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By Root 20312 0

” With this statement he proved that he was as much under my spell as I under his; he had accepted that he, too, was one of that endless series of parents to whom I alone had the power of giving birth. And although, after a time, I found the air in his chambers too oppressive, and left him once more to the isolation from which he would never again be disturbed, he had shown me how to proceed. Consumed by the two-headed demon of revenge, I used my telepathic powers (for the first time) as a weapon; and in this way I discovered the details of the relationship between Homi Catrack and Lila Sabarmati. Lila and Pia were always rivals in beauty; it was the wife of the heir-apparent to the title of Admiral of the Fleet who had become the film magnate’s new fancy-woman. While Commander Sabarmati was at sea on manoeuvres, Lila and Homi were performing certain maneuvers of their own; while the lion of the seas awaited the death of the then-Admiral, Homi and Lila, too, were making an appointment with the Reaper. (With my help.)

“Be secret,” said Sharpsticker Sahib; secretly, I spied on my enemy Homi, and on the promiscuous mother of Eyeslice and Hairoil (who were very full of themselves of late, ever since, in fact, the papers announced that Commander Sabarmati’s promotion was a mere formality. Only a matter of time …). “Loose woman,” the demon within me whispered silently, “Perpetrator of the worst of maternal perfidies! We shall turn you into an awful example; through you we shall demonstrate the fate which awaits the lascivious. O unobservant adulteress! Did you not see what sleeping around did to the illustrious Baroness Simki von der Heiden?—who was, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bitch, just like yourself.”

My view of Lila Sabarmati has mellowed with age; after all, she and I had one thing in common—her nose, like mine, possessed tremendous powers. Hers, however, was a purely worldly magic: a wrinkle of nasal skin could charm the steeliest of Admirals; a tiny flare of the nostrils ignited strange fires in the hearts of film magnates. I am a little regretful about betraying that nose; it was a little like stabbing a cousin in the back.

What I discovered: every Sunday morning at ten a.m., Lila Sabarmati drove Eyeslice and Hairoil to the Metro cinema for the weekly meetings of the Metro Cub Club. (She volunteered to take the rest of us, too; Sonny and Cyrus, the Monkey and I piled into her Indian-made Hindustan car.) And while we drove towards Lana Turner or Robert Taylor or Sandra Dee, Mr. Homi Catrack was also preparing himself for a weekly rendezvous. While Lila’s Hindustan puttered along beside railway-lines, Homi was knotting a cream silk scarf around his throat; while she halted at red lights, he donned a Techni-colored bush-coat; when she was ushering us into the darkness of the auditorium, he was putting on gold-rimmed sunglasses; and when she left us to watch our film, he, too, was abandoning a child. Toxy Catrack never failed to react to his departures by wailing kicking thrashing-of-legs; she knew what was going on, and not even Bi-Appah could restrain her.

Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors. When Lila drove her Hindustan to an address off Colaba Causeway, she was Juliet coming out on to her balcony; when cream-scarfed, gold-shaded Homi sped off to meet her (in the same Studebaker in which my mother had once been rushed to Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home), he was Leander swimming the Hellespont towards Hero’s burning candle. As for my part in the business—I will not give it a name.

I confess: what I did was no act of heroism. I did not battle Homi on horseback, with fiery eyes and flaming sword; instead, imitating the action of the snake, I began to cut pieces out of newspapers. From GOAN LIBERATION COMMITTEE LAUNCHES SATYAGRAHA CAMPAIGN I extracted the letters