It was surely through Amma’s interventions, too, with Charlotte oiling her strings, that I received such exemplary VIP treatment. An unmarked black Ambassador drew up at the door of my building, the driver darting out flapping two rubber mats, which he set down before me one in front of the other, bending over again and again after I stepped upon the first mat to reposition it ahead of the second, unrolling a dry pathway for me in this way to the car door so that for the first time in days I was spared wading through puddles of fetid water. Policemen unfolded from their slouches as I was escorted into the station, rising to greet me with a cordial dip of the head and a respectful, Namaste, madam. I was ushered to a plush seat as if in a theater in front of a one-way viewing window screen as the Samir Khans of Mumbai with numbers on their chests were rolled out one by one for my inspection, smacked under the chin to provide a full-face view, slapped hard into right profile, another hard slap to spin the head into left profile, all of these visuals to the background static of, Stand up straight, maderchod, open your bhenchod eyes, gaandu, or I’ll cut off your golis—then dragged offscreen as if with a cane by the shirt collar like a bad act in a burlesque that the audience hisses and boos out of its sight as I shook my head, no, no. It felt as if hundreds of Samir Khans were passed in front of me, from slum urchins, to enraged teenagers, to the newly radicalized with full black pubic beards, to skullcapped merchants, to imams in white-robed splendor, to the aged with wiry beards hennaed bright orange. My eyes blurred over, all pity was leached out of me for these mothers’ sons, each of whom surely had sinned in some fashion to deserve such treatment, I reasoned, but the sinner I was seeking was not among them—the Samir Khan who had stolen you from me.

Most apologetically for the failure of this exercise, with an exaggerated show of solicitousness, a senior official approached to suggest that under the circumstances, since I was already out of the house, I allow myself to be conveyed to the city morgue to view the remains of unidentified female missing persons—a painful experience, yes, but necessary, and one that he and his staff would do their very best to facilitate with utmost sensitivity. I allowed myself to be taken into the stone edifice of the morgue, through the autopsy chamber where naked bodies were laid out on the tables constructed of stone like altars, torsos split open into two flaps folded back as in an anatomy textbook, scalps lifted off like the stem of an aubergine, then onward to the cold room to view the corpses already processed but unclaimed. At the entrance I was offered a mask against the stench, which I rejected with a proud dismissive brush of my hand, exactly as I would refuse a blindfold on the road to my own execution.