Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

(He did not watch “hockey.” For people of his ethnic persuasion and tropical youth, hockey, which in the USA was renamed “field hockey,” was a game played on grass. To play field hockey on ice was, in his opinion, the absurd equivalent of ice-skating on a lawn.)

Mr. Ismail Ismail, or, alternatively, Mr. Smile Smile. He was a brown man in America longing for a brown woman, but he did not see his story in racial terms.

Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.

If the two guiding principles of the universe were paranoia (the belief that the world had meaning, but that meaning was located at a concealed level, which was very possibly hostile to the overt, absurd level, which meant, in brief, you) and entropy (the belief that life was meaningless, that things fell apart and the heat-death of the universe was inevitable), then he was definitely in the paranoid camp.

TO BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.