fortune on her hobby. Even so, that "Achilles Tang" had so utterly captivated her that she put it in her bedroom. Tamkinat had bought it in Singapore—its natural habitat being the Indo-Pacific—and brought it back to Pakistan with the greatest care. Looking now at this "Achilles Tang" as it serenely glided in the aquarium I remember how back then that other fish, barely twelve inches long, had severed the intimacy between Tamkinat and her husband Air Commodore Asad. Tamkinat could not bear to have it out of sight for a minute; Asad, on the other hand, hated all fish. He could tolerate one room in the house set apart as an aquarium; what he could not tolerate was the constant presence of that fish in their bedroom. After a few stiff arguments it was decided that they would sleep in separate bedrooms and meet, whenever separation became too oppressive, in a third room. Tamkinat loved her daughter Iram more than anything else. She would often say: "In olden times the life of a princess would be lodged in the pupil of some parrot's eye or in a pearl in some demon's earring—likewise my own life is lodged in Iram. Perhaps that's why she called Iram "Life." Asad and Tamkinat lived a fast life. Like "jet-setters" they divided their time among such pursuits as cocktails, discos, card games, clubs, swimming, and riding. But Iram had scarcely had a whiff of that life of fun and thrills. It is not that the couple had deliberately kept their daughter apart from the main stream—in fact she went to a convent school, watched Indian movies on the VCR, read Western novels—but she definitely was quite different from the other girls of her social class. God knows how Tamkinat had brought Iram up so that she had lost none of her innocence. I would often envy the girl, whose personality combined a stunning blend of Eastern manners and Western sensibility. Tamkinat had stumbled upon her hobby quite by accident. And the story of that "stumbling" was rather exotic. She had been to Bangkok. There she ran into a learned Pandit who was an accomplished yogi and read horoscopes with prophetic accuracy. Tamkinat had him read her horoscope and teach her some yoga. The matter would have ended there had Tamkinat not had one "nerve" too many. The meeting with the learned Pandit was followed by an intense interest in astrology. She bought piles of books on the subject. Whenever I met her, she would launch into a lecture on the movements of the stars, the zodiac signs, their characteristics, properties, positions, and their evil influences. Once when I met Tamkinat in those days I was mildly surprised to see that she wore a gold chain around her neck. In the middle of the chain were two fish that hugged the curve of her neck. When I asked what that meant, she explained, "It's my sun sign; I had it sent to me from the U.S." A couple of weeeks later when I went to her house, I found not only the two gold fish noosed round her neck, but also innumerable live fish. Her house had turned into a veritable aquarium. Asad complained. He said he was fed up with Tamkinat's extremes. He loved to eat fish, but Tamkinat avoided eating fish as rigidly as a Jama avoids meat. Annual of Urdu Studies, #6 S7