Chottu works at Mrs Bindra’s. He lives in a room on the terrace, surrounded by black Sintex water tanks. His room has a tin roof which heats up during the daytime. He has few possessions, all of which he keeps locked in his grey tin trunk. For furniture he has a bed, a mattress, a surahi, a small rectangular mirror, a noisy table fan. To liven up the walls he’s cut out glamorous pictures from Delhi Times. Semi-naked Bollywood actresses and foreign models smile and pout at Chottu. At night they go a step further. Some pop out of their frames and climb into bed with him. He says he has felt them touching him in all the right places.

Chottu is from Garwhal. He is fair-skinned, has shiny black eyes and big hands. He is moody and irritable when with us. In front of Mrs Bindra he is subservient and self-effacing, always ready to please. He misses the rain and the mountains, the company of his friends. He’s fond of his drink. We do a lot of that sitting in the park opposite the main market or in Sadiq’s rickshaw while he peddles us around. Chottu stares at all the fancy women with their oversized sunglasses and opulent cars. He finds it strange that I remain indifferent to the sensual world around us.

We have another hangout—the first floor. The golf-playing Mrs Bindra, wife of the dead Rear Admiral Bindra, owns C-47, Defence Colony. She lives on the ground floor. I’m in the annexe on top of the garage, while Chottu’s servant’s quarter is on the terrace. Between Mrs Bindra’s plush, dark home and the terrace lies a vacant first-floor apartment. A young woman committed suicide here weeks before I moved. No one has been bold enough to rent the place after that incident. Chottu feels her ghost is still around. He describes her as being very sexy, very aloof. She worked for a bank and lived on her own. At night she had boyfriends over. Chottu used to clean her apartment on Sundays. He had a key to the flat. He was the one who found her dead body dangling from an Orient ceiling fan.

The three of us go there sometimes, either in the mornings when Mrs Bindra is out playing golf or when she’s out of station, visiting her only daughter in Bombay.

It’s one of those weekends. Mrs Bindra is in Worli, visiting her daughter who works for Hewlett-Packard. We have taken over the first floor. The curtains are drawn. The rooms are empty so our voices echo, bounce off the walls. In the vacant space our low voices acquire a rumbling, bass-like quality.