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surveying the flat, he had found it suitable and now wanted to settle down for a session. When Shakti returned with a cold Cobra and two glasses, I felt as if I were being drawn into an unfamiliar drinking culture: of hotel rooms, curtains drawn, a bottle on a plywood table with some nuts, an ashtray filling up quickly. Seeming to read my thoughts, Aakash asked if I had any cigarettes. I didn’t but knew that there were some in the house. Chamunda insisted a packet of Dunhills be kept for her in the bar. I brought these out. Aakash looked at them admiringly, then pulled one out and lit it with cupped hands. He inhaled, inflating one cheek, then with the cigarette at arm’s length, blew on to it, watching the end brighten through the smoke.
    The Cobra was amber-coloured. Its pretty colour in the glass, catching the light in the room filling with smoke, made me want to have some. Aakash poured me one with great aplomb, exaggerating the tilt of the glass. I asked him how he’d come.
    ‘Motorbike,’ he said, letting out smoke from the corner of his mouth.
    ‘What kind?’
    ‘Hero Honda,’ he replied, now inhaling strenuously, making a pained face as if it were difficult to talk.
    ‘Nice.’
    He smiled ironically, ‘What to do, saab? I’m not a rich man. But this I can say, the bike was bought with my own hard-earned money.’
    I feared some conversation about privilege when he surprised me. In English, he said, ‘I’ve never sucking dick,’ and laughed.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Yes, man. You know Sunil, he’s the other trainer at the gym…’
    ‘The big beefy guy?’
    ‘No, no. Someone else; I think he comes after you leave. Anyway, he was called for a personal training to the house of a gay. They took him there blindfolded and brought him into the gay’s office. The gay puts sixty thousand down on the table and says, “Sucking.” Sunil ran out from there, but they had bodyguards and Alsatians and Dobermanns, and they say if you don’t sucking, we’ll let them out and they’ll make keema out of you.’
    ‘What did he do?’ I said, now more horrified at the recounting of this wild story in the middle of the afternoon than at its bizarre, filmy details.
    ‘He’s sucking, man,’ Aakash said matter of factly. ‘He’s sucking, sucking, for one hour, sucking…’ He screwed up his dark lips so that their pink interior was more visible than ever.
    ‘Aakash, come on, this is not true.’
    ‘It’s true, man,’ Aakash insisted. ‘It’s true.’
    ‘Did he take the money?’
    ‘Why not, after he’s sucking…’
    ‘Yeah, yeah, please.’
    Aakash laughed. ‘He bought a Hero Honda.’
    I was sure the story was a lie, but I couldn’t gauge his motive in telling it. Was he trying to suss me out, see how appalled I would be? I was surprised at his own indifference; the story seemed hardly to make a dent in his notions of morality, as if all vice, no matter what its nature, was a luxury item.
    He drank the beer quickly and yelled for Shakti, who appeared with another one. Aakash was enjoying this mid-afternoon revelry in the little-used flat. He poured me another glass without my asking for it. I had been under the impression that Aakash worked from five a.m. till late at night. I wondered how he’d found this block of free time in the middle of the day; I also didn’t expect a trainer to have these habits. Most of all, I was surprised at how his earlier urgency had given way to such complete repose. I asked if drinking beer damaged his physique. After taking a large gulp, he put down his glass, stood up and walked to the middle of the room. Then he removed his grey and black striped T-shirt, and standing in a grey vest, flexed his chest and triceps. His skin now seemed lighter and his physique more proportionate. Where the muscles had been expanded near the chest and the arms, there were stretch marks, pale and hairless, like knife wounds. A fine layer of hair ran over his shoulders and back, culminating in a