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met by local villagers, who pushed them under the water until they drowned and then looted their bodies.

“Shut your face,” Zeeny shouted at him. “Why are you telling him such things? Already he thinks we’re savages, a lower form.”

A shop was selling sandalwood to burn in a nearby Krishna temple and sets of enamelled pink-and-white Krishna—eyes that saw everything. “Too damn much to see,” Bhupen said. “That is fact of matter.”

In a crowded dhaba that George had started frequenting when he was making contact, for movie purposes, with the dadas or bosses who ran the city’s flesh trade, dark rum was consumed at aluminium tables and George and Bhupen started, a little boozily, to quarrel. Zeeny drank Thums Up Cola and denounced her friends to Chamcha. “Drinking problems, both of them, broke as old pots, they both mistreat their wives, sit in dives, waste their stinking lives. No wonder I fell for you, sugar, when the local product is so low grade you get to like goods from foreign.”

George had gone with Zeeny to Bhopal and was becoming noisy on the subject of the catastrophe, interpreting it ideologically. “What is Amrika for us?” he demanded. “It’s not a real place. Power in its purest form, disembodied, invisible. We can’t see it but it screws us totally, no escape.” He compared the Union Carbide company to the Trojan Horse. “We invited the bastards in.” It was like the story of the forty thieves, he said. Hiding in their amphoras and waiting for the night. “We had no Ali Baba, misfortunately,” he cried. “Who did we have? Mr. Rajiv G.”

At this point Bhupen Gandhi stood up abruptly, unsteadily, and began, as though possessed, as though a spirit were upon him, to testify. “For me,” he said, “the issue cannot be foreign intervention. We always forgive ourselves by blaming outsiders, America, Pakistan, any damn place. Excuse me, George, but for me it all goes back to Assam, we have to start with that.” The massacre of the innocents. Photographs of children’s corpses, arranged neatly in lines like soldiers on parade. They had been clubbed to death, pelted with stones, their necks cut in half by knives. Those neat ranks of death, Chamcha remembered. As if only horror could sting India into orderliness.

Bhupen spoke for twenty-nine minutes without hesitations or pauses. “We are all guilty of Assam,” he said. “Each person of us. Unless and until we face it, that the children’s deaths were our fault, we cannot call ourselves a civilized people.” He drank rum quickly as he spoke, and his voice got louder,

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