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Lazarus was going to look like. The only photograph the papers ever printed had been taken decades earlier. The man in that picture was heavy-set, a raging bull, a Mike Tyson look-alike. A flame-eyed revolutionary. But this man was tall and slender and walked with gentle grace. When she saw that silhouette, long and skinny as a Spielberg alien, walking to freedom with the klieg lights behind it, she knew she was seeing her father, raised from the dead. Emotion leapt up in her; but resurrections don’t happen, they really don’t, and it wasn’t her father. As the glare of the lights stopped flooding the camera lens India understood that she was looking at an allegory of the future, the future her father had not wanted to imagine. Mandela, metamorphosed from firebrand into peacemaker, with wicked Winnie at his side. Morality and immorality, the beatified and the corrupted, walked toward the cameras, hand in hand, and in love.
    In the capital city of the billion-dollar industries of film, television and recorded music Max Ophuls never went to the movies, detested television drama and comedy, owned no sound system, and happily foretold the coming end of these temporary perversions, which, he predicted, would shortly be abandoned by their devotees in favor of the infinitely superior appeal of the immediacy, spontaneity and continuity of live performance, the thrilling power of the physical presence of the performer. In spite of this melancholically purist position the ambassador frequently descended from his ivory tower on the mountaintop road named after the president who died dreaming of a league of united nations, and like the Assyrian in the poem who came down like a wolf on the fold, occupied, under cover of night, the penthouse suite he maintained in one of the city’s best hotels. It was widely held that many ladies with big careers in the despised forms had been entertained there. When they asked him why he refused to see their movies he replied devotedly that he was experiencing the thrilling power of their live performances instead, and nothing they could do on screen could equal what they were doing with such immediacy, spontaneity, continuity and presence right there in the famous hotel.
    On the day before Max’s death the first bad portent manifested itself in the form of a contretemps with an Indian movie star. In the beginning Max had had no idea she even was a film actress, this girl with the skin the color of scorched earth, the well-concealed body and the demure manner of a disciple walking in the footsteps of a great
rishi.
She began following him around the lobby of the great hotel day after day until he demanded to know her business and was told in the low voice of the deep fan, the heart fan, that she had been drawn into his gravitational field just as the planet Venus had been sucked into its orbit around the sun and she asked for nothing better than to be allowed to move around him at a respectful distance for, perhaps, the rest of her life. Her name, Zainab Azam, meant nothing to him, but at his age he had no wish to look so beautiful a gift horse in the mouth. In his suite after their first lovemaking she suddenly spoke with detailed knowledge and boundless admiration about his long-past ambassadorship to India, when he had coined the saying
India is chaos making sense
which was now to be found in all books of quotations and which was used on an almost weekly basis by some Indian public figure or other, always with pride. She told him that he was the Rudyard Kipling of ambassadors, the only one of all the envoys in all the embassies down all the years who had truly understood India, and she was his reward for that understanding. She asked for nothing, refused his gifts, disappeared into an inaccessible dimension of her own for most of every day but always returned, demure and self-effacing as ever until she undressed, after which she was a fire and he her slow but eager fuel. What are you doing with