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want to see if we can find some action?’
    ‘You mean, like, babes?’
    ‘No, riots, I’m a reporter, remember.’
    That’s a brilliant idea, man.’
    ‘Do you know where Deepak is?’
    ‘The mad fucker said he was off to Shuklajee Street. Riots or no riots the man needs to get his rocks off.’
    ‘Oh well.’
    ‘Drink in Gokul’s first?’
     
    ~
     
    We left the hostel slightly before nine. There was no breeze, and the night was warm but not unpleasantly sticky as it could be during the summer and the monsoon. We walked briskly down Wodehouse Road, and emerged on to Colaba Causeway, which was inscribed like a great glittering whip on one of the busiest areas in the city. The Causeway was usually humming with people, traffic, light and noise until very late at night but today its vigour was sapped. No crowds gathered in the lobby of the Regal theatre, spilling out on to its steps; the restaurant next to Sahakari Bhandar was deserted, and even the dense throngs that filtered past the pavement stalls filled with counterfeit and stolen foreign goods were noticeably thinner. There was light and music from Leopold’s Cafe as the sailors, druggies and whores continued to party—it would take a nuclear explosion to shut the place down—but otherwise there was no noise. We could actually hear our heels on the pavement, and individual explosions of sound—the receding rumble of a BEST bus, the clanking as a restaurant downed its shutters, a beggar hawking and spitting on the pavement.
    I was filled with a nervous exhilaration, afraid yet tense with anticipation at what we might encounter. This was what war correspondents and cops and soldiers must feel, I thought: the rush of adrenalin. At the same time, I felt vulnerable, stripped of the anonymity a city confers upon its inhabitants. I was not Muslim, my penis was not circumcised, I still wore my sacred thread and I could recite the Gayatri mantra, but the thought that my identity could be put to the test by some thug made me nervous. I remembered stories about South Indian and Gujarati immigrants being targeted by mobs in Bombay a few decades earlier, when they were accused by opportunistic politicians of taking jobs away from native-born people of the state, and I worried briefly about these riots losing their focus, turning from one target to another, and then let the thought go. I wondered what Rao was thinking about, he seemed a bit subdued, although I could sense that he continued to be excited by the prospect of witnessing a riot; I had no doubt that it would go down well as party talk. But did it bother him that he was South Indian and therefore at some slight risk? It probably hadn’t even occurred to him, I thought, he floated in the bubble that encased the city’s elite, far above the netherworlds where the less privileged lived and, from time to time, killed each other.
    Gokul’s was almost deserted when we got there. Usually, at this time of night, the low-ceilinged main room and the mezzanine that you had to bend over almost double to negotiate would have been thick with a fug of smoke and noise, waiters careening past the densely packed tables with trays of whisky, rum, bowls of peanuts, ice buckets and soda, but today only three tables were occupied and most of the waiters were crowded together at the back of the room, gossiping. We were served as soon as we sat down, and our waiter lingered to chat.
    ‘They’re going from gully to gully slaughtering the Miyans, saab. I myself saw three dead last night and tonight there will be more.’
    It did not matter whether the waiter had seen three or thirty dead, by the time these riots were finished, every one of Bombay’s residents, bar those too young to speak, would have their own impressions of a city gone mad. My imagination was now inflamed by the possibilities—a lead story in the magazine worthy of being nominated for the country’s highest journalism awards, anchored perhaps by the words of one