Daktar finished his pissing games and then looked at Koka, leaning against the Dutta-house gate. “Drink and puke. Don’t drink, still puke. This is why I swear I don’t like to drink with you lot. Screw the high! Fuck the happiness! Racket and ructions—that’s all you can do!”

“Harbart-da screwed!” Koton screamed, “Harbart-da fucked!”

Koka was thinking that he’d never touch another drop in his life. But then he began to run, vomit-threads trailing from the corners of his mouth—because, loud enough to wake the street, Somnath had started to scream: “Khororobi’s coming! He’s coming to feed you all fish!”

Drowned and dead a long time ago, he could still come, could Khororobi. Especially if Harbart-da called him.

That night, then, this—a fatal kick-ass googly—had been the plan. More often than not, such nights slid past in a haze, a booze glaze.

With, sometimes, a dead breeze.

*

The large clock on the second-floor veranda struck: one. Chop chunks on sal-leaf plates; at the bottom of the clay pot, stripes of Gujarati-shop-chana gravy—about eight cockroaches were relishing their dinner on the floor. A fat lizard slowly slid down the street-side wall, then crept up the leg of Harbart’s bed and looked—was he asleep? Harbart was still. So still that the lizard crawled across his chest and then down his arm to his left hand, only to find it immersed in a bucket of blood-smelling cold water. Calculating the distance between arm and bucket rim, his green eyes shining in the dark, the lizard paused for a moment and then leapt. And then—just as he was thinking of sliding down and making his way over to a dinner of cockroaches—an extraordinary blue light filled the room. The lizard and the cockroaches were the only witnesses. On the outside wall, toward the alley, the closed window—and rubbing her face against its dusty glass, a fairy was flapping her wings, trying to make her way into the room, trying to come close to Harbart. The blue heat of her blue face fogging up the glass, her blue tears washing it clean.

Harbart’s eyes had been half-open then.

Someone had closed them later.

This night, then, this had been the plan.

Then, in the early hours of the morning, the ants had come. Ants know how to share, how not to fight and fisticuff. The black ants pick up the crumbs, the bits of food, the grain of dal, stuck between the teeth and then picked out and flicked away, dry food, minuscule morsels. The red ants and the large ants go straight for the nostrils, the phlegm, the eyes, the saliva at the corners of the mouth, the base of the tongue, the soft spots in the gums. And so on. Amid such a carnival of carnivores, it was but natural that the cricket cacophony would be relegated to mere background music. For whether good days or bad, in civilization or savagery, they have been singing the same song. Whether they are heard, or not.