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shaken but not stirred 是什么意思
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haken but not stirred动摇，但绝不会混杂失味，但不要搅的例句Like Bond&#39.一如邦德手中的马丁尼;s martini, lounge culture has been shaken，酒吧文化已被摇动, but definitely not stirred
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出门在外也不愁be shaken是什么意思_be shaken在线翻译_be shaken什么意思_be shaken的意思_be shaken的翻译_英语单词大全_911查询
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be shakenbe shaken 网络解释1. 会被震撼& & # And the sands on the shoreline #|# 海岸线上的沙滩 # | # Will be shaken #|# 会被震撼# | # And the tide will pound and the waves will sound #|# 大潮袭来,声音轰鸣作响 #be shaken 网络例句1. His resolution is not to be shaken by anything. & &他的决心是怎么也动摇不了的。2. As for me, I said in my prosperity, I will never be shaken. & &30：6 至于我，我在平顺时曾说，我永不动摇。3. His resolution is not to be shaken by anything. & &他的决心是不可动摇的。4. He alone is my r he is my fortress, I will not be shaken. & &惟独他是我的磐石，我的拯救；他是我的高台，我必不动摇。5. He alone is my r he is my fortress, I will never be shaken. & &惟独他是我的磐石，我的拯救；他是我的高台，我必不很动摇。6. Please keep your eyes open and pay attention to us, and you will be shaken! & &请睁大你的眼睛瞧着吧，你会震惊的！7. He alone is my r he is my fortress, I will not be shaken. & &诗62：6 惟独他是我的磐石，我的拯救。他是我的高台。我必不动摇。be shaken是什么意思,be shaken在线翻译,be shaken什么意思,be shaken的意思,be shaken的翻译,be shaken的解释,be shaken的发音,be shaken的同义词,be shaken的反义词,be shaken的例句,be shaken的相关词组,be shaken意思是什么,be shaken怎么翻译,单词be shaken是什么意思常用英语教材考试英语单词大全 (7本教材)
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cher1sh什么意思
cher1sh什么意思
09-01-16 &匿名提问 发布
Reality is a que the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars' faces dissolv tiny details assume g the illusion dissolves - or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality ... we have come from 1915 to 1956, so we're a good deal closer to the screen... abandoning my metaphor, then, I reiterate, entirely without a sense of shame, my unbelievable claim: after a curious accident in a washing-chest, I became a sort of radio. ... But today, I feel confused. Padma has not returned - should I alert the police? Is she a Missing Person? - and in her absence, my certainties are falling apart. Even my nose has been playing tricks on me - by day, as I stroll between the pickle-vats tended by our army of strong, hairy-armed, formidably competent women, I have found myself failing to distinguish lemon-odours from lime. The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor sahib has been crossed in - what? - surely not love? ... Padma, and the cracks spreading all over me, radiating like a spider' and the heat... a little confusion is surely permissible in these circumstances. Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of ev in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything - to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it to others. For me, there
I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began ... Ye Akashvani hai. This is All-India Radio. Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani cafe, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light with only a cheap transistor for company. A bubbling air filled with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle- voices in the dark. Pickle-fumes, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then ... it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat... it was not the voices (then or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea - the idea that his parents' outrage might lead to a with that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deformity ... while I, now, Padma-less, send these words into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. He and I, I and he ... I no
he never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost ... he had no cracks. No spiders' webs spread through him in the heat. Pa but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook. And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive through the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize impotence - ever since the notorious free-transistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented what men could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied) ... then, the nearlynineyearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines. Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat-haze, then and now, blurs his then-time into mine ... my confusion, travelling across the heat-waves, is also his. What grows best in the heat: cane- certain millets such as bajra, linseed, and (given water) tea and rice. Our hot land is also the world's second largest producer of cotton - at least, it was when I learned geography under the mad eye of Mr Emil Zagallo, and the steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador. But the tropical summer grows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom, to fill the close perspiring nights with odours as heavy as musk, which give men dark dreams of discontent... then as now, unease was in the air. Language marchers demanded the partition of the state of Bombay along linguistic boundaries - the dream of Maharashtra was at the head of some processions, the mirage of Gujarat led the others forward. Heat, gnawing at the mind's divisions between fantasy and reality, made an the half-waking chaos of afternoon siestas fogged men's brains, and the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires. What grows best in the heat: lust. In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through by night, they rioted in my head. We shall be watching your life with t it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own. It's time to talk about the voices. But if only our Padma were here ... I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father's hand - walloping my ear in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another, bodiless hand, which once hit him full in the face - at least had one salutary effect: it obliged me to reconsider and finally to abandon my original, Prophet-apeing position. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I withdrew deep inside myself, despite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue room with her pesterings: 'But what did you do it for, Saleem? You who're always too good and all?' ... until she fell into dissatisfied sleep with her mouth still working silently, and I was alone with the echoes of my father's violence, which buzzed in my left ear, which whispered, 'Neither Michael nor A not G forget Cassiel, Sachiel and Samael! Archangels no lon the Recitation was completed in A the last prophet will come only to announce the End.' That night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not after all been chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far from being scared, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust. Telepathy, the kind of thing you're always reading about in the sensational magazines. But I ask for patience - wait. Only wait. I but also more than telepathy. Don't write me off too easily. Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience - before I began to act - there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Luck-now Urdu to the Southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surface transmissions - the front-of-mind stuff which is what I'd originally been picking up - language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words ... but that was after I heard, beneath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other precious signals, utterly different from everything else, most of them faint and distant, like far-off drums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke through the fish-market cacophony of my voices... those secret, nocturnal calk, like calling out to like ... the unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signalling nothing more than their existence, transmitting simply: 'I.' From far to the North, 'I.' And the South East West: 'I.' 'I.' 'And I.' But I mustn't get ahead of myself. In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented m and soon I was able to 'tune' my inner ear to those voices which I nor was it long before I picked out, from the throng, the voi and of Mary P and of friends, classmates, teachers. In the street, I learned how to identify the mind-stream of passing strangers - the laws of Doppler shift continued to operate in these paranormal realms, and the voices grew and diminished as the strangers passed. All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father's wrath, and anxious to keep my right ear in good working order, I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy, the difficulties of concealing knowledge are a but fortunately, my nearest and dearest were as anxious to forget my outburst as I was to conceal the truth. 'O, you Saleem! Such things you talked yesterday! Shame on you, boy: you better go wash out your mouth with soap!'... The morning after my disgrace, Mary Pereira, shaking with indignation like one of her jellies, suggested the perfect means of my rehabilitation. Bowing my head contritely, I went, without a word, into the bathroom, and there, beneath the amazed gaze of ayah and Monkey, scrubbed teeth tongue roofofmouth gums with a toothbrush covered in the sharp foul lather of Coal Tar Soap. The news of my dramatic atonement rushed rapidly around the house, borne by Mary and M and my mother embraced me, 'There, we'll say no more about it,' and Ahmed Sinai nodded gruffly at the breakfast table, 'At least the boy has the grace to admit when he's gone too far.' As my glass-inflicted cuts faded, it was as though my announce and by the time of my ninth birthday, nobody besides myself remembered anything about the day when I had taken the name of Archangels in vain. The taste of detergent lingered on my tongue for many weeks, reminding me of the need for secrecy. Even the Brass Monkey was satisfied by my show of contrition - in her eyes, I had returned to form, and was once more the goody-two-shoes of the family. To demonstrate her willingness to re-establish the old order, she set fire to my mother's favourite slippers, and regained her rightful place in the family doghouse. Amongst outsiders, what's more - displaying a conservatism you'd never have suspected in such a tomboy - she closed ranks with my parents, and kept my one aberration a secret from her friends and mine. In a country where any physical or mental peculiarity in a child is a source of deep family shame, my parents, who had become accustomed to facial birthmarks, cucumber-nose and bandy legs, simply refused to see any more embar for my part, I did not once mention the buzzings in my ear, the occasional ringing bells of deafness, the intermittent pain. I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing. But imagine the confusion inside my head! Where, behind the hideous face, above the tongue tasting of soap, hard by the perforated eardrum, lurked a not-very-tidy mind, as full of bric-a-brac as nine-year-old pockets ... imagine yourself inside me somehow, looking out through my eyes, hearing the noise, the voices, and now the obligation of not letting people know, the hardest part was acting surprised, such as when my mother said Hey Saleem guess what we're going for a picnic to the Aarey Milk Colony and I had to go Ooo, exciting!, when I had known all along because I had heard her unspoken inner voice And on my birthday seeing all the presents in the donors' minds before they were even unwrapped And the treasure hunt ruined because there in my father's head was the location of each clue every prize And much harder things such as going to see my father in his ground-floor office, here we are, and the moment I'm in there my head is full of godknowswhat rot because he's thinking about his secretary, Alice or Fernanda, his latest Coca-Cola girl, he's undressing her slowly in his head and it's in my head too, she's sitting stark naked on a cane-bottomed chair and now getting up, crisscross marks all across her rump, that's my father thinking, MY FATHER, now he's looking at me all funny What's the matter son don't you feel well Yes fine Abba fine, must go now GOT TO GET AWAY homework to do, Abba, and out, run away before he sees the clue on your face (my father always said that when I was lying there was a red light flashing on my forehead)... You see how hard it is, my uncle Hanif comes to take me to the wrestling, and even before we've arrived at Vallabhbai Patel Stadium on Hornby Vellard I'm feeling sad
We're walking with the crowds past giant cardboard cut-outs of Dara Singh and Tagra Baba and the rest and his sadness, my favourite uncle's sadness is pouring into me, it lives like a lizard just beneath the hedge of his jollity, concealed by his booming laugh which was once the laugh of the boatman Tai, we're sitting in excellent seats as floodlights dance on the backs of the interlocked wrestlers and I am caught in the unbreakable grip of my uncle's grief, the grief of his failing film career, flop after flop, he'll probably never get a film again But I mustn't let the sadness leak out of my eyes He's butting into my thoughts, hey phaelwan, hey little wrestler, what's dragging your face down, it looks longer than a bad movie, you want channa? pakoras? what? And me shaking my head, No, nothing, Hanif mamu, so that he relaxes, turns away, starts yelling Ohe come on Dara, that's the ticket, give him hell, Dara yara! And back home my mother squatting in the corridor with the ice-cream tub, saying with her real outside-voice, You want to help me make it, son, your favourite pistachio flavour, and I'm turning the handle, but her inside-voice is bouncing against the inside of my head, I can see how she's trying to fill up every nook and cranny of her thoughts with everyday things, the price of pom-fret, the roster of household chores, must call in the electrician to mend the ceiling-fan in the dining-room, how she's desperately concentrating on parts of her husband to love, but the unmentionable word keeps finding room, the two syllables which leaked out of her in the bathroom that day, Na Dir Na Dir Na, she's finding it harder and harder to put down the telephone when the wrong numbers come MY MOTHER I tell you when a boy gets inside grown-up thoughts they can really mess him up completely And even at night, no respite, I wake up at the stroke of midnight with Mary Pereira's dreams inside my head Night after night
Always at my personal witching-hour, which also has meaning for her Her dreams are plagued by the image of a man who has been dead for years, Joseph D'Costa, the dream tells me the name, it is coated with a guilt I cannot understand, the same guilt which seeps into us all every time we eat her chutneys, there is a mystery here but because the secret is not in the front of her mind I can't find it out, and meanwhile Joseph is there, each night, sometimes in human form, but not always, sometimes he's a wolf, or a snail, once a broomstick, but we (she-dreaming, I-looking in) know it's him, baleful implacable accusative, cursing her in the language of his incarnations, howling at her when he's wolf-Joseph, covering her in the slime-trails of Joseph-the-snail, beating her with the business end of his broomstick incarnation ... and in the morning when she's telling me to bathe clean up get ready for school I have to bite back the questions, I am nine years old and lost in the confusion of other people's lives which are blurring together in the heat. To end this account of the early days of my transformed life, I must add one painful confession: it occurred to me that I could improve my parents' opinion of me by using my new faculty to help out with my schoolwork - in short, I began to cheat in class. That is to say, I tuned in to the inner voices of my schoolteachers and also of my cleverer classmates, and picked information out of their minds. I found that very few of my masters could set a test without rehearsing the ideal answers in their minds - and I knew, too, that on those rare occasions when the teacher was preoccupied by other things, his private love-life or financial difficulties, the solutions could always be found in the precocious, prodigious mind of our class genius, Cyrus-the-great. My marks began to improve dramatically - but not overly so, because I took care to make my versions different from th even when I telepathi-cally cribbed an entire English essay from Cyrus, I added a number of mediocre touches of my own. My purpose wa I did not, but I escaped discovery. Under Emil Zagallo's furious, interrogating eyes I remained beneath the bemused, head-shaking perplexity of Mr Tandon the English master I worked my treachery in silence - knowing that they would not believe the truth even if, by chance or folly, I spilled the beans. Let me sum up: at a crucial point in the history of our child-nation, at a time when Five Year Plans were being drawn up and elections were approaching and language marchers were fighting over Bombay, a nine-year-old boy named Saleem Sinai acquired a miraculous gift. Despite the many vital uses to which his abilities could have been put by his impoverished, underdeveloped country, he chose to conceal his talents, frittering them away on inconsequential voyeurism and petty cheating. This behaviour - not, I confess, the behaviour of a hero - was the direct result of a confusion in his mind, which invariably muddled up morality - the desire to do what is right - and popularity - the rather more dubious desire to do what is approved of. Fearing parental ostracism, he suppressed the news o seeking parental congratulations, he abused his talents at school. This flaw in his character can partially be excused on the grounds but only partially. Confused thinking was to bedevil much of his career. I can be quite tough in my self-judgements when I choose. What stood on the flat roof of the Breach Candy Kindergarten - a roof, you will recall, which could be reached from the garden of Buckingham Villa, simply by climbing over a boundary wall? What, no longer capable of performing the function for which it was designed, watched over us that year when even the winter forgot to cool down - what observed Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice, Hairoil, and myself, as we played kabaddi, and French Cricket, and seven-tiles, with the occasional participation of Cyrus-the-great and of other, visiting friends: Fat Perce Fishwala and Glandy Keith Colaco? What was present on the frequent occasions when Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi-Appah yelled down from the top floor of Homi's home: 'Brats! Rackety good-for-nothings! Shut your noise!' ... so that we all ran away, returning (when she vanished from our sight) to make mute faces at the window at which she'd stood? In short, what was it, tall and blue and flaking, which oversaw our lives, which seemed, for a while, to be marking time, waiting not only for the nearby time when we would put on long trousers, but also, perhaps, for the coming of Evie Burns? Perhaps you'd like clues: what had once hidden bombs? In what had Joseph D'Costa died of snake-bite? ... When, after some months of inner torment, I at last sought refuge from grown-up voices, I found it in an old clocktower, which nob and here, in the solitude of rusting time, I paradoxically took my first tentative steps towards that involvement with mighty events and public lives from which I would never again be free ... never, until the Widow ... Banned from washing-chests, I began, whenever possible, to creep unobserved into the tower of crippled hours. When the circus-ring was emptied by heat or c when Ahmed and Amina went off to the Willingdon Club
when the Brass Monkey was away, hanging around her newly-acquired heroines, the Walsingham School for Girls' swimming and diving team ... that is to say, when circumstances permitted, I entered my secret hideout, stretched out on the straw mat I'd stolen from the servants' quarters, closed my eyes, and let my newly-awakened inner ear (connected, like all ears, to my nose) rove freely around the city - and further, north and south, east and west - listening in to all manner of things. To escape the intolerable pressures of eavesdropping on people I knew, I practised my art upon strangers. Thus my entry into public affairs of India occurred for entirely ignoble reasons - upset by too much intimacy, I used the world outside our hillock for light relief. The world as discovered from a broken-down clocktower: at first, I was no more than a tourist, a child peeping through the miraculous peepholes of a private 'Dilli-dekho' machine. Dugdugee-drums rattled in my left (damaged) ear as I gained my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the eyes of a fat Englishwoman suffering from the tummy- after which, to balance south against north, I hopped down to Madurai's Meenakshi temple and nestled amongst the woolly, mystical perceptions of a chanting priest. I toured Connaught Place in New Delhi in the guise of an auto-rickshaw driver, complaining bitterly to my fares about the risi in Calcutta I slept rough in a section of drainpipe. By now thoroughly bitten by the travel bug, I zipped down to Cape Comorin and became a fisher-woman whose sari was as tight as her morals were loose ... standing on red sands washed by three seas, I flirted with Dravidian beachcombers in a language I couldn' then up into the Himalayas, into the neanderthal moss-covered hut of a Goojar tribal, beneath the glory of a completely circular rainbow and the tumbling moraine of the Kolahoi glacier. At the golden fortress of Jaisalmer I sampled the inner life of a woman making mirrorwork dresses and at Khajuraho I was an adolescent village boy, deeply embarrassed by the erotic, Tahtric carvings on the Chandela temples standing in the fields, but unable to tear away my eyes ... in the exotic simplicities of travel I was able to find a modicum of peace. But, in the end, touri curio 'Let's find out,' I told myself, 'what really goes on around here.' With the eclectic spirit of my nine years spurring me on, I leaped into the heads of film stars and cricketers - I learned the truth behind the Filmfare gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala, and I was at the crease with Polly Umrigar at the Brabourne S I was Lata Mangeshkar the playback singer and Bubu the clown at the circus behind Civil Lines ... and inevitably, through the ramdom processes of my mind-hopping, I discovered politics. At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my pajama-cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire ... at another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage as usual: I was two months old and my mother had run out of breast-milk. I occupied, briefly, the mind of a Congress Party worker, bribing a village schoolteacher to throw his weight behind the party of Gandhi and Nehru in the comi also the thoughts of a Keralan peasant who had decided to vote Communist. My daring grew: one afternoon I deliberately invaded the head of our own State Chief Minister, which was how I discovered, over twenty years before it became a national joke, that Morarji Desai 'took his own water' daily ... I was inside him, tasting the warmth as he gurgled down a frothing glass of urine. And finally I hit my highest point: I became Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister and author of framed letters: I sat with the great man amongst a bunch of gaptoothed, stragglebeard astrologers and adjusted the Five Year Plan to bring it into harmonic alignment with the music of the spheres ... the high life is a heady thing. 'Look at me!' I exulted silently. 'I can go any place I want!' In that tower which had once been filled choc-a-bloc with the explosive devices of Joseph D'Costa's hatred, this phrase (accompanied by appropriate ticktock sound effects) plopped fully-formed into my thoughts: 'I am the tomb in Bombay .. .watch me explode!' Because the feeling had come upon me that I was some that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen ... which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. 'I can find out any damn thing!' I triumphed, 'There isn't a thing I cannot know!' Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the spirit of self-aggrandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an instinct for self-preservation. If I had not believed myself in control of the flooding multitudes, their massed identities would have annihilated mine ... but there in my clocktower, filled with the cockiness of my,glee, I became Sin, the ancient moon-god (no, not Indian: I've imported him from Hadhramaut of old), capable of acting-at-a-distance and shifting the tides of the world. But death, when it visited Methwold's Estate, still managed to take me by surprise. Even though the freezing of his assets had ended many years ago, the zone below Ahmed Sinai's waist had remained as cold as ice. Ever since the day he had cried out, 'The bastards are shoving my balls in an ice-bucket!', and Amina had taken them in her hands to warm them so that her fingers got glued to them by the cold, his sex had lain dormant, a woolly elephant in an iceberg, like the one they found in Russia in '56. My mother Amina, who had married for children, felt the uncreated lives rotting in her womb and blamed herself for becoming unattractive to him, what with her corns and all. She discussed her unhappiness with Mary Pereira, but the ayah only told her that there was no happiness to be gained from 'the mens'; they made pickles together as they talked, and Amina stirred her disappointments into a hot lime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes. Although Ahmed Sinai's office hours were filled with fantasies of secretaries taking dictation in the nude, visions of his Fernandas or Poppys strolling around the room in their birthday suits with crisscross cane-marks on their rumps, his apparatu and one day, when the real Fernanda or Poppy had gone home, he was playing chess with Dr Narlikar, his tongue (as well as his game) made somewhat loose by djinns, and he confided awkwardly, 'Narlikar, I seem to have lost interest in you-know-what.' A gleam of pleasure radiated from the lu the birth-control fanatic in the dark, glowing doctor leaped out through his eyes and made the following speech: 'Bravo!' Dr Narlikar cried, 'Brother Sinai, damn good show! You - and, may I add, myself - yes, you and I, Sinai bhai, are persons of rare spiritual worth! Not for us the panting humiliations of the flesh - is it not a finer thing, I ask you, to eschew procreation - to avoid adding one more miserable human life to the vast multitudes which are presently beggaring our country - and, instead, to bend our energies to the task of giving them more land to stand on? I tell you, my friend: you and I and our tetrapods: from the very oceans we shall bring forth soil!' To consecrate this oration, Ahmed S my father and Dr Narlikar drank a toast to their four-legged concrete dream. 'Land, yes! Love, no!' Dr Narlikar said, my father refilled his glass. By the last days of 1956, the dream of reclaiming land from the sea with the aid of thousands upon thousands of large concrete tetrapods - that same dream which had been the cause of the freeze -and which was now, for my father, a sort of surrogate for the sexual activity which the aftermath of the freeze denied him - actually seemed to be coming close to fruition. This time, however, Ahmed Sinai was spending
this time he remained hidden in the background, and his name appe this time, he had learned the lessons of the freeze and was determined to draw as little attention to so that when Dr Narlikar betrayed him by dying, leaving behind him no record of my father's involvement in the tetrapod scheme, Ahmed Sinai (who was prone, as we have seen, to react badly in the face of disaster) was swallowed up by the mouth of a long, snaking decline from which he would not emerge until, at the very end of his days, he at last fell in love with his wife. This is the story that got back to Methwold's Estate: Dr Narlikar had been visiting friends near Marine D at the end of the visit, he had resolved to stroll down to Chowpatty Beach and buy himself some bhel-puri and a little coconut milk. As he strolled briskly along the pavement by the sea-wall, he overtook the tail-end of a language march, which moved slowly along, chanting peacefully. Dr Narlikar neared the place where, with the Municipal Corporation's permission, he had arranged for a single, symbolic tetrapod to be placed upon the sea-wall, as a kind of icon pointing t and here he noticed a thing which made him lose his reason. A group of beggar-women had clustered around the tetrapod and were performing the rite of puja. They had lighted oil-lamps at th one of them had painted the 铎-symbol they were chanting prayers as they gave the tetrapod a thorough and worshipful wash. Technological miracle had been transformed into Shiva- Doctor Narlikar, the opponent of fertility, was driven wild at this vision, in which it seemed to him that all the old dark priapic forces of ancient, procreative India had been unleashed upon the beauty of sterile twentieth-century concrete ... sprinting along, he shouted his abuse at the worshipping women, gleaming
reaching them, he kicked away their little dia- it is said he even tried to push the women. And he was seen by the eyes of the language marchers. The ears of the language marchers heard the rou the marchers' feet paused, their voices rose in rebuke. F oaths were oathed. Whereupon the good doctor, made incautious by anger, turned upon the crowd and denigrated its cause, its breeding and its sisters. A silence fell and exerted its powers. Silence guided marcher-feet towards the gleaming gynaecologist, who stood between the tetrapod and the wailing women. In silence the marchers' hands reached out towards Narlikar and in a deep hush he clung to four-legged concrete as they attempted to pull him towards them. In absolute soundlessness, fear gave Dr Narlikar the his arms stuck to the tetrapod and would not be detached. The marchers applied themselves to the tetrapod ... silently t mutely the force of their numbers overcame its weight. In an evening seized by a demonic quietness the tetrapod tilted, preparing to become the first of its kind to enter the waters and begin the great work of land reclamation. Dr Suresh Narlikar, his mouth opening in a voiceless A, clung to it like a phosphorescent mollusc ... man and four-legged concrete fell without a sound. The splash of the waters broke the spell. It was said that when Dr Narlikar fell and was crushed into death by the weight of his beloved obsession, nobody had any trouble locating the body because it sent light glowing upwards through the waters like a fire. 'Do you know what's happening?' 'Hey, man, what gives?' - children, myself included, clustered around the garden hedge of Escorial Villa, in which was Dr Narlikar' and a hamal of Lila Sabarmati's, taking on an air of grave dignity, informed us, 'They have brought his death home, wrapped in silk.' I was not allowed to see the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay wreathed in saffron flowers on his hard, but I got to know all about it anyway, because the news of it spread far beyond the confines of his room. Mostly, I heard about it from the Estate servants, who found it quite natural to speak openly of a death, but rarely said much about life, because in life everything was obvious. From Dr Narlikar's own bearer I learned that the death had, by swallowing large quantities of the sea, taken on the qualities of water: it had become a fluid thing, and looked happy, sad or indifferent according to how the light hit it. Homi Catrack's gardener interjected: 'It is dangerous to lo otherwise you come away with a little of it inside you, and there are effects.' We asked: effects? what effects? which effects? how? And Purushottam the sadhu, who had left his place under the Buckingham Villa garden tap for the first time in years, said: 'A death makes the living see th after they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated.' This extraordinary claim was, in fact, borne out by events, because afterwards Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi-Appah, who had helped to clean up the body, became shriller, more shrewish, more
and it seemed that everyone who saw the death of Dr Narlikar as it lay in state was affected, Nussie Ibrahim became even sillier and more of a duck, and Lila Sabarmati, who lived upstairs from the death and had helped to arrange its room, afterwards gave in to a promiscuity which had always been lurking within her, and set herself on a road at whose end there would be bullets, and her husband Commander Sabarmati conducting the Colaba traffic with a most unusual baton ... Our family, however, stayed away from the death. My father refused to go and pay his respects, and would never refer to his late friend by name, calling him simply: 'that traitor'. Two days later, when the news had been in the papers, Dr Narlikar suddenly acquired an enormous family of female relations. Having been a bachelor and misogynist all his life, he was engulfed, in death, by a sea of giant, noisy, omnicompetent women, who came crawling out from strange corners of the city, from milking jobs at Amul Dairies and from the box-offices of cinemas, from street-side soda-fountains a in a year of processions the Narlikar women formed their own parade, an enormous stream of outsize womanhood flowing up our two-storey hillock to fill Dr Narlikar's apartment so full that from the road below you could see their elbows sticking out of the windows and their behinds overflowing on to the verandah. For a week nobody got any sleep because the wailing of the Narlikar
but beneath their howls the women were proving as competent as they looked. They took over the running of the Nursing H they investigated all of Narlikar' and they cut my father out of the tetrapod deal just as coolly as you please. After all those years my father was left with nothing but a hole in his pocket, while the women took Narlikar's body to Benares to have it cremated, and the Estate servants whispered to me that they had heard how the Doctor's ashes were sprinkled on the waters of Holy Ganga at Manikarnika-ghat at dusk, and they did not sink, but floated on the surface of the water like tiny glowing firebugs, and were washed out to sea where their strange luminosity must have frightened the captains of ships. As for Ahmed Sinai: I swear that it was after Narlikar's death and the arrival of the women that he began, literally, to fade... gradually his skin paled, his hair lost its colour, until within a few months he had become entirely white except for the darkness of his eyes. (Mary Pereira told Amina: 'That man
so now his skin has made ice, white ice like a fridge.') I should say, in all honesty, that although he pretended to be worried by his transformation into a white man, and went to see doctors and so forth, he was secretly rather pleased when they failed to explain the problem or prescribe a cure, because he had long envied Europeans their pigmentation. One day, when it was permissible to make jokes again (a decent interval had been allowed to elapse after Dr Narlikar's death), he told Lila Sabarmati at the cocktail hour: 'All the best people are
I have merely given up pretending.' His neighbours, all of whom were darker than he, laughed politely and felt curiously ashamed. Circumstantial evidence indicates that the shock of Narlikar's death was responsible for giving me a snow-white father to set be but (although I don't know how much you're prepared to swallow) I shall risk giving an alternative explanation, a theory developed in the abstract privacy of my clocktower... because during my frequent psychic travels, I discovered something rather odd: during the first nine years after Independence, a similar pigmentation disorder (whose first recorded victim may well have been the Rani of Cooch Naheen) afflicted large numbers of the nation's business community. All over India, I stumbled across good Indian businessmen, their fortunes thriving thanks to the first Five Year Plan, which had concentrated on building up commerce... businessmen who had become or were becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destinies had drained the colour from their cheeks ... in which case, perhaps my father was a late victim of a widespread, though generally unremarked phenomenon. The businessmen of India were turning white. That's enough to chew on for one day. But Evelyn Lilith B the Pioneer Cafe is get and - more vitally - midnight's other children, including my alter ego Shiva, he of the deadly knees, are pressing extremely hard. Soon the cracks will be wide enough for them to escape ... By the way: some time around the end of 1956, in all probability, the singer and cuckold Wee Willie Winkie also met his death.
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