Luka and the Fire of Life - By Salman Rushdie Page 0,3

itself, make it flow the wrong way and make us young again.’

Soraya knew what she was talking about. As Luka grew older, his parents seemed to get younger. When baby Luka sat up straight for the first time, for example, his parents became incapable of sitting still. When he began to crawl, they hopped up and down like excited rabbits. When he walked, they jumped for joy. And when he spoke for the first time, well!, you’d have thought the whole of the legendary Torrent of Words had started gushing out of Rashid’s mouth, and he was never going to stop spouting on about his son’s great achievement.

The Torrent of Words, by the way, thunders down from the Sea of Stories into the Lake of Wisdom, whose waters are illumined by the Dawn of Days, and out of which flows the River of Time. The Lake of Wisdom, as is well known, stands in the shadow of the Mountain of Knowledge at whose summit burns the Fire of Life. This important information regarding the layout – and, in fact, the very existence – of the Magical World was kept hidden for thousands of years, guarded by mysterious, cloaked spoilsports who called themselves the Aalim, or Learned Ones. However, the secret was out now. It had been made available to the general public by Rashid Khalifa in many celebrated tales. So everyone in Kahani was fully aware that there was a World of Magic existing in parallel with our own non-Magic one, and from that Reality came White Magic, Black Magic, dreams, nightmares, stories, lies, dragons, fairies, blue-bearded genies, mechanical mind-reading birds, buried treasure, music, fiction, hope, fear, the gift of eternal life, the angel of death, the angel of love, interruptions, jokes, good ideas, rotten ideas, happy endings, in fact almost everything of any interest at all. The Aalim, whose idea of Knowledge was that it belonged to them and was too precious to be shared with anyone else, probably hated Rashid Khalifa for letting the cat out of the bag.

But it is not yet time to speak – as we will eventually have to speak – of Cats. It is necessary, first of all, to talk about the terrible thing that happened on the beautiful starry night.

Luka grew up left-handed, and it often seemed to him that it was the rest of the world that worked the wrong way around, not him. Doorknobs turned the wrong way, screws insisted on being screwed in clockwise, guitars were strung upside down, and the scripts in which most languages were written ran awkwardly from left to right, except for one, which he bizarrely failed to master. Pottery wheels wheeled perversely, dervishes would have whirled better if they whirled in the opposite direction, and how much finer and more sensible the whole world would be, Luka thought, if the sun rose in the west and set in the east. When he dreamed of life in that Widdershins Dimension, the alternative left-handed Planet Wrongway on which he would be normal instead of unusual, Luka sometimes felt sad. His brother Haroun was right-handed like everyone else, and consequently everything seemed easier for him, which did not seem fair. Soraya told Luka not to be depressed. ‘You are a child of many gifts,’ she said, ‘and maybe you are correct to believe that the left way around is the right way, and that the rest of us are not right, but wrong. Let your hands take you where they will. Just keep them busy, that’s all. Go left by all means but don’t dawdle; do not be left behind.’

After Luka’s curse on the Great Rings of Fire circus worked so spectacularly, Haroun often warned him in a scary voice that his left-handedness might be a sign of dark powers bubbling inside him. ‘Just be careful,’ Haroun said, ‘not to go down the Left-Hand Path.’ The Left-Hand Path was apparently the road to Black Magic, but as Luka didn’t have the faintest idea how to take that Path even if he wanted to, he dismissed his brother’s warning as the kind of thing Haroun sometimes said to tease him, without understanding that Luka did not like to be teased.

Maybe because he dreamed about emigrating to a Left-Handed Dimension, or maybe because his father was a professional storyteller, or maybe because of his brother Haroun’s big adventure, or maybe for no reason at all except that that was the way he was, Luka grew up with a strong