I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stup… - Salman Rushdie

Genius was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her womb. She needed no-one but herself.

time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay’s electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don’t believe me – tied to electricity, it’s usually a few hours wrong. Unless we’re the ones who are wrong . . . no people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on the time.)

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.