“I don’t know,” said her husband gruffly. “It’s not done. People will talk.” “People”; “them”: simple, collective pronouns and nouns that had, however, complex but exclusive gradations in the life they’d made their own. “People” was not only managers, heads of sections, and directors, but their wives, too. “Them” had the ability to take on different, often contesting, resonances: right now it conveyed, at once, both Mr. and Mrs. Sinha-Roy and the difference between them as individuals.

“What about the son, what about Amal,” said Mrs. Gupta tranquilly. “We should take him a little something.”

It was as if she were testing him; she liked teasing him at times.

“What about Amal!” he said, mimicking her. “He doesn’t need anything. Don’t be silly!” His face had a special vehemence of emotion that came into being when he knew he’d be called upon to display a fatherliness that he did not possess. Somehow, the boy—the idea of him, not even the boy himself—exhausted him more than anything else.

In the Sinha-Roys’ flat, the cook, a dark septuagenarian, woke up from a brief nap to finish frying the little patties he’d set aside for the afternoon. The driver rang the bell and came in holding a bouquet of flowers; and Mrs. Sinha-Roy, like a somnambulist in her housecoat, moved from dining table to living room and back again in the heat of the afternoon, distributing flowers from one vase to another.

The whole day seemed like an eternity to the boy, especially when holiday and party happened to coincide in a chance intermission. He had no homework he needed to attack immediately; instead he had this sense of a function, a role that had come to him out of nowhere, a calling that he was equal to.

By evening the guests and colleagues, before they left their houses, had begun to apply the finishing touches—aftershave lotion on the cheeks, the last fold of the sari smoothed till it seemed exactly in place. And, at home, like some unappeasable master of ceremonies, Amal tasted the savouries, which were either brought to him on a plate with a glass of cola, or which he himself chose at random.

The Guptas were, as it happened, the first to arrive; they must look suitably grateful, because they were to occupy this flat from the twenty-third of the month; they needed to put in an appearance before anyone else. On the way, Mrs. Gupta had bought herself a fragrant mogra from a girl and put it in her hair. The flat itself was on display; every preparatory movement had stopped, and the drawing room had a finished look about it, as if a work of art had reached its public, final version.