“Who knows?”

Only fifty paise, after an hour.

Next she tried to get on the bus when it stopped at the red light, and beg there, but the conductor saw her coming and stood at the door: “Nothing doing.”

“Why not, uncle?”

“Who do you think I am, a rich man like Mr. Engineer? Go ask someone else, you brat!”

Glaring at her, he raised the red cord of his whistle over his head as if it were a whip. She scrambled out.

“He was a real cocksucker,” she told Raju, who had something to show her: a sheet of wrapping plastic, full of round buttons of air that could be popped.

Making sure the conductor couldn’t see, she got down on her knees and put it on the road right in front of the wheel. Raju crouched. “No, it’s not right. The wheels won’t go over it,” he said. “Push it to the right a little.”

When the bus moved again, the wheels ran over the plastic sheets and the buttons exploded, startling the passengers; the conductor poked his head out of the window to see what had happened. The two children ran away.

It began raining again. The two of them crouched under a tree; coconuts came crashing down, and a man who had been standing next to them with an umbrella jumped up, and swore at the tree, and ran. She giggled, but Raju was worried they would get hit by a falling coconut.

When the rain stopped, she found a twig and scratched on the ground, drawing a map of the city, as she imagined it. Here was Rose Lane. Here was where they had come, still close to Rose Lane. Here…was the Bunder. And here-the garden inside the Bunder that they were looking for.

“Do you understand all of this?” she asked Raju. He nodded, excited by the map.

“To get to the Bunder, we have to go”-she drew another arrow-“through the big hotel.”

“And then?”

“And then we go to the garden inside the Bunder…”

“And then?”

“We find the thing Daddy wants us to get.”

“And then?”

The truth was, she had no idea if the hotel was on the way to the port or not: but the rain had driven the vehicles away from the road, and the hotel was the only place where she might be able to beg for the money right now.

“You have to ask for money in English from the tourists,” she teased Raju as they walked to the hotel. “Do you know what to say in English?”

They stopped outside the hotel to watch a group of crows bathing in a puddle of water. The sun was shining on the water, and the black coats of the crows turned glossy as scintillas of water flew from their shaking bodies; Raju declared it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

The man with no arms and legs was sitting in front of the hotel; he yelled curses from the other side of the road.

“Go away, you devil’s children! I told you never to come back here!”

She shouted back, “To hell with you, monster! We told you: never come back here!”

He was sitting on a wooden board with wheels. Whenever a car slowed down at the traffic light in front of the hotel, he rolled up on his wooden board and begged from one side; she begged from the other side of the car.

Raju, sitting on the pavement, yawned.

“Why do we need to beg? Daddy is working today. I saw him cutting those things-” He moved his legs apart and began sawing at an imaginary crossbeam below him.

“Quiet.”

Two taxis slowed down near the red light. The man with no arms and legs rushed on his wooden board to the first taxi; she ran to the second one, and put her hands into the open window. A foreigner was sitting inside. He stared at her with an open mouth: she saw his lips making a perfect pink “O.”

“Did you get any money?” Raju asked, when she came back from the car and the white man.

“No. Get up,” she said, and dragged the boy to his feet.

By the time they had crossed two red lights, however, Raju had figured it out. He pointed to her clutched fist.

“You got money from the white man. You have the money!”

She went up to an autorickshaw parked by the side of the road. “Which way is the Bunder?”

The driver yawned. “I don’t have any money. Go away.”

“I’m not asking for money. I’m asking for directions to the Bunder.”

“I told you, I’m not giving you anything!”

She spat at his face. Then she grabbed Raju by the wrist and they ran like mad.

The next autorickshaw driver they asked was a kind man. “It’s a long, long way. Why don’t you take a bus? The number three-forty-three will get you there. Otherwise it’ll be a couple of hours at least, by foot.”

“We don’t have money, uncle.”

He gave them a rupee coin and asked, “Where are your parents?”

They got onto a bus and paid the conductor. “Where are you getting off?” he shouted.

“The port.”

“This bus doesn’t go to the port. You need the number three-forty-three. This is the number…”

They got out and walked.

They were near the Cool Water Well Junction now. They found the one-armed, one-legged boy working there, as he always did; he went hopping about from car to car, begging before she could get to them. Someone had given him a radish today, so he went about begging with a large white radish in his hand, tapping it on the windshields to get the attention of the passengers.

“Don’t you dare bring your begging here, you sons of bitches!” he shouted at them, waving the radish threateningly.

The two of them stuck their tongues out at him and shouted, “Freak! Disgusting freak!”

Raju began crying after an hour and refused to walk anymore, so she picked in a rubbish can for some food. There was a carton with two biscuits, and they had one each.

They walked some more. After a while, Raju’s nostrils began bubbling.

“I can smell the sea from here.”

She could too.

They walked faster. They saw a man painting a sign in English by the side of the road; two cats fighting on the roof of a white Fiat; a horse cart, loaded with chopped wood; an elephant, walking down the road with a mound of neem leaves; a car that had been smashed up in an accident; and a dead crow with its claws drawn in stiffly to its chest, its belly open and swarming with black ants.

Then they were at the Bunder.

The sun was setting over the sea, and they went past the packed markets, looking for a garden.

“There are no gardens here in the Bunder. That’s why the air is so bad here,” an old Muslim peanut seller told them. “You’ve got the wrong directions.”

Looking at their crestfallen faces, he offered them a handful of peanuts to munch on.

Raju whined. He was hungry…to hell with the peanuts! He thrust them back at the Muslim man, who called him a devil.

That made Raju so angry he left his sister and ran, and she ran after him until Raju came to a stop.

“Look!” he shrieked, pointing at a row of mutilated men with bandaged limbs, sitting in front of a building with a white dome.

Gingerly they walked around the lepers. And then she saw a man lying down on a bench, his palms crossed over his face, breathing heavily. She came near the bench, and saw, right at the water’s edge, fenced off by a small stone wall, a little green park.

Raju was quiet now.

When they got to the park, there was shouting. A policeman was slapping a very dark man. “Did you steal the shoes? Did you?”

The very dark man shook his head. The policeman hit him harder. “Son of a bald woman, you take these drugs, and then you steal things, and you-son of a bald woman, you-!”

Three white-haired men, hiding in a bush near her, gestured to Soumya to come and hide with them. She took Raju into the bush, and they waited there for the policeman to leave.

She whispered to the three white-haired men, “I’m the daughter of Ramachandran, the man who smashes rich people’s houses in Rose Lane.”

None of the three knew her father.

“What do you want, little girl?”

She said the word, as well as she could remember, “…ack.”