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wondering why everyone is so upset … They are approaching Ghani’s house. A bearer awaits the shikara, standing with clasped hands on a little wooden jetty. Aziz fixes his mind on the job in hand.
    … “Has your usual doctor agreed to my visit, Ghani Sahib?” … Again, a hesitant question is brushed lightly aside. The landowner says, “Oh, she will agree. Now follow me, please.”
    … The bearer is waiting on the jetty. Holding the shikara steady as Aadam Aziz climbs out, bag in hand. And now, at last, Tai speaks directly to my grandfather. Scorn in his face, Tai asks, “Tell me this, Doctor Sahib: have you got in that bag made of dead pigs one of those machines that foreign doctors use to smell with?” Aadam shakes his head, not understanding. Tai’s voice gathers new layers of disgust. “You know, sir, a thing like an elephant’s trunk.” Aziz, seeing what he means, replies: “A stethoscope? Naturally.” Tai pushes the shikara off from the jetty. Spits. Begins to row away. “I knew it,” he says. “You will use such a machine now, instead of your own big nose.”
    My grandfather does not trouble to explain that a stethoscope is more like a pair of ears than a nose. He is stifling his own irritation, the resentful anger of a cast-off child; and besides, there is a patient waiting. Time settles down and concentrates on the importance of the moment.
    The house was opulent but badly lit. Ghani was a widower and the servants clearly took advantage. There were cobwebs in corners and layers of dust on ledges. They walked down a long corridor; one of the doors was ajar and through it Aziz saw a room in a state of violent disorder. This glimpse, connected with a glint of light in Ghani’s dark glasses, suddenly informed Aziz that the landowner was blind. This aggravated his sense of unease: a blind man who claimed to appreciate European paintings? He was, also, impressed, because Ghani hadn’t bumped into anything … they halted outside a thick teak door. Ghani said, “Wait here two moments,” and went into the room behind the door.
    In later years, Doctor Aadam Aziz swore that during those two moments of solitude in the gloomy spidery corridors of the landowner’s mansion he was gripped by an almost uncontrollable desire to turn and run away as fast as his legs would carry him. Unnerved by the enigma of the blind art-lover, his insides filled with tiny scrabbling insects as a result of the insidious venom of Tai’s mutterings, his nostrils itching to the point of convincing him that he had somehow contracted venereal disease, he felt his feet begin slowly, as though encased in boots of lead, to turn; felt blood pounding in his temples; and was seized by so powerful a sensation of standing upon a point of no return that he very nearly wet his German woollen trousers. He began, without knowing it, to blush furiously; and at this point his mother appeared before him, seated on the floor before a low desk, a rash spreading like a blush across her face as she held a turquoise up to the light. His mother’s face had acquired all the scorn of the boatman Tai. “Go, go, run,” she told him in Tai’s voice, “Don’t worry about your poor old mother.” Doctor Aziz found himself stammering, “What a useless son you’ve got, Amma; can’t you see there’s a hole in the middle of me the size of a melon?” His mother smiled a pained smile. “You always were a heartless boy,” she sighed, and then turned into a lizard on the wall of the corridor and stuck her tongue out at him. Doctor Aziz stopped feeling dizzy, became unsure that he’d actually spoken aloud, wondered what he’d meant by that business about the hole, found that his feet were no longer trying to escape, and realized that he was being watched. A woman with the biceps of a wrestler was staring at him, beckoning him to follow her into the room. The state of her sari told him that she was a servant; but she was not servile. “You look green as