I wave them away as we emerge, but they follow us down the street, ringing their bells and crisscrossing our path. “What a lovely wife you have,” they hoot. “So sexy in that red sari without her burkha—too bad the Limbus will beat her up to teach her a lesson.”

The oldest in the group, a boy of about twelve with long scabs on his cheeks, stops his bicycle right in front of us. “Come this way.” He gestures towards a narrow alleyway trailing off. “The guards on the main road have rifles. They’ll only let you through if you pay a lot.”

Although I’m confident I can prove I’m Muslim (if reciting all the Koran verses I know by heart doesn’t do it, there’s always the anatomical identity card), I lose my nerve. Sarita would present a problem even if less flamboyantly dressed, plus what if they find my gun? I take her hand and follow the boy down the alley, wondering if he’s leading us into a trap. The feeling intensifies as he ushers us through a large wooden doorway into an empty compound, then chains his bicycle to a post and disappears up some steps. I’m looking for rifles to start blazing at us from the windows circling the compound when the boy returns. “Here,” he says, handing Sarita a length of brown fabric. “Put this on.”

“What is it?” she asks, holding up the sturdy cotton material. “It looks like a tablecloth.”

The boy shrugs. “It used to be. But now it’s a burkha. My mother cut out the eyeholes and sewed together the ends—she used to cover my sister with it while shopping before we had a proper one made. I’ll let you have it cheap—just fifty rupees.”

Sarita declares she’s not about to wear a tablecloth, but I take it from her and give the boy a twenty, who smiles and says his name is Yusuf. He scampers to a door on the other side of the compound. “See?” he says, throwing it open. “You’re now past the guards.”

We step into a market lane—so thronged with humanity that it almost makes up for the desolation of the neighborhoods we’ve trudged through. Unlike my last time in Mahim, every last woman is now enveloped in a bulky burkha and most of the men sport skullcaps and beards. (Did they begin growing them the minute war was declared?) Flaming torches affixed to the energy-sapped lampposts give the scene a festive, medieval air. Sarita stumbles along beside me, looking like a child playing “ghost” under her tablecloth. “I can’t believe it,” she suddenly exclaims, pointing at a man sitting by the road selling pomegranates. She buys a large red specimen for fifty rupees to replace the one lost in the train. “How that swine in Crawford Market cheated me!”

“This one cheated you too,” Yusuf says. “I could have got it for fifteen.”

Both the quality and variety of wares being hawked from the pavements amaze me. The pomegranates, like the glistening apples and pears and oranges, nestle in individual foam compartments—packing usually reserved for only the choicest imported fruits. Tins of meat and fish, practically never spotted outside of tony South Bombay boutiques, lie stacked in bountiful, artistically spiraling pyramids. One vendor sells nothing but five different kinds of toothpaste—upon closer examination, the brands are all unfamiliar (“Denticon,” “Protect,” “Kingcol”) with writing in English and Arabic, even Chinese! Where does all this come from? I ask Yusuf. The question stumps him initially, but then he brightens. “We must manufacture it all here in Mahim,” he proudly declares.

We haggle over how much he will charge to lead us to the Hotel Rahim. His first bid is a new pair of Adidas, being sold by one of the hawkers for three thousand rupees, but he soon capitulates when I hold fast to my offer of another twenty. “That’s the way to the one restaurant still open,” he says, pointing down a narrow lane as we pass a row of old buildings. “People claim they’ve started chopping up dogs to use in their kebabs, but my mother says that’s just the way tinned meat tastes. And if you go further, you’ll come to the main road with the mosque—you can join the line if you want to eat for free.”

Yusuf tells us his father died when he was three, that in addition to his sister, he has a sixteen-year-old brother who’s with the Limbus. “Not by choice—they came to our door one day, and my mother didn’t have anything to pay them off. When my brother resisted, they caught me by the hair and started beating me with a whip.” He points at the scabs on his face. “Luckily, I’d seen them do it before in the market, so I had enough sense to cover my eyes with my fists.”

Sarita is so distressed that she hugs him to herself and kisses the scars that extend to his forehead. He looks up craftily at her face. “Why don’t you get me the Adidas? That way, I can outrun them if they try to catch me again.”

Just past a shuttered post office, the crowd peters out and the buildings give way to a large swathe of blackened ruins. Except for the odd intact wall or doorway, everything for a few blocks seems to have been consumed in some terrible conflagration. “Did the Pakistanis bomb the area?” I ask, as we pick our way through the rubble and charred timbers.

“The Pakistanis? No, they never bother us. They just fly past above. Though once I saw a big fight in the air, with rockets and everything. One of the planes exploded—I’m not sure whose it was. The whole city shook when it landed. You could see the smoke from everywhere, just like when the bridge blew up. We tried to find it on our bikes, but it was too far away—we rode all the way to the devi standing on her head before turning back.”

“So this wasn’t caused by another plane crash?”

“A plane crash?” Yusuf laughs. “No, it’s the Limbus who did this. See that arch still standing there? That was the entrance to the new Ad Labs Cineplex. The Limbus said movies are against the Koran, so they set the theater on fire. But the flames spread and all the buildings around burned down with it. Including their own headquarters.” He chuckles, then gets wistful. “I used to love watching movies there. The seats were so good you could see every part of the screen. Now the Limbus will beat you if you even hum a film song.” He starts singing softly—a snatch from the theme of Superdevi, then looks around to make sure nobody is listening.

The ruins give rise to an area of town that shimmers through the dusk with a familiar yet unexpected luminosity. I realize it is the light from electric bulbs. “Most people here have their own generators,” Yusuf explains. “It’s where the rich live.” He points to a building with tastefully lit awnings over each window. “That’s the Hotel Rahim—I’ve never been inside. They say Shahrukh Khan himself once stayed in it.”

As we part, he high-fives me. “That’s the way they do it in America—I’ve seen it on TV.” He starts running down the lane, then turns around. “If you need help, just ask for Yusuf—everyone in Mahim knows me.”


THE MONSOONS ARRIVED, putting a serious crimp in our sex life. The beaches turned stormy, the library balcony wet and sludgy—so many pigeons sheltered in its eaves that droppings fell as profusely as rain. Even the Regal, perversely, got packed, showing hit after sold-out hit. One evening, we snuck into the deserted racecourse at Mahalaxmi but couldn’t get into the covered stands—we ended up so drenched and muddy trekking across the turf that no taxi would take us back.

June went by, and then July, each week getting wetter (but more parched in terms of sex). The fact that I spent so much of my leisure time within striking distance of Karun made this forced abstinence even harder to bear. “It’s the eternal tragedy of being gay in Bombay,” I lamented. “Never a place to yourself.” With city rents so high, most sons (the Jazter included) lived with their parents until marriage (the Jazter excluded)—and usually well after as well.

Rahim escaped this fate. His widower father passed away just as my cousin turned of legal age, leaving him the sprawling turn-of-the-century flat near Chowpatty where the two of them lived. I’d barely seen him since returning from the States, so I was surprised to get the invitation from him in the mail.

“He says it’s a wedding celebration. All men, lasting all night. Knowing Rahim, it’s probably going to get quite wild.” I slid Karun the card across the tea things on the table. “But we don’t have to worry about anyone—the important thing is we can do what we want, spend the night together.”

“You mean there’ll be other people around?”

“Who cares? We’ll wrap ourselves in a blanket and hide in a nook so that nobody can even see us.”

“I’m not ready for such openness.”

I’d been through this before with Karun—his extreme trepidation at the slightest hint of exposure. He’d used the same reason to veto disco nights organized sporadically at different clubs around the city by the local Gay Bombay group. “Don’t you think it’s time to loosen up a bit? Or are you still waiting for your report card from the experiments to come exonerate you in the mail?”

“It’s hardly like that. I just don’t want to blare out such a private matter to strangers at a party.”

“What you really don’t want to do is admit you’re just like them.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Which part? That your report card is stamped H for Homo or that it’s a label you just can’t accept?”

“If you feel that way, maybe you should go to Rahim’s yourself. I’m sure you’ll find someone more to your standards amongst all those other men.”

I stalked out of the tea shop, incredulous Karun would pass up such an opportunity in the middle of a drought. What was he, a camel, that he had used his hump to store up the sex we’d had? Why couldn’t he have a normal libido, be a slave to unseemly urges like everyone else? The Jazter jewels had turned so blue that they’d be a pair of twisted ice bonbons soon. I needed massive quantities of immediate action to restore them to their natural state.