Mullaji—the owner of a belly the size of a pumpkin, and several petty businesses, including a butcher’s shop—is the local entrepreneur of Okhla Basti. It was here, at his small butcher’s shack, that we first met. Except that then, instead of raw meat, Mullaji was into selling biryani. I would drop by at Nasir bhai’s to pick up a tola or two of ganja and would invariably succumb to the temptation of a chillum. So it happened one time that I had smoked plenty—I can’t quite remember how many chillums, and had felt very hungry afterwards. And it was while eating in Mullaji’s shack that I met Roxy, the pimp. After a plateful of biryani, I shared another chillum with Roxy, who had, in the meantime, explained to me that he preferred his friends to call him Ahmad. I wasn’t too sure how I’d become his friend, but, then, most people at Mullaji’s had passed through Nasir bhai’s smoking den; they tended to be in a generous mood. At some point in the conversation, Ahmad promised me a girl; I gave him my address, fixed a time for the next day and left. The following morning I had completely forgotten about the encounter, so when Roxy turned up in the evening I was a little surprised and even scared.

At first I didn’t believe it. A pimp is just not supposed to behave this way. A nondescript, sallow youth, casually draped over my landlady’s ornate iron gate, shouting, almost screaming, ‘Aaa ke le ja,’—loud enough for old Mrs Khosla, two houses down to the left, to look up from her gardening, her eyes all scrunched up like paper balls. Wouldn’t he want to be discreet—if not for my, then for his own sake?

Let’s not forget the dog downstairs (I poisoned him a few weeks later, but that’s another story). The insecure rat of a Pomeranian—a supposedly unwanted Valentine’s Day present for the landlady’s daughter—had been abandoned with Devinder, the manservant, who lived in the garage below my room. Within weeks of the dog’s arrival, Devinder imported his entire family from his village: a tall and striking-looking wife, two young sons, and a daughter who usually hung around the staircase—always a pink ribbon in her hair—looking rather lost and homesick. Once, on a rainy afternoon, when I lay wasted after a night of heavy drinking, complicated by a near-fatal bout of food poisoning, Devinder’s daughter arrived at my doorstep with a motichoor laddu. It turned out that while I lay wheezing and croaking, Devinder’s woman had given birth to a baby daughter, right there in the garage. ‘Is there a dai there?’ I asked the little girl. She shook her head. I figured Devinder must have rolled up his sleeves for this one.