It was but natural that some men would lose their minds after too long an exposure to such desolation and loneliness. In the course of time, therefore, a practice developed of not letting any soldier stay at this post for wo years running so that none had to face the ravages of the storm for more than one hundred and twenty days. It was during one of these quiet spells that the man and woman came across this post hidden in the folds of the hills. The wind had been blowing with savage fury for hree days and had its force not suddenly abated, they would have missed the post altogether and with it the only source of water for miles around. Indeed, they had steeled themselves to travel on during the approaching night when the impenetrable curtain of dust and sand seemed to lift and reveal the fort with its unhappy looking date trees.

The soldiers, who had remained huddled behind closed shutters while the wind blew, had come out into the open as soon as the sky cleared. Sick and dispirited after three days and nights in darkened, airless and fetid-smelling rooms, they were walking about, busy cleaning themselves and drawing in gulps of fresh air. They had to make the most of this brief respite before the wind started again.

Some of the men noticed the two figures and their camel as they topped the rise and moved slowly and hesitantly towards the fort. Both were staggering as they approached. The woman’s clothes, originally black, as those of the man, were grey with dust and sand, lines of caked mud standing out sharply where sweat had soaked into the folds. Even the small mirrors lovingly stitched as decorations into the woman’s dress and the man’s cap seemed faded and lacklustre.

The woman was covered from head to foot in garments but, on drawing closer, her head covering slipped and exposed her face to the watching soldiers. She made an ineffectual gesture to push it up again, but appeared too weary to really care and spent all her remaining energy walking step after step towards the group of men.

When the veil slipped from the woman’s face, most of the soldiers turned their heads away, but those who did not saw that she was hardly more than a child. If her companion’s looks did not, the sight of her red-rimmed swollen eyes, her matted hair and the unearthly expression on her face told the story clearly.

The man motioned the woman to stop and walked up, by himself, to the subedar commanding the fort. He kept a frenzied grip on the barrel of an old and rusty gun that he carried across his shoulders. He had no time to waste over any triviality. ‘Water,’ his hoarse voice said from between cracked and bleeding lips, ‘our water is finished, spare us some water.’ The subedar pointed wordlessly towards a half empty bucket from which the soldiers had been drinking. The man lifted the bucket and drew back towards the woman who was now huddled on the ground.

He cradled her head in the crook of his arm, wet the end of her shawl in the bucket and squeezed some drops of water on to her face. Tenderly, and feeling no shame at so many eyes watching him, he wiped her face with the wet cloth as she lay in his arms. A young soldier snickered but immediately fell silent as the baleful eyes of his commander and his companions turned on him. After he had cleansed her face, the Baluch cupped his right hand and splashed driblets of water on to her lips. As she sensed water, she started sucking his hand and fingers like a small animal. All of a sudden, she lunged towards the bucket, plunged her head into it and drank with long gasping sounds until she choked. The man then patiently pushed her away, drank some of the water himself and carried the bucket up to the camel, which finished whatever was left in a single gulp.

He brought the empty bucket back to the group of soldiers, set it down and stood there, silent and unmoving.

At last the subedar spoke. ‘We have given you water. Do you wish for anything else?’

A struggle seemed to be going on within the man and after a while, very reluctantly, he looked back at the subedar. ‘Yes, I wish for refuge for the two of us. We are Siahpads from Killa Kurd on the run from her people. We have travelled for three days in the storm and any further travel will surely . . .’

‘Refuge,’ interrupted the subedar brusquely, ‘I cannot offer. I know your laws well and neither I nor any man of mine shall come between a man and the law of his tribe.’

He repeated, ‘Refuge we cannot give you.’

The man bit his lips with the pain that roiled within him. He had diminished himself by seeking refuge. He had compromised his honour by offering to live as a hamsaya, in the shadow of another human being. He turned as if to move, but realized that he had no choice but to humble himself further.

He once again faced the subedar. ‘I accept the reply,’ he said. ‘I shall not seek refuge of you. Can I have food and shelter for a few days?’

‘That we shall give you.’ The subedar hastened to atone for his earlier severity. ‘Shelter is yours for the asking. For as long as you wish it, for as long as you want to stay.’

There was a long line of rooms some distance away from the fort. These had been hastily constructed during the First World War when the strength of this fort had, for a short period of time, increased almost a hundredfold. Sand had started collecting against the walls as soon as the construction was raised. Slowly and steadily, it had risen and with no one to clear it, had reached roof level after a few years. With the passage of time, most of the walls and roofs caved in under its crumbling pressure. Now, nearly fifty years after the initial construction, mounds of sand occupied these rooms. However, there till remained a few that had not yet collapsed.

It was in one of these rooms that Gul Bibi and her over were provided their shelter. For a few days, the couple hardly stirred outside their one small room. The nly signs of life were the opening and closing of shutters as the wind died or strengthened or when food was taken to the hut by the soldiers. Some time after the food had een left at the doorstep, the door would open furtively and the platter would be dragged in, to be pushed outside a while later.

As days passed, the couple appeared to gather more courage. They would occasionally leave the door open while the man stepped outside to look after his camel.

Then one day the woman too came out to make a broom out of some thorn shrubs for sweeping the room. After a few days of inactivity, the man, of his own volition, started fetching water for the troops on his camel. He would load up the animal with water skins and visit the springs twice a day. Once he brought to the fort, as a gift, a few baskets, which the girl had woven out of date palm leaves. ‘They are to keep your bread in,’ he explained to the soldiers. And this is the pattern life followed as time rolled by. Days turned to weeks and weeks to months. Winter gave way to summer. Some soldiers left as their period of duty ended. Others arrived to serve their turn at this outpost.

With each change—even the most minor—the couple appeared to withdraw into themselves for a while. They hardly ventured outside, and none of the shutters would open. Then, after some time, they would cautiously emerge and slowly adjust to the change. In this state, they reminded the soldiers of small, frightened desert lizards which rush frantically into their burrows at the slightest sign of danger.

As each party of soldiers left, some would try to leave behind for the couple anything they could spare out of their meagre possessions. A pair of partly worn-out shoes, a mended bed sheet, some aluminium utensils. These they would tie into a parcel and place at the doorstep of the hut before the army truck drove them away, back to the headquarters. Then the soldiers started taking up a collection on every payday and insisted on handing it over to the man for fetching their water. He had refused the money the first time, but as the soldiers appeared to get upset at this rebuff, he forced himself to accept the payment without expressing his gratitude in words. With no discernible expression on his face, he would take the proffered money, stuff it into a pocket of his tattered waistcoat and walk away. Indeed, there were times when his look of infinite patience, aloofness and lack of expression made some new arrivals among the soldiers feel uneasy. But as time passed, each new group would accept him though they failed to breach the barrier he had drawn around himself.

The real change came with the birth of their child.

The soldiers had become accustomed to the same collection of drab buildings with their sullen and frustrated dwellers, each begrudging the days wasted at this bleak outpost and desperately longing for a return to more habitable places, to the sights and sounds of crowded bazaars, the smell of water and vegetation, the feel of clean, freshly laundered clothes and the banter and sally in the shops. But with news of the birth, the air of resentfulness and bitterness, which seemed permanently to envelop this post, appeared to lighten.

To most of the soldiers, there was sheer wonder in the wizened looks of the infant with his black locks of hair, as he was carried around by the mother. The baby’s thin, plaintive cries brought back memories of their own families whom they had not seen for years.

With the birth of their son, the couple too seemed to shed their fears. Indeed, they appeared to be relieved finally of their worries and tensions.

As soon as the season of sandstorms was over, the woman wove an awning out of desert scrub and rigged it over the door to provide protection from the strong sun during the coming summer months. She mixed some clay and water and coated the room, the floor and the door front with it.

She did more than that. She made a low wall about six inches high and enclosed an area the size of two beds in front of their room. She also made a gate into this small courtyard of hers—a gate with two small towers each topped with a small round knob. After completing it, she stood proudly waiting for her man to return in the evening to see her handiwork.

She had to wait for a long time because his camel had wandered away while grazing. When he finally returned, he looked at her work for a long time before speaking.

‘My love, take away the towers, there is something about them I do not like.’

She stood still for a while and then as the meaning sank into her, she rushed frantically towards them and crumbled them back into clay.

Subedar followed subedar as each year ended and a new one began. Indeed, the couple measured the passage of time by the change of subedars. When the sixth one arrived, they realized that the boy was five years old.

A sprightly and active child he was too. Fed on army rations, he looked older than his years. He spent his days inventing games of his own and playing them by himself or skipping from boulder to boulder, following the soldiers on their patrols. By the evening, he was generally tired and would creep into his mother’s lap and sleep for a while before they started the meal.

One evening, when the man returned with water from the springs, the boy was still asleep in his mother’s lap.

She turned as if to get up but the man stopped her with a gesture. ‘Stay for a while, I like looking at you.

There is an air of peace around you.’

‘I wonder what his life shall be when he grows up. What would you like him to be?’ he looked at the woman.

She thought for a while. ‘Let him be a camel herder, handsome and gentle as his father,’ the woman murmured.

‘And fall in love with the sardar’s daughter, his master’s wife,’ the man countered.

‘And carry her away,’ continued the woman.

‘Into misery and sorrow and terror,’ flung back the man.

‘Don’t ever repeat this. You must never talk thus,’ she whispered.

The sleeping boy suddenly opened his dark eyes and said laughingly, ‘I have been listening to you and I shall tell you what I will be. I shall be a chief, I shall have horses and camels. I shall feast your friends and defy your enemies wherever they be.’

Gently the woman pushed the boy away from her lap and started getting the evening meal ready.

One winter morning, while the couple were sitting in front of their hut, a camel rider suddenly appeared and rode his camel straight up to the fort. His arrival was so unexpected that it left them no time to hide. So they remained sitting impassively while the man finished his business and rode away without casting a glance in their direction. Nevertheless, as soon as the stranger rode over the crest, the couple gathered the child, who had been playing in the dust of the courtyard, and moved inside the hut as though its chilly interior suddenly offered more warmth than the sun outside.

A little later, the subedar walked up to the hut and called the man outside. He wasted no time on preliminaries.

‘That rider who has just left the fort was a Siahpad.’ The subedar told him. ‘He was asking questions about you. You know what that means?’

The man nodded dumbly.

‘If you wish to leave,’ continued the subedar, ‘collect some food from the canteen. The men have packed a bag for you. If God wills, we shall meet again one day.’

The couple departed on their camel at early dusk, the man sitting in the middle with the boy perched in front and the woman behind him. Once again the old familiar smell of fear was in his nostrils. The woman had asked no questions. She packed and dressed quickly, first putting warm clothes on both herself and the boy, and then making a light load of the few things which they needed to carry for their journey. The rest of her possessions, those collected over the past years, she neatly arranged in a pile in one corner of the room.

Her man had brought the camel around to the doorstep and made it kneel. He had cleaned his gun and it was back on his shoulders. As she stepped out to mount the camel, she cast a quick backward glance inside the room, her glance briefly touching the firmly packed clay floor, the date palm mats she had woven over the years and the dying embers in the fireplace. Her expression remained as calm and serene as if she had been prepared for this journey for a long time.

The lone camel followed the lightly strung telegraph line for about twenty miles before the man decided to strike eastwards into the broken country.

They tried to use their knowledge and wits to the full. They varied their pace, changed direction frequently and also the time of travel. They never spent more than the very minimum time possible at any waterhole. When they rested, they chose the most secluded spot and even there, they would pile up scrub and thorn brush to hide them and their camel.

They saw no signs of their pursuers and after five days the woman became a little sanguine. ‘Perhaps the stranger was not a Siahpad. Perhaps we were not recognized,’ she

remarked hopefully. ‘Perhaps he kept the news to himself.

Perhaps they did not chase us. Perhaps they have lost us,’ she chanted.

‘No,’ the man said, ‘they are after us. I feel it in the air.’

The man was right. On the morning of the sixth day, as the couple were filling the water skin at a waterhole, they saw their pursuers top the horizon.

It was still early morning when the desert air is unsullied by the eddies of sand and the whirling of dust devils. The party was a considerable distance away but there could be no mistaking who they were. The woman’s husband and her father were riding their camels a short distance in front of the main body of men.

The man called Gul Bibi close to him. He placed his hand on her shoulder and looked into her eyes. ‘There is no escape for any of us. There was never any escape. You know what I have to do now?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I know. We have talked about this day many times. But I am afraid, my love.’

‘Do not be frightened,’ spoke the man. ‘I shall follow you. I shall follow you soon.’ The woman walked away a few paces and stood there with her back towards the man. Suddenly, she spoke out again. ‘Do not kill the boy. They might spare him. I am ready.’ The man shot her in the back while she was still speaking. He then reloaded his gun and looked reflectively at the boy who stared back at him with unblinking eyes. With a shrug the man turned away, walked up to the kneeling camel and shot it dead. He then stood together with the boy waiting for the pursuers to reach him.

The party rode up to the waterhole and dismounted.

The old man was in the lead. He glanced at the sprawled body of his daughter and looked at her lover.

‘Who is the boy?’ he asked. His voice was cold and without emotion. The voice of a stranger. The inky black folds of the headgear hid half his face, but the eyes were the old familiar eyes which each man of the tribe knew. Eyes that could show anger, hatred, love, laughter, fondness and humour more vividly than anyone else. Now they showed nothing.

‘Who is the boy?’ the sardar asked again, his voice remaining flat, not even showing impatience.

‘Your daughter’s son,’ replied the man.

The boy stood shivering as the two men talked about him. He was nervously fingering a small silver amulet which hung around his neck on a grey-coloured string.

The husband of the dead woman approached. ‘Whose son is he?’ he growled. ‘Yours or mine?’ The lover did not reply but his eyes again met those of the old man. ‘He is her son,’ he repeated pointing to the huddled boy. ‘That silver amulet is hers. She must have placed it around his neck before her death. Do you not recognize the amulet? She always said you gave it to her to ward off evil spirits.’

The old man said nothing, but picked up a stone. His companions did likewise. The lover stood still as the first shower of stones hit him. He started bleeding from the wounds on his face and temples. There was another shower of stones and yet another, before he fell.

At first, he lay half sitting and half sprawling. Then he lay with only his elbow supporting him. Finally, that small gesture of pride too failed him and he lay stretched on the ground, his clothes darkened with blood and small rivulets of it running across his back staining the ground. The hail of stones continued with the circle of men moving closer and closer. The agony ended only with death, the bones broken and the head crushed beyond recognition.

After they had killed the lover, the offended husband turned to his companions.

‘Now we start with the boy.’ The boy who had been standing next to the dead camel heard this and started whimpering. ‘No,’ admonished the old man, ‘the boy’s death is not necessary. We shall leave him as we found him.’

Some of the other men murmured their agreement.

‘Yes, let him stay as he is,’ they agreed. ‘The sardar is right.’

The party dragged the bodies a short distance away and entombed them separately in two towers made out of the sun-blackened stones which lay scattered in profusion all around the waterhole. They used mud and water to plaster the towers so that their work might endure and provide testimony, to all who cared, about the way in which the Siahpad avenged insults. The old man took no part in the burial but walked about by himself. He did, however, interrupt his walking for a while and stood at the spot where the bodies had lain.

As soon as the men had finished, they mounted their camels and rode away. After travelling but a short distance, the father of the dead woman suddenly reined in his camel.

‘I should have brought the boy,’ the older man said, shading his eyes with his hand and staring in the direction of the waterhole.

‘Death would be best for the likes of him,’ burst out the son-in-law. ‘The whelp has bad blood in him.’

‘Half of his blood is my blood. The blood of the chiefs of this tribe. What mean you by bad blood?’

‘I still say what I said before,’ answered back the husband. ‘He has bad blood. Nothing good shall come out of him.’

The sardar moved his camel up to the other man’s as the rest watched him. He looked around. ‘Let me tell you all now,’ he shouted. ‘My daughter sinned. She sinned against the laws of God and those of our tribe. But hear this also. There was no sin in her when she was born, nor when she grew up, nor when she was married. She was driven to sin only because I did not marry her to a man.’

He pointed a shaking finger at his son-in-law. ‘You know well enough what I say,’ he thundered, his emotions suddenly bursting out. ‘Marry another woman, marry as often as you like. Every one of them shall be driven to sin, for reasons you are aware of.’ At this insult, shouted in his face before the men of his tribe, the face of the other man darkened with rage.

‘You should not have said such things, old man, even if you be our chief,’ he shouted as he drew his sword quickly and slashed at Gul Bibi’s father. Once, twice, thrice he swiped and the old man was already dead as he slid down in small jerks like a broken doll from the saddle to the ground.

With his death, the party scattered. The men did not wait to bury their chief’s body in a proper grave but left it covered under a thin layer of sand, hoping the approaching sandstorm would bury it deeper. Whether fearful of the evil they had seen or afraid of being involved in another feud, or maybe weary of each other’s company, they just rode away hurriedly.

At the waterhole, the boy had stopped shivering after the party departed. He had overcome his fear and was sitting between the two towers playing with some stones and quartz crystals. At first he had tried to prise some stones away from the towers, but they were too tightly wedged together and his fingers made no impression on them.

As the sun rose higher, he sat quietly watching the clouds of sandgrouse which appeared in the sky. Flight after flight alighted at the edge of the waterhole, dipping their beaks in the water and flying away back into the sun. Their peculiar chuckling calls and the whirring of countless wings provided him some diversion from the horror he had just witnessed.

Then he was completely alone. The thousands of birds, which had kept him company for a while, had disappeared. With nothing to keep him occupied, he became aware of his thirst and hunger. He tried to resist it for a while, but as the pangs grew sharper, he finally walked over to the camel and opened the bag containing food. He ate a little, drank some water and then lay down squeezed against the dead camel as the sandstorm approached.

Back

The odd thing was that the dawah was largely to Muslims who never had the time to attend the prayers even if the mosque was a few minutes’ walk from their front door. He travelled with a group that went first to a mosque in Ghaziabad and from there to a series of other mosques in the little towns around Lucknow, even passing through Tufailganj where Ismat Sharif lived.

Rafiq found some comfort when he heard that Shaista’s brother rarely attended prayers, and that the local imam blamed the misfortunes of the Sharif household on the fact that they had forgotten they were Muslim. Wasn’t it the same with Shabbir Manzil?

Hadn’t they too, in their arrogance, denied their faith and identity and addressed their petitions to the government, to the powers that were made by men and were, therefore, fallible?

In the group with which he travelled Rafiq found a number of people like him, who had only recently realized that they were bound by something deeper. One of them had lost a brother in a riot in Meerut; others claimed that their Muslim names made potential employers wince and look away. It was a bad time for the economy and stupid to be a visible minority of any sort.

After a few unsuccessful attempts to land a middle-level job at a local factory, one of the men, Haris, had recently forged papers which misspelled his name as ‘Harish’. Since his last name was Chaudhary, carrying no religious significance, a little smudge on his birth certificate would make him safely employable. Haris told Rafiq this in confidence, adding that he was sure his application would go through this time. He had paid the requisite bribes to the right people; only his name had been standing in the way. ‘One of the clerks handling my paperwork helped me out. He told me that it didn’t matter if I padded the folder with hundred-rupee bills, his supervisor wouldn’t hire a Muslim. He also told me where documents and certificates could be “manufactured”!’ Haris laughed.

‘Isn’t that wrong?’ Rafiq asked, feeling a little uneasy, as if by listening to this, and being expected to keep it confidential, he was somehow complicit in the forgery.

‘Wrong?’ Haris’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll tell you what is wrong. Having to run from door to door begging, that’s wrong. Destroying your pride is wrong. Having to hang your head before your wife and children is wrong. This is nothing.’

Then, shaking his head Haris said, ‘You know what your problem is, Rafiq? You care too much about what people will say.’ Rafiq looked away, but Haris’s guess was painfully close to the truth.

‘Are you married?’ Haris asked.

‘My wife died a few months ago.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that . . . And children?’

‘I have a son, Jamaal.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s staying at the madrassah in Moazzamabad.’

‘Don’t you want to take care of him?’ Haris asked.

And at that Rafiq looked up, suddenly angry.

Haris laughed lightly. ‘You do, don’t you? Well then all this doesn’t matter too much, does it?’

‘I don’t want to lie,’ Rafiq said lamely.

Haris made an exasperated noise. ‘Listen, you can’t expect the world to comply with your wishes.’

When Rafiq didn’t reply Haris added, ‘There’s a simple trick that will help you get a job at an Islamic school.’

Rafiq didn’t like the word ‘trick’, but he listened.

‘Just be angry,’ Haris said. ‘Rant and rave. Talk about the grand tragedies, about oppression, zulm, riots and murder. Grow your beard a little longer and miss no opportunity to raise your voice against the suffering of Muslims. It’s what the mullahs do all the time.’

Rafiq nodded reluctantly.

Haris threw up his hands. ‘You’re an intelligent man, and you’ll do a good job teaching, what does it matter if you have to scare the people interviewing you a little to get the job. If they ask about some vague point of law, tell them—“The police shoot Muslims every other day, and this is what you are worried about?”’

‘It’s not as if it is untrue,’ Rafiq mumbled.

Haris laughed softly. ‘As long as they haven’t shot us.’

At the next interview, in a little school newly established at Hamirpur, fifteen kilometres from Moazzamabad, Rafiq kept his face stern. His beard had grown, filling the hollows of his face. He knew snatches of Islamic doctrine now, and when they quizzed him about it, he answered the questions readily enough at first, and then, taking a deep breath, he said, ‘You know my credentials. I have taught at a much better place than this. I even sacrificed part of my salary when they were conducting vasectomies during the Emergency on poor Muslims. I have proved myself as both a teacher and a Muslim, what exactly is it that you are trying to determine?’

It caught them up short, the blunt words maybe, or the fierceness of the tone. There was a mumbled conversation among the three men who were sitting across the table.

After a while the eldest of them said, ‘My apologies, Ansari sahib, but we are leaving you in charge of our children, after all. We shall let you know by the end of the week.’

‘Thank you,’ Rafiq said. He kept his face stiff, unwilling to betray the tension he felt inside. There was still some money left in his savings, but not for much longer, and he cursed Haris for the bad advice. There was no need to pretend to be so hard, but now that he’d spoken as he had, there was nothing to be done about it. ‘As salaam aleikum,’ he said as he left.

Two days later he was informed that he had got the job. Rafiq knew better than to celebrate. He went to the mosque, and after thanking the imam for his help, immediately, and very publicly, offered prayers in thanks.

He was in the hands of God now.

It was a disguise that grew on him. Very much like the time when he had confronted Ahmad Saeed, Rafiq realized that the anger he expressed, even if he believed none of it, gave him a sort of power. Now that he had lost access to Shabbir Manzil, he found that he liked to sit among the serious people at the mosque after the prayers and discuss the trials and tribulations of Muslims.

And just as a memory for Urdu poetry had carved out a place for him at Shabbir Manzil, his ear for a finely turned phrase made him a voice to listen to when people talked of riots and revolution. It was funny, though, how much he had to thank Haris for, because it wasn’t just in job interviews that well-articulated anger gave you some space. He spoke rarely, but just once in a while he would trail out some pithy argument, said in controlled rage, about the state of Muslims, in India, in all the world. It gained him the kind of respect that none of his social climbing had.

As for young Jamaal, even after his father found employment, he spent much of his free time at the mosque, either being taught his Arabic and Urdu by the imam or playing with the other children, and it was there that he first heard the name his father had earned. Rafiq was completing the non-obligatory prayers one day and Jamaal was waiting for him, watching a group of prosperous looking gentlemen, as they stood chatting. One of them turned his head and noticed the child staring at them.

‘Hello, young man,’ he said, his long mane bobbing.

Although Jamaal found the person vaguely familiar, he was too shy to speak. He was only eight years old, and the three years after his mother’s death had taught him only the value of silence.

‘Hello,’ the person repeated. His mane reminded Jamaal of the picture of a lion he had stuck on his pencil box, and imagining this strange man as a scrawny, undersized lion, standing on two legs and with no tail to speak of, Jamaal had to hide a smile.

‘Ah, so the little one laughs,’ the strange man said, and Jamaal was about to ask him about the vastness of his hair, and where his tail had gone, when one of the other men turned to see what was happening. And maybe he was the real lion, because the long-maned man’s smile narrowed until it was hardly even there. But Jamaal wasn’t afraid. There was something very familiar about the larger man; Jamaal could not see this new man’s hands, but he felt he knew what they looked like and how they felt.

‘So, Khan sahib, you’ve spotted one of the next generation of poets?’ the larger man said, and he might have had a hint of a smile on his face because now the long-haired man let his smile reappear. Then the larger man looked beyond Jamaal and his features, relaxed and generous till now, tightened swiftly with revulsion. ‘Here comes that mullah, Rafiq.’

And with those words the little knot of men wound down their conversation and moved towards the exit of the mosque. Jamaal turned to see who they were referring to and saw his father coming their way. He wanted to call the men back to say that they had it wrong. Yes, the man approaching them was called Rafiq, but he was not a mullah, he was a teacher at the small school in Hamirpur. But they fled so quickly that he had no time to say anything, and when his father came and rested a hand on his shoulder, there was no need to say anything. Father and son, neither was much for words.

Afterwards, when he was at home, Jamaal took out his blue plastic pencil box and looked again at the lion stuck on it, and realized that none of the men had actually looked like lions. In the picture, little as it was, the great cat stood upright and unafraid, its head raised in challenge. It seemed like the master of all it surveyed, not one who would scuttle away from any man, mullah or not.

Only later did Jamaal find out that the large man was his uncle, Ahmad Saeed Shabbir, the cousin of his dead mother. But that was all he found out. The only time he saw the older man was at Friday prayers, standing far in front among the rows of prestige just behind the imam. Jamaal stood with the children, far to the back so their whispering, pinching and other games wouldn’t disturb the elders in their prayer. His father stood somewhere in between, ahead of the unmarried men, but far behind the prestigious first few rows, and it seemed that Rafiq was glad, and would have stood even further back, among the children, so that he could be close to his son. But such display of affection was considered unseemly in men, and Rafiq would only come to Jamaal after the prayers, rest his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and they would make the trip to the cemetery to pray at Jamaal’s mother’s grave.

There is more to being a mullah than prayer. It took a while for Jamaal to understand the difference, although he had always known instinctively that there was one. People called the imam ‘Maulana sahib’ in deference to the obvious markers of his faith, but they would never have referred to him as a mullah. It would have been an insult of sorts. Maulana Jalali Qayoom was the imam of one of the oldest mosques in the city; he had social standing, prestige. He was no mere mullah.

When Jamaal understood that, he understood much, or as much as the mind of a boy who spent most of his time listening and little talking, and who was approaching his teenage years, could understand. This was about power, about honour, and ultimately about wealth.

Later, he would learn more. That it wasn’t money that distinguished the imam and made him more than a mullah. No, he had little enough, but still he had enough, and if he needed more it would have been provided. It isn’t necessary to add that it would have been the wealthy families that would have provided, because who else had the means? They would have provided because the imam was necessary, the mosque was necessary, an order was necessary on top of which the rich and powerful could find their place.

In the end what is the point of power if people don’t admire you for it? What is the use of wealth if others don’t envy you for it? You can’t eat gold, but you can live off your pride. For that you need a community composed of both the rich and those who desire to be rich. You need a guardian of morality who whispers the requests of the needy into the ears of the wealthy so that they can be generous, all in the name of God’s grace.

Mullahs, though, were a different breed. They had no mosque, just a message. Their piety had a smell, like the sweat of those who can afford soap but not perfume. It was an offence to the well-cultivated sensibilities of the rich, making their nostrils curl in disgust. Worst of all, the mullahs didn’t listen, and they certainly didn’t whisper. A mullah had the Word of God, and didn’t care to murmur it gently, nor did he care to have its nuances explained to him, especially the parts that excused the important folk from the petty obligations of prayer and other such minor details.

Still, what did it matter? Without a mosque, without the favour of the wealthy, a mullah was a mere man, even if his voice was more insistent than that of most.

That Jamaal understood all this instinctively was not only because he had spent all his life listening. The more important reason was that he was powerless, a cipher in the system that cared little for mullahs, or their sons. Nothing teaches a person the rules of power better than being excluded from it, and Jamaal knew all about that. And he learned about it at the same place as his father had: St Jude’s.

Jamaal gained admission in the sixth standard at St Jude’s, the excitement of it making his eleven-year-old body tremble with joy. But it was short-lived, for it was here that he learned soon enough what it meant to be poor. The school had originally been set up by German missionaries in 1904 as Wolfsson School, but was taken over by the government during the First World War. It had finally ended up in the hands of the Gill family, of fine old Sikh ancestry, who were gifted a large plot of land in the region for their loyalty to the British Empire. No better fate could have befallen the school. The Gills were rich enough to ignore the profits from it, little as they were, and old Harinder Gill, the patriarch of the family, had himself been one of the first students of St Jude’s. A committed Anglophile, he made sure that St Jude’s had all that it needed for a thorough, if Spartan, education emphasizing the values of an English public school.

Whether out of his anglicized sense of fair play—and his anglicized ways had found their first expression in the change of the school’s name—or just because he didn’t need to favour the children of the rich, Harinder Gill instituted entrance exams for the school, and based the fee structure on the income of the parents of the students who made it through the exams. This meant that middle-class parents who dreamed of sending their children to St Jude’s could now actually afford to. This legacy was what Rafiq had benefitted from, and now Jamaal.

But privilege, or the lack of it, will show. Although the entrance exam was open to all and even a mullah could send his son to St Jude’s, the hurdles of wealth were not just in the income of the rich, but in the attitude of their children as well. Within the confines of the school the politics of wealth was indulged in as viciously by the children as their parents played it outside. But maybe that is how things were meant to be. The children were training for their adult lives and if they didn’t learn how to recognize who mattered and who didn’t, what good would their education be?

But it was a stiff-upper-lip school, and the teachers ever vigilant, and the rules of the game needed to be as subtle. The first rule was to do with wealth, of course, and how to flaunt it. Since everybody was forced to wear the school uniform, it was the accessories that counted: the shoes and the stationery. To own a cheap plastic pencil box, as Jamaal did, marked one out as somebody to be avoided. The stickers that Jamaal had covered the plastic with made it worse for him. You could easily see that the stickers were of the cheapest quality, and even those were old, their condition as threadbare as Jamaal’s chances of social acceptability.

The game of exclusion and mockery was usually played out most successfully in the gym class. The well-fed children of the rich glowed healthily next to their scrawny, pigeon chested rivals. Even if physique was a gift of genetics rather than of wealth, the quality of running shoes clearly divided those who walked on air from those whose heels barely rose above the dirt of their existence.

Jamaal wore canvas sneakers of the cheap variety that lasted barely one season, with rubber soles so thin that pebbles would punch their way through them if Jamaal ran too hard. But why would he run swiftly anyway? There was no prize awaiting him at the finish line. Being a winner requires more than just being first in a race: a victory is never quite that unless there are people who will acknowledge your triumph. It was the reason Jamaal never stood first in any of his exams. He had never excelled at anything enough to attract attention.

Except once. It had happened right at the beginning, before he learned how to behave.

Jamaal had been taught by Rafiq to do well, and Rafiq was a good teacher at least, a man who valued his students’ achievements. Jamaal’s early education had been studded with gifts and encouragement. Nothing too expensive, just a sticker here, a candy there, and often enough only a dazzling smile from a silent but proud father. At school it was different. In his first social sciences test Jamaal had answered every question correctly, even getting an extra point for a bonus question, earning a score of 21 out of 20 points. His father had been delighted and just before the maghrib prayers he had taken Jamaal to the local stationery shop and bought him his first fountain pen. The boy had spent all evening playing with the pen, filling it with ink, squirting it out, practising his signature endlessly, even attempting the temerity to write his father’s name.

The pen didn’t go unnoticed at school. Every little change was noticed, and anyway it wasn’t as if Jamaal hid it. He wrote with a flourish, each move of his hand making the gold of the pen glitter. The next day was gym class, and three of the boys stayed afterwards to talk to Jamaal. They were openly admiring of his skills in social sciences, and Jamaal was happy to brag. He didn’t notice that Arun was not there. He should have. Arun was the one who usually came first in class, and these three, Amit, Saurav and Rahul, were his closest friends.

There was a moment when Jamaal felt something odd. Rahul had been praising him to the skies, and said, ‘You could be part of our study group. You could lead us.’

A sudden silence descended on the group. Although Rahul had proposed the idea, it had lost steam even before he finished saying it, the last words coming out less as a statement than as a question already gone wrong.

Amit added, reluctantly, ‘We meet on Saturday mornings at Ruby’s.’

Jamaal knew the name of the restaurant. It was the most fashionable restaurant in Moazzamabad. Actually, it was the only one; all the rest were glorified dhabas or other greasy eateries. Jamaal had never been there, of course. But he had stared curiously at the rich people of the city walking within its portals. He had no idea what it cost to eat there. He had never thought about it. What was the use, when he knew that he could never afford it? And how did one behave inside a place like Ruby’s? How did one sit, what did one ask for and how? There were, Jamaal knew, a hundred different ways to fail in a place like that.

‘Saturday morning?’ he asked falteringly.

The others nodded slowly, unsure, and that gave Jamaal time to think up an excuse. ‘My Urdu lessons—I go to the mosque for my Urdu lessons on Saturday,’ he blurted.

And at that they all smiled, suddenly liberated. For no reason Jamaal started laughing, and the others joined in. He was so relieved that his classmates had turned out so much more welcoming than the children in Rasoolpur.

Even when he got back to his class Jamaal didn’t notice anything odd, except that Amit, Saurav and Rahul immediately left his side and made their way to where Arun was sitting, smiling contentedly to himself. And then school was over, gym class being the last session for the day.

It was only when he reached home and took out his books to do his homework that Jamaal found out what had happened. When he opened the fountain pen, ink splashed out of the cap all over his shirt and trousers. He leapt to his feet, trying to save his notebook. His clothes could be washed, but not the paper. Luckily he had sat on the floor instead of his bed, and he ran to get a cloth to mop up the ink. He filled a bucket of water, and soaking the cloth, he carefully cleaned the mess, and then, sprinkling some washing powder on the floor, he scrubbed the tiles until the stains were almost gone, leaving only a slight darkness in the cracks. When he turned his attention to the pen, he found that there was no nib. It had been snapped off, as if somebody had taken the pen and smashed it, nib first, into the ground with as much force as he could muster. It was destroyed beyond any hope of recovery, and when he realized that Jamaal started to cry.

He couldn’t tell his father—what could his father do? He himself owned only one fountain pen, an old one. He couldn’t afford to buy Jamaal another one, especially if even that one would be broken by the boys in school. And if Jamaal complained, what would he say? What proof did he have? Just that Amit and Saurav and Rahul had praised him, that they had talked to him like a friend, an equal? And even if the teachers believed him, would that make him safer, could he ever afford to bring the fruit of his achievements, the proof of his father’s pride, to school, knowing that someone would find a way to destroy it? A gift was no use if you lived forever in fear of what might happen to it.

So Jamaal learned that there was a price to success, and the price wasn’t simply hard work. He also realized that he wasn’t a fighter, that he didn’t have the courage to confront his tormentors. He could only bend before them, not challenge them in any way. He understood then why his father never protested about being called a mullah behind his back. He understood who his father was, and also that he was his father’s son, a mullah’s son, and a coward. He lay down on the cool ground, curled his body around the broken pen and wept.

Back

But she thought about my question and she answered, not that night, or the night after, but later. ‘When you look at my life,’ she taught me, ‘Don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother, and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road. If my mother talks to a man who isn’t her son, brother or cousin, she will hear the sound of my father’s hand across her face, feel his fists against her breasts. But you’ve seen me with men? If I don’t want to talk I say “get lost oye!” And they do. And If I want a gift or feel like non-veg I just have to tell them and they give me what I want, no questions. They thank me. Every life has its benefits. I make money and money gives me something my mother never had; will never have. Azaadi. Freedom. And if I have to dance for men so I can have it, okay then, I will dance for men.’

And so six years later Leela chose azaadi, and she chose also to curtail it, by defining the parameters of her life as the area from her flat to Night Lovers, a place whose rhythm and cadences she lived life by. Anything outside these self-imposed boundaries, even if it was an adjoining suburb, she referred firmly to as Bombay, as though Bombay was elsewhere and distantly so. Bombay was also ‘bahar gaon’, out of the village, abroad. ‘I’m going abroad,’ she would tell me and I would gently rib her saying, would you like a lift to the airport? ‘I’m going abroad’ she would say to me, and in her occasional wistfulness she revealed her hidden yearning. Leela knew what it meant to go abroad, and for all her talk of freedom, she didn’t always believe she enjoyed it.

Leela reached Night Lovers before the other dancers because she wanted to help Shetty. But she was also determined to make her presence felt. Maar-peet or nakabandi, gangvar or encounters—he would always be around. ‘God willing,’ so would she. To show she wasn’t one of them she referred to Shetty not as seth, boss, as they did, but PS. She snitched on those who poked fun of his ‘pregnant’ belly or his ‘outing problem’.

Leela explained this ‘outing problem’ to me: ‘He pushes and pushes and pushes,’ she whispered, concern writhing on her face. ‘But nothing comes out! So what can he do poor durrling? Of course he has to put his fingers in! Take it out himself! But it’s so stubborn, it takes so long, once he’s done he just runs out, no flush, nothing. I’ve told him a hundred times, “how can you greet kustomers with that hand? Run it over my face even? And don’t you slap my buttocks!”’ ‘I want to take him to medical,’ said Leela. ‘But if his outing problem stops his wife will wonder how and why, and then she will find out about me.’

How would she know? I asked curiously.

‘Sometimes,’ Leela reddened. ‘He soils his pants. If we fix him, he says, his Mrs. won’t have any pants to clean.’

About an hour after Leela arrived, around 3 p.m. that is, Shetty

ould send off a fleet of auto-rickshaws to pick up his heera- moti’s, jewels—the bar dancers so competent their dancing paid for his ‘electric-paani’.

If one of them phoned to whine about her bruised knee or aching back, he would cajole and calm her, and immediately send to her the spotless white van he kept on standby. Inside, the dancer would find a box of her favourite mithai, a bouquet of flowers, and more often than not, attached to a stem with the tender fragility of a love letter, a rolled up five hundred rupee note.

‘My chokris are high maintenance,’ boasted Shetty.

‘Some are quite fair-skinned,’ he said, as though in explanation. ‘Not fair like a heroine! But more fair than kustomers. And they have to be kept happy. If I don’t treat them well, they will run off. And if I lose my best girls, I will lose my biggest collections. So any time one of them does nautanki, I throw notes at her. No worries then! Why no worries then? Because money is music. Yes or no? Yes! One note, two note, three note, four note . . . and they dance like it’s a sone ki barsaat!’ A rainfall of gold.

The bar dancers arrived in groups of three, even five, for they shared auto-rickshaws and taxis, and with them came the fragrance of Jovan Musk and Revlon Charlie, and if they had recently been sent to Dubai or had lovers who’d been there, of Armani and Versace, and because they were freshly bathed their hair was wet, combed through and tightly pulled back, and perhaps their skin glowed beneath all that makeup. The chiffon of their saris and the sequins of their lehenga cholis created a dazzling, blinding effect and when they stood before the altar it appeared as though they had gathered not in prayer, but in celebration.

The altar wasn’t easy to spot, but it was there, above the cash register. It held a gold-plated statue of Lakshmi, a string of chillies and lemons to protect against evil, and a diamond-studded statue of Ganesh. As the bar dancers prayed, Shetty sang a short hymn. Then sniffing hungrily at the incense he said, ‘Bhagwan ka naam lo aur kaam shuru karo!’ Take God’s name and start work.

Once in a while Shetty would clap his hands and in loud imitation of the ringmaster of Gemini circus—which he visited every time it came to town—command, ‘now brothers and sisters, kahin mat jaiye, seat pe rahiye, kyunki aap dekhnewale hain . . . .’ Don’t go anywhere, stay in your seats, because you are about to see . . . In the time I knew him, he never once completed this sentence.

I asked if it was because he’d forgotten what came next.

‘Of course not!’ Shetty exclaimed, taken aback. ‘But suspense is good, yes or no? These girls of mine never go anywhere. What Gemini-Shemini, most of them don’t know what a joker is! So the suspense factor is important. It can be useful. Say one night one of my girls decides she wants to leave for another dance bar, say the manager there has promised her a bigger cut of her collection. But as she’s leaving she may think, “arre, but what were we going to see?” Who knows, maybe this curiosity, the superstition that she doesn’t know what she was meant to see, will encourage her to apply the brakes. Maybe it will keep her close to me.’

‘Do you watch thriller films?’ Shetty asked, noticing I was unimpressed. ‘You never know the truth until the end, am I right? Right! And a gambler? Does he know whether he’s going to win or lose? Does he? But he still picks up the cards! My girls are gamblers, it’s the nature of their job, understand that. They gamble with their health, their safety, their good name. All I’m doing, really, is offering them something worth gambling on for.’

Shetty treated his bar dancers like children—He teased, humoured, and manipulated them. If he yelled at them one day, on the next he would bestow on them great affection. And although he had a fierce temper, they rarely saw it—he had beaten one of his dancers in public, only once. He conveyed disapproval with a smile on his face, so they were never sure whether he was being serious or silly. To be safe, they assumed muscle in his voice, and almost always did exactly as told.

Of course, Shetty’s successful management of Night Lovers hinged on more than his relationship with his bar dancers. They were, in fact, the least of his concerns. How he dealt with the police, the local bureaucracy—the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC), and with the criminals who came calling for their cut of his profits, was crucial to his survival.

Shetty didn’t just pay hafta, he ran favours, wrote off tabs, even offered women if the women consented and they always did because it was expected of them.

Shetty used the term ‘politics’ to explain why he paid hafta. It connoted a sly corruption, but one he was compelled to feed for his survival. ‘It’s police-log ka politics,’ he said to me, ‘bureaucrocy ka politics.’

The police say that not all of them take hafta, and they’re right. They argue that only those who break the law feel compelled to pay hafta. They’re wrong. Hafta is like salary—you fork over a mutually acceptable amount every month, negotiate a raise every year, and in return receive a service. It was a culture upheld in the police station itself, where some senior inspectors demanded hafta from their subordinates. This in turn led their subordinates to demand hafta from the people who lived on, and off the street.

Bar owners who resisted payment, which could vary from five thousand rupees to a crore of rupees every month, depending on their income, suffered immediate consequences.

Laws like the Bombay Police Act and the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, which clamped down on sex work, were most often used against dance bars. They were nebulous because they dealt with the arguably indefinable subject of morality. They could be applied to whomever the police saw fit. If they chose to, the police could arrest Shetty for obscenity—by deeming even a fully clothed girl obscene—and have his licenses revoked. He would then, once more, have to pay a string of BMC officials large bribes. Back in business if he still refused to pay the police, the situation would merely repeat itself.

So Shetty paid hafta, and he also paid a builder to construct a concealed room at the back of Night Lovers. This was how he received the service he paid for: When the police were compelled to conduct a raid, which could end in the arrest of members of Shetty’s staff, who then would be liable for release only after paying bail, one of them would forewarn Shetty via code—often a predetermined, humorous text message about wives and girlfriends. When Shetty received the text he would either send his bar dancers home, or, if he didn’t want to lose money, thirty minutes before the time designated for the raid, hustle all but a couple of them into the secret room. When the police arrived they would find the lights on, the music low, and a few ‘waiters’ serving snacks. They would find it hard to concoct charges for arrest.

‘See how I protect my kustomers,’ Shetty said self-righteously. ‘If I didn’t pay the police they would snatch up not only my girls, but my kustomers. Give them slappings; threaten to tell their wives, shove them in lock-up.’

Sometimes the police were customers. When a policeman entered a dance bar, he might declare, ‘This is my area.’ This was how he would tell a man like Shetty, if Shetty didn’t already know, that he was from the local police station and could make a nuisance of himself. So there was no question of giving him a bill. He was offered cigarettes and whisky, kebabs and paan, even stacks of ten rupee notes to throw on the bar dancers.

Or if the local police station required a new set of furniture—chairs, tables, lights, you name it—the senior inspector might send his men over to Shetty’s to ‘borrow’ whatever it was they wanted. It went without saying that the ‘borrowed’ items were never returned.

Shetty preferred the police to the BMC—less red tape. But he had a soft spot for another band of extortionists—the criminal gangs of the so-called ‘underworld’ he had to pay to leave him alone.

The relationship between dance bars and gangs went a way back. It was generally accepted that organised crime in Bombay developed from the needs of Prohibition. When Prohibition was relaxed in the 1960s and ‘permit rooms’ as they were called, for a permit was required to buy and drink liquor, became popular, the owners of these ‘permit rooms’ began to face demands from the gangs that had prospered and grew powerful from bootlegging. If they didn’t pay up they were physically attacked; their customers were harassed.

When permit rooms converted into dance bars and proved a success, the demands of the gangs grew. They wanted not only more money, but to own the dance bars either in part or full. Their involvement, as with all the businesses they were connected with, brought greater political scrutiny to the dance bars, leading to higher licensing fees, and from the police and BMC, demands for more hafta.

Shetty, who had inherited his father’s Udupi restaurant, described himself as a self-made man. He had, after all, turned the restaurant into a profitable and very popular dance bar. He was impressed by gangsters, he said, because they too were selfmade. Their bold subversiveness was so extremely masculine, it represented to him the freedom ideal. Even small-time gangsters, the only kind of gangsters Shetty would ever meet, really, carried arms and delivered threats. When they came by Night Lovers to pick up their ‘fee’ he treated them like favoured customers. Although he paid them twenty thousand rupees a month, much more on Diwali and the New Year, he liked to add a ‘tip’ to the envelope he handed over. He gave them drinks on the house. He took them to the makeup room to meet his prettiest bar dancers. he’d hang around them like an enthusiastic teenager hoping to pick up gossip about ‘celebrity’ gangsters—Dawood, Abu Salem,

Chhota Shakeel.

You should ask Dawood for a job, I once joked, having just watched him escort a couple of thuggish-looking, gold-wearing, concealed pistol-toting men, to the door.

Shetty’s eyes lit up, and then, as quickly, dimmed. ‘But I’m a family man,’ he sighed.

* * *

Night Lovers began to fill up from about 7 p.m., at the end of most potential customers’ work day. Although their persuasions varied, the clerks and career alcoholics, tradesmen and twenty something’s who walked in were of modest status, expectations and income. They knew to go only where welcome. In a dance bar, their money could buy the attention of a beautiful woman. And unlike a high-end South Bombay night club, it was democratic. There was no entry fee, no sartorial standard, no pressure.

Still, it set expectations of its customers and from them.

I guess it had what some might call glamour. The women were responsible for this, of course, but so too was the decor, which brought to mind a set from a 1970s item number, resplendent with kitsch and glitz. Night Lovers had golden pillars, and out of each jutted a Medusian head. One wall was of glass, the table legs were disco balls, and opposite the altar was a full length painting of a naked woman, her modesty protected only by the length and lushness of her blue and pink hair. Although Shetty’s style was to me unique, in the context of the dance bar it fulfilled expectations. Night Lovers was designed to enhance its disconnect with the world outside its doors—the real world that is.

Leela danced alongside about twenty other girls on a slightly elevated stage in the middle of the bar. For the first few hours she was enthusiastic for she was drunk and had dragged on an accommodating waiter’s joint. She feigned pleasure, winking naughtily at the customers before her, pouting at their reflections in the mirrored wall behind her. And she was careful not to miss a single step of the dance routines she practised so diligently at home. That was what she was tipped for after all—to appear like an item number, to prove herself no less than a Bollywood star, a star like Aishwarya, Sushmita, Priyanka.

Do what you want, Shetty instructed his girls, but give kustomer-sahib ‘paisa vasool.’ Value for money.

Leela wasn’t allowed to speak with customers during her performance and she rarely did. In fact, she noticed only those who threw money on her, as was the custom, or asked the steward standing by for this purpose to place a garland of hundred or five hundred rupee notes around her neck. If she was feeling wicked, she would accept the money and staring deep into customer’s eyes silently mouth: ‘Is this all you think I’m worth?’ She would rub her eyes and pouting, murmur ‘Hai! Kyun na mein sweecide karoon? Kyun na main apna sar ohven mein daloon?’

Why shouldn’t I commit suicide? Why shouldn’t I stick my head into an oven?

If a customer was familiar with Leela’s ways, which, truth be told, were the ways of all experienced bar dancers, he’d swat her off with a good-natured laugh.

Not so a ‘fresh’ one. ‘No!’ such a man would cry, rummaging frantically through his wallet for more money, even if it was the last of his money, seeming to really believe Leela would kill herself, right there, on the dance floor. Leela would acknowledge the fluttering notes with a smile, and for a few seconds, perhaps even a minute, dance as though customer was the only man in the room. But even before he could settle back to enjoy her attentions, Leela and her unspoken promises would have glided towards another man.

In a Bombay dance bar it was not just money that was power. Nakhra was power too, the power to break a fresh one’s heart.

Soon, however, Leela’s intoxication, her playful moments of spinning around the dance floor, evaporated. She felt as she always did towards herself, her job, her life—used, wasted, bored.

Her customers were hardly hi-fi in their cheap, choppy bowl cuts. Their shoes were much too large as though they expected—at their age!—to grow. The chottu-types wore heels, and when they smacked their feet on the table tops like Raja Hindustanis, Leela was faced with rows of potato holes. She swore she smelt feet, despite the strong cologne her customers reeked of, and when I asked of the smell, she said ‘dirt’.

They were predictable too in the way they started out polite, calling her ‘miss’ to her face (if ‘pataka’ and ‘item’ when she turned), and how only a whisky-coke later, they were indistinguishable from roadside Romeos—those open-shirted, deshi-drinking thugs who made caressing gestures with their hands as they muttered filthy words to passing women.

Customers pretended it was the alcohol making them so, when the truth was they didn’t need an excuse to hiss at her breasts, ‘ai booty, what’s your loveline number?’

She disdained their amateurish attempts to get her attention. How one would say ‘here, take my bijniss card’ as a ruse to hold her hand, even though he knew well that touching a dancer inside the bar wasn’t allowed. How another thought a hundred and a compliment about her ‘white-white’ complexion would get her to linger.

When they were real drunk, they were real cunts. They would rate the girls aloud, shouting rudely ‘five on ten!’ ‘Eight on ten!’

There was always one who would attempt to dance, and that was so ‘no kalass’ the girls wouldn’t care if he was a ‘zabardast paisawala’, had plenty of money, or a ‘dus paisawala’, had none; they would mouth ‘gandu’, dick, to his face. They would hoot when the bouncer dragged him off the floor.

Leela dismissed even young men, her own age. They were strugglers, she knew, with little control over their lives. Their mothers and wives kept a steady grip on their earnings and monitored their social lives to protect them from women exactly like her. They were, at best, good for flattery and a few tens. They were dreamers too, and they dreamt of things Leela had no interest in—of working in an AC office, of upgrading from a motorcycle to a ‘motor-gaadi’; of pilgrimaging to Tirupati.

The young men flush with hundreds and excited to spend it all were, typically, new recruits in local gangs. They were boys really, who had gone from being useless and unemployable to becoming ‘men,’ paid regularly for their allegiance and muscle. Few had known temptation, and as they faced it now, they didn’t quite know how to respond. Their first taste of a dance bar had come courtesy of a senior gangster, a Bada Don, for gangs routinely used places like Night Lovers to impress the possibilities.

‘See all of this,’ the Bada Don would have said gesturing grandly, the gold chains around his neck gleaming brightly. ‘All this can be yours to enjoy if you have the money. But how will you earn so much money my young friend? Tell me? Think! That’s right! It will happen if you work for me.’

This lot was under no illusion. They expected to die young or live behind bars and behaved with a heady recklessness Leela found profitable, but distasteful. Playing games may have been part of her job, but life itself, she knew well, was no game.

But the worst customer barring none was the ‘chhota mota sindhi chamar chor’. This peculiar dance bar phrase amalgamated qualities a bar dancer considered most undesirable.

These included being stingy and of low caste—sometimes as ‘low’ as that of the girls themselves. A chamar chor was a misguided young man, most often in his late teens or early twenties. He robbed things shiny and expensive-looking from his parents’ home, and sold these to his friends or the petty thieves they knew, for what was known as ‘cheating ka paisa,’ small fraud money. He’d snatch cell phones laid casually on a shop counter. Racing past on a stolen motorcycle he’d tear purses from the arms of women in auto-rickshaws.

The only place a chamar chor could enjoy his money without coming under suspicion was in a dance bar—even though a bar dancer like Leela, knowing well the source of his largesse was no more than a fistful of jhol, stolen goods, would accept his notes with a grimace.

Bar owners like Shetty encouraged men like the chamar chor. They were fair game. Shetty enjoyed playing games. Unlike Leela, he was sure of winning.

He would welcome the chamar chor with fanfare. ‘Consider this your home,’ he would say, pulling the chamar chor into an embrace. ‘Think of me as your father. Fathers and sons don’t count money between them, do they now?’

Once the chamar chor ran out of money, he ran up a debt, siphoning Officer’s Choice and 8 p.m. down his throat, demanding garlands of notes. Soon as he got drunk he became a real cunt. Typically, he would take over the dance floor offering his best imitation of Amitabh Bachchan in that most raucous of Bollywood songs Jumma Chumma De De.

‘Chumma!’ He would scream, begging for a kiss.

‘Chumma!’ he would lunge across the floor, sliding this way and that.

‘Chumma!’ he would sigh and soon enough with a ‘Chumma’ collapse.

And that was the beginning of the end of his simple life.

For when the chamar chor’s debt touched a comfortably round and suitably large figure, say 100,000 rupees, an amount, given the temptations, he could spend within a week, Shetty would jump in. He would tell the chamar chor to pay up or else. That the chamar chor couldn’t, was a given. So there were two ways he could resolve the problem he had created. He could go to jail—which implied not just a meeting with a magistrate, but beatings courtesy an accommodating policeman; if he was vegetarian finding chicken skin in his food, if he was non-vegetarian discovering worms. Or he could do Shetty a favour. The favour might involve six months of washing dishes in the kitchen, or of running errands—ferrying the dancers back and forth at all times of night and day. But if the chamar chor was unlucky, he would suffer what men like Shetty called a ‘Bombay Special’ and the only response to a command involving those words was ‘Yes sethji.’

A Bombay Special was Bombay; it was everything the name implied—shock and awe, expectation, desperation, and always the underlying question ‘why me?’

A bar owner says, ‘I need someone shot. Here’s the gun. Now scram, cunt.’

The chamar chor replies, ‘But . . . but I don’t know how to fire a gun!’

The bar owner responds, ‘Ai, taking part in a competition? Want to win first prize? . . . Arre, hold the gun two inches against the head and pull the trigger. Ek dum Khallas. Smooth as butter.’

He laughs, ‘Why the fear my friend? Afraid of firecrackers?’

And so it was that a young, silly, petty thief, would come to kill for a bar owner with a gun, a grudge, and a penchant for gangster films whose script he claimed as his own.

So it was that a killer was born.

If the chamar chor completed his Bombay Special there was no way back. If he did not, there was no way out.

But if his success was no fluke, if he could go on to shoot another and one more, he could perhaps one day, become a Bada Don.

A Bada Don was a gangster without regrets. He was a man like Feroze Konkani, a Dawood man, now dead, once the city’s highest paid shooter who by the age of twenty was said to have been involved in eighteen killings. Dawood rewarded Konkani with a flat in upscale Juhu, a car, and pillow cases of cash he spent on bar dancers.

His women would have known that Konkani’s money, like that of all Bada Dons, was ‘harami ki kamayi,’ unclean and immorally obtained. It was ‘dadagiri ka paise,’ acquired through extortion.

They didn’t care. They didn’t care because in the business they were in honesty was no virtue—it equalled greater poverty. And poverty eventually made criminals of everyone, even those who swore to resist—it was the only way to transcend the free fall of their marginalised lives. So everyone was a ‘history-sheeter’, a person with a record of committing crimes, and it was considered better to be with a successful thug, a Bada Don, than with a chamar chor who depended on his woman even for his evening paan.

A bar dancer who found herself dancing regularly for a Bada Don, and then one night having with him ‘filmi sex’—sex practices he insisted she copy from pornographic films he bought her—would quell any second thoughts she might have on the matter, by repeating to herself, as though in doing so it became true: ‘Men are all gangsters anyway. So why shouldn’t I throw my lot in with a successful one?’

She would reassure herself, ticking off the fingers of her left hand as she spoke aloud to anyone who would listen: ‘Gangsters have money. They’re smart looking. They have tashan, style. What’s not to like? And they’re straight talkers. “Fuck me” they say, straight off. They don’t suck your blood, choos choos ke, choos choos ke, like other men do. And even if they are troublemakers, they aren’t trouble that lasts long. Here today, dead in a police encounter or a gangvar tomorrow. A Bada Don knows death is his shadow. He understands that the life he has chosen can be so rich, so fulfilling, bursting with every pleasure and with every pain, because it is also so brief. So today means everything. Today my gangster will feed me and drink with me and we will go driving in his Honda City to Aksa beach and behind the bushes we will lie down, and afterwards, when we are done, we will have chai and samosas and if not him, then at least I will pretend we are husband-wife.’

Leela said, ‘A few girls do get scared once they discover their man is a murderer, a don. They stop meeting him, change their cell number, change even the dance bar in which they work. But what does he care? As long as he has money to spend, he will find women to spend it on. We are all the same to him—the living same-same, the dead same-same . . . . But sure, there are others who will only go out with a gangster. They find it thrilling! The first time a chamar chor kills a man he sees his life flash before him. He goes home, says goodbye to his family, locks his bedroom door, and waits for the police. But do the police care if some do take ka bhonsdi ka lund, two-bit cock of a motherfucker, was shot in the head while pissing on the wall of the JW Marriot? . . . Days pass; days without money. What does the chamar chor do? He goes back to that same dance bar. He begs the bar owner to find work for him, any work will do he says, making his meaning clear. And so he kills again. But this time the killing doesn’t scare him. It’s a thrill, a powerful thrill, because he killed a man and suffered no retribution; because for a few seconds of work he made more money than his father has ever brought home, forget in one month, in six months, and his father is fifty years old and still has payments left on his two-wheeler. And it’s a thrill because he knows that the only thing that stands between him and money is his conscience. He can make money for the rest of his life because in Bombay city if there is one thing you’re never short off it is people . . . . He thinks to himself, so easy! ‘Trigger daba, figure kama!’ And this power, this freedom, this is what attracts a bar dancer to a killer. Do you know why?’

Why’s that?

‘Because we yearn to be free.’

Of course, a true Bada Don like Dawood wouldn’t visit a Bombay dance bar, or a dance bar in public. But a Bombay don was no Dawood, and neither was a Bombay man. And of all the customers from all over India Leela would perform for at Night Lovers, no one was more vulnerable, or to use her word, ‘pathetic’, than the middle-aged Bombay man.

‘Give him a chance to say two words,’ grumbled Leela. ‘Two! He’ll say two hundred.’ As evening’s shadows lengthened, so did the stories—the unhappy marriage, the wife who might as well have padlocked her knicker-bra, the children who flippantly nicknamed him Mr. ATM.

Leela may have found her customers pathetic, but they made me sad. For a few, visiting a dance bar was no more than a boys’ night out. But others were clear, even humble, in their loneliness. I knew this not because these men hit on Leela—not all of them did, and many took their time doing so, but because of their consistent, often futile attempts, to get her to talk to them, to listen to them, and to remember them when they returned.

Bombay has a torrential quantity of people. There are people everywhere, and they are confined not just to public spaces and the interactions of push, shove and pull, but to what should be personal spaces. For want of space children sleep with parents, for greater want parents sleep in the door way of their home. Husbands and sons heft their bedding down the street and unfurl it on the floor of their local temple or mosque.

In death, privacy takes with it intimacy. And so when men in situations like these sought intimacy elsewhere, one of the first places they went to, because it was socially and economically accessible to them, was a dance bar.

But Leela didn’t see nuance, and that was because she didn’t have to.

What are they like? I asked of her customers.

She shrugged.

What do you know of them?

‘My head,’ she replied, tapping her temple, ‘is not a computer. I don’t have place for so much information.’ Perhaps because Leela enjoyed B-grade horror flicks, she remembered the ones with the terrible features. Those she hoped wouldn’t return. The gangster with the cauliflower ear, the construction worker with the forest of hennaed knuckle hair. That Parsi fellow with a hole in his tooth so large Leela swore she’d once seen him pour a quarter into his mouth only to have it come tumbling out.

To Leela a customer was ‘a Ramzan goat’. Destined for slaughter. And she, Leela said to me, must wield the knife that would slit his throat, cut his head off, and hang his carcass to drip, drip, drip. Never forget, she instructed—a bar dancer’s game is ‘lootna’, ‘kustomer ko bewakuf banana’. To rob, to fool a kustomer. And every bar dancer prayed for the sort of client whose indulgence would make newspaper headlines. A scamster like Abdul Karim Telgi, who was rumoured to have lavished 90,0000 rupees on a bar dancer. Or Aman Mishra, a young man who became famous for spending over 20,0000 rupees on a bar dancer he was apparently infatuated with. (Two years later, after he was revealed to be a conman, Mishra kidnapped the bar dancer for ransom).

Although Leela had yet to be discovered by an Abdul or an Amar, she was undeterred, rarely allowing her distaste for her current, what she considered lowly, crop of customers to show. She was professional, and she knew that sort of behaviour would get her fired, wife or no wife.

But of course, if Leela didn’t know her customers, fewer knew Leela. They didn’t even know what to call her; she was always calling herself something different. One night she was Kareena, having just watched the actress Kareena Kapoor in Dev. On another night, she would introduce herself as Rani, for Rani Mukherjee in Yuva.

When she was done with work, Leela would clean up in the makeup room, say her goodbyes, and stop by Shetty’s office for her money. All the money thrown at her was picked up by a steward and placed in a dabba with a single key Shetty kept in his wallet, which was, in turn, chained to the pocket of his front shirt. Shetty would open the box in front of Leela, note the amount in a dense, cloth-bound register, and pay her cut accordingly. Leela never could be sure that everything she earned went into her dabba and not into that of another girl’s by mistake or into Shetty’s wallet on purpose. But she had no choice but to believe him, just like every bar dancer in Bombay believed in her manager.

Tucking her money away in her bra, Leela would head to the back door to avoid bumping into customers. She would pass through the kitchen, inevitably filthy at this time of night, through the alcohol-storage area with its imported whiskies and country liquors, with even packets of haath bhatti—home brew sold in plastic bags for a few rupees, and slip into the auto-rickshaw that had brought her to the dance bar.

Leela had known her auto driver Badal for several months; He was her protégé. They had met in Kamatipura when he was fifteen and his mother Bani’s pimp. Leela saw her childhood self in Badal. She figured his adolescence was as much a zone of desperation as hers had been. When she wasn’t engaged with customers Bani lavished her energies on Tommy, a pet goat with a rosy red collar she hoped to train for the circus. How quickly money ran out! Sometimes there was so much of it, Bani would order beer and biryani and suddenly all the building’s ‘whores,’ rendered shameless by hunger, would decide she was their best friend. They would eat until they burped, and then Bani would order Badal out to buy paan so sweet it made the teeth squeak, and the omen would chew and gossip and gamble away whatever little money they had left.

When the take was low, Bani encouraged her three-year-old daughter Baby to stick her head out of the window and help her and Badal outsell the competition.

‘Baby clap your hands!

Smile!

Happy smile,

Big-big smile,

Actress Kareena Kapoor-like smile!

Now swish your dress to and fro,

And smile, Baby smile!’

Leela brought Badal to Mira Road with the hope that he could build a life for himself outside the brothel. If he drove a rented auto-rickshaw, in a few years he might earn enough to buy his own. One day perhaps, Leela daydreamed for the boy; he could graduate to chauffeuring a car. So she set him up with a madam down the road from her flat and in exchange for running errands and keeping watch over her girls—making sure they didn’t run away, that is—the madam allowed Badal to live rent-free. To resolve the issue of a driving license, since Badal was underage and looked it, Leela helped out with a modest loan which would serve as hafta, and an introduction to the local constable’s wife, a woman who had impressed her with her ‘pull’.

Not only could she get things done through her husband, Leela said, but also through his boss, a senior inspector with whom she was conducting a secret affair.

Back

When he was recognized, Henry didn’t mind. In his experience, the encounter with a reader was a pleasure. After all, they’d read his book and it had an impact, otherwise why

would they come up to him? The meeting had an intimate quality; two strangers were coming together, but to discuss an external matter, a faith object that had moved them both, so all barriers fell. This was no place for lies or bombast.

Voices were quiet; bodies leaned close together; selves were revealed. Sometimes personal confessions were made. One reader told Henry he’d read the novel in prison. Another that she’d read it while battling cancer. A father shared that his family had read it aloud in the aftermath of the premature birth and eventual death of their baby. And there were other such encounters. In each case, an element of his novel—a line, a character, an incident, a symbol—had helped them pull through a crisis in their lives. Some of the readers Henry met became quite emotional. This never failed to affect him and he tried his best to respond in a manner that soothed them.

In the more typical encounters, readers simply wanted to express their appreciation and admiration, now and again accompanied by a material token, a present made or bought:

a snapshot, a bookmark, a book. They might have a question or two they hoped to ask, timidly, not meaning to bother. They were grateful for whatever answer he might give. They took the book he signed and held it to their chest with both hands. The bolder ones, usually but not always teenagers, sometimes asked if they could have their picture taken with him. Henry would stand, an arm over their shoulders, smiling at the camera.

Readers walked away, their faces lit up because they’d met him, while his was lit up because he’d met them. Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort.

As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have. Henry was essentially unchanged by the success of his novel. He was the same person he had been before, with the same strengths and the same weaknesses.

On the rare occasions when he was approached by a reader in a disagreeable way, he had the last weapon of the writer working under a pseudonym: no, he wasn’t XXX, he was just a guy named Henry.

Eventually the business of personally promoting his novel died down, and Henry returned to an existence where he could sit quietly in a room for weeks and months on end. He wrote another book. It involved five years of thinking, researching, writing, and rewriting. The fate of that book is not immaterial to what happened next to Henry, so it bears being described.

The book Henry wrote was in two parts, and he intended them to be published in what the publishing trade calls a flip book: that is, a book with two sets of distinct pages that are attached to a common spine upside down and back-to-back to each other. If you flick your thumb through a flip book, the pages, halfway along, will appear upside down. A head-to-tails flip of the conjoined book will bring you to its fraternal twin. So the name flip book.

Henry chose this unusual format because he was concerned with how best to present two literary wares that shared the same title, the same theme, the same concern, but not the same method. He’d in fact written two books: one was a novel, while the other was a piece of nonfiction, an essay. He had taken this double approach because he felt he needed every means at his disposal to tackle his chosen subject. But fiction and nonfiction are very rarely published in the same book. That was the hitch. Tradition holds that the two must be kept apart. That is how our knowledge and impressions of life are sorted in bookstores and libraries—separate aisles, separate floors—and that is how publishers prepare their books, imagination in one package, reason in another. It’s not how writers write. A novel is not an entirely unreasonable creation, nor is an essay devoid of imagination. Nor is it how people live. People don’t so rigorously separate the imaginative from the rational in their thinking and in their actions. There are truths and there are lies—these are the transcendent categories, in books as in life. The useful division is between the fiction and nonfiction that speaks the truth and the fiction and nonfiction that utters lies.

Still, the custom, a set way of thinking, posed a problem, Henry realized. If his novel and essay were published separately, as two books, their complementarity would not be so evident and their synergy would likely be lost. They had to be published together. But in what order? The idea of placing the essay before the novel struck Henry as unacceptable.

Fiction, being closer to the full experience of life, should take precedence over nonfiction. Stories—individual stories, family stories, national stories—are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals. It would not be fitting to place such a grand expression of our being behind a more limited act of exploratory reasoning.

But behind serious nonfiction lies the same fact and preoccupation as behind fiction—of being human and what it means—so why should the essay be slotted as an afterword?

Regardless of meritorious status, if novel and essay were published in a sequence in one book, whichever came first would inevitably cast into shadow whichever came second.

Their similarities called for novel and essay to be published together; respect for the rights of each, separately. Hence, after much thinking on Henry’s part, the choice of the flip book.

Once he had settled on this format, new advantages leapt to his mind. The event at the heart of his book was, and still is, profoundly distressing—threw the world upside down, it might be said—so how fitting that the book itself should always be half upside down. Furthermore, if it was published as a flip book, the reader would have to choose in which order to read it. Readers inclined to seek help and reassurance in reason would perhaps read the essay first. Those more comfortable with the more directly emotional approach of fiction might rather start with the novel. Either way, the choice would be the reader’s, and empowerment, the possibility of choice, when dealing with upsetting matters, is a good thing. Lastly, there was the detail that a flip book has two front covers. Henry saw more to wraparound jacket art than just added aesthetics. A flip book is a book with two front doors, but no exit. Its form embodies the notion that the matter discussed within has no resolution, no back cover that can be neatly, patly closed on it. Rather, the matter is never finished with; always the reader is brought to a central page where, because the text now appears upside down, the reader is made to understand that he or she has not understood, that he or she cannot fully understand, but must think again in a different way and start all over.

With this in mind, Henry thought that the two books should end on the same page, with only a blank space between the topsy-turvy texts. Perhaps there could be a simple drawing in that no-man’s-land between fiction and nonfiction.

To make things confusing, the term flip book also applies to a novelty item, a small book with a series of slightly changed images or photographs on succeeding pages; when the pages are flicked through quickly, the illusion of animation is created, of a horse galloping and jumping, for example. Later on, Henry had plenty of time to dwell on what cartoon story his flip book would tell if it had been this other type: it would be of a man confidently walking, head high, until he trips and stumbles and falls in a most spectacular fashion.

It should be mentioned, because it is central to the difficulties Henry encountered, to his tripping and stumbling and falling, that his flip book concerned the murder of millions of civilian Jews—men, women, children—by the Nazis and their many willing collaborators in Europe last century, that horrific and protracted outbreak of Jew-hatred that is widely known, by an odd convention that has appropriated a religious term, as the Holocaust. Specifically, Henry’s double book was about the ways in which that event was represented in stories. Henry had noticed over years of reading books and watching movies how little actual fiction there was about the Holocaust. The take on the event was nearly always historical, factual, documentary, anecdotal, testimonial, literal. The archetypal document on the event was the survivor’s memoir, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, for instance. Whereas war—to take another cataclysmic human event—was constantly being turned into something else. War was forever being trivialized, that is, made less than it truly is. Modern wars have killed tens of millions of people and devastated entire countries, yet representations that convey the real nature of war have to jostle to be seen, heard and read amidst the war thrillers, the war comedies, the war romances, the war science fictions, the war propaganda. Yet who thinks of “trivialization” and “war” in the same breath? Has any veterans’ group ever made the complaint? No, because that’s just how we talk about war, in many ways and for many purposes. With these diverse representations, we come to understand what war means to us.

No such poetic licence was taken with—or given to—the Holocaust. That terrifying event was overwhelmingly represented by a single school: historical realism. The story, always the same story, was always framed by the same dates, set in the same places, featuring the same cast of characters. There were some exceptions. Henry could think of Maus, by the American graphic artist Art Spiegelman. David Grossman’s See Under: Love also took a different approach. But even with these, the peculiar gravity of the event pulled the reader back to the original and literal historical facts. If a story started later or elsewhere, the reader was inevitably marched back in time and across borders to 1943 and to Poland, like the protagonist in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. And so Henry came to wonder: why this suspicion of the imagination, why the resistance to artful metaphor? A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real. Was there not a danger to representing the Holocaust in a way always beholden to factuality? Surely, amidst the texts that related what happened, those vital and necessary diaries, memoirs and histories, there was a spot for the imagination’s commentary. Other events in history, including horrifying ones, had been treated by artists, and for the greater good. To take just three well-known instances of artful witness: Orwell with Animal Farm, Camus with The Plague, Picasso with Guernica. In each case the artist had taken a vast, sprawling tragedy, had found its heart, and had represented it in a nonliteral and compact way. The unwieldy encumbrance of history was reduced and packed into a suitcase. Art as suitcase, light, portable, essential—was such a treatment not possible, indeed, was it not necessary, with the greatest tragedy of Europe’s Jews?

To exemplify and argue this supplementary way of thinking about the Holocaust, Henry had written his novel and essay. Five years of hard work it had taken him. After he had finished, the dual manuscript was circulated among his various publishers. That’s when he was invited to a lunch. Remember the man in the flip book who trips and stumbles and falls. Henry was flown over the Atlantic just for this lunch. It took place in London one spring during the London Book Fair. Henry’s editors, four of them, had invited a historian and a bookseller to join them, which Henry took as a sign of double approval, theoretical and commercial. He didn’t see at all what was coming. The restaurant was posh, Art Deco in style. Their table, along its two long sides, was gracefully curved, giving it the shape of an eye. A matching curved bench was set into the wall on one side of it. “Why don’t you sit there?” one of his editors said, pointing to the middle of the bench. Yes, Henry thought, where else would an author with a new book sit but there, like a bride and groom at the head table. An editor settled on either side of him. Facing them, on four chairs along the opposite curved edge of the table, sat an editor on each side of the historian and the bookseller. Despite the formal setting, it was a cozy arrangement. The waiter brought over the menus and explained the fancy specials of the day. Henry was in high spirits. He thought they were a wedding party.

In fact, they were a firing squad.

In the normal course of things, editors flatter writers into seeing everything that’s wrong with their book. Every compliment hides a criticism. It’s a diplomatic way to proceed, meant to improve a book without crushing its author’s spirit. And so it started, after they had ordered their lunch and small-talked a little, the advance of the complimentary adjectives disguising imperative suggestions, like Birnam Wood moving on Dunsinane Castle. But Henry was a clueless Macbeth. He just wasn’t hearing what they were saying. He laughed and waved their increasingly pointed questions aside. He told them, “You’re reacting exactly the way readers will—with questions, comments and objections. And that’s how it should be. A book is a part of speech. At the heart of mine is an incredibly upsetting event that can survive only in dialogue. So let’s talk!”

It was the bookseller, an American bookseller in London, plain-spoken and nasal-sounding, who finally grabbed Henry by the lapels, so to speak, and forced his point upon him clearly and roughly. “Essays are a drag,” he said, speaking, Henry supposed, of his retail experience on both sides of the Atlantic but perhaps also of his critical experience reading them. “Especially if you’re taking on a sacred cow like the Holocaust. Every few seasons a Holocaust book comes out that bangs on the heart chords”—that’s how the bookseller put it—“and goes planetary, but for every one of those there are crates of others that end up being pulped. And with your approach—and I don’t just mean the flip book thing—I also mean this idea you have where we’re supposed to throw our whole imagination at the Holocaust—

Holocaust westerns, Holocaust science fictions, Holocaust Jamaican bobsled team comedies—I mean, where is this going? And then you also want to do it as a flip book, which is normally just a gimmick, in the same section as the joke books, and, I don’t know, it strikes me that your flip book might just be one big flop book. Flip-flop, flip-flop, flipflop,”

he finished, as the first course arrived, an array of tiny dishes with morsels of over-the-top delicacies on them.

“I hear you,” Henry replied after blinking a few times and swallowing what felt like a large goldfish, “but we can’t always be taking the same approach. Shouldn’t the very newness of it, both in the content and in the form, in a serious book, attract attention? Won’t it be a selling point?”

“Where do you see the book being displayed?” asked the bookseller, as he chewed on his food with an open mouth. “In the fiction section or the nonfiction?”

“Ideally both,” Henry replied.

“Not going to happen. Too confusing. Do you know how much stock a bookstore handles? And if we have to worry about turning the book every which way so the right cover is facing out, we’ll never see the end of it. And where are you going to put the bar code? It always goes on the back cover. Where do you put a bar code on a book with two front covers?”

“I don’t know,” said Henry. “On the spine.”

“Too narrow.”

“On the inside flap.”

“Cashiers can’t be opening the book up, looking for it everywhere. And what if the book is plastic-wrapped?”

“On a little wraparound band.”

“They tear and fall off. And then you don’t have a bar code at all—a nightmare.”

“I don’t know then. I wrote my book on the Holocaust without worrying about where the fucking bar code would go.”

“Just trying to help you sell your book,” said the bookseller, rolling his eyes.

“What I think Jeff is pointing out,” interrupted one of Henry’s editors, coming to the rescue, “is that there are certain problems, practical and conceptual, with the book that need to be addressed. For your own good,” she emphasized.

Henry tore a piece of bread and furiously swiped at a tapenade made of olives that came from an exclusive grove of six trees in a remote corner of Sicily. He noticed the asparagus. The waiter had expounded at great length on the sauce, its culinary sophistication, the refinement of its ingredients, on and on. By the sounds of it, one lick of the stuff and you had as good as earned a Ph.D. Henry stabbed an asparagus, wiped it in the pinkish drizzle and stuffed it in his mouth. He was too distracted to taste anything but green mushiness.

“Let’s take a different approach,” the historian suggested.

He had a friendly face and a soothing voice. He tilted his head and peered at Henry over his glasses. “What’s your book about?” he asked.

Henry was thrown into confusion. An obvious question, perhaps, but not one that he could answer so easily. That’s why people write books, after all, to give full answers to short questions. And the bookseller had rankled him. Henry took a deep breath and collected himself. He tried his best with the historian’s question. But his answer came out in stammers and meanders. “My book is about representations of the Holocaust. The event is gone; we are left with stories about it. My book is about a new choice of stories. With a historical event, we not only have to bear witness, that is, tell what happened and address the needs of ghosts. We also have to interpret and conclude, so that the needs of people today, the children of ghosts, can be addressed. In addition to the knowledge of history, we need the understanding of art. Stories identify, unify, give meaning to. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.”

“Yes, yes, perhaps,” the historian said, brushing Henry’s words aside, staring at him harder, “but what’s your book about ?” A buzz of nervousness shook Henry on the inside. He tried another tack, to do with the idea behind the flip book. “Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it’s true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn’t become story, it dies to everyone except the historian. Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.” Henry could sense that the historian was about to interrupt him and he hurried along incoherently. “With the Holocaust, we have a tree with massive historical roots and only tiny, scattered fictional fruit. But it’s the fruit that holds the seed! It’s the fruit that people pick. If there is no fruit, the tree will be forgotten. Each of us is like a flip book,” Henry pursued, though it didn’t follow from what he was just saying. “Each one of us is a mixture of fact and fiction, a weaving of tales set in our real bodies. Isn’t that so?”

“I get all that,” the historian said with a trace of impatience.

“But once again, what is your book about ?”

To that third iteration of the question, Henry had no answer. Perhaps he didn’t know what his book was about. Perhaps that was the problem with it. His chest rose as he breathed in heavily and sighed. He stared at the white tablecloth, red-faced and at a loss for words.

An editor broke the awkward silence. “Dave has a point,” he said. “There needs to be a tighter focus in both the novel and the essay. This book you’ve written is tremendously powerful, a remarkable achievement, we all agree on that, but as it stands now, the novel lacks drive and the essay lacks unity.”

The waiter arrived, Henry’s constant saviour during that catastrophic lunch, bringing a new dish, the pretext for a change of topic, forced gaiety and grim eating, until another editor, or the bookseller, or the historian, felt the professional urge—and perhaps the personal one—to take up his or her rifle, take aim at Henry, and shoot again. That was the whole meal, a blundering lurch from the frivolity of over-refined food to the dismemberment of his book, Henry quibbling and squabbling, they reassuring and wrecking, to and fro, back and forth, until there was no more food to eat and nothing left to say. It all came out, wrapped in the kindest words: the novel was tedious, the plot feeble, the characters unconvincing, their fate uninteresting, the point lost; the essay was flimsy, lacking in substance, poorly argued, poorly written. The idea of the flip book was an annoying distraction, besides being commercial suicide. The whole was a complete, unpublishable failure.

When at last lunch ended and he was released, Henry walked out in a daze. Only his legs seemed to be working. They set him off in an unknown direction. After a few minutes he came upon a park. Henry was surprised at what he found there. In Canada, where Henry was from, a park is usually a sanctuary of trees. This London park was not like that. It was an expanse of the loveliest grass, a symphony of green. There were some trees, but they stood very tall with high branches, as if they were mindful of not getting in the way of the unbridled grass. A round pond gleamed in the centre of the park. The weather was warm and sunny and people were out in great numbers. As he wandered about the park, Henry awoke to what had just happened to him. Five years of work had been consigned to oblivion. His mind, stunned into silence, sputtered to life. I should have said this . . . I should have said that. . . Who the fuck was he . . .? How dare she . . . ?—so the shouting match in his head went, a full-blown anger fantasy.

Henry tried to call his wife, Sarah, in Canada, but she was at work, her cell phone off. He left a rambling, heartbroken message on their voice mail.

A moment came when the tense muscles twitching in Henry’s body and the emotions seething inside him came together and spoke in unison: with his fists clenched in the air, he lifted a foot and stamped the ground with all his might, at the same time letting out a choked-up sound from his throat. He hadn’t consciously decided to act out like this. It just happened, a snap expression of hurt, fury and frustration. He was near a tree, the soil around it soft and bare, and the impact of his foot-stamping was thunderous, certainly to him, and a couple lying nearby turned his way because of it. Henry stood, amazed. The ground had trembled. He had felt the reverberations. The earth itself had heard him, he thought. He looked up at the tree. It was a giant tree, a galleon with its sails in full rig, an art museum with its entire collection on display, a mosque with a thousand worshippers praising God. He gazed at it for several minutes. A tree had never before been so soothing to him. As he admired it, he could feel the anger and distress draining from him.

Henry looked at the people around him. Lone individuals, couples, families with children, groups; of every race and ethnicity; reading, sleeping, chatting, jogging, playing, walking their dogs—people varied yet at peace with one another. A peacetime park on a sunny day. What need was there to talk about the Holocaust here? If he found some Jews amidst this peaceable gaggle, would they care to have him gore their beautiful day with talk of genocide? Would anyone care to have a stranger come up to them whispering, “Hitlerauschwitzsixmillionincandescentsoulsmygodmygodmygod”? And hell, Henry wasn’t even Jewish, so why didn’t he mind his own business? Everything is context, and clearly the context was wrong. Why write a novel about the Holocaust today? The matter is settled. Primo Levi, Anne Frank and all the others have done it well and for all time. “Let go, let go, let go,” Henry intoned. A young man in sandals walked by. Flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop went his feet, like the bookseller’s damning conclusion. “Let go, let go, let go,” Henry intoned.

After an hour or so, he made his way to the edge of the park. A sign informed him he was in Hyde Park. The irony struck him. He had entered the park like Mr. Hyde of Stevenson’s tale, deformed by anger, wilfulness and resentment, but he was leaving it more like the good Dr. Jekyll.

Henry realized then what answer he should have given the historian. His flip book was about having his soul ripped out and with it, attached, his tongue. Wasn’t that what every Holocaust book was about, aphasia? Henry remembered a statistic: fewer than two percent of Holocaust survivors ever write about or testify to their ordeal. Thus the typical approach of those who do speak about it, so precise and factual, like a stroke victim who’s learning how to speak again and who starts with the simplest, clearest syllables. For his part, Henry now joined the vast majority of those who had been shut up by the Holocaust. His flip book was about losing his voice.

And so Henry left Hyde Park no longer a writer. He stopped writing; the urge left him. Was this a case of writer’s block? He argued later with Sarah that it wasn’t, since a book had been written—two, in fact. It was more accurate to call it writer’s abandonment. Henry simply gave up. But if he did not write, he would at least live. A stroll in a London park and an encounter with a beautiful tree at least taught him that useful lesson: if you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.

Back

I told Daadi.

She raised her chin and folded her hands in her lap, and said, ‘I don’t know about that. All I know is that he was a very serious young man.’

But there were pictures that my mother had and they testified to his whims. One morning he was stark and unshaven and went out to row a boat in a lake, or a river – only a stretch of water was visible behind him – and his hair was dirty and uncombed, his eyes almost shut against the glare. My mother said he looked like that because he had drunk a lot of alcohol at night.

‘Nonsense,’ said Daadi in her room. ‘Who tells you these things? He never touched it. Others may have, but he didn’t. He always refused it.’

I told my mother.

She said, ‘It’s wishful thinking.’

‘Why does she do it?’

‘Because she’s his mother. She’s had to keep him alive. People need things to believe in.’

She was lying in bed and trying to read a book.

I said, ‘Even if the things aren’t true?’

She lowered the book, thought about it and said, ‘Well. It’s hard to say what’s true sometimes. One person might have one way of looking at things. And another person might have another way. You can hold your own beliefs as long as they allow other people to live their lives. You can’t tell me that your beliefs are better than mine. I wouldn’t like that. And neither would you, if you put yourself in my position.’

But Daadi had said, ‘The truth is always there, whether you believe it or not.’

So I tried to believe in what remained of my father, and looked at his pictures and read his books:
The Indian Army had responded vigorously to Pakistani infiltration of irregular forces into Kashmir. With a double pincer on Badori Bulge, the Indians had captured the strategic Haji Pir Pass. Core areas in Azad Kashmir, including the towns of Muzaffarabad and Mirpur, lay threatened. The only way out of this critical situation was to launch a diversionary manoeuvre.

The shiny g-suit hung in the wardrobe and was ready for wearing.

Operation ‘Grand Slam’ was thus launched in the early hours of September. Audacious as the plan was, it took the Indians by complete surprise.

He stood beside the jet, his helmet raised to his heart. He was going to fly it alone for the first time.

A Pak Army force consisting of an infantry division and two armoured regiments, along with extensive artillery support, started the attack on Indian positions.

He was trying to move the control column but it was stuck in his hands.

Outnumbered and outgunned, Brig. Man Mohan Singh, Commander Infantry Brigade, was faced with a critical situation.

The plane was shuddering.

He frantically called for air support.

But the plane went down. And he died all over again.

‘Goodnight,’ said my mother. She had finished reading her book; she returned it to the bedside table and reached out a hand to extinguish the lamp.

And the thoughts stayed on in the dark and changed their shapes and became wishes that were made silently to a dead father, who was always somewhere, even after he had died, even after it was known that he would never respond – he was alive and he was listening.

Back

Uma snapped shut her copy of Chaucer, which she had brought with her to compensate for the Medieval Lit class she was missing at the university. In the last few hours she had managed to progress only a page and a half into the “Wyfe of Bath’s Tale”—this despite the fact that the bawdy, cheerful Wyfe was one of her favorite characters. Now she surrendered to reality: The lobby of the P&V Office, with all its comings and goings, its calling out of the names of individuals more fortunate than herself, was not a place suited to erudite endeavors. She surrendered with ill grace—it was a belief of hers that people ought to rise above the challenges of circumstance—and glared at the woman stationed behind the glassed-in customer service window. The woman was dressed in a blue sari of an electrifying hue. Her hair was gathered into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and she wore a daunting red dot in the center of her forehead. She ignored Uma superbly, as people do when faced with those whose abject destinies they control.

Uma did not trust this woman. When she had arrived this morning, assured of a nine a.m. appointment with the visa officer, she found several people swirling around the lobby, and more crowding behind, who had been similarly assured. When questioned, the woman had shrugged, pointing to the pile upon which Uma was to place her paperwork. Clients, she told Uma, would be called according to the order of arrival for an interview with the visa officer. Here she nodded reverently toward the office to the side of the lobby. Its closed door bore the name Mr. V.K.S. Mangalam stenciled in flowery letters on the nubby, opaque glass. Craning her neck, Uma saw that there was a second door to the office, a blank wooden slab that opened into the sequestered employees area: the customer service window and, behind it, desks at which two women sorted piles of official looking documents into other piles and occasionally stamped them. The woman at the counter pursed her lips at Uma’s curiosity and frostily advised her to take a seat while there was one still available.

Uma sat. What else could she do? But she resolved to keep an eye on the woman, who looked entirely capable of shuffling the visa applications around out of bored caprice when no one was watching.

***

Now it was three p.m. A few minutes earlier, the women at the desks had left on their mid-afternoon break. They had asked the woman in the blue sari if she wanted to accompany them, and when she had declined, stating that she would take her break later, they had dissolved into giggles and whispers which she loftily ignored. There remained four sets of people in the room, apart from Uma. In the distant corner was an old Chinese woman dressed in a traditional tunic, accompanied by a fidgety, sullen girl of thirteen or fourteen who should surely have been in school. The teenager wore her hair in spikes. Her lipstick was black and so were her clothes. Did they allow students to attend school dressed like this nowadays? Uma wondered. Then she felt old-fashioned. From time to time, grandmother and granddaughter fought in fiery whispers, words that Uma longed to decipher. She had always been this way: interested—quite unnecessarily, some would say—in the secrets of strangers. When flying, she always chose a window seat so that when the plane took off or landed, she could look down on the tiny houses and imagine the lives of the people who inhabited them. Now she made up the dialogue she could not understand.

I missed a big test today because of your stupid appointment. If I fail Algebra, just remember it was your fault—because you were too scared to ride the bus here by yourself.

Whose fault was it that you overslept six times this month and didn’t get to school for your morning classes, Missy? And your poor parents, slaving at their jobs, thinking you were hard at work! Maybe I should tell them what really goes on at home while they’re killing themselves to provide for you . . .

Near them sat a Caucasian couple about a decade older than Uma’s parents, their clothes hinting at affluence: he in a dark woolen jacket and shoes that looked Italian, she in a cashmere sweater and a navy blue pleated skirt that reached her calves. He riffled through The Wall Street Journal; she, the frailer of the pair, was knitting something brown and unidentifiable. Twice he stepped outside—to smoke a cigarette, Uma guessed. Sometimes, glancing sideways, she saw him watching his wife. Uma couldn’t decipher the look on his face. Was it anxiety? Annoyance? Once she thought it was fear. Or maybe it was hope, the flip side of fear. The only time she heard them speak to each other was when he asked what he could pick up for her from the deli across the street

“I’m not hungry,” she replied in a leave-me-alone tone.

“You have to eat something. Build up your strength. We have a big trip coming up.”

She knitted another row before responding. “Pick up whatever looks good to you, then.” After he left, she put down the knitting needles and stared at her hands.

To Uma’s left sat a young man of about thirty years, an Indian by his features, but fair-skinned as though he came from one of the mountain tribes. He wore dark glasses, a scowl and a beard of the kind that in recent years made airport security pull you out of line and frisk you. To her other side sat a lanky African American, perhaps in his fifties, Uma couldn’t tell. His shaved head and the sharp, ascetic bones of his face gave him an ageless, monkish appearance, though the effect was somewhat undercut by the sparkly studs in his ears. When Uma’s stomach gave an embarrassingly loud growl a couple of hours back (trusting in the nine a.m. appointment, she hadn’t brought with her anything more substantial than a bagel and an apple), he dug into a large rucksack and solemnly offered her a Quaker Oats Peanut Butter Bar.

It was not uncommon, in this city, to find persons of different races randomly thrown together. Still, Uma thought, it was like a mini U. N. summit in here. Whatever were all these people planning to do in India?

***

Uma herself was going to India because of her parents’ folly. They had come to the United States some twenty years back as young professionals, when Uma was a child. They had loved their jobs, plunging enthusiastically into their workdays. They had celebrated weekends with similar gusto, getting together (in between soccer games and Girl Scout meetings and Bharatnatyam classes for Uma) with other suburbanite Indian families. They had orchestrated elaborate, schizophrenic meals (mustard fish and fried bitter gourd for the parents; spaghetti with meatballs and peach pie for the children) and bemoaned the corruption of Indian politicians. In recent years, they had spoken of moving to San Diego to spend their golden years by the ocean (such nice weather, perfect for our old bones). Then, in a dizzying volte-face that Uma considered most imprudent, her mother had chosen early retirement and her father had quit his position as a senior administrator for a computer company to accept a consultant’s job in India. Together, heartlessly, they had leased out their house (the house where Uma was born!) and returned to their hometown of Kolkata.

“But all these years you complained about how terrible Kolkata was,” Uma had cried, aghast, when they called to inform her of their decision. Apart from her concern for their well-being, she was vexed at not having been consulted. “The heat, the dirt, the noise, the crowded buses, the beggars, the bribes, the diarrhea, the bootlicking, the streets littered with garbage that never got picked up. How are you going to handle it?”

To which her mother had replied, with maddening good humor, “But sweetie, all that has changed. It’s a different India now, India Shining!”

And perhaps it was, for hadn’t her parents glided effortlessly into their new life, renting an air-conditioned terrace-top flat and hiring a retinue of servants to take care of every possible chore? (“I haven’t washed a single dish since I moved here!” her mother rhapsodized on the phone.) A chauffeured car whisked her father to his office each morning. (“I only work from ten to four,” he added proudly from the other phone.) It returned to take her mother shopping, or to see childhood friends, or to get a pedicure, or (before Uma could chide her for being totally frivolous) to volunteer with an agency that educated slum children. In the evenings her parents attended Rabindra Sangeet concerts together, or watched movies on gigantic screens in theaters that resembled palaces, or walked hand in hand (such things were accepted in India Shining) by the same lake where they had met secretly as college students, or went to the club for drinks and a game of bridge. They were invited out every weekend and sometimes on weeknights as well. They vacationed in Kulu Manali in the summer and Goa in the winter.

Uma was happy for her parents though secretly she disapproved of their newly hedonistic lifestyle. (Yet how could she object when it was so much better than what she often saw around her: couples losing interest in each other, living in wooden togetherness or even breaking up?) Was it partly that she felt excluded? Or was it that by contrast her university life, which she had been so proud of, with its angst-filled film festivals, its cafes where heated intellectual discussions raged late into the night, its cavernous libraries where one might, at any moment, bump into a Nobel Laureate, suddenly appeared lackluster? She said nothing, waiting in a stew of anxiety and anticipation for this honeymoon with India to be over, for disillusion and dyspepsia to set in. A year passed. Her mother continued as blithe as ever, though surely she must have faced problems. Who doesn’t? (Why then did she conceal them from Uma?) Now and then she urged Uma to visit. “We’ll go to Agra and see the Taj Mahal together—we’re saving it for you,” she would say. Or, “I know the best ayurvedic spa. They give sesame oil massages like you wouldn’t believe.” In a recent conversation, she’d said, twice, “We miss you. Why don’t you come visit? We’ll send you a ticket.”

There had been something plaintive about her voice that struck Uma in the space just below her breastbone. She had missed her parents, too. Though she had always decried touristic amusements, suddenly she felt a desire to see the Taj Mahal. “I’ll come for winter break,” she promised rashly.

“How long is that?”

“Six weeks.”

“Six weeks! Lovely!” her mother said, restored to buoyancy. “That should give us enough time. Don’t forget, you’ll need a new visa—you haven’t been to India in ages. Don’t mail them your passport—that takes forever. Go into the office yourself. You’ll have to wait a bit, but you’ll get it the same day.”

Only after she had hung up did Uma realize that she had failed to ask her mother, enough time for what? She also realized that her boyfriend Ramon, whom her parents knew and had always treated affably (her father had even given him an Indian nickname, Ramu), had not been included in the invitation.

She might have let it pass—tickets to India, were, after all, expensive—but then there was that other conversation, the one where Uma had said, “It’s a good thing you haven’t sold the house. This way, if things don’t work out, you’ll have a place to come back to.”

“Oh no, sweetie,” her mother had replied. “We love it in India—we knew we would. The house is there for you, in case—.”

Then her mother had caught herself deftly in mid-sentence and changed the subject, leaving Uma with the sense that she had been about to divulge something she knew Uma was not ready to hear.

***

Minutes before the second rumble, Uma felt a craving to see the sun. Had the gossamer fog that draped the tops of the downtown buildings when she arrived that morning lifted by now? If so, the sky would be bright as a Niles lily; if not, it would glimmer like fish-scales. Suddenly she needed to know which it was. Later she would wonder at the urgency that had pulled her out of her chair and to her feet. Was it an instinct like the one that made zoo animals moan and whine for hours before natural disasters struck? She shouldered her bag and stepped toward the door. A few more seconds and she would have pushed it open, run down the corridor and taken the stairs up to the first floor two at a time, rushing to satisfy the desire that ballooned inside of her. She would have been outside, lifting her face to the gray drizzle that was beginning to fall, and this would have been a different story.

But as she turned to go, the door to Mr. Mangalam’s office opened. A man hurried out, clutching his passport with an air of victory, and brushed past Uma. The woman in the blue sari picked up the stack of applications and disappeared into Mr. Mangal’s office through the side door. She had been doing that every hour or so. For what? Uma thought, scowling. All the woman needed to do was call out the next name in the pile. Uma had little hope that that name would be hers, but she paused, just in case.

It was a good time to phone Ramon. If she were lucky, she would catch him as he walked across the Student Union plaza from the class he taught to his laboratory, wending his way between drummers and dim sum vendors and doomsday orators. Once in the laboratory, he would turn the phone off, not wanting to be distracted. He was passionate about his work, Ramon. Sometimes at night when he went to the lab to check on an experiment, she would accompany him just so she could watch the stillness that took over his body as he tested and measured and took notes. Sometimes he forgot she was there. That was when she loved him most. If she got him on the phone now, she would tell him this.

But the phone would not cooperate. No Service, the small, lighted square declared.

The man with the ear studs looked over and offered her a sympathetic grimace. “My phone has the same problem,” he said. “That’s the trouble with these downtown buildings. Maybe if you walk around the room, you’ll find a spot where it works.”

Phone to her ear, Uma took a few steps forward, though not with much hope. It felt good to stretch her legs. She watched the woman emerge from Mr. Mangal’s office, shaking out the creases of her sari, looking like she had bitten into something sour. Uncharitably, Uma hoped that Mr. Mangalam had rebuked her for making so many people wait for so many unnecessary hours. The phone gave a small burp against her ear. But before she could check if it was working, the rumble rose through the floor. This time there was no mistaking its intention. It was as though a giant had placed his mouth against the building’s foundations and roared. The floor buckled, throwing Uma to the ground. The giant took the building in both his hands and shook it. A chair flew across the room at Uma. She raised her left arm to shield herself. The chair crashed into her wrist and a pain worse than anything she had known surged through her arm. People were screaming. Feet ran by her, then ran back again. She tried to wedge herself beneath one of the chairs, as she had been taught long ago in grade school, but only her head and shoulders would fit. The cell-phone was still in her other hand, pressed against her ear. Was that Ramon’s voice asking her to leave a message, or was it just her need to hear him?

Above her the ceiling collapsed in an explosion of plaster. Beams broke apart with the sound of gigantic bones snapping. A light fixture shattered. For a moment, before the electricity failed, she saw the glowing filaments of the naked bulb. Rubble fell through the blackness, burying her legs. Her arm was on fire. She cradled it against her chest. (A useless gesture, when she would probably die in the next minutes.) Was that the sound of running water? Was the basement they were in flooding? She thought she heard a beep, the machine ready to record her voice. Ramon, she cried, her mouth full of dust. She thought of his long, meticulous fingers, how they could fix anything she broke. She thought of the small red moles on his chest, just above the left nipple. She wanted to say something important and consoling, something for him remember her by. But she could think of nothing, and then her phone went dead.

Back

‘My father went out very early Tuesday morning and hasn’t returned home yet. I thought he was gone. I spent the night at the foot of his bed but when I awoke, his body’d vanished.’

Despite the crystalline sunshine outside of a warm March morning, the box-like first room of the police station, with its glum blue walls, was tubelit. A doorway—without a door—in the left wall gave access to the other rooms. Opposite it hung a large blackboard—yellow-bordered—bedecked with statistics in Hindi. Those of a permanent nature—name, jurisdiction, circle, range—were ornamentally painted in in white; more ephemeral matter—the name of the Station House Officer, the number of constables on duty and of gun licences issued in the last quarter of the year—were clumsy squiggles in chalk. The board was new; Jamun didn’t remember it from his visits last year. Fortunately, the constable on duty too was new; Jamun didn’t recall having bribed him the previous September in the messy aftermath of Dr Mukherjee’s suicide.

‘Where do you stay, sir?’

‘C 472.’

The constable nodded as though Jamun had merely confirmed what he had surmised all along. He rose smoothly and without warning—startling Jamun a little—crossed to the wooden almirah that faced the main entrance and returned to the desk with a fat bookkeeping register. ‘Bittoo’, said its cover in red, on a green background, above the painting of a long-haired baby sucking its thumb with an adult expression in its eyes. The constable opened it almost at its mathematically exact middle; the two halves, with their edges painted in rainbow-coloured wavelets, lay open and exposed like thighs. With a fat, hairless hand, he began massaging, rhythmically caressing, up, down, up and all the way down again, the stitching of the inner spine of the register. Jamun watched the meaty snake-like fingers ooze up towards him and inexorably slither back, the heavy palm press down almost lovingly with its weight, as though intent on forcing the seam apart. The policeman then brought his fist down on the right-hand leaf with a decisive okay-on-with-it! thump, next smoothened the sheet out in a long caress of contrition, licked his finger and began flipping the pages forward. Almost immediately, he stopped, backtracked, rapidly falling back a dozen pages or so, paused again, shuffled forward once more, regressed, then advanced—like a cat circling about in its litter box, furiously turfing up sand from all angles over its doings, stopping to discontentedly examine its handiwork—till he finally found what he had been looking for, a couple of folded pages, of a different shade of white, preserved in the register, much like the leaves of various plants that Jamun as a schoolboy, for his Botany class, used to abandon in dictionaries and other heavy tomes to establish, with their desiccation, some now-forgotten scientific fact. The constable unfolded the pages, flattening them against the register with his swollen palm. From across the desk, Jamun could just about make out that it was a printed form that posed its questions—generously spaced, like an examination paper—in Hindi.

‘Yes sir, please, the details. Tell me. Name?’

‘Mine? Or my father’s? My father’s, Shyamanand.’

‘Full name and address?’

Jamun gave them and watched the ballpoint pen almost gouge the information into the left-hand page of the register.

‘A full description of the missing person?’

The tubelight suddenly began to flicker furiously, like a moth fluttering its wings when caught in a gecko’s mouth. He paused for the voltage to stop seesawing; with a click, the tubelight steadied and started to glow more brightly than ever. He waited for it to burst all over them and snuff their petty tribulations out. ‘Well, he is eighty-five. White-haired, white beard too. He never stirs out anywhere without one of his walking sticks. I mean, he can’t because he’s half-paralysed.’ He paused for the constable to digest and regurgitate the information out on to the page. Upon hearing ‘half-paralysed’, the policeman, without stopping his notetaking, looked up and gazed for a while at Jamun with his deep and expressionless eyes. ‘I don’t remember what he’s wearing, though. Pyjamas and a T-shirt, of course, but not which ones. And perhaps his mustard-coloured half-sweater and brown woollen cap.’

The constable nodded definitively, as though he had had enough—at least for the time being—of that one particular answer. ‘Date and time of incident?’

‘Tuesday morning, as I said, the 9th of March. He must’ve left at three or four or so; I mean, I thought he was dead but when I woke up, he’d gone.

The policeman gazed expressionlessly again at Jamun, as at a problem. He then, writing on every alternate line, took his time to jot down the response, diligently incising each letter till he was satisfied with its thickness and depth. ‘And your good self and address?’

‘My good self is Jamun, male, single, in good health, fortytwo going on forty-three, innocent as a rose. My good address too is C 472.’

‘Your relationship with Missing Person?’

‘He is my son. I am his father. Damn. I mean, he is my father. I am his son.’

‘A brief description of the event?’

‘I just gave it to you,’ murmured Jamun politely. It was as obsequiously voiced as an objection could be.

The constable probed him with his eyes again. ‘No, that was a full description of the missing person. The present question demands a brief description of the incident.’ At the base of his interrogator’s moustache, Jamun noticed the grey roots that the black dye hadn’t reached.

‘Well, he must’ve just left, that’s all.’ Jamun felt flooded— nauseous—with exhaustion. He hadn’t slept a wink all night.

First there’d been the sledgehammer demolition of Naina Kapur’s house next door that’d stopped at midnight only when neighbour Gupto had phoned some police jeep about the noise; then in the silence there’d been the rats making merry in the kitchen. In the end, he’d got up and bravely bearded them in the wee hours to retrieve a bowl of chocolate cornflakes and cold milk for company. ‘I mean, he was lying in bed icy and I thought he’d had a heart attack in the toilet.

Then I spoke to my neighbour Mrs Naina Kapur late at night across our boundary wall. She couldn’t sleep either— naturally—because the second floor above her head was being knocked down. Then I dozed off on the floor of my father’s room—beneath where he lay, at his feet. And when I awoke, there was no one in the house save me.’

The constable wrote a couple of lines, then woodenly examined them, burped gently, pushed his chair back a little—it farted again, politely—and cracked his knuckles.

‘Place where Missing Person went missing?’ His assiduity seemed to have abated.

‘In the neighbourhood, I guess. I thought I heard in my sleep a car drive away. He used to avoid the beach—because of the crowds—and the boundary wall of the colony because of the stink of fish from the other side.’

‘The profession of Missing Person?’

‘He retired from government service more than twentyfive years ago.’

‘Relatives? Near and dear ones?’

‘I was—am—the only dear one physically near to him.’ Jamun had to pause to clear his throat. ‘My mother died fifteen—sixteen—years ago. I have an elder brother who stays in Noida.’ His eyes and tone became pensive. ‘I haven’t phoned him yet.’

‘Names of Close Friends in Locality/School/Place of Employment of Missing Person?’

‘Me, I suppose. He had been on nodding terms with one neighbour, Mr Nayadu, who was taken a couple of years ago.

Our first-floor tenant Dr Mukherjee would drop in every now and then for a game of chess and a cup of tea but he too passed away last September in somewhat unfortunate circumstances. Who else? Our new tenant, a foreigner lady, would chat with my father once in a while—she’s away at the moment—Benares or Mathura or Ujjain or something—and there’s our cook, a widow—she doesn’t speak at all and doesn’t listen much either. In her presence, my father held forth often on what disasters her dishes were and what wonders with fish curry would have been possible under the benign influence of coconut if only she had been intelligent— but none of them were his close friends. He was eighty-five, remember.’ Jamun stopped to clear his head, feeling that in a series of unintentionally ill-natured remarks, the last had been particularly unfilial. The constable seemed to agree, for, leaving a couple of lines blank for some future jottings, he let the entire paragraph pass.

‘Any hobby, passion or interest of Missing Person?’

Unsought, like imps unstoppered from some phial, stray lines from Jamun’s past floated up to beguile with their associations his wits. ‘The old are really fairly simple to manage. They begin to doze more and more every day, and to drink mugs of warm milk; when they turn seventy-two, they sigh and set their sights on seventy-three.’ The opinion had been Kasibai’s, his cook, trollop and housekeeper of fifteen years ago. After the death of Jamun’s mother, his father had come to stay with them and within the year, unable to bear the old man’s nit-picking, Kasibai, claiming that some calamity in her village needed her attention, had packed up, borrowed some money from Jamun, stolen some more and left. Their sojourn together on the whole had been horrible; staying with his father alone thereafter became quieter, more tender and companionable and markedly more depressing.

Jamun’s daydreams of suicide dated from approximately that phase of his life. In fifteen years, he just hadn’t been able to decide which reason for it was to be judged paramount.

‘He and I played chess on weekends. He watched TV and, being constipated, while waiting in the mornings for the urge to visit the toilet, wrote poems in Bengali.’

The constable incised one word on his page. Jamun guessed it to be ‘TV’.

‘Nature of Missing Person?’

With a shrug in his voice, a what-else-is-there-to-say in the slump of his shoulders, Jamun replied, ‘He was an eightyfive- year-old widowed gentleman.’ The policeman’s steadfast and expressionless gaze extracted from him after a few moments three more sentences. ‘He liked food. He had no vices. He was quiet because he remained alone throughout the day.’

‘Missing Person was Male or Female?’

‘Male.’

‘He had any Love Relationship with anybody?’

‘No.’

‘Any quarrel, dispute, any enmity with anyone?’

A wasp and a tea boy entered the room at the same time, the second pausing for a moment to poise himself on his toes on the doorstep, holding aloft by its strap—like a lantern in a mine—his once-white flask and cheerfully but wordlessly, with his wriggling eyebrows, asking them whether. While Jamun declined, the wasp buzzed around the constable’s head like an orbiting satellite. The invisible laser beam in his gaze made it swerve towards Jamun, change tack midway and head for the switchboard beside the entrance, where it obediently disappeared into one of the sockets like an explorer into a cave on the face of a mountain in a Tintin comic.

‘Well, we had our minor disagreements like father and son always do but nothing serious.’

‘Any crime/misdemeanour/felony/transgression in Missing Person’s personal life?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Has he ever gone missing before?’

‘No, never, not in the forty years that I’ve known him.’

‘Missing Person’s usual haunts? Places that he frequented both here and outside the city?’

‘He hasn’t been anywhere alone in the last two decades, not since his paralytic stroke. He stayed with me, then with my brother. When my brother went off on work to Noida, I asked for a transfer so that I could be here with him. You see, he didn’t want to abandon the house that he had built. He wanted to spend his last days here.’

The gush of information was painstakingly abridged into three lines. Dulled, Jamun watched the ballpoint in the constable’s large hand incise and etch twice the straights and curves of each letter before jerkily—but methodically—moving on.

‘I parked my car outside the compound, on the road. I hope that’s okay. I mean it won’t be towed away?’

Over his glass of tea, the constable again gazed at Jamun silently and expressionlessly till he had telepathically transmitted his low opinion of answerers who posed questions to interrogators during an examination.

‘Names of frequent visitors to your residence?’

‘None. I mean, the most regular were the fishwala, the vegetable vendor and the fruit seller whom my father used to call Kabuliwala because he is tall, thin, sunburnt, long-nosed, scruffy-bearded and a wily bargainer. None. When our tenant is here, she has visitors sometimes—a woman comes to massage her and a card sharp drops in twice a week for her yoga sessions but nobody comes to meet us. Except for Lobhesh Monga. He’s a builder. He drops by now and again to try and entice my father to sell the house to him so that he can break it down and build a four-storey apartment block on it, not counting the basement.’

‘Atmosphere of the house is normal?’

‘Not sunny, if that’s what you want to know. My father and I—and the house itself, I should add—are all moody by temperament.’ Jamun stopped, shut his eyes, gripped his knees and waited for the sudden giddiness to pass. Breathe deeply, with your abdomen, he cautioned himself. Waves of blood, it seemed, rose up from behind his ears and, roaring and swelling, thumped dully against his forehead. ‘We lived together quietly and unhappily. I mean, if someone had to leave the house, it should’ve been me,’ he added without opening his eyes.

‘Any financial stringency in the household? Did Missing Person thrash you or you him because of violent disagreements and tensions over your or his vices or addictions? Was the atmosphere of the house vitiated as a consequence?’ ‘Vitiated’ was in English—ghar ka vatavaran vitiated ho gaya tha kya?

Thinking that that set of questions did not merit a reply, Jamun continued to inhale deeply and try and quickly awaken his third eye to a furious subjugation of all that restive blood in his head when a ‘Yes, please?’ from the constable made him open his eyes, blink and respond tonelessly, ‘No, we aren’t either poor or very rich. No, we didn’t thrash each other—perhaps because we were as—if not more—vitiated than the house.’

Outside, a white jeep scudded in through the gates and skidded to a halt between the jacaranda saplings that had been planted a couple of years earlier by an environmentally conscious Station House Officer. From the rear of the vehicle emerged two pot-bellied policemen and a civilian in pyjamas, white shirt and handcuffs. Jamun watched them walk away towards the outhouses. A brown stray dog, wagging its tail, followed them at a trot.

‘Missing Person liked his profession?’

‘He had none. He was eighty-five.’

From his desk, the constable picked up the two pages of the printed form and, pushing his thick lips out this way and that, looked them over, as though wondering whether he could summarize the remaining questions into a couple and thus be done with it.

‘Bad Company had Missing Person fallen into before/ever/ from time to time?’

‘No.’

‘Missing Person failed his school/college exams and therefore left home?’

‘No.’

‘Was fed up with studies in general?’

‘He loved books, the older and mustier the better.’

‘If Missing Person stayed in hostel, perhaps its atmosphere was vitiated?’

‘Such was not the case in the present instance,’ replied

Jamun, feeling—on seeing the constable nod his head in slow and steady approbation—that he had at last begun to speak his interrogator’s language.

‘Because of old age, loss of memory?’

‘No, not really. He didn’t remember only the things that he didn’t want to.’

‘Any sudden and unexpected event relevant to the issue?’

While wondering, after all that he had said, what the policeman could possibly mean, Jamun paused to look as though he was occupied in setting his thoughts in order. ‘My father liked our tenant. Her visa is to expire soon and she’s been facing some difficulty about its renewal. That might have upset and depressed him. He was the sort of person whom anything could depress—from the way someone shut a door to there not being enough garlic in the chicken curry, anything. He didn’t like it when she went away on work or vacation. He liked exchanging pleasantries with her. And with our next-door neighbour, Mrs Naina Kapur. I can’t though think of any specific sudden event that could have unsettled him. Though all events are unexpected in one sense, aren’t they. It isn’t as though round about now is the anniversary of my mother’s death or anything. I mean, we did squabble on Monday afternoon about a new glass nameplate that he’d ordered without telling me but that was a routine overflow of bile.’

‘Missing Person was ill? Undergoing treatment where he was?’

‘He’s been half-paralysed for more than the past two decades because of a stroke. He can walk about and so on and doesn’t need help to eat and bathe and dress but his left arm is a dead, dried-up stick. While Dr Mukherjee was around, he would give my father some capsules now and then for his blood pressure but he—my father—took them largely because they were free.’ Jamun paused to hear himself, to gauge whether what he had said sounded right. ‘I mean, he didn’t as a matter of course need medication. Paradoxically, his heart and blood pressure stabilized after his stroke. As I said, it only—if you know what I mean—only—killed his left arm and half-killed his left leg. When he was in a good mood, he would make it a point to lift his left leg and walk—just as the physiotherapists had advised him to. When he was tired and morose, he would drag it behind him; it then sounded like a broom sluggishly sweeping the floor. When I heard that foot being lugged around in another room, I knew that he was blue.’

The constable wrote nothing down and stolidly continued to regard Jamun’s face. After a moment, he turned his head fifty degrees and stared out through the open doorway at the March sunshine on the leaves—grey with dust—of the hibiscus bush. It heard his silent demand because the tea boy soon appeared at the threshold with his once-white flask.

‘Mind of Missing Person was okay or feeble?’

‘He wasn’t in any way senile.’

‘Religiously inclined? Ever gone on pilgrimage? Kedarnath Badrinath Mansarovar Jai Jagannath Kumbh Mela?’

‘Metaphysical maybe more than religious.’ Jamun couldn’t find the Hindi word for metaphysical, so used the English.

‘His daily route included the Shiva temple behind A Block but that was because of its garden and the view of the sea from behind it. By metaphysical, I mean that he liked reading and daydreaming about the eternal questions. How can one tell the difference between Life and Death?

Between God and Death? Did the Buddha return to the Life Cycle because Nirvana was too empty? A time to be born, a time to die, a time to go?

‘Missing Person left home because of despondency and low spirits?’

‘The only person I know who was consistently more blue than him is me.’

At that reply, the constable put down his ballpoint, scratched the sweat stain at his left armpit with one finger, finished his second round of tea, looked into the empty glass for a moment and belched gently.

‘Missing Person is likely to be where now you think?’

‘I think he’s dead. While out on the road, he met with an accident. A hit and run, a heart attack. He’s lying now in a hole somewhere cold and half-covered with earth.’ The constable’s eyes seemed to become more distant, to recede, when he saw the tears of exhaustion and guilt in Jamun’s. ‘Or Lobhesh Monga’s spirited him away to one of his pilgrim resthouses at Kashi or Haridwar or Dakshineshwar or wherever.

Good food and salvation in return for a couple of signatures on stamped paper. I don’t know. It isn’t like my father to hobble off down a lane less travelled. Maybe someone picked him up and left him cold in the morgue of a hospital. You have information—no—about all such cases? What is the procedure? Can I visit all these hospitals by myself? Will they allow me to inspect their dead?’

In reply, the constable, leaving the ballpoint inside it as a bookmark, shut the register on his labours.

Back

I will have passed into the lap of Sri Maharaj when you meet the sahib with the letter. Twenty years from now, it will be your turn to be hanged by the government. Until then, know that your father stole as long as he breathed, robbed when he could not steal and killed whenever necessary. Ask the youngest child in Najibabad, the richest shopkeeper in Bijnor, the most powerful landlord in Bareilly—they will tell you that Sultana the bhantu was the greatest daku of all.

In two years you will reach the age of six, when a boy must begin to learn the trade of his fathers. Now, listen carefully to the munshi as he reads this, and ask him to repeat the words so you do not forget. There are three hollow spaces inside the mouth where a man may hide coins, rings and small knives: one on either side, between the cheek and upper lip, and a third, secret one, deep inside the throat. There exists a fourth hiding place, not in the mouth but at the other end; keep nothing but silver trinkets there, because gold may not be worn below the waist, let alone kept in a dirty place.

At the age of seven, you must learn how to slide coins from your palm into the sleeve of your kurta, how to hold a long musket against your body so no one suspects you have one, how to speak to a sub-inspector so he thinks you have just woken from sleep, how to excite the pity of an English superintendent of police who is about to arrest you (he will arrest you anyway, but his inspectors will not kick you if he expresses concern), how to engage a shopkeeper in conversation while you steal his grain, and how to pass as a bania though you are dark and thin.

At seven and a half you must learn the language of the jungle, because a bhantu, even one born in jail, is a child of the Bhabar. If you can shriek like a peacock, whistle like a shama bird and chirp like a bulbul, you will never be without words. When the police are about, use these signals to speak to other bhantus: bark like a kakar that has been attacked by a leopard, chatter like a monkey warning the jungle of a tiger’s approach or make the sound of a porcupine rattling its quills while running from a wild dog.

Before you turn eight and your limbs lose their tenderness, you must learn to squeeze through holes in walls—a diligent boy can pass through a passage that will scratch the sides of a snake. A bhantu does not fear the dark; he does not dread being smothered or suffocated in small spaces. Like a baby in a womb, he stays inside as long as he likes and pushes himself out when the police have left.

A boy of eight must be able to complete at least one roomalinaqab: dig a hole under a locked door and crawl through it. There are two other ways of entering a house: khan-naqab, in which you need to dig through the wall, and bagli-naqab, in which you make a hole in the wall near the door and open the latch from the inside. I do not favour these: you never know who is asleep on the other side of a wall, and people in Bareilly and Moradabad lock their doors from inside. Roomali-naqab is the safest and most effective method: no one sleeps behind a door, and you can always dig a passage under it. If the doorsill is paved, dig deeper and you will reach sand, because nobody lays more than two layers of brick under the door.

Remember not to rob when theft is possible, but do not hesitate to flash a knife if challenged. When necessary, kill. This is the wisdom handed down by our fathers, and that which has been true for four hundred years cannot become wrong in one lifetime.

The best time to poison a man with datura seeds is after he has been outside all day in the hot month of Aashaad, so the police think it is heat stroke. When using arsenic, dye your sheets green in full view of the police, then use some of that dye in the kitchen—your enemy will fall ill. Most banias sell the dye and it is cheap. Remember to burn the dhoti in which you pound and sift the powder, so the police find no trace. When shot by the police or bitten by a snake, look for the brahmabuti plant in the Bhabar jungle. Any bhantu can teach you how to recognize it from its flowers. Tear off three leaves, wash them and squeeze their juice on the wound. It will heal the bite of the most vicious krait and the wound from a police musket, or even an English sahib’s rifle.

When shooting with a 12-bore musket, remember that it does not fire well beyond eighty arm-lengths, and the new muskets issued to the police in Rohilkhand produce too much smoke, giving away your location.

Do not rob sahibs, kings or nawabs, or ASPs, SPs and police officers of higher ranks. The greatest man you may steal from is a DSP, a deputy superintendent of police, because he will be a thakur or a brahmin in the twilight of his life, not a young sahib freshly arrived from Vilayat. Though the DSP is poorly paid, he will have collected a small treasure from a lifetime of hoarding. Being old, he will eagerly part with it when he fears for his life.

Twice every year, the Bijnor police come to Najibabad Fort and set up a desk near the gate. Bhantus are asked to form a line and the police take pictures of their hands. When you are twelve you will be asked to stand in this line and your fingers will be pressed on a tin slab smeared with ink. Once they have this picture, the police will know every time you touch a knife, a handle or a doorknob. From the guards at the gate, try to find out when they will come; the guards look stern but they are bhantus. For many years, my dada—your great-grandfather—also stood guard at this gate, and he would tell any bhantu what he knew in exchange for a banana. Use the banana the sahibs give you during morning prayer. On the day the police come, hide in the grove of samal trees near the rear wall of the fort, so they never get a picture of your fingers.

When you are thirteen you will be able to leave the fort alone with a day pass. In towns like Najibabad, Bijnor and Moradabad, you will find thakurs and banias shrinking from you, pandits sprinkling themselves with water from the Ganga when your shadow falls on them, and the poorest chamars and bhangis— though they beat leather and clean drains—refusing to touch you. You will then ask yourself: what kind of blood does a bhantu have that a chamar will not touch him? Know that a man’s place in this world is determined by his father’s—your birth is no lower than that of the sahib who brings you this letter. A bhantu’s blood is redder than a bania’s or a thakur’s, and his heart beats faster. Four hundred years ago, your fathers were rajputs, rulers of Chittorgarh in Rajputana in the great desert to the west. They tasted the Mughal emperor’s wine, smoked his charas and fondled his wives. It was the emperor Akbar who turned his back on Maharana Pratap, our father, and drove him from Chittorgarh Fort into the ravines of Haldighat. We bhantus have wandered the jungles ever since—sons of rajputs born to rule—subject to no one and obeying no one’s laws. Some day we will regain Chittorgarh, and the thakurs and banias will tremble before us. Until then, we must steal when we can, rob when we cannot and kill when necessary.

I have now taught you all that a boy can learn from his father. When you are a young man hiding from the police in the Bhabar jungles, you will wonder what kind of a bhantu your father was. Riding through villages in the Tarai plains, you will stop to ask, ‘Who was Sultana Daku?’ From inside their shops, the banias will be eager to answer, for they have seen my vengeance. Or you will ask the government, after they have captured you and set a date for your hanging, ‘What do you know of Sultana Daku?’ They will bring you files with dates of this or that raid, the names of those killed and long lists of property that I looted. But a boy must learn the truth from his father, so I will now tell you how I was born, how taught the trade and brought to manhood, how loved and how betrayed to the police.

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