Asrar said nothing. He had realized that many of the women he saw were sex workers. He had also seen a movie made on prostitutes and red-light areas. That movie was playing in his head. Ali threw the chocolate wrapper into the nearby drain from which two fat mice were peeping out. They were staring at a discarded chicken piece which a drunkard had thrown a few moments ago. Mosquitoes had alighted on the chicken piece. Flies were also competing to get access. No sooner had the chocolate wrapper been thrown in the drain than the flies headed towards it. The mice attacked the piece of chicken together. The mosquitoes flew away. A cricket that was lazing on a rice grain seemed to regard the mice with the utmost indifference. The chaos in the drain made the vulture cast his eyes on it. He looked down upon the mice with a sense of superiority and went back to looking at the Nepalese woman.

The pace of Mohammad Ali’s heartbeat increased, and his feet shivered. He entered the building opposite the restaurant. Two girls standing at the main gate of the building tried to stop him and strike up a conversation. One of them wore jeans, a white T-shirt and scarlet lipstick. The other one wore a sari and a body-hugging blue blouse with buttons in the front. She tried holding Mohammad Ali’s hand. He touched her cheek, whispered something and moved forward. Asrar noticed that two buttons of the blue blouse were undone and a Rs 100 note was carefully tucked into it. When Asrar passed the women, one of them spat out betel juice and told the other girl, ‘Madhuri’s customer!’

The other one said, ‘Madhuri gets them by doing French.’

The other one disagreed and said, ‘Do not talk rubbish.’

The one in the jeans answered with silence and raised her fingers to her throat as if to swear. There were many rooms in the building, but all of them were engulfed in darkness. A small 40 watt bulb hung in a corner but it was covered with spider webs. In fact, a few dead spiders hung from the bulb. At the end of a saffron light, a lizard slept comfortably on an open electric wire which had snapped from the switch.