Even as Gautam was summoning within himself the preparedness to set his body moving, without safety, without company, in mid-air as it were, there came a bang from not too far away, and then the sound of a muffled, amplified voice: “Check … one-two-three … check.” “Come on,” said Khusroo, losing interest in Gautam’s lonely fledgling efforts to translate into motion. “Let’s see what those chaps are doing. If you don’t mind,” he added, “we’ll continue later.” “No, no,” said Gautam. “No, let’s see what those chaps are doing.” They went down the corridor and turned right, and walked a little way to the first door to the hall. At the other end of the now empty hall, where only this morning they had stood distractedly with their hymnbooks, the stage was occupied by the Phantom Congregation, who were practising, in resounding fits and starts punctuated by gaps of silence and slouching, the songs that would set this hall and the bones and vertebrae of various eager neophytes vibrating next Saturday. Rahul Jagtiani, the lead singer, a tall, unextraordinary boy with spectacles and a moustache, was holding the mike with one hand casually, as if it were a perfectly mundane, everyday object, and talking to Keki Antia, the bassist, who, as he struck the strings on his guitar with his plectrum, produced fat, ponderous globules of sound. The other two were bent upon their instruments in introspective postures of study and absorption: the thin, spirit-like, demoniacally stubble-cheeked Freddy Billimoria, who leaned with a mixture of swooning pleasure and fatigue over his drums, now thudded, with a pedal at his foot, the great bass drum standing upright, and now, superfluously, hit the floating cymbal with a polished attenuated stick that seemed a fitting extension of his own skinniness, creating a marvellous sound that rippled outward, a reverberating whisper. And Rajat Kapoor, also splenetic and unpredictable, hit his guitar strings at times to release that loud electric bang that Khusroo and Gautam had heard from a distance, which they now understood to be a particular chord. Then he would rapidly turn one of the four knobs on the guitar’s incandescent flame-red box and prick his ears for a prophetic hum on the speaker. To Khusroo’s and Gautam’s awe, Rahul Jagtiani suddenly turned and exclaimed, “Hey—one-two-three,” and all those individual technological noises were gathered into a single united wave, and they began to sing “Smoke on the water, fire in the sky.” The combined voices of Antia, Jagtiani, and Billimoria could hardly be heard over Rajat Kapoor’s guitar, which had been, midway through the song, launched into the wayward kinks and corkscrew effect of the wa-wa mode. Khusroo and Gautam felt jolted by the scruff of their necks and shoulders, a cavity forming in their solar plexus, and they looked on speechless with wonder.