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Rushd’s name and unwittingly conjured up, before Geronimo’s mind’s eye, the face of Bento Elfenbein quoting Spinoza).
    “I have little truck with Averroism, a deviant school of thought descended from the priapic doctor of Córdoba,” Father Jerry growled, thumping the table with a little of his old fervor. “Even in the Middle Ages it was considered a synonym for atheism. But if the story of Dunia the fertile maybe-genie-with-the-dark-brown-hair is true, if the Córdoban indeed planted his seed in that garden, then we are his bastard brood, the ‘Duniazát’ from which maybe down the centuries emerged our garbled ‘D’Niza,’ and the curse he laid upon us all is our destiny and our doom: the curse of being out of step with God, ahead of our time or behind it, who can say; of being weathercocks, showing how the wind blows, coal mine canaries, perishing to prove the air is poisonous, or lightning rods, through whom the storm strikes first. Of being the chosen people God smashes with his fist to make an example of, whenever he wants to make a point.”
    So I’m being told at this point in my life that it’s okay to be my father’s illegitimate son because we are all a wrong-side-of-the-blanket tribe of bastards, Geronimo Manezes thought, and wondered if this too was part of the old man’s idea of an apology. He found it hard to take the story seriously, or to care about it very much. “If the story is true,” he said, making conversation to be polite, to conceal his lack of interest in this old-time folderol, “we are a little bit of everything, right? Jewslim Christians. Patchwork types.” Father Jerry’s heavy brow furrowed deeply. “Being a little bit of everything was the Bombay way,” he muttered. “But it is out of fashion. The narrow mind replaces the wide skirt. Majority rules and minority, look out. So we become outsiders in our own place, and when trouble comes, and trouble is coming for sure, outsiders have a habit of getting it in the neck before anyone else.”
    “By the way,” Uncle Charles said, “the real reason you never heard the family fairy tale from him is that he didn’t want to admit his Jewish origins. Or maybe his genie origins, because genies don’t exist, do they, and if they do they come from the Devil, am I right? And the reason you didn’t hear it from me is that I forgot it years ago. My sexual orientation provided all the outsiderness I needed.” Father Jerry glared at his brother. “I always thought,” he said furiously, “you should have been beaten harder as a child, to thrash the buggery out of you.” Charles Duniza pointed a noodle-wrapped fork at the priest. “I used to pretend to myself that he was joking when he came out with stuff like this,” he told Geronimo. “Now, I can’t pretend anymore.” Lunch ended in a stiff, bad-tempered silence.
    Chosen people, Geronimo thought. I’ve heard that term before.
    Geronimo Manezes walking his formerly beloved streets realized that something had broken. When he left “Mumbai” a few days later he knew he would not return. He traveled the country with Uncle Charles, looking at buildings. They visited the home built by Le Corbusier in Gujarat for the matriarch of a textile dynasty. The house was cool and airy, protected by brise-soleil structures from the excesses of the sun. But it was the garden that spoke to Geronimo. It seemed to be clawing at the house, snaking its way inside, trying to destroy the barriers that separated exterior space from interior. In the upper regions of the house, flowers and grass successfully surmounted its walls, and the floor became a lawn. He left that place knowing he no longer wanted to be an architect. Uncle Charles went south to Goa but Geronimo Manezes made his way to Kyoto in Japan and sat at the feet of the great horticulturist Ryonosuke Shimura, who taught him that the garden was the outward expression of inner truth, the place where the dreams of our childhoods