I found Sonny in his room, surrounded by posters of Spanish bullfights, morosely playing Indoor Cricket by himself. When he saw me he cried unhappily, 'Hey man I'm damn sorry about Evie man she won't listen to anyone man what the hell'd you do to her anyway?'… But I held up a dignified hand, commanding and being accorded silence.

'No time for that now, man,' I said. 'The thing is, I need to know how to open locks without keys.'

A true fact about Sonny Ibrahim: despite all his bullfighting dreams, his genius lay in the realm of mechanical things. For some time now, he had taken on the job of maintaining all the bikes on Methwold's Estate in return for gifts of comic-books and a free supply of fizzy drinks. Even Evelyn Lilith Burns gave her beloved Indiabike into his care. All machines, it seemed, were won over by the innocent delight with which he caressed their moving parts; no contraption could resist his ministrations. To put it another way: Sonny Ibrahim had become (out of a spirit of pure inquiry) an expert at picking locks.

Now offered a chance of demonstrating his loyalty to me, his eyes brightened. 'Jus' show me the lock, man! Lead me to the thing!'

When we were sure we were unobserved, we crept along the driveway between Buckingham Villa and Sonny's Sans Souci; we stood behind my family's old Rover; and I pointed at the boot. 'That's the one,' I stated. 'I need to be able to open it from the outside, and the inside also.'

Sonny's eyes widened. 'Hey, what're you up to, man? You running away from home secretly and all?'

Finger to lips, I adopted a mysterious expression. 'Can't explain, Sonny,' I said solemnly, 'Top-drawer classified information.'

'Wow, man,' Sonny said, and showed me in thirty seconds how to open the boot with the aid of a strip of thin pink plastic. 'Take it, man,' said Sonny Ibrahim, 'You need it more than me.'

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could never manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers… shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips. But now, hidden in the boot of the Rover, there travelled with her a stowaway, who lay hidden and protected by stolen cushions, clutching a thin strip of pink plastic in his hand.

O, the suffering one undergoes in the name of righteousness! The bruising and the bumps! The breathing-in of rubbery boot-air through jolted teeth! And constantly, the fear of discovery… 'Suppose she really does go shopping? Will the boot suddenly fly open? Will live chickens be flung in, feet tied together, wings clipped, fluttery pecky birds invading my hidey-hole? Will she see, my God, I'll have to be silent for a week!' My knees drawn in beneath my chin-which was protected-against knee-bumps by an old faded cushion-I voyaged into the unknown in the vehicle of maternal perfidy. My mother was a cautious driver; she went slowly, and turned corners with care; but afterwards I was bruised black and blue and Mary Pereira berated me soundly for getting into fights: 'Arre God what a thing it's a wonder they didn't smash you to pieces completely my God what will you grow up into you bad black boy you haddi-phaelwan you skin-and-bone wrestler!'

To take my mind off the jolting darkness I entered, with extreme caution, that part of my mother's mind which was in charge of driving operations, and as a result was able to follow our route. (And, also, to discern in my mother's habitually tidy mind an alarming degree of disorder. I was already beginning, in those days, to classify people by their degree of internal tidiness, and to discover that I preferred the messier type, whose thoughts, spilling constantly into one another so that anticipatory images of food interfered with the serious business of earning a living and sexual fantasies were superimposed upon their political musings, bore a closer relationship to my own pell-mell tumble of a brain, in which everything ran into everything else and the white dot of consciousness jumped about like a wild flea from one thing to the next… Amina Sinai, whose assiduous ordering-instincts had provided her with a brain of almost abnormal neatness, was a curious recruit to the ranks of confusion.)

We headed north, past Breach Candy Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north along Horaby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali's island tomb, north off what had once been (before the dream of the first William Methwold became a reality) the island of Bombay. We were heading towards the anonymous mass of tenements and fishing-villages and textile-plants and film-studios that the city became in these northern zones (not far from here! Not at all far from where I sit within view of local trains!)… an area which was, in those days, utterly unknown to me; I rapidly became disoriented and was then obliged to admit to myself that I was lost. At last, down an unprepossessing side-street full of drainpipe-sleepers and bicycle-repair shops and tattered men and boys, we stopped. Clusters of children assailed my mother as she descended; she, who could never shoo away a fly, handed out small coins, thus enlarging the crowd enormously. Eventually, she struggled away from them and headed down the street; there was a boy pleading, 'Gib the car poliss, Begum? Number one A-class poliss, Begum? I watch car until you come, Begum? I very fine watchman, ask anyone!'… In some panic, I listened in for her reply. How could I get out of this boot under the eyes of a guardian-urchin? There was the embarrassment of it; and besides, my emergence would have created a sensation in the street… my mother said, 'No.' She was disappearing down the street; the would-be polisher and watchman gave up eventually; there was a moment when all eyes turned to watch the passing of a second car, just in case it, too, stopped to disgorge a lady who gave away coins as if they were nuts; and in that instant (I had been looking through several pairs of eyes to help me choose my moment) I performed my trick with the pink plastic and was out in the street beside a closed car-boot in a flash. Setting my lips grimly, and ignoring all outstretched palms, I set off in the direction my mother had taken, a pocket-sized sleuth with the nose of a bloodhound and a loud drum pounding in the place where my heart should have been… and arrived, a few minutes later, at the Pioneer Cafe.

Dirty glass in the window; dirty glasses on the tables-the Pioneer Cafe was not much when compared to the Gaylords and Kwalitys of the city's more glamorous parts; a real rutputty joint, with painted boards proclaiming lovely lassi and funtabulous falooda and bhel-puribombay fashion, with filmi playback music blaring out from a cheap radio by the cash-till, a long narrow greeny room lit by flickering neon, a forbidding world in which broken-toothed men sat at reccine-covered tables with crumpled cards and expressionless eyes. But for all its grimy decrepitude, the Pioneer Cafe was a repository of many dreams. Early each morning, it would be full of the best-looking ne'er-do-wells in the city, all the goondas and taxi-drivers and petty smugglers and racecourse tipsters who had once, long ago, arrived in the city dreaming of film stardom, of grotesquely vulgar homes and black money payments; because every morning at six, the major studios would send minor functionaries to the Pioneer Cafe to rope in extras for the day's shooting. For half an hour each morning, when D. W. Rama Studios and Filmistan Talkies and R К Films were taking their pick, the Pioneer was the focus of all the city's ambitions and hopes; then the studio scouts left, accompanied by the day's lucky ones, and the Cafe emptied into its habitual, neon-lit torpor. Around lunchtime, a different set of dreams walked into the Cafe, to spend the afternoon hunched over cards and Lovely Lassi and rough bins-different men with different hopes: I didn't know it then, but the afternoon Pioneer was a notorious Communist Party hangout.