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the last vestiges of his curry, sat back, and belched’ (YLD, 89), especially appreciates the café
because it allows him access to both worlds—in both of which he excels, but in neither of
which he quite fits—at once. While enjoying the company of his professional and social
companions, he is surrounded by his own young oysters: ‘Spectators on the footpath
outside—Chinese children, Indonesian youths with nowhere to go—stood and watched the
drunken white men eating and drinking on their iron chairs.’ The oysters of Tweedledee’s
poem have clean shoes, which was logical since they had no feet. Koch gives us ‘a man with
no legs, who propelled himself across the floor to us with wooden blocks tied to his hands,
blocks which hissed and shuffled slyly on the tiles at our feet, as we fumbled for our money’
(YLD, 89-90). This image, repeated from Koch’s India of Across the Sea Wall, is followed by
that of a ‘woman dressed in a hood-like head-scarf and a crazy assortment of coloured rags
and tatters, who carried what appeared to be a baby wrapped in a filthy shawl’. This is Koch’s
rendition of the Duchess, who carried a baby which was no baby but only a pig. Sculpting his
image after the Lewis Carroll original, Koch presents the pathos of the situation in a way
which builds for the reader the same walls of emotional protection which must exist for any
real visitor to such a Third World café, writing, ‘It was an old trick; there was nothing inside
the shawl but rags, and we all knew it’. The beggar’s show is as two-dimensional as the
wayang and as dreamlike as Alice’s Wonderland, as ‘she whined and gestured at the bundle
and then at one limp, exposed brown breast with its fantastically elongated nipple.’ The
phantasmagoria ends with journalists gaining some excuse for being able to sit in those iron
chairs by giving the woman money ‘in a hiatus of painful quiet’, all except for Billy ‘who
waved her away with a frozen stare’ (YLD, 90), and sets up the final bizarre episode in the
café.
Two other journalists, Curtis and Sloan, mischievous characters in the Lewis Carroll
tradition of madness, bring in a dwarf off the street and present him as a gift to Hamilton,
provoking what Cookie describes as ‘a childish fear’ in Hamilton, as if ‘the joke would come
true, that he would be saddled with the Indonesian dwarf for ever’ (YLD, 92). In the café
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