‘There were two of them, I tell you. They were wearing black ski masks and whispering to each other. Plotting. The masks were the kind that thieves wear. Or murderers. If I hadn’t woken up in time and held the door closed, they would have got me.’

Eram had a powerful urge to argue with his father, to prove to him that he was wrong about everything. Dr Pahwa, the neurologist who had first diagnosed Faizl with Parkinson’s disease, had warned them about the dreams. He had said that the progression of the disease was unpredictable but that the strange and terrifying dreams Faizl would experience were a common symptom. The information carried by his neurons will fire in fits and starts. Images and memories and sensory input all mixed up together like soup, he had said.

Soup my ass, Faizl had snorted as soon as they left the doctor’s room. There’s nothing wrong with me.

It would serve no purpose telling his father again that he had been dreaming. Faizl resisted any suggestion that his mind was no longer in mint condition. Eram knew this, but couldn’t stop himself.

‘Whoa. That sounds like one crazy dream. Dr Pahwa did say—’

A small ceramic bowl, of the kind that collect on dressers and side tables everywhere, came speeding towards his face. Eram snatched it out of the air just in time. In a way, what with Parkinson’s being primarily a motor dysfunction, it was nice to see that his father’s throwing arm was still on point.

‘Okay, fine, so it wasn’t a dream,’ he said. ‘Why can’t we be gentlemen about it? If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times, violence is the last resort of the—’

‘Get out of my room, please. I have to get some sleep before class.’ Faizl taught economic theory to undergrads thrice a week at the university.

Eram replaced the bowl, out of his father’s reach, and retreated. Hoping that the lights would encourage the demons in Faizl’s head to do the same, he left them on.

Jogger’s Park, bounded by the sea on one side and Carter Road on the other, was, at 5.30 a.m., the sole preserve of the greying and the halt. Eram had never really paid attention to the elderly before Faizl got sick. Old people were just there. They smelled funny, like mothballs and overripe oranges, they moved too slowly and they were forever telling you how much bigger you were since the last time they had seen you. My, you’ve become so tall, they would say, even if you’d met last week. It was a total conversation killer. What were you supposed to say in return? Thanks sounded wrong, like taking credit for being able to breathe or something. Mostly, with old people, you just fake-smiled until you could mount an escape.

Eram dodged a power-walking Sikh couple at the bend and settled into a steady rhythm down the straight edge of the park. As if in response, Beethoven’s Ode To Joy picked up tempo in his earphones. Classical music bored the crap out of Eram. The uplifting beauty of the horn section in the third movement or whatever was lost on him. Why couldn’t all these geniuses have written some genius lyrics for their genius compositions? To him, music without words was simply noise. The only reason he bothered listening to the stuff even occasionally was because the Baron recommended it. To build mental focus and natural mathematical ability, he said.