Read Online Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie - Free Book Online Page B

those mist-shrouded zones which Luka’s gaze could not penetrate; and pale, deadly Sickfish, who fed upon the lifelines of the diseased.
    Running along the bank was a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and looking worriedly at a clock. Appearing and disappearing at various points on both banks was a dark blue British police telephone booth, out of which a perplexed-looking man holding a screwdriver would periodically emerge. A group of dwarf bandits could be seen disappearing into a hole in the sky. ‘Time travellers,’ said Nobodaddy in a voice of gentle disgust. ‘They’re everywhere these days.’
    In the middle of the river all sorts of bizarre contraptions – some with bat-like wings that didn’t seem to fly, others with giant metal machineries aboard like the innards of an old Swiss watch – were circling uselessly, to the rage of the men and women aboard them. ‘Time machines are not as easily built as people seem to think,’ Nobodaddy explained. ‘As a result many of those would-be intrepid explorers just get stuck in Time. Also, on account of the odd relationship between Time and Space, the people who do manage to time-jump sometimes space-jump at the same time and end up’ – and here his voice grew darkly disapproving – ‘in places where they simply don’t belong. Over there, for example,’ he said as a raucous DeLorean sports car roared into view from nowhere, ‘is that crazy American professor who can’t seem to stay put in one time, and, I must say, there is an absolute plague of killer robots from the Future being sent to change the Past. Sleeping there under that banyantree’ – he jerked a thumb to indicate which tree he meant – ‘is a certain Hank Morgan of Hartford, Connecticut, who was accidentally transported one day back to King Arthur’s Court, and stayed there until the wizard Merlin put him to sleep for thirteen hundred years. He was supposed to wake up back in his own time, but look at the lazy fellow! He’s still snoring away, and has missed his Slot. Goodness knows how he will get home now.’
    Luka noticed that Nobodaddy was not as transparent as he had been a while earlier, and also that he was sounding and acting more and more like the over-talkative Rashid Khalifa, whose head was always full of all sorts of nonsense. ‘
Time,
’ he was singing under his breath, ‘
like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away …
’ That did it. That was all Luka was prepared to hear. As if it wasn’t bad enough that this, this creature from the Nether World was slowly filling up with more and more of his beloved father, which meant, of course, that Rashid Khalifa, Asleep in his bed at home, was getting emptier and emptier; and that as Nobodaddy’s Rashid-ness increased Luka was confusingly filled with emotions of fondness for him, even of love; but now the strange entity in his father’s vermilion bush shirt and panama hat had actually started singing in Rashid’s unbearable singing voice, the second-worst singing voice in the known world, second only to the fabled tuneless tones of Princess Batcheat of Gup. And what a song to choose! ‘
They fly forgotten, as a dream
–’
    ‘We’re wasting Time,’ Luka interrupted Nobodaddy angrily. ‘Instead of singing that stupid hymn, how about suggesting a way for us to travel up into the Fog of the Past and find whatwe’re here to find … i.e. the Dawn of Time, the Lake of Wisdom, the Mountain of Knowledge, and the –’
    ‘Shh,’ said Bear the dog and Dog the bear together. ‘Don’t say it aloud.’ Luka flushed a deep red at his near-mistake. ‘You know what I mean,’ he finished, much less commandingly than he had intended.
    ‘Hmm,’ said Nobodaddy thoughtfully. ‘Why don’t we use, for example, that incredibly powerful-looking, off-the-road-worthy, river-worthy, strong-as-a-tank, and possibly even jet-propelled, eight-wheeled-slash-flat-bottomed amphibian vehicle moored to that little pier over