Then the tear-gas came and we had to flee, coughing spluttering blind, from riot police, like criminals, crying falsely as we ran. (Just as once, in Jallianwalabagh-but at least there were no bullets on this occasion.) But although the tears were the tears of gas, Picture Singh was indeed cast down into an awesome gloom by the heckler's gibe, which had questioned the hold on reality which was his greatest pride; and in the aftermath of gas and sticks, I, too, was dejected, having suddenly identified a moth of unease in my stomach, and realized that something in me objected to Picture's portrayal in snake-dance of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich; I found myself thinking, 'There is good and bad in all-and they brought me up, they looked after me, Pictureji!' After which I began to see that the crime of Mary Pereira had detached me from two worlds, not one; that having been expelled from my uncle's house I could never fully enter the world-according-to-Picture-Singh; that, in fact, my dream of saving the country was a thing of mirrors and smoke; insubstantial, the maunderings of a fool.

And then there was Parvati, with her altered profile, in the harsh clarity of the winter day.

It was-or am I wrong? I must rush on; things are slipping from me all the time-a day of horrors. It was then-unless it was another day-that we found old Resham Bibi dead of cold, lying in her hut which she had built out of Dalda Vanaspati packing-cases. She had turned bright blue, Krishna-blue, blue as Jesus, the blue of Kashmiri sky, which sometimes leaks into eyes; we burned her on the banks of the Jamuna amongst mud-flats and buffalo, and she missed my wedding as a result, which was sad, because like all old women she loved weddings, and had in the past joined in the preliminary henna-ceremonies with energetic glee, leading the formal singing in which the bride's friends insulted the groom and his family. On one occasion her insults had been so brilliant and finely calculated that the groom took umbrage and cancelled the wedding; but Resham had been undaunted, saying that it wasn't her fault if young men nowadays were as faint-hearted and inconstant as chickens.

I was absent when Parvati went away; I was not present when she returned; and there was one more curious fact… unless I have forgotten, unless it was on another day… it seems to me, at any rate, that on the day of Parvati's return, an Indian Cabinet Minister was in his railway carriage, at Samastipur, when an explosion blew him into the history books; that Parvati, who had departed amid the explosions of atom bombs, returned to us when Mr L. N. Mishra, minister for railways and bribery, departed this world for good. Omens and more omens… perhaps, in Bombay, dead pomfrets were floating belly-side-up to shore.

January 26th, Republic Day, is a good time for illusionists. When the huge crowds gather to watch elephants and fireworks, the city's tricksters go out to earn their living. For me, however, the day holds another meaning; it was on Republic Day that my conjugal fate was sealed.

In the days after Parvati's return, the old women of the ghetto formed the habit of holding their ears for shame whenever they passed her; she, who bore her illegitimate child without any appearance of guilt, would smile innocently and walk on. But on the morning of Republic Day, she awoke to find a rope hung with tattered shoes strung up above her door, and began to weep inconsolably, her poise disintegrating under the force of this greatest of insults. Picture Singh and I, leaving our shack laden with baskets of snakes, came across her in her (calculated? genuine?) misery, and Picture Singh set his jaw in an attitude of determination. 'Come back to the hut, captain,' the Most Charming Man instructed me, 'We must talk.'

And in the hut, 'Forgive me, captain, but I must speak. I am thinking it is a terrible thing for a man to go through life without children. To have no son, captain: how sad for you, is it not?' And I, trapped by the lie of impotence, remained silent while Pictureji suggested the marriage which would preserve Parvati's honour and simultaneously solve the problem of my self-confessed sterility; and despite my fears of the face of Jamila Singer, which, superimposed on Parvati's, had the power of driving me to distraction, I could not find it in myself to refuse.

Parvati-just as she had planned, I'm sure-accepted me at once, said yes as easily and as often as she had said no in the past; and after that the Republic Day celebrations acquired the air of having been staged especially for our benefit, but what was in my mind was that once again destiny, inevitability, the antithesis of choice had come to rule my life, once again a child was to be born to a father who was not his father, although by a terrible irony the child would be the true grandchild of his father's parents; trapped in the web of these interweaving genealogies, it may even have occurred to me to wonder what was beginning, what was ending, and whether another secret countdown was in progress, and what would be born with my child.

Despite the absence of Resham Bibi, the wedding went off well enough. Parvati's formal conversion to Islam (which irritated Picture Singh, but on which I found myself insisting, in another throwback to an earlier life) was performed by a red-bearded Haji who looked ill-at-ease in the presence of so many teasing, provocative members of the ungodly; under the shifting gaze of this fellow who resembled a large and bearded onion she intoned her belief that there was no God but God and that Muhammad was his prophet; she took a name which I chose for her out of the repository of my dreams, becoming Laylah, night, so that she too was caught up in the repetitive cycles of my history, becoming an echo of all the other people who have been obliged to change their names… like my own mother Amina Sinai, Parvati-the-witch became a new person in order to have a child.

At the henna ceremony, half the magicians adopted me, performing the functions of my 'family'; the other half took Parvati's side, and happy insults were sung late into the night while intricate traceries of henna dried into the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet; and if the absence of Resham Bibi deprived the insults of a certain cutting edge, we were not overly sorry about the fact. During the nikah, the wedding proper, the happy couple were seated on a dais hastily constructed out of the Dalda-boxes of Resham's demolished shack, and the magicians filed solemnly past us, dropping coins of small denominations into our laps; and when the new Laylah Sinai fainted everyone smiled contentedly, because every good bride should faint at her wedding, and nobody mentioned the embarrassing possibility that she might have passed out because of the nausea or perhaps the kicking-pains caused by the child inside her basket. That evening the magicians put on a show so wonderful that rumours of it spread throughout the Old City, and crowds gathered to watch, Muslim businessmen from a nearby muhalla in which once a public announcement had been made and silversmiths and milk-shake vendors from Chandni Chowk, evening strollers and Japanese tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs; and there were pink Europeans discussing camera lenses with the Japanese, there were shutters clicking and flash bulbs popping, and I was told by one of the tourists that India was indeed a truly wonderful country with many remarkable traditions, and would be just fine and perfect if one did not constantly have to eat Indian food. And at the valima, the consummation ceremony (at which, on this occasion, no bloodstained sheets were held up, with or without perforations, since I had spent our nuptial night with my eyes shut tight and my body averted from my wife's, lest the unbearable features of Jamila Singer come to haunt me. in the bewilderment of the dark), the magicians surpassed their efforts of the wedding-night.