Nodding signboards had scarcely been taken down when the demolition crews of the Narlikar women move

Nodding signboards had scarcely been taken down when the demolition crews of the Narlikar women moved in; Buckingham Villa was enveloped in the tumultuous dust of the dying palaces of William Methwold. Concealed by dust from Warden Road below, we were nevertheless still vulnerable to telephones; and it was the telephone which informed us, in the tremulous voice of my aunt Pia, of the suicide of my beloved uncle Hanif. Deprived of the income he had received from Homi Catrack, my uncle had taken his booming voice and his obsessions with hearts and reality up to the roof of his Marine Drive apartment block; he had stepped out into the evening sea-breeze, frightening the beggars so much (when he fell) that they gave up pretending to be blind and ran away yelling ... in death as in life, Hanif Aziz espoused the cause of truth and put illusion to flight. He was nearly thirty-four years old. Murder breeds death; by killing Homi Catrack, I had killed my uncle, too. It was my fault; and the dying wasn't over yet.
The family gathered at Buckingham Villa: from Agra, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother; from Delhi, my uncle Mustapha, the Civil Servant who had polished the art of agreeing with his superiors to the point at which they had stopped hearing him, which is why he never got promoted; and his half-Irani wife Sonia and their children who had been so thoroughly beaten into insignificance that I can't even remember how many of them there were; and from Pakistan, bitter Alia, and even General Zulfikar and my aunt Emerald, who brought twenty-seven pieces of luggage and two servants, and never stopped looking at their watches and inquiring about the date. Their son Zafar also came. And, to complete the circle, my mother brought Pia to stay in our house, 'at least for the forty-day mourning period, my sister.'
For forty days, we were besieged by the dust; dust creeping under the wet towels we placed around all the windows, dust slyly following in each mourning arrival, dust filtering through the very walls to hang like a shapeless wraith in the air,' dust deadening the sounds of formal ululation and also the deadly sniping of grieving kinsfolk; the remnants of Methwold's Estate settled on my grandmother and goaded her towards a great fury; they irritated the pinched nostrils of Punchinello-faced General Zulfikar and forced him to sneeze on to his chin. In the ghost-haze of the dust it sometimes seemed we could discern the shapes of the past, the mirage of Lila Sabarmati's pulverized pianola or the prison bars at the window of Toxy Catrack's cell; Dubash's nude statuette danced in dust-form through our chambers, and Sonny Ibrahim's bullfight-posters visited us as clouds. The Narlikar women had moved away while bulldozers did their work; we were alone inside the dust-storm, which gave us all the appearance of neglected furniture, as if we were chairs and tables which had been abandoned for decades without covering-sheets; we looked like the ghosts of ourselves. We were a dynasty born out of a nose, the aquiline monster on the face of Aadam Aziz, and the dust, entering our nostrils in our time of grief, broke down our reserve, eroded the barriers which permit families to survive; in the dust storm of the dying palaces things were said and seen and done from which none of us ever recovered.