The book vendor had seen this smile on the faces of all his customers who had bought that book. This sixty-eight-page paperback edition of the book was no less than a treatise. Qasim stuffed the book into his trouser pocket and smoothed his kurta. Usman noticed him and smiled. Aslam picked up a book which was titled The Dangerous Love of a Djinn and started looking at its cover. It had a girl on it and in the background was the picture of a smiling, beardless djinn whose one hand was on the girl’s shoulder while the other held a knife to her throat.

Haider asked, ‘Do you believe in djinns?’

To which Aslam replied, ‘In our society there are djinns. Even the Quran talks about them.’

‘But can a djinn fall in love with a girl?’

‘A djinn once fell in love with a woman in our locality.’

‘Tell me the details of the story in the evening,’ Usman said. ‘Let’s go before the kebabs get over at the hotel.’ They were all hungry and hence they moved ahead. Near the Mandvi Post Office, on an archaic elevation, was a sabeel (water kiosk) below an old tree. They halted under its shade. Suleiman was thirsty.

The elevation had two earthen pots of water and two steel glasses secured with chains. Suleiman quaffed down a glass of water in one go. Asrar’s eyes began observing the surroundings. There were bookshops behind the sabeel. There was a mosque nearby with white minarets. There were shops selling clothes, commodities of daily use, etc., around the mosque. One- or two-storey buildings stood in the vicinity. Just a glance at these buildings was enough to tell that they were from another era. Time had withered many windows. Just a few yards from these buildings, two skyscrapers were under construction. The tree under which they sought shelter near the post office was also quite old.

Under the same tree, many years back, the don Dawood Konkani had partied and made merry. A road goes towards the Mumba Devi temple and Kalbadevi from here. A monster living on the old trees near the Mumba Devi temple had revealed to the tree that the boy Dawood who made merry with his friends here and repeatedly uttered to them ‘Abhe chutiya hun kya?’ would become the don of Dongri and would swiftly create terror in the entire world. He would flee from Mumbai when the dawn of the new century would be short of thirty-eight solar eclipses. He would rule another island and would become a member of a secret espionage agency that would terrorize the city of Mumbai. Many would call these acts of terror—his revenge. The intelligence agencies of the world would be in search of him. He would find shelter in a cave provided by another secret agency.

For the tree, all the information provided by the monster was gibberish, and hence it never took him seriously. The tree asked the monster, ‘So, from where do you collect these rumours?’