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almost all of him below the shoulder, sprouting a fine interior coat of teeth that pressed and teased, unable to resist sampling at the anticipated feast; here a shaven fingernail, there a beheaded nipple.
    Looking down, I could see his genitals begin—all unnoticed, for once—to stiffen.
    â€œBut Don’t-care was made to care,” I continued, blithely. “Don’t-care was hung. Don’t-care was put in the pot, and boiled ‘til he was done.”
    And I gave his heart another little squeeze, for emphasis.
    Oh, yes, his Empire might well linger far into the next century. But he’d be going home much sooner—and not to London, either, where he might at least occasionally be able to buy someone to kill. Back to some dreary Suffolk estate, to take up the middle child’s portion, dazzling idiots behind the hay-wains with a fading grab-bag of exotic memories, doomed to forever wear the mask of respectability. To marry, to breed, to be buried and rot. And all in a dim, small place that no longer held anything but potential boredom for him, where no one would know to stiffen at his scent, or whisper his name in fear as he passed by.
    Well, we were in the jungle now. And the law of the jungle is universally understood: Eat, or be eaten.
    â€œHave no fear, Lieutenant,” I murmured. “For you may count yourself assured that, even if no else does, I will take care to always award you a place in my memory.”
    Grammar blinked, his eyes already red-lined and darkening, as the cilia slowly haemorrhaged. His mouth worked, but words failed him. I brought mine closer, in case a final sentence might yet be forthcoming.
    Then he gave a gushing whoop, and laughed out loud, spattering our mutual visage with liquid viscera.
    Whereupon—with no regrets to speak of—I bit the mad bastard in half.
    And so at last we come to you, o my beloved—little raggamuffin, would-be tourist district date rapist. You, with your fresh-cut fade and precious Apache Indian concert tickets, with barely enough real Hindi under your belt to tell the demure Calcutta girl you once thought I was—when first we met, you all swagger and chatter, spinning yourself a man-sized noose of lies as you steered me towards this oh-so-deserted alley—a dirty joke. Here in this bright, drunken, filthy place, so full of neon and flies, this overhanging crush of shacks where one open window lets slip a lick of the latest Bollywood duet, another the drone of Johnny Cash falling down, down, down. The ring of fire, the endless Wheel, spinning.
    You thought me merely a bumpkin to be robbed of her virginity, and yourself the true synthesis of Anglo-Indian culture, post-British Occupation. But I believe you now know better.
    The Mutiny of 1857 marked one whole turn of the Wheel for India and Britain alike, replacing up most firmly with down; it gave the British (via the East India Company) a perfect excuse to stay in India, to seize control, to cut down the guilty and the “loyal” as well in their lust for gain. They imposed their own system of values on everything they met: Breaking apart clans, ransacking treasuries, erasing whole villages, disinheriting heirs because they were adopted rather than biological, and deeding the lands involved to a plump little Queen, more concerned with the state of her marriage than with exactly whose bleeding hands all these exotic gifts had been ripped from.
    Soon enough, Army replaced Company—but nothing really changed. The British swept in like a tide of cockroaches, mating and killing as they willed, forcing themselves in at the top of our caste system in order to escape their own. They stayed until they had outworn their welcome a thousand times over, until those brought up in India—but still calling an England they had never even seen “Home”—were immune to even its most enticing charms. They maintained their stiff spines upright against heat and