The warm breeze-turned-cool drones in my ears. Above my head martins chitter in their mud-feathered nests. From the floor below come the strains of a Hindi film song and the voices of men playing cards. In the lengthening shadow cast by the ancient school of learning, village boys play tipcat. Bhagmati is not with me and the calm and peace of the surroundings are conducive to daydream.

What did they teach at this madrasa? Astronomy, astrology, mathematics, chemistry and the Quran? Boys sitting in rows chanting their tables? Whatever happened to Siri and the great tank which supplied its drinking water? Was it still there when Taimur, the club-footed Mongol, sacked Delhi and slew 50,000 of my citizen-ancestors? How long did it take to repopulate the city?

I see the scenes of horror which must have taken place around Hauz-i-Alai during the massacre. Men sitting on their haunches with their hands tied behind them and necks bent low; the flash of scimitars and heads rolling away from bodies; spurts of blood, the tops of spines sticking out. Shrieking, wailing mothers, wives and sisters. Children benumbed with terror. The Mongolian shadow of God on earth enjoying the scene from somewhere near where I am sitting. If only I had been there, armed with a modern sharpshooter’s rifle fitted with a telescopic sight, I would have climbed a tree beyond bowshot and shot the lame bastard dead. I would have picked out his generals and one after another sent them to hell. I would have created panic in the ranks of the Mongols, Turks, Tartars and all the other Central Asian savages. The Delhiwallas would then have risen against them, slaughtered thousands like goats and sent the rest screaming back to Samarkand.

A stone narrowly misses my head and crashes down on the floor. I see a pack of urchins scuttling away into Firoze Shah’s tomb. ‘Oi, oi, oi,’ I yell. ‘You harami . . . ’ Before I can tell them what I will do to their mothers and sisters, a swarm of apis historicus Delhiana descends on me. I flail my arms. I run like one pursued by the devil. They follow me attacking my face, neck, arms. I unwrap my turban, wrap my face and arms in its folds, and crouch on the ground. I can hear the card-players shouting for help as they run to safety and the grass-mower’s bullock bellowing on its way to the village. The assault continues for five hellishly long minutes before it is called off. I pluck dead bees off my body. I pick two caught in the meshes of my beard and get stung on the tips of my fingers. My flesh begins to swell, my fingers become too fat to be useful, my body tingles all over. I run back my car and drive as fast as I can to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital.