‘Pizza pizza pizza!’ Sanjeev shouted, running up to them. ‘We got pizza every kind of pizza and beer, Kingfisher beer, Godfather beer, Bangla beer, all kinds of beer.’

They stopped. They turned. They looked. Then they turned away. One looked back as his brothers moved. He was tall and very thin from the drugs, fidgety and scratchy, his bad skin ill-concealed with make-up. Sanjeev thought him a street-god.

‘What kind of pizza?’

‘Tikka tandoori murgh beef lamb kebab kofta tomato spinach.’

‘Let’s see your kofta.’

Sanjeev presented the drooping wedge of meatball-studded pizza in both hands. The robotwallah took a kofta between thumb and forefinger. It drew a sagging string of cheese to his mouth, which he deftly snapped.

‘Yeah, that’s all right. Give me four of those.’

‘We got beer we got Kingfisher beer we got Godfather beer we got Bangla beer ...’

‘Don’t push it.’

Now he ran up alongside the big slow-moving car they had bought as soon as they were old enough to drive. Sanjeev had never thought it incongruous that they could send battle robots racing across the country on scouting expeditions or marching behind heavy tanks, but the law would not permit them so much as a moped on the public streets of Varanasi.

‘So did you kill anyone today?’ he called in through the open window, clinging on to the door handle as he jogged through the choked street.

‘Kunda Khadar, down by the river, chasing out spies and surveyors,’ said bad-skin boy, the one who had first spoken to Sanjeev. He called himself Rai. They all had made-up J-anime names. ‘Someone’s got to keep those bastard Awadhi damwallahs uncomfortable. ’

A black plastic Kali swung from the rear-view mirror, red-tongued, yellow-eyed. The skulls garlanded around her neck had costume-sapphires for eyes. Sanjeev took the order, sprinted back through the press to his father’s clay tandoor oven. The order was ready by the time the Kali-hummer made its second cruise. Sanjeev slid the boxes to Rai. He slid back the filthy, wadded Government of Bharat scrip-rupees and, as Sanjeev fished out his change from his belt-bag, the tip: a little plastic zip-bag of battle-drugs. Sanjeev sold them in the galis and courtyards behind Umbrella Street. Schoolkids were his best customers, they went through them by the fistful when they were cramming for exams. Ahraura had been all the school Sanjeev ever wanted to see. Who needed it when you had the world and the web in your palmer? The little shining capsules in black and yellow, purple and sky blue, were the Rajghatta’s respectability. The pills held them above the slum.

But this night Rai’s hand shot out to seize Sanjeev’s hand as it closed around the plastic bag.