Only when we were aboard S.S. Sabarmati, and anchored off the Rann of Kutch, did I remember old Schaapsteker; and wondered, suddenly, if anyone had told him we were going. I didn't dare to ask, for fear that the answer might be no; so as I thought of the demolition crew getting to work, and pictured the machines of destruction smashing into my father's office and my own blue room, pulling down the servants' spiral iron staircase and the kitchen in which Mary Pereira had stirred her fears into chutneys and pickles, massacring the verandah where my mother had sat with the child in her belly like a stone, I ako had an image of a mighty, swinging ball crashing into the domain of Sharpsticker sahib, and of the old crazy man himself, pale wasted flick-tongued, being exposed there on top of a crumbling house, amid falling towers and red-tiled roof, old Schaapsteker shrivelling ageing dying in the sunlight which he hadn't seen for so many years. But perhaps I'm dramatizing; I may have got all this from an old film called Lost Horizon, in which beautiful women shrivelled and died when they departed from Shangri-La. For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake. We arrived in Karachi on February 9th - and within months, my sister Jamila had been launched on the career which would earn her the names of 'Pakistan's Angel'
