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.

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It's hard to believe," Chamcha argued. "I've lived here for many years and it never happened before ..." His words dried up because he saw the manticore looking at him through narrow, distrustful eyes. "Many years?" it asked. "How could that be? -- Maybe you're an informer? -- Yes, that's it, a spy?" Just then a wail came from a far corner of the ward. "Lemme go," a woman's voice howled. "OJesus I want to go. Jesus Mary I gotta go, lemme go, O God, O Jesus God." A very lecherouslooking wolf put its head through Saladin's screens and spoke urgently to the manticore. "The guards'll be here soon," it hissed. "It's her again, Glass Bertha." "Glass . . .?" Saladin began. "Her skin turned to glass," the manticore explained impatiently, not knowing that he was bringing Chamcha's worst dream to life. "And the bastards smashed it up for her. Now she can't even walk to the toilet." A new voice hissed out across the greeny night. "For God's sake, woman. Go in the fucking bedpan." The wolf was pulling the manticore away. "Is he with us or not?" it wanted to know. The manticore shrugged. "He can't make up his mind," it answered. "Can't believe his own eyes, that's his trouble." They fled, hearing the approaching crunch of the guards' heavy boots. o o o The next day there was no sign of a doctor, or of Pamela, and Chamcha in his utter bewilderment woke and slept as if the two conditions no longer required to be thought of as opposites, but as states that flowed into and out of one another to create a kind of unending delirium of the senses.. . he found himself dreaming of the Queen, of making tender love to the Monarch. She was the body of Britain, the avatar of the State, and he had chosen her, joined with her; she was his Beloved, the moon of his delight. Hyacinth came at the appointed times to ride and pummel him, and he submitted without any fuss. But when she finished she whispered into his ear: "You in with the rest?" and he understood that she was involved in the great conspiracy, too. "If you are," he heard himself saying, "then you can count me in." She nodded, looking pleased. Chamcha felt a warmth filling him up, and he began to wonder about taking hold of one of the physiotherapist's exceedingly dainty, albeit powerful, little fists; but just then a shout came from the direction of the blind man: "My stick, I've lost my stick." "Poor old bugger," said Hyacinth, and hopping off Chamcha she darted across to the sightless fellow, picked up the fallen stick, restored it to its owner, and came back to Saladin. "Now," she said. "I'll see you this pm; okay, no problems?" He wanted her to stay, but she acted brisk. "I'm a busy woman, Mr. Chamcha. Things to do, people to see." When she had gone he lay back and smiled for the first time in a long while. It did not occur to him that his metamorphosis must be continuing, because he was actually entertaining romantic notions about a black woman; and before he had time to think such complex thoughts, the blind man next door began, once again, to speak. "I have noticed you," Chamcha heard him say, "I have noticed you, and come to appreciate your kindness and understanding." Saladin realized that he was making a formal speech of thanks to the empty space where he clearly believed the physiotherapist was still standing. "I am not a man who forgets a kindness. One day, perhaps, I may be able to repay it, but for the moment, please know that it is remembered, and fondly, too. . ." Chamcha did not have the courage to call out, _she isn't there, old man, she left some time back_. He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air a question: "I hope, perhaps, you may also remember me? A little? On occasion?" Then came a silence; a dry laugh; the sound of a man sitting down, heavily, all of a sudden. And finally, after an unbearable pause, bathos: "Oh," the soliloquist bellowed, "oh, if ever a body suffered. . . !" We strive for the heights but our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him. _Once I was lighter, happier, warm. Now the black water is in my veins_. Still no Pamela. _What the hell_. That night, he told the manticore and the wolf that he was with them, all the way. o o o The great escape took place some nights later, when Saladin's lungs had been all but emptied of slime by the ministrations of Miss Hyacinth Phillips. It turned out to be a well-organized affair on a pretty large scale, involving not only the inmates of the sanatorium but also the detenus, as the manticore called them, held behind wire fences in the Detention Centre nearby. Not being one of the grand strategists of the escape, Chamcha simply waited by his bed as instructed until Hyacinth brought him word, and then they ran out of that ward of nightmares into the clarity of a cold, moonlit sky, past several bound, gagged men: their former guards. There were many shadowy figures running through the glowing night, and Chamcha glimpsed beings he could never have imagined, men and women who were also partially plants, or giant insects, or even, on occasion, built partly of brick or stone; there were men with rhinoceros horns instead of noses and women with necks as long as any giraffe. The monsters ran quickly, silently, to the edge of the Detention Centre compound, where the manticore and other sharp-toothed mutants were waiting by the large holes they had bitten into the fabric of the containing fence, and then they were out, free, going their separate ways, without hope, but also without shame. Saladin Chamcha and Hyacinth Phillips ran side by side, his goat-hoofs clip-clopping on the hard pavements: _east_ she told him, as he heard his own footsteps replace the tinnitus in his ears, east east east they ran, taking the low roads to London town. 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.

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