The Holy City Read Online Free PDF Page A

relaxing, under an awning, consuming wine and eating pasta. An average family, complete with two or three children: all of them with perfectly rounded powder-white heads. Like puddings.
    â€” The Balloon Family, I remarked to Vesna.
    But not just ordinary ballons, I explained. Ones which were almost, without exception, utterly featureless — perfectly polished, smooth and dove-white.
    There was a light wind blowing at the time and I remember thinking: I hope that little boy’s head continues to remain upon his shoulders. I would just be afraid it might detach itself and drift away with abandon on the breeze.
    Which it didn’t, fortunately.
    And when I looked again, they were all in exactly the same positions as they had been before. With the mother,who was sporting an orange tan and a blue baseball cap, turning to her husband. I remember being struck: no eyes, no mouth. Moons
en famille.
Aesthetically quite pleasing, though, I have to say, in their uniformity, almost perfectly choreographed as they raised their disc-heads in unison, regarding the screens directly above the Plaza, steadily rotating with an eerie kind of poetry.
    You can imagine how such a spectacle might, initially, have tended to be somewhat discommoding — even startling. No longer, however. In a small way, even, it’s become almost reassuring: as though it reminds one of how far we have come in this newly urbanised country — having at last left behind the quite unnecessary and infuriating self-defeating ingrown complexities that were so much a part of rural life in Cullymore: where, inferring slanders and conspiracies at every turn, faces seemed to alter almost by the second. Where each random gesture seemed freighted with immense significance, every glance a semaphore reflecting the labyrinthine, complex intensity of suppressed passions within.
    Little innocent Cullymore, where everything seemed to twist and turn by the day, and where, at times in your life there, you would have willingly parted with all your earthly possessions for the privilege of being seated beside such a composed and unthreatening assembly. With their milky sphere-heads seemingly emptied of guile, all considerations of conspiracy and subterfuge consummately erased. Gazing whitely at the turning plasmas, which pause at intervals asthough in compliance with the directions of some invisible conductor.
    â€” The Balloon People, I laugh, and Vesna thinks it’s funny too, with heads like Eucharistie hosts!
    As regards our non-national friends who are to be seen now in substantial numbers in Mood Indigo, let me say this. Attitudes towards those who might be described as ‘nonindigenous’ have only softened in this country quite recently. We are much more sophisticated now, it is routinely attested, and will never again be using words such as ‘nigger’ or ‘Baluba’. We have moved on. And surely it is laudable that such is the case. But some time ago, I am afraid, we knew very little, if anything, about such matters. We were, and surely this must be contritely acceded to, laughably unschooled and ill-informed. Perhaps indeed a trifle xenophobic, if the truth be told. This was the nature of the world in which I grew up — whether it appeals to me or whether it doesn’t. And which I hope will provide some explanation, however insufficient, maybe provide some background to the reason I insulted my psychotherapist Meera Pandit and called her unwholesome names.
    Not that Meera was what you’d call proper black — not really. Not ‘full-blown’ black, I mean to say. Not Nigerian, for example — ebony — black and shiny the way that Marcus Otoyo was. Gleaming and polished, in that shiny African way. No, Pandit, you see, was a Hindu, not from anywhere near Nigeria, or anywhere else in Africa for that matter. I think from somewhere out near Bangladesh. As a matter offact, to be fair to old Meera, now that I think