Nasir bhai’s smoking den was situated right on top, like a sentry box outside a fortress town. Beyond, the slum spread out like a labyrinth—a mottle of brown and black—as far as the eye could see.

Angad often wondered what he was doing in a place like this—a place far removed from his own world, the world he was born into and worked in, one with whose rules he bore an instinctive familiarity. Could it be that failing to understand its rules, he was looking for a different world, with different rules?

In the basti, no one seemed to grudge his presence, or particularly care who he was, what name he went under, what job he did. They didn’t ask why he stayed on when others of his kind came, picked up stuff and left as soon as possible. It was also probably easier to be accepted in a community which was made of a refugee people in the first place; uprooted from Bangladesh, now living in a squalid slum in New Delhi, they knew the feeling of being on the run, knew the value of temporary resting places.

Two hours later, the sun had set and Angad lay stoned on a thick wooden plank. Around him the basti thrummed with evening activity. The men, back after a hard day’s labour, assembled around Nasir bhai’s shop for their ten-rupee fix of cheap weed; those of a more gregarious disposition sauntered down the narrow path that divided the basti into two halves to Gopal’s shack where they would buy sachets of spiced country liquor. The women, their saris hitched up to their knees, carried pails of water for cooking and bathing. From where Angad lay he could see their bare legs—the calves all muscular and polka-dotted with mud—walk past him briskly, until they disappeared behind the opaque smoke of coal fires. Children in faded rags, some wearing nothing, ran around screaming, shouting, creating confusion. Every once in a while, when a pheriwala arrived selling candyfloss or blow-bubble toys, the children’s clamour reached a new crescendo.

Mullaji was back in his butcher’s shop for evening duty. A bewildered chicken escaped from the makeshift slab just as he was about to slaughter it, and scrambled down the basti, its wings scraping Angad’s nose. Mullaji cursed before taking off in weary pursuit. This was the fourth time in two days that the chicken had escaped execution. You knew Mullaji’s patience was at the end of its tether when the vein under the dagger-shaped scar on his back turned a peculiar shade of purple.