Chapter 1

A hen is an egg's way of making another egg.
This was the thought uppermost in the mind of Ramjut Pillay, Asiatic Postman 2nd Class, at the start of the horrific Tuesday morning that altered the course of his life. He tried to have an uppermost thought every morning, for fear of being lulled into intellectual stagnation by the sort of reading his work required of him:

Mrs. WM Truscott
4 Jan Smuts Close,
Morningside,
Trekkersburg,
Natal,
South Africa

Not that most envelopes, being mailed locally, had anything like as much on them, making this example--an air letter from Cincinnati--the workaday equivalent of War and Peace.
Not that there was ever any real need to read further than the first couple of lines anyway, because nothing reached his sorting-frame that hadn't already been set aside for Morningside, but he prided himself on being conscientious.
Ramjut Pillay slipped Mrs. Truscott's air letter through the slot in her front door, sidestepped her dachshund with nimble disdain, and continued on his way. There was nothing today for the Van der Plank family at number 6, and only a few bills and a holiday postcard for the Trenchards at number 8.
He no longer perused postcards; the sheer inanity of their scribbled messages was more than his rather remarkable mind could bear.
"So let us ponder more profoundly and afresh," he murmured, as he opened the gate to 8 Jan Smuts Close, "the devilish cunning shown by the aforesaid egg, and its consequent effect upon the wretched fowl in question. . . ."
Ramjut Pillay invariably used the plural form when addressing himself, being exceedingly conscious of the fact that there was a lot more to him than met the eye--which, admittedly, wasn't much.
Bespectacled, standing five-two-and-a-quarter, slightly bow-legged and as spare as a sparrow's drumstick, he "reliably informed" his pen pals the world over that he was "wholly Gandhi-esque" in appearance, "save for a head of
truly healthy hair." What he didn't tell his pen pals was that people frequently looked right through him, just as though he wasn't there, and that, as a child, his mother had kept losing him on buses, in shops, and at the Hindu temple down Harber Road.
Once, when he was about twelve years old, his father and mother, after a frantic search of the bottom end of town, had found him seated in the midst of the temple elders, under a sacred fig-tree. "Ramjut," his mother had cried out, "don't you know how worried your father and I have been? Just what are you up to, child, with these wise old men?" To which he had replied: "Eating figs."
The front door to 8 Jan Smuts Close opened before he could
slip the mail through its letter-slot.
"I wondered if--" began blowsy Mrs. Trenchard, her green eyes darting to the mail in his right hand.
He knew what she was after. All last week it'd been the same, the constant hope against hope that her son had written to her from army camp. "You keep hearing these stories," she had explained to him, "that they're no sooner given their boots than they're sent to fight in the bush in Namibia." Indeed, her motherly anguish would once again have been pitiful to behold, were Ramjut Pillay paying the slightest attention to it.
Instead, he was slyly stealing a look at seventeen-year-old Suzie Trenchard--he'd delivered her recent birthday cards in their unsealed envelopes--who was languidly descending the staircase, engrossed in a glossy magazine. The white girl's legs were bare all the way up to the frilly-edged panties she wore beneath a shortie nightie. What legs! Broad thighs, smooth knees, calves with a truly...