Sitting down in a chair, he took off his shirt, which Ratna’s wife hung for him on the hook next to Ratna’s. While the women waited in the kitchen, the astrologer showed Ratna the choice of boys.

He opened an album of black-and-white photos; they gazed at the faces of one boy after another, who looked back at them out of tense, unsmiling portraits. Ratna scraped one with his thumb. The astrologer slid the photo out of the album.

“Boy looks okay,” Ratna said after a moment’s concentration. “The father does what for a living?”

“Owns a firecracker shop on Umbrella Street. A very good business. Boy inherits it.”

“His own business,” Ratna exclaimed with genuine satisfaction. “It’s the only way ahead in the rat race; being a salesman is a dead end.”

His wife dropped something in the kitchen; she coughed and dropped something else.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

A timid voice said something about horoscopes.

“Shut up!” Ratna shouted. He gestured at the kitchen with the photo-“I have three daughters to marry off, and this damn bitch thinks I can be choosy?”-and he tossed the photo into the astrologer’s lap.

The astrologer drew an X across the back of the photo.

“The boy’s parents will expect something,” he said. “A token.”

“Dowry.” Ratna gave the evil its proper name in a soft voice. “Fine. I’ve saved money for this girl.” He breathed out. “Where I’ll get dowry for the next two, though, God alone knows.”

Gritting his teeth in anger, he turned toward the kitchen and yelled.

The following Monday, the boy’s party came. The younger girls went around with a tray of lemon juice, while Ratna and his wife sat in the drawing room. Rukmini’s face was whitened by a thick layer of Johnson’s Baby Powder, and garlands of jasmine decorated her hair; she plucked the strings of a veena and sang a religious verse, while looking out the window at something far away.

The prospective groom’s father, the firecracker merchant, was sitting on a mattress directly opposite Rukmini; he was a huge man in a white shirt and a white cotton sarong, with thick tufts of glossy, silvery hair sticking out of his ears. He moved his head to the rhythm of the song, which Ratna took as an encouraging sign. The prospective mother-in-law, another enormous and fair-skinned creature, looked around the ceiling and the corners of the room. The groom-to-be had his father’s fair skin and features, but he was much smaller than either of his parents, and seemed more like the family’s domestic pet than the scion. Halfway through the song, he leaned over and whispered something into his father’s hairy ears.

The merchant nodded. The boy got up and left. The father held up his little finger and showed it to everyone in the room.

Everyone giggled.

The boy came back, and squirmed into place between his fat father and his fat mother. The two younger girls came with a second tray of lemon juice, and the fat firecracker merchant and his wife took glasses; as if only to follow them, the boy also took a glass and sipped. Almost as soon as the juice touched his lips, he tapped his father and whispered into his hairy ear again. This time the old man grimaced; but the boy ran out.

As if to distract attention from his son, the firecracker merchant asked Ratna, in a rasping voice, “Do you have a spare beedi, my good man?”

Searching in the kitchen for his packet of beedis, Ratna saw, through the grille in the window, the bridegroom-to-be, urinating copiously against the trunk of an Ashoka tree in the backyard.

Nervous fellow, he thought, grinning. But that’s only natural, he thought, feeling already a touch of affection for this fel low, who was going to join his family soon. All men are nervous before their weddings. The boy appeared to be done; he shook his penis and stepped away from the tree. But then he stood as if frozen. After a moment he craned his head back and seemed to gasp for air, like a drowning man.

The matchmaker returned that evening to report that the firecracker merchant seemed satisfied with Rukmini’s singing.

“Fix the date soon,” he told Ratna. “In a month, the rental rates for wedding halls will start to…” He gestured upward with his palms.

Ratna nodded, but he seemed distracted.

The next morning, he took the bus to Umbrella Street, walking past furniture and fan shops until he found the firecracker merchant’s place. The fat man with the hairy ears sat on a high stool, in front of a wall of paper bombs and rockets, like an emissary of the God of Fire and War. The groom-to-be was also in the shop, sitting on the floor, licking his fingers as he turned the pages of a ledger.

The fat man kicked his son gently.

“This man is going to be your father-in-law, aren’t you going to say hello?” He smiled at Ratna. “The boy is a shy one.”

Ratna sipped tea, chatted with the fat man, and kept an eye on the boy all the time.

“Come with me, son,” he said, “I have something to show you.”

The two men walked down the road, neither of them saying a word, till they got to the banyan tree that grew beside the Hanuman temple on Umbrella Street; Ratna indicated that they should sit down in the shade of the tree. He wanted the boy to turn his back to the traffic so that they faced the temple.

For a while Ratna let the young man talk, only observing his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and neck.

Suddenly he seized the fellow’s wrist.

“Where did you find this prostitute that you sat with?”

The boy wanted to get up, but Ratna increased the pressure on his wrist to make it clear that there would be no escape. The boy turned his face to the road, as if pleading for help.

Ratna increased the pressure on the boy’s wrist.

“Where did you sit with her? At the side of a road, in a hotel, or behind a building?”

He twisted harder.

“By the side of a road,” the boy blurted out, then looked at Ratna with his face close to tears. “How do you know?”

Ratna closed his eyes, breathed out, and let go of the boy’s wrist. “A truckers’ whore.” He slapped the boy.

The boy began to cry. “I only sat with her once,” he said, fighting back his sobs.

“Once is enough. Do you burn when you pass urine?”

“Yes, I burn.”

“Nausea?”

The boy asked what the English word meant, and said yes once he understood.

“What else?”

“It feels like there is something large and hard-like a rubber ball-between my legs all the time. And then I feel dizzy sometimes.”

“Can you get hard?”

“Yes. No.”

“Tell me what your penis looks like. Is it black? Is it red? Are the lips of your penis swollen?”

Half an hour later, the two men were still sitting at the foot of the banyan tree, facing the temple.

“I beg you…” The boy folded his palms. “I beg you.”

Ratna shook his head. “I have to cancel the wedding, what else can I do? How can I let my daughter get this disease too?”

The boy stared at the ground, as if he had simply run out of ways to beg. The drop of moisture at the tip of his nose gleamed like silver.

“I’ll ruin you,” he said quietly.

Ratna wiped his hands on his sarong. “How?”

“I’ll say that the girl has slept with someone. I’ll say that she’s not a virgin. That’s why you had to cancel the wedding.”

In one swift motion, Ratna seized the boy’s hair, yanked back his head, held it for a moment, and then slammed it against the banyan tree. He stood up and spat at the boy.

“I swear by the god who sits in this temple before us, I will kill you with my own hands if you say that.”

He was in fiery form that day at the Dargah, thundering, as the young men gathered around him, about sin, and disease, and about how germs rise from the genitalia, through the nipples, into the mouth, and eyes, and ears, until they reach the nostrils. Then he showed them his photos: images of rotten and reddened genitalia, some of which were black, or distended, or even appeared charred, as if acid-burned. Above each photo was one of the face of the victim, his eyes covered by a black rectangle, as if he were a victim of torture or rape. Such were the consequences of sin, Ratna explained; and expiation and redemption could come only in the form of magic white pills.