* * *

People broke into the clocktower in Durbar Square to ring the stroke of midnight: ten crashing strokes, and then a paean of joy. “Ten o’clock,” said the pervert. Like many of his kind, he was an unimaginative man and had not responded to questions or entreaties, not to violence or the threat of violence, not to scandal or the threat of scandal, but to the promise of a fee. Thanakar had promised him eleven dollars and put a spark into his sullen eye. Thanakar hated him for it. He had a long thin face.

They stood on the steps of a dismal building—half shrine, half labor exchange—looking out over the crowd. The pervert had taken him into the city’s stews, by rickshaw, until the ways got too thick, and then on foot. Thanakar felt vital and self-confident, full of hope and hate. His mood had changed in a few hours, and around him, too, the mood had changed. The streets still seethed with people, but it had stopped raining, and in the atmosphere there was a current of joy that had been absent earlier. Only a few people carried weapons or seemed inclined to need them. With the tolling of midnight and the start of the festival, people had forgotten, not their differences, but at least their animosity. The bishop’s shops were looted and burning along the major thoroughfares, but to Thanakar that was a pleasant sight.

People had smiled to see him, reached out to touch him as he passed. Sustained by the example of the new saint, he had not turned away. Women yelled and pointed from upstairs windows.

Abandoning the rickshaw, they had gone on deeper into the city’s muddy heart. At midnight, in the bishop’s market, a crowd had gathered among the boarded stalls. A man stood on a barrel, gesticulating and shouting in a language so debased that Thanakar could only recognize one word in ten. Perhaps that wasn’t it, he thought guiltily. The man was far away from where they stood on the steps of the labor exchange, and his shouting was muddled in the noises of the crowd. Even so, thought Thanakar, Abu would have had no trouble understanding.

“What is he saying?” he asked. And again, “What is he saying?” The pervert had turned away down the steps, muttering something inaudible. “Wait,” said Thanakar. “I want to watch.”

The square was lit with torches and uneven fires from gutted buildings. The sky burned orange, as if traces still lingered from a malignant sunset. But as the shouting stopped and the people grew so still that Thanakar fancied he could hear them breathe, a new kind of light spread out humbly from among them.

Men and women produced lumps of candles from underneath their ragged clothes. As they lit them, one from another, tentacles of light seemed to reach down the dark alleyways, and the center of the square seemed to burn up bright, the torches and the bonfires overwhelmed in a gentle golden radiance. There was no wind. People stood without talking, almost without moving. The candle flames burned straight and gentle, and then there was a slight commotion in the middle of the crowd as women unwrapped baskets of birds, red and white doves. They held them up and coaxed them into the air; having spent so long in blinded baskets, they seemed unwilling to go, and when they finally rose one by one into the dark, it was with no great rustling or flapping, but they went gently. Thanakar watched them, his heart full of a kind of happiness. Men pulled a banner to the top of a flagpole—the sun in splendor, gold silk on white.