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a gesture of unchangingness in defiance of the invasion of the doctori-attache from Heidelberg? Once Aziz asked the ancient, straight out, what it was all for; but Tai only breathed on him and rowed away. The breath nearly felled Aziz; it was sharp as an axe.
    In 1918, Doctor Aziz's father, deprived of his birds, died in his sleep; and at once his mother, who had been able to sell the gemstone business thanks to the success of Aziz's practice, and who now saw her husband's death as a merciful release for her from a life filled with responsibilities, took to her own deathbed and followed her man before the end of his own forty-day mourning period. By the time the Indian regiments returned at the end of the war, Doctor Aziz was an orphan, and a free man-except that his heart had fallen through a hole some seven inches across.
    Desolating effect of Tai's behaviour: it ruined Doctor Aziz's good relations with the lake's floating population. He, who as a child had chatted freely with fishwives and flower-sellers, found himself looked at askance. 'Ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz.' Tai had branded him as an alien, and therefore a person not completely to be trusted. They didn't like the boatman, but they found the transformation which the Doctor had evidently worked upon him even more disturbing. Aziz found himself suspected, even ostracized, by the poor; and it hurt him badly. Now he understood what Tai was up to: the man was trying to chase him out of the valley.
    The story of the perforated sheet got out, too. The lady wrestlers were evidently less discreet than they looked. Aziz began to notice people pointing at him. Women giggled behind their palms…
    'I've decided to give Tai his victory,' he said. The three lady wrestlers, two holding up the sheet, the third hovering near the door, strained to hear him through the cotton wool in their ears. ('I made my father do it,' Naseem told him, 'These chatterjees won't do any more of their tittling and tattling from now on.') Naseem's eyes, hole-framed, became wider than ever.
    .. .Just like his own when, a few days earlier, he had been walking the city streets, had seen the last bus of the winter arrive, painted with its colourful inscriptions-on the front, god willing in green shadowed in red; on the back, blue-shadowed yellow crying thank god!, and in cheeky maroon, sorry-bye-bye!-and had recognized, through a web of new rings and lines on her face, Ike Lubin as she descended…
    Nowadays, Ghani the landowner left him alone with earplugged guardians, To talk a little; the doctor-patient relationship can only deepen in strictest confidentiality. I see that now, Aziz Sahib-forgive my earlier intrusions.' Nowadays, Naseem's tongue was getting freer all the time. 'What kind of talk is this? What are you-a man or a mouse? To leave home because of a stinky shikara-man!'…
    'Oskar died,' Ilse told him, sipping fresh lime water on his mother's takht. 'Like a comedian. He went to talk to the army and tell them not to be pawns. The fool really thought the troops would fling down their guns and walk away. We watched from a window and I prayed they wouldn't just trample all over him. The regiment had learned to march in step by then, you wouldn't recognize them. As he reached the streetcorner across from the parade ground he tripped over his own shoelace and fell into the street. A staff car hit him and he died. He could never keep his laces tied, that ninny'… here there were diamonds freezing in her lashes… 'He was the type that gives anarchists a bad name.'
    'All right,' Naseem conceded, 'so you've got a good chance of landing a good job. Agra University, it's a famous place, don't think I don't know. University doctor!… sounds good. Say you're going for that, and it's a different business.' Eyelashes drooped in the hole. 'I will miss you, naturally…'
    'I'm in love,' Aadam Aziz said to Ilse Lubin. And later,'… So I've only seen her through a hole in a sheet, one part at a time;