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a bus and follow him down into the plains which the sun has scorched and pulverized into a dusty hell. We pant under ceiling fans. And now the temperatures soar.

    Our stay in Murree has been cut short because the Parsees of Lahore are holding a Jashan prayer to celebrate the British victory.
    On the day of the Jashan the temperature is 116°F in the shade. A tonga waits in the porch. Hollow-eyed and dazed with heat we pile perspiring into the tonga. Mother and Ayah in the back and Adi and I up front with the tongaman. We sit back to back on a bench divided by a quilted backrest. A flimsy canvas canopy shelters us from the sun. The tonga is held together by two enormous wooden wheels on either side of the shaft and is balanced by the harnessed horse. Up front we are more secure—unless the horse falls.
    Scarcely out of our gate, the horse falls. Adi and I shoot over the guard and spill onto Warris Road. Mother and Ayah are suspended high in the air, clinging for all they are worth to the other end of the seesaw. Adi and I get up and scamper to one side. The tongaman picks himself off the horse cursing: and the Birdwood Barracks’ sepoy abandons his post and runs forward to render help. Ayah’s presence galvanizes men to mad sprints in the noon heat. It is a pity she has no such effect on animals though.
    The tongaman and the sepoy lift the shafts and assist the harnessed horse to stand upright. Adi pats the horse’s rump. The animal swishes his bristly tail and blows wind in our faces. The sepoy makes an encouraging sucking noise with his tongue and pushes one of the enormous wooden wheels to start the tonga. Straining and quivering under the dual burden of passengers and heat, the shaken animal drags us past the barracks, the barricading walls of the Lucy Harrison School for girls next to it, up Queens Road, past the pretty pink spread of the Punjab High Court and behind the small-causes court to the Fire Temple.
    We leave the tongaman and Ayah to gossip and doze beneath whatever shade they can find.
    The main hall of the temple is already full of smoke. Two priests, sitting cross-legged and swaying slightly, face each other across a fire altar. They are robed in a swollen froth of starched white muslin. They wear cloth masks like the one Colonel Bharucha wore in the hospital. Their chanting voices rise and
boom in fierce competition and the mask prevents specks of spittle from profaning the fire. They sit on a white sheet amidst silver trays heaped with fruit—grape, mango, papaya—and flowers. And the malida cooked by the priest’s wife. Adi and I join the children sitting patiently on a wooden bench—our collective mouths drooling.
    The priests cannot be hurried. They go through a ritual established a millennium ago. They stoke the fire with silver tongs and feed it with sandalwood and frankincense.
    It is comparatively cool beneath the high ceiling. My eyes are getting accustomed to the dark but smart with smoke. Mother has found a seat in the front row. There is an empty chair between her and Colonel Bharucha. He must have grown taller, because his pink scalp thrusts higher above his hairline than before. Godmother sits next to him, fanning herself and the doctor with a slow, rotary motion of her palm-leaf punkah. She catches my watering eye and winks. Only I ever see her wink. Her dignified bearing and noble features preclude winking. She only relaxes her guard with me. No one sees her as I do. Slavesister is snatching a few blessed minutes of sleep in the last row. Godmother knows she’s asleep. She knows everything. Slavesister sleeps peacefully because she knows Godmother will not mind. Godmother, after all, is not unreasonable.
    Both priests stand up, smoothing their beards and garments. Chairs squeak as the ladies greet each other and gradually converge on the fruit trays. Slavesister waddles plumply forward on painful bunions, smiling her patient, obliging smile, securing her