Her plan was to give everything away to the needy. But at that rarefied altitude on Pali Hill, Gehna couldn’t see anybody in need. She stood outside her parents’ apartment building and looked left, then right.

Where is everybody? She felt a small, almost negligible, tickle of irritation. In her mind’s eye, helping the needy hadn’t involved a one-kilometre hike with a heavy suitcase down Pali Hill. About midway to the main street, the American Tourister lost a wheel. Gehna was forced to half-carry and half-drag it the rest of the way.

When she finally reached the marketplace, she immediately spotted what she was looking for. A row of tenements had sprouted up almost overnight, like mushrooms in the dark. Gehna had heard her parents bitching about it, how it was such a blot on the landscape (Nina), how it affected the value of property in the neighbourhood (Ajay), yada yada. Gehna didn’t know about property values, but she could see what Nina had meant.

The hutment was ugliness itself. Eight or ten canvas shacks, each about as tall as Gehna, held together with plastic wire, tarpaulins and prayer. Since the place was illegal, there was no provision for sanitation or sewage; the communal area outside the huts had turned into a muddy swamp from the baths the residents took in the open, and the miasma of piss was strong.

Gehna saw a young boy sitting by himself on the ground outside one of the tents. She wheeled her suitcase up to him, edging carefully around pools of what she hoped was water. The kid was whacking a stick repeatedly into the mud. He looked up briefly at Gehna when her shadow fell on him, then went back to punishing the mud. A bluebottle fly landed on his face and walked undisturbed near one corner of his mouth.

‘Hello,’ Gehna said, squatting in front of the boy. She waved the fly away from his face. ‘Are you hungry?’

She rummaged through the food in her suitcase and came up with Reese’s peanut butter cups. She offered one to the boy.

I wonder if his mother taught him not to take candy from strangers? Nope, he’s taking it.

Gehna had to unwrap the chocolate for the kid. He took a hesitant bite. His eyes widened and he shoved the rest of it into his mouth, sticking his other hand out for more. It pleased Gehna to be there in that moment, surrounded by stench and squalor as she was. She was bringing joy to a poor child’s day and there was no better feeling than that. She looked around for more people to feed and saw two more children approaching her. One of them was a girl of around ten years, so Gehna took out her favourite T-shirt and handed it to her. The girl gave her a shy smile.

Looking back, Gehna couldn’t have said exactly when that idyllic scene turned horribly to shit. All she knew was that suddenly there were a lot of kids around her. A lot of kids. Too many. Some only reached her waist, but others were older, taller, bigger. Mouths open, arms outstretched, they tugged at her clothes, demanding attention. The noise around her grew as the mob of children begged for things. Didi, chocolate, they howled. Didi, T-shirt. Didi Didi Didi. Once, when Gehna was little, she had turned on the shower to take a bath. The scalding hot water running into the drain had brought roaches. They had bubbled out of the drain in hundreds, carpeting the bathroom floor with their gross, brown bodies. Gehna had panicked then, as she panicked now.