Anmol and Roshni are about to accept defeat and leave when a eunuch appears in front of them like an apparition. He is very tall, taller than both of them. He is dressed in a pink cotton sari. His hair is made up in a huge bun. He offers to show them the way. They follow meekly. He takes them to a bush that looks like it has been recently vacated. The grass is flat and warm. Big black ants crawl out of invisible holes in the ground. A caterpillar occupies a spot of sunshine on a big heart-shaped leaf. Anmol hands the eunuch a twenty-rupee note. ‘Student,’ he adds nervously. The eunuch does not ask for more. He sets a time limit—half an hour—then leaves quietly. Roshni pulls up her T-shirt and Anmol buries his face in her breasts.

Someone is calling to them. A second eunuch looms large. He wants money—his share of the pie. ‘But I just paid,’ protests Anmol. The eunuch sounds irritated, ‘Look, I don’t know who you’ve paid but this is my territory. The rates are fixed: fifty rupees for students, hundred for the rest. You get half an hour. That’s it. Do it, move it. I don’t see the problem.’ The logic is irrefutable. Anmol quietly parts with another fifty. They get back to business. Didn’t he-she say ‘do it, move it’?

Ten minutes later another eunuch arrives.

Anmol and Roshni have had enough. They dust each other’s clothes and prepare to leave. The new eunuch is as serious as the others about his cut. He chases them with curses and threats. But they are on their way out. They do not plan to be back in a hurry. So they give eunuch 3 the cold shoulder.

It’s lunchtime. It’s time to eat, then return to one’s desk job. Anmol observes the love parade filing solemnly out of the park. Everyone looks vaguely familiar. He turns to Roshni, ‘Doesn’t that man look like the cashier at the campus bank? I have never seen such a look of contentment on his face. And that clean-shaven dude over there—doesn’t he sit at window number twelve in the uni’s admin section? Isn’t that woman over there, the one wearing all that jingly-jangly stuff, the college principal’s secretary?’

Anmol is an instinctual rule-follower. He’s been like that ever since he was a child. Boys would dare each other to break rules, but Anmol never joined in their rebellion.