By noon he had cleaned it front to back top to bottom magazines stacked in date of publication shoes set together in pairs lost clothes in a black plastic sack for the dhobiwallah to launder. He lit incense. He threw out the old bad milk and turning food in the refrigerator, returned the empty Coke bottles for their deposits - made chai and sneaked out to get samosas which he passed off as his own. He nervously watched Big Baba and Ravana step into their battle-harnesses for a three-hour combat mission. So much he learned in that first morning. It was not one boy one bot; Level 1.2 aeais controlled most of the autonomous processes like motion and perception, the pilots were more like officers, each commanding a bot platoon, their point-of-view switching from scout machine to assault bot to I-war drone. And they did not have their favourite old faithful combat machine, scarred with bullet holes and lovingly customised with hand-sprayed graffiti and Desi-metal demons. Machines went to war because they could take damage human flesh and families could not. The Kali Cavalry rotated between a dozen units a month as attrition and the jemadar dictated. It was not not not Japanese anime, but the Kali boys did look sexy dangerous cool in their gear even if they went home to their parents every night, and working for them cleaning for them getting towels for them when they went sweating and stinking to the shower after a tour in the combat rig was the maximum thing in Sanjeev’s small life. They were his children, they were his boys; no girls allowed.

‘Hanging round with those badmashes all day, never seeing a wink of sun, that’s not good for you,’ his mother said, sweeping round the tiny top-floor living room before her next lesson. ‘Your dad needs the help more; he may have to hire a boy in, what kind of sense does that make, when he has a son of his own? They do not have a good reputation, those robot-boys.’

Then Sanjeev showed her the money he had got for one day.

‘Your mother worries about people taking advantage of you,’ Sanjeev’s dad said, loading up the handcart with wood for the pizza oven. ‘You weren’t born to this city. All I’d say is, don’t love it too much, soldiers will let you down, they can’t help it. All wars eventually end.’