“Please, sir,” mumbled the woman. “For the festival.”

“Where do you live?” he asked, because he wanted to see some change, some loosening in the circle around him. But once the question was out, he realized that he had trapped himself, because Abu touched him on the shoulder and whispered, “Good for you,” and because the woman raised her head and looked at him with such an expression of gratitude, it was as if he had already saved the child’s life.

“Not far,” she said.

This was inexact. After the decision was made to go, they stood around waiting, for unclear and shifting reasons. People jabbered to each other in languages the doctor didn’t know. There seemed to be two opinions about where the child was. A message was sent, a reply expected. It never came, but in the meantime people argued about how to go and what to bring. They would need electric torches. None were available. Someone’s brother had one. And then suddenly they all started in a crowd, turning away from the fairgrounds into a filthy labyrinth of streets.

Thanakar had waited with a sense of anticlimax. But as he and Abu marched along, the street illuminated by fireworks and the fitful torch, picking through gutters filled with garbage and stinking excrement, Thanakar was overwhelmed by nervousness. The woman who had originally accosted them had vanished, and instead the whole crowd was accompanying them, twenty people at least. More joined them at every twist of the narrow street, and often they had to stop while a whole jabbering conversation flowed around them. But finally, after more than half an hour, they stopped outside a house as wretched-looking as any Thanakar had ever seen, a wooden shack with boarded windows, guarded by a bony dog. It rushed to meet them, snarling and showing its teeth, but someone threw a stone and it whimpered away.

The prince and the doctor stood appalled. But they had come too far to turn back, so they stepped in through the littered yard and up the steps, to where one man was swinging the electric torch. By its light he showed them a crude placard next to the doorway:CONFESSIONAL. SIN EATING. “Dirty place,” he confided. “Very bad. Not a good place.” He grinned and stepped aside to let them enter.

The house was divided into two rooms. In front, through a glass doorway, they could see the sin eater, sitting with a client, but they had no time to look, for the crowd propelled them past, to where a woman knelt next to a broken armchair. It was the woman who had stopped them at the fair. She had changed her clothes; unnecessarily, thought Thanakar, for her new dress was just as dirty, just as torn as the old.

He looked around. Light came from a kerosene candle. It reflected dully off a wall decorated with pictures of animals clipped from magazines. On a bed nearby, under the woman’s hand, in a nest of dark sheets, lay a sleeping child.