Three months or so went by. One morning, he was at his spot behind the white dome, bellowing at the Stonehenge of worried young men, when he saw a face that made his heart stop.

Afterward, when he was done with his lecture, he saw the face again, right in front of him.

“What do you want?” he hissed. “It’s too late. My daughter’s married now. Why have you come here now?”

Ratna folded the stool under his arm, dropped his medicines into his red bag, and walked fast. A flurry of footsteps followed him. The boy-the firecracker merchant’s son-panted as he spoke.

“Things are becoming worse by the day. I can’t piss without my penis burning. You must do something for me. You must give me your pills.”

Ratna gnashed his teeth. “You sinned, you bastard. You sat with a prostitute. Now pay for it!”

He walked faster, and faster, and then the footsteps behind him were gone and he was alone.

But the following evening, he saw the face again and the quick steps followed him all the way to the bus stand, and the voice said, again and again, “Let me buy the pills from you,” but Ratna did not turn around.

He boarded the bus, and counted to ten; producing his brochures, he spoke to the passengers of the rat race. As the dark outline of the fort appeared in the distance, the bus slowed down and then stopped. He got down. Someone else got down with him. He walked away. Someone walked behind him.

Ratna spun around and seized his stalker by the collar. “Didn’t I tell you, leave me alone? What has gotten into you?”

The boy pushed Ratna’s hands away, straightened his collar, and whispered, “I think I’m dying. You have to give me your white pills.”

“Look here, none of those young men is going to be cured by anything I sell. Don’t you get it?”

There was a moment of silence, and then the boy said, “But you were at the Sexology Conference…the sign in English says so…”

Ratna raised his hands to the sky. “I found that sign lying on the platform of the station.”

“But the Hakim Bhagwandas of Delhi -”

“Hakim Bhagwandas, my arse! They’re white sugar pills that I buy wholesale from a pharmacist on Umbrella Street -right next to where your father has his shop; my daughters bottle them and stick labels on them at my house!”

To prove his point, he opened his leather case, unscrewed the top from a bottle, and scattered the pills across the ground, as if broadcasting seed on the earth. “They can do nothing! I have nothing for you, son!”

The boy sat on the ground, took a white pill from the earth, and swallowed it. He got down on all fours and scooped up the white pills, which he began swallowing in a frenzy, along with any dirt attached to them.

“Are you mad?”

Getting down on his knees, Ratna gave the boy a good shake, and asked the same question again and again.

And then, at last, he saw the boy’s eyes. They had changed since he had last observed them: teary and red, they were like pickled vegetables of some kind.

He relaxed his grip on the boy’s shoulder.

“You’ll have to pay me, all right, for my help? I don’t do charity.”

Half an hour later, the two men got off a bus near the railway station. They walked together through streets that became progressively narrower and darker, until they reached a shop whose awning was marked with a large red medical cross. From inside the shop, a radio blared out a popular Kannada film song.

“Buy something here, and leave me alone.”

Ratna tried to walk away, but the boy clutched his wrist. “Wait. Pick the medicine for me and then go.”

Ratna walked quickly in the direction of the bus stop, but again he heard the footsteps behind him. He turned, and there was the boy, arms laden with green bottles.

Regretting that he had ever agreed to bring him here, Ratna walked faster. Still he heard the light, desperate footsteps again, as though a ghost were following him.

For several hours that night Ratna lay awake, turning in his bed and disturbing his wife.

The next day, in the evening, he took the bus into the city, back to Umbrella Street. When he reached the firecracker shop he stood at a distance with his arms folded, waiting until the boy saw him. The two of them walked together in silence for a while, and then sat down on a bench outside a sugarcane juice stall. As the machines turned, crushing the cane, Ratna said:

“Go to the hospital. They’ll help you.”

“I can’t go there. They know me. They’ll tell my father.”

Ratna had a vision of that immense man with the tufts of white hair growing out of his ears, sitting in front of his arsenal of firecrackers and paper bombs.

The following day, as Ratna was folding his wooden stand and packing his case, he was conscious of a shadow on the ground in front of him. He walked around the Dargah, past the long line of pilgrims waiting to pray at the tomb of Yusuf Ali, past the rows of lepers, and past the man with one leg, lying on the ground, twitching from the hip, and chanting, “Al-lah, Al-laaah! Al-lah!”

He looked up at the white dome for a moment.

He went down to the sea, and the shadow followed him. A low stone wall ran along the sea’s edge, and he put his right foot up on it. The waves were coming in violently; now and then water crashed against the wall, and thick white foam rose up into the air and spread out, like a peacock’s tail emerging from the sea. Ratna turned around.

“What choice do I have? If I don’t sell those boys the pills, how will I marry off my daughters?”

The boy, avoiding his gaze, stared at the ground and shifted his weight uncomfortably.

The two of them caught the number five bus and took it all the way into the heart of the city, disembarking near Angel Talkies. The boy carried the wooden stool, and Ratna searched up and down the main road, until he located a large billboard of a husband and a wife standing together in wedding clothes:

HAPPY LIFE CLINIC

Consulting Specialist: Doctor M. V. Kamath

MBBS (Mysore), BMec (Allahabad), DBBS (Mysore),

MCh (Calcutta), GCom (Varanasi).

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

“You see those letters after his name?” Ratna whispered into the boy’s ear. “He’s a real doctor. He’ll save you.”

In the waiting room, a half dozen lean, nervous men sat on black chairs, and in a corner, one married couple. Ratna and the boy sat down between the single men and the couple. Ratna looked curiously at the men. These were the same ones who came to him: older, sadder versions; men who had been trying to shake off venereal disease for years, who had thrown bottle after bottle of white pills at it, to find no improvement-who were now at the end of a long journey of despair, a journey that led from his booth at the Dargah, through a long trail of other hucksters, to this doctor’s clinic, where they would be told at last the truth.

One by one, the lean, wasted men went into the doctor’s room and the door shut behind them. Ratna looked at the married couple and thought, At least they are not alone in this ordeal. At least they have each other.

Then the man got up to see the doctor; the woman stayed back. She went in later, after the man had left. Of course they are not husband and wife, Ratna told himself. When he gets this disease, this disease of sex, every man is alone in the universe.

“And who are you in relation to the patient?” the doctor asked.

They had taken their seats, at last, at his consulting desk. On the wall behind the doctor a giant chart depicted a cross-section of a man’s urinary and reproductive organs. Ratna looked at it for a moment, marveling at the diagram’s beauty, and said:

“His uncle.”

The doctor made the boy take off his shirt; then he sat next to him, made him put his tongue out, peered into his eyes, and put his stethoscope to the boy’s chest, pressing it to one side and then the other.