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legacy, and they led him into his lifelong involvement with that
arcane science which has so awesome a power for good or ill.
    Shame ? 28
    The household servants were as under-occupied as he; his
mothers had gradually become very lax about such matters as
cleanliness and cuisine. The trio of menservants became, there-
fore, Omar Khayyam's first, willing subjects. Practising with the
aid of a shiny four-anna coin he put them under, discovering with
some pride his talent for the art: effortlessly keeping his voice on a
flat, monotonous plane, he lulled them into trances, learning,
among other things, that the sexual drives which his mothers
appeared to have lost completely since his birth had not been simi-
larly stilled in these men. Entranced, they happily confessed the
secrets of their mutual caresses, and blessed the maternal trinity for
having so altered the circumstances of their lives that their true
desires could be revealed to them. The contented three-way love
of the male servants provided a curious balance for the equal, but
wholly platonic, love of the three sisters for one another. (But
Omar Khayyam continued to grow bitter, despite being sur-
rounded by so many intimacies and affections.)
    Hashmat Bibi also agreed to 'go under'. Omar made her
imagine she was floating on a soft pink cloud. 'You are sinking
deeper,' he intoned as she lay upon her mat, 'and deeper into the
cloud. It is good to be in the cloud; you want to sink lower and
lower.' These experiments had a tragic side-effect. Soon after his
twelfth birthday, his mothers were informed by the three loving
menservants, who stared accusingly at the young master as they
spoke, that Hashmat had apparently willed herself into death; at
the very end she had been heard muttering, '. . . deeper and
deeper into the heart of the rosy cloud.' The old lady, having been
given glimpses of non-being through the mediating powers of the
young hypnotist's voice, had finally relaxed the iron will with
which she had clung to life for what she had claimed was more
than one hundred and twenty years. The three mothers stopped
swinging in their seat and ordered Omar Khayyam to abandon
mesmerism. But by then the world had changed. I must go back a
little way to describe the alteration.
    What was also found in the slowly emptying rooms: a previ-
ously mentioned telescope. With which Omar Khayyam spied out
    Escapes from the Mother Country ? 29
    of upper-storey windows (those on the ground floor being perma-
nently shuttered and barred): the world seen as a bright disc, a
moon for his delight. He watched kite-fights between colourful,
tailed patangs whose strings were black and dipped in glass to make
them razor sharp; he heard the victors' cries - 'Boi-oi-oi! Boi-oi!' -
come towards him on the gritty breeze; once a green and white
kite, its string severed, dropped in through his open window. And
when, shortly before his twelfth birthday, there strolled on to this
ocular moon the incomprehensibly appealing figure of Farah
Zoroaster, at that time no more than fourteen but already pos-
sessed of a body that moved with the physical wisdom of a
woman, then, in that exact moment, he felt his voice break in
his throat, while below his belt other things slid downwards too,
to take their appointed places, somewhat ahead of schedule, in
hitherto-empty sacs. His longing for the outside was immediately
transformed into a dull ache in the groin, a tearing in his loins;
what followed was perhaps inevitable.
    He was not free. His roving freedom-of-the-house was only the
pseudo-liberty of a zoo animal; and his mothers were his loving,
caring keepers. His three mothers: who else implanted in his heart
the conviction of being a sidelined personality, a watcher from the
wings of his own life? He watched them for a dozen years, and,
yes, it must be said, he hated them for their closeness, for the way
they sat with arms entwined on their swinging,