So you will understand why Parvati-the-witch, the possessor of truly wondrous powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her midnight-given gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community which had constantly denied such possibilities.

On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of sight, and the only danger was from scavengers-after-scrap, from searchers-for-abandoned crates or hunters-for-corrugated-tin… that was where Parvati-the-witch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a humble shalwar-kameez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others, midnight's sorceress performed for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a child. Saucer-eye, rope-like pony-tail, fine full red lips… I would never have resisted her for so long if not for the face, the sick decaying eyes nose lips of… There seemed at first to be no limits to Parvati's abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were demons conjured? Did djinns appear, offering riches and overseas travel on levitating rugs? Were frogs turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose into jewels? Was there selling-of-souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit of it; the magic which Parvati-the-witch performed for me-the only magic she was ever willing to perform-was of the type known as 'white'. It was as though the Brahmins' 'Secret Book', the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her; she could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she permitted snakes to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, involving praying to the snake-god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the goodness of the Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reciting a spell: Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless; in a like manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected)-she could cure sores and consecrate talismans-she knew the sraktya charm and the Rite of the Tree. And all this, in a series of extraordinary night-time displays, she revealed to me beneath the walls of the Mosque-but still she was not happy.

As ever, I am obliged to accept responsibility; the scent of mourn-fulness which hung around Parvati-the-witch was my creation. Because she was twenty-five years old, and wanted more from me than my willingness to be her audience; God knows why, but she wanted me in her bed-or, to be precise, to lie with her on the lengdi of sackcloth which served her for a bed in the hovel she shared with a family of contortionist triplets from Kerala, three girls who were orphans just like her-just like myself.

What she did for me: under the power of her magic, hair began to grow where none had grown since Mr Zagallo pulled too hard; her wizardry caused the birthmarks on my face to fade under the healing applications of herbal poultices; it seemed that even the bandiness of my legs was diminishing under her care. (She could do nothing, however, for my one bad ear; there is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.) But no matter how much she did for me, I was unable to do for her the thing she desired most; because although we lay down together beneath the walk on the blind side of the Mosque, the moonlight showed me her night-time face turning, always turning into that of my distant, vanished sister… no, not my sister… into the putrid, vilely disfigured face of Jamila Singer. Parvati anointed her body with unguent oils imbued with erotic charm; she combed her hair a thousand times with a comb made from aphrodisiac deer-bones; and (I do not doubt it) in my absence she must have tried all manner of lovers' sorceries; but I was in the grip of an older bewitchment, and could not, it seemed, be released; I was doomed to find the faces of women who loved me turning into the features of… but you know whose crumbling features appeared, filling my nostrils with their unholy stench.

'Poor girl,' Padma sighs, and I agree; but until the Widow drained me of past present future, I remained under the Monkey's spell.

When Parvati-the-witch finally admitted failure, her face developed, over-night, an alarming and pronounced pout. She fell asleep in the hut of the contortionist orphans and awoke with her full lips stuck in a protruding attitude of unutterably sensuous pique. Orphaned triplets told her, giggling worriedly, what had happened to her face; she tried spiritedly to pull her features back into position, but neither muscles nor wizardry managed to restore her to her former self; at last, resigning herself to her tragedy, Parvati gave in, so that Resham Bibi told anyone who would listen: 'That poor girl-a god must have blown on her when she was making a face.'

(That year, incidentally, the chic ladies of the cities were all wearing just such an expression with erotic deliberation; the haughty mannequins in the Eleganza-'73 fashion show all pouted as they walked their catwalks. In the awful poverty of the magicians' slum, pouting Parvati-the-witch was in the height of facial fashion.)

The magicians devoted much of their energies to the problem of making Parvati smile again. Taking time off from their work, and also from the more mundane chores of reconstructing tin-and-cardboard huts which had fallen down in a high wind, or killing rats, they performed their most difficult tricks for her pleasure; but the pout remained in place. Resham Bibi made a green tea which smelted of camphor and forced it down Parvati's gullet. The tea had the effect of constipating her so thoroughly that she was not seen defecating behind her hovel for nine weeks. Two young jugglers conceived the notion that she might have begun grieving for her deceased father all over again, and applied themselves to the task of drawing his portrait on a shred of old tarpaulin, which they hung above her sackcloth mat. Triplets made jokes, and Picture Singh, greatly distressed, made cobras tie themselves in knots; but none of it worked, because if Parvati's thwarted love was beyond her own powers to cure, what hope could the others have had? The power of Parvati's pout created, in the ghetto, a nameless sense of unease, which all the magicians' animosity towards the unknown could not entirely dispel.

And then Resham Bibi hit upon an idea. 'Fools that we are,' she told Picture Singh, 'we don't see what is under our noses. The poor girl is twenty-five, baba-almost an old woman! She is pining for a husband!' Picture Singh was impressed. 'Resham Bibi,' he told her approvingly, 'your brain is not yet dead.'

After that, Picture Singh applied himself to the task of finding Parvati a suitable young man; many of the younger men in the ghetto were coaxed bullied threatened. A number of candidates were produced; but Parvati rejected them all. On the night when she told Bismillah Khan, the most promising fire-eater in the colony, to go somewhere else with his breath of hot chillies, even Picture Singh despaired. That night, he said to me, 'Captain, that girl is a trial and a grief to me; she is your good friend, you got any ideas?' Then an idea occurred to him, an idea which had had to wait until he became desperate because even Picture Singh was affected by considerations of class-automatically thinking of me as 'too good' for Parvati, because of my supposedly 'higher' birth, the ageing Communist had not thought until now that I might be… 'Tell me one thing, captain,' Picture Singh asked shyly, 'you are planning to be married some day?'

Saleem Sinai felt panic rising up inside himself.

'Hey, listen, captain, you like the girl, hey?'-And I, unable to deny it, 'Of course.' And now Picture Singh, grinning from ear to ear, while snakes hissed in baskets: 'Lake her a lot, captain? A lot lot?' But I was thinking of Jamila's face in the night; and made a desperate decision: 'Pictureji, I can't marry her.' And now he, frowning: 'Are you maybe married already, captain? Got wife-children waiting somewhere?' Nothing for it now; I, quietly, shamefully, said: 'I can't marry anyone, Pictureji. I can't have children.'