I have no memory of hanging up and ending that conversation with Charlotte. I believe it continues to this day, all the things I should have said, every regret articulated. What I next recall is being startled into alertness by the constriction of my heart, a polluted gray dawn filtering in through the window, and I am still sitting in that chair at the kitchen table clutching my mobile, flakes of stinking slum excrement peeling off me and mounting in piles on the floor, continuing to shed as I make my way to your room to divine for signs of preparation for an extended absence. The same mess as always, untouched. Under the circumstances, I reasoned, it would not be a transgressive violation of your sacred privacy if I were to open your laptop to check for even a cryptic reference to plans for a demonstration at the mosque, but all of your devices were gone. Of course—you took them along with you to the slum every day in your backpack. I had failed to pay attention.

As the hours passed, my entire self continued to fall away in flakes of dry slum shit, exposing my vital organs to every insult. Compulsively, I was checking and rechecking on my own computer on every conceivable news source site, listening to the radio and TV for bulletins and alerts, every cell of my body susceptible to the slightest reference to a takeover at Haji Ali. Nothing, not a syllable. In India a mosque, a temple, is a tinderbox; set a spark to it and the fire spreads ravenously, the whole madhouse convulses for days and days and is ravaged. It was clear to me that the powers, police, politicians, all of the main players, were ruthlessly focused on keeping the incendiary news of the takeover from leaking, bent on negotiating covertly with the occupiers, to extricate them from the premises with stealth tactics so as not to trigger yet another riot of unforgiving dimensions.

By late afternoon the waste matter of the slum that had attached itself to me—whatever had not already seeped into my skin and permeated my inner core forever—finally washed off in the monsoon rains. I was standing soaked, holding up my wrecked umbrella, spoke-twisted and shredded, at the entrance to the causeway to Haji Ali. I could no longer bear the media silence—the state of not knowing what happened to my loved one, by all accounts so detrimental to achieving closure following a disaster according to the testimony of survivors. This situation became intolerable. In desperation I left my flat in spite of my fear that you might show up while I was gone and I would not be there to welcome you home, and came to the scene to find out for myself what was going on. My heart soared at the sight of the barricade at the causeway entrance, and the policemen hanging out under a nearby shelter, perhaps rather too casually it occurred to me, though I quickly censored the thought, and there were not as many as I would have expected or liked to see considering the provocation, nor any sign of the loved ones of the other kids demonstrating inside, a danger to themselves and others. I was the only parental figure present. Still, there was a barricade, there were armed guards with visible lathis barring access. I stood there letting myself be washed by the lashing rain, taking comfort in the thought that at least I knew where my child was tonight.