Leroy Neiman Casino painting
Leroy Neiman Carnaval Suite Panteras painting
What drew him back into the otherworld, into that undercity whose existence he had so long denied? -- What, or rather who, forced him by the simple fact of its (her) existence, to emerge from that cocoon-den in which he was being -- or so he believed -- restored to his former self, and plunge once more into the perilous (because uncharted) waters of the world and of himself? "I'll be able to fit in the meeting," Jumpy Joshi had told Saladin, "before my karate class." -- Where his star pupil waited: long, rainbow-haired and, Jumpy added, just past her eighteenth birthday. -- Not knowing that Jumpy, too, was suffering some of the same illicit longings, Saladin crossed town to be nearer to Mishal Sufyan.
o o o
He had expected the meeting to be small, envisaging a back room somewhere full of suspicious types looking and talking like clones of Malcolm X (Chamcha could remember finding funny a TV comic's joke -- "
Johannes Vermeer Saint Praxidis painting
about the black man who changed his name to Mr. X and sued the _News of the World_ for libel" -- and provoking a few angry-looking women as well; he had pictured much fist-clenching and righteousness. What he found was a large hall, the Brickhall Friends Meeting House, packed wall-to-wall with every conceivable sort of person -- old, wide women and uniformed schoolchildren, Rastas and restaurant workers, the staff of the small Chinese supermarket in Plassey Street, soberly dressed gents as well as wild boys, whites as well as blacks
Thursday, 6 November 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment