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directives that went: ‘Mr Korda wants a flying horse. Mr Korda wants a forty-foot genie. Mr Korda wants a six-armed goddess.’ And everything Mr Korda wanted, he got.
    Alexander Korda masterminded the operation, but Baba rarely saw him. Her dreams of being plucked from obscurity and groomed for stardom were dashed when she got stuck instead with a succession of different directors, one of whom was a lumpy-looking German with wispy hair and no sense of humour. Still, she managed to smile while she unfolded canvas chairs for him and Miss Duprez and the other leading lights, and she managed not to look too sick when the dancing girls wafted gaily past her in their diaphanous harem pants, and she even managed a joke when the dog star of the movie got loose one day and tried to savage her.
    But she fell in love at first sight with Sabu, the boy who played the ‘thief’ of the title.
He
had been propelled to stardom three years ago when he’d been cast as the lead in
Elephant Boy
. Sabu Dastagir was only fifteen, but already he was the toast of London: he’d been sculpted by Lady Kennet, painted by Egerton Cooper, and he’d even appeared on television.
    He might have been the toast of London, but Sabu was one of the easiest-going, most approachable people on the set, with a smile as broad as the Ganges and charm enough to lure the stripes off a tiger. It was only a matter of days before he and Baba became good friends, after he’d accidentally knocked off one of the goddess’s six arms. Thereafter, Baba had nicknamed him ‘Sabutage’, and allowed him in return to call her by her pet name.
    ‘How did your parents feel about you leaving India?’ she asked him one lunchtime, when they were sitting together at the top table in the canteen. A gaggle of costume extras at the far end of the room were eyeing Sabu and giggling, clearly keen to pluck up the courage to ask for his autograph. Baba knew she was very privileged to be sitting at the top table, and she found it hard not to preen a little.
    ‘I’m an orphan, Baba,’ he said. ‘My mother died when I was a baby, and my father died when I was six.’
    ‘Oh. I
am
sorry.’
    ‘My father was a mahout, like me.’
    ‘A mahout?’
    ‘An elephant handler. He looked after the elephants in the Maharajah of Mysore’s stables.’
    ‘What a swell job!’
    Sabu gave her a cynical look. ‘You don’t get paid a pile of rupees for sweeping up dung. But he loved the elephants, and they loved him. He taught his favourite animal to rock my cradle when I was a baby, and even to pick me up in his trunk and rock me that way too. When my father died, that elephant went mad with grief. He broke his chains and ran off into the jungle.’
    ‘Oh, how sad!’ Out of the corner of her eye, Baba could see the extras nudging a slave girl in vermilion chiffon towards their table. ‘Have you any family left in India, Sabu?’
    ‘Yes. They are completely dependent on me now, since I was discovered by Robert O’Flaherty. The filmmaker,’ he added, for her enlightenment.
    ‘He made
Man of Aran
, didn’t he?’
    Sabu looked surprised. ‘How do you know that? I wouldn’t have thought that was your sort of film.’
    ‘I went to the Aran Islands on a day trip once. I was at boarding school on the west coast of Ireland.’
    ‘Ireland? Why didn’t your folks send you to an English boarding school?’
    ‘I have cousins over there.’ Baba didn’t want to tell Sabu that she had been shipped off to this remote outpost of Europe at her grandmother’s behest. ‘My best friend there was an Indian girl.’
    ‘An Indian girl – at school in Ireland? How weird!’
    ‘It’s true. Girls came from all over the world to be educated at Kylemore Abbey. I had friends from Japan, Mexico and America, as well as India.’
    ‘Was it a posh school?’
    ‘I guess it was, but we ran a little wild. It was in the middle of the country, miles from anywhere, with lakes to swim in and mountains to