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imagining Abbajaan’s discomfort in the midst of his moneyed white followers in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.
    “He’d be a Hindoo, like that Mr. Gandhi, right?” The sergeant was speculating again.
    “A Muslim,” Kabir corrected. “Like Mohammed Ali Jinnah.”
    “Oh, I get it, like Elijah Mohammed. A heathen, anyways, for your ma’s white family, right, sir?”
    Kabir acknowledged this, though Mother had converted to Islam immediately upon marriage, whereupon the words “infidel”and “heathen” became applicable to her blood relatives, certainly not his father’s. Yes, it was possible, indeed probable, that Mother’s family saw Abbajaan and himself as heathens.
    Still, it was no business of this stranger.
    “You don’t speak like a Negro, sergeant.”
    “‘Scuse my sayin’, sir, but you don’t either.” A giant guffaw followed.
    Kabir smiled thinly, holding on as the Jeep bucked and slid sideways beneath him. When he was five, Abbajaan had sung a few anti-Raj songs that drew the attention of British authorities. He’d been obliged to flee London, like the Prophet to Medina, and so the family had moved to Paris. The sergeant’s comments were making Kabir glad Abbajaan had chosen Paris over Boston. In Paris, among Abbajaan’s rentier followers, blood distance from royalty, even petty royalty, was the measure of excellence, while skin colour went unnoted.
    “I talk white, like you, sir,” the sergeant confided with pride. “Been working on it a few months now.”
    “You have?”
    The sergeant nodded. “When I got to London, it hit me right away: the enlisted men in the British army talked in their different accents, but their officers talked like they’re all on the BBC. That got me thinking. I started noticing how I talk. Realized that on the telephone, on the radio, even when they couldn’t see me, they could
hear
the colour of my skin. So I figure I’ll just talk different—fool ‘em whenever I want.”
    “Been here a long time, then, sergeant?”
    “A little over a year now. I was with the Red Ball Express, hauling gas and ammo from the depots to forward airfields. Got assigned to the pool afterwards—I’m a natural with machines.”
    The sergeant had supplied
le sang rouge de guerre
—the red blood of war—when the Allied armies sped past their supply lines in late 1944. His endless hours of driving in convoys and each five-gallon jerrican he hauled had saved Allied forces from stalling on their way to the Rhine.
    “How long before you go home?” Kabir asked the question foremost in every serviceman’s mind since Mr. Truman had declared a Day of Prayer throughout America and diplomats were back in split-tailed splendour on both sides of the Atlantic.
    “Don’t mind if I never go back, sir, though I’m a native son. Think I’ll just settle down anywhere there ain’t no Whites Only signs. Not Germany, even though the women are real easy pickin’s here now we’re allowed to fraternize. Many of them have never seen Negro Americans like me. We tell ‘em we’re night fighters and they all doggone believe it! I’d live in Paris, maybe. Negroes do well there—I’ll have a club of my own. Can’t do that in Mississippi without a Colored sign, you know, sir. But then again, maybe you don’t know, seeing as you pass.”
    “Pass?”
    “Pass for white, sir.”
    The Jeep ploughed past a scorched, roofless cottage. A sagged-faced woman shouted after them, pointing to her cart filled with pots, pans and clocks for sale.
    Kabir kept his face impassive and looked away. His aspirations had so far been better served by identifying with Mother’s race than with Abbajaan’s. No reason to admit this to a stranger. And “passing,” as the sergeant called it, only takes one so far: Kabir wasn’t entitled to American citizenship, since Mother had lost hers by marrying an Asian Indian. American laws expressed the wishes of Mother’s family perfectly. An occasional letter arrived