A Fatal Inversion Read Online Free

faces. Most probably it had not even been Shiva. In the neighborhood where Adam lived he seldom saw any but white people, so naturally he confused one dark-skinned person with another. Wasn’t it natural, too, that whenever he saw an Indian face he should retrieve Shiva from his memory? It had happened before in shops, in post offices. And it hardly mattered anyway, for Shiva was gone now, gone for another ten years… .
    He humped their hand luggage off the baggage cart, passed Anne her handbag, and had recourse to a therapy he sometimes employed for turning away the rage he felt toward her. This was with a false niceness.
    “Come on,” he said, “we’ve time to get you some perfume in the duty-free.”

3
    EVIL WAS A STUPID WORD . It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, woolly, as applied to “love.” Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural. These thoughts had been inspired in her husband’s mind by a sentence from a review on the cover of a paperback novel Lili Manjusri had bought at the Salzburg airport. “A brooding cloud of evil,” the commentator had written, “hovers over this dark and magnificent saga from the first page to the astonishing dénouement.” Lili had bought it because it was the only work in English she could find at the bookstall.
    Whenever Shiva considered the word, he saw in his mind’s eye a grinning Mephistopheles with small, curly rams’ horns, capering in a frock coat. Events in his own past he never thought of as evil but rather as mistaken, immensely regrettable, brought about by fear and greed. Shiva thought most of the folly of the world was brought about by fear and greed, and to call this evil, as if it were the result of purposeful calculation and deliberate wrongdoing, was to show ignorance of human psychology. It was in this way that he was thinking when, with Lili by his side and their suitcases on a trolley he would abandon at the tube station entrance, he looked up and met the eyes of Adam Verne-Smith.
    Shiva had no doubt it was Adam he saw. To him Europeans did not specially all look alike. Adam and Rufus Fletcher, for instance, though both white, Caucasian, and of more or less Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Norse-Norman ancestry, were very dissimilar in appearance, Adam being slight and white-skinned with a lot of bushy (now receding) dark hair, while Rufus was burly and fair, with curiously sharp-pointed features for so fleshy a man. Shiva had seen Rufus some years before, though he was absolutely certain Rufus had either not seen or not recognized him, while he was equally sure Adam knew perfectly well who he was. He began to smile from exactly the motive Adam had attributed to him, a desire to ingratiate and to defend himself, to turn away wrath. He had been born in England, had never seen India, spoke English as his cradle tongue, and had forgotten all the Hindi he had ever learned but he had all the immigrant’s protective reactions and all his self-consciousness. Indeed, he had more, he thought, since the events at Ecalpemos. Things had gotten worse since then. There had been a gradual slow decline in his fortunes, his fate, his happiness, and his prosperity, or prospect of prosperity.
    Adam glared back at him and looked away. Of course he would not want to know me, Shiva thought.
    Lili asked him what he was looking at.
    “A chap I used to know years ago.” Shiva used words like “chap” now and “pal” and “kiddy,” words used by Indians wanting to sound like true Brits, though he would not have done this once.
    “Do you want to go and say hello to him?”
    “Alas and alack, he doesn’t want to know me. I am a poor Indian. He is not the kind of bloke who wishes to know his colored brethren.”
    “Don’t talk like that,” said Lili.
    Shiva smiled sadly and asked why not, but he knew he was being unfair to Adam as well as to himself.