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eaten in the Rushdie household, nor would you find on their dinner table the similarly proscribed “scavengers of the earth and the sea”; no Goan prawn curry on this dining table. There were those very occasional visits to the Idgah for the ritual up-and-down of the prayers. There was, once or twice a year, fasting during what Indian Muslims, Urdu—rather than Arabic—speaking, called Ramzán rather than Ramadan. And once, briefly, there was a
maulvi
, a religious scholar, hired by Negin to teach her heathen son and daughters the rudiments of faith. But when the heathen children revolted against the
maulvi
, a pint-sized Ho Chi Minh look-alike, teasing him so mercilessly that he complained bitterly to their parents about their disrespect for the great sanctities, Anis and Negin just laughed and took their children’s side. The
maulvi
flounced off, never to return, muttering imprecations against the unbelievers as he went, and after that there were no further attempts at religious instruction. The heathen grew up heathenish and, in Windsor Villa at least, that was just fine.
    When he turned away from his father, wearing the blue-and-white-striped cap of Bradley House and the serge mackintosh, and plunged into his English life, the sin of
foreignness
was the first thing that was made plain to him. Until that point he had not thought of himself as anyone’s Other. After Rugby School he never forgot the lesson he learned there: that there would always be people who just didn’t like you, to whom you seemed as alien as little green men or the Slime from Outer Space, and there was no point trying to change their minds. Alienation: It was a lesson he relearned in more dramatic circumstances later on.
    At an English boarding school in the early 1960s, he quickly discovered, there were three bad mistakes you could make, but if you made only two of the three you could be forgiven. The mistakes were: to be foreign; to be clever; and to be bad at games. At Rugby the foreign, clever boys who had a good time were also elegant cricketers or, in the case of one of his contemporaries, the Pakistani Zia Mahmood, so good at cards that he grew up to become one of the world’s finest bridge players. The boys who had no sporting ability had to be carefulnot to be too clever and, if possible, not too foreign, which was the worst of the three mistakes.
    He made all three mistakes. He was foreign, clever, non
-sportif
. And as a result his years were, for the most part, unhappy, though he did well academically and left Rugby with the abiding feeling of having been wonderfully well taught—with that nourishing memory of great teachers that, if we are lucky, we can carry with us for the rest of our lives. There was P. G. Lewis, known, inevitably, as “Pig,” who so inspired him with the love of French that he rose in the course of one term from the bottom to the top of the class, and there were his history teachers J. B. Hope-Simpson, a.k.a. “Hope Stimulus,” and J. W. “Gut” Hele, thanks to whose skilled tutelage he was able to go on to win an exhibition, a minor scholarship, to read history at his father’s old alma mater of King’s College, Cambridge, where he would meet E. M. Forster and discover sex, though not at the same time. (Less valuably, perhaps, “Hope Stimulus” was also the person who introduced him to Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
, which entered his consciousness like a disease, an infection he never managed to shake off.) His old English teacher Geoffrey Helliwell would be seen on British television on the day after the
fatwa
, ruefully shaking his head and asking, in sweet, vague, daffy tones, “Who’d have thought such a nice, quiet boy could get into so much trouble?”
    Nobody had forced him to go to boarding school in England. Negin had been against the idea of sending her only son away across oceans and continents. Anis had offered him the opportunity and encouraged him to take the Common Entrance