The dawn bus brought Miss Rehana to the gates of the British Embassy. When the advice expert Muhammad Ali saw her beauty, he went over to offer her advice, for a small sum. She told him she was poor. He was smitten with her, and for the first time ever, offered free advice. She was going to the embassy to get a passport for Bradford, England, to join her fiance there. He warned her how slight her chance of going was, and told of the embarrassingly intimate questions that she would be asked. He advised her that, for a fee, all the necessary papers could be delivered, with all the proper authentic seals. He checked people carefully before suggesting this, making sure they'd come from hundreds of miles away, so that by the time they'd discovered he tricked them, that they were swindled, they were unlikely to return. He even offered to get her the passport for free She was appalled at the idea that she commit a crime, and turned him down. Later, he saw her when she left the building, and she was calm. He thought she had pulled it off. She then bought him a pakora, thanked him for his advice, and apologized for her rudeness. She had been turned down. She told him her story. Her engagement had been arranged when she was 9 years old; her parents knew they were dying and wanted her to be looked after; her fiance was then 30. Today, she answered the questions all wrong. Now she'll go back to her job, working in Lahore in a great house, as ayah to 3 good boys who would be sad to see her leave. Muhammad Ali thought this was a great tragedy. "I truly do not think you should be sad," she told him, as she climbed aboard the bus. This story takes place in Pakistan.

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Columbus arrives as a supplicant at the court of Queen Isabella of Spain, hoping for cash and three tall ships. When the Queen asks him what he desires, he bows over her hand and murmurs, "Consummation." The Queen is offended. Columbus becomes known at Isabella's court for his colorful clothes and excessive drinking. The Queen plays with Columbus, permitting him familiarities, then banishing him to the stables and piggeries for forty days. "The search for money and patronage," Columbus says, "is not so different from the quest for love." Isabella claims Granada, the last redoubt of Arab Spain. Columbus gives up hope. He departs the court, passing long columns of Jews, who are being expelled from Spain. He dreams that Isabella is herself having a dream, in which she sees that all the known world is hers, but that she will never be satisfied by the possession of the known. Isabella's heralds arrive and tell Columbus that she has summoned him for his voyage--she saw a vision, and it scared her.

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A CRITIC AT LARGE about the M-G-M movie "The Wizard of Oz." The writer wrote his first story in Bombay at the age of 10; it was called "Over the Rainbow," and was inspired by "The Wizard of Oz"--the film, not the book, which he did not read as a child. An oddball in the West, the film was similar in style to films made in Bombay, though more polished. There's not a trace of religion in Oz. The film's driving force is the inadequacy of adults. As Aljean Harmetz revealed in her book "The Making of the Wizard of Oz," the film had no one auteur. Discusses differences between the film and L. Frank Baum's book, notably in the Kansas sequences. Judy Garland gave the film its heart, along with Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion. At the heart of the film is the tension between the dream of leaving and the dream of roots. A striking aspect of the film is its lack of a male hero. The power center is a triangle at whose points are Glinda, Dorothy, and the Witch (the Wizard turns out to be an illusion). At the close of this radical and enabling film we are given the conservative homily, "There's no place like home." In Baum's 6th Oz book Dorothy sends for Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and they all settle down in Oz. There is no longer any such place as home--except for the homes we make. Now it is the writer's fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of his child. And this is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic.

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Zulu and Chekov, who got their nicknames from their lifelong devotion to "Star Trek," are Sikhs working as diplomats at India House in London. ("Zulu" being a corruption of "Sulu".) They have been friends since their boyhood in Dehra Dun. In August, 1984, Chekov arrives from Delhi. Zulu lives at Wembley with his wife and children. In November, Indira Gandhi is assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. Despite Chekov's protests, Zulu goes underground to infiltrate the Sikh extremists assumed to be behind Mrs. Gandhi's assassination. Chekov recalls their previous months together in England. Chekov, after a period of modernity, had reverted to wearing the traditional Sikh beard and turban. While Chekov drove Zulu to Stratford for a performance of "Coriolanus,O Zulu spoke about "The Lord of the Rings,O by J.R.R. Tolkien, comparing the position of the Hobbits--knowing nothing of the forces that threaten them, or those that may save them--to that of the Sikhs. At a dinner party at Chekov's house, Chekov talked about England as a breeding ground for Indian revolutionists. When he talked about his friendship with Zulu, a lady guest garbled the lyrics of "Love and Marriage.O Three months after Zulu goes into hiding, he telephones his wife and urgently tells her to have Chekov "beam him up.O Chekov meets Zulu on a country motorway. Zulu emotionally tells Chekov about the massacres of Sikhs in Delhi, and says the Sikhs were set up--the Congress Party was behind Mrs. Gandhi's assassination. Zulu leaves the service in disgust, and becomes a successful businessman in Bombay. In May, 1991, Chekov is with Rajiv Gandhi when a Tamil woman assassinates him with a bomb, killing Chekov as well. In his last moments, Chekov finds himself on the Starship Enterprise--he takes Zulu's hand as the ship is attacked by Klingons.

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PERSONAL HISTORY about writer's experience in 1967, when he rented a room in London directly above a legendary boutique--legendary at the time--called Granny Takes a Trip. The apartment belonged to a woman named Judy Scutt, who made a lot of clothes for the boutique, and whose son, Paul, was a university friend of his. Granny Takes a Trip was at World's End, at the wong end of the King's Road in Chelsea, but to the assorted heads and freaks who hung out there, it was the Mecca, the Olympus, the Kathmandu of hippie chic. Mick Jagger was rumored to wear the dresses. Every so often, John Lennon's white limo would stop outside, and a chauffeur would go into the shop, scoop up an armload of gear "for Cynthia" and disappear with it. German photographers with platoons of stone-faced models would arrive once or twice a week to use Granny's windows as backdrops for their spreads. Granny's had famous windows. Like "Gone With the Wind," it invented the cliches. Describes the trippy interior. Tells how Sylvia, who ran the shop, explained to him that conversation was dead and decided not to speak to him. Tells how, in a defining moment, Sylvia refused to sell six dozen of a particular garment to a man who was a "square" and a buyer for a ladies' apparel chain. Writer later met someone who went out with Sylvia for years; "Did she ever speak to you?" writer asked him. "No," he said. "Not a bleeding word."

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ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about the novel... At the centenary conference of the British Publishers' Association, Professor George Steiner said, "We are getting very tired in our novels... Novels will continue to be written for quite a while but, increasingly, the search is on for hybrid forms..." So here it is once more, wrapped up in the finest, shiniest rhetoric: I mean, of course, that tasty old chestnut the Death of the Novel. To which Professor Steiner adds, for good measure, the Death (or, at least, the radical transformation into some sort of computer whiz kid, some sort of supernerd) of the Reader, and the Death (or at least the radical transformation into electronic form) of the Book itself.... Discusses the falsity of the notion that the novel is being starved by artists going into other arts, such as filmmaking... The novelist Paul Auster recently told writer that the inescapable fact all American writers had to accept was that they were involved in an activity that in the U.S. was no more than a minority interest--like, say, soccer... Literature--good literature--has always been a minority interest... 5,000 new novels were published in, America last year... Publishers are overpublishing because in house after house good editors have been fired or not replaced, and an obsession with turnover has displaced the ability to distinguish good books from bad. Let the market decide, too many publishers seem to be saying... So out to the stores the books go: into the valley of death go the five thousand, with publicity machines providing inadequate covering fire... There is another real danger facing literature, and of this Professor Steiner makes no mention; that is, the attack on intellectual liberty itself--intellectual liberty, without which there can be no literature. There are many such struggles taking place in the world today: in Algeria, in China, in Iran, in Turkey, in Egypt, in Nigeria, writers are being censored, harassed, jailed, and even murdered. The death of the novel may be far off, but the violent death of many contemporary novelists is, alas, an inescapable fact...

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SHOUTS & MURMURS about meaningless naming... For the first time since the decline of Dadaism, we are witnessing a revival in the fine art of meaningless naming. This thought is prompted by the American release of the British film "Trainspotting" and by the opening of Lanford Wilson's new play, "Virgil Is Still the Frogboy." Mr. Wilson's play is not about Virgil. No frogs feature therein. The title is taken from an East Hampton, Long Island, graffito to whose meaning the play offers no clue. This omission has not diminished the show's success. As Luis Bunuel knew, obscurity is a characteristic of objects of desire. Accordingly, there is no trainspotting in "Trainspotting"; it's just a predictable, even sentimental movie that thinks it's hip.... The movie has many admirers, perhaps because they are unable to understand its title, let alone the fashionably indecipherable argot of the dialogue... Nowadays, dreary old comprehensibility is still very much around. A film about a boy-man called Jack is called "Jack." A film about a crazed baseball fan is called "The Fan." The film version of Jane Austen's "Emma" is called "Emma"... In 1928, Bunuel and Salvador Dalf co-directed the Surrealist classic "Un Chien Andalou," a film about many things, but not Andalusian dogs. So it is with Quentin Tarantino's first film, "Reservoir Dogs." No reservoir, or dogs in reservoirs or reservoirs of dogs. The story goes that when the young Tarantino was working in a Los Angeles video store his distaste for fancy-pants European auteurs--like, for example, Louis Malle--manifested itself in an inability to pronounce the titles of their films. Malle's "Au Revoir les Enfants" defeated him completely, until he began to refer to it contemptuously as--you guessed it--"the, oh, reservoir dogs movie." Subsequently he made this the title of his own movie, no doubt as a further gesture of anti-European defiance. Alas, the obliqueness of the gibe meant that Europeans simply did not comprenday... In accordance with the new Zeitgeist, therefore, the title of this piece has in part been selected--"sampled"--from Lou Reed's wise advice "Don't eat at places called Mama's," in a recent issue of this magazine. To forestall any attempts at exegesis ("Author, Citing Dada's Erstwhile Esoterisism, Opposes Present--Day 'Mamaist' Obsfucations"), I confess that as a title it means nothing at all; but then the very concept of meaning is now outdated, nerdy, preironic. Welcome to the New Incomprehensibility: gibberish with attitude.

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FOOD about bread... There was leavened bread in Bombay, but it was sorry fare: dry, crumbling, tasteless--unleavened bread's paler, unluckier relative. It wasn't "real." Real bread was the chapati, or phulka, served piping hot; the tandoori nan, and its sweeter Frontier variant, the Peshawari nan; and for luxury, the reshmi roti, the shirmal, the paratna... Compared with these aristocrats, the leavened white loaves of my childhood seemed to merit the description that Shaw's immortal dustman, Alfred Doolittle, dreamed up for people like himself: they were, in truth, "the undeserving poor." My first inkling that there might be more to leavened bread than I knew came while I was visiting Karachi, Pakistan, where I learned that a hidden order of nuns, in a place known as the Monastery of the Angels, baked a mean loaf... Now, in the matter of bread such extraordinariness is not good. You want bread to be a part of daily life. You want it to be ordinary... At 13 and a half, I flew to England... And, suddenly, there it was, in every shopwindow. The White Crusty, the Sliced and the Unsliced. The Small Tin, the Large Tin, the Bloomer. The abandoned, plentiful promiscuity of it. The well-sprung bounciness of it between your teeth. Hard crust and soft center: the sensuality of that perfect textural contrast. I was done for. In the whorehouses of the bakeries, I was serially, gluttonously, irredeemably unfaithful to all those chapatis next door, waiting for me back home. East was East but Yeast was West. This, remember, was long before British bread counters were enlivened by the European invasion, long before ciabatta and brioche; this was 1961. ...I should add that there was a second discovery, almost as thrilling; that is, water. The water back home was dangerous and had to be thoroughly boiled. To be able to drink water from the tap was a privilege indeed. I have never forgotten that when I first arrived in these immeasurably wealthy and powerful lands I found the first proofs of my good fortune in loaf and glass. Since that time, a regime of bread and water had never sounded like a hardship to me.

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Mr. Maharaj, a powerless prince, has brought his American bride-to-be to his palace in India. There is a terrible drought. Mr. Maharaj talks of the firebird which "makes its nest in a secret place." Yesterday, in a dry water hole, a woman ignited. "The combustibility of women is a source of resigned wonder to the men." There is gossip about the American: "She is rich ...she will bring sons, and rain. No, she is poor ...the drought is in her body ...she is barren." They pass a wedding party. The groom is an old man, but the bride is young. In New York, Mr. Maharaj and the American ate an Indian lunch high above the park. He said their countries were alike. She "had a reputation in financial circles as a person who could ...conjure up, for her favored projects, the monetary nourishment they required. A 'rainmaker.'" She took him to the opera and seduced him. His palace "crumbles, stinks." In her hot room, alone, she thinks of home, cries dry tears, and sleeps. Mr. Maharaj's sister, over sixty, but the greatest dancer in the state, says she is dancing to ward off the firebird. The American says that must be an old wives' tale. Miss Maharaj says, "Here there are no old wives' tales. Alas, there are no old wives." That night, there is an extravaganza in the American's honor. The prince reveals, bitterly, that he has conjured up this luxury beyond his means so that she can get money. She tells him she is pregnant. That night, she wakes to Miss Maharaj at her bedside. She says the prince won't let her leave because the villagers believe a baby boy will break the drought. If she does, he will keep the child. She feels a need for action. She begins to see through Mr. Maharaj. All he has is water. Again and again she awakes with Miss Maharaj murmuring: "once the men have spent their dowries, then the firebird comes. ...Do you know how many brides he has had?" The American confronts the prince: "Is it true you burn your brides?" In a fury, he brings her to his sister's dance class, and interrogates the students. When he asks his sister how many brides he has had, she says, "She is the first." The bride's health fails, and Miss Maharaj nurses her. She tells of a great prince whose bride retained her youth and beauty as he faded. Jealous, he burned the fortress, and both died. The prince was transformed into a giant bird, made of flames, which turns women to ashes at their husbands' command. The bride's illness recedes and she decides to take the child to America. She will grant the father free access, and make trips East. In the dead of night, a scratch armada of motor vehicles assembles. Miss Maharaj's women, with weapons, are piling in. The American goes with them. They pass through a ruined stone arch "into fiction." The old bridegroom is there, looking murderous, his young wife at his side. Facing them is Mr. Maharaj. In the background are the male villagers. The women rush in, shrieking. "The sister faces the brother. ...it is an opera without supertitles ...Miss Maharaj command[s] her brother, what started between our parents stops now ...his body turns to fire ...his words hang in the air as the firebird's breath scorches Miss Maharaj, burns her to a cinder, and then turns upon the dotard's shrieking bride. I am the firebird's nest." The American "crashes upon Mr. Maharaj like a wave, and the angry dancers pour behind her ...she feels the frontiers of her body burst and the waters pour out ...drowning the firebird and its nest ...carrying away the old dotard and his murderous fellows, cleansing the region of its horrors, its archaic tragedies, of life." It is reported that Mr. Maharaj and his sister were killed in the flood caused by an unexpected downpour. The American woman, Mr. Maharaj's fiancee, is flying home; her baby will be born in America: "She caresses her swelling womb. Increasing, she is both fire and rain."

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LIFE AND LETTERS about Indian literature... Contemporary Indian literature remains largely unknown in the United States, in spite of its considerable present day energy and diversity. The few writers who have made an impression (R.K. Narayan, Vikram Seth) are inevitably read in a kind of literary isolation: texts without context... The prose writing--both fiction and nonfiction--created in this period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen "recognized" languages of India, the so-called "vernacular languages," during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, "Indo-Anglian" literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. The true Indian literature of the first postcolonial half century has been made in the language the British left behind... Mentions the difficulty of translation, between vernaculars as well as to English... Ironically, the century before independence contains many vernacular-language writers who would merit a place in any anthology mentions Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Dr. Muhammad iqbal, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, and Premcharid... Present-day successors are O.V. Vijayan, Suryakant Tripathi, Nirmal Verma, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Suresh Joshi, Amrita Pritam, Qurratulain Hyder, and Ismat Chughtai. Writer tells about the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto... Indian critical assaults continue to be made. Its practitioners are denigrated for being too upper middle-class; for lacking diversity in their choice of themes and techniques; for being less popular in India than outside India... It is true that most of these writers come from the educated classes of India; but in a country still be-deviled by high illiteracy levels how could the situation be otherwise? Mentions both R. K. Narayan and G.V. Desani; writer states that his own style is an outgrowth of Desani's... Ved Mehta is a writer known both for his astute commentaries on the Indian scene and for his several distinguished volumes of autobiography. Mentions Satyajit Ray, Anita Desai, V.S. Naipaul, Bapsi Sidhwa, Gita Mehta, Padma Perera, Anjana Appachana, Githa Hariharan, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Seth, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Sara Suleri, Bapsi Sidhwa, Amit Chaudhuri, Arundhati Roy, Ardashir Vakil, and Kiran Desai.

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REFLECTIONS connecting Princess Diana's death to the themes of "Crash." It is one of the darker ironies of a dark event that the themes and ideas explored by J.G. Ballard in "Crash" and David Cronenberg in the film adaptation, which many in Britain have called pornographic, should have been lethally acted out in the car accident that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed, and their drunken driver. Ballard's novel, by bringing together two erotic fetishes of our culture - the Automobile and the Star -- in an act of sexual violence (a car crash), created an effect so shocking as to be thought obscene. The addition of the Camera, in the case of Diana's death, created a cocktail of death and desire even more powerful than the one in Ballard's book. Think of it this way. The object of desire, the Beauty, the Blonde (Diana), is repeatedly subjected to the unwanted attentions of a persistent suitor (the Camera) until the dashing, glamorous knight (riding his Automobile) sweeps her away. The Camera gives pursuit. But the Automobile is driven not by a hero but by a clumsy drunk. The object of desire, in the moment of her death, sees the phallic lenses advancing upon her. Diana Spencer died in a sublimated sexual assault. "Sublimated" is the point, because the camera is acting on our behalf. If blood is on the hands of the press, it is also on ours. When you saw the pictures of Dodi and Diana cavorting together, did you say that's none of my business, and turn the page? We are the lethal voyeurs. "Are you satisfied now?" people in Britain have been shouting at photographers. Could we answer the same question? Are we going to stop being fascinated by all those purloined moments of public people's private lives? Not a chance. A British newspaper editor told how Diana composed the famous shot in which she sat, alone and lovelorn, in front of the world's greatest monument to love, the Taj Mahal. Diana was not given to using words like "semiotics," but she was a capable semiotician of herself. Some have been saying that her "collusion" with the media must be an important mitigating factor in any discussion of the paparazzi's role in her death. But the battle is for control. In escaping the lenses, she was asserting her determination, perhaps her right, to be a Subject rather than an Object. Wanting to be the mistress of her own life, she surrendered herself to a driver who was not even able to control the car. The Windsors and the Al Fayeds are the archetypal Insiders and Outsiders. Mohamed Al Fayed, the Egyptian who longed to be British, has tragically lost his eldest son, perhaps he has also lost his best, last chance of being accepted by the Britain he loves. The Windsors's status is also in doubt. Once beloved of the nation, they are now widely seen as the family that maltreated the far more beloved Diana. If Mr. Al Fayed is fated to remain on the outside looking in, then the Royal Family itself, very much on the inside, may just possibly be on the way out. The nation's love of Diana will undoubtedly transfer itself to her sons. But the British people may come to feel that these boys would be better off away from the crippling burdens of being royal. Behind all else is the simple fact of three dead people, one of them a good mother who tried to show her boys something of what the real world was like. She took them to fun fairs and burger joints, but she also took them to soup kitchens and clinics for the terminally ill. How can they go on living in the real world she tried to show them? How might they, one day, be happy again? Diana herself seemed far happier once she'd escaped the Royal Family. Perhaps Britain itself would be happier if it made the same escape, and learned to live without kings and queens. Such are the unthinkable thoughts that have become all too thinkable now.

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PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer's thoughts on the 10th anniversary of the sentence of death issued against him by the late Ayatollah Khomeini for his controversial book "The Satanic Verses." The writer calls the "fatwa"--a Middle Eastern sentence of death--which he received from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989, his "unfunny valentine." The writer claims that since the fatwa he has had two lives: one in which he is trapped by hatred, and another in which he lives and writes freely. He claims that the death sentence has affected his writing by making him more interested in happy endings, and by improving his sense of humor. He describes the sense of violation he felt when he received the fatwa; he claims it was as if armed men had burst into his home and laid waste to it. He describes the difficulty of going about normal every-day activities with the memory of this intrusion constantly on your mind. The writer compares the damage caused by such an intrusion to a spear which twists in the stomach but does not kill. He also compares it to an old boarding-school memory in which his limbs feel impossibly weighty when he wakes from his sleep. But the writer insists that he will prevail and draw strength from his injuries. He wants to continue being a voice celebrating literature and its "fierce-minded rebuke to dogma and power..." He describes how inspiring it was to take part in a recent dedication ceremony for a house for refugee writers in Mexico City. He claims he is determined "to prove that the art of literature is more resilient than what menaces it," and he contends that "the best defense of literary freedoms lies in their exercise." The writer says that he empathizes most closely with outsiders, those who don't belong. He claims that the "dark anniversaries" of the fatwa are a time for him to "reflect upon the countervailing value of love." The writer ends with a metaphor about St. Valentine's remains.

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After her death in a Mexican earthquake, the aging pop singer Vina Apsara becomes a cult figure. Her old friend tries to come to terms with her death by explaining why people pour into stadiums to listen to her music and testify to its importance in their lives. On St. Valentine’s Day, 1989, the last day of her life, Vina awoke at noon in a hotel in Guadalajara, Mexico, with a half-dead stranger by her side, the young playboy heir of a local construction baron whom Vina had taken home after her concert at the city’s convention center. Vina, forty-four, was making a new start, a solo career without Ormus Cama, her husband and partner. She and the narrator, her old friend Umeed Merchant, a.k.a. Rai, a photographer, take a helicopter to Tequila, where Don Angel Cruz, owner of a celebrated distillery, was to hold a banquet in her honor. Meanwhile, Vina’s playboy lover had been taken to the hospital, where he dies of a drug overdose. Separated from Ormus on this tour, Vina has discovered the limitations of her own material. The new songs she’s written meet with a tepid response. But roars of acclaim follow each of the hits from her old band, VTO: at once the minority of youngsters in the audiences perk up and go crazy, the crowds’ hands begin moving in unison. Before they land, the pilot is informed of mild earth tremors in the region, but he reassures Vina and Rai that they have passed. As Apsara majestically descends from the helicopter a cry goes up, just her name, Veeenaaa, and Rai recognizes that in spite of all the hyperbolic revelry and public display of her life, she has never been resented, something in her manner disarms people, and what bubbles out of them instead of bile is a miraculous, unconditional affection. Vina, who had survived a California earthquake, is undisturbed by the tremors, but their host, Don Angel Cruz, is oozing with fear for his crops and distillery. Don Angel begins to sing, in his genuine countertenor voice, from the opera “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and Vina joins in its showstopper finale, Love’s triumph over death. The earth begins to shake just as she finishes: the walls of Don Angel’s hacienda crack and fall away; sewage bursts upward from the streets; debris rains from the sky; the streets heave. Rai starts taking pictures of the scene. The Angel distillery succumbs, bursting open, and a river of tequila makes its frothing way into the lanes of the town, overtaking the fleeing populace. Don Angel scurries around with a saucepan, trying pathetically to save what he can. Vina gets in the helicopter for her planned trip to a remote villa on the Pacific coast, the Villa Huracan, co-owned by the president of a record company. As the helicopter is rising, she screams “Goodbye, Hope” down at Rai, whose real name, Umeed, means “hope.” In Rai’s last photograph of Vina, the ground beneath her feet is cracked like crazy paving and there’s liquid everywhere. Her arms are spread wide, her hair’s flying, the expression on her face is halfway between anger and fear. This last Vina is calamity incarnate, a woman in extremis, who is also by chance one of the most famous women in the world. The pilot who takes Vina to the Villa Huracan says she insisted on going forward with the arrangements, and that when they got there, the villa was seemingly intact. He says in a television interview that he saw someone meet her on the steps. But the villa’s owner says in another interview that he, his other guests, and his staff had all fled. Rai imagines that Vina was alone when it happened, with a Margarita in her hand, singing against the orange-and-purple sky. Then the ground simply opened and ate her, like a mouth. When he is sent on an overflight of the site of the vanished villa, Rai unexpectedly falls apart, weeping and shouting Vina’s name. That she was loved, cherished, and desired, Rai has always known, but he is nevertheless unprepared for the scale of the worldwide response to her death. Dying when the world shook, by her death she shakes the world, and is quickly raised to the ranks of the divine. All over the world, when the news of her death breaks, people pour into the streets, whatever their local hour. Over and over again, in the streets of Yokohama, Darwin, Montevideo, Calcutta, Stockholm, Newcastle, Los Angeles, people are heard describing her death as a personal bereavement, a death in the family. Crowds begin to gather, first at clubs and record stores, and, when they run out of room, at stadiums, arenas, parks, maidans. The sound systems offer her music to the crowds. Videotapes of her performances are played on stadium screens. Individual men and women walk up onto these stages and talk simply, personally but selflessly, about where they were when they first heard her music and what it has meant in their lives, at their weddings, their children’s births, the death of their lovers. Music—Vina’s voice, singing Ormus’s melodies—surges round the world, crossing all frontiers, belonging everywhere and nowhere, and its rhythm is the rhythm of life.

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OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about the writer’s life-long love affair with soccer, and his keen enthusiasm for the famous North London team, Tottenham Hotspur... He saw his first game in London in 1961, between Arsenal and Real Madrid. Real Madrid were rated as perhaps the greatest team ever... Tells about the World Cup and about goalkeepers... Mentions his continued outrage that Pat Jennings, a brilliant goalie, was transferred from the Spurs to Arsenal... Mentions the chants sung by the crowd... Wembley Stadium is due to be replaced at the end of the year... Describes the turnabout of the team’s fortunes for the better upon hiring former manager of rival Arsenal, George Graham... Writer describes a game at Wembley between the Spurs and Leicester...

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LETTER FROM INDIA about the writer’s recent visit to India... Before the Partition massacres of 1947, my parents left Delhi and moved south, correctly calculating that there would be less trouble in secular, cosmopolitan Bombay. As a result, I grew up in that tolerant, broadminded city whose particular quality—call it freedom—I’ve been trying to capture and celebrate ever since... In 1988, I was planning to buy myself a place in Bombay with the advance I’d received for my new novel. But that novel was “The Satanic Verses,” and after it was published the world changed for me, and I was no longer able to set foot in the country that has been my primary source of artistic inspiration. Whenever I made inquiries about getting a visa (although I was born an Indian national, I now have a British passport), word invariably came back that I would not be granted one....India was the first country to ban “The Satanic Verses”; the book was proscribed without due process before it entered the country, by a weak Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi, in a desperate, unsuccessful bid for Muslim votes... Friday, April 7th: The telephone rings. The Delhi police are extremely nervous about my impending arrival. Can I please avoid being spotted on the plane? My bald head is very recognizable; will I please wear a hat? My eyes are also easily identified; will I please wear sunglasses? Oh, and my beard, too, is a real giveaway; will I wear a scarf around that? The temperature in India is close to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, I point out: a scarf might prove a little warm.... My son Zafar, twenty, is coming with me. He hasn’t been to India since he was three, and is very excited. Saturday, April 8th: India rushes in from every direction, thrusting me into the middle of its unending argument, clamoring for my total attention. Buy Chilly cockroach traps! Drink Hello mineral water! Speed Thrills But Kills! shout the hoardings. There are new kinds of message, too. Enroll for Oracle 81. Graduate with Java. And, as proof that the long protectionist years are over, Coca-Cola is back with a vengeance. I was last in India in August, 1987, for the fortieth anniversary of Independence. I have never forgotten being at the Red Fort, in Old Delhi, and listening to Rajiv Gandhi delivering a stunningly tedious oration in broken schoolboy Hindi, while the audience simply and crushingly walked away. Writer descibes an incident in which he worries, after a warning from a police official, that an interview he gave may lead to police quelling a riot by force... Tells about the warm welcome he receives in Delhi... Vijay throws a farewell party for me. And there’s a surprise: my two actress aunts, Uzra Butt and her sister Zohra Segal, are there, with my cousin Kiran Segal, Zohra’s daughter and one of the country’s foremost teachers of the Odissi school of Indian classical dancing. This is the zany wing of the family, sharp of tongue and mischievous of eye. “I haven’t seen you dance for years,” I say to Kiran....“Come back soon,” she says. “Then I’ll dance.” 

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At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new “victory city” of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the day’s heat pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real.

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The day that Junior fell down began like any other day: the explosion of heat rippling the air, the trumpeting sunlight, the traffic’s tidal surges, the prayer chants in the distance, the cheap film music rising from the floor below, the loud pelvic thrusts of an “item number” dancing across a neighbor’s TV, a child’s cry, a mother’s rebuke, unexplained laughter, scarlet expectorations, bicycles, the newly plaited hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong sweet coffee, a green wing flashing in a tree. Senior and Junior, two very old men, opened their eyes in their bedrooms on the fourth floor of a sea-green building on a leafy lane, just out of sight of Elliot’s Beach, where, that evening, the young would congregate, as they always did, to perform the rites of youth, not far from the village of the fisherfolk, who had no time for such frivolity. The poor were puritans by night and day. As for the old, they had rites of their own and did not need to wait for evening. With the sun stabbing at them through their window blinds, the two old men struggled to their feet and lurched out onto their adjacent verandas, emerging at almost the same moment, like characters in an ancient tale, trapped in fateful coincidences, unable to escape the consequences of chance.

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No writer ever really wants to talk about censorship. Writers want to talk about creation, and censorship is anti-creation, negative energy, uncreation, the bringing into being of non-being, or, to use Tom Stoppard’s description of death, “the absence of presence.” Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it. And writers want to talk about how much they get paid, and they want to gossip about other writers and how much they get paid, and they want to complain about critics and publishers, and gripe about politicians, and they want to talk about what they love, the writers they love, the stories and even sentences that have meant something to them, and, finally, they want to talk about their own ideas and their own stories. Their things. The British humorist Paul Jennings, in his brilliant essay on Resistentialism, a spoof of Existentialism, proposed that the world was divided into two categories, “Thing” and “No-Thing,” and suggested that between these two is waged a never-ending war. If writing is Thing, then censorship is No-Thing, and, as King Lear told Cordelia, “Nothing will came of nothing,” or, as Mr. Jennings would have revised Shakespeare, “No-Thing will come of No-Thing. Think again.”

Consider, if you will, the air. Here it is, all around us, plentiful, freely available, and broadly breathable. And yes, I know, it’s not perfectly clean or perfectly pure, but here it nevertheless is, plenty of it, enough for all of us and lots to spare. When breathable air is available so freely and in such quantity, it would be redundant to demand that breathable air be freely provided to all, in sufficient quantity for the needs of all. What you have, you can easily take for granted, and ignore. There’s just no need to make a fuss about it. You breathe the freely available, broadly breathable air, and you get on with your day. The air is not a subject. It is not something that most of us want to discuss.

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Afterward, when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She called him at home, on his private line, without explaining how she got the number. “How does it feel,” she asked him, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but the question shut out the light. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: “It doesn’t feel good.” This is what he thought: I’m a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left, and guessed that the answer was probably a single-digit number. He hung up the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom, at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived. The living-room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. Then he locked the front door.

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In 1982, when I was in Hamburg for the publication of the German translation of “Midnight’s Children,” I was asked by my publishers if I would like to meet Günter Grass. Well, obviously I wanted to, and so I was driven out to the village of Wewelsfleth, outside Hamburg, where Grass then lived. He had two houses in the village; he wrote and lived in one and used the other as an art studio. After a certain amount of early fencing—I was expected, as the younger writer, to make my genuflections, which, as it happened, I was happy to perform—he decided, all of a sudden, that I was acceptable, led me to a cabinet in which he stored his collection of antique glasses, and asked me to choose one. Then he got out a bottle of schnapps, and by the bottom of the bottle we were friends. At some later point, we lurched over to the art studio, and I was enchanted by the objects I saw there, all of which I recognized from the novels: bronze eels, terracotta flounders, dry-point etchings of a boy beating a tin drum. I envied him his artistic gift almost more than I admired him for his literary genius. How wonderful, at the end of a day’s writing, to walk down the street and become a different sort of artist! He designed his own book covers, too: dogs, rats, toads moved from his pen onto his dust jackets.

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