contempt for his own kind, then his own kind can feel nothing but scorn for him. What is he? A fauntleroy, a grand panjandrum? Is this my fate: to lose a son and find a freak?"
"Whatever I am, father dear," Saladin told the older man, "I owe it all to you."
It was their last family chat. All that summer feelings continued to run high, for all Nasreen's attempts at mediation, _you must apologize to your father, darling, poor man is suffering like the devil but his pride won't let him hug you_. Even the ayah Kasturba and the old bearer Vallabh, her husband, attempted to mediate but neither father nor son would bend. "Same material is the problem," Kasturba told Nasreen. "Daddy and sonny, same material, same to same."
When the war with Pakistan began that September Nasreen decided, with a kind of defiance, that she would not cancel her Friday parties, "to show that Hindus--Muslims can love as well as hate," she pointed out. Changez saw a look in her eyes and did not attempt to argue, but set the servants to putting
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