The Crow Eaters

We will stay where we are … let Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, or whoever, rule. What does it matter? The sun will continue to rise – and the sun continue to set – in their arses …!’

and Bose and Jinnah and Nehru … and that other stupid fool in Karachi, Rustom Sidhwa, also picks them up! What does he do? He sacrifices his business and abandons his family to the vicissitudes of chance and poverty. He wears a Gandhi cap, handloom shirt, and that transparent diaper they call a dhoti. He goes in and out of jail as if he were visiting a girl at the Hira Mandi! Where will it get him? Nowhere! If there are any rewards in all this, who will reap them? Not Sidhwa! Not Dadabhoy Navroji! Making monkeys of themselves and of us! Biting the hand that feeds! I tell you we are betrayed by our own kind, by our own blood! The fools will break up the country. The Hindus will have one part, Muslims the other. Sikhs, Bengalis, Tamils and God knows who else will have their share; and they won’t want you!’
‘But where will we go? What will happen to us?’ asked Bobby Katrak in

Back at the hotel, when she narrated the story of her brush with death, Faredoon was despondent. ‘Another golden opportunity gone,’ he reflected glumly.

They came upon small stone structures, little make-believe temples, as if masons, halfway between constructing dolls’ houses, had become serious, and turned them into Mandirs with spiralling cones and sacred decorations. There were offerings of fresh flowers and sugar at the mouths of these dolls’ house Mandirs.

‘Are you a communist?’
‘Maybe,’ said Yazdi. ‘Perhaps I’m a follower of Mazdak.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘The first communist. A Zarathusti ancestor. He realised centuries ago that all material goods, including women, had to be shared!’

it is insane to look beneath the surface of India

‘I’ll feed dying children. I’ll buy medicine for the sick left to decay like exposed excrement in those choked bazaar lanes. You prefer not to think about them. I’ve heard the tormented screams of children at midnight! Who are they? And the perverted monsters that torment them? You choose not to know. But I know nothing else – see every morning the mutilated corpses of prostitutes found in the gutters, and the agonising pain of millions of futile, wasted lives.’

If a point was stretched, what did it matter? All is fair in love and advertising.

When he climbed up to the flat Freddy had regained his control. He led Mr Bottliwalla into the vacant sitting room and there engaged him in an eager, scathing, and logical attack on superstition, astrology, reincarnation and all that rubbish. He decided not to mention anything about the janam patri to Putli. She was inclined to be superstitious and might take the nonsense to heart, he explained to Mr Bottliwalla. And when Mr McReady, the affable, bearded Scotsman from the Planning Commission, dropped in for a drink, he was surprised by Freddy’s vehement tirade against the so-called saints, soothsayers and mystics of India.

‘Hope the girls are good, old chap,’ said Prince Kamaruddin, opening a jewelled snuff box and squeezing a pinch into each nostril above his enormous, stiffened moustache.
Mr Allen, already disconcerted by the odour of jasmine, garlic and sweat