Basant nodded. A glimmer of hope appeared in his terrified mind. This current nightmare was only a warning.

Sachin unexpectedly slapped Basant once more, sending the man onto his back, his ears ringing and his nose rebleeding.

Without another word, Sachin took off his leather glove, glared down at Basant for a beat, waved for his companions to follow, and returned to the black Mercedes.

Sitting up with a sense of utter relief when he realized he was being left, Basant proceeded to get to his feet. A moment later he had to leap back into the loose trash and out of the way as the large sedan surged toward him, missing him by inches. Basant stared after the goons’ car while the red taillights receded into the smoke and haze. Only then did he become truly aware of the darkness and stench surrounding him, and the facts that his nose and arm were bleeding, that he’d gathered a small audience of silent, staring landfill urchins, and that the rats were inching closer. With sudden new fear and revulsion, Basant struggled back onto his feet, extricated himself from the soft trash and regained the firmness of the track, all the while grimacing from the pain in his side from the kick he’d suffered. Although it was very difficult to see, because of the moonless night, he hurried forward, hands outstretched like a blind man. He had a long way to walk before reaching a road that would have transportation. It wasn’t pleasant and was definitely scary, but at least he was alive.

SAME TIME IN A SECTION OF NEW DELHI

On a busy business street, wedged between typical, three-storied, reinforced-concrete commercial buildings whose façades were almost completely covered by signs in both Hindi and English, stood the starkly modern five-story Queen Victoria Hospital. In sharp contrast to its neighbors, it was constructed of amber-mirrored glass and green marble. Named after the beloved nineteenth-century British monarch to appeal to the modern medical tourist as well as the rapidly expanding Indian upper middle class, the hospital was a beacon of modernity thrust into the center of India’s timelessness. Also in contrast to its neighboring plethora of small businesses, which were, for the most part, still open, busy, and casting harsh blue-white fluorescent light into the street, the hospital looked bedded down for the night, with little of its soft, interior illumination penetrating the tinted glass.

Except for two tall, traditionally costumed Sikh doormen standing at either side of the entrance, the hospital could have been closed. Inside the day was clearly winding down. As a tertiary hospital with no real emergency department, the Queen Victoria handled only scheduled elective surgery, not emergencies. The soiled dinner dishes had long since been picked up, washed, and hidden away in their cupboards, and most of the visitors were gone. Nurses were handing out evening medications, dealing with drains and dressings from the day’s surgeries, or sitting within bright cones of light at nurses’ stations to finish up their computerized charting duties.