Ad Magic and the boy, with the monkey on his shoulder, crossed the road again and sat on a pair of broken merry-go-round horses that were detached from an abandoned carousel. Next to the carousel was the small Ferris wheel, contrived to be powered by a horse or mule rather than a motor. Nearby was a ticket kiosk decorated with elephant-men and monkey-men painted in brilliant, bubblegum colors. The carnival was defunct and depressing. Ad Magic remembered bright lights—a carnival of his childhood, before he had picked up on the tawdriness of carnivals and saw only the enchanting splendor of them. He couldn’t have been more than four. He was sitting in a red miniature car when he saw one of a different color—yellow—that he liked better. Impulsively, he scrambled for the better car. Just as he unbuckled his seat belt and was halfway out of the red one, the ride began and he fell, catching his arm under the car, wrenching and skinning his elbow, and bashing his face against the little vehicle’s fake door. Suddenly he was plucked free by a man in a felt hat and a raincoat, who smelled pleasantly of aftershave. His father? A stranger? He wasn’t sure; there was no face, as there had been no face on the doctor.

He searched his pockets for his cigarettes and discovered a small, flat, green-and-black tin of Powell’s Headache Tablets. He took two of these, dry-swallowed them, and then lit up another cigarette. He spotted an empty tour bus pulling up alongside the damaged bus he had arrived in, and from his seat on the rusting pony Ad Magic watched his party emerge from the New Zealand Café, board the new bus, and take off. There was no goodbye wave, even from the friendly Bahrainis. Again he tried to recover his name and city of origin, but it was hopeless. At least he had come to Bombay rather than Lusaka, or Lima, or Rangoon, or Zanzibar. He remembered coming into Zanzibar on a steamer, seasick—the odor of the spices was so powerful he could smell it twenty miles offshore. He remembered feeling instantly well when the boat reached the harbor, and how the inhabitants of the city were outside—it was midnight—marveling at the recently installed streetlights. An Australian tourist told him that Zanzibar was the last place in the world to get streetlights and that when the bulbs burned out the streetlights would never glow again unless Swiss workers were imported to come in and change them. “The bloody buggers can’t even change a light bulb,” the Australian said. “It isn’t in their makeup.” Ad Magic’s recollection of Zanzibar was like an Alice-in-Wonderland hallucination. It seemed that he had remained stranded there for weeks, almost penniless, living on bread and oranges.