What chews on bones refuses to pause… its only a matter of time. This is what keeps me going: I hold on to Padma. Padma is what matters Padma muscles, Padmas hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus… who, embarrassed, commands: Enough. Start. Start now.

Yes, it must start with the cable. Telepathy set me apart; telecommunications dragged me down…

Amina Sinai was cutting verrucas out of her feet when the telegram arrived… once upon a time. No, that wont do, theres no getting away from the date: my mother, right ankle on left knee, was scooping corn tissue out of the sole of her foot with a sharp ended nail file on September 9th, 1962. And the time? The time matters, too. Well, then: in the afternoon. No, its important to be more… At the stroke of three oclock, which, even in the north, is the hottest time of day, a bearer brought her an envelope on a silver dish. A few seconds later, far away in New Delhi, Defence Minister Krishna Menon (acting on his own initiative, during Nehrus absence at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers Conference) took the momentous decision to use force if necessary against the Chinese army on the Himalayan frontier. The Chinese must be ejected from the Thag La ridge, Mr Menon said while my mother tore open a telegram. No weakness will be shown. But this decision was a mere trifle when set beside the implications of my mothers cable; because while the eviction operation, code named leghorn, was doomed to fail, and eventually to turn India into that most macabre of theatres, the Theatre of War, the cable was to plunge me secretly but surely towards the crisis which would end with my final eviction from my own inner world. While the Indian XXXIII Corps were acting on instructions passed from Menon to General Thapar, I, too, had been placed in great danger; as if unseen forces had decided that I had also overstepped the boundaries of what I was permitted to do or know or be; as though history had decided to put me firmly in my place. I was left entirely without a say in the matter; my mother read the telegram, burst into tears and said, Children, were going home!… after which, as I began by saying in another context, it was only a matter of time.

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