He stumbled towards the vanity unit in the corner of the room, barely managing to reach it in time. He flung the door open, pulled the cord switch, leaned forward and aimed straight for the drain hole.

As a schoolboy, Mayank had always treaded middle ground. He was not a social disaster but at the same time he liked to maintain his distance from people and events. Maybe he had no choice in the matter. Maybe he was born with a congenital inability to immerse himself in the present.

This gap between his self and what the self experienced translated, in Mayank’s thirteen-year-old mind, into a gap between his sense of self and the body that the self inhabited. The self and the body were separate entities, dwelling in mutually exclusive realms. This enabled him to observe the world around him and everything that it contained, including his own body, with a sense of detachment. His body could have been an apple lying on a table.

Every day when his parents went for their regulation evening walk, he would play with his body. He would strip to his underclothes and examine himself in the mirror. He would slip on his mother’s bangles and anklets and rings, his palms sticky with fuzzy desire; he would stuff fluorescent tennis balls under his vest—the mere sight of these pretend breasts would leave him flushed and excited. He had developed a hearing as keen as a dog’s. His ears were trained to wait for the thump-thump of feet ascending the staircase, the key turning in the Godrej lock.

A full ten minutes after barfing, Mayank stood in front of the mirror, his hands resting on the edge of the basin. His calm, untouched self sat regally on a throne like a benign raja, calmly observing and calculating the damages inflicted on his body—the bloodshot eyes, the runny nose, the burning in the solar plexus, the taste of sour vomit in the mouth. This calm self also noticed something else that wasn’t part of his body. A small pouch stuffed with things lay on the flat top that surrounded the basin. The zipper was shut except for a small opening at one end. The oversized head of a toothbrush emerged ominously from this opening, like a naughty baby snake that wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. It was as if the snake had tried to slither out of the pouch and make a getaway, then changed its mind at the last minute when it realized that the world was a hostile place where snakes with poison in their fangs were feared but baby snakes—no matter how prickly their bristles—were dismissed as mere toothbrushes.