人的精神内部寻找意识的来源又有什么本质上的区别呢？当我们把主客体之间的矛盾说成是心理发展的外因时，就会出现唯物论和辩证法在最基本原理上的二律背反；同时也推翻了儿童心理是在主客体相互作用的过程中发生发展的这个基本前提。

一些学者凭借视觉上的直观经验，把心理发展的内外因界定于主客体之间，而且不可逾越。实际上客体只相对于主体而言的，它并不等同于整个纯客观环境，而只是环境的一部分。主体通过活动发挥出现实的本质力量（实践能力和认识能力），才能使客观环境中的“自在之物”转化成“为我之物”，即活动对象或客体。儿童心理发展的内外因应该界定于客体与自在之物之间，而主客体则是不可分割的整体。对于刚刚降生的婴儿来说，环境才是纯粹的心理发展的外因；随着儿童本质力量的成长，环境中的自在之物就逐渐转化为儿童活动的对象，即客体，这部分的环境因素也就转化为儿童心理发展的内因。唯有如此，我们才能在内因的动力学意义上，正确把握教育对儿童心理发展所起的主导作用，也才有可能深刻领会维果茨基的正确命题：教学是人为的发展。还有一些学者习惯于把儿童心理发展的内外因界定于主观的心理过程和客观的物质过程之间，因此就把主客体之间的矛盾归之于心理发展的外因。儿童真实的生活过程是一个有机联系的连续发展的整体，虽然儿童内部的心理活动起源于外部的实践活动，观念上的活动对象派生于现实中的活动对象，但在儿童的真实生活中，内部活动与外部活动，观念上的活动对象与现实中的活动对象，以及主体活动与活动对象，都是难以割裂的。列昂茨夫说得好，由于内部活动与外部活动的根本的共同性，“这两种活动是人同他从中实现其现实生活的世界的相互联系的中介。与此相适应，作为古典的笛卡儿──洛克心理学之基础的主要区别：外部世界、时空世界（外部的躯体的活动和它有关）这一方面，同另一方面──意识的内部现象和过程的世界──的区别，应当让位于另一种区别，即对象性现实及其观念化的转化形式这一方面，同另一方面既包括外部过程，也包括内部过程在内的主体活动的区别。这就意味着排除了把活动分割为仿佛属于两个完全不同领域的两个部分或两个方面。”如果我们硬是把儿童的内部心理活动从他的生活实践中剥离出去，那岂不是悖逆现代心理学发展主流？这也不符合儿童真实的生活过程。如果我们硬要从儿童的主观心理世界中去寻找心理发展的根本动力，那同唯心论者在人的精神内部寻找意识的来源又有什么本质上的区别呢？当我们把主客体之间的矛盾说成是心理发展的外因时，就会出现唯物论和辩证法在最基本原理上的二律背反；同时也推翻了儿童心理是在主客体相互作用的过程中发生发展的这个基本前提。
一些学者凭借视觉上的直观经验，把心理发展的内外因界定于主客体之间，而且不可逾越。实际上客体只相对于主体而言的，它并不等同于整个纯客观环境，而只是环境的一部分。主体通过活动发挥出现实的本质力量（实践能力和认识能力），才能使客观环境中的“自在之物”转化成“为我之物”，即活动对象或客体。儿童心理发展的内外因应该界定于客体与自在之物之间，而主客体则是不可分割的整体。对于刚刚降生的婴儿来说，环境才是纯粹的心理发展的外因；随着儿童本质力量的成长，环境中的自在之物就逐渐转化为儿童活动的对象，即客体，这部分的环境因素也就转化为儿童心理发展的内因。唯有如此，我们才能在内因的动力学意义上，正确把握教育对儿童心理发展所起的主导作用，也才有可能深刻领会维果茨基的正确命题：教学是人为的发展。还有一些学者习惯于把儿童心理发展的内外因界定于主观的心理过程和客观的物质过程之间，因此就把主客体之间的矛盾归之于心理发展的外因。儿童真实的生活过程是一个有机联系的连续发展的整体，虽然儿童内部的心理活动起源于外部的实践活动，观念上的活动对象派生于现实中的活动对象，但在儿童的真实生活中，内部活动与外部活动，观念上的活动对象与现实中的活动对象，以及主体活动与活动对象，都是难以割裂的。列昂茨夫说得好，由于内部活动与外部活动的根本的共同性，“这两种活动是人同他从中实现其现实生活的世界的相互联系的中介。与此相适应，作为古典的笛卡儿──洛克心理学之基础的主要区别：外部世界、时空世界（外部的躯体的活动和它有关）这一方面，同另一方面──意识的内部现象和过程的世界──的区别，应当让位于另一种区别，即对象性现实及其观念化的转化形式这一方面，同另一方面既包括外部过程，也包括内部过程在内的主体活动的区别。这就意味着排除了把活动分割为仿佛属于两个完全不同领域的两个部分或两个方面。”如果我们硬是把儿童的内部心理活动从他的生活实践中剥离出去，那岂不是悖逆现代心理学发展主流？这也不符合儿童真实的生活过程。如果我们硬要从儿童的主观心理世界中去寻找心理发展的根本动力，那同唯心论者在人的精神内部寻找意识的来源又有什么本质上的区别呢？当我们把主客体之间的矛盾说成是心理发展的外因时，就会出现唯物论和辩证法在最基本原理上的二律背反；同时也推翻了儿童心理是在主客体相互作用的过程中发生发展的这个基本前提。