A fortnight ago, he had suffered the greatest blow of his life. His father had passed away from pneumonia. The day after Gururaj returned to Kittur from his ancestral village, having shaved his head and sat with a priest by the water tank in his ancestral temple to recite Sanskrit verses to bid his father’s soul farewell, he discovered that he had been promoted to deputy executive editor, the number two position at the newspaper where he had worked for twenty years.

It was life’s way of evening things out, Gururaj told himself.

The moon shone brightly, with a large halo around it. He had forgotten how beautiful a nocturnal walk could be. The light was strong and clean, and it laminated the earth’s surface; every object carved sharp shadows in it. He thought it might be the day after a full moon.

Even at this hour of the night, work continued. He heard a low, continuous sound, like the audible respiration of the nocturnal world: an open-backed truck was collecting mud, probably for some construction site. The driver was asleep at the wheel, his arm stuck out of one window, his feet out of the other one. As if ghosts were doing the work behind, morsels of mud came flying into the truck from that direction. The back of Gururaj’s shirt became damp, and he thought, But I will catch a cold. I should go back. That thought made him feel old, and he decided to go on; he took a few steps to his left and began to walk right down the middle of Umbrella Street; it had been a childhood fantasy of his to walk down the middle of a main road, but he had never been able to sneak away from his father’s watchful eyes long enough to fulfill the fantasy.

He came to a halt, right in the middle of the road. Then he quickly went into a side alley.

Two dogs were mating. He crouched down and tried to see exactly what was happening.

After completing the act, the dogs separated. One went down the alley and the other headed toward Gururaj, running with postcoital vigor and almost brushing his trousers as it went past. He followed.

The dog came onto the main road and sniffed at a newspaper. Taking the newspaper in its mouth, it ran back into the alley, and Gururaj ran behind it. Deeper and deeper the dog ran into the side alleys, as the editor followed. Finally, it dropped its bundle; turning, it snarled at Gururaj, and then tore the newspaper to shreds.

“Good dog! Good dog!”

Gururaj turned to his right to confront the speaker. He found himself face-to-face with an apparition: a man in khaki, carrying an old World War II-era rifle, his yellowish, leathery face covered with nicks and scars. His eyes were narrow and slanting. Drawing closer, Gururaj thought, Of course. He’s a Gurkha.

The Gurkha was sitting on a wooden chair out on the pavement, in front of a bank’s rolled-down shutter.

“Why do you say that?” said Gururaj. “Why are you praising the dog for destroying a paper?”

“The dog is doing the right thing. Because not a word in the newspaper is true.”

The Gurkha-Gururaj took him for an all-night security guard for the bank-rose from his chair and took a step toward the dog.

At once it dropped the paper and ran away. Picking up the torn and mangled and saliva-stained paper with care, the Gurkha turned the pages.

Gururaj winced.

“Tell me what you’re looking for: I know everything that’s in that newspaper.”

The Gurkha let the dirty paper go.

“There was an accident last night. Near Flower Market Street. A hit-and-run.”

“I know the case,” Gururaj said. It had not been his story, but he read the proofs of the entire paper every day. “An employee of Mr. Engineer’s was involved.”

“The newspaper said that. But it was not the employee who did it.”

“Really?” Gururaj smiled. “Then who did it?”

The Gurkha looked right into Gururaj’s eyes. He smiled, and then pointed the barrel of the ancient gun at him. “I can tell you, but I’d have to shoot you afterwards.”

Looking at the barrel of the rifle, Gururaj thought, I’m talking to a madman.

The next day, Gururaj was in his office at six a.m. First to get there, as always. He began by checking the telex machine, inspecting the reels of badly smudged news it was printing out from Delhi and Colombo and other cities he would never visit in his life. At seven he turned on the radio and began jotting down the main points of the morning’s column.

At eight o’clock, Ms. D’Mello arrived. The chattering of a typewriter broke the peace of the office.

She was writing her usual column, “Twinkle Twinkle.” It was a daily beauty column; a women’s hair-salon owner sponsored it, and Ms. D’Mello answered readers’ questions about hair care, offering advice and gently nudging her correspondents in the direction of the salon owner’s products.

Gururaj never spoke to Ms. D’Mello. He resented the fact that his newspaper ran a paid-for column, a practice he considered unethical. But there was another reason to be cool toward Ms. D’Mello: she was an unmarried woman, and he didn’t want anyone to assume that he might have the slightest interest in her.

Relatives and friends of his father had told Guru for years that he ought to move out of the YMCA and marry, and he had almost given in, thinking that the woman would be needed to nurse his father in his growing senility, when the need for a wife was removed entirely. Now he was determined not to lose his independence to anyone.

By eleven, when Gururaj came out of his room again, the office was full of smoke-the only aspect of his workplace that he disliked. The reporters were at their desks, drinking tea and smoking. The telex machine, off to the side, was vomit ing out rolls of smudged and misspelled news reports from Delhi.

After lunch, he sent the office boy to find Menon, a young journalist and a rising star at the paper. Menon came into his room with the top two buttons of his shirt open, a shiny gold necklace flashing at his neck. “Sit down,” Gururaj said.

Gururaj showed him two articles about the car crash on Flower Market Street, which he had dug out of the newspaper’s archives that morning. The first (he pointed to it) had appeared before the trial; the second after the verdict.

“You wrote both articles, didn’t you?”

Menon nodded.

“In the first article, the car that hits the dead man is a red Maruti Suzuki. In the second, it is a white Fiat. Which one was it, really?”

Menon inspected the two articles.

“I just filed according to the police reports.”

“You didn’t bother looking at the vehicle yourself, I take it?”

That night he ate the dinner that the caretaker at the YMCA brought up to his room; she talked a lot, but he was worried she was trying to marry him off to her daughter, and he said as little as possible to her.

As he went to sleep he set the alarm for two o’clock.

He woke up with his heart racing fast; he turned on the lights, left his room, and squinted at his clock. It was twenty minutes to two. He put on his trousers, patted his wavy strands of hair back into place, and almost ran down the stairs and out the gate of the YMCA and in the direction of the bank.

The Gurkha was there at his chair, with his ancient rifle.

“Listen here, did you see this accident with your own eyes?”

“Of course not. I was sitting right here. This is my job.”

“Then how the hell did you know the cars had been changed in the police-”

“Through the grapevine.”

The Gurkha talked quietly. He explained to the newspaper editor that a network of night watchmen passed information around Kittur; every night watchman came to the next for a cigarette and told him something, and that one visited the next one for a cigarette in turn. In this way, word got around. Secrets got spread. The truth-what really happened during the daytime-was preserved.

This is insane, this is impossible-Gururaj wiped the sweat from his forehead.