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paper-thin remnants
of priceless silken carpets were destroyed beyond all possibility of
repair. 'Take that,' he screeched amidst the corpses of his useless,
massacred history, 'take that, old stuff!' - and then burst (dropping
guilty hatchet and clean-sweeping broom) into illogical tears.
    It must be stated that even in those days nobody believed the
boy's stories about the far-flung infinities of the house. 'Only
child,' Hashmat Bibi creaked, 'always always they live in their
poor head.' And the three male servants laughed too: 'Listening to
you, baba, we are thinking this house has grown so huge huge,
there mustn't be room for anywhere else in the world!' And three
mothers, sitting tolerantly in their favourite swingseat, stretched
out patting hands and sealed the matter: 'At least he has a vivid
imagination,' said Munnee-in-the-middle, and Mother Bunny
concurred: 'Comes from his poetic name.' Worried that he might
be sleep-walking, Chhunni-ma detailed a servant to place his
sleeping-mat outside Omar Khayyam's room; but by then he had
placed the more fantasricated zones of 'Nishapur' off-limits
for ever. After he descended upon the cohorts of history like a
wolf (or wolf-child) on the fold, Omar Khayyam Shakil confined
himself to the well-trodden, swept and dusted, used regions
of the house.
    Something - conceivably remorse - led him to his grandfather's
dark-panelled study, a book-lined room which the three sisters
had never entered since the old man's death. Here he discovered
that Mr Shakil's air of great learning had been a sham, just like his
supposed business acumen; because the books all bore the ex libris
plates of a certain Colonel Arthur Greenfield, and many of their
pages were uncut. It was a gentleman's library, bought in toto from
    Escapes from the Mother Country ? 27
    the unknown Colonel, and it had remained unused throughout its
residence in the Shakil household. Now Omar Khayyam fell upon
it with a will.
    Here I must praise his autodidactic gifts. For by the time he left
'Nishapur' he had learned classical Arabic and Persian; also Latin,
French and German; all with the aid of leather-bound dictionaries
and the unused texts of his grandfather's deceptive vanity. In what
books the young fellow immersed himself! Illuminated manu-
scripts of the poetry of Ghalib; volumes of letters written by
Mughal emperors to their sons; the Burton translation of the Alf
laylah wa laylah, and the Travels of Ibn Battuta, and the Qissa or
tales of the legendary adventurer Hatim Tai . . . yes, yes, I see that
I must withdraw (as Farah instructed Omar to withdraw) the mis-
leading image of the mowgli, the junglee boy.
    The continual passage of items from living quarters via dumb-
waiter to pawnshop brought concealed matter to light at regular
intervals. Those outsize chambers stuffed brim-full with the mate-
rial legacy of generations of rapaciously acquisitive forebears were
being slowly emptied, so that by the time Omar Khayyam was ten
and a half there was enough space to move around without
bumping into the furniture at every step. And one day the three
mothers sent a servant into the study to remove from their lives an
exquisitely carved walnut screen on which was portrayed the
mythical circular mountain of Qaf, complete with the thirty birds
playing God thereupon. The flight of the bird-parliament revealed
to Omar Khayyam a little bookcase stuffed with volumes on the
theory and practice of hypnosis: Sanskrit mantras, compendiums
of the lore of the Persian Magi, a leathern copy of the Kalevala of
the Finns, an account of the hypno-exorcisms of Father Gassner of
Klosters and a study of the 'animal magnetism' theory of Franz
Mesmer himself; also (and most usefully) a number of cheaply
printed do-it-yourself manuals. Greedily, Omar Khayyam began
to devour these books, which alone in the library did not bear the
name of the literary Colonel; they were his grandfather's true