As if he were being rocked from side to side, and backward and forward, in a train compartment, Khusroo’s hips and torso shook, as, more frugally, did his legs. “On the shuffeling maadness,” he sang, “of loco-motive bryeath—da da da all-time loser’s hurtlin’ to his dyeath…” Melody was replaced by a menacing curl of the lips. All the time, Khusroo seemed to lean forward quickly and spectatorially, then immediately retreat backward with a mildly alarmed air; meanwhile, his arms, quite irrelevantly and encouragingly keeping time, appeared to treat these two ostensibly unconnected movements as part of a single motion, accompanying them with magical and peremptory snaps of the fingers. “You try, too,” said Khusroo. Gautam, sitting on the floor and looking up, pretended cunningly not to hear. Khusroo stopped and stamped his foot. “Gautam Bose, what am I doing here if you’re not going to get up and do something?” he said sternly. “Khusroo, I’ve just realised…,” mumbled the other. “Realised?” said Khusroo, enraged, as if it had been a particularly poorly chosen word. “You haven’t realised anything! Come on, get up.” Gautam obeyed, out of embarrassment; he lifted himself from his brooding inactivity with a giant, ostentatious effort. Then he stood with both his arms by his sides, like a boxer who doesn’t know what to do. Khusroo uttered unexpected soothing words: “It’s easy, Gautam, just loosen up.” But each part of Gautam’s body felt like a mechanism that had been jammed and rusted and made useless by shyness and sensitivity, and some miraculous lubricant, like forgetfulness, was now required. He remembered his parents, who, for about two months in the middle of their lives, used to put a 45 r.p.m. on the gramophone, and then, in broad daylight, amidst the drawing-room furniture, watched by Gautam looking past the twin peaks of his knees, sitting huddled on the sofa, try out their recently memorised dance steps. His mother, repeatedly adjusting the aanchal on her sari, and saying “Cha-cha-cha” under her breath, as she had no doubt been told to by her instructor, would dance with an expression of utter determination on her face. There were times when, on Gautam’s request, she did this when his father was not there, alone, in the drawing room, and the look of determination reappeared. Every Saturday evening, they would go to the first floor of an old mansion behind the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Mr. Sequiera conducted his dancing classes. Mr. Sequiera even advertised on the slides in cinema halls, illuminating this message: BE A SOCIAL SUCCESS: LEARN BALLROOM DANCING! For a while, thus, cha-cha-cha was mentioned in the house, and also that word that could have come straight from a fable: foxtrot. Then, after two months, almost overnight, his parents gave up dance and stopped playing those records and quite calmly took up other habits. Though it is said that children pass through “phases,” Gautam found that his parents probably passed through as many phases, if not more, than he did. They were always changing, developing, growing. For instance, when Gautam was eight, his mother would return from the hairdresser with her hair leavened into a full-grown bun, set and lacquered into a marble repose. Now, however, those accessories—hair net, false hair, lacquer spray—were lying in some drawer untouched, and his mother’s hair, on evenings out, had taken on another, less extreme, incarnation. His father, too, he remembered, once had two personable sideburns, which, one day, without explanation, had been reduced to a more modest size. There was nothing fixed, constant, or permanent about his parents.