IX
A Wonderful Lamp
1
Eighteen months after his heart attack, Saladin Chamcha took to the air again in response to the telegraphed news that his father was in the terminal stages of multiple myeloma, a systemic cancer of
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komentar
VIII
The Parting of the Arabian Sea
It had been the habit of Srinivas the toy merchant to threaten his wife and children, from time to time, that one day, when the material world had lost its savour, he would drop everything, including his name, and turn sanyasi, wandering from village to village with a begging bowl and a stick. Mrs. Srinivas treated these threats tolerantly, knowing that her gelatinous and
VII
The Angel Azraeel
1
It all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha
in his den: love, the refractory bird of Meilhac and Halévy's libretto for _Carmen_ -- one of the prize specimens, this, in the Allegorical Aviary he'd assembled in lighter days, and which included among its winged metaphors the Sweet (of youth), the Yellow (more lucky than me), Khayyám-- FitzGerald's adjectiveless Bird of Time (which has but a little way to fly, and lo! is on the Wing), and
VI
Return to Jahilia
When Baal the poet saw a single teardrop the colour of blood emerging from the corner of the left eye of the statue of Al-Lat in the House of the Black Stone, he understood that the Prophet Mahound was on his way back to Jahilia after an exile of a quarter- century. He belched violently -- an affliction of age, this, its coarseness seeming to correspond to the general thickening induced by the years, a thickening of the tongue as well as the body, a slow congealment of the blood, that had turned Baal at fifty into a figure quite
V
A City Visible but Unseen
1
"_Once I'm an owl, what is the spell or antidote for turning me back into myself?_" Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, prop. Shaandaar Café and landlord of the rooming-house above, mentor to the variegated, transient and particoloured inhabitants of both, seen- it-all type, least doctrinaire of hajis and most unashamed of V C R addicts, ex-schoolteacher, self- taught in classical texts of many cultures, dismissed from post in Dhaka owing to cultural differences with certain generals in the old days when Bangladesh
was merely an East Wing, and therefore, in his own
IV
Ayesha
Even the serial visions have migrated now; they know the city better than he. And in the aftermath of Rosa and Rekha the dream-worlds of his archangelic other self begin to seem as tangible as the shifting realities he inhabits while he's awake.
III
Ellowen Deeowen
1
I know what a ghost is, the old woman affirmed silently. Her name was Rosa Diamond; she was eighty-eight years old; and she was squinting beakily through her salt-caked bedroom windows,
watching the full moon's sea. And I know what it isn't, too, she nodded further, it isn't a scarification or a flapping sheet, so pooh and pish to all _that_ bunkum. What's a ghost? Unfinished business, is
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