‘The First of the Odds’: A short story by novelist Anees Salim

Written as a polyphonic narrative, The Odd Book of Baby Names traces the lives of nine children, many of them illegitimate, of one of India’s last monarchs. This was omitted from the published version of the book and has now come forward to be read as a standalone story.

Abduk, the one who is blessed by God.

Once – when the skies were a lot whiter, leaves were much greener and the earth under the fig tree turned a deep copper when it rained – my father ruled a kingdom. He died this afternoon in his sleep, sans his sceptre.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un. Verily we belong to Allah, and verily to Him do we return.

When the news of his death reached me, I was sitting at my bedroom window which overlooked, across acres of buildings that were shorter than the tenement block I lived in, the palace he probably had been confined to.

My home had eleven windows, all arched, all green. No matter which direction they opened to, they all afforded a distant view of one of his palaces. There were nine of them, standing on the crowded skyline like something shaped out of clay, surrounded by structures that looked to have been constructed in a hurry. But I was somewhat sure that he was living his last days out in Cotah Mahal, the palace my bedroom had a view of, while the other eight royal residences ached with his absence.

The news of his passing did not particularly shock me. I had been ill long enough to think of death with an air of expectation, with a hint of a smile. But it pained me to think that he would not be living behind one of those windows anymore, that his gaze would not drift occasionally to the general direction of this tenement house. There was a problem with this kind of pain, it would grow more intense with time, and I was almost sure that the lump in my throat would harden day by day, especially at sunset when the sun appeared directly above Cotah Mahal and swathed the palace in a golden light. The full moon, too, would accentuate the pain.

I guess my mother, barely twenty, met my father, barely eighteen, in one of those nine palaces. They must have met briefly and, given their ages, a bit shyly, and she must have walked out of the palace in some kind of a trance, hoping to be summoned again. She did not retrace her steps to the palace but once, bearing a wailing me in her arms, and even though she could not meet my father in person, our presence in the palace was acknowledged, she with a little sack of gold coins and I with a name– Abduk, the one who is blessed by God.

A few hours after the news of his death broke, I ordered my prayer rug to be unrolled next to the armchair so that I could perform the funeral prayer in full view of Cotah Mahal. But before I could start my ablutions another piece of news reached me, that he was still alive; he was definitely on his deathbed, but certainly not dead. I had the prayer mat rolled up and stowed away. In the distance, the nectar of evening light slipped down the finial of the palace, and the night fell shortly afterwards.

When dragonflies had wings, cats had feelers and kites had strings, there were acres and acres of barren land between the tenement block and Cotah Mahal. One by one buildings started to crop up, filling the empty space with almost identical masonry. But none, fortunately, hid my view of my father’s palaces.

Since the false news of his death reached me, I dreaded looking out of windows. All nine palaces now looked like reminders of his mortality and, in a way, my own. Despite being father and son, we were men in the evening, separated only by eighteen years.

It was rumoured that he kept a catalogue of his children, and I was sure that my name would be the first among the many. Did he ever wonder how his illegitimate children live? Would he strike off the names of his children in the register if he was intimated about their deaths?

When the skies were snow-white, clouds occasionally looked like bearded men and sunrises were much ruddier, I owned a circus company, prior to which I had worked in one, in the role of a juggler. I had mastered jugglery by the time I reached twelve, trained by a nomad who, when his street performance went unrewarded, came to the orphanage I grew up in for leftovers.

Formerly a prison, the orphanage was a big brown building with collonaded corridors and rooms as tiny as – what else do you expect? – lockups, funded by the royal family, and the caretaker, a kind old man with a long silvery beard and a prayer bump, repeatedly reminded us that a feeling of brotherhood should prevail among the inmates, misconstruing which I grew up believing that each inmate was the king’s illegitimate son and hence my half-brother, until I turned eighteen, when it was mandatory for us to shun the protection of the orphanage and earn our living. The caretaker took me aside when I went up to him to bid farewell and whispered to me even though we were alone. “Remember this. Not only is your father a king but your mother is from a good family, an almost aristocratic family.” That was the first time I heard about my mother, and what I heard surprised and saddened me at once. “If you find it hard to make a living on your own, come back to me,” he said. “I will take your case to His Highness.”

Within a week of my departure from the orphanage, I found myself employed with a circus company, but it was unsettling to wake up every morning on a narrow metal bed beside a cloth partition which invariably presented me with the shadow of a pony tethered to a peg, nosing a pail of barley, kissing a bale of hay. I stayed there long enough to witness the docile colt turn into a restive stallion. Then the circus folded up.

Jugglers were dime a dozen back then, but clowns were hard to come by. If you could fuse a bit of tomfoolery into juggling, you became a rare breed. Growing up in an orphanage had made me bold enough to break into buffoonery at the drop of a hat, and aided by a lick of paint, a patchworked costume and a rubber nose the size of a tomato I sneaked my way into a sinking enterprise where everyone, in an honest attempt to keep it afloat, volunteered to do double duty. Unicyclists, after a few rounds of pedalling around the ring, came back as stilt walkers, cooks came on stage as fire-eaters, mahouts as dragons and the trapeze lady as the ringmaster’s concubine. For nearly two years the circus operated out of a little clearing behind Parade Ground with varying degrees of struggle, but when they decided to pull the tents down and turn it into a travelling circus to stay in the race, I found myself unable to leave the city of my birth and decided to test the veracity of the caretaker’s promise. On an early evening, I mustered up the courage to pay the orphanage a visit.

The years I had not been to the big brown building had played havoc with its keeper. His face had wrinkled up like a rain-starved field, his breathing sounded like a rusting pulley, his beard, once a glistening silver expanse, had been hennaed into a light shade of copper and his eyes were beginning to fail him. It took him an effort and a few anecdotes to recognize me but when reminded about the promise he had once made, he looked happy that I was in need of its fulfilment. Leaving his charges under my care, he set off to one of the nine palaces and did not return until late into the night. He came back with a sunken face, and the way he walked into the building did not portend any good news. Breathing hard as if he were still trying to come to terms with a scathing insult and shaking his head in disbelief, he paced the hallway, stamping his walking stick on the floor with such force that it stirred children in their sleep. Then he stopped and broke into a wide smile.

“Abduk, the one who is blessed by God in every way, is blessed again,” he said. “You are going to start a circus on your own. His Highness wants you to.”

A little boy, who was woken up by the laborious strides of the caretaker, came out of a room and watched us curiously as I tried to cope with the sudden change in my fortune. I could pitch my tents in the same clearing behind Parade Ground my former employer had moved his business from. I would be handed the resources the next week.

I hardly slept that night. As I lay awake waiting for the brightest sunrise in my life, I heard a child cough and cry, followed by the thuds of the old man’s walking stick as he laboured down the aisle to nurse the child and pat him back to sleep. I wondered who fathered that child. Someone as privileged as mine, or someone as impoverished as the gypsy I had learned juggling from? By daybreak, I was already dressed up to face the world and left the orphanage as soon as the caretaker woke. Only after I left the orphanage did I realise that I had forgotten to ask the caretaker about the boy who had kept him awake most of the night.

I quickened my steps as I rounded Parade Ground and covered the last leg of the trip in a trot. The circus that had become a travelling entertainer had left very little behind; an oval pitch of flattened earth, a series of holes where they had extracted the pegs from, a mound of ash where the kitchen had been and a few poles that had been taken over by wild creepers. In my mind, I had already glued up a new structure, a majestic network of tents funded by the royal family, surrounded by caged animals, all guarded by a reinforced fence with a wrought iron gate, above which sat a wooden board fashioned like a scroll announcing the name of the circus. My mental picture of the enterprise dwindled a bit every day and what was eventually built with the money defrayed by the palace was a mere ghost of what I had imagined it to be. A fair-sized centre tent, surrounded by a few shanties where we could sleep, dream and cook, a twenty-rowed gallery, a bunch of wind instruments, a few cages for birds, a humble fence and no wild animals. But the name of the circus was still majestic. The man who had named me had named my entrepreneurship as well: King Circus.

For the maiden show, a packed house was in attendance, thanks to the caretaker who, as an act of solidarity, herded the entire orphanage into the tent, and the children, as if acting upon instructions, erupted into animated rounds of applause every time the name of the circus was announced. Later, the caretaker met me backstage and inquired about my absence on the stage. His face fell when I told him I was the juggler in the guise of a clown and he clicked his tongue over and over again. “I don’t know if His Highness would be pleased to know that one of his offspring has become a clown. But I don’t want any of my children to grow up to be a clown. I will die a sad man.”

A few days later, the caretaker died in sleep. The news of his death reached me just as I was about to enter the ring, dressed as a clown, my hands laden with juggling balls. I imagined children crowding around his bed and trying to wake him. I thought of the child who woke up and wept late in the night; I imagined him waking up and weeping that night too and, having no one to comfort him, drifting back to sleep as tears dried up on his cheeks. A ball slipped from my hand and fell to the ground, followed by another, until I was juggling emptiness. But everyone saw the mix-up as something the clown side of me pulled off to ridicule the juggler side of me. A hum of laughter spread through the stands. And Pintu the dwarf came on stage so that I could retire to the backstage and grieve.

When the mountains were still visible behind the clocktower, the moon was pearlier and monsoon was more than just a prattle on the roof, I spotted a small man in a disproportionate wig and a fake beard seated five rows deep into the gallery. His eyes never left me, even when there was something more worth watching than a juggler’s stock histrionics. He appeared to be stuck in a trance, neither able to laugh nor to clap his hands.

The moment I saw through his disguise, I thought of the night the caretaker of the orphanage returned from Cotah Mahal with the good news, which he broke after a show of having been let down by the man he had trusted my future with. I remembered him telling me my father would always have his eyes on me. He said, “Your father”, I distinctly remember him saying that.

The presence of the man in disguise made me edgy, but it also made me happy. I assumed it was how children felt when parents came to watch them perform. Only that mine sat in false hair, staring like I had already let him down. I juggled with exaggerated care, and my hard concentration erased the grin of a buffoon from my painted face. And what existence does a clown have without the smile of a defeated man on his face? I wanted the show to end and my father to disappear; at some point in my forced performance I had started to believe that the masquerade was choking him. Probably he had come to appraise what had been built with his money, probably he was ashamed of the size of the endowment, probably he regretted being so tight-fisted. Probably. I was not sure. But I was somehow certain that he was displeased on some account.

When my bit was done, I went backstage. Sitting on a steel trunk with the clown’s cap in my hands, I suddenly found the courage to confront him. While wiping the paint off my face, I caught my reflection in the mirror. For the first time in my life, it occurred to me that I bore a remote resemblance to him. That filled me with a sense of assurance bordering on audacity. I shed the clown’s costume and gait, and strode soldierly towards the gallery, unsure of what to tell him. But the man in a wig and fake beard had gone. And I started to wonder if it was really my father.

When Lake Hussain was less slate-like, the domes of Cotah Mahal were eye-hurting amber and the Kiswah on my prayer rug was darker than the darkest night, I turned sleepless in anticipation of Rumi’s arrival. I was so certain it was going to be a boy that I decided to name him Rumi and, as months passed in restless waiting, I found myself so obsessed with the name that I decided to call the child Rumi even if it turned out to be a girl.

Rumi, a bouncing baby with adorable Mongolian features, arrived a week earlier than expected when I was in the ring, juggling. A patch of light appeared at the back of the gallery when one of my neighbours brushed aside the curtain and stepped into the tent. He became a dark shape groping his way down the aisle when the curtain fell back to its place, his march ending just outside the ring where he stood still for a moment, perplexed about the mode of communication, before breaking into animated mimes that relayed the news of uncomplicated childbirth to me. My hands were occupied with red, white and purple balls, there was no way to mime the all-important question back: boy or girl? So I accelerated my act and left the ring as soon as Pintu the dwarf came on stage.

“Girl,” said the neighbour when I took him backstage.

“I am going to call her Rumi,” I said.

I was slowly coming to terms with the harsh reality of addressing a girl by a distinctly boy’s name for a lifetime when the neighbour started to chuckle. “It’s a boy,” he said as we walked home. “He got your eyes and nose.”

For the first time in my life, I regretted my joker’s red rubber nose. I heard Rumi whimpering from three houses away. The midwife had already left and the house was teeming with neighbours. The child’s nose had turned red from crying and I wondered if it hinted at the possibility of him taking after me and sporting a clown’s costume and rubber nose one day.

The next show was due in a couple of hours and I rushed back to the tent with a kind of smile I had not known I was capable of producing. Within the radius of my immediate neighbourhood, people smiled hesitantly back, evidently wondering why someone with a permanently angry face suddenly thought of beaming at them. Once I had run out of neighbours and near-acquaintances, strangers returned the smile, wondering if they knew me, and however hard I tried to erase it from my face it stayed like an indelible stain, even after I painted my face, slipped into the joker’s costume, plugged in the rubber nose and started juggling.

It took me a few years to do away with that particular brand of smile once and for all. And when I did, what replaced it was something impossible to wipe off my face. It was there to stay. Forever.

When the arch of the Four Minar was much browner and the minarets of Mecca Mosque wore the shade of green that the city’s parrots could effortlessly camouflage against, I used to take Rumi for sightseeing trips down the road that skirted Cotah Mahal. The railings were a pea-green then, the pillars between them strawberry. The last time I looked, the railings had acquired the colour of seaweed, but the pillars were still strawberry.

Rumi was two, a buxom bald boy who weighed twice his age, probably thrice. He had a precocious taste for architecture and loved nothing more than being taken down roads lined with big buildings. Maybe the smallness of our home and its undesirable surroundings had cultivated in him a yearning for wide avenues and majestic architecture. He did everything, threw every type of tantrum that was in the repertoire of a two-year-old, to escape the sunless interiors of the single-room house we had rented at the edge of a slum. Every Monday – King Circus rested its manpower and birds on Mondays after back-to-back shows on Sundays – I took a rickshaw up to the roundabout after the Four Minar, where began a long line of palatial buildings that culminated at the grandest of them all, Cotah Mahal. Sitting Rumi on my shoulders, I would stroll down the quiet and shaded street, my fingers curled around his ankles. He braced himself against a possible fall by gripping my hair so tightly that my wife had to extricate strands of hair from his fingers on our return. From my shoulders, he watched the slow parade of buildings with curious eyes, but nothing captured his imagination like the Cotah Mahal. He turned ecstatic at the sight of sentries who stood immediately behind the tall gates and the ponies that grazed in the distance.

On one such tour, a sudden squall of rain surprised us, rushing to us like a flock of birds and settling on us with a chirp-like patter. I took Rumi off my shoulders and, covering his head with the end of my shirt, ran in search of a shelter which, in a secluded and affluent neighbourhood like this, was nowhere in evidence. He stretched out a hand to touch the rain and started to chuckle. We were running past the palace gates when a sentry stepped onto the sidewalk and blocked my way, hissing angrily, “Get in there. The child is getting drenched.” He was pointing to a wooden cabin behind a pillar. His benevolence, though expressed irately, surprised me. How often do you come across a sentry who doesn’t want a stranger’s child to catch the flu?

The rain thickened and the drumming on the roof grew louder. The little cabin smelled of wet leather and horse dung. As we waited for the rain to stop, a man appeared at an upstairs window. Dwarfed by the distance and blurred by the rain, he stood there still, a hand-held sideways to stop the curtain from falling back and hiding his view of the winding, rain-washed drive. The last time, the only time, I saw him at close quarters, he was in disguise. He had a wig and facial hair and a fake interest in jugglery.

I pointed a finger at the French window, drawing Rumi’s attention. “Put your hand down,” the sentry said through his gritted teeth. “You are not supposed to point out His Highness.”

“It is your grandpa,” I whispered into Rumi’s ear. “Grandpa.”

“Grandpa,” Rumi started to yell, cupping his hands around his mouth. He yelled louder and louder to be heard over the din of rain. “Grandpa, grandpa.”

“Leave at once,” the sentry said murderously. “Go before I call others to throw you out.”

I hid Rumi’s head under my chin and ran out into the lashing rain. He stretched a hand out to catch the raindrops and began to chuckle again.

When juggling balls were glowing blobs of colours – wine red, magenta, lemon yellow, ebony and emerald – and the circus tent was the shade of homemade butter, I lost the skill of jugglery forever.

My mastery over the only skill I ever possessed left me on a Sunday evening. The turnout was so good that there were even people who watched the show standing, most of whom were villagers who had never been to a circus before, who had begged to be let in and been allowed to watch the show on the condition that they should watch it standing, all two hours and twenty minutes of it. The rounds of applause were hearteningly long, fading out in degrees before the tent fell silent in anticipation of the next number; the gales of laughter were loud, honest and hearty. Midway through the opening act, I saw the end of my career approaching as the neighbour who had brought the news of Rumi’s birth to the tent peeled the curtain back and walked uncertainly down the aisle. He had some urgent news to share, else he would not have come. The nearer he came to the stage, the faster the rhythm of my breathing became, until it was suffocating me. I wondered about the nature of the news he had been assigned by other neighbours to break. Grabbling in the half-dark, he skirted the ring and disappeared through the door that opened to the green room, and by the time I finished the session and reached the backstage he was sitting on a stool, head down, encircled by buglers, drummers, clowns and petty daredevils. They all looked at me with a deep frown, as if I had done something that was completely unexpected of me and caused them some serious distress and shame.

“What?” I asked irately.

The neighbour stood up wearily and put a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go home.”

“Please go home,” said Pintu the dwarf. “We will manage the show.”

I felt numb, but I was still touched by the confidence of a little buffoon to run the show. I saw tears twinkling in his eyes. I sensed his stubby little fingers shiver.

“What happened at home?” I asked loudly. The band had started to play, the cyclists were on the stage.

“Rumi choked on a little ball,” the neighbour said, refusing to meet my eyes. I remembered the set of balls I had taken home to teach him juggling. They were small in size, but they were of the same colours as the ones I had been performing with a few minutes ago; wine red, magenta, lemon yellow, ebony and emerald.

I was offered a chair, I slumped down on it and sat still as Pintu stood on his toes and wiped the paint off my face with a rag. His face, too, was painted, but he was not wearing his rubber nose. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he worked the wet rag on my chin, nose and forehead. Then he stood back and sized me up, as if instead of wiping off my makeup he had made up my face for the next show.

The darkness inside the tent looked so strange, so unreal as they led me down the murky aisle, past the audience who sat in collective awe of the cyclists who pretended to be asleep as they circled the pit. When the curtain was peeled back to let me out, the night pounced on me with another kind of darkness, big black sheets sewn together with white threads of light.

“Do you want us to inform any of your relatives, sahib?” Pintu asked in his squeaky voice.

“No.” A fit of anger, almost uncontrollable, took hold of me. “Don’t you know I am an orphan?”

When birds were more than moving blurs in the sky and ants were still visible to the naked eye, my circus company came crashing down.

Exactly a week after Rumi had been buried in a graveyard behind a little mosque I hadn’t known existed till that day, the circus had reopened. For a doting father, it might have been too early to resume work after he had lost his only child. But I thought juggling would calm me down and I would stay distracted as long as my show lasted. But how wrong I was. My hands had grown stiff, and the juggling balls had started slipping out of my hands far too many times to be taken as an act of deliberate bungling. My shoulders started to ache from the weight of my son I could no longer take for the weekly outings. Along with it, a new anger began to froth inside me: how did my own father never miss me? I turned surly, and without my knowledge I had become an insufferably bad employer, perpetually complaining, preposterously overbearing, eternally pessimistic.

Having been hired by other circus companies in the city, people began to leave me. The musicians were the first to go, they left much before the final show. The drummers, the buglers, the fiddlers and the percussionists I had added to the circus over the years came and stood in front of me, shame-faced, as if bad music had ushered in difficult times for King Circus. After mumbling apologies, they walked briskly away to their new employers.

“There would be no music from now on,” I told Pintu the dwarf.

“Silence is our new music, sahib,” he replied.

Even in the absence of music, the circus survived for another month or so. Then, prompted by the stuntmen’s decision to follow the example of the musicians, we decided to wind up. After we ended the final show with a collective bow at the scantily populated galleries, the trapeze artists, ropewalkers, cyclists, daredevils and clowns left in ones, twos and threes. All except Pintu the dwarf, who watched his friends merge into the little crowd that had turned up to watch the last show.

“Give me some time before I leave, sahib,” he said, collecting the colourful hats from the floor. “I just want to sleep on my bed for half an hour before I go.”

He carried the hats to the little alcove behind the bandstand. This had been his home for decades, a narrow strip that housed a foldable cot, a wooden chair, a tiny table and nothing else; the place he retired to after the show, where he slept until noon or beyond, where he brushed his teeth, shaved his face and wrote letters with much effort and pain, where I once had a glimpse of him lying on his back, the zip of his trousers open, his body going taut as he drained himself off the last drop of orgasm.

Feeling my eyes on him, he smiled and placed the hats carefully inside an olive-green trunk and pushed it into the darkness under the cot. Then, without even sparing me a glance, he removed his shoes and placed them next to the chair, like he always did, so that he could swing his legs out of the bed and put his feet directly into the wretched pair, exactly the way he did every afternoon upon waking.

This was my last night in the tent, too. I would padlock the gates once Pintu the dwarf had gone and hand over the key to the caretaker of the grounds on my way home. With the passage of time, weeds would take over the tents, the stands would gather rust, the cloth walls would grow grey and the roof, if not collapsed, would sag with the weight of many monsoons.

Birds twittered from behind the tent walls, as if seeking permission to leave. I strolled through the empty little circus town, down the lightless warrens that led to the backyard where the cages were. I opened the cages one by one and tossed macaws, parrots and doves into the night air. Parrots and doves readily took to the air, but macaws tottered around, uncertain about the newly found freedom. Despite my attempts to drive them away, they held their ground and when I walked back they hopped behind me into the tent. I herded them back to the open again and waited patiently for them to muster courage and fly into the free world. But they shuffled around the cages for a long time and then sneaked contentedly back into them.

I must have been away from the tent much longer than Pintu the dwarf wanted to relive the many sleeps he had slept on the metal bed by the bandstand. He must either be thoroughly bored, yawning, or in deep sleep, snoring.

But the bed was empty. He had disappeared. So had the olive-green trunk under the bed. It took me a while to realize that I had been cheated by the most loyal member of my circus. But, after a while, I forgave him. I had kept worrying about him, not just about him but everyone like him, who had meager possessions and limited talents, who would have nothing but the comforts of the street to fall back on. I should not have given him a chance to steal the trunk of hats and trinkets. I should have gifted it to him after the last show, which we performed with tears in our eyes and a peculiar heaviness in our chests. Now, confronting the empty metal bed, I could picture him walking to the gates for one last time, burdened by the weight of uncertainty and the steel trunk. I was sure he would have paused at the gates to look at the tent. It is in our nature to force a last glimpse of places and people, to hoard them in our memories and play them like a piece of music in moments of emptiness.

After filling a bag with my possessions, I stood in the dark ring for a while. Then walked down the empty aisles to the exit. It was sentimentally cheap and ridiculously cliched to imagine a round of applause rising from the front row and rippling through the galleries. The silence was more befitting. Silence, as Pintu the dwarf said, was my new music.

As I put the sinisterly fat key into the big lock for the last time, I heard the flapping of wings above the gates. I looked up. Macaws. They had finally decided to free themselves. They were finally airborne.

When the foundries used to emit palls of smoke, spiders still wove webs and soap bubbles were not yet extinct, colours failed me. They didn’t vanish altogether; they simply lost their souls. The skies turned less white, leaves less green, yolks blonde. I no longer saw colours the way my wife and children did. (Three boys were born after Rumi’s death. And the first time I heard each of them cry I remembered the neighbour who had walked through the dark aisle towards the ring. But I didn’t remember him from the day he carried the news of Rumi’s arrival into this world, but of his departure from it.) Details started to fade, things gathered a light coat of grey, and silverfish swam in the air when I woke up every morning.

“Cataract,” the doctor said after inspecting my eyes through an apparatus that looked like a crude form of telescope. “It is an advanced form of cataract.”

At the mention of cataract, the light dimmed in the room. The sun under the curtains lost its lustre.

“Look at the ants.” He pointed a pencil at the wall. “Gradually you will stop seeing tiny things like them.”

I didn’t see any ant. I had long stopped seeing ants and even wondered where had all the aphids gone.

“Soon you will fail to see colours the way the rest of us do. Then you will stop seeing everything altogether.”

“You are saying I should start wearing glasses?”

“No, I am saying you should undergo eye surgery when you can afford one. The sooner the better. Else you stand a fat chance of going blind.”

I let the cataract be. I had seen enough. I had seen life in stark detail. I didn’t want to see anything more.

When dreams had colours, I once woke up from a nightmare in which a trapeze artist had failed to make contact with his partner’s hands and crashed to the ring where there were no safety nets to break his fall. Unable to go back to sleep, I spent the whole night watching the dark outline of Cotah Mahal in the horizon. I remembered the nightmare as I sat at a window and watched the moonlit domes of the palace, where I would go and wait in a long queue in the morning to have a last glimpse of my father. That would be my first glimpse of him without a wig and false beard.