The rainbow is broad, as wide as the sidewalk, and is constructed like a grand staircase. It was about a ten-year-old Bombay boy who one day happens upon a rainbow’s beginning, a place as elusive as any pot-of-gold end zone, and as rich in promises. Maybe he didn’t really find the story, in which case he had succumbed to the lure of fantasy, and this was the last of the many fairy tales he told me or else he did find it, and hugged it to himself as a talisman and a reminder of simpler times, thinking of it as his treasure, not mine-his pot of nostalgic parental gold. Shortly before my father’s death, in 1987, he claimed to have found a copy moldering in an old file, but, despite my pleadings, he never produced it, and nobody else ever laid eyes on the thing. I wrote my first story in Bombay at the age of ten its title was “Over the Rainbow.” It amounted to a dozen or so pages, dutifully typed up by my father’s secretary on flimsy paper, and eventually it was lost somewhere on my family’s mazy journeyings between India, England, and Pakistan.
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