Although my schedule was shot to pieces when I went to get Dharam-he was sleeping in the net, and I woke him up and said we were going on a holiday to the South, and dragged him out-and it was hard to keep my red bag in one hand and Dharam in the other hand (for the train station is a dangerous place for a little boy, you know-lots of shady characters around), still I began to move in this zigzag way south from Delhi.

On the third day of traveling like this, red bag in hand, I was at Hyderabad, waiting in line at the station tea shop to buy a cup of tea before my train left. (Dharam was guarding the seat in the compartment.) There was a gecko just above the tea shop, and I was looking at it with concern, hoping it would move before it was my turn to get tea.

The gecko turned to the left-it ran over a large piece of paper posted on the wall-it stood still for a moment, like that, then darted to the side.

That large piece of paper on the wall was a police poster-my police poster. It had already arrived here. I looked at it with a smile of pride.

A smile that lasted just a second. For some bizarre reason-you'll see how sloppily things get done in India -my poster had been stapled to another poster, of two guys from Kashmir -two terrorists wanted for bombing something or the other.

You'd almost think, looking at the posters, that I was a terrorist too. How annoying.

I realized that I was being watched. A fellow with his hands behind his back was looking at the poster, and at me, most intently. I began to tremble. I edged away from the poster, but I was too late. The moment he saw me leaving, he ran up to me, caught my wrist, and stared at my face.

Then he said, "What's it say? That poster you're reading?"

"Read it for yourself."

"Can't."

Now I understood why he had come running. It was the desperation of an illiterate man to get the attention of the literate man. From his accent I knew he was from the Darkness too.

"It's the wanted-men list for this week," I said. "Those two are terrorists. From Kashmir."

"What did they do?"

"They blew up a school. They killed eight children."

"And this fellow? The one with the mustache?" He tapped my photo with a knuckle of his right hand.

"He's the guy who caught them."

"How did he do that?"

To create the illusion I was reading the printing on the wall, I squinted at the two posters, and moved my lips.

"This fellow was a driver. Says here he was in his car, and these two terrorist guys came up to him."

"Then?"

"Says he pretended he didn't know they were terrorists, and took them for a ride around Delhi in his car. Then he stopped the car in a dark spot, and smashed a bottle and cut their necks with it." I slashed two necks with my thumb.

"What kind of bottle?"

"An English liquor bottle. They tend to be pretty solid."

"I know," he said. "I used to go to the English liquor shop for my master every Friday. He liked Smir-fone."

"Smir-noff," I said, but he wasn't listening. He was peering again at the photo in the poster.

Suddenly he put his hand on my shoulder.

"You know who this fellow in the poster looks like?"

"Who?" I asked.

He grinned.

"Me."

I looked at his face, and I looked at the photo.

"It's true," I said, slapping him on the back.

I told you: it could be the face of half the men in India.

And then, because I felt sorry for that poor illiterate, thinking he had just endured what my father must have endured at so many railway stations-being mocked and hoodwinked by strangers-I bought him a cup of tea before going back to the train.

Sir:

I am not a politician or a parliamentarian. Not one of those extraordinary men who can kill and move on, as if nothing had happened. It took me four weeks in Bangalore to calm my nerves.

For those four weeks I did the same thing again and again. I left the hotel-a small, seedy place near the train station that I had taken after leaving a deposit of five hundred rupees-every morning at eight and walked around with a bag full of cash in my hands for four hours (I dared not leave it in the hotel room) before returning for lunch.

Dharam and I ate together. What he did to keep himself amused in the mornings I don't know, but he was in good spirits. This was the first holiday he had had in his whole life. His smiles cheered me up.

Lunch was four rupees a plate. The food is good value in the south. It is strange food, though, vegetables cut up and served in watery curries. Then I went up to my room and slept. At four o'clock I came down and ordered a pack of Parle Milk biscuits and a tea, because I did not know yet how to drink the coffee.

I was eager to try coffee. You see, poor people in the north of this country drink tea, and poor people in the south drink coffee. Who decided that things should be like this, I don't know, but it's like this. So this was the first time I was smelling coffee on a daily basis. I was dying to try it out. But before you could drink it, you had to know how to drink it. There was an etiquette, a routine, associated with it that fascinated me. It was served in a cup set into a tumbler, and then it had to be poured in certain quantities and sipped at a certain speed from the tumbler. How the pouring was to be done, how the sipping was to be done, I did not know. For a while I only watched.

It took me a week to realize that everyone was doing it differently. One man poured all the coffee into his tumbler at once; another never used the tumbler at all.

They're all strangers here, I said to myself. They're all drinking coffee for the first time.

That was another of the attractions of Bangalore. The city was full of outsiders. No one would notice one more.

I spent four weeks in that hotel near the railway station, doing nothing. I admit there were doubts in my mind. Should I have gone to Mumbai instead? But the police would have thought of that at once-everyone goes to Mumbai in the films after they kill someone, don't they?

Calcutta! I should have gone there.

One morning Dharam said: "Uncle, you look so depressed. Let's go for a walk." We walked through a park where drunken men lay on benches amid wild overgrown weeds. We came out onto a broad road; on the other side of the road stood a huge stone building with a golden lion on top of it.

"What is this building, Uncle?"

"I don't know, Dharam. It must be where the ministers live in Bangalore."

On the gable of the building I saw a slogan:

GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD'S WORK

"You're smiling, Uncle."

"You're right, Dharam. I am smiling. I think we'll have a good time in Bangalore," I said and I winked at him.

I moved out of the hotel and took a flat on rent. Now I had to make a living in Bangalore -I had to find out how I could fit into this city.

I tried to hear Bangalore 's voice, just as I had heard Delhi 's.

I went down M.G. Road and sat down at the Cafй Coffee Day, the one with the outdoor tables. I had a pen and a piece of paper with me, and I wrote down everything I overheard.

I completed that computer program in two and a half minutes.

An American today offered me four-hundred thousand dollars for my start-up and I told him, "That's not enough!"

Is Hewlett-Packard a better company than IBM?

Everything in the city, it seemed, came down to one thing.

Outsourcing. Which meant doing things in India for Americans over the phone. Everything flowed from it-real estate, wealth, power, sex. So I would have to join this outsourcing thing, one way or the other.

The next day I took an autorickshaw up to Electronics City. I found a banyan tree by the side of a road, and I sat down under it. I sat and watched the buildings until it was evening and I saw all the SUVs racing in; and then I watched until two in the morning, when the SUVs began racing out of the buildings.