Fifteen years later—though they did not know it—they would be in different parts of the world, having become quite different people; Khusroo, so popular with girls and so enviably familiar with them, would discover in Texas that he was “gay,” a word that had still not entered their vocabulary, except briefly in the line “A Poet could not but be gay”; Gautam would study chartered accountancy in London and never return home; Anil would become a playwright in English; Freddy Billimoria’s moustache would darken; he would lose his thinness and become regional (Asia) manager of an American corporation; Charmayne would get married and have two children and open an aerobics class; no one would know where Rahul Jagtiani was; the few who remembered him would still be able to recall with some difficulty the bird-like cry of his guitar.

“Apparently he’s gunrunning in the Congo,” said Khusroo of Jim Morrison, who got all his information from his elder brother Darius, a formidably knowledgeable individual whom Gautam had glimpsed only once or twice, a person who possessed a quirky, almost spiritual beauty that was incarnated in the silvery braces he shifted uncomfortably, every few minutes, in his mouth, and the two or three small, inflamed red pimples that were scattered on his cheeks. “With Rimbaud.” “Rambo?” said Gautam, never before having heard a name that sounded like that. “Not Rambo, Rimbaud,” said Khusroo through his nose. Both Khusroo and his best friend, Anil, were Gautam’s guides through the echoing, fantastic-hued chambers of rock music; they talked, Gautam listened; but behind all the words was the distant, intransigent, instructive, bespectacled figure of Darius. It was Darius who had first brought to their small worlds the intractable poetic name of Frank Zappa; it was Darius who had informed them of the subtle but fluid difference between “bop” and “jazz”; it was Darius who set off colourful fusions of images in their heads by declaring that the walrus in “I Am the Walrus” was John Lennon, and that “Sexy Sadie” was the Maharishi: Darius spoke the words; Khusroo and Anil merely repeated. Since then Gautam had entered a pink-green world of innuendoes and monsters, culminating in his purchase of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from Rhythm House, with rows of famous heads, dead ones and living ones, arranged on the cover like a great floral bouquet, a gift, and at the back, at the bottom, near “Printed in Dum Dum, Calcutta,” the words he had almost missed: “A splendid time is guaranteed for all.” They went now into their classroom and slung their satchels on their backs. They had a lot to talk about as they went down the stairs.