Ratna thought, To get a disease like this, on his very first time! Where is the justice in that?

After examining the boy’s genitals, the doctor moved to a washbasin with a mirror above; he pulled a cord, and a tube light flickered to life above the mirror.

Letting the water run into the basin, he gargled and spat, and then turned off the light. He wiped a corner of the basin with his palm, lowered a blind over the window, inspected his green plastic wastebasket.

When he ran out of things to do, he returned to his desk, looked at his feet, and practiced breathing for a while.

“His kidneys are gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone,” the doctor said.

He turned to the boy, who was trembling hard in his seat.

“Are you unnatural in your tastes?”

The boy covered his face in his hands. Ratna answered for him.

“Look, he got it from a prostitute, there’s no sin in that. He’s not an unnatural fellow. He just didn’t know enough about this world we live in.”

The doctor nodded. He turned to the diagram and put his finger on the kidneys, and said:

“Gone.”

Ratna and the boy went to the bus station together at six in the morning the following day, to catch the bus to Manipal; he had heard that there was a doctor at the medical college who specialized in the kidneys. A man with a blue sarong, sitting on the bench in the station, told them that the bus to Manipal was always late, maybe fifteen minutes, maybe thirty, maybe more. “Everything’s been falling apart in this country since Mrs. Gandhi was shot,” the man in the blue sarong said, kicking his legs about. “Buses are late. Trains are late. Everything’s falling apart. We’ll have to hand this country back to the British or the Russians or someone, I tell you. We’re not meant to be masters of our own fate, I tell you.”

Telling the boy to wait for a moment by the bus stand, Ratna returned with peanuts in a paper cone which he had bought for twenty paise, and said, “You haven’t had break fast, have you?” But the boy reminded him that the doctor had warned against eating anything spicy; it would irritate his penis. So Ratna went back to the vendor and exchanged the peanuts for the unsalted kind. They munched together for a while, until the boy ran to a wall and began to throw up. Ratna stood over him, patting his back, as the boy retched again and again. The man in the blue sarong watched with greedy eyes; then he came up to Ratna and whispered, “What’s the kid got? It’s serious, isn’t it?”

“Nonsense; he’s just got a flu,” Ratna said. The bus arrived at the station an hour late.

It was late on the way back as well. The two of them had to stand in the densely crowded aisle for over an hour, until a pair of seats became empty beside them. Ratna slid into the window seat and motioned for the boy to sit down next to him. “We got lucky, considering how crowded the bus is,” Ratna said with a smile.

Gently, he disengaged his hand from the boy’s.

The boy understood too; he nodded, and took out his wallet, and threw five-rupee notes, one after the other, into Ratna’s lap.

“What’s this for?”

“You said you wanted something for helping me.”

Ratna thrust the notes into the boy’s shirt pocket. “Don’t talk to me like that, fellow. I have helped you so far; and what did I have to gain from it? It was pure public service on my part, remember that. We aren’t related; we have no blood in common.”

The boy said nothing.

“Look! I can’t keep on going with you from doctor to doctor. I’ve got my daughters to marry off, I don’t know where I’ll get the dowry for-”

The boy turned, pressed his face into Ratna’s collarbone, and burst into sobs; his lips rubbed against Ratna’s clavicles and began sucking on them. The passengers stared at them, and Ratna was too bewildered to say a word.

It took another hour before the outline of the black fort appeared on the horizon. The man and the boy got off the bus together. Ratna stood by the main road and waited as the boy blew his nose and shook the phlegm from his fingers. Ratna looked at the black rectangle of the fort, and felt a sense of despair: how had it been decided, and by whom, and when, and why, that Ratnakara Shetty was responsible for helping this firecracker merchant’s son fight his disease? Against the black rectangle of the fort, he had a vision, momentarily, of a white dome, and he heard a throng of mutilated beings chanting in unison. He put a beedi in his mouth, struck a match, and inhaled.

“Let’s go,” he told the boy. “It’s a long walk from here to my house.”

DAY SIX (EVENING): BAJPE

Bajpe, the last area of forested land in Kittur, was marked out by the founding fathers as one of the “cleansing lungs” of the town, and for this reason was for thirty years protected from the avarice of real estate developers. The great forest of Bajpe, which stretched from Kittur right up to the Arabian Sea, was bordered on the town side by the Ganapati Hindu Boys’ School and the small adjacent temple of Ganesha. Next to the temple ran Bishop Street, the only part of the neighborhood where houses had been allowed. Beyond the street stood a large wasteland, and beyond that began a dark lattice of trees-the forest. When relatives from the center of town visited, the residents of Bishop Street were usually up on their terraces or balconies, enjoying the cool breezes that blew from the forest in the evening. Guests and hosts together watched as herons, eagles, and kingfishers flew in and out of the darkening mass of trees, like ideas circulating around an immense brain. The sun, when it plunged behind the forest, burned orange and ocher through the interstices of the foliage, as if peering out of the trees, and the observers had the distinct impression that they were being observed in return. At such moments, guests were wont to declare that the inhabitants of Bajpe were the luckiest people on earth. At the same time, it was assumed that if a man built his house on Bishop Street, he had some reason to want to be so far from civilization.

GIRIDHAR RAO AND Kamini, the childless couple on Bishop Street, were one of the hidden treasures of Kittur, all their friends declared. Weren’t they a marvel? All the way out in Bajpe, on the very edge of the wilderness, this barren couple kept alive the all-but-dead art of Brahmin hospitality.

It was another Thursday evening, and the half a dozen or so members of the Raos’ circle of intimates were making their way through the mud and slush of Bishop Street for their weekly get-together. Ahead of the pack, moving with giant strides, came Mr. Anantha Murthy, the philosopher. Behind him was Mrs. Shirthadi, the wife of the Life Insurance Company of India man. Then Mrs. Pai, and then Mr. Bhatt, and finally Mrs. Aithal, always the last to descend from her green Ambassador.

The Raos’ house was all the way down at the end of Bishop Street, just yards away from the trees. Sitting right on the forest’s edge, the house had the look of a fugitive from the civilized world, ready to spring into the wilderness at a moment’s notice.

“Did everyone hear that?”

Mr. Anantha Murthy turned around. He put a hand on his ear and raised his eyebrows.

A cool breeze was blowing in from the forest. The intimates came to a halt, trying to hear what Mr. Murthy had heard.

“I think it’s a woodpecker, somewhere in the trees!”

An irritated voice boomed down:

“Why don’t you get up here first, and listen to the woodpeckers later? The food has been prepared with a lot of care, and it’s getting cold!”

It was Mr. Rao, leaning down from the balcony of his house.

“Okay, okay,” Mr. Anantha Murthy grumbled, picking his way down the muddy track again. “But it’s not every day a man gets to hear a woodpecker.” He turned to Mrs. Shirthadi. “We tend to forget everything that’s important when we live in towns, don’t we, madam?”